skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Just out of curiosity, have you had to maintain/modify any of these apps over these years and years?

Absolutely.

> If so, without any schema changes?

Usually, to be honest, yeah... Core, basal units of any given business process usually don't change. Only how they are abstracted, and that abstraction lives in code, not the database.

With a proper storage architecture it is very very very rare to need to change old data structures. It most definitely doesn't happen often enough to necessitate the use, overhead, and complexity of a baked-in migrations library.

If you think "adding a table" or "adding a field" is a "schema change" then that is where the problem lies... I think. Extending a schema should not require a migration library. CHANGING a schema, as in, destroying old data, and making new data, could surely use the help of a migration library, but, generally, if you're doing that often, you're doing something very wrong, and if you're not doing that often, then you definitely don't need a baked in migration library.

Ultimately, if things are so bad that you need a migrations library, you're better off fixing that shit at a low level, and starting over from scratch if necessary. Sometimes, instead of creating years and years of tech debt and burning resources on working with a clusterfuck, you just need to take what you can from that clusterfuck, and do it right. Then you only have a single migration, to go from old clusterfuck data to new extensible data structure.

Chances are, if you have old fucked up horrific data, it stays that way, and then some person or team comes along and writes a nice clean API on top of it. And then people have to maintain that horrific thing, and it's only horrific because it's interfacing with shit data layers in the first place.

Don't just abstract bad data architecture away into a service layer, is my point... Do it right.

Extensible is the key word here, but with an emphasis on decoupling.

If you have some dynamical data structure that is truly changing, structurally, often, and isn't simply being appended to or extended, then it probably should not be stored in a traditional SQL database in any way that necessitates schema changes. If you can't figure out how to represent data in an effective, decoupled, and extensible manner, then you're screwed from the get-go. Migrations library won't help you.
It sure feels like a bubble to me. I don't know how many friends I have with six figures of student loans and no career, but it's a lot. Considering that those loans don't even go away with bankruptcy, it's waaaay too many.

I've noticed that younger students are starting to realize how much risk there is in something like that and shy away when my generation didn't. Maybe it's that I grew up in a "striving" middle class, but a lot of my friends were told "just go to the best college no matter what and don't think about cost you'll make tons later," which ended up to be only partially true, and only for some people.

I'm hoping that http://lambdauniversity.com will help overcome some of those things and extend opportunities to folks who can't afford that kind of risk. It's full-time computer science training for free up front, paid back as a percentage of income for a couple years after you graduate. If you don't make more than $50k/yr you never pay back.
Where the capital goes is distinct from the fact that it's coming in the first place.

No one is choosing to misallocate capital, which then drives foreign investment. The dynamic that makes more sense to me is: foreign entities want to invest in the US, they deploy capital here, and that creates liquidity (lower interest rates, etc) while also increasing the debt load.

How that capital gets allocated is a function of domestic dynamics (political, economic, etc) -- but the fact that there is capital to allocate is, as I note, exogenous.
I like to think more in terms of the trade deficit and budget deficit.
Nim has many virtues, but there's insane bias against it on this site. All my comments in favor of it have been deceptively censored here for a very long time...
Parenthesis.

And lots of other things too. I just wanted to make a lisp joke. I will see myself out.
Well that was really interesting to learn. Thanks! That's pretty amazing it's run by a single person. Many companies are relying / using only a .ai domain which sounds even riskier when you put it that way but maybe I'm just paranoid :)
There's also this recent piece [1], which was lost behind the Medium paywall until republished (apparently just today?) on urbit.org. It's a very solid introduction to the platform, its intent, and the reasoning which underlies it, and it's refreshingly free of jargon. If you're looking for something to whet your curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend it.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpy5vt4zfuwgzax/the%20not%20so%20d...
If I'm looking at the right privacy policy (was searching for the general one which would cover Google Analytics un-logged-in tracking), here's a couple of things that struck me as being fairly open ended. Especially for a company as large as Google (and future Google).

From: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infouse

"We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads delivered by Google."

Also: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#nosharing

"We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example, we may share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services."

I don't want to get into a "Google's creepy" discussion, as I realize that's a personal choice and a lot of people don't have a problem with it these days.

But I do. And I'd be willing to put my money where my mouth is if that were an option.
It's probably vulnerable.
Yikes.

>Trump is literally that big of an idiot.

This line again. I'll believe it when I see it. So far I think he's played everything very well, and that started with his choice of opponent.

>It's really something truly amazing to see "both sides are equally bad" given that we have a traitor for a President, a GOP and Congress that is happy to look the other way as much as possible.

You sound like a republican in 2009. For heaven's sake just listen to yourself for a moment.

I guess what goes around, comes around.
Because it doesn't necessarily have to cost that much. There are world-class universities in Europe, Australia, Japan, etc. that don't cost $60k+ a year.
Not the OP, but I think the comment meant that without inflation adjustment and proper ratios, you can't draw correct conclusions.

The nominal number is big, but 2008 number is today's dollars would have been $14.17 trillion, or 11.3% higher than the current debt reported.
I think this is true with regards to loans and grants that are independent of the university, but not for direct subsidizing of the education through the university. That is, I think you're right that guaranteeing large loans and things like Pell Grants simply incentivizes universities to increase their prices by that much.

However, what should/could be done, is states could do what they've been supposed to do this whole time and begin actually covering students' tuition directly. Unfortunately most states don't increase tertiary education spending YOY at a rate fast enough to cover the increasing costs and enrollment numbers. So the burden falls on the federal government, which gave us this terrible debt-based system
Eh, unlike some of the other conversations, politics is a saturated market. I'm not sure you'd hear anything new here, and it won't stand out in the noise anyway.

Curious though, what would you hope to hear discussed? Geopolitical intrigue? Tech industry angle?

Here's one interesting thing I'll say: The vast majority of this kind of "news" consists of non-events. Think about it when you see the next story. So-and-so will have delivered a form to whats-her-face over in the fleem department and their press office will be releasing comments to the newspapers. None of this stuff means anything if you don't know the context. It's pretty funny.
An Indian village addicted to chess
What economic growth policies could we enact that would result in 5-6% GDP growth? From my admittedly limited understanding, that seems to be quite the stretch.
You realize the President had nothing to do with appointing a special prosecutor right?
Failed on the users who took well to the training, or to those who ignored it/failed it?

Because we can always not care about those others in the context of what we should do.
You could write a Django site in a single file if you wanted to.

See this for an example:
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/lightweight-d...
Exactly...sounds eerily similar to the way housing was inflated by government. People then blame greedy capitalists and ask for even more government intervention :(
For those who have installed it, does it (re)-add Night Mode that we've seen in N previews on Nexus devices?
Isn't the same also true with .io? I'm not sure if they use any anymore, I remember google.io pointing to something but it doesn't seem to anymore. Really curious to see what the future brings for these domains.
Apparently in some areas. Mostly northern Utah by the look of it.
But they're on a different part of our floor.

https://youtu.be/xnG1OiGGL0Q?t=41s
There are pilot projects:

http://www.audi.com/corporate/en/corporate-responsibility/we...

(mentioned on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction)

Who knows what the economics really are, but they don't sound dire.
I'm using linux for some time and I installed tons of software without
my package manager (thats unavoidable because not every package archive
has every software).

In the end its all about trust. If you trust some web domain you can
also trust their software. If that software is compromised you're out
of luck. No package manager or walled apple garden can help you with
that.
One has to wonder whether Simmons is just trying to revive the old RSS ecosystem. "What do developers like these days, JSON? Let's do RSS in JSON!" ... This does not help.

The real challenge these days is to replicate the solutions Facebook and Twitter brought to feeds (bidirectionality and data-retention in particular) in a decentralised manner that could actually become popular. Simply replicating RSS in the data-format du jour is not going to achieve that.
Would you say the same thing of Go or Chrome? These are tools anyone can use. Building something higher in the stack isn't cheating, it's just reuse. (Snapchat is built on Google Cloud, for example.)

As always you want to be careful about dependencies, but that doesn't mean rewriting everything.
I can see there's no Ruby SDK, but are there any plans to build one?
Great article. Slamming android and talking about Russian software. Click bait to boot? Sold.

My only issue is with his comment on swift. Which also sucks. Objective-C is wonderful and delightful. I'm sad to see it losing favor.

Oh well, off to try Kotlin. Maybe I'll finally make an android app... no.
> So far I think he's played everything very well, and that started with his choice of opponent.

Huh? Did you just claim that DJT "picked" HRC as his opponent somehow? And then further imply that it's somehow evidence of him playing 4-dimensional chess?

>You sound like a republican in 2009. For heaven's sake just listen to yourself for a moment.

I don't know what that means. Obama literally did nothing within a mile of what Trump is being accused of (with evidence, no less). People that say what you just said are loudly advertising "I'm not paying any real attention to the news".

Session lied about meeting Kislyak. He committed perjury over it. The Russian agent accused of being behind the plot to compromise the 2016 election. And then months later, Trump meets with them, in the White House, gets bamboozled by them and reveals top secret intel to them.

How the fuck can you, in good faith, actually act like Obama did anything of that caliber?
Correct, they are working on targeting LLVM
I really hope this approach is one adopted in the rest of the industry, because it would very easily allow for a transactional-privacy system to be implemented: users set a limit on who can access what data, for how long, for what purpose, etc and advertisers/tech companies still have the opportunity to gather data whilst not completely obliterating users privacy.

Both parties get what they want, and nobody loses out. Win win.
After it has run its course...
Welcome to the vicious cycle of Government intervention.

"Well we threatened a bunch of people with violence until they behaved against their own judgement. Turns out this led to all sorts of problems. Better do some more threatening to correct it."

In addition to being moral, a free market avoids this sort of feedback loop.
The only problem with Steve's rant is that he starts out describing his experience with APIs, but then it turns into an issue of better languages.

Presumably Kotlin doesn't wrap the entire Android API with some kind of better API, but most Android API calls would be direct Kotlin->Java calls, so how does Kotlin solve the nasty API issue?

Really, this seems to be another Java critique by Steve. He's also written critiques against typed languages in general, including Scala.

Android's API issues are language independent I think. Compare the design of Guava vs Android, you can make well designed and easy to use Java APIs, it just takes thoughtfulness.
All of Elon's ideas and actions: tunnels, hyperloop, solar, AI, electric cars, space launches and travel - are useful for getting to other planets and settling there. The investigation and ideas can be proved out in parallel here on Earth, and then applied in other planets.
Voat needs an Angel or will be forced to shut down
Aren't .blog TLDs available. I'm surprised google.blog isn't registered.
Sound does require an observer indeed. Soundwaves even require observers and definition of them as soundwaves. Otherwise there is nothing.
Your last paragraph describes the Australian university system. Government foots the bill to invest in your education, you pay it back gradually (and not until you're earning enough for it not to hurt).
Even for training? That would be disappointing.
>And Android has some pretty big red-light APIs. Fragments, for example, are a well-known Flagship Bad API in Android.

Ugh. I left Android development right around Honeycomb - where Fragments were supposed to be the cool way to manage your app and you'd get screen orientation and device screen configuration all for almost free. In practice I found Fragments far more confusing to use than the already complex Activity lifecycle. To hear that 3 years later that everyone may think Fragments were a bad idea doesn't leave me feeling good.
1. Those are a very small portion of the total available jobs. Even if every 18 year old had the aptitude, there aren't enough of those jobs.

2. It's a LOT easier to get into all of those fields with a relevant degree. As noted elsewhere, a degree is a strong signal that you can perform at least some of the work.
Fundamentally a registry is just a database that contains the information you see in WHOIS queries along with IP addresses. Writing one with a simple front-end would be an easy weekend hackathon project for an experienced developer. You definitely couldn't implement all of EPP that quickly, but a simple CRUD web application for domain names, sure. There are many dozens of different registry implementations out there, most of them homegrown and running just a single TLD. And let me take a moment to plug our registry software, the source code for which is available here: https://nomulus.foo
https://mobile.twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/4768359808...
Ask HN: Will Twitter Disable Replies to Combat Trolling?
With the recent backlash from advertisers against contentious content, the push towards live, and with Biz coming back, it seems like Twitter has set everything in place to "pivot" to broadcast-only. If replies are removed the trolling goes away and the focus is re-set to live, broadcast-only "comments" and DMs could handle any necessary conversation. Is this coming down the pipe?
This is standard industry practice - Samsung releases stuff before WWDC and product unveilings. This isn't new for Apple.
We've had 30 (40?) years of educators looking down on blue collar jobs and gearing everything towards pushing everyone to university because it's a golden ticket to a successful life. What most people didn't realize is that university was an attribute of successful people, not a prerequisite to be successful.*

People who might have been totally successful in vocational school or a variety of other things have been directed towards college they can't afford, they struggle in, and come out with exactly zero new opportunities open to them but now $100k+ in the hole.

* In most fields.. some fields absolutely require a college education.. for now.
Digital Toolbox – Digitally Transform Your Business
Why don't you commit now? If you really love it, wouldn't now be the best time to get involved?

> speed (native compilation)

Native compilation is often stated as a speed benefit, and it definitely saves startup costs, but Java is still extraordinarily fast; the JIT is an impressive thing.

I think there are good reasons for native: deterministic runtimes; fast startup times; low memory overhead; and lower runtime costs. Some of those you give up by adding a GC back in though.

Speed isn't necessarily one of the reasons for native.
I enjoyed dumping on Google earlier too. I love firebase, but I've talked two companies I've worked with out of using it for new, mission critical projects. The earlier article made me feel completely vindicated in my recommendations.

I simply have no trust that:

- Google won't randomly cancel firebase (wave, reader, etc)

- Google won't randomly, suddenly jack up the prices for firebase, leaving users in the lurch (appengine)

- When something mission critical breaks or changes, I'll have any way of contacting someone who cares, no matter how much my company is paying for the service. (Google's support forums are a pit of sorrow)

I was reading an article the other day talking about personhood[1]. It makes the point that part of being a member of society is the idea of standing. That is, if you break your word there has to be a way for you to lose out as a result. If there isn't, its impossible for anyone to enter into an agreement with you because you can't be trusted. Forming an agreement requires both sides to have skin in the game.

I don't genuinely believe that google has skin in the game when it comes to cloud services for small-to-medium customers. Its just too easy for them to drop the ball, stop answering emails and leave customers in the lurch. They've done it again and again. I'd say its the default way Google operates.

Thomas Schelling from The Strategy of Conflict:

> Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.

Please, firebase. Please be different. But know that thats the reputation you're fighting against. Thats the reputation you've inherited by joining Google. But for now I'm standing by my earlier recommendations.

[1] http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...
Beyond the expensive of the metals another problem is duty cycles. Most transition metal catalysis is oxygen sensitive, and it seems like for some reason the first step of splitting water is creating oxygen. Plants go through great lengths to separate oxygen synthesis (photosystem II) from electron consumption. Most hydrogen production in lower organisms (like e coli) occurs entirely in anoxic conditions. Engineered systems for generating hydrogen via algae typically are temporally segregated (harvest light during day, produce hydrogen at night) which defeats the purpose and is also chemically steppy (carbohydrate intermediates).
You present yourself as having some knowledge in this area. That being the case, what do you think of the treatments presented in the article?
$300/gram Cocaine in USA...

Contract killing by "3 US army snipers"...

Something tells me their data sources aren't too carefully vetted
> Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro based on the maintainer's political blog?

Yes, people pick Linux distributions based on the maintaining organization's ideology (heck, they pick Linux itself for ideological reasons.)
Does anyone remember when he wrote this?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...

And in the comments section he got lit up because he was unfamiliar with Haskell/Scala/OCaml type languages...

and here he is 9 years late to the party touting a baby version of these statically typed FP languages. I actually laughed out loud reading this blog post.
Hello fellow Obj-C fan. I tried to teach myself Swift much like I taught myself Obj-C. It didn't feel right.
While important, those are driven by capital flows (into the US), not the other way around. Because the US has open capital markets and a floating exchange rate, exogenous flows really dictate everything.

If the exogenous capital flow is held constant, then the budget deficit reflects the allocation of debt (driven by capital flows) to the government sector. But you could have a perfectly balanced budget, and the debt burden would fall somewhere else -- likely the household sector, via constant consumption but increased unemployment. (This is because government spending is consumption, and therefore stimulative; government cutbacks to enforce a balanced budget, or tax increases, would result in job losses elsewhere in the economy.)

I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds of how the capital flows are apportioned within the economy. What's appealing about Pettis's analysis is it's rooted in balance sheet arguments, which have really beautiful identities. The exact balancing mechanisms are complex and dynamic, but the overall balance is true by definition. It's a powerful framework to look at international economics.
Nvidia is the TPU killer. V100: 120 TFLOPs, TPU: 45 TFLOPs.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense, to be honest.

The problem in the US system is the government feels everyone has a "right" to an education, so it will underwrite an unlimited amount of loans regardless of what you do with them.

That pumps the system so full of cash no one is quite sure what to do. They just keep raising prices and people keep coming, because what are you going to do, not go to college? Even after funding slows, the prices are still sky high, and people keep paying.
Tuition and Room and Board are increasing way faster than inflation.

https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Articles/Educa...

CNBC has a fun infographic interactive from 2014 to look at where those increases are going.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college-costs-are-so-high...
Sorry, not in our plan!
I thought dotnet.net was already bad...
It's a pretty terrible design to couple activity state to the physical orientation of the device.
When looking at this in relation to the fact that the united states is bigger than it was 10 years ago in a number of regards. See these for less dour views:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
No, we don't. This doesn't do anything except break compatibility.
This is true on an individual level but not a macro level. Not everybody can be a developer or IT professional. The market just can't support that.