skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Must admit I've stopped after the firtst, but: With thousands of programmers, what real features have been released to facebook.com? I often ask myself what those thousands of programmers do, as a user (I know not customer in this case) I can't see it. All of them mobile? Ads? Image recognition? With thousands of programmers should't the output be (5 people dev teams, one feature a month) hundreds of features/stories per month? Could users live with that?

I'd also think commits are not a productivity metric.
> There won't be a reason for the average consumer not to get an iOS device.

Wow, that's some hyperbole. Other than price I presume you mean.
Actually, no it's way above better than other ways they could verify your identity. Did you not read account of the Wired reporter who had his online identity stolen and wiped because companies used easily obtainable information about the person to identify the person's identity? If they had used a password instead it never would have happened.

I don't understand what your issue is with telling them the password? Just change it to something random and change it back after if it's not something you are comfortable sharing or saying out loud. It may personally offend you, but t's certainly not a bad practice.
Does he actually answer that question? I read the main post, which seemed to conclude if it's good, it's good, and if it's bad, it's bad. Then there's some replies, and finally a single (negative) number presented for the Rybka chess engine. What about programs that aren't chess engines?
>In the past 4-5 years on laptops and desktops, I've had very few problems [with suspend-to-disk], mostly traceable to display drivers.

Thanks.
When "The Tablet" piece came out, I was sold on Gruber's ability to really analyze Apple and think through details in an informational and insightful way. I was impressed enough that I sought out and read some of his much earlier long-form essays, mostly about the nascent days of OS X. He's always had this in him, but I agree the snark has been pushed way too far over the course of recent years to the detriment of the blog.
I'm a daily laptop linux user, and like you I know how to go a long time between reboots, so I can wait for my computer to start up.

But forget about us, we're already converts, we don't matter. My grandfather (93 years old) is also a daily laptop linux user. When he presses that power button, that laptop better be booted and ready /yesterday/. And when he pushes it again, it better be off before he closes the lid. Slow startup and shutdown times are simply not an acceptable user experience; they are literally the difference between enjoying and wanting to use the computer, and not wanting to bother with it.

And don't think for a minute he's going to learn about suspend, hibernate, power savings, battery life, or whatever. It's just not going to happen. His laptop lives in the closet, so it's going to be off (either by his doing, or the battery running out). When he sees something on tv and wants to read about it, he takes the laptop out, plugs it in, and turns it on. If it's not ready for him when he's ready for it (i.e. now) then he just won't use it.

However, since I've got that sucker booting from power button to firefox home page load complete in under 7 seconds, he uses it all the time. And it's amazing how it enriches his life. You simply can't get computer use to penetrate into lives like his without fast booting and an easy user experience.
Build RESTful web services with Java technology
The messaging back-end is probably completely decoupled from the stuff running other components of the site. I would imagine everything interfaces with each other, and as long as you don't break the interface, things could be changed pretty orthogonally.
Glad to have more eyeballs on this. Thanks guys. We're on it.
The Bible and Homosexuality
The point of a summary though is to offer the promise of an interface. The code should implement the summary, not the other way around.

Code comments though are different. They are there to annotate code. They are incredibly useful in collaborative environments but only if they are used to organize, discuss, and debate the code, not describe it.
Insurance companies make money by investing the premium in investments. A correctly balanced insurance book will match premiums + claims over an expected time period. The idea is to invest the premium and make money off the investments. This is why Warren Buffet buys insurance companies, because he is a good investor.

If an insurance company is paying out more in claims than they are taking in in premium, that is when they will increase the premiums. If they are taking in more premium than they are paying in claims, they will generally identify areas where this is the case, and lower premiums to attract more customers.

There is a lot of ignorance about insurance companies on this thread. There is also a lot of ignorance that self-driving cars will require no insurance. Not all of the cost of insurance goes to insuring the driver hitting something. There are fire, theft and third party property + injury components. None of these will be removed, though some may be reduced over time in line with claims being lower.

Most of the extra cost of insurance in a large city has to do with the theft component (especially if not garaged). People who live in rural areas pay much less insurance than those in city areas, principally due to decreased theft rates. Autonomous cars will be stolen just like regular cars.
In Response to “11 Reasons a 23-Year-Old Shouldn’t Run Your Social Media”
The cameras they have on Curiosity are just fine, considering the bandwidth that they've got available to them. The problem, in this case, is simply that they didn't point them at the most interesting thing in the area!
Merely hiding Views is even worse since the data is still public but people are now less likely to find out. Stupid Quora.
In my considered experience, those who are most hostile to unnecessary comments tend to put the most comments in their code. It isn't an argument against code comments, just being very picky about what is a useful comment collaboration-wise.
I'm not impressed with Uber. I read the entire article twice and many of the comments, then went to their home page.

I still have no idea what they do other than it somehow relates to taxicab service.
Unanswered or unaddressed by you? All of these questions have most certainly been answered or at least very seriously addressed with room for more conversation.
Can I ask how precisely you deleted it? When I tried a few months back, they wouldn't allow a deletion, they would only allow it to be "disabled".

My reason for trying to delete it was also privacy related, although it will seem like a minor thing. It turns out that when you initially sign up, they turn any friend you have on facebook into someone you "follow" on Quora. My list of facebook friends is not public information. The list of people you follow on Quora is. Ergo, they turned a subset of my private friends list into a public list that anyone could see, and without warning.

Again, seems like a minor thing, but in principle it was a privacy violation, so as soon as I realized this I attempted to delete the account.
Interesting. I can vouch for the speed of leveldb on a five node cluster - I'm using it in our startup on 5 dedicated machines with around 12GB of RAM, running on FreeBSD. Riak version is 1.1.4; Riak 1.2 is supposed to have a lot of leveldb refinements.
It took me until I read the comments on this thread.
What annoys me about posts like this in general is that they only see cars (and motorised transport in general) as a cost, but don't take into account any benefits.

It's a silly position to only talk about costs, completely disregard any benefits. It comes across like a petulant brainwashed teenager, and people should try and argue their point better.
If anyone has a line to some execs at Groupon, I have an idea how they can turn things around: http://i.imgur.com/IgLqt.jpg
I don't what people are even doing on quora. I hadn't even heard about it. It was only a incidence that a colleague tweeted a link, and only one answer was displayed it required login to proceed further and read more answers. At that moment I lost interest and closed the browser tab.

I can understand the need to demand login to answer or ask questions. But asking people to login to read answers is just too much for today's internet environment.

This is just a re incarnation of expertsexchange all over again.
I was thinking more that you let your employees come up with new ideas every once in a while. Like Google 20% time or LinkedIn HackDays.
Because its easier to complain about it.
Yes, HN is a special-interest group. I actually liked it better when it was even more narrowly focused, back when it was mostly YC-funded companies and their friends, plus spies like myself. [1] It was probably even more "boring" then, for people who were not me: There were fewer contributors and a lot more focus on a particular subset of startups. It was even called "Startup News".

But what of it? It is not the job of any one site on the web to represent the whole world. That's what the rest of the web is for. Use that navigation bar!

Meanwhile, of course Twitter is exactly as diverse as you want it to be: It's much bigger, which is balanced because you control the mix of who you read. You can tweak your follower list to be fun and interesting. On the flip side, it's quite possible to tune your Twitter experience to be far narrower than HN ever has been. It's up to you.

As for App.net, yes, here in its earliest stages it definitely excludes people who can't afford $4.25 a month. [2] And that is too bad. Perhaps even unjust. However, dare I point out that in the USA it's pretty darned low on the list of unjust things: I literally just spent more than $4.25 in one day riding public transit, which suggests that Boston is, in a sense, at least 30 times more exclusive than App.net. [3] I'll reserve my supply of righteous anger for high rents, soaring medical costs, usurious check-cashing outfits, high broadband costs, and state university tuitions, I think.

(The biggest injustice of a $4.25 monthly fee is that it excludes people from places where US$4.25 is a lot of money. Here we must hold out hope that prices will fall over time. Which they almost certainly can do: It takes more money to invent a thing than to run it at scale.)

---

[1] Flaw Number One of the "country club" analogy is that country clubs don't publish their internal discussions to globe-spanning message boards where anyone can read them, including those of us who aren't yet computer scientists and don't have YC startups.

[2] Flaw Number Two of the "country club" analogy is that country clubs are considered snobbish not merely because they cost a lot, but because you can't necessarily join one simply by paying the fee. They reserve the right not to admit you even if you pay. AFAIK App.net does not, although presumably they'll boot you for policy violations.

[3] Oh, you think you'll save money by driving? Have you priced the parking in Boston lately? Calculated the per-mile cost of operating your car?
This was a very good piece from gruber and I say that as someone who has consistently hated his snarkiness and apple fanboyism in the past. He makes deep analyses of the ipad mini here and dare I say, sets himself apart as a key asset in the Apple tech press. There should be someone as capable of doing in-depth analyses in other tech fields too. I was thinking specifically about android device news. The folks at androidpolice are the best I know. But not of Gruber's calibre.
As a recent hire, I have to agree completely with everything he said. It's such a terrible working environment that I just might have to stay here for an inordinate amount of time so I can continue to complain about it.
Indeed. They have quite a toolchain and a wide variety of libraries. While a change in the javascript framework or PHP compiler affects everything, it isn't dependent on everything.
What so the third world doesn't exist? Seriously?
Even outside impartial observers see the Nokia situation just getting worse and worse, and Windows Phone doing absolutely nothing to pull them out of the hole they're in.

I appreciate Gruber because he's unapologetic about something like that. We can dance around it forever, but judging by sales and in-the-wild presence of WP7, that briefly if crudely summarizes the Lumia & WP7 ecosystem to date. Doing this stupid old world stuff like distributing nail polish that matches your phone isn't distracting anyone from the increasingly untenable situation Nokia is sliding into right now. Moreover, moves like that make it seem like they're treating their situation flippantly.

It's not about "hate", it's about not candy coating things to appease certain groups. We heard for the last two years about how beautiful and fast and revolutionary WP7 is and how nice the Lumia hardware looks. Now it's time to put up or shut up and they just haven't. That's a fact, and I don't see why someone should have to ignore that and paint a happy face on the situation to not be considered a "hack". Moreover, I don't think you can extrapolate from that that Gruber hates Nokia, the Lumia or WP7. It's just a snarky observation.

If your issue is with the joke itself, I'll give you that. It wasn't all that funny or anything. I also agree he's a much better writer when in long form, and his snark does get over the top. I see where he's coming from here though.
Give a 50% overhead and make the cab driver's cost $15 an hour. I used to pay about $50 for a half hour cab ride from LAX to Westwood, tip and surcharge subtracted, call it $40. I would still find a "no driver" taxi ride for $30 expensive.

OK, now factor in lower insurance premiums...

Now cut the price of the car in half (no front seats, steering column, etc needed)...

Now cut out the pay for the time cabbies spend waiting for calls

Now cut the fleet size by 75% (better utilization due to intelligent routing, cabs never sleep, etc)

I have a feeling there are a bunch more ways this will get a lot cheaper...
The 3DS eshop is very easy to use. I've spent way too much money there already.

My only con is that you can't buy AAA titles, requiring me to order physical goods like a caveman.
Um... So a quarter notable mostly for Apples entry into a tablet form factor market already pioneered by other competitors is somehow a testament to the platform's... dominance?

(I really want to respond to the idea of yearning for another IBM/Microsoft-scale monopoly too, but I'll limit myself to simple snark for now.)
Yeah, regular cabs have their place. I take them when I can, because they are cheaper. But in Chicago many will give you a problem if you don't pay in cash and many neighborhoods are underserved. When it's 3AM and I'm in a far-out fairly sketchy neighborhood, I'm SO glad Uber exists.
With $570m in quarterly revenues, 40% y/y growth, $1.2b in cash and profitable, I'd like to hear your rationale on how it's not worth $1b.
How will that work without having that other resolution you want to avoid? The issue was avoided on the desktop by not requiring everything be full screen.

I understand the issue, but my personal iPad usage would not be affected by more resolutions (I surf, read and watch video) but the greater PPI would be very appreciated. That's why it's frustrating.
Some people set it up so that 'jj' (while in insert mode) is equivalent to ESC (or perhaps it was Ctrl-c, I forget). Either way, that would make vim usable with an iOS device's keyboard.
I was way too naive to expect a Facebooker to not actually be drunk on the cool-aid and actually bother to offer a comprehensive good/bad overview of FB.
This is all very good advice which will save you much stress and many wasted hours.

I would add:

Document any reference material you use, including the source and why you're including it. Cache any digital content, either in the project path or using a management tool like Zotero.

Keep a research log. Minimally, annotate your trials. Coming back even a week later and trying to figure out which trial was done on what hunch with what results is extremely time consuming without this information.
That's not something I care about when I want to read something laying on the couch or in bed. I don't do it much on my iPad either actually.
A lot of our manpower goes into designing, implementing, and maintaining highly scalable systems and tools that allow the actual product teams to do their work. And of course there are plenty of teams that are simply focused on improving the scalability of existing features.

It's hard work to scale something as complex and inter-dependent as Facebook when you're operating at the scale of almost a billion monthly active users.
While this adds nothing to the conversation, I would like to think there is a strong contingent of Indian males at HN as well.
The Nautilus - The Entrepreneur Ship
Engineers typically go the other way though: always write email and never meet. Then they wonder why their project goes south because the specs are incomplete or the users aren't happy.

I think it's largely a knee-jerk reaction against bad meetings - hour long no-point crapfests - but they don't have to be like that.
You know things are all good and well when a company is doing well and pre-IPO but the truth is, Facebook will need to so major results quarter on quarter to prevent the stock from tanking. A little less satire and a little more business is what's needed. Given the state of Facebook's stock performance post-IPO, I would say the joke is on him.
It wasn't a knock against relational databases. The issue is update in place. If you have a relational database that is append only there is no problem. He actually wrote one (datomic).

The criticism of a primary key is again not anything against having primary keys, but that in a database that allows updates in place a primary key is meaningless. It is meaningless because it doesn't specify a value -- you pass a primary key and it could be anything by the time the receiver gets around to using it. If instead the value was immutable passing a primary key would be fine.

I've done work with ERP systems and having the ability to query against arbitrary points in time would be amazing. What was the value of inventory on this date? There are other ways to go about this (event sourcing) but it moves all the complexity to application code. The goal would be for the database itself to do the work for us.
> a time dimension (or, if you prefer, place-oriented programming)

Place oriented is the opposite of having a time dimension. It means that at any time, the thing at that place might be different. This was done for your second argument, efficiency. The talk argues that if functional programming with values is efficient enough for you, than you shouldn't be writing object oriented software.

Values on the other hand absolutely have a time dimension. His "Facts" slide says it as does datomic and his revision control example.

He has another great talk that touches a bit more on time:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...
I work from home / where ever every day. And, it is wonderful. I can even take as much unpaid time off as I want, whenever I want, as long there is no disruption of business services to our clients. This works because I get paid hourly (I don't work = I don't get paid) and we have very fine granularity in tracking what work was done when. There is also high trust amongst all the team members that everyone is being honorable.
As an OS X, and thus launchd user... I think you guys are crazy! :)

For launchd, the service description is a few declarative entries: on OS X, ssh.plist is 37 lines, but only because XML plists are really verbose; it could be half that in a saner format. On my Debian system, /etc/init.d/ssh is 167 lines of almost entirely boilerplate shell script that has to be maintained separately for each service (and that isn't even enough to make the script standalone; it invokes the 1400 line start-stop-daemon). The only thing simpler about SysV init is that it's the legacy everything is compatible with: the simplicity of shell scripts doesn't hold up when you need over 100 lines for a simple daemon.

launchd itself is many thousands of lines of code (too much?), but it provides cron and inetd-like services (i.e. generalized on-demand services - it is really nice to know that a daemon has zero effect on my system, no pages that had to be loaded from disk, when it's not being used, but still operates efficiently when it comes under load; this also makes the implementation for the daemon simpler in some cases), as well as automatic process termination/restarting. Its service-on-demand focused dependency model is nondeterministic in the same way that systemd is (?), but it's completely reliable, since it's standard by now so everything is designed to work with it.

Of course I usually use suspend and restore, but making rebooting really fast makes the system more fun to use.

And yes, I'm talking about launchd, not systemd, but from what I've heard systemd is pretty similar in design and goals.
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The fact that you can't update your house easily is because it is a physical object. Using values doesn't change how easy it is to change your software. If anything, it makes it easier because you know your changes can't screw anyone else up.
It's harder for an actor to masquerade under an Uber-style system than traditional regulation. Every move is tracked, and customers could even get photographs of registered drivers via their own trusted channel -- as opposed to the easily-faked licensing documents carried by traditional cabs. (Big cities sometimes have 'gypsy cabs' whose markings and meters can be hard for even local police to distinguish from licensed cabs.)

And what if there are competitors? As long as all of them are branded, and can be reviewed on third-party sites, customers can decide whether they like the power of driver reviews, or some other mechanism for checking abuses.

You're right, it is dynamic. Who moves faster, an Uber-like enterprise or a decades-old insider-controlled city regulatory bureau? Which tends towards satisfying riders faster? There was a decade of complaints about how awful SF taxis were before Uber arrived... but the last-century regulatory assumptions protected incumbents from the pressure for change.

There were once upon a time conditions A, B, C that made it hard for customers to assess cab rates, routes, and reliability. Those specific factors led to regulations X, Y, Z.

But now for users of technology, conditions A, B, and C are gone. Anonymous pick-ups are precluded by design. Wild-goose routing to plump up fares or misleading riders about prevailing rates are both much harder... and even if you manage such a scam a little, there's no more disappearing into the night afterwards with your ill-gotten gains: there's an indelible reputational and transactional trail allowing redress. All the X, Y, Z regulations specifically created because of the 20th-century limitations are obsolete and should be nullified as soon as possible. You don't need to be brainstorming new 'what if' rationales for them, in advance of any extant problems.
I think it's an underrated step between self-driving cars and cars that drive unoccupied, as in your example of cars that go park themselves. Adverse weather conditions, mechanical failure, a simple flat tire -- if something goes wrong with a car, we expect the owner to be there to deal with the problem.

That's not to say that the problem can't be solved, but my guess is that it will take time and culture changes to adapt to these cars before people have the kind of comfort level to allow empty cars to roam around.