skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is, but the question is what "killed" by technical debt means. It's uncommon but not unheard of for code to reach the point of "we can't do that". Mostly, though, the proximate cause of death is a funding shortage or management decision to shutdown. Technical debt is just driving the cost overruns or inefficiencies that kill the project.
Same with government.
Yes. My first job as an employee.

Shockingly enough, the “project” was a gigantic Excel spreadsheet. Accumulating debt on a thing like that is actually very easy.
Maybe try posting it again?
The article mostly just quotes two other sources that have already been discussed here:

WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935

There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor', https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13394900
It is extensively tested except that the individual parts are owned by different units that need to optimize their profitability.

So instead of having an overall good looking site you have tiny billboards screaming at you to buy.

I use Amazon all the time. I just never look at their home page much and just look at search results.
The API gateway seems quite expensive to me. I guess it has its use cases and mine doesn't fit into it.

I run a free API www.macvendors.com that handles around 225 million requests per month. It's super simple and has no authentiction or anything, but I'm also able to run it on a $20/m VPS. Looks like API gateway would be $750+data. Bummer because the ecosystem around it looks great. You certainly pay for it though!
Sorry for the naming confusion. This tool does not deal with MS Excel files which are binary files and needs specialized programs (like MS Office/libre office) to make sense out of it. This tool just reads plain text CSV/TSV Files. Also this is just a browser based tool reading the plain text CSV/TSV files and there is no server side program processing it.
This comes down to how our species survives, and there are really two issues: global sustainability and the human race's fragility to catastrophe.

We to get globally sustainable as quickly as possible, there's absolutely no argument against that. We definitely need to make our agriculture more petrochemical efficient, at the very least.

In terms of urbanization and the human race's vulnerability to catastrophe, we can mitigate a lot of the dangers by just limiting city density, and including intensive food cultivation. That way, in case of a major emergency, you at least have a buffer. Having a lot of people who know how to grow food also allows you to spin up production quickly.

Ultimately, we're looking at a crisis of employment as computer programs take over white collar work. We have millions of years of evolution as efficient mixed source foragers, robots aren't going to take that job.
Why a bad app?
You had a search engine and rendering the search results was the bottleneck?
That's really weird. Don't know a lot about JSF but other templating languages are usually really not ever the bottleneck. Maybe if you have some giant table with thousands of cells each with its own complicated template directive (for loop with conditionals etc).
Thanks for the question about this. For some context we drink a lot of coffee at my office. We have two pots (bold & light roasts). People never know when coffee is ready or brewing without going to the kitchen. We have a #coffee channel so people can post that they are brewing, but then we had issues with people stealing cups before the pot was done (don't do this).
So this app gives an interface for people to just click their face and the bot will handle it from there. It says that a pot is brewing, and 12 minutes later will post that the pot is ready.

To your point, it is just a mobile app with a slack integration. I built it to test out jasonette, which was a great experience, but I have no delusions of grandeur here.
Adjusted per GDP?

You are the sixth (seventh?) economy of the world, you are expected to pay more. Did you expect Austria to contribute more than the UK? The EU has some associated costs, which need to be paid, and there is budget for investing in depressed areas (many in the UK).

But don't worry, you will get 30 different trade deals which do not cost any penny in supervising or enforcing, because that just happens automagically: you sign in the bottom of a paper, and all written rules are respected, enforced, supervised and updated. Isn't that sweet?
That is very interesting, thanks! I hadn't thought about Unicode or tolerating human error. Although the times I have worked with it have been when it is a transport medium between two computer programs.
The amazing thing here is that Looking Glass studios was known for its well-written stories and innovative gameplay, in addition to its technology. The first two generally come from highly creative people that are not necessarily trained in the minutiae of high-performance technical design. It must be incredibly difficult to assemble a team like that while also recruiting someone with the technical chops to create the engine.
People need to start saying what their product does on their website
It appears that HN automatically added the (2016) tag by looking at the permalink, which I mistakenly set as 2016 (still need to get used to 2017!), and that was what I was trying to say, because it looked as though the post was written a year ago.

Sorry for the confusion!
As far as tech goes, this is mostly a pointless exercise.

The car is supposed to know it's in a low-speed urban environment where there may be zebra crossings, so it accelerates accordingly and always has time to break.

If a pedestrian makes an illegal crossing, the car should try to protect its occupants first, which is the most natural response for a human driver. Not to mention autonomous cars will be more likely to turn these unavoidable accidents into avoidable ones.

One can entertain all sorts of situations, but so far I haven't found one without an answer. It always boils down to not including a "split-second morality system".
They are, so I'm not sure I understand the attack upthread.
>A simple "off" switch for Intel ME would please a lot of people.

But not a corporate security team, of course. It's not that simple.
Reminds me of the email suite from Netscape Communicator, which eventually evolved into Thunderbird.

http://www.sabah.net.my/manuals/en/nscomm/images/messwin.gif
Even single man-month long "refactors" are something I'm wary of. Smaller changes are easier to test, easier to review, easier to merge, easier to verify are actually improving the state of things and heading in the right direction, easier to pause when your priorities unexpectedly shift midway through cleanup without leaving a terrible mess...

I'm okay with the occasional week-long rewrite of a subsystem, but usually only after I've spent some time coming to grips with exactly why the old one is terrible and have a firm grip of exactly how the new one will be better.
Ask HN: How does one convince people and change minds in a post-fact world?
This post was spurred on by this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/5ntjh2/all_this_fake_news/dceozzo/

We've reached a point where factual evidence is no longer sufficient to convince someone of something. Did modern discussion platforms fail us? Is there something that can be changed about them to stop this?

...Can this even be undone?
The Cloud Vendors Want You to Embrace the Third Wave of Computing
The Russians can absolutely not just drop the margins and put SpaceX out of bushiness. Of course if the Russian state would fully fund everything and over free space access, so could the US. Neither of them will, neither can practically, politically do it. Its a pretty absurd claim, that I have heard nobody make except you.

SpaceX is not being propped up, the get contract because they beat everybody else on price.
No, you've not laid out the logic by which that statement follows from the others.

> America with its democracy exporting foreign policy gives the rational that democracies don't go to war.

I'd actually argue quite a lot with this: the US does not export democracy, it exports capitalism and calls it democracy. It's quite happy to overthrow democratic socialist governments.

Really the key factor is that trading partners don't go to war, because then it's unprofitable and/or they don't have enough independent infrastructure to survive. You can't go to war with your nose to spite your face. This is partly why, despite the bad relations between the EU and Russia and the small war in Ukraine, the gas pipeline remains untouched. They need the money and we need the gas.

And your inference that I'm American is also wrong. I'm an Englishman living in Scotland supporting Scottish independence within the EU. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to be a "reasonable" Euroskeptic for years, but this year of the referendum I gave up because the unreasonable side has taken over. Yes, the EU is not very democratic and parts of the EU get economically steamrollered. Guess what - this happens within countries too. Greece is to the EU as 80s Liverpool and the "north" was to the Thatcher government: abandoned.

Leaving the EU does not make Europe go away, it doesn't solve any of the economic or social problems, but it does remove a mechanism for resolving them peacefully.

The UK is not very democratic on close inspection either, and all these threats to remove one of the few bits of black-letter constitutional law we do have - ECHR - are really not encouraging.
Of course not, it's a message router, not a storage engine.

...

Actually, it has some basic capability to store everything in a set of files
stamped with time (and optionally gzipped), but this hardly counts.
It doesn't start faster than Windows 10 in my experience. Ubuntu server without desktop might, but Linux Mint 18 definitely does not on my hardware.

Anyway, there are plenty of reasons that people don't use Linux and you can find a lot of them with this search term - https://www.google.com/search?q=why+don%27t+people+use+linux

If you need convincing that next to nobody runs Linux on their desktop, you can read about that here - https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+desktop+market+share
> but CSV is trivial, no?

You can define a narrow subset or version of CSV that is trivial, but that doesn't reflect what one finds in the wild as "CSV", which was not systematically defined or described until well after many mutually incompatible things by that name.wdre well established.
KDB+ Web Components
So what about the Music Genome project?

http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp
Er, one of the best developers I know is over 50. However, they consciously chose that path instead of tracking into management because they like being a principal engineer where that means they still get to work with code, but also have enough experience to anticipate pitfalls and make considered decisions.
The parallels between US/UK banks is is astounding here.

Family run, too big to fail, rife with fraud and corruption etc.
They are very different. Most CEOs come from a business background and possess related skills. Secretary of State on the other hand needs to have a deep understanding of history, world affairs and international politics.
Is Blue Origin trying to reach the Moon? I'm not aware of a project from Spacex or Blue Origin to do so. Spacex has their sights on Mars and Blue Origin seems to be about space tourism (orbit maybe). I admit to not being aware of the long term goals of Blue Origin though so maybe I missed something.
Great read.

I've personally found that the 'Talking to Humans' book to be a great resource for thinking about customer development from the customer's perspective.

My favourite concept there was "walk in your potential customer's shoes". Not rocket science but can get forgotten in all the excitement of Lean Canvases etc..
Two examples I can recall. First time was an embedded application for a smallish (2-3 SW developers total in the company) firm. The code was, by my estimation, initially developed by a real talented senior guy. It at one time did what it was meant to do pretty well, and adhered to sound (at the time) best practices. Well Mr. Senior Guy ended up leaving for whatever reason, and since then, a string of less senior folks were brought in one by one to burn out maintaining the system throughout the years. And by "maintain" I mean "toss in every feature under the sun that the CEO asked for, whether or not it made sense and whether or not the rest of the system kept working". Every little thing that might get one potential customer to say yes was bolted on hastily and shipped as soon as it could compile. Just get it to work by any means and ship it. I was brought in as one of this long string of people. By the time I came, the CEO was frustrated that the system could not be added to quickly enough anymore, and that core functionality would fail in the field more and more often. It was a total mess, and eventually proved irredeemable. I'd like to say I left the system in better shape than I found it but at the end of the day it didn't matter. Technically, this project is not dead so it doesn't meet this Ask HN's criteria, but I don't think they ever have or will make another major release of it. It will limp along until they start taking technical debt seriously.

The second one was a mobile app that was originally ported from some legacy J2ME app and "gotten to work" on the iPhone platform. It was pretty much a straight port, data structure by data structure, from Java to Objective C, and didn't really use the platform properly at all. For example, each and every control was hand-crafted to mimic the original J2ME app, rather than using the built in UIs that iPhone provided. It got to the point where nobody could touch it without it falling over, and no senior person was willing to work on it anymore. I was senior enough in my career at that point that I could insist that a complete re-write was the only way to go. We did that successfully and the previous pile of technical debt was killed.

Those examples aside, I'd say that almost every place I have worked suffered from technical debt to a large degree. The common theme was a huge legacy code base that suffered for years (decades) from repeated "just cram it in and get it to work" abuse. The metaphor I always like to use is: No home builder on earth would, when their requirements were to build a 5 story apartment building, take a single story single family home and just add 4 floors. But seemingly every company building software attempts to do this.
And of course it suits Apple to focus on the highest probability event, particularly since (unlike FX traders) they don't stand to very quickly lose large amounts of money if low probability but cannot be ruled out yet positive news for the pound happens. The worst case scenario for Apple if the pound rebounds involves people thinking their UK App Store is a bit overpriced until they revise prices again.
How do you know Opera will do that? I don't think they would care too much at this point.
GitLab is down. Oh, not again! Who's to blame? What to do?
> I have an uneasy feeling about these frameworks as well, but I'm not an expert in this field. So if I'm told that it's not worth the effort to recreate all of that stuff from scratch I'm going to have to believe it.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert in the "ml" field either, and only really informed because of my academic/contract research work in neuroimaging wrt DSP and beamforming and having to rely on performative code involving what at the end of the day comes down to manipulating matrices with some set of mathematical/physics constraints; I wished reviewers gave us an easier time with our paper and just believed our results without taking months before accepting it haha.

But if you are able to use these frameworks/hack around the quirks for your use case with minimum effort and solve your problems to satisfactory degree, I completely understand that they can be good enough.

>…we keep the capability to selectively dig deeper…

>That's why I'm always trying to reduce the frameworkness and increase the librariness of any third party code we use. Scripting language runtimes are a major roadblock in that approach.

I don't disagree with your sentiments at all, but it seems like you are already at the intersection where you just need to go down your own road because its probably unrealistic to expect Google's needs to be aligned with yours in the long term. Then again, I'm the type of person who would fork the nightly version of firefox and remove and add the stuff I want out of the box so maybe this is not the best suggestion >.<
13 Programming Languages to Learn in 2017
I think he is saying that electron apps are bad because they are so power hungry.

I'm using a 2008 macbook as well and I don't have any huge problems with most apps. I do stay away from web-tech-based apps as much as I can though.
Tried ScudCloud? Open source third-party Slack client (also based on Electron): https://github.com/raelgc/scudcloud

Never really compared their resource usage since I'm only in one Slack team 99% of the time and even the official app isn't that horrendous in that use case.
> So what mechanisms keep the price from instantly dropping if "everyone" agrees it should be lower? Market inefficiencies? Or lots of money betting on an upswing?

Asymmetric uncertainty: some people believe there is a small chance that things could change for the better; in that case, the market will go up spectacularly and Apple will update their prices again. If that doesn’t happen, Apple doesn’t have to change their price again, which is, I presume, a fairly costly operation — but the equilibrium rate with an effective Brexit is lower than where it is now.

Once such situation is if the Parliament refuses to approve the referendum: Courts have rules their vote is needed, and most MPs were against Brexit beforehand.
How about Geary ? Or ClawsMail ?
I know of at least one company whose entire business is handling this stuff. They find growing companies as they hit critical mass and need to move their Excel data into a real database. The product is just "Your data is hideous and was entered by hand without validation or formatting; it'll never convert and it'll be wrong when it does. We can help."

They handle all kinds of theory and technical stuff, like normalization and processing Excel-corrupted dates. But they also handle a lot of easy-but-agonizing tasks like regularizing single quotes into apostrophes, which crop as soon as you let humans enter free-form data.
I paint for a living, and I much prefer Krita to Photoshop nowadays. It's really very good. For my purposes it matches Photoshop's features plus more, such as the guides (vanishing point, ellipses etc), symmetrical painting etc.

That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users. This worries me a bit. If anyone has been looking of an open-source project in this space to get involved in, here's a very successful one that could use a hand!
Yes, there is no double taxation - but you essentially need to involve yourself with the tax authority of every country you are doing business in.

In a real single integrated market, I'd have company registered in country X, serve customers across entire Europe, but file taxes on the entire income in X only. I'm thinking they don't allow that because it would open doors to all kinds of tax optimization for the little people - ex. say UK workers would register themselves as companies in countries with very low taxes, and continue to work ("provide services") in UK. This kinds of schemes are allowed for the megacorps, but not for us regular folk.
I think gregman1 means bad from a resource consumption point of view. It takes a lot of memory and CPU compared to similar, non-electron based text editors.
The question for me is if our government doesn't provide any of those services why aren't we paying half that number?
I used Nylas back when it was free, and it is a good email client, but it just wasn't worth $7 a month to me, and certainly not $12, especially when I consider that Office 365 Business Premium is only $12.50 a month, and includes Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. I would never use Office 365 personally, but when I consider the value offered by Office 365 Premium vs. Nylas, for about the same price, it makes Nylas Email look grossly overpriced.

It seems to me that Nylas could make a lot more money by charging $1 a month, since there are likely many, many more people willing to pay $1 vs. $12. Probably more than the 12 to 1 ratio required to break even.

I like Nylas, and think it is a good email client, but their pricing suggests they haven't done the market research and competitor analysis required to price themselves strategically and to be successful.
Taino Indians got to Cuba from the Yucatan, which is a 135 mile sea voyage. The Galapagos Islands have pre-Incan pottery, and they are 563 miles west of South America. The Falkland Islands are around 200 miles from Isla de los Estados Island (reached by Fuegian Indians). So the Falklands (Malvinas) were very reachable. Very early Native American migrants were sea faring people who moved down along the North American and South American west coast then back up along the east coast. Haplogroup d4h3a found in bones at Prince of Wales Island on the Alaska panhandle, are 10,000 years old. Chumash who settled Channel Islands off southern California have haplogroup d4h3a, the Fuegians, who probably made it to the Falkland Islands, have haplogroup d4h3a. The Ainu people of Japan also built "lashed-canoes" -like the Chono and the Chumash (as well as dugouts), and they may have a link with the Amerindians. Like you say, oceanic transport is not trivial but Amerindians were doing it for distances over 100 miles for millennia.
Go to Google or Facebook and Search Evon Latrail
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Fiduciary duty it isn't a magic spell that shareholders cast and then the company does everything all the time to squeeze profit out of everything. Lots of Google services are still free (as in price)
I have been convinced that NAND chips have been price-fixed for years now, similar to how the exact same companies (Samsung a big one) involved in their production price-fixed RAM chips and then LCD panels. A few years ago, there was an investigation launched into exactly this. South Korea, however, closed that investigation. Has anyone heard whether that investigation was closed as one of the 'political favors' the bribes facilitated? Given the production processes involved, the materials involved, and the sheer titanic scale of the number of products which include NAND chips, it is absurd that we do not yet have SSDs which are significantly larger, and significantly cheaper, than any mechanical hard drives.
Shmoocon 2017: The Ins and Outs of Manufacturing and Selling Hardware
I open the page and have no idea what Nylas is. I click on the logo and I'm taken to the blog home page, where 60% of the screen is the Nylas logo with no subheader telling me what it is. I click on it again and it just refreshes the blog index. No link to nylas.com. How do so many people make the same mistake?
Reinventing Poor Cities at Scale
Sadly, that's the only marketplace around. I have about 5 APIs there and the activity is really low.
Back in '96 I was in a startup company in the Boston area. We had a B2B app that we customized per customer. It worked over dial-up. We didn't foresee affordable internet connections coming. When it did we couldn't rewrite critical subsystems quickly enough.

Because our product was customized per customer - not just look-and-feel, we coded their business rules into it - we had problems scaling. Further, our design didn't lend itself to rapid development.

First our sales team left. Then developers started to leave. Within a couple of years after I left, the company folded. Many good experiences had in that company. Many lessons learned.
A Lack of Internet Access Is Killing Western Massachusetts