skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I've been on projects that I believe would have succeeded if we'd approached them differently, with less debt. One was due to magpie syndrome - influential architects who enjoyed working with bleeding edge technology and convinced management not to listen to the more conservative recommendations of the developers who would be doing the majority of the work. The software was a wreck, and morale dropped (and the original architects left the team). I think the project would have worked with a better approach, but after a change in upper management, they decided to end the project completely.

Another was a rewrite of an application that had been very popular, but was written by someone who was actively learning on his own (a talented developer who later learned to write very clean and well organized code). It was, as I like to call it, "superglued" to the server. SQL statements that could have been handled with a join were instead handled by querying all the ids, running through them in a loop, building a new query, getting results, stashing them in an array, one by one. When those queries took too long, they were run in the background or just crashed the system. Changes were all made in place, on the prod system. There was no build, no archive, no nothing (this was in the early 2000s - even back then, this was a no-no, but it wasn't quite as shockingly unusual as it is now) I was part of a team that tried to rewrite it, but halfway through the organization was frustrated with the time and expense and terminated the project.

Interestingly, I think there's almost always a psychological or political factor in play when a project is killed purely by "Technical debt". In theory, debt itself shouldn't really play much of a role in whether a project is worth pursuing, because it's all sunk cost. If a project has a positive enough ROI that it would be worth pursuing as a greenfield project, then even the worst case scenario, trash everything and start over, is a net win.

However, I think what happens is that some people never wanted to see the project happen in the first place, or people get very frustrated with the expense, or people start to suspect that the failure was inevitable and that the technical problems are just a distraction. Think Jurassic Park (which in many ways is a story of a software project failure, a theme that is much stronger in the book). At the end, during the "post mortem", some of the characters think that the problem was in the approach. That with a bigger budget, less dependency on a few people, less corner cutting due to a lowball bid from a software developer, enforced through threats to reputation and lawsuits, that with a better approach it all would have worked. On the other hand, you have the chaotician, who insists from the start that a project like this will fail inevitably.

My guess is that if it was ever worth pursuing, it is always worth pursuing. The problem is, we can never really tell. Sometimes failure due to technical debt is taken as a sign that this failure was inevitable. Other times, it isn't.
It hasn't always been the case, though. During a period from roughly 1930 to late 1970s, political polarization in this country was rather modest. (http://www.voteview.com/pdf/The_Polarization_of_Modern_US_Po...) Only recently has political polarization approached the levels last seen in the late 19th century.

And even with current heavy polarization, it's not completely binary. I can easily see, say, four party possibilities out of our current two.
What language / shell is that? Powershell?
Zoom video conferencing service raises $100M on billion-dollar valuation
You’ll Never Be the Same Again
Absolutely. Tangent but...

I've long thought that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is sort of a waste of breath... not because it's wrong but because over-engineering is a far greater problem today than premature optimization.

Over-engineering is a plague in modern software. Most of the failures due to technical debt that I've seen involved cases where "smart" developers built swiss army chainsaws to do things that required a hammer. This also often results in products that require orders of magnitude more resources than they should, which makes cloud vendors like Amazon and Digital Ocean a lot of money I guess.
One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.
Are you sure of that? One most of the systems I've used with IPMI functionality (oracle and supermicro), the BMC resides in a separate chip with it's own processor and RAM.

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Nuvoton_WPCM450R_IPMI_C...

Oracle uses these:

https://www.aspeedtech.com/products.php?fPath=20&rId=376
Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong
Thermal transfer compound comparison: Vegemite vs. Arctic Silver (2002)
$149 per month medical startup aims to be Apple Store of doctor’s offices
Windows 2000 and Half Life 2 spring to my mind immediately.
Breaking out of the legacy straitjacket:how to use budget cycles for innovation
Could you tell me about those changes?
sorry, I minced my words a little bit. what I mean is if the ME were already programmed to do these nasty things by design, one way to remedy such an undesirable "feature" would be to constantly run AES with new keys each time.
Women’s March Gives Boost to Startup for Bus Sharing
I'm sorry to hear about your problem with the transition. Did you attempt to contact customer support about this?

My experience was I received a coupon via e-mail at june 15 2016. I upgraded the same day. But I also still use other e-mail clients to access my mail e.g. from my phone. So I would not be locked out of my e-mail if Nylas quit working that same day.
Project Implicit
You can learn through SQL Injection too, and it's way more fun :) https://redtiger.labs.overthewire.org/
Gtk is not very cross-platform. It looks non-native on Windows, and it's so non-native on macOS that you have to run an X server just to see it. wxWidgets seems to be abandoned (their bindings don't even have a Python 3 release, which would happen right away if anyone cared). Most of these provide dated UI elements that people don't want to work with.

Qt perhaps is holding up the best, but I can see why people prefer Javascript's event model to Qt's.

Pointing out that old toolkits still exist doesn't necessarily help when people expect more from their toolkit now.
Oh, the EU parliament works all the time for the people

The problem is that all national governments have to approve each EU directive before it becomes law in the EU council. The national governments then usually, due to lobby pressure, add loopholes to net neutrality, reduce consumer protections, or demand TTIP.

If you get rid of the EU, you’re only left with this council – and then you get zero net neutrality but instead TTIP and all the other bullshit.
How I Got My Attention Back
I don't think they usually get killed. They just die slow and painful deaths.

People are reluctant to change them so they don't adapt.
I remember my first day on the job too.
>I'm from one of those "lesser" countries - Greece. I can assure you that nobody "stepped on our throat". For years we thrived as part of the EU, until the economic crisis hit and messed it all up.

"Thrived" just meant the Greek state could for a few years borrow money more easily because of the Euro, nothing substantial that one could actually call "thriving". The actual health of the economy (inflated numbers from borrowing aside) was in its worst condition ever.

For the Greek economy it was the beginning of the end, as at the same time, The euro, and the lack of control of its own monetary policy, sealed the inability of Greece to ever repay its debt. And of course made its exports, lackluster even before, collapse completely.

>The Germans actually tried to help, in the way they thought was best

Actually they merely tried to enforce their economic ideology of austerity upon further austerity, totally in spite of dire results and being totally not workable, all the while making billions in the process for the German economy, plus insuring its banks against the crisis with EU money (transferring money from the European public to the financiers).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-l...

Greece is now an ex-country on life support giving the semblance of a European country.

>Nobody wanted to harm the Geeks and nobody tried to harm the Greeks

The world is not some hugging and loving place, international politics and finances even more so. Those doing the harm could not care less if they were harming Greeks, Irish, Italians, etc. specifically, so that much is true: they didn't actively try to "harm the Greeks".

It was a matter of pursuing their own financial interests, as always is. The Greek public were just imbeciles in recognizing that, and the Greek politicians where profiting just the same.
Apple App Store Prices Rise in UK, India and Turkey
6 Application Integration Trends to Watch Closely in 2017
"secure delete" (actually "secure erase") is a term from the ATA standard, it's supported by practically all ATA and later SATA devices for a very long time. The idea was you'd tell the disk to erase everything, it would do the actual deletion in the background but would not allow reading the old data. This was also the way to reset passworded harddrives, you could send a secure erase command without authentication, the drive would wipe itself and once done, the password is gone.

Once SSDs arrived on the scene, they were limited by the interface as ATA didn't specify a way to mark sectors as unused. People found that their performance would degrade with use as all the sectors became utilized. But a secure erase command would mark all sectors as erased, so the drive would work like new. Later on, ATA got the TRIM (and later queued versions of TRIM) so the OS can mark specific sectors as erased. But the result is that a lot of people confuse flash sector erasing with secure erase.
While Angular 1 might be 'obselete', there's still a lot of corporations out there with tons of Angular 1 code, and most of them are not going to be upgrading anytime soon. Angular 2 is enough of a paradigm shift that it would require rewriting those apps from scratch, pretty much, and there won't be a business need to do so for another 5+ years for a lot of these companies.

We're still doing new apps in Angular 1 here, because everyone knows it, we can reuse more code, we know most of its quirks and how to squeeze performance out of it, and we can get the apps out the door a lot faster. Eventually we will have a new project where we decide to use something more current, though.
Have you checked your site for the “Not Secure” warning in Chrome and Firefox?
Or you could implement RFC 3798, an update of RFC 2298. It's not like these things haven't been standardized for almost 2 decades.
I'd love to see that rail happen. Nowhere near Texas, but it would be cool. That said, Texas isn't really representative of the rest of the country.
Samsung chief faces long day as South Korean court weighs arrest warrant
Dollar falls after President-elect Donald Trump describes it as ‘too strong’
Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture
Weird. I'm on Linux though, but I can't imagine that the line endings should matter.
Thank god media doesn't try to distract us with trivial minutiae in the West, eh?
OP note: I have chosen the subtitle instead of the headline for this article as I feel like it's more descriptive.
Except in the common intersection of their interests.
Four salary negotiation mistakes UX designers make
Some of the worst examples of that are when a project uses a custom build of a library of which the source no longer exists and no record of the changes exists either.
That sounds unlikely to me, or at least something hard to measure that could easily be spun in different ways depending on your favored interpretation. Do you remember where you read it?

A couple of immediate objections come to mind. First, "intelligence" is difficult to define or measure. Things like standardized IQ tests tend to come with an implicit agenda. Second, thinking instead about "innovation", history surely shows that most innovation happens when humans group together (in farming communities, cities etc).

It's true though that in recent history, cities are more associated with social atomization. Overall it seems like a very fuzzy and complicated issue.
Essential reading: nine experts on the books that inspired them
I know one... having to exchange data with Windows systems/users...
From Barcelona to Malia: how Brits on holiday have made themselves unwelcome
Your opinion is here is valid, but how would you address the criticism that this isn't solving the real issue, and is obviously a power-grab?
Why do we cache?
Thanks for sharing that. I am a moderator of an addiction-related subreddit, and recently a commenter made a short list of things they had struggled with which included (unsurprisingly) alcohol, tobacco and drugs. But they also included an unhealthy dependence on 'self-help' which was my first encounter with this idea. So you're not alone!
> I had convinced myself that these things were myths, so now I'm sad that my boss isn't Ed Catmull.

Wasn't Catmull involved in wage-fixing? [http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage-...]
Show HN: FactHunt – Curate Interesting Facts from All Over the Internet
Reintegrating future changes in the upstream is also made nearly impossible as a result; our tech lead made a change to numpy a few years ago, didn't manage to get it accepted by the project, and we're stuck with this version until the sun burns out.

If there are changes in future numpy versions we want, it's up to us to backport them, which is nowhere near our core business.

There's a lot to be said for standardization and 'boring.'
I'm sorry to say it's false hope. Such an outcome would likely lead to greater ruin.

Just like Trump and the electoral college, if we project the vote into MP constituencies Brexit got 60% [0].

This means that most MPs voting 'No' to Brexit would anger their constituents for Subverting Democracy - one of Theresa May's favorite talking points[1]. This would likely lead to a more extreme/populist government in the next election, and perhaps some internal strife and riots in the meantime.

Who would you rather have at the helm?

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/nomura-2-charts-show-why-rema...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=subverting+democracy
Yeah, I understand that, but at the same time, backups and security, while being among the two most critical aspects of IT and computer infrastructure at a company, are often the most overlooked by everyone. That persists today and I'm sure it was even more the case back then. If management can't give it the time of day, how can an employee be expected to do so?

An executive usually requires a "Come to Jesus" moment like this one, where the entire company teeters on the precipice due to lax backup or security policies, to really have the importance impressed upon him or her. At that point, they are generally much more supportive, though sadly, this too can start to fade if the sysadmins do their job too well.

I don't want anyone to come away thinking that most companies have solved these problems. It's definitely not the case, even in large, established companies. Security and backups continue to get little attention until it's too late.

We really need to call a celebrity in MBA circles and get that person to run a seminar meant to scare the pants off the execs.
You don't need to work for a company with large datasets to start learning and playing with large datasets. There are freely available repositories of data you can play with. Checkout the AWS public datasets - https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/. There should be more then enough there for you to start playing with "big data" tools and getting familiar with how to store, ETL, and query large datasets.
Then why doesn't Google rank speedy pages?
Code School has 3 courses on databases, 2 on SQL and 1 on NoSQL. https://www.codeschool.com/learn/database

The Try SQL course is free, the other 2 you have to pay for. https://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-sql
I'm an individual, not a company. I make web pages. Lots of other individuals also make web pages. It's not like only companies make websites and consumers only use websites.
Do you still ship the open source engine with no authentication system at all? That was a massive problem last time I checked. Sure, you mentioned it, but many didn’t read that before setting it up.
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I never understood the attitude of some companies to fire an employee immediately if they make a mistake such as accidentally deleting some files. If you keep this employee, then you can e pretty sure he'll never made that mistake again. If you fire him and hire someone else, that person might not have had the learning experience of completely screwing up a system.

I think that employees actually makes less mistakes and are more productive if they don't have be worried about being fired for making a mistake.
Perhaps, but it's not as though the popularity of oil pipelines is especially high. They still get built! If anything, much of the bureaucracy and public would far prefer to build high speed rail in place of a pipeline. Certainly neither face a particularly positive regulatory environment.

I'm not sure what your second point is getting at. Rail lines face pretty huge eminent domain burdens along with everything else.

My point was mostly that the hurdles of building rail and pipelines are both quite high. The economic benefit of oil pipelines are enough to make them worth the trouble to a private firm. Rail, not so much.
Hmm, it's open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylas_N1

https://github.com/nylas/N1
Rotorcraft PPL here: actually assigning blame is a very important part of accident analysis because it's critical to determining whether resolution will involve modifying training curriculum or if there was a mechanical failure. CFIT, engine failure due to fuel exhaustion, flight into wires, low G mast bumping, and settling with power are all sure ways to die from pilot error. And if the pilot did make a serious error their license could be suspended or revoked.
Article 5 paragraph 2 in your link more explicitely says this as well.
Complete List of Dolby Vision Titles Available on Netflix, Vudu and Amazon Video
curious to know your setup
That's definitely a less-aggravating situation by far. I've had a lot of cases where a significant amount of specialist human time was in a spreadsheet and it's really made me wish there was an Excel-for-data which acknowledges how many people are using it for semi-structured data like this.
I don't use Vim now. And it's good that you said that, cause I never used Vim as an IDE always felt wrong using it like that, but that's just my opinion.
At least Intel (and probably others) now provide full-disk encryption by default. So the flash is unreadable by any other controller: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...
Confusing. There really needs to be a history of changes to each HN post, it looks like it's back to pointing at thenextweb's article.
Ask HN: How did you convince the decision makers to pay the technical debt?
I started to answer the other question about technical debt. Then I realized that this question was more interesting to me.

How did you frame the argument that convinced the non-technical decision makers that technical debt should be taken care of? Was the metaphor of "technical debt" a good way to frame the argument, or was the notion too ethereal?
Stop using flashcards (to learn vocabulary)
sounds like this will put the nail in mashape's coffin. not sure why this is downvoted, mashape's marketplace has been dead for quite some time, there are no buyers.
Then don't buy those shares.
You can't 'hard delete' anything from Facebook. So an even better way to protect yourself is not giving them your phone number whatsoever.
Climate Change Is Costly; Serious Climate Policy Is a Bargain
"Why would I fire you? I just paid $10M to train you to not that make mistake again!"
Google Drive/Docs Down for Some Users
Wow, I had a no idea about several of these resources. Nice job on the layout too.
I didn't like spacemacs, but that's just me. Whole point of Emacs for me is customizing it to your own liking, spacemacs feels just forced to me. Even Emacs+EVIL feels much better, but then again, that is just me.
Thunderbird is not EOL.

Disclaimer: I am a Thunderbird developer.
It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump.

Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.
We have a similar application in PHP. By the time I've traced through all of the included files that are touched by a particular function, I've forgotten what I'm looking for. It's truly a nightmare.
Quick Guide to Medications for Alcohol Abuse
> The scenario you describe would cause the identity key to change and trigger a notification if one of the potential clients has that option enabled.

... and that notification would be shown after that potential client's WhatsApp client had re-encrypted the undelivered messages and re-sent them.
It's funny to see Google as the "slow, bloated, evil corporation that doesn't care" while MS is actively trying to shrug off that stereotype.

15-years-ago-me is confused.
Call me crazy but I think some entity is trying to manipulate the market in the short term here. By all reason the Pound should be falling even further with the increased uncertainty of a hard brexit and leaving the single market, instead someone out there is buying up as much as they can. Somethings not right.
An important part of the political theory behind pluralism is to do with managing certain realities beyond just individuals. You will have multiple power centres within societies (corporations, universities, trade unions, NGOs etc.). Allowing them a free voice has many benefits. Particularly it helps keep the peace, it makes power structures more obvious and it allows legitimate concerns to be surfaced more quickly and reliably.

Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.
Alice, the Alien, and the Illusion of the Twin Paradox
:rms2: