skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work in the insurance systems industry. There are many, many expensive problems that have to be solved before legacy systems can be replaced. In no particular order:

* The Myth of Uniqueness: Each and every company doing business believes that their business is different and couldn't possibly be the same as another company's. This is not completely untrue, but it's also not completely true. The problem is that this myth is propagated by the enterprise software vendors. The profit margins on services to customize software is far, far greater than the margins on software licenses. It is in vendors best interest to promote software customization.

* 50 Years of Customization is Hard to Throw Away: OK, maybe there's not many 50 year old systems running in production any more, but there are 25 year old systems. The amount of money spent to customize those systems over the years is enormous and big corps are not eager to toss that money spent away to start over.

* Database Conversion is Hard: Not so much difficult, but hard in the sense that it requires many, many hours to first clean up the old database, run the conversion, then validate the new data. One mistake could mean that someone's policy lapses because the conversion broke the automated Pre-Authorized Cheque processing code for that one client.

* Working at Big Corps is Uncool: Let's face it, being a programmer at a big bank or insurance company is perceived as boring. The over 40 set that these jobs appeal to aren't traditionally big adopters of new technology. As these people get promoted into decision making roles, they default to safe, known technologies.

* Corporate Partnerships: Big financial industry companies outsource their IT to corporations like IBM. These services companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It's much like bee-keeping bears ;)

* The old stuff still works: Even though the legacy code is unreadable and numbers in the millions of lines, it still mostly works. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument is an easy one to make when your executives (beholden to the shareholders) have to make their quarterly numbers.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see start-ups in the financial services software industry pop up with innovative solutions. In fact, I've thought about attempting this myself, given my background. But the elephant herd of legacy vendors to find your way around is extremely intimidating. In fact, I actually saw a few small vendors pop up over the years, get small contracts within the big insurance company to do something innovative with their shiny new technology (but not mission critical to the corporation), and then watch that company take on more and more lucrative services contracts further from their core software product. Eventually, their initial product offering becomes a footnote for them and they turn into something else, legacy related.
Possibly of interest to readers of this link, Wikipedia is hosting an engineering meetup in San Francisco on August 15: http://www.meetup.com/Wikipedia-Engineering-Meetup/events/69...

Looks like a chance to talk about these projects and ideas with people who work on Wikipedia full-time, including on the mobile interfaces and visual editor.
That's what it tells you if you click the "Learn more" link:)
you did see this http://i.imgur.com/KPGYL.jpg right? A large-screen candybar phone isn't really revolutionary. Nor is a touch-screen interface. I really don't know what you mean. Something with a web-browser? http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/wce/wceapps.htm A home-screen? http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/palm-treo-600-at/4505-64... An app store? http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3504_7-5021267-1.html Face-time? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dell_Axim_X30_624.jpg

Nothing that Apple did was really that new ... they have never been the "new"; just the people that came up with the right marketing sauce to convince people to buy it; and that's just a US thing. US lagging behind in mobile tech was an on-going joke up until about 2007 because other companies had had run-away successes in the Asian and Europe markets already. Just nothing of that scale in the US.

There were touch-screen smartphones in 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Simon_Personal_Communi... ... Oftentimes there were widely available commercial equivalencies 10, 15, even 20 years prior to the Apple "Innovation" event. And then a few years later they (Apple) pretend like they invented and own all of it.

I don't see Palm or Rim or LG or Qualcomm or IBM or Sony or Nokia or Ericsson or even Microsoft going around and suing the pants of people in the Mobile space; even though they clearly have more of the prior art right than Apple does.

With Apple, suing people out of market has been their modus operandi at least since Lisa.

And I really don't know what you mean with the Microsoft comparison; you can do a very identical analysis with early 80s computer UIs ... from visicalc to desqview to deskmate to countless utility suites that did WIMP pre-lisa, some even graphically (e.g., wordperfect, wordstar)
How is that different from Bandcamp?
On Programmer Archaeology (video)
It doesn't need its own domain, but the Twitter format is so limited, I'm not very likely to visit this again even though it was quite entertaining. Maybe make it a blog instead? It doesn't need its own domain or anything.

> Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale-startup.

Now you're just attacking a straw man, aren't you? :)
Mind telling me more about the fault-tolerant abilities/properties of Erlang? I'm not really able to conceptualize it right now. Maybe an example? :) Thanks.
> If you use a lot of generic code in Java, you're going to really miss it in Go.

Doubt it, Go code has much less need for generics than Java code. This is in part because of Go's interfaces which cover some of the same space, because Go has builtin map and slice types, and because the general coding style in Go.

Have you really felt the need for generics when writing Go code? Because that is very, very rarely the case for me, and talking with many other Go programmers, the need for generics seems to very rarely come up when actually writing real world Go code.

One has to realize that features are not interchangeable across languages, just because they are essential to some language doesn't mean that they even make sense in another language.
He could make a profit with a smal percentage or via registration or per publish.

Problem is alot of artists who are in deals will not have the rights to there music to sell this way and those that do pay high percentages online in general, so viable for new talent in some ways.

We shall see.
>The one thing the author fails to address is what is actually revolutionary about the OUYA: It is a TV-based console without a developer licensing fee.

This is wrong !
You will have to pay 30% of each sold copy of your game to the big G ?!?

Source: For applications that you choose to sell in Google Play, the transaction fee is equivalent to 30% of the application price. You receive 70% of the payment and the remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees. From: http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/a...
It was never my intention to start a meme like this. I started [citation needed] because specifically Wikipedia was (and I guess still is) replete with assertions that had no evidence. I got increasingly annoyed at half-baked statements that could not be easily removed, either because they sounded plausible or because someone would object.

So I decided to create the {{fact}} tag, which would highlight the phrase that had the questionable content. That way, the article could keep the material, but it would be easier to a. signal to the reader that the statement's veracity was in doubt until some sort of citation was provided, or b. someone (hopefully the original author!) would provide a citation for the statement.

It was, to put it mildly, wildly successful. It appears to have been my greatest contribution to Wikipedia, and, it appears, to wider society.

Not sure how this makes me feel. I was hoping for something more significant, but I suppose that if I have contributed something worthwhile then this might as well be it!
This can actually only be a good thing. There's so many layers of management in motorola. Dealing with them is like a page form the script of brazil
After the dot com bust, they only interesting consulting job I could get as a 5 month gig for an Indian company writing a Java Sharepoint clone. They did not pay very well, but the work was satisfying. I have also had two remote gigs from China and a few from Europe. Earth seems flat (in the Thomas Freidman sense) to me! Btw, I live in the mountains of Central Arizona.
USS Porter and Oil Tanker collide in Strait of Hormuz (pics)
It'd be more difficult to get people to subscribe to a blog. Keeping it light hearted on Twitter is great for a little fun service such as this—of course only for those who are already on Twitter.. :)
Fair, people also were dying in India in the 60s and 90% of the population lived on less food than they needed every day (according to Amartya Sen), Ehrlich said it would get worse with famines because of lack of resources and hundred of millions starving to death, he was wrong and Amartya Sen argued that malnutrition in India correlates more with corruption than with lack of resources.

To be fair a great number of Indian children still suffers from malnutrition but my argument is that the situation improved because the world is not static as Ehrlich predicted, Africa will also improve in the long run with the advent of modern agriculture techniques.
You don't use Twitter by visiting individual accounts. Pro-tip: Try the 'follow' feature.
Discover open source changes
I love it. I searched for a few of these just to confirm that real comments were being used.

Was not disappointed.
Startup Marketing Before Funding
Oh, and the whole tendency of the java community to over-engineer everything...while it seems to be much less frequent these days, it's still there. Not so much on the Play side, but it can definitely still be found. That's one of the things which pushed my away from java back in the day...I was sooo tired of reading project docs five times and still not understanding what the hell someone was trying to say.
stricter definition of C pointers - this made me laugh, as the less-strict definition of C pointers is called undefined behavior.

This leads me to this statement based on what you said: interesting Real World C programs make use of undefined behavior
Have you considered using Project Lombok? http://projectlombok.org/
That's probably true. Still, I wish they had links.
Definitely yes. You can tell by the shape of the street sign. To my mind it's somewhere in the south of Paris. Maybe near the Parc Montsouris but I'm not sure.
Game of Thrones & other HBO series on demand in UK
My problem with java is not the language itself. It is the bloated, over-engineered frameworks that were built on top of it that way too many companies bought into. See EJB2, JSF, etc... Way too many java frameworks make the job at hand harder.

A huge smell to me is that java frameworks have... frameworks... which have frameworks to finally arrive at a frankenstein's monster that is semi usable until its not and then woe-be-the-engineer saddled with its architecture. JSF is by itself is unproductive to develop with, so frameworks like RichFaces rose on top of it, which were also not enough, so other frameworks like Seam rose on top of them. And one feature of Seam is to make the JSF event-based framework behave more like an action-based framework ala struts or spring MVC. Maybe this should beg the question, "WTF are we doing with this dubiously helpful technology (JSF) at the foundation of our (web) technology stack?"

Its interesting to me that many "new" languages getting implemented are built on the JVM (or are old languages ported to java). I expect the JVM will outlive Java by a long margin.
Yeah, they are real tweets. Except that some of them are from the articles themselves, not the comments. Like this one "services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value."
Reading the license text, I do not see any exception for distribution of exact copies. What the license text say's is: if you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under Ms-PL.

Project will use the technology described in the now open patents, but the source code will likely never see any use beyond as a reference manual.
How statically linked programs run on Linux
Can anyone with naval experience give insight into how this could happen with all the modern tech and backup systems?
The OP is absolutely spot on, however, innovation in those fields he mentions is very hard because they tend to be closed shops. I think the best thing those places could do would be to talent buy some startup teams and see what happens because it's sure as hell true that their existing IT is failing to move with the times.

Witness the ridiculous mess the British banking industry has gotten into (with RBS, a massive British consumer bank having a failure that caused them weeks of further problems).

It can often seem to those of us outside that management in those companies has focussed on pure profit, not dealt with technical debt and not even tried to make an effort to adapt their IT strategy to the rest of the world.
A more detailed set of articles about this are in a large spread from The Economist a little while back:

http://www.economist.com/node/21552901

Considering the boldness of the economic claims, it fills in a little more background and necessary information to make this claim believable.
You really just made a new HN account only so you could diss me. Protip: Let that sink in for a moment.
Show HN: Search Suggestions as an Application UI
Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal?

It's actually not that strange of a remark, depending on context.
I don't think it is legal?
Round shapes weren't uncommon until someone used it for displacing things, hence inventing the wheel.

Syncing data over a network wasn't unheard of as well, but then someone came with dropbox.

Nothing today is "really new", but the novelty is in the way this is put together and used.
5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration. I think it's a side effect of some developers stuffing everything into the session and expecting clustering to fix everything.

Umm...I think you've been working in the wrong Java shops. I've never seen, nor do I believe it's possible, for a well-written python/perl/php app to be faster than a well-written Java app.

The startup of the JVM is horrendous. If you're doing even moderate web development, there is a minimum two to three second startup period for a web server. That simply doesn't exist in PERL/PHP/Python. There's no such thing as a permgen error in PERL/PHP/Python. I've never seen PERL/PHP/Python go off and spin the disk as furiously as Java trying to load classes. It's ridiculous.

Sure, Java's start-up is slow. But it shouldn't be an issue in web apps since your application will likely use threads if it's a Java app. I can see if your app was process-oriented, like many ruby/python web apps are, but with Java's native thread support it makes no sense to start up multiple processes unless you really have a need for the separation.
Absolutely! I don't particularly like Java the language, but what I hate is the bs-filled "enterprise" ecosystem where code and technology is just an afterthought. Things may have changed though, but 4 years ago I had to look up Java projects on Wikipedia to understand what they where.
I don't hate the Java language. I hate the Java ecosystem.

The teams I work with that use Java end up being the slowest moving teams because they can't deploy even the simplest code changes without a lot of pomp and circumstance and inability to upgrade their servers without disrupting the whole fragile of chain version dependencies. The java teams are the only teams that have to stop the world for hours when doing server code upgrades. Rails and PHP teams have much simple code deployments.
X0 (Xzero) HTTP Web Server 0.5.0 released, with Load Balancer plugin
The biggest problem for me is lack of clues of importance of the subject. Somehow I learned from printed encyclopedias that the longer the article the more important the subject is (in context of the subject of course).
Take music. According to impression i got from Wikipedia, there's almost no important music made or recorded before, let's say 21st century :-) Or more specifically - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_(Beyoncé_Knowles_album) - seems to be one of the most important, influential record ever made?
I have. Little too magic for me.
To be more specific I was talking about dying from pot itself, not from extended effects.
Java is a tad boring to program in, but other than that there's not too much to complain about. I'm personally going to stick to what I think is its best part, the JVM, and use Clojure to abstract myself from all the lower level necessities.

At this point for me Clojure is simply more fun to write in, although it remains to be seen if it gets ever accepted into the "industry best practices" mainstream that will make your boss sleep well at night, just like Java has for the past decade. Some of the old school LISPers (I'm talking people 70 and older who taught the language before I was even born) I know claim that they haven't gotten bored yet, so there's hope.
Fuck it, steal it!
Might as well shop around after you have some sales. Tried angellist?
Easily.

Modern UAIS systems, designed to help prevent collision at sea, are often turned off in politically "difficult" areas because they transmit the ship's position, velocity (speed and course-over-ground), what they're carrying, and where they're going. Ideal for pirates.

Modern ship radar systems are ARPA's - Automatic Radar Plotting Aids - and they only track vessels if you ask them to, they don't automatically identify and track potential collision threats.

Avoiding collisions comes down to someone actually looking out the window, and someone (possibly, but not necessarily, the same someone) watching the radar for potential threats, and taking the action of deciding to track them.

Really modern radar system, like the ones I've been working on for the past 20 years, aren't cleared to run ships because they haven't been "type certified," which means that they aren't "hardened" and then tested in the active marine environment.

If this happened in an area watched by one of our systems, alarms would have been sounding for around 15 minutes before the actual collision, enough time to take appropriate action.

The problems with getting these "really modern" systems onto ships are multiple. Your coding standards for desktop or web applications just don't apply, you need something more akin to the coding for space travel. There will often be no one on board capable of diagnosing problems, or even identifying if it's misbehaving. As a result it has to work perfectly, all the time, without maintenance, without attention. Such software is expensive, especially since it's safety critical, and subject to SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) regulations.

Net result is it's really, really expensive, and margins in shipping are so tight, no ship owner will install a system when instead, they have to have people on watch who are supposed to accomplish the same tasks.

Added in edit: I see that this, despite having three votes very quickly, is way down on page 3 of the "front page" - so it's been flagged. I'd guess that's because it's from the Daily Mail, and has nothing obviously hacker-related. As a result pretty much no one will see it. <shrug> Still, I hope I've answered your question.
In a sense, this goes in line with "release early, release often". I get that it's a big step to actually release a software or service, but the more you wait, the more you risk actually defining the product too much, or missing the boat completely while someone else takes the prize. I think even a service that is somewhat prone to errors can be released as long as it's made clear that it is, and that it's at least decently functional. And it is, of course, absolutely imperative that an easy to reach and easy to use feedback system be put in place.
CompCert does support PowerPC which RAD750 implements. On the other hand, compiler bugs are probably not the weakest link.
This resonates with me as well, why am I so much more outgoing and fearless in strange situations than when I'm back in known surroundings? Strange.
Funny I thought the same thing. "Fuck it, piratebay it!" I guess TPB stole the ship image from common culture...
8 Common Programming Mistakes
This is fairly retarded.
Security questions are salt
Not sure that RAM or CPU usage are ever going to be at top of my list when it comes to evaluating a word processing package. I don't even care as long as it's below 1gb ram and uses less than a whole core, the embarrassment of riches in the average computer today makes it a non-issue.
Youtube already does that. If you flag that you own a video you'll get money from free views on it. But it barely works because it's too easy to abuse. Real artists often can't monetize their own videos because an abuser uploaded it first and claimed as his. Youtube is being abused to hell and google can't control it.

I wonder which genius solution megabox have to suceed where google failed. Or if it's just marketing.
As far as I can tell, there is no tool in FreeBSD base that provides a simple way to check and update all ports using binaries. FreeBSD's pkg_add only handles direct installs of new packages. Upgrade management, things like "update everything" or "update this package and its dependencies" is usually done through one of the external tools like portmaster, portupgrade, pkg_upgrade, etc. Which interact with the ports tree and pkg_add behind the scenes, but with additional info on dependencies to keep the whole thing sane. They do the job okay, but they all have their quirks.

From its man page, it seems OpenBSD's pkg_add supports updating (and a lot of other things), so I guess they don't have this problem to start with. That's interesting, I wonder why the feature is lacking on the FreeBSD side.
Same. Maven drove me pretty crazy, to be honest. Compare it with Ruby gems or Laravel's bundles, Maven felt like using a ten thousand ton tank to round up sheep.
This is a nice example of the kind of anti-harassment policy that the Ada Initiative is encouraging (link found in article but promoting here because it's worth taking in).

http://www.blogher.com/frame.php?url=http://2012.brucon.org/...
I'm a little bothered by articles that paint DefCon in this kind of light. I'm a regular attendee or DefCon and I have NEVER seen any sort of the behavior as described in the article. I also noticed that her examples all take place off site at non-DefCon controlled events.
In the last few years of DefCon I've seen an explosion in the number of women attendees-it was actually very impressive. In past years its been a few wives and girlfriends, a scattering of women computer professionals and many vendors/reporters. But this year in particular the lines were packed with women. It was great to see so many women come out and enjoy the conference. I'm sure DefCon and male computer professionals still need to work hard to make sure women feel welcome, but from my prospective it looks like some great strides have already been made.