skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Its position as the #1 web server language has already been taken over by nodejs

How so? Because when I put a PHP script on a server with "<?php echo 'Hello world' . date('Y' time()); ?>" that is a one-liner and I'm sure it'll work for the next 20 years.

With nodejs, I have to implement the whole webserver and then my web app is also a server, even if it's "only" 20 lines of code and I need other tools to make sure that this server never crashes or automatically reboots and all that stuff.

Imho, the main benefit of PHP is: You can write a script today and because the language is mature, it doesn't change all the time and you can be quite confident that it'll keep running for another decade.
I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to use .local as a unicast domain name due to its use in mDNS/Zeroconf
If you made a film, then you're a film maker. But success in films and in games, is not evenly distributed.
I built something like this with the 74 series IC chips when I was in college. It was really fun!
There were a few popular non-Mozilla apps that were built using XULRunner back in the day, but considering Mozilla has made it clear that XUL development will soon stop, I don't think it's likely to be a technology that grows in popularity.
It's always sad when a company has issues for months and nobody either sees them or acts during that time. Though 'Desde la barrera todo el mundo es torero'.
How to Do an Repeated Measures ANOVA in Python with Statsmodels (master)
Whatever makes you feel better about yourself, obviously /s
I like this design better. The mechanical linkage isn't complicated. Balanced two-bladed rotors. You're only sending minor impulses at certain points in the rotation rather than changing the speed significantly.
No, to maximize their chance of a happy, productive life, and maximize the chances of those around them, and maximize the health and strength and long-term viability of our society as a whole.

Humans are not well-adapted to the temptations, challenges, and weird outcomes of modern life. Many people - probably most people - need to have their world and their choices shaped by social policy and group morality. Left with total freedom and no guidance, they would destroy themselves because they couldn't understand or handle the perverse, distant, brutal, unpredictable outcomes of their decisions.

We're just not evolved to thrive in a world with World of Warcraft, heroin, credit cards, sugary drinks, alcohol, motor vehicles, birth control, mass media, porn, reality TV, glamour magazines, Photoshopped models, etc.

The more our world diverges from the conditions of our ancient ancestors, the more it needs to be shaped. And as a very individualistic freedom-loving person, I hate saying this but it's true.
Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'
SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy. From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists. There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels.

But:

- SoundCloud neglected the platform.

- Then they did one of the worst redesigns of any site I've seen (try reordering a track in your spotlight [paid feature] in Chrome. Crashes the tab and has done for years. I need to open another browser to do that.).

- Then it became overrun with major label artists.

- Then they started offering features just to the big artists - various UI/branding options - (forgetting about the artists that got them to where they were).

- Then they did the whole paid streaming mess which they were never going to succeed in. Anybody could have told them that, I really don't believe anyone in that company thought 'Go' would work. I think they just needed to do something.

I'm not sure if they've taken so much money now that this isn't possible anymore but if I were CEO I would take it back to it's roots. Focus on the unsigned artists. Fix the site. Offer a distribution system (like CDBaby/TuneCore) so that SoundCloud can be a one-stop show for unsigned artists. Now you've got paid accounts (for stats/spotlight/unlimited upload space) and a small cut of distribution on all paid platforms.

I don't understand how in a world where more artists are getting big without label help nobody is offering a great platform for them. SoundCloud got very close in the past. BandCamp has gotten close too (although it lacks the social/sharing/viral aspect of SoundCloud). If SoundCloud does end up shutting down it's due to greed and poor management. Instead of focusing on what they do well and what people use them for they've tried to go after the money and they were much too late making that move to get any of it.
No offense, but what makes you think (potential) customers like you are so valuable that serving their pet peeves becomes a sane business decision?

Everyone is moving to web technology because it cuts down on cost on many fronts, not because it's the better technology. Finding web developers is easy and using Electron (etc) gives free cross-platform support, which is very valuable. It's all about economics, not quality.
Fortunately pgAdmin3 is not going anywhere for now because BigSQL maintains an LTS release that stays compatible with the most recent Postgres versions: https://www.openscg.com/bigsql/pgadmin3/

So I simply continue to use pgAdmin3 until something better comes along because I also really didn't like pgAdmin4.
You are right and I was not clear.

What I mean: Since they all signed NDAs they are not allowed to openly criticize their company—ever. Not when being hired and not after being fired. Since 173 were fired it's easy to ignore NDAs because they won't get caught. But it's not right, they break a significant agreement and this is so typical for employees (just head to Glassdoor and how much internal stuff is disclosed).
We brought electricity and phone service to these places. What makes internet different?
Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of <10% per year. At that rate, my money is safer in the bank or some kind of low risk portfolio. If you have an 80% chance of losing the money, then you better expect at least a x5 return rate when selling your shares.

I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need investors, period. Of course you could say - well, just don't make a product that nobody pays for; but obviously there is a market for such products, on the investor side.
I switched jobs, and started with Symfony 3. The thing felt like some Java framework, but poorly documented and harder to use than it should be. It had lots and lots of setup code done before handling every request. There's a whole DI framework with it's own tons of setup code for every component.

This is also the overarching feeling I get from the big PHP frameworks: Java envy. They picked an architecture which is perfectly sensible in Java, but slow by design in PHP. You also notice this in the language features being added, where gradually PHP is turning into Java. On the Java side instead there is Scala envy, with Java slowly turning into Scala.

I don't mind PHP taking good ideas from Java though, PHP 7.x is much improved and the community overall seems to be moving in the right direction: take the good ideas from Java, without taking on the worst excesses.
Happens everywhere.

In corp I've seen engineers go behind their manager's back to write something in their favourite language knowing it would've been rejected if discussion had happen beforehand.
Exactly - what of the social impact of not having Internet connectivity in 2017? How would that affect your ability to find and do work, to communicate, to shop?
I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up there but i'll try.

We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres.

The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of silca gel for her garden.)

We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away.

Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night.

Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.)

In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away.

Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile. Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would routinely run out in the middle of a call.
According to the book "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism", countries become hardworking and disciplined because of economic development, rather than the other way around. A long but interesting quote:

"Having toured lots of factories in a developing country, an Australian management consultant told the government officials who had invited him: “My impression as to your cheap labor was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage.”

This Australian consultant was understandably worried that the workers of the country he was visiting did not have the right work eithic. In fact, he was being quite polite. He could have been blunt and just called them lazy. No wonder the country was poor — not dirt poor, but with an income level that was less than a quarter of Australia’s.

The country in question… was Japan in 1915. It doesn’t feel quite right that someone from Australia (a nation known today for its ability to have a good time) could call the Japanese lazy. But this is how most westerners saw Japan a century ago.

In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese “give an impression…of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.” Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25 years (1888-1913), fully mastered the Japanese language, and taught in Japanese university. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an “easy-going” and “emotional” people who possessed qualities like “lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.”

(...)

This was not just a western prejudice against eastern peoples. The British used to say similar things about the Germans. Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as “a dull and heavy people.” “Indolence” was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature."
I notice a contradiction in two of your points that happened to fall together:

Apparently nuclear displacing other generation saves many lives, yet Fukushima, which shut down Japan's Nuclear didn't cost any lives. It seems like your trying to have it both ways.
Too lazy to search for the exact reference but I remember reading a book by famed French medievalist Jacques le Goff (I think it was "Pour un autre Moyen Âge") where he tells the story of how clocks first showed up in city center towers in and around Northern France and Flanders, around the 1300s, as a mean of "regulating" the activity of city-dwellers who were now working as laborers in the newly created "industrial" manufactures (the Medieval Period came with its own industrial revolution). That area of the world has remained one of the most developed in the world well into the 20th century.
> Then it became overrun with major label artists.

So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. Many new album releases are missing on SoundCloud but available on Spotify from day one.

Probably I am the only one but I find most 'DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity (I am into electronic music though). Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker. These mixes and 'the extended repetoire' are no competitive advantage over Spotify and Co.
Words can have more than one meaning based on context? Mexicans are so confusing! Nature is so wild...
Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways
We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are. At least some of the issues are listed as only appearing after a while. Journalists likely are a lot more receptive to/asking around for employees with complaints when there is a general air of failure (or total overblown hype) surrounding a company.
Ahorita is not used in Argentina. I am almost sure it is not used in Uruguay or Chile either.
I love what you have done here, I cant wait to get some time to try out your "instructions"
Perhaps your generation. Of those things that gave him prominence and influence, they were done decades before I was born.

The guy is a linguist. I wish he would stick to what he's good at.
Most of these articles about broadband access conflate Internet access with broadband speeds. Yes, Internet access is basically a necessity in modern life. However, 25Mbps download (which is the definition used) is absolutely not.
Soundcloud Is Near Deal to Sell Stakes to Private Equity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861925
More legal work is done by smart software, but cultivating client relationships has never been more important.

I always found this turn of phrasd to be somewhat odd.

Why has cultivating relstionships never been more important? What is it about today that makes this true? And if it's not true, then the whole "but" is just handwaving nonsense inserted in place of the crux of the whole argument.
Lived there once. (More info in my other reply.) They wanted 15k to bring electric lines half a mile. $6k for phone. We never did have electric outside of solar/wind/genarator. We had phone service via a device they installed that had a solar panel and an antenna that looked like this on it. https://cdn.instructables.com/FNY/J38K/GXQPMTQV/FNYJ38KGXQPM...

After a year or so they decided they needed it more in Alaska and they laid the line for free. Then waited a year to collect the equipment they so desperately needed in Alaska.
I've considered using Qt in the past as it seems like a good GUI framework, but there seems to be one technical factor that holds it back from even greater market share, which is language bindings.

If you program in C++ or Python, no problem, both have good support for Qt. However, outside those two languages it seems that the available bindings tend to be small projects rather than something robustly tested. That's appeared to be the case a few years ago at least, would be happy to be proved wrong.
> Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars?

This reminds me of the current ICOs and the token economy. Early adopters try to push new currencies like crazy to cash out once popularity peaks.

SoundCloud was never thought as a real business. Everybody involved in the music industry should have known that it's not possible to build a solid business based on the oligopoly of three music labels and with Spotify having a headstart of 50m users and being still not profitable.

But still all these VCs with USV leading the way told us it's the next billion dollar unicorn. Old-school pump and dump.
In English we have a very context-sensitive timing word: 'soon'. Soon can mean 5 seconds from now or much more, depending on context.

'I'm leaving for the airport soon.' This probably means within a few minutes or hours.

'Soon my kids will be all grown up and leaving for college.' This means anything up to a decade or more. Nobody would expect my son to leave today, even though the wording is the same as my airport declaration.

This rarely causes any trouble, despite the large difference in meaning.
A need to reproduce isn't the only thing that motivates humans...
> If you're going to put in the effort to write a proper desktop application with native components through Qt, .NET, Java or OpenGL or something, go ahead but please don't bother with webapps with a browser wrapper, just leave them on the web where they belong. If you need a little more integration, do it with a browser extension.

Yeah... no. I'm not that fond of using Electron apps (Atom, Slack...) myself, but I absolutely don't want them in a browser window. Writing a "native" application simply isn't an option in many cases.

> The top comment on any news article or discussion forum being something other than "great, another unnecessary Electron app that'll waste my CPU, RAM and battery".

So what? There's the same handful of curmudgeons posting that comment everywhere. That doesn't mean they're valuable as a demographic. It depends on the market of course, but if your application solves a problem that nothing else solves as well (as it should), then running on Electron is not a dealbreaker. Most ordinary users can't tell and don't know to care.
China’s Booming Autonomous Car Opportunity
Ask HN: Offline Reader for HN – Pocket and HN Comments
I don't know how other people use hacker news.

What I do is, I "open in new tab" on the "comments" of the titles I am interested in and I look through 2-3 pages. Then I go to each comment page & open the article and read it. The comments help in understanding the counter points & get better understanding.

So, is there a reader like pocket. It should save the article and the comments.

I was unable to find this function in any of the apps around. How does everyone read HN?
For starters, it takes the priority away from "serving us better" as the GP's claim was.
The human slaves.
In a way they could reproduce. They might just need to convince a human to handle the physical part - assembling a new host computer, but that could be just about giving the human the right incentives (maybe $ or knowledge).
personally I think if they had focus on monetizing the artists side of the business and keep it small as you say they could have a great business not at the scale of Spotify but sustainable.
Also why are you instantly downvoting my comments?

Users you reply to can't downvote your comments. The software doesn't show the down arrow for replies to one's own comments.
You don't need fibre for that. 3G is more than enough to browse Facebook, find a job, and buy toilet paper off Amazon.
This seemed to me a very sad story. The time during which SoundCloud as it was known and loved really existed was the era before they were really worrying about their "business model". As soon as they contemplated how they could exist long term, they started copying mainstream music services in a way that no-one loved. The real question is: given how much amazing free content there is, how are we going to nurture valuable cultural ecosystems like soundcloud, and create a meaningful and stable niche for them and their employees in our economies?
That sounds like a reasonable reason to fire someone
Ask HN: What charitable efforts make good use of technical skills?
A post I read a while back about an effort to equip an island with a working GSM network using open-source software (https://babyis60.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/the-island-phone-system-adventure/, similar effort https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/cellulars-open-source-future-is-latched-to-tallest-tree-in-the-village/) piqued my interest and got me thinking about similar opportunities. Does anyone know if there are any volunteering opportunities doing network / infrastructure building in developing countries? I did my Master's in EE + telecomms.

Looking a bit closer to home, I should probably take a look at Code Club – a colleague had good things to say about it. I was hoping to find something which might (selfishly, perhaps) satisfy my sense of adventure too, however...
There's a certain type of developer that's impossible to miss on developer-focused social media: the thrill-seeker which loves learning new programming languages, building an apparently impressive-looking project with them and writing blog posts about how everything was awesome.

Introducing a new language to an organisation is completely different from the above and it's nice for a change to see blog posts that also consider the long-term sustainability of a solution, maintenance costs, potential staffing and training difficulties, etc. These are things that are very important for a mature project.
Marketing automation is not about clickbait but knowing who your users are, what are their biases and then showing you only that ad which will have a response and not show what won't work. Thereby, making $ spent on marketing more efficient. Companies are generally run by financials rather than societal benefit. I do not know whether that is a good thing or not, only future will tell. :)
Serving customers better is a means to an end (i.e. maximizing profits), not an end it itself.
This seems like an extraneous tetchy comment but I don't think it is. Extant slow internet connections would be a lot more usable if websites weren't full of video/audio adverts, trackers, and JS being used for stuff (displaying text/images or doing some awful and slow scrolling) that browsers do well natively.

Try using the internet (beyond HN or gmail or pinboard) on a mediocre internet connection without any adblocker or noscript-equivalent. It gets nasty very fast.

To be fair, this isn't a justification for not building out better last-mile links -- just like, the miserable state of residential internet connections in the US is made a lot worse by awful bloated websites. https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ and http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm are good reads on this.
You're hilarious
Who is the audience of Noam Chomsky? Antisemites? Khmer Rouge supporters? Never understood why anyone takes him seriously.
> We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are.

Every employment contract has by nature a NDA embedded. And those are much stricter than dedicated NDAs since employment contracts get rarely negotiated line by line, most employees just accept and sign employment contracts.
My guess is that their data centers look exactly like this

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
What is not proven for me is that this is more cost effective than the quadcopter. The unbalanced rotors look like they will need expensive bearings. The complex speed control looks like it is going to be very expensive by the time they have tackled the efficiency issues. This is vs using just two more identical motors. This brings economies of scale, plus you can use smaller motors. The efficiency issue alone may mean a quadcopter needs less battery capacity, allowing a lighter payload. Always interested in a novel design, but still lots to prove
Thanks for that link, that was a hilarious read. Highly recommended.
Nice find. Reminded me of the conjoined triangle of success