skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I refer to my period as a Xamarin contractor as "bomb technician programming." The biggest advantage of Xamarin is also the greatest source of its problems: anyone who programs C# can start a Xamarin.Forms app and get a proof-of-concept sufficiently advanced to show their boss who will run it up the chain and get it approved as a project. And THEN the devs -- who are awesome web developers -- begin to realize just how much they don't know about mobile and that they've coded themselves into more than a few corners and aren't sure how to get out... and I know this from first-hand experience from my first couple Xamarin projects. There comes a point where you realize that knowing C# is only part of the solution. You wouldn't take an accomplished ASP.NET MVC developer who has only done web work and assign them to an Akka.net or advanced, massively concurrent, highly-multi-threaded Windows Service project and expect them to succeed right away just because it's all C#. Same idea... different platform.

Xamarin is great for people who want to use C# to write mobile apps and know the underlying platforms well enough to know where the landmines are and how to side-step them. There's undeniable time-savings in being able to write non-platform-specific code one time and just link to it from the Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android project. It's also possible to write cross platform apps very, very quickly with Xamarin.Forms if you understand where the issues are there as well...

But it's even faster to just write a mobile web site. When I am asked for my recommendations for a mobile app idea my first question always is: "Can this be done with a mobile web site (which is PWA these days)?" If yes, why go further? If you really want the app store exposure then packing up your PWA as a hybrid app isn't all that difficult so mobile web is still my first choice. It's not unless you have specific, unambiguous needs that mobile web or hybrid cannot handle that going native -- Xamarin or otherwise -- is recommended.

Keep it simple, deliver value, and go home happy and a little richer.
I think at the very least they should be able to see someone do it so they know what steps are involved. Possibly a video with steps but stated that it isn't the focus of the class.
Interested to see how this would play out in Europe under the GDPR. Data should be personal data and hence each data subject has full rights to access it.
I hate it when PMs ask me for an estimate of effort on a task I have never done before and I get this question all the time. I get asked to get a new process through a deployment system I've never worked with before and that's fine. How long will it take? That depends on how complex the deployment system is and I haven't worked with it yet.
How close are they to retirement age? I ask because income takes time to turn into wealth. I used to think of 1,000$ as a huge amount of money, but given time to build up assets and some relatively modest pay increases and that's no longer the case.

PS: The other thing that happens to most people is eventually their kids move out of the house. That opens up a lot of possibilities even without a pay bump.
Ask HN: What not to do with AWS Lambda?
I am working on my thesis and I need advice from the AWS community. Lambda has become a golden hammer though it's important to know how to use golden hammer properly. Once people starts understanding how to use it, they see golden nails everywhere!

With AWS Lambda, I have heard a lot of stories about what you can do and lessons to build an event-driven architecture. But I want to hear what are the part of architecture where you should absolutely not use serverless aka antipatterns. Here are few of what I have come across:

* async calls
* too many dependencies
* redundant functions
* too much granularity
* shared code
* tight coupling
Per web search, that's a normal price. The question is if that's a good use of investor funds for a low value xompany.
Just wanted to second your recommendation and add that they also run Windows very well (although personally I ran Fedora on my previous ThinkPad and current Dell XPS 15).

If you do go down the Windows route, just make sure you create new installation media from the Microsoft website and do a clean install before anything else.
I wrote a PWA and got it published in 3 app stores[0]. I found this to be a pretty good mix: I can access native mobile features while using modern web features and rolling out instant updates without app store approval.

[0]: http://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2018/04/13/i-built-...
As long as people wants new apps quickly (now) and cheaply (free) the developers problems are _very_ important. Making those problems smaller or disappear makes it quicker and/or cheaper to develop apps and the companies paying for the apps will like that.
There is such a thing as "good enough". The cheap plastic solution tends to win when that happens. We weren't there in 2011, maybe we're not there in 2018, but the writing's on the wall.
When I first started working as a web developer, my boss would ask me how long it would take to finish a project. I would give him an estimate time, and he would always double it. As it turns out he was always right. But because of it, I learned to provide better time estimates. Overtime I became more accurate and started to provide more realistic time frames. Depending where you work or who you work with there's a lot more that goes into your day to day tasks than just coding.
What use would this type of data be to the average consumer? Outside of the obvious question of ownership and argument of who owns the data - isn't this otherwise very similar to being in a plane crash and demanding the black box data? Surely the data, itself, isn't very helpful compared to the analysis of the data?

Note: My question is in no way trying to argue against the consumer owning the data. I'm just wondering how this kind of data could be useful without access to the means to analyze it.

Edit: Not sure why all the down votes. I explicitly tried to indicate I was asking a question about the data value and avoiding the ownership question. I, personally, think the data should be the device owner's property. But my opinion on ownership and my question wasn't related to the ownership.
How can it have influence if they know the views happened after the “decision“? Seems odd.
Especially when the company has ties to the founder/CEO.
The downvote means: "I cannot tell whats wrong with the theory b/c I didnt even read it. I don't know what a spinor is, nor am I familiar with the concept of point splitting. I dont even understand why the coupling constant is superfluous b/c I always thought the dimension of a spinor is -3/2 instead of -1/2."

But downvoting in the first place seems reasonable.

Not trying to attack the standard model here but rather showing interest in discussing a new approach.
> organisational osmotic pressure

OT, but I love that term!
It's also false gold for the developer, it seems like less work but PWA's (in my experience) are almost always a worse experience for the User and require far more work to get them up really usable, if it's possible at all. Lot's developers are trying to sell this technique because they can't be bothered to learn something new. The reality is that it's a worse experience at the end of it for both the developer and the user.
That doesn't make sense. The profitable units are the ones that can be sold for good money, and money is the reason for selling.
Awesome! What did you use to go through the redirects? I’ve had issues with some browser automation only giving the final url.
Moving milestones, incomplete requirements, too many meetings, wrong tech stack, trying to break everything into halfdays to fit an agile agenda.

What does work is waterfall. Whatever is in the repo at the end gets shipped.
That's a fine argument for a bootstrapped startup with one product, but isn't meaningful when talking about the tech titans that suffer from the exact same problems.

This is the same type of argument that makes short-term profit take precedence over long-term success. Why in the world are we getting a deadline of 4 months? You, as an executive, had to know burn rate was blowing through cash a lot earlier than that.

Engineers hate releasing poor quality products because we know we'll eventually have to fix them and we will likely be given almost no leeway time-wise to fix the actual debt, as time will always favor ugly hacks that "work" over well-written code that prevents the problem in the future.
> Of course people may try and use "Free Software" to mean "software that has no price", but people apply labels and terms wrong all the time, that doesn't make them right.

Yes, but why do you think it is "wrong"? :-) Because it is the same opinion as RMS holds? It is only a matter of definition, IMHO.
Lol no way, but I admit "recipe" and "cookbook" don't really work in software.
I get your point but I think arguing information about the state of your home is PII would be fairly straightforward.
First of all, let me point out that this:

> Most of my work seems to be boring CRUD work where the challenge is gluing libraries together or figuring out business requirements. Actual interesting technical problems seems to be mostly wrapped in ready-made libraries / SaaS services.

...isn't a problem. It's a sign of maturity of the field. In 2018 most problems that you can solve with a computer should have an off-the-shelf library or service. (And most of the job of most working programmers should be mostly selecting and configuring existing solutions according to known design patterns. Like most engineering.)

Second, you've got to take into account that NN/ML/AI et. al. is going to "eat" a portion of all programming work within the next fifteen years or so.

(I think we're due for a contraction of professional programmers, at least as far as the job has been done for decades.)

If you really want to tackle intricate problems you're gonna want to look at biology or nanotech. People in this discussion have already mentioned "matter compilers" and "systems biology".

If you really want to stick to Computer Science problems I would suggest coordination and control of swarm robots. (That's what I'm working on, FWIW.)
Have you considered maybe you're treating your engineers like children? Why aren't they cognizant of the business realities? If they aren't on the same page as the business side, that's poor leadership on your part. I think everybody can appreciate that in order to keep the lights on sometimes you need to be in crisis mode, but if the company perpetually operates in crisis mode, then maybe the engineers aren't the problem.

Here's the reality, and maybe you've forgotten: The engineers are the ones who are going to get dumped on, and you and the VP's are the ones who are going to reap the benefits. Never forget that.
yes, reported to customer support but they just said this is how it works and that's it.
Ask HN: Can a US developer transition to the EU easily?
Context: I am a dual citizen US/Greek. Did schooling in both contries and am fluent in both. Earned my BS in the US and currently in grad school and full time employeed. Also at some point I could speak some french.

I have been considering moving to a city with good transit and quality of life, but from my POV that's not really a thing in the US. Then it occured to me that I can probably live in EU.

How hard would it be to transition to working in the EU? How fluent would I need to be to work as a developer/engineer in the EU?
Today at 2PM EST on twitch.tv/aws

The email just said "We can hardly contain ourselves. Tune in tomorrow for a live announcement about running containers on AWS." But that almost certainly means EKS.
I needed a tool for myself so I've learned to code
Why Open Source Software Is Moving to GitLab After Microsoft-GitHub Deal
In my experience, it probably runs Windows 10 better than it originally ran Vista.
According to this article, yes, it is. On the other hand it is a really, really easy to convert a react native app to a web app with react so it might have been a very good choice of technology anyway.
Yes, plan, the more planning the better. But set the deadline first, and plan and design around meeting the deadline. Ask yourself, "I have two weeks to deliver this, but if I had to deliver something tomorrow afternoon, what would I do?" -- and do that first.
CIA Stargate Collection
In the cases mentioned, it's not the "average consumer", but the owners who get into crashes and who presumably have a great incentive to figure out what's needed to analyze the data.

It's not as if there's only one objective way to analyze the data.
Drop me an email (jgc @ cloudflare).
There is no good reason for anybody to be doing this. I used to give the benefit of the doubt whenever a new action was taken by the government that seemed to have an exploitable loophole; but I've learned that if a regulation or agency can be weaponized and exploited, it will be.

So to paraphrase George R.R. Martin, what's the worst reason that they could have to wanting to do this? Well, they likely want to stifle the voices of whoever they feel is opposing their power, or to map out the relationships between people in the media who make up the political left. Then, they may attempt to harass them, get them fired from their jobs, buy the organizations supporting them, and so forth. Or they may try to find some point of disagreement among them to turn them against each other.

You probably think this is paranoid; but history suggests that something like this is what will happen.
The warning says that it attempts to mitigate it (with a referral to the documentation of the extract function). It's of course a bit strange that in one case it's a note that explains how the mitigation works, and in the other case it's a warning to not blindly trust foreign zips, but it seems clear to me that either both are affected, or neither of them is.
You could disable cors for your browser.
You don't usually own the plane that crashed. Unless if you're Elon Musk of course.
I think there's something to the Hume quote about reason being a slave of the passions.
All over. It's not strictly weather data, either. The majority of the data comes from programs within DSCOVR, LPDAAC, NASA, NOAA, NCDC, USGS, ARGO, CDC, CDIAC ORNL, DOE, EIA, EPA, FDA, EOSWEB, USFS, PHMSA and USDA. The snapshots I have are already around 50TB; I'm working on setting up updates at daily resolution for each of these sources, documenting it all and transforming it into something queryable.
The eternal conversation, apparently.

I agree with making fine-grained plans as a way to uncover issues. Just remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy. On the other hand, fortune favors the prepared. (I actually think those are both Eisenhower quotes, aren't they?)
Needs a (2005), this wasn't recent at all.
I've been there and the grass isn't always greener.
Perhaps since there was a grand available ($10-$20/person, as the article says) the numbers were significantly skewed. At 20$/person this totals $4,000M.

Although this doesn't mean sterilizations didn't happen, I'd be very interested to read more about this, preferably from a better source. If it happened, I've never heard of it and neither did many people I know, meaning it probably didn't get the kind of publicity this kind of Nazi-tier mass-sterilization programme should have gotten.
> I don't understand why there needs to be an execution graph. Conditional logic?

Of course. You may have different requirements, but here's an example flow of the one project I had worked on:

Lint --------------------
\
Build -+-- Tests (fast) --+-- Release --- Deploy
\ /
- Tests (slow) -

There are some extra rules like deploy and slow tests only running for release tag builds (vX.Y.Z) and lint being allowed to fail for branches with "wip-" prefix in their name.

Lint runs in parallel with build + test (multiple runners, on different machines, each having some concurrency). Different tests run in parallel so you have to wait a little less. Tests only run after build is ready. Release only runs if both lint and tests succeed. Deploy is after the release.

You can write this graph as a shell script, but this is not without downsides:

1. You need a DSL (a bunch of pre-defined shell functions or external commands) that control the individual jobs in a sane manner.

2. You can't just look at the script and draw the pipeline graph (so before the pipeline's ran CI/CD can't tell you what's going to happen next).

3. You can't guarantee that the plan will be the same if pipeline is re-ran again. With shell scripts, program output may change, even though all inputs are the same.

If all you need is to run a simple shell script, with no multi-machine parallelism and no fancy conditional logic - all of the YAML stuff is an overkill you don't need. Although I guess all you need is approximately this:

run-ci:
script:
- ./run-ci.sh

Which doesn't look like any large sacrifice to me.

> gitlab-ci does some ninja code escape mangling thing (turn on debugging output to see it in action). So in your log you continue to see 'echo id: $CI_BUILD_ID' instead of 'id: 123456'.

Not sure I've encountered this much, but yes, this probably makes things complex. I agree that this is can be a pain point.

> I have no idea why anyone would do that.

I'm not sure, but the probable rationale is likely that they didn't want secrets to leak. Variables are the place where you can store various secret information, like CI signing keys or remote server credentials. They probably didn't want to leak what happens with e.g. `curl --user "ci:$CI_DEPLOY_PASSWORD" "$CI_DEPLOY_URL"`.
I no longer work at CF, but the team were always OK with raising the limit on-asking: I’d suggest opening a new ticket and asking for a review.

(I kicked off the lengthy internal FAQ that covers this exact point...)
There is some irony in paying someone to drive you around and then sitting there in the back seat playing a racing game.
There are three responses:

1. "Interesting" has more to do with the person who is being interested than the task. There are people who insist on telling me about various sports statistics as if it is amazing and interesting, and they really want to meet famous athletes. There are others who really want to work with the machine code etc. Can you maintain interest?

2. I bet you even the ideal interesting jobs you can think of: say Elon Musk's job running multiple firms probably feels like yours from the inside. Board upset that he can't get the manufacturing levels up, sleeping in the factory, trying to figure out what is going wrong by staring at who knows what while asking SpaceX to hold off on the meeting this week.

3. Sleep early and drink caffeine -- not kidding -- and your job might seem more interesting.

Edit: There is probably someone out there complaining that they have to figure out boring technical details when they really want to learn more about the business challenges.
The author got a number of things wrong, but the thing that has surprised you is one of the few that xe actually got right. The handle-based API and subdirectories, introduced in MS-DOS version 2, were both Unix concepts added to MS-DOS that remained in DOS+Windows and in its successors OS/2 and Windows NT. (This wasn't the only Unix concept to cross to the IBM+Microsoft world. 32-bit OS/2 even changed to keeping system time the same way that Unix did, with a 64-bit count of seconds since the Epoch.) Command pipelines were right there in MS-DOS 2, as well. Peter Norton wrote a chapter about them in his MS-DOS and PC-DOS Users Guide in 1984.

Ironically, the thing that you have got wrong, in your turn, is your assertion that "an obsession with unstructured text" is actually true of MacOS and Linux in the first place. Most textual data files in such operating systems are in fact structured into records and fields; many data files (especially on the BSDs with termcap, the account database, and various others being Berkeley DB files) are not text at all; and there has been one particular database (the login database) that has not been text since 1BSD and Research Unix version 7.
As far as I know, that is true.
Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles
Then pick any non-PII data point you like.
My father suffers from dementia–and my siblings forced him to sign a new will
When computers were new, IBM would not sell computers to customers, but rent them out. Since most people nowadays seem to pay for cell phones, tablets, etc. in monthly installments and “need” to get a new model as soon as the one they have is fully paid off, I’m sure a jump to leasing/renting devices is a very small one in practice.
Ask HN: How do you visualize complicated problems?
I've been struggling to find a medium that works better than a piece of paper and a pen when it comes to visualizing my ideas, especially when programming. I can usually think through a simple problem when there are a few components involved but once I start losing track of things I need to write it down.

The problem is I end up with all these sticky notes around my desk with small diagrams. I like things like draw.io, but it's just too much sometimes for a simple sketch. A Wacom tablet would work great (especially using mypaint) but, it's a bit much to buy to have to take out and plug in every time I want to make a simple sketch.

What do you all usually do?
That's definitely something I need to think through more. And what your father-in-law said sounds wise. Thanks for sharing it.

The reason I ended up in tech is in part my fascination about tech, especially as applied to uplifting ourselves and solving our problems (yes, I watched way too much Star Trek: The Next Generation in my formative years). I never thought much about family - in fact, for the most of my life, I felt it's something of a side endeavour. I still feel it shouldn't be the sole focus of a person, though I definitely believe it's more important than I believed in the past.

Same for relationships. And small communities. I feel that maybe we overdid this globalization thing. Maybe global competition and centralization of various kinds of innovative work is more efficient, but it also doesn't seem healthy. Living in a city, there's no such thing as "local community" anymore. Not even neighbours.

> I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am.

Still, I'd like to feel like I'm actually doing my part beyond just participating in the economy as consumer. I have specialized skills, I'm not dumb. But I have hard time finding opportunities to do things I'd know could help meaningfully and effectively. There must be something. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

Your comment you linked to is golden. I'm favouriting it. Those are definitely words I'll try to remember from now on.
That's exactly what CI does. It saves me from doing it, and it can do so with concurrent workers (say, if I finish the next thing before the hour is up. Should I be running the two concurrent test suites on my local machine? Or holding them in a queue, manually...)

My build spins up a browser and does expensive feature testing in a browser window to prove that our Rails app and JS code play nice together. For a long time, this was working in a way where the browser would stay behind other windows and not get in my way. Then a Chrome upgrade came and now, at the start of every example, the window moves itself to on top of the other windows on the screen, and steals the focus.

I know you're going to tell me to file a bug somewhere, but I suspect this change was made on purpose for a good reason.
(Maybe you remember pop-unders?)

CI solves this problem for me, rigorously, and in a way that is unobtrusive and not brittle. If you're not using CI, you probably don't understand the idea that "all developers should be able to run the test suite, but none of them should have to do it." That's the big idea. CI helps our team to increase their velocity, and keep it up.