skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I really enjoyed that episode :)

> Curious, since it was just you writing the backend, what was the reasoning behind doing microservices + react SPA. Both of those require a lot of commitment, and coordination. Microservices especially are something I'd be more likely to consider with a very large team/many teams instead of a single developer.

> Would you choose a microservice architecture again?

For microservices - we were planning integrations with messy systems. Think, having to poll an API, deal with XML, or have to do custom auth on lots of different incoming data endpoints. Microservices made it easy to add new experiments (like our ical service) easily without adding complicated logic to the central datastore. For reference, we already had API keys and signed agreements with four integration partners (POS, HR, etc) that we wanted to roll out in a short period, with more people lining up. We also wanted to add messaging capabilities beyond SMS quickly, so that's why we architected the bot like that - where some providers had strict sending limits (like twilio) but others did not require as much of a strict queue.

For react - I didn't pick that and I've actually completely unfamiliar with the library. I'm learning VueJS now and that would be my choice for future SPAs. Now that I understand how shared components work, I would have changed a lot of the system design.

I'm already starting on my next company. It's a monorepo with three folders: pkg (packages), cmd (any `package main` commands), and static (all JS, SCSS, etc that gets built by Webpack then wrapped up in a single bindata.go). The primary app is a monolith. However, I'm making it possible to add additional service, such as cron jobs in separate containers or a command line utility based on the same protobuf definition.
I like your idea that being inundated with information is part of the cause. That seems likely.

Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated.

E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights.

He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't.

Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!"

I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc...

And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly...

I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense.

I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about.

It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...
No one would be happier than me if they pull this off. However, I think the timeline is super ambitious. They never had to deal with human passengers till now, meaning they have to develop all that skill set in 1.5 years. Even with significant help from NASA/Russia this sounds like an extremely tall order to me.
By that definition everything is on "legal quicksand" because virtually anything can be outlawed. Uber found a confluence between technology, consumer demand and political change. That confluence has historically defined winning companies.
Donald Trump's 'shadow President' in Silicon Valley
There are multiple ways to look at this depending how you view people in your country

People's opinions are manipulated by either media (i.e. corporations) or government and they are told what to worry about. Just because economy seems to be doing well in this poll, it could be because people are told it is doing well. Now I haven't looked at any indicators, so maybe it is actually doing well, but I am using it as an example here.

Unemployment could be an exception here. People do feel that personally, it is a lot less abstract. So maybe that is closer to reality.

But even healthcare, so many think it is now "being fixed" so they stop worrying about it.

During Bush's time we see worrying about a moral decline, It is likely not because people were particularly immoral then but his rhetoric focused on religious groups (Evangelicals) and he used them as a block pretty much to vote for him.

Then guns. Look at that, in 2013 people were so worried about them. Why? Almost just as worried as the "Lack of money". It is probably not because people were shot left and right, but because the administration, the media, and various gun groups (NRA) picked that as a talking between them.

So this is just as much about what is really wrong with the country vs what people believe is wrong with the country and the two things don't have to be the same. It also shows how easy it is to manipulate people and changing their political agenda.
Hiding hours gives a wrong impression of how long a certain job will take and how much work is really involved. Same situation I see in large organisations and developers working long hours to get a project done because they've under-quoted. The employer then uses those metrics to measure future projects. Then when the employee's eventually burns out or start a family and transition into normal working hours the employer will see a sudden decline in productivity and assume they've been slacking off.

In the end you have the best intentions for your client but can end up making it worse for yourself going forward. Quote down to the minute you've been working on a project, if the client is un-happy then that is something you can work with.
If the "mess up" is deliberately discriminating against somebody over a protected class like sex, I think firing them immediately is a fair and arguably ideal action to take. I would be surprised if this wasn't the standard operating procedure in most companies.

I assumed from the phrase "massive jackass" in your post that cruel behavior from him was typical and dramatic enough to be a marked pattern. Most companies /are/ willing to fire people who repeatedly disrespect and are cruel to their coworkers. It's part of a bare baseline that you need to maintain to have a decent work environment for your employees. You and the woman he discriminated against makes at least two separate eye witness reports to an egregious offense (protected class discrimination), and I assumed from your description of him that his cruelty wasn't just exposed to you two.
This is an interesting development. I am curious to see how they take this integration forward. Specifically, I have questions whether it will still have a Premium component or will it be made completely open-source.

For those interested in an alternative, I am currently building a simpler bookmarking tool [1] that works pretty much exactly like Pocket or Instapaper. Email This will extract useful content from a page and send it to you via email instead of you having to download an additional app or login to another service to access your bookmarks.

[1] https://www.emailthis.me
Berkeley is easily as expensive as SF of not more.
Have you read this?

https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...

It seems racism is another aspect of Uber's culture. Since the narrative is Kalanick sets the culture, and he chose to fire the brown guy who has no apparent complaints from Uber co-workers instead of firing the white guy mentioned in Amy's post, who has actual complaints against him, it would seem firing Amit was a racially-motivated choice of scapegoat.

He's obviously hoping to feed this into the news cycle to make the negative attention go away so he can resume business as usual with no real change. My point is if he had fired Amy's perpetrator it might have worked. But with her adding allegations of racism to the mix, this stunt fails.
In what way is employing people in an offical capacity (you pay them, withhold income tax, holiday pay, health cover, superannuation (401k or whatever you call it) off the books?

Don't these data get reported to government, and worker on academic and corporate economists? Who endeavour to account for the effects of employment in an econo-socio-politio-historic evaluation of the world.
I'd rather it not be Justin Bieber.

Either the rocket would blow up on the pad or it would never come back. ;)
33k per month take home on 1 million per year would mean the tax rate is over 60%. There is no way that's right.
Yes, but not until the very end(which is why I called it a side note). I'm assuming this article follows the journalistic inverted pyramid paradigm.
A few points (from personal experience):

* Citizens safe against human trafficking: Australia - No; Indonesia - Yes. Wat.

* Same Sex Marriage is not yet legal in Oz.

* Village Roadshow is trying to get a bunch of websites censored in Oz. Visit medium.com in Malaysia and you'll find that it's banned.

* Singapore as a country appears to be not represented

Seriously? Sources?
Administrations may not necessarily make new laws/regulations, but they are able to make priorities. For example, the Bush Administration had a bigger focus on stopping illegal immigration and enforcing the Patriot Act:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/politics/gonzales-lays-out...

In contrast, the Obama administration was seen to have "rebuilt" the civil rights arm of the Justice dept into its "crown jewel": http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-justice-department-tru...

One of the more well-known initiatives of the Justice Dept. under Obama's administration is the police data initiative, something that was sparked after officer-involved shootings (Ferguson, etc.) revealed that the FBI was doing a shoddy job of tracking these incidents nationwide:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...

A non-justice example: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's work in looking at fairness in lending and housing:

- https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-f...

Incidentally, this initiative has led to one of the best government datasets: 9.2 GB of mortgage data: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/hmda/
Look at F1 in 1972 and F1 in 2017 for an example of what relentless, continuous improvement looks like. Can you imagine what would be like if they'd given up on the series? If all that we had was NASCAR and Indy? The entire automotive industry would be over a decade behind, if not more. Most thigns people take for granted like ABS and traction control might not even exist.

Look at SpaceX as an example of what happens when someone fumbles the ball so hard it takes over four decades to recover it. Virtually nothing happened in that time other than the shuttle program, and that was never intended for travel outside of Earth orbit.

Now we're finally back to innovating and engineering for actual space travel.
Show HN: Store.js v2.0 – Cross-browser storage for all use cases
Thanks for being so transparent and sharing your learnings! Good luck with your future project.
They expect to make money on the appreciation of the house's value.
Why did Google let an executive who had credible complaints against him resign on his own, and even threw a goodbye party for him? I can only imagine how the victim felt when he or she heard about that party.
Processing Streaming Human Trajectories with WSO2 CEP
Ball rolling bees reveal complex learning
Someone related to Montgomery Public Schools. Googling the domain of their email shows up the school.
This view is too simplistic. Many people believe that truths are being hidden from them or intentionally distorted. Distrust of the media and belief in conspiracy theories are rampant. So it's not rejection of facts, it's rejection of the corrupt elites that are reporting them.

Obviously I don't believe this and I find it hard to empathize with these folks. I spent the holidays listening to my cousin tell me how naive I was for believing what I read in the New York Times, then rant for hours about how mass shootings are all staged hoaxes.
SoundCloud’s new $5 a month service has the best features for half the price
Travis might be largely responsible, but an anonymous account is not good evidence of it.
Boston Dynamics Officially Unveils Its Wheel-Leg Robot: “Best of Both Worlds”
I switched away from a 2016 MBP w/Touch Bar.
Switched to a Dell XPS (9560).

For the curious, here are the specs and price:
MBP: 2.9GHz i7, 16GB, 2TB NVMe, Radeon Pro 460 4GB GPU - $4299

XPS: 2.8GHz i7 (Kaby Lake), 32GB, 1TB NVMe, Nvidia GTX 1050 4GB @ 4K res - $2499

The big jump in price in the full spec iMac is the 2TB of storage. NVMe isn't cheap.

If they were both at 1TB storage, and more comparable spec for spec, the XPS makes for a more powerful machine. (and for me raw power is WAY more important than thin/light)

Why did I switch? Major GPU issues, a gimmicky touchbar with only TouchID as it's useful piece, crappy battery life, and the need for something reliable that wasn't going to flake at the drop of a hat.

Like I've commented elsewhere, it's hard not to get the impression that all Apple cares about is the iPhone.

They've been making thin and light the priority, at the expense of things that power users want.

Lest anyone assume I'm stomping off mad... I've been a hardcore Mac user for 14 years.

I am using Windows 10 on the XPS. I figured it would be a major source of pain, in terms of workflow, to switch back. The Windows Subsystem for Linux takes almost all of that pain away.

I still have my MBP, but it's sitting on the shelf. Once more updates come out, maybe I'll revisit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The (Potentially) Habitable Worlds of TRAPPIST-1
Yes. I would always use gRPC-gateway in the future. It's an amazing library. Check out the `protobuf` folder - we basically defined the whole api there in a language-agnostic way. For client libraries, you can autogenerate gRPC definitions quickly. For servers, gRPC-gateway provides a Swagger definition that meant that we always had 100% up to date API docs that include a Postman-style way to execute calls. The auto-generated API docs sped up front-end development so much.

I think that access to the docs requires logging in, so here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/R0AvB

Jason Chen is using Elixer/Phoenix for his new project, by the way, and thinks that it's the future for Rails developers.
SoundCloud unveils $4.99 mid-tiered music offer
This will only happen if he's forced out or there's a massive internal strike at Uber. I imagine he has to have something over on the board (e.g. proof of their knowledge/complicity in covering up sexual harassment), given how obviously toxic he is. And from the interactions I've had with Uber employees on this forum, there are no lengths they won't go to rationalize the most obviously horrific behavior on the part of Uber's leadership.

I'm not optimistic, but then again we seem to be living in quite the era for black swans.
Snowden's Guardian Angels Need Your Help
Find anything better than Gnome-Do for it on Linux?
Nah, I disagree.

It's time for housecleaning in this industry. If it is true that he jumped before he was pushed at Google, then they must have had some serious evidence against him.

Should Hans Reiser be given a second chance because he's good at file systems?

Turn it around, if an engineer does amazing work all their career, and behaves within societal norms, do they at some point accumulate enough credit to allow them a "get out of jail free" pass?
> Everyone is more than their worst moments

Maybe. In my worst moments, I haven't sexually harassed a coworker. I think a lot of people can say that, honestly and proudly. Singhal made his $35M+, and I'm honestly not too worried about him finding his next job. He'll be OK.
> I guess that's skin in the game

Should be a requirement in most engineering/maintenance fields IMO. When I used to be a pilot, the engineer who signed off on the maintenance manifest after a major aircraft service was always required to go up on the check flight with the flight crew.
> My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner, so that's going to be my last iPhone as well.

Did you buy Applecare Plus? I broke my screen on my 6S and Apple replaced the entire phone. They also offered to replace only the screen, but I opted to pay more for a full replacement because the body was damaged. They never mentioned anything about the fingerprint reader being impaired after replacing the screen.
Sorry to hear that. I'll make sure to fix it. Are you on windows? What version of Firefox?

Aside: Firefox have been breaking our site every couple of months and we have to keep hacking around their regressions.
You're forgetting about dependency management. The win for in-ram cache on incremental builds is real.
He clearly mentioned "It (sexism) wasn't even blatant either..".

In every company there are 'Jackasses' (selfish egotist managers, politically malevolent colleagues etc.) who can never be fired for their specific ways of 'jackassery'. In this Uber narrative it was not anyway implied that this person was always sexist jackass.

I'm just being respectful of the anonymous Uber engineers who are speaking up. This would only lead to goodness for the existing female employees who are there in Uber and other companies.
Needs a (2014) tag.
Why use a VM when I can run things directly on the bare metal or in a docker container and not pay the virtualization overhead.
How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters (2007)
As a tech company, Tesla has never delivered a product on time. Worse, it's usually 2-3 years late, not the usual 3-6 months delay for software. At this moment, GM beat the Model 3 to market with its cheaper competitor by at least six months and at industry scale.

Now, bear in mind, I'm an early stage Tesla investor. I bought Tesla at $38 and sold them at $150. I felt they were beyond fairly priced at $150 before they unveiled any self-driving tech. So I've been ignoring financial industry naysayers for years.

My take on Tesla is this: this moment is do or die for the company. It's fine to be six months late or even a year late if they launch the Model 3 with full autonomous driving capability at a price affordable to the upper-middle class. But more could be fatal. Several major competitors are nipping at their heels concerning both EVs and autonomous cars, including GM, Nissan, and BMW among others.

The one best thing going for Tesla is their sterling reputation with consumers. Geeks believe that their cars are magic spaceships and are willing to wait unbelievably long times to own one. Their brand reputation is better than Apple. They must deliver quality and not rush production just to meet the Bolt EV in the market.
I think a question like this is so nebulous that people can answer it in a multitude of ways, none more or less valid.

Global warming doesn't really affect the USA specifically and/or uniquely, so maybe that biases the answer? Also, dying of smoking is less a worry when you see a truck about to run you over. Maybe people preference immediate danger over longer term danger?

The issue of "country" is an interesting one in the other direction as well. If a state/city/county has 16% unemployment, but the country has low unemployment, some people may think it is a country-wide issue, and preference that. Ditto other issues that are state or local level issues.

In any case, I can see why almost any answer is valid, which kinda makes the whole question an odd one.
RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) are a pretty unique police service. Depending on the area of the country they can operate as everything from federal law enforcement right down to local police services. In many rural places they operate as all levels of law enforcement all at once, something you wouldn't find in the US. The vast territory and mandate they cover makes for some unique challenges.
But Japanese has the extra wrinkle that it uses different words depending on what is being counted...
I get my small batch artisanal American made PCB from oshpark.com
Cool. Got a link to some good vendors?
RR, Ruby Rogues - https://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues
This was the one must fun and favorite, until panel split to https://www.greaterthancode.com

They had around 15 episodes where they discussed books with their authors, for example:

- RR Book Club: Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns with Kent Beck

- RR Book Club: Understanding Computation with Tom Stuart

- RR Book Club: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture with Martin Fowler

- RR Book Club: Refactoring Ruby with Martin Fowler

Another cool thing was picks at the end of each episode https://github.com/ryanburgess/ruby-rogues-picks

Software Engineering Radio - http://www.se-radio.net

FLOSS weekly - https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly

The Amp Hour - http://theamphour.com
Random feedback for your main site: It's totally unclear to me if you only offer some kind of classroom product or something for more general use. Some of the text indicates the latter, but all the sign-up stuff seems to only target the first.
Not sure I'd give Singhal a pass --depending on evidence provided, that said, I'd probably give someone who develops a cure for even one of the cancers a pass. It's probably not the PC thing to say, but if someone could have such a positive on their side of the scale, I think I could give them a pass.

Your example has some false equivalence, Hans is a convicted murderer, Singhal is an accused sexual harasser. Those are not equivalent.

In a purely procedural society such a hypothetical person does not get a pass --in a more relative society he gats a pass. Kind of how we look the other way regarding historical figures of importance and their flaws when what they achieved transcends those flaws.
He resigned on his own terms. I know executives pull that crap all the time to avoid getting "fired" but the fact is he quit voluntarily
I can't believe that the environment isn't on a single one of these lists.
Switched after the release. Now on a Thinkpad with 32GB of RAM for half the cost. Took a bit of adaption moving to Linux but I'm glad I did. Have had minimal downtime since switching to Ubuntu, can only recommend it for work if you're using a popular flavour and you've got popular hardware. Life's too short to spend time fixing driver issues and configs.. Unless that's your job. ;)
Nice Post to Understand for designing good API!
Cached version - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wjfI6iX...
African Polyphony & Polyrhythm
I am constantly surprised by how many intelligent, generally rational people I meet also believe in (what I consider) absurd conspiracy theories. I've had people talk to me seriously about chemtrails, free energy devices being suppressed by oil company assassins, flouride in the water for mind control...