skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, here's one extremely simple example....

Say you have a screen where you have to show sales for an individual customer.

One way of doing this is, within the screen that requires this data, querying sales by that customer using the dynamic sql feature provided by the ORM you are already using. One line of code, and it exists in the source code exactly where it is consumed at runtime.

Another way of doing this is writing a stored procedure that returns the same data and accepts customer name as an argument. Now, this SP has to be exposed through <n> application layers before the UI can ultimately call it. So now, you have a very specific (and obscure) stored procedure, that has to be exposed in <n> layers of application tiers.

Now imagine you need sales for an individual customer, but now only for products from a particular manufacturer, and imagine the two ways that could be implemented. Rinse and repeat for every other distinct data retrieval use case you have.

This is just one type of an implementation style that can be made excessively complex. Now throw some new design patterns that you just read about into the mix. Now, on top of your <n> app tiers, you now get several additional wrapper classes on top of all this, so a simple select from your database ends up with a call stack 12 levels deep with 6 levels of indirection.

And if you suggest perhaps there's an alternate way, you're an outcast. At the very least, one would hope you could have an open-minded discussion about the relative merits of the two approaches. But this is just my experience, YMMV.
Yes, that's why the OP says Backbone isn't quite traditional MVC — because it includes collections, not controllers.
I bet the odds are damn good that neither of them ARE polluting the OS Cache.

That they are is just speculation from someone whose taken his experience and projected it onto everybody.

Since he's a person who mucks around with random system settings (like the one in his article) there's no telling what previous damage he's done to cause this problem.
I don't get the negativity on using your distro's packages, at least from the staying-stable perspective. Any decent package manager should let you pin/hold critical packages on a particular version, so if "the next Ubuntu ships with a different SQLAlchemy by default" you just hold the SQLAlchemy package at the version you want and then ignore it until you're ready to make that move.

99% percent of the time when I hear people complaining about their distro's packages, the complaints are coming from the opposite direction -- they want to run something bleeding-edge and the distro doesn't have it yet. (This is the standard beef Rubyists have with Debian, for instance -- that code that just hit Github ten minutes ago isn't in Debian's repos yet.)
The iPad 3 makes a beautiful second monitor. (App called Air Display).
That's not what I mean. Boil this down to it's logical conclusion. If a cop arrests anyone for something that is deemed after the fact unjustifiable, they should similarly be held liable for damages. I mean, why stop at taking pictures? Is it not just as much an inconvenience to be arbitrarily arrested for burglary?

Throw in the culture of the police corps - and you could see a lot more "not my job" type behavior from the police. This sort of law could very well be interpreted as a slap by an ungrateful populace.

I'm just saying there is a balance here. Us vs. them isn't likely to result in improvement. This law seems very knee-jerky to me.
I still don't quite grasp it. He is talking about page outs, but how is disabling the dyn-pager helping with that? Shouldn't page outs only happen when RAM is full?

At my machine with 8 GB RAM and uptime of 4 days I have page outs of only 2 Megabyte. And page ins of 2 Gigabyte.

P.S.
I subscribe to your blog! * starstruck
Losing the Future: Gutting Science Training
Less Is More, Even With Databases
Google's Cutts Explains How Google Search Works
If they dropped 17", but upped the resolution of the 15" past that of the current 17", I'd be fine.
Year One with Code Academy
Haswell's Fused Multiply-Add is the thing which excites me the most. I remember seeing that on the roadmap when it came out, and wondering how I'd live until 2013. It's weird that 2013 is next year now.
Clever Google hack to quickly find out all about someone
Somebody's smoking crack to think $10 is a good price for streaming a documentary no one's heard of, with the option to pay even more for a download.

Don't they teach pricing any more?

I just know these guys are leaving money on the table.

Try $2 for a view, $5 for a download, $12 for a DVD. Assuming you're a world renowned comedian with millions of fans. Anything less, adjust price downward accordingly.
I really enjoy using TestFlight, they have great tools and are free.
I've long thought that programming education was extremely lacking, and rather elitist (Really? You need a 2500 page tome to learn the "Basics of Java"?)

Now that computers are invading more of our lives, people are starting to find ways past that, and learning how to program in spite of the poor resources available.

I think that this future is inevitable, and for me it can't come soon enough.
I've found jsdom to break for quite a bit of real-world crap HTML. Next time, I'm going to try driving phantom.js with node using https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node

I've had pretty good luck with phantom.js, but it is somewhat difficult to debug.
I'd echo that view, also with twenty years of (Unix) programming behind me. The start of the slippery slope seemed to be object-orientation; yes, it can be ideal in some areas, helps re-use if done well, but since the majority of source is of average quality or worse it often seems to just add obfuscation, layers to wade through, contortions to fit the solution to the OO model the language provides, and poor names because so many need to be created that it becomes tedious. Contrast with Go's interfaces.

Design patterns have also had an overall negative effect IMHO. Useful as a lingua franca for theoretical discussion they've again been over-adopted and the vocabulary has become so large, and sometimes imprecise, lessening their usefulness, that it sometimes seems like a geek version of the management-speak for which we criticise the pointy-haired.

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming" — Brian Kernighan. I often find the above add more complexity than they're worth.
She's not crazy, but she is running Adobe software on a machine without sufficient RAM. Adobe installs gods own cache of really crappy stuff that starts up at boot and who knows what kind of kexts they shove in there to make your machine unstable.

I won't run any adobe software after I saw the abuse they did to my machine.

Apple basically gets a free pass if you're running Adobe. This is a company that ships crap.

Also, you're probably starving it of sufficient memory. If Lightroom is up, you're probably out of memory, even with 8GB.

I'd recommend getting rid of Lightroom and going to Aperture, or given aperture is a bit behind the curve, upgrading to 16GB of RAM and seeing what adobe-installed processes and KEXTS you can get rid of.
I know it is not your intent and I have tried my best to not take offense to your comment but their are a lot of issues that can affects ones ability to communicate in a particular medium. In this particular one (written) dyslexia can be almost debilitating, if a person has dyslexia, the are no more or less incompetent than any given person they just strive to overcome a disability in the way they their mind works. If the parent poster happens to have dyslexia then your post is the equivalent of walking up to a person on the street with a speech impediment and telling them it is hard to take them serious because of how they talk. I know that was not you intent, which is why I do not take it personal, but I did want to draw the parallel. That being said, I do disagree with the contents of the original post. I think their is a lot of value in a good CS program.
What hit me about this article is that I employ almost an identical stack and have never really stepped back and taken a look at just how many pieces are required to make a non-trivial web app. When you're working with these tools day-in, day-out, you get almost institutionalized and forget the complexities that you've absorbed over the years.

A side note: it's a testament to the great work the open-source community has put in over the past decade (two decades?) or so that so many pieces can come together and work relatively seamlessly.
So it takes 5 seconds to search the system logs for the date of the last login? How is this any less broken?
Nah, consider it "supporting-commentary" to you. It was more about the original post referring to the shelf-life of programs.
Yes, it is incredible. (Edit: ah okay, not the assertion I thought of) And they mostly did it. Conclusion: there is a silver bullet.

If you can do a second draft with 10 times less code, then at least 90% of the first draft's complexity was accidental. By definition, so to speak. The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question.

The VPRI did find particular abstractions, embodied in their various Domain Specific Languages. Implicit parallelism (not concurrency) was tested in one of their languages (Nile), for 2.5 drawing. The problem was embarrassingly parallel to begin with, but they only had to modify the runtime to parallelize it (30 times faster with 40 cores). I also believe they have some form of implicit concurrency.

Also, it doesn't matter if they didn't invent some new ground-breaking abstraction. Because they just showed that applying the right old ideas in a systematic ways can have a tremendous effect. Now the industry just have to wake up.
My late 2006 MBP had all sorts of wifi issues with 10.5 the first year or so it was out. Like routine kernel panic-bad level stuff.
> At the moment, they have a dedicated audience that will gladly pay $15.

And when they lower the price the other 99.9% of potential viewers will have forgotten all about it and lost interest.
1.5TB of spinning rust in my macbook pro, no observations of this problem. Did see something like it when I was using an SSD that was about to fail.
Adobe Foundation Announces $1 Million Scholarship For Students
In addition, isn't a big part of Amazon's appeal the excellent customer service (especially effective in mitigating the cost of no physical presence when competing against big box stores)? I'm by no means an expert, but I'd assume that factors like speed and price are higher up on the list of priorities for a firm buying industrial supplies vs. the average customer shopping for books or a new TV. I just don't know how much of what Amazon is known for would translate into growing a market share in raw materials.
Thanks! Super useful feedback...

"I had to actually work a little bit to find the content I cared about"

Does content = job description? We realize Pubget doesn't have brand recognition so we took prime real estate to call out who we are. Do you look for the job description first even when you don't recognize the brand?
This is a great resource and I'm glad Majd wrote it. However, this is really the kind of content that should be coming out of Google itself.

Google is in an interesting position. Of all of the major Silicon Valley tech companies, I think Google is the one most seen as the "web" company, and yet they've staked a lot of their future on Android. Android, instead of making the web a first-class citizen, has in fact set the mobile web back by years. While they should have worked to bring all of the strengths of the web to mobile devices, they decided to play the app game on Apple's terms and, IMO, have lost.

Surely someone at Google realizes that killing the open web also kills the company's cash cow--search and related advertising--but based on their behavior it doesn't seem like it.

My hope is that the Android wakes up and decides to make the web a priority again. In league with the Chrome team (some of the smartest people I've ever met), they could do wonders to make developing for the mobile web a joy instead of the disaster that it currently is. Google needs focus, and it needs its focus to be on the mobile web. Having great, unified documentation about building sophisticated web apps that competes with Apple's Developer Centers is a good start to doing so.
thanks, i should have included a code sample too:

import requests
from lxml import etree

jquery_like_page = etree.HTML(requests.get('url').text)
Yacc Is Dead (Parsing With Derivatives) implemented in Go
In your case, it is the applications. Final Cut Pro X still has some instability, and photoshop is crap.
I can see my personal use of amazonsupply just because I already use amazon at home (its the new walmart of the web if you haven't heard).

at work --- not so much. have to create an account to charge to, worry about lead times. not worth it.
I call that "plumbing", since it's basically just getting different sizes and shapes of pipes to connect. But "meat grinding" is good too.
Arrive Alive
They rarely have a modern enough package to be worthwhile. When you control the package pipeline, you have the ability to dictate how modern or conservative your software is.

The problem is that most programming languages (especially Python and Ruby) are ecosystems unto themselves and often move at a much faster pace than any stable distro (or LTS) could keep up with. That's why we have gems and pip.

Cf. Ubuntu LTS MongoDB default is like 1.2 or something. This is why I switched to using 10gen's repo.
I would always take no code over wrong code.
Testflight does not help you capture the user emotion. It is very important to find out how the user views a certain feedback. Does he view it as a suggestion, question or a problem, it helps to know how big a pain point it is.
Don't change the subject, it's exactly what you mean. This law doesn't cover "anyone" for "something," it's covers photography, period.
> What happens when there are vulns for your stack?

That’s a good point and the answer is: You have to monitor your dependencies of public services (that aren’t that many).

But you have to do that anyway, because I can’t explain to our customers that their data has been hacked because Ubuntu/Red Hat didn’t update Django (fast enough).
Few lawyers make good money when you look at hours worked. You'd make far more in software working those hours than you will for many decades (if ever) as a lawyer.
A mild concern of mine with the "Google, if you’re listening" annotations. It's worth remembering that Chromium's an open-source project. If you really want something, send a patch.
Some cool stuff, but not much I need with any regularity. Other sources are more than fine. I'll be excited when they stock the types of high-carbon steels that Aldo Bruno[0] sells.

I'm still waiting for someone to disrupt the hard to search supply shops like Jantz: http://www.knifemaking.com/Default.asp

0: http://njsteelbaron.com/
Money is just a representation of work...it is a means of storing and exchanging things with one another.
OpenGL 3.1? Isn't that like many years old?
Methinks the point is to survive & solidify the transition to the new manufacturing tech before going whole-hog on capability improvements. Such is the nature of Intel's "tick-tock" development cycles: get fundamental and boring changes down cold before showing what awesomeness can come of them.
The Bubble and (Misunderstood) Network Effects
The worst thing about them is the fact that they are installed into global site-packages that you shouldn’t use for any serious coding.

And yes, they are mostly outdated too.
What assertion, exactly? That the personal computing stack can be implemented in 20K LOC?

No, the assertion from the article that "99% or even 99.9% of the effort that goes into creating a large software system is not productive."

While it's very interesting and frankly astonishing that they've been able to reimplement things that are fairly well understood in 100x less code, this is not at all the same as proving the assertion that these things could have been originally done in 100x less code. I hope that it's true that they could have been -- it's exciting to think that it might be true -- but it doesn't seem to be a claim that STEPS proves, or tries to, from the explicit goal of reusing concepts and designs from other OSes.
> So, go ahead and be smug about gold

You have no idea about basic economics and it isn't my job to teach you. Look up 'deflation' and read this:

http://m.cnbc.com/id/40088925/Roubini_Here_s_Why_a_Gold_Stan...

Finally, the gold standard would still be fiat currency. Governments only stay on it when it benefits them, or when they think it does, and can go off it at any time.

> libertarianism does lead to the rapid advancement of a society from third world conditions to first world conditions

Only by allowing companies to optimize for profit and advancement at the expense of everything else.

That's it, really: The Libertarian ideal of free markets deciding practically everything means that whoever gets ahead in the free market can write their own laws, effectively, and not have to worry about any externalities (like pollution, or injured workers, or so on) they create.

You also haven't made the case for it helping a country that's already in the First World.

> Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle.

Which is simplistic in that it deliberately ignores all of the ways to initiate force that companies actually engage in (union-busting, polluting, legislation-purchasing) and focuses on the crap they don't do, like breaking-and-entering or outright homicide.

> IF you want to argue against libertarianism, show how it is moral to initiate force.

No. Not valid. I must merely show that Libertarianism is a sub-optimal way to prevent the initiation of force, which I have above.

> you imagine are scary ("Gilded Age" for instance)

You really don't know how bad the Gilded Age was, do you?
Too Much Copyright
>Working with closely on a day to day basis with someone up the technical competence / experience scale from you is fantastic

Oh dear god yes. Masterful experience for engineers.
You're missing the bigger point. Look at the message sent. It's bigger than some hippie taking pictures at an occupy berkeley event.
I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected.

For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second statement immediately if I firmly dismiss the first?

Sometimes edge cases pop up, but why waste the time to go through the cycles of reiterating all the same points?
Look at the video he linked, here: http://tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ (tldr: 20.000 lines seems to suffice to make a running OS with "personal computing" apps.)

I think you will mostly agree with the video, but If you don't know of the Viewpoint Research Institute, it will be worth your while.
There's also a decay function with a roughly exponential envelope that covers the number of people possibly interested as a function of time.

For a documentary that pretty much only appeals to science and engineering geeks, hitting the front page of HN is the peak interest at t=0. Now what. Well it starts decaying. Might go up a bit, but in a week that tail is going to be dominant and the potential sales a minute fraction of those possible TODAY if a sales conversion occurs.

Most films are highly perishable. They don't make a lot after initial interest and excitement wanes as new films are always coming out.

Right now I can buy a couple DVDs I want with shipping for the same $15 of a download of a documentary that people are saying is sort of OK but has slow moments, or I can buy a month's Netflix and realize the real limit is I only have so much time to watch things.
It's not like they started five years ago with that 100x process in place. They've spent most of their time inventing it.

Keep in mind, too, that Linus built a kernel, but was able to use a lot of already-written gnu software for the rest.
Why is estimating so hard?
More than Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining
a lot of comments and interesting personal annotations on data mining.
"That is the core task of data mining : detecting patterns. And this can be any kind of pattern as will become clear in the following paragraphs. But in fact it is relatively simple. "
...
"This is one of the most difficult topics in data mining, not because the algorithms are difficult, but because in most cases the results have no actual business meaning, " ...
Throwing money at yahoo just brings on more patent suits (from others). Throwing money at patents provides them cover.
Perhaps, but that's a completely different argument than the one TFA is making.

Besides, in the Ubuntu case anyway, LTS is supposed to be old. The whole point of LTS releases is to let slow-moving institutions/enterprises sit on ancient packages for 3-5 years without having to worry about backporting security updates. If you want recent versions of packages LTS is precisely the wrong place for you to be.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/13/messages/1380.ht...
Have to enable js/flash (I browse with NoScript), but it's interesting that it works through FF's Private Browsing (FF 11.0).
It appears to me, as a graduate of both, that the difference is largely attributable to the business school receiving larger grants from alumni than the engineering school. The graduate school of business recently received a very large donation from an alumnus, sufficient to build a brand new and extremely modern facility to house its MBA program.

But I wouldn't necessarily say that the university as a whole puts more focus on the business school than engineering - in fact, before the Hough donation, the MBA facilities were located in between two floors of a very old building, and you had to actually duck down to enter, through a very short and narrow doorway, a la Being John Malkovich.
This kind of frankensteinism was one of the motivating reasons for creating Julia (see this InfoWorld interview: http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/new-julia..., please ignore the misleading title). Python, although it can get you closer to single-language scientific computing, can't quite get you there because of the split language model: at the very least, libraries have to be written in C for adequate performance; often complex projects end up requiring parts written in C.

Doing practical scientific computing only using code implemented in Julia is completely unrealistic. At the very least, a lot of fast kernels (BLAS, LAPACK, etc.) are going to be implemented in C and/or Fortran for the foreseeable future. What Julia brings to the table is the ability to call C/Fortran libraries without writing anything but Julia code — you can just load a .so file and call functions without compiling anything (see http://julialang.org/manual/calling-c-and-fortran-code/). If we could have the same level of trivial interoperability with Python, then you could potentially use scientific libraries written in Python, while still only ever writing Julia code. That helps alleviate the "frankenstein project" problem without throwing out all the excellent work that's been done by the SciPy community.

In the other direction, there are people who already have projects that are all or mostly Python. Forcing them to have some random piece in Julia just to use a nice bit of Julia functionality is making the frankenstein problem worse. If they can trivially call Julia code (perhaps via a .so, as it were just a library written in C), then that's one less frankenstein project in the world.
Sounds like you have had the usual experience with 3rd party sellers on Amazon. Never ever buy from them!

These parts are being directly stocked and sold by Amazon.
Are the funding lines starting to converge?