skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to escape the vicious cycle of technical debt
At my company time is always running short which is the excuse for all kinds bad or short sighted decisions, IMHO. Obviously this slows us down and makes time short again. I try to raise awareness of technical dept and common anti patterns, but i don't come through. I talked to some of my coworkers and they see the same, but all of us seem unable to change a thing.

I wonder if anyone can give me directions on how to improve things. Especially with the product owners/managers that have less technical background.

Or maybe a piece of good advice on how to deal with that personally. I also considered if I was the problem - by somehow misjudging the situation or something - but i think like myself, so don't spare the criticism.

---

A current example of the type of problems we face.

A big move from our DC to a private cloud based solution is coming up because our hoster closes that location.

My coworker and I where charged with building the new infrastructure. We built a sweet CI/CD infrastructure using gitlab and kubernetes. We did in ~5 months which took ~10 devs twice that the last time. So things are improving actually - yay! All our newer services where easily migrated, new prometheus monitoring is a treat. There is the last big monolith tho - two people and a short hard deadline while maintaining all the other services. So we sat together with the relevant devs and decided to fix away all those doodads in nginx and varnish configs and make the software usable on the new infrastructure together.

Now product owners start to complain that their tickets don't get completed and some even started to pull rank and moved devs to other tasks - moar tracking. They seem unable to grasp that a site can actually fail when load can't be handled, so they don't get stressed like i do.

Currently the site takes ~20 seconds to render at some places. so there is no urgent need for improvements? I don't get it, should i just watch it fail and relax some?
I think the RNDR token is the only one I've seen that really makes sense. https://rendertoken.com/. And the people behind it (Otoy) are very reputable.
> It is not an argument, it is a fact

All capital flows have a home-country bias. Even securities which are easily bought and sold internationally [1].

Proximity to investors matters even within countries. A start-up raising VC or person promoting an ICO in Silicon Valley will raise more money faster than someone in Montana. They, in turn, will outperform someone in Zanzibar. Doesn't mean it can't be done from Montana or Zanzibar. Just that it's more difficult.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_home_bias_puzzle
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think NLTK has ever had state of the art anything.
At least nitrogen powered Guinness draught is safe.
He knows too much. Better put him at the top of our pyramid scheme so he loses his integrity in exchange for money like Mr. McAffee.
> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any.

Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.
That's the early web. The early Internet was connecting universities, companies, and government sites two decades before the web came around.
Apple App Store turns 10
If they win this game show, young people can have their student debt paid off
>One could argue that if you have to dip down to the level of porn just to find some value, ICOs are worth dismissing

One could also argue that when porn starts adopting a technology, you should adopt it too because that tech is what is going to win.

Porn has consistently chosen the winners and any tech that discourages or disallows porn's involvement loses.
Yes... and as someone mentioned, the amount is very low compared to it's peak - https://dappradar.com/app/3/cryptokitties (you can see all time history) - on 09/12/2017 it had around 14k daily users...
Concentrate on experiencing as much as you can on this awesome planet we were all lucky enough to be a part of. There is more than enough here for a dozen lifetimes to explore.
There are many reasons. Miniaturized equipment, limited battery, nodes moving around randomly, etc
Will the f35 still be stealthy in 10 years against improved DSP capabilities?

My understanding is that if slap a super computer on top of the current radar systems, you can kinda of maybe possibly triangulate a F35. And DSP can be scaled up horizontally with cores...

(I am not an expert on radars, planes, dsp, etc)
This only implies that FTL transport would make causality travel a bit faster... but not subvert it (i.e. "travel through time" or "change the past").
Then some user will copy a directory, check it in, and declare that s/he «has branched the code». Oh, and quietly pull in some other directory, which is clearly not branched. This is just broken IMHO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17432801 was what got me thinking along these lines. If CCBill has a stranglehold on the porn payment processing industry, crypto is a natural threat to them. And that implies crypto has real power to shake up old models.
Operation Mincemeat
It's insane to this forum, is what. Whether it is actually insane is irrelevant, it just won't have any traction here and cause needless noise.
Wes Bos (https://wesbos.com) has an upcoming advanced React video course on building a project that'll use Prisma. It's coming out around August and it's supposed to be epic.

You can look at the code for final project here, maybe it'll be useful:

https://github.com/wesbos/Advanced-React
I think docked bike shares had the following problems:

- they were spaced too far apart

- they weren't in residential areas

The dockless bikes, and scooters, were a response to that. We could go back to using docks if we solved those two problems.

Or what if there was a hybrid approach, incentivising users who brought their bike / scooter to a dock by making the ride cheaper or free?
Yep, got that part.
I'm just amazed that TNT, a compound dating back to 1863 (just googled it) is in active use 155 years later. Of course it works well enough, but I'd imagine the military to go for the absolute most bang for the buck (pun absolutely intended) and am surprised it ha[sd]n't happened yet.
Bird requires this.
Why bother with a new airframe then? Just work out the systems in a current, effective airframe like the F-16 or -22.

But as stated elsewhere, that isn't porky enough.
As someone who has actually worked on such things, you'd expect updates to drop off to a trickle on an actually productive engineering project. At least compared to the pre-ICO hype. A few regular blog posts every other week, vs. a constant storm of promotional material and hype.
Four easy ways to screw up your seed round
Full Stack Developer, Master of None
After 20 years experience in software development and no degree, I went back at 39 to get a Bachelors. Firstly, I had always felt as though it was a dirty secret that I didn't have a degree and I never knew which jobs I had been turned down for because I did't have one.
Secondly, when I looked at the executive of the organisation I currently work for, every single one had letters after their name. I realised it's very unlikely (but possible) to move up the corporate ladder without at least a Bachelors, if I choose that path. Thirdly, a Bachelors degree is used as a filter for many things - insurance, immigration, bank loans. It helps to be able to check that box.

There is also, of course, the learning experience.
Because you can, and it’s better to eat than to not eat.

If someone is willing to pay you to explore idea space on reasonable terms, you’re a fool not to do it.
> I’m guessing you don’t have much experience with front-end code

Okay. You're guessing wrong.

I'm just asking for a bit honesty here. If they start adding console.log everywhere, how about you ask them why they're doing it that way? In a codebase I know nothing about it's not uncommon for me to add some console.log around to see how the code flows. Adding breakpoints isn't efficient when it's being hit 100 of times; reading console.log output can be done quite quickly.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the original test, but I'm just tired of playing these games where a person asks me a question and they're holding off important information that they will use to judge me.
(Ah, this story finally reached HN. It's been like, what, 2-3 days.)

Before anyone starts getting upset about climate changes caused by carbonated beverages - from what I've read it's a totally carbon-neutral affair. Carbon is captured from the atmosphere and eventually burped out back into the atmosphere by carbonated beverage lovers.
People game OKRs, but it doesn't matter. Planning work a quarter out for your team is very valuable, no matter what you call it.

I was the TL of a very small team at Google. My manager and nearby senior engineers were very good at forcing me to plan my team's work for the quarter in the form of OKRs, and the results were quite surprising. I would say something like "I'll add that to next quarter's OKRs" and people trusted that it was actually going to get done. There were no weekly status meetings, or nag emails, or anything like that... people assumed that if my team said we were going to do something, it was going to be done. And they were right, because we actually focused on exactly what we said we were going to focus on. We had to prioritize, and so we spent a little more time on features than on system stability than I would have without any plan ("just one more day to automate this part of the release that only saves 5 seconds once a month!"). It was quite good.

Meanwhile, when I first joined Google, I went to the company OKR scoring meeting. There was a KR like "have one billion active foobar users" and the score presented was .7, the minimum "passing" score. They did not have 700,000,000 users though. I distrusted company OKRs ever since. I can do multiplication; you lied.

TL;DR: planning is valuable. Making up a number to make yourself feel good is pointless. The key is to not tie self-directed and self-graded OKRs to anything important, just look at it like a reasonable todo list for the next 3 months.
what machinery is needed?
(Ruby) Hyperloop
For this to work, the roads need to be better or same quality, and the usage of plastic needs to be more economically efficient.

Road quality being the same, the addition of plastic, including the labor, additional equipment costs of spreading it, storing it, producing it, must be cheaper than the cost of using just the bitumen.

Additionally, processing the recycled plastic has to be cheaper than just making new plastic for this process in the first place.

If this works out, it would be a good use of some waste materials.
LabKey Is Seeking a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
> Bioethanol and chemical factories, for example, also produce carbon dioxide as a by-product.

You know what that means. Indirectly we drink that tasty cow fart. I hope they clean the filters.
A new semiconductor with record-high thermal conductivity
> without having to trust anyone has value

There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera

In practice, nobody wants to do these things. So we see centralization at exchanges. Precisely in the way people not wanting to handle cash use banks.
Re sky cheetah: yes, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. That cheetah model is oversimplified and bad -- it has a heard but doesn't have any requirements or objectives for the head,
I've worked on systems that had the CI system set up to only fail style or inspection when the overall issue count was larger than the previous one. Over time, your issue count will become asymptotic toward zero. There is a gap in that if you add new code that has issues at the same time that you refactor and remove issues, you won't be alerted. So...don't do that!

Tests have also been very helpful. So say I'm in a situation where the legacy code is not style-compliant, let's forget the style-oriented analysis and double down on adding tests. Once you have good test coverage, start to clean up the styling and start to think about static code analysis as part of the build.
EDIT: Also the blue shift in the front is totally not what you would see either. That's assuming no EM radiation exists outside of the visible. What you'd actually see is infra-red becoming actually-red as lower energy wavelengths are blue-shifted into the visible.
That’s actually a conservative number. We [1] design UI/UX for all sorts of startups and the last year a good chunk of that was for ICO related projects. The vast majority dies somewhere during the sales period.

[1] http://fairpixels.pro
An ICO is an "Initial Coin Offering", it's supposed to be like an IPO except instead of offering shares, you're selling cryptocurrency coins. ICOs are usually framed as a way to fund a project or business, usually related to cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology in some way. The idea is that the project's success will increase the value of the coins you bought and you'll be able to sell them for more later.

The main difference is that the coin is just a coin, buying it won't make you a shareholder and you aren't subject to the regulation that IPOs and shareholders are. That regulation makes it difficult to scam investors by starting a dummy company, pretending it's a valuable operation, selling shares in an IPO, and then running away with the money. Doing this with an ICO is much easier, and there's a lot of concern about how many ICOs are frauds.
I was speaking to a different entity. The mod I was speaking to probably wouldn't use an ad hominem as their basis for an unrealistic forecast.
Looks scammish
Initial Coin Offering - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/initial-coin-offering-i...
I need help with the tinkering platform. I’m aware of the ocw class however it’s idk, I wanna build shit.
Bacteria-detecting strip of plastic film could make best-before dates irrelevant
Ask HN: Is anyone interested in a ticket to HOPE?
I have a ticket to this year's HOPE conference in NYC, and can't attend because of a wedding I forgot about. Is anyone interested in a ticket?

Tickets are sold out, but go for $170. I'd be open to any offers on price for the ticket, and would be happy to make sure that the ticket went to a hacker who is a student or from a traditionally under-represented background.
Do you know what milk and meat are made of?
I hadn't quite caught that the manufacture of fertilizer is so carbon-heavy -- it's not just the energy sunk into cracking apart N2, but the H is also coming from fossil fuels. -.-
"It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." (I was joking, of course, when I said this.)
It seems to me that that's a reasonable metric for determining if something was well written or possibly well commented. I had an opportunity to go back to some of my older code about a year ago. It was scary to me what portion of it I no longer understood. Worse yet, portions of it referred to documentation that I could no longer find. The company had migrated their documentation through several storage organization technologies and no one seemed to know where the old stuff went. Luckily I ran across a retired engineer who recalled where a lot of it had been archived.

(Unrelated) When I read the article, the first thing I thought was that all of the simple programs had already been written.
As a partner at YC, I can say that we are actively working on how YC can help founders in China. One difference I've noticed with Chinese startups is the relative speed at which they move. If you thought SV moved quick...it's nothing compared to Beijing! Re: what SV advice is transferable, we're still very much figuring this out. It's not 100% but I highly doubt it's as limited as I've heard some BJ investors and founders imply :)

Good resources on China and startups:
- 996 Podcast by GGV https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/
- Sinica Podcast https://supchina.com/series/sinica/

Daily/TC style news
- Axios China daily email http://link.axios.com/join/signup-all
- Pandaily https://pandaily.com/
Isn't the idea here that you could just travel a shorter distance in less time than it takes light to travel a longer distance?
While I appreciate the sentiment, I thi k the fact that we can learn from fewer examples demonstrates that the learning process isn’t as efficient as ours, therefore it isn’t yet optimal. It seems like a goal should be for learning to be as efficient or more efficient for computers than for humans.
The seeming irrationality of a well-tuned emotional system
A good question. And the answer is a bit surprising: community.

If you search for spankchain, you'll likely end up on their discord. There are friendly people to help answer your questions and set you up.

It's the same advantage YC has: by being a meta-layer, you end up attracting everyone who's trying to do anything in the space, rather than one specific aspect. Eventually, the network effects are most of the value.
It doesn't, if they do it after request.
Those are all good ideas, thanks! I made it super easy, it's an invalid URL. Everything else is setup, but having a few more non-required steps would allow me to be more granular between two otherwise good candidates.
NYC Apparently Has Only 1 Employee Who Can Fix Subway System's Vending Machines
>It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative.

I don't think the ICO's are being compared to the Internet itself, but to the many early attempts at building webapps on it that ultimately collapsed in the dot com crash. That's what most ICOs are.
I had a look, but I don't understand how it deals with 'new' podcasts. The play queue seems arbitrary and uneditable. But maybe I'm missing something. (Otherwise it does look nice.)
I've been using this daily for a while now, super useful!
A documentary that investigates the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen.
Published April 2nd
Location: Orange County / Los Angeles

Remote: Open

Willing to relocate: Yes, either west coast or east coast

Technologies: Python, iOS, Swift, Nodejs, Postgres, Redis

Resume: https://keybase.pub/huyanhh/HuyanhHoang%20Resume.pdf

Email: hello at whoyawn.com

New grad looking for junior level-mid level opportunities.
Contract work is fine too.
This a weird article. I have been closely following Tesla for the last 5 years and it has been the target of constant FUD and misinformation. Some very powerful people are on a mission to take down Tesla. Look at the stream of negative opinion pieces that come out of WSJ. Weirdly, when Musk fights back against the FUD, the press claims he needs to "shut up". Well, maybe if the press covering Tesla didn't have a clear agenda, may be he will shut up ? Maybe Slate will write an article covering the agenda driven hit pieces against Tesla ?
I didn't read your other comments, so it's not an ad hominem. I'm just saying that I'm confident enough that this particular comment of yours or others like it will just be 'noise' here, and possibly an exercise in frustration for you.

But you're right that you didn't ask me. I just felt like responding, considering this is a public forum where both you and I have the ability to just say stuff.

Anyways, by all means keep at it, if that's what you feel like doing!
Watch the speedrun of Dragon Warrior, it's mental how much that dude has to remember and time properly based on sound cues.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm still reading through the efficiency analyses.

I note that none of your sources refute the fairness argument. Source [3] concedes it, concluding that "HFTs impose adverse selection costs on other investors, by trading with them when they (HFTs) have better information".

> how does price discovery function [without] asymmetry? what "fair" advantages would you allow

Why wouldn't the market work without information asymmetry? Pricing would still be a difficult problem because in practice, it's difficult to predict the future even with "perfect" information. The market will reward good judgment.

I agree that the market also motivates useful information discovery, such as satellite imagery, but this ties back into the question of whether microsecond pricing actually increases efficiency.
Nigeria's Vibranium Valley project
Elixircards – Flashcards to help you master Elixir
Can you point me (a complete layman in this area) in a particular direction to get a bit more of a solid understanding of this area? I wouldn't even really know what search terms to use...
The EU Competition Commission is said to be on the verge of issuing a multi-billion dollar penalty for this behavior.

>Google could face a record penalty this month from European regulators for forcing its search and Web-browsing tools on the makers of Android-equipped smartphones and other devices, potentially resulting in major changes to the world’s most widely deployed mobile operating system.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/09/google-...
Speaking of unrealistic forecasts...
On its face, you're casually suggesting vapor trails from aircraft as the cause of Europe's CO2 shortage. Rather than elaborate on your chain of thought, you go right towards predicting distopia.

I'm guessing your image isn't a vapor trail reference, but a reference to "chem trails". Chem trails are controversial and widely regarded as a conspiracy theory.

The main criticisms I'd have for your contribution are these: Your comment is erratic, has spurious relation to the article, makes vague references to controversial conspiracies and provides no evidence.

In my opinion, this is an inappropriate forum for it simply because it's a better without it. Someone smarter than me could probably point out specific HN rules though.
WebGL: I mean can I install a desktop environment on your machines, start a browser in it and then WebGL will be fast because it has access to a fast GPU?
Cambridge launches UK’s first quantum network
Let's not forget ARM sold out to Softbank right about when RISC-V was picking up steam (2016). As engineers they probably saw it coming. The bankers not so much.
I need things running 24/7 unfortunately. But I won't pretend I know the rest of the market. I just know my small part, where I don't see a good fit.

Anyway, the more competition the better, and I'm sure you will find a place!
Perseid Meteor Shower 2018: When, Where and How to See It
To be fair, there's a known solution to the cryptokitty scalability problem (a particular type of "plasma chain" tuned for nonfungible tokens) and this is being worked on and will likely see the light of day pretty soon. This of course does not solve the bigger problem: the small user base.
Hypothesis: property-based testing for Python
Welcome to Schweizerhaus (https://www.schweizerhaus.at)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer
We got 86 billion neurons in our brains that all crave to get used - so you can even imagine them as single agents trying to get along.

It's like 86 billion guys that try to please that thing they simultaneously produce (our consciousness). What I want to say: The algorithm can be dumb as f*. I call it the f-star-algorithm. But the computational power in our brains is extremely high.