skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised the article makes no mention of the semantic web, a brain-child of his that he's been promoting and working on almost exclusively for the past several years. It would be the solution to the "closed-data" problem that the article talks about.
The main problem is the perception that code would linearly scale if the GIL was removed. Eg on a 4 core machine code would run 4 times as fast. And that the GIL has no value. Both statements are completely false. (A bigger issue is the reference counting anyway. Changing that should be a precursor to GIL removal.)

I'm an author of a C extension (apsw) and the GIL is fantastic. Without it the code would be considerably more complicated, longer and likely to have race conditions and similar gnarly bugs.

As a Python developer I use:

* Multiple processes usually by executing a new process which allows me to easily substitute testing processes and using stdin/stdout
* Use networking for talking between parts (allows spreading over multiple machines, failover, redundancy, load balancing etc)
* multiprocessing for pure Python work
* Threads for I/O bound work or work that waits on other things
* C extensions that release the GIL

Actually getting rid of the GIL wouldn't help.
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Thanks for the heads up. I've pushed at least 10 times today, cowboy coded the fix... Kids, don't try this at home.
Love a bit of Tim Hunkin. Anyone reading HackerNews would probably enjoy his television series from the early 90s: The Secret Life of Machines. Details, including links to download locations (bittorrent for preference I'd imagine) here: http://www.timhunkin.com/control/n_tv_index.htm
I've seen the Software Architect role defined in many different ways. Some are the ones you've described, some are "paper only" architects who never code, but theorize to some unknown end.

The ones I've see that are most productive are the ones who more closely match the description in the article. They aren't above anyone, but they are supposed to be some of the most technically knowledgable people in the organization. Too that end, they have some of the most demanding jobs in the group and have to do more and understand more than a Senior Developer, who may only be well versed in one language or have the depth of understanding at all levels of the stack that an architect should.

Architects at my current employer will be called on to write production level code in more than one language, have the charge to watch over the commits and have the responsibly and authority to fix problems they see. They also end up being the janitor sometimes, pulling wires in the server room when the network engineers are short handed. It's a system that works pretty well.
And the "Snake Oil" being sold in the US wasn't quackery. It was typically a combination of alcohol, morphine, and/or cocaine.

People weren't stupid -- it definitely made them 'feel better'.
Yes, I understand that. But the process is slow. Hyperinflation in some countries was/is much, much worse than regular inflation in developed countries.
Ask HN: How to get feedback?
After submitting a pair of Show HN (SHN) stories I was a bit dismayed to see
they received zero interest, particularly as I got up at 6am to post
one. ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196039

I wonder what's wrong? Surely the site must suck (first release should be
embarrassing right?), but even so a few "this sucks ..." replies would
be much preferable to the deafening indifference I received instead.

Looking over hnshowcase for the last few days I see that the majority of
SHNs get 0-1 votes or 40+. I haven't seen a clear division in site
quality between the two groups though, as many of the interesting are
the ignored. At risk of sounding like a whiner, should I have enlisted
a network of employees or upvoters first? I'm just a single guy and
this is my side project so I unfortunately don't have those kind of
resources available.

What can I do to turn this around? Would appreciate any comments.
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If four years would be enough to change a lot about the core JavaScript language, there wouldn't be a need for the book in the first place. It's still quite modern enough, and will be until a major EcmaScript overhaul is propagated and accepted by all common browsers…

It's not about modern web techniques, which is why it aged that well. For those, I'd personally recommend pulling apart some modern webapps or libraries, or reading modern tutorials. Usually you're somewhat outdated once your book reached its publisher… (Having said that, JavaScript Patterns is also pretty neat)
The idea pays for itself. You did a good job, people love it and you deserve the credit.

Congratulations and keep up the good ideas!

By the way, nice to see a fellow Canadian hacking it up!
How can one kill that which is already dead?
What people seem to be forgetting is that Glass isn't augemented reality -- it's a display that sits in the top of your vision, not over all of it.
Never used a tablet, but I guess you have to build muscle memory to correctly map tablet -> screen coordinates, right?
I don't think it's a lie or a misunderstanding, but a reasonable summary of the situation. They shouldn't have to mention the "pay damages and stop shipping the software" alternative, since that is always an implicit possibility.
I'll buy for minute that it makes sense to scare off everyone who relies on bullshit bingo websites. But then, why maintain a lulzy website at all? Wouldn't a non-hipster, however you define them, spend that effort coding instead?
both RequireJS and Browserify are not good options. Browserify's implementation is awkward, incomplete and pollutes global scopa a lot.

Check out OneJS: http://github.com/azer/onejs

It's the only tool that lets you structure your client-side project as a CommonJS package and produces unobtrusive code mixable with anything in same global scope.
nice, thanks. will check it out.
Don't forget the all important #3; riding a Segway makes you look like a total tool.
I've been wearing mine for ~3 years. No complaints.
HR has taken to calling low-level programmers "engineers" for some silly reason which makes the term meaningless. "Software Architect" is the new term for what used to be called a "Software Engineer", the one person in charge of the design of the whole system. In ten years the ads will probably be calling for "Software Architects" with two years of experience, and we will need another new word to describe the job of the software engineer / architect / ???.
s/Architect/Engineer/g

None of these characteristics should be stuffed in an architect role. Every engineer should possess them.
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Yes, definitely the engineer should code and write tests. (That's why they're called engineers.) The analyst is the one who doesn't need to, but of course it couldn't hurt either.

I recommend python for simplicity and power. But perl or ruby would be fine too if they are a core tech at your company.
Seeing with music
A Amazon Smartphone could be a rather interesting device, since Amazon is mainly selling content. So they do not care (much) if they make money by selling hardware.

For example a phone which is mostly geared towards ebooks, that is a very good display but no GPS and no strong graphics capabilities, could have a market. (Especially if it is cheap and already unlocked). Additionally Amazon is a trusted brand, which already has the credit card number of most potential customers, they could therefore easily build a strong app store/ mobile shopping site (actually they already have it).
There are two separate issues here. It's clear that Cisco deliberately created the Cloud Connect service (I won't speculate on their motivations; in theory such a service could benefit customers) and deliberately auto-updated customers to it (which they promised all along). The TOS is a separate problem and appears to be a combination of legal ass-covering and deliberate misinterpretation.
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As you grow as a company (especially if you grow quickly or through acquisitions), the more integration points between parts of the company to have.

You eventually reach a point where you are spending more time on integration parts of the company than innovating to keep ahead of competitors. At this point you are dead in the water while your competitors start to catch up.

Yahoo hit exactly this point. If Google is not careful they will also hit this point.
Unrelated rant: Dear Google, can you please add QR-Codes to the web play-store.
Def Leppard re-record own songs to win back digital download revenue
Anybody fairly handy can build a garden shed. If someone showed up calling themselves an "garden shed architect" and stood off to the side directing traffic I'm sure the "builders" would find it and them to be a complete waste of space. (wait cheesy pun alert?)

However, how many of us would like to get into an elevator ready to shot us to the 100th floor knowing that there was no architect on the project as all the builders decided that was an unnecessary title and those functions could easily be handled by the GC?

Amazon, Heroku etc has made it much easier to build garden sheds - there's a lot more garden sheds around per large building than there used to be. So I suspect if you believe the SA title to be completely unnecessary it's most likely because you're building sheds not buildings. Doesn't mean we still don't want and need them for those larger buildings.
I'm a micro-optimization and numerics guy by trade (mostly I write math libraries); they are almost completely irrelevant to my area of work.

Priority queues should be covered in a competent introductory data structures course. Bloom filters are marginally more obscure, but I still expect a good candidate to have come across them at some point. They're so widely used that it's pretty hard to avoid learning about them if you've done any significant amount of work or just spend time reading HN (they come up in someone's blog every month or so).

Note that I said "would hesitate to", not "wouldn't hire". If someone were otherwise a strong candidate, but happened to not be familiar with these, I would almost surely still hire them.

I should clarify that a typical candidate for a junior position on my team is either coming from graduate school or has 3-5 years experience in industry. I have correspondingly higher expectations for their background knowledge.
For a year or so in college, I worked at night for a security firm. I spent several months working in a bank's operation center, watching the camera feeds from the branches overnight. Anyway, for some reason part of the training for that job mentioned that the average bank robbery at the time grossed only about $1500 (about $4000 now). Plus the robbers would almost certainly be on video and the FBI was automatically involved. And with dye packs (bundles of cash that explode with brightly colored dye) and other measures... Well, robbing a bank was a pretty stupid plan.

The other months of that job involved patrolling the HQ for a phone company, including the central computer rooms. One day we got a memo about a well-known hacker group that had dressed up in suits and just walked into the building because the daytime guards weren't checking IDs. Ha.
I cringe when people claim to be writing more than the most basic JS and aren't using prototypes.
Nope, that's correct. Those letters do not have high frequency 2-letter combinations compared to the others.
Minor issue, but the App Store did not launch when the iPhone did. According to someone on wikipedia, the App Store isn't quite 4 years old yet. Still an impressive record if it truly is the first issue they've had.
Those aren't basic at all, and I'm not sure why the commenter considered them so. As we all know, junior engineers have very limited exposure to a small area of tech, that's the very definition. It might just happen to be that the dev just finished a CS degree and is great at some of these algorithms, but that doesn't translate into a wide spectrum of technologies, which is only found in people with many years experience.

I was the one that actually picked those, just out of thin air to illustrate my point.

This I feel pretty confident that if they were the best solution to a problem I was having, I would find them through research. is exactly my point. How would you know that a bloom filter might be the best solution unless you know of it's existence in the first place. An architect's role is to suggest areas of research to junior engineers, who very likely may only have some vague memory from algorithms class.
AOL’s Longest-Running Employee on the History of AOL Chat Rooms
> I always find it odd that the same developers who deride PHP look at things like IIFE and think "wow, JS is a cool, modern language!"

I don't deride PHP (I don't know it), but I see nothing wrong with IIFE. Yes, it could benefit from some syntactic sugar, but otherwise it is just using one of the best features of JavaScript, function support (first-class functions, anonymous functions, etc.).

It makes perfect sense to use a pattern like IIFE in order to encapsulate code, often using closures to allow access in a controlled manner from the outside, etc.

I suppose perhaps you don't like closures and so forth, and that's fine, but many people including me love them.
This sums it up nicely too: http://bredemeyer.com/
Honor Code
> Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.

As more people get mobile e-mail, things like iMessage, etc., they're going to have to keep SMS from being overly spammy or people will stop using it.
What if the situation in his example was reversed? What if, his wife lay with the newborn baby, and he felt that he wanted to go visit the client, but he said 'no' instead? Would he still be wrong?
A software architect I worked with before thought he was gods gift to programming, every time something worked out it was his work, when it failed he always blamed the 'process'.

You should change the title to 'Being a Good Software Architect'.
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4 Types of Insurance You Can't Afford to Skip
No one likes to think about the worst-case scenario, but if you're not prepared for it, it can ruin you. You may never need all of the coverage that comes with these 4 types of insurance, but you can't afford to skip over any of them!An individual dental plan Chances are your employer-sponsored health insurance doesn't cover dental services anymore
Github won the source control thing..
If you successfully argue that the GPL forms a contract (and I'm not sure if it does or not), you can argue for specific performance instead of damages.
Exactly my thoughts. There really needs to be some healthy competition in client side languages.
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Codepoints.net, a fully open-source Unicode resource
It is possible, but the neurons are actually complex computing units that take a plethora of signals into account: subtle temporal behavior (relative timings of post and pre-synaptic activations), complex chemistry in the cell as well as the in the synaptic cleft, and many more less understood things.
Secondly, as you can imagine, the connectivity is far from random. Like in larger nervous systems (or even more than in large pools or neurons), these computing units take precise roles, part due to the developmental process, part due to later stage learning. But in the end, the machinery is precise, and simulating it requires understanding all of it.

I believe that this understanding should not come though imagery alone, but also through studies of the development of these organisms' brains. Like we are now forming artificial neural maps through "machine" learning techniques that are accelerated versions of their biological counterparts, I believe that we should develop developmental algorithms into large-scale simulations. The goals being to first understand how it works, second to see if the models are able to replicate the end result, a good indication that they are useful models.

(I do research in computational neuroscience.)
Show HN: My Vim Cheat-Sheet Poster
Nice article. I think it highlights the challenge of trying to balance multiple sources of priority, all of which are important to you. Of course, we can say that the family is the most important (which it should be), but, if you always prioritize family events over work, you might not have much of a career. Beyond maintaining an awareness of your internal decision process, I think it is important to communicate to everyone your commitments and stick to them. In the long run, being reliable is more important than being being a hero in a specific situation. In the Gandhi example, he did not prioritize his grandson to the exclusion of everything else, but he did make a commitment and followed through consistently.

Of course, this type of prioritization issue also applies to work within a startup. There's always more to do than you can possibly finish, and you need to pick between multiple urgent tasks...
This is a great move to make BT more mainstream and remove the boilerplate cost of installing a client, etc.
This is just not true.

Bloom filters are marginally more obscure, but I still expect a good candidate to have come across them at some point.

Possibly in your area the candidates you get may have come across them, but then they wouldn't be junior engineers, by definition. If you're advertising for "strong algorithms" candidates then sure, but I bet half the people reading this have never used or come across any probabilistic data structure!
Payments collected on behalf of other parties (i.e., the payment fee) are not treated as revenue under GAAP. If AirBNB were to do such a thing, its auditor would refuse to sign off on its financial statements.

And, as I said, the post is assuming maximum commission on each reservation, with the length of each reservation increasing substantially from the year before. (To put it in comparison, it is like saying that Microsoft's revenue from Windows 8 will be $100 billion this year, assuming the best numbers for everything.)
Cultivating Value in the Culture of More
Show HN: Emacs in the browser with Dropbox, GDrive, Github, etc.
It's literally shocking to me that responsible adults would "just start talking" about basic resiliency, like failing over to a different region, for a major commercial service.

There are ways to do it that take seconds (we do that at Quantcast using anycast), there are ways that take minutes (using DNS failover, which is readily available), and there are ways that basically take forever (Netflix guys - feel free to contact me).

It's pretty clear they were aware of the problem, and if they had even the simplest and most basic DNS control, they could have moved people over minutes after realizing the problem.
I felt like the vim guys got too much love from the post a while back, wanted to bring the emacs community to the web too!
To be clear, I think the price ($40 / night) is a decent. Cheap enough for most, particularly given the flexibility. Enough money for the landlord (my guess is they can easily pull in $5 - $8 k / mo) to provide decent services. I would like to see more competition ... e.g. include use of laundry, breakfast, etc.
Does this work right for anyone?

For me the words don't stay put. It flickers constantly, making it near impossible to read.
Thanks -- can you give me an example?
Does the same for me, but you can press the pause button to get a snapshot.
Howdy HN. This is my first ever internet commercial venture, but mostly, I just wanted to share the fruits of my labor. Do let me know if there's anything you think I missed on the cheat-sheet! :-)
Agree with everything he says. Except for the part that I don't.

A software architect creates a vocabulary to enable efficient communication across an entire company.

That needs to be done with caution, because in a small team/organisation it's absolutely correct. In a large organisation it's just a non-confrontational way of saying "We need an enterprise architecture." That ends up becoming an IT dictionary whose value is to IT alone [1]. And IT serves the business. Not the other way 'round.

If you're doing this in a large organisation, do it for a project, and not for the organisation. It's right up there with the architect that sees an enterprise service bus as a silver bullet. Aka a unicorn.

Edit:
[1] Unless you're HP Services, IBM, ATOS, Cap Gemini or some similar systems integrator, because if you're one of them you're in the business of selling billable hours, and an enterprise architecture is an awesome way of billing to eternity without even having to deliver business value.
The most popular articles on Dr. Dobb's for the first half of the year
The peer effect of seeing a lot of other people working hard around you. I definitely benefit from proximity to other hard-working people. Particularly when you're embarking down the vague, ill-defined path of launching an idea ... it can help a lot to know that you're not the only one.
In my experience that architecture roles can definitely mean that at a lot of companies (the pasture part specifically, but I would like a scarf). To some degree it's natural to let the role end up like that, but as the person in the role, you have to work to make sure you're still involved with all teams even if you don't have any direct reports.
Facebook to Launch Mobile Advertising Product
It's a clever list of aphorisms. None of the qualities you desire are actually defining features of the SA, though.

Who on your team is not a student? who is not a mentor? who should gloat when they are right? who does not understand the most precious parts of the system?

I think your list is less about A Software Architect and more about people who take pride in their work.
I was going to say the same thing, coding for such behaviors has to either be pretty simple, or there is more going on here than just neurons.
I'd love for Google to buy them and combine them with the Google Goggles team so they do something similar to the "offline voice" that they made for JellyBean. In the same way you could use the "full engine" when connected through the Internet (Google Goggles), but also still be able to do 80% of it offline through something like Word Lens.
Twitter ordered to hand over data on an Occupy Wall Street protester
I'm sure it didn't literally shock you.
Didn't we just have a discussion of this type of comment today? [1]

Being able to move /millions of requests per second/ (this was a Friday night!) on /thousands of servers/ [2] to a different /thousands of servers/ involves more than just routing requests to the right IP. Like having a separate set of /thousands of servers/ capable of handling that much failover, for one. Plus, if you had read the link, what they just started talking about a year after moving to AWS was moving across regions; they're already set up to fail entire availability zones over to other availability zones in the same region.

Neither architecture at scale nor employee experience magically appears from nowhere. It's not even been two years since they moved from a data center to running the site on AWS. Considering how much they've had to learn, and the kinds of tools they've had to build for themselves to manage their kind of scale (read their tech blog!), I think the cheap insults are unwarranted.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208134

2: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/02/fault-tolerance-in-high-...