skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beats the hell out of XML. The reason JSON works so well is b/c it's dead simple and no one can implement their own stupid version.

I have seen so many takes on xml and soap over the years. Every one of them made me sneer in disgust.
I use it because it works. Something without an implementation is not an alternative.
Banks figured this out already: Stop sending things
directly in email, and instead send notifications.

Yeah, and it sucks and everyone hates it.

That's all very well when you're sending someone a bank statement and you don't care if they bother to read it - but when you want to send someone an invoice, and you're keen that they read it and respond in a timely manner, you need a higher standard of customer service.
How to have better political conversations
Visual Studio is the most used IDE and somehow I don't know a single person who uses Visual Studio.

http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-mo...
I don't understand why YC would be able to help the ACLU "hone their skills."

If it's about access to legal skills, the ACLU has been around for nearly 100 years and has been involved in pivotal court cases.

If it's about money, I've seen articles saying that the ACLU's donation base has gone up quite a lot since Trump.

If it's about reputation, I don't think there's any contest. I suspect that more Americans know about the ACLU than YC, by an order of magnitude. It's also worth noting that the only place I've seen this advertised is in tech blogs, and a few news outlets. I haven't seen anything in legal journals, and the ACLU's website doesn't even seem to mention it.

The one thing I could see as being logical is YC helping the ACLU to work on more technical projects, and using technology to get more people involved in civic duty. But if that's the case, then it's extremely misleading to say the ACLU is a YC "startup", and far more accurate to say they are collaborating on projects of some sort.
Generating B2B Leads Using Contests (Case Study and Beta Launch)
So we launched a new product in the super competitive space of lead gen. I know WTF were we thinking haha

We had so many people saying it would never work or how are you different or don't even bother (you need to niche DOWN).

But after many rounds of revisions we finally released our baby child in the viral contest space and our beta test generated 7k B2B email leads and 8k new social followers.

Case Study on product Launch - https://vyper.io/blog/case-study-using-viral-leaderboard-contests/

Wanted to share the details to prove that you should do what you love even if people tell you no! Also I am being a little greedy as I want your feedback/opinions/criticisms etc.

- would you use this tool?
- how would you improve this tool?
- how would you market this tool?
- how would you limit the damage of copy cats?

I know this leaderboard contest product will last about 2-3 months before being completely copied.

Anyway, over to you! Also you can reach directly at jack@vyper.io if you want to give private feedback!
The man boobs i'm having is costing me a shot at MMA glory
If you fork a go package with subfolders, you will be in for some trouble. Your fork is still importing the original subpackages, because they are referenced by their absolute (original) address. You don't want to rename the imports in the entire fork because you still want to merge/pull request with the original. So your fork needs to live in a folder that uses the original name, not your fork's name (that local repo will have two remotes, the original and yours). This is a pretty annoying and error prone disconnect, especially for people wanting to use your fork; they need to do the same type of workarounds.
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author’s plan to bring Silicon Valley to middle America
In most modern western airports checked bags are scanned using a CT scanner rather than a 3 image x-ray that you see used for carry-on bags. This gives a much better image with more spatial clues regarding the contents and makes the resulting image much easier for automated detection assistance. Checked bags are also often passed by canine units for explosive detection.
Heh, you're lucky. I have two toddlers and I cannot stand to hear them cry and I sure as heck can't say 'no' to pleading eyes asking me 'Daddy do you want to play Legos with us?'.

As a result I had to get a desk in a co-working space. Not cheap but I find grown ups bantering loudly far less distracting than my kids asking me to play.
Clearly almost no one is asking for alternatives.
Why don't you just stay late or come in early, don't you care about the company?!!
Yes, I intended it as sarcasm.
I work very closely on this product. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and I'll answer as best as I can.
An example of what I would consider red-light camera abuse:

Philadelphia has a number of red light cameras which each generate about 10,000 tickets a year. That's about 30 tickets a day for each camera, $100 per ticket. 12 cameras generate $9 million a year [1].

If 30 people are "running" the red light each day, does that say more about the drivers or about the setup of the red light?

[1] http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/traffic/transit/Red-Light-Cam...
How is this easier to use than e.g. acme.sh?
Any source for that claim?
SD-WAN: Entry Point for Software-Defined Everything
> the new, two-word scarlet logo, created by branding firm Wolff Olins—“The Met”—resembled a “red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs,”

Hah. The old logo wasn't great, sure, but the new one is both forgettable and ugly.
And this, along with MS' history, is why I still have a hard time using any of their technology. I appreciate some of their open source efforts, but for the most part they're still the same old. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
The New York Times has always been good at digital things. They have a decent API and have digitized a lot of historical articles from the 20th century.
I want to be a programmer or at least be building important stuff at 56. I just don't want my sustenance to depend on it.

There is crazy ageism in this industry. And I don't want to fighting pointless battles, while you could be spending time in peace doing a lot of other work.
There is quality content out there, much of it for free. It's just hard to find, particularly via search engine.
I regret to have read this. It is very depressing, but also eye opening.
What Are the Most Common Words Developers Log?
I like the ideas put forth in this article. I wonder, though, if "distillation" is a re-casting of "scholarship" as considered by the humanities.

People studying topics ranging from Biblical Studies to History to Literature often do not create new source material, unlike in STEM. Yet there is a large degree of effort taken to "distill" existing facts through new lenses, producing novel concepts and interpretations. These efforts can transform our understanding of many areas of human endeavour.
Generally, the bigger and older the company is, the more unmaintained cruft you have. Banks would be one of the worst I imagine.
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

- Grace Hopper
I get where you're coming from, but this concept you take issue with goes by another name: "due diligence"

I'd even argue that selling a cheap ~$50 printer and then expecting to make it back on consumables is a legitimate business model. If you're the kind of person who prints once in a blue moon, it makes more sense than buying a ~$200 laser printer.

Printers are generally expensive and generally last a few years. They're not casual, off-the-cuff purchases. Much like a computer, they are a precision machine, but with many more moving parts. I really don't believe it's unreasonable to do a couple hours worth of research on something that'll be in your home or office, possibly doing Important Serious Business Things, for years.
On Firefox, I'm using DownThemAll. It has lots of features, including bandwidth throttling, downloading from multiple mirrors at once, checksumming, pausing etc.
The problem is less our ability to make the drives themselves have a high TWR (thrust to weight ratio) so much as that the power generation necessarily required to run them is very heavy. See here:

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/03/rockets-elec...
Movie Galaxies – social graphs of 700 movies
They're still trying to get even for Marc Andreessen sabotaging NCSA Mosaic's cross-system portability stuff, in an attempt to prevent the year of the Windows Web Browser.

https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic/blob/fd11fb7c900e8...

Much of the cross-system portability stuff has been intentionally
REMOVED from this version of the library by Marc A in order to
discourage attempts to make "easy" ports of Mosaic for X to non-Unix
platforms. The library needs to be rewritten from the ground up; in
the meantime, Unix is *all* we support or intend to support with
this set of source code.

And of course for this remark:

https://ontechnologyandmedia.com/2009/07/12/the-return-of-th...

Netscape co-founder Mark Andreessen boasted that Netscape would reduce Microsoft Windows to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”
Most businesses are boring. I'm actually a fan of how so many of these companies are taking proven tech to industries that operate like it's 2005 or even 1995. That's what it will take for tech to make the world more efficient and productive.
I made the mistake of thinking "open plan" meant low-walled cubes. Because I've been working longer than this fad existed. I think we had even used the term back then. I didn't get why people were suddenly whining about them.

Then I saw a real "open plan" office.

Holy shit. Why aren't workers violently revolting?
The most complete bike share visualization and analysis website
Why are Deploy Boards being restricted to EEP customers? I would love access to that, but I don't need the support and geo-replication (and 5x cost increase) that comes with EEP.
I have no idea. My bits and pieces all seem to still work (not that anyone wants them) if that's any indication.

And I stay busy, just with other stuff like this:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/17/mountain-vigilantes-ta...

Yeah, don't get me started on how my county (doesn't) maintain[s] roads. It's depressing and it's not just here.

But I'll ask my doctor if TRT is right for me. I actually will though I sound like a crappy TV ad.
Next, Recycle Direct™. Select the mail you want delivered, and the USPS sends everything else directly to the recycling center.
Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Microsoft could tabulate these reports to find what OS their customers want to use with OneDrive. But if they don't get recorded, there's no info to learn that from.
Used Gnome for a while now, like it a lot. However, at times it feels quite bloated and that the bloat will mean some apps don't get attention they should.

Night light is nice, though. Will try it as soon as it hit the repositories on Arch.
It's just like anything else that we used to live without ... mobile phones, call waiting, microwaves, you name it. Doesn't mean that having new things today isn't an improvement or more convenient in some ways.

I've used printed boarding passes sometimes and other times used the app. Using the app isn't necessarily more convenient when it comes to the boarding pass, but the Delta app can quickly tell me if my flight is delayed, gives me gate updates, and alerts me when my baggage has been loaded onto the plane. Could I get along without it? Sure. But is having that information on my phone useful? Of course.
The same with Sharepoint 2003 and Outlook WebApp 2003. Microsoft did a lot of things during the browser wars. Then later in Balmer era Microsoft was very soft and a rather good citizen, but since 2012 they changed back to Bill Gates style flavoured with indian spice.
How does the light behave? some deviations
I love linux, and use it as my daily machine for work and home. But whenever I mention to others in the community that we really need to clean up this crap, and make our systems reliable instead of flashy, they treat me like I'm insane. It's amazing to me that we still have sound, wifi, and display issues that need to be solved with shitty hacks in 2017.
Ha, the flip phones are key. They must have algorithmically calculated that the 90s were the optimum time to live a false life.

I wonder why the machines made people live boring lives - seems like a great way to get them to wonder "is there more to life than this?"
finally buckled down and got a WSJ subscription

I tried to be clever and use California's library system which has WSJ for free, because I thought "hey its 2017 library databases like ProQuest wouldn't still suck right"

well it was horrible like I just got jettisoned back onto Blackboard in the mid 2000s, so after that I just bought the WSJ subscription.
A one man startup, time management and preparing an Employee job description
Java IO: slowest readLine ever
As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.
Any timeline on po box support?
First, the parametric polymorphism mechanisms in most OO languages are orthogonal to the concept of classes.

Second, as I said, try it with multiple types that are interdependent. Once you do that, you go down the rabbit hole of higher-kinded and existential types to make sure that everything lines up properly with the compiler's inference mechanisms.

A key difference is that the generics in most OO languages allow you to parameterize only by types. An ML functor makes the parameter a module. Everything you can stuff in a module can be part of the parameter signature, and you can create whatever relationships you need between them. And you can do things such as hash tables with both case-sensitive and case-insensitive string keys that still share the same string type.

Finally, in your Scala example, keep in mind that unlike ML functors, it has the usual constructor problem that many simple genericity mechanisms have: constructing instances of the parameter type. In Scala, that means you end up working with CanBuildFrom or implicit arguments; C# and Eiffel have specialized (and ultimately, still less flexible) language constructs to deal with that.
Machine-owned enterprises already exist. Any sufficiently large corporation, with a sufficiently diffused ownership structure qualifies. The governance of such corporations can be described as an artificial super-intelligence, that is often malevolent to human interests (It will happily optimize for paper-clips, or whatnot.)
This is fascinating -- likely one of the biggest moves a company has taken to foster and cultivate open-source.

Working full-time on anything that isn't providing a reliable source of income is frightening and I think it's prevented a lot of people from developing useful tools.

Will be watching this!
Note: the reason we need Night Light to be in Gnome is because since the move to Wayland, it can't be done by an external application like it used to be under X; it has to be done by the Wayland compositor.

I'm looking forward to using this in Fedora 26. One of the major things that broke for me in Fedora 25 was Redshift.
I'm glad this is a priority for you guys Sid, the one thing keeping me from using Gitlab is that it doesn't feel as snappy as Github. But as a point of reference, I'm also a guy that won't use Atom because it doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime. For some of us, speed comes first.
You don't have to settle with the complainant, if you can convince the judge and/or jury.

Even if you don't actually want to go to court, you can usually still write an answer. Then you can still propose a settlement more favorable to you by mail, if the case isn't dropped outright. Why pay $100 if you could pay $20 plus postage stamps?

The automated enforcement would completely fall apart if the contractor had to spend money on skilled human labor for every citation. So every time you get a ticket from a robot, write an answer, and request source code for the robot's software as discovery. People pay because they don't want the hassle, but when you just send in a check for automated traffic enforcement tickets, you are paying the Dane-geld, and will never be rid of the Dane.

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!" --R. Kipling, "Dane-geld"

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...

(Not a lawyer. Not legal advice.)
Partly related anecdote: I did some contract work some years ago for a startup (Tellytopia, later acquired by Concurrent Systems) that was into the video over IP space. Video transcoding was a part of the project, but I didn't work on that, which was in C++. I worked on some of the surrounding parts, in Python with XML-RPC, talking to Java, across machines. I remember that all or most functions in the app were XML-RPC-enabled, so that they could be located in different machines, which must have helped somewhat with scaling.
Could be good way to dodge registered mail you have to sign for, but don't want to...If you knew the source.

The picture of the envelope would give you more info on what it was, who sent it, etc, than the current green slips do.
The machine reading is now so good that there's only one center left, in Salt Lake City, where humans look at images of illegible addresses.[1] "We get the worst of the worst. It used to be that we’d get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren’t good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine. Still, it’s our job to make sure it gets to where it’s supposed to go."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...
Oh, that's how the kids talk these days! And TBH, I was able to laugh my way through most of it. (I would have cracked up otherwise.) I had low expectations, and once we got into Kafka territory I just decided to try and enjoy the ride.
They could also be useful, in theory, for detecting session hijacking through cookie sniffing. Did somebody's device fingerprint change mid-session? It's possible that person's account has been hacked, so they should at least be made to log in again.
Still amazes me that people support Microsoft in anything in this day and age.
Ironic we nearly went under a few times during the early days because our customers (tier 1 telecoms and financial firms) would drag their heels for months and months over invoices many magnitudes less than this.

Makes me wonder what's up with the process at these firms - wish we knew enough to say whether they're the exception or the rule.
This is why I could not live in New York City.
"The obvious way for such an enterprise to begin is for the owner of a human-owned business to automate away as much of his work as possible, and then to die without leaving the business to anybody else. The business would simply continue to take payments, provide services, and pay bills, until something catastrophic happened that it couldn't respond to automatically."

This depends on the location the original owner is resident in. In many cases, if the owner dies without an heir or will, their assets go to the state [1].

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-estate-settled-if...
Mid 30s and this reflects the worry I have about my future. I kind of want to head down the non-programming technical management/leadership path, but I'm just not seeing a way to take that step right now. Same issue as always, people are (supposedly) desperate for managers and leaders with real tech/dev background, but they want you to have technical management experience already.

It's not that I don't like programming in general, it's just that so many of the things that many of us get paid well to do are so damn boring.
This is really helpful, thank you!
Supreme Court sets higher bar for education of students with disabilities
I was imagining someone selling off-the-shelf users with established history, like pre-shelved c-corps that you can buy.... "in business since 1955".
If i get pulled over by a cop and he doesnt show up to court, my ticket is dismissed.

When i get mailed a ticket from a corporation, who is expected to show up in court to be my 'accuser'?
I'm happy to see them too - the last batches had a lot of more mature companies and almost no "seed stage" startups.

I think I read in a comment that they're no longer accepting teams without ideas and that the experimental batch ended up pretty badly.
>3. Turn off your computer and personal devices when they’re not in use.

This article reads like an AOL scare from 1995 directed at my grandma.
Work with your frenemies and coopetition
Quote from the linked article by John Carmack[1]:

> The fly-by-wire flight software for the Saab Gripen (a lightweight fighter) went a step further... Control flow went forward only. Sometimes one piece of code had to leave a note for a later piece telling it what to do, but this worked out well for testing: all data was allocated statically, and monitoring those variables gave a clear picture of most everything the software was doing.... No bug has ever been found in the “released for flight” versions of that code.

When I started writing Arduino code, I independently re-invented this technique. I write my code with only fixed-size loops and no delay() calls (basically cooperative multitasking), making heavy use of finite-state machines to keep track of what should happen when.

This style of code takes some getting used to, but its advantages are enormous: I see other people using delays and busy-loops and then struggling to get interrupts working to keep their device responsive, whereas I have a clean linear set of logic that can be easily understood and is free of strange race conditions and the like, and is guaranteed to keep responding to events.

This style also makes it easy to literally eyeball performance: attach a bicolor LED (one that has e.g. red and green LEDs in the same package) and tell it to toggle colors once per loop. If the main loop is taking more than 8 milliseconds or so the LED will start to flicker visibly; if something pauses the LED will go solid and it's obvious the main loop is frozen.

[1] http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...

(Edits for clarity and writing style.)
I miss Wine Library TV.

I thought Crush It was a good book for when it was released but didn't enjoy Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as much. That felt like a couple of pages of content that was forced into book form.

I would recommend Getting Real by 37 Signals over either of those books though.
That'd be awesome, but I expect there'd be significant pushback from the direct mail advertising industry that makes up a good chunk of the postal service's revenue.
Microsoft's cash cow has always been Windows, and secondarily, Office. That directed their decisions then and it directs their decisions now.

The landscape may change such that Microsoft feels it is beneficial to release things like .NET Core as open-source, but this doesn't reflect a change in what Microsoft values ("A PC on every desk running Microsoft software" and the associated revenue streams), it reflects a change in what they believe is necessary to secure their goals.
Or you could say something like:

...10 miles on a tire only 0.68mm thick, about half as thick as a US dime.
> Since loudness is a psychophysical percept, it's also dirty pool to speak of loudness in this way.

It's worth noting that there are standards for loudness as well.

For example: The FCC broadcast spec for commercials uses ITU 1770, which involves a filter. The resulting measurement is then labeled in units of dB LKFS. (LK are filter params, which are fixed by the spec, FS is full-scale, ie this is done digitally. (As an aside, video streaming could sure use some more uniformity for its inline commercials too.))
Wait... yeah, isn't it? That makes the 2012 post have a very different feeling, after reading this.
Show HN: Getting started guide for data engineering tools