skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using Vagrant since the early days. While I have to admit I've spent zero time in the Vagrant source and I'm sure your assessment is accurate, I'm not sure how much I really care that it might be java-ish or bloated or not well written. I like well written code as much as the next guy. But I'm not deploying Vagrant to my production machines to be accessed by millions of users where I need to squeeze a few milliseconds out and I'm not building on top of vagrant as a framework. I use it behind the scenes as a tool to save me time and bootstraps my development servers. And it does that well. You don't need to maintain the internals, which means you can focus on your actual business, which I don't think is writing provisioning tools :)

Edited for spelling
I feel you man. I didn't really know how to articulate my feelings, but it all feels cheesy and false. It's like social conditioning. It's not real life. It's what your high school english teacher would want you to say about the event, not what you really felt.

As a side note, I would have said "Come on bro dive off that board like a BOSS... the chicks will dig it!" My kids are gonna get tough love.
I have been using Workflowy for many month now. Its not perfect. But it has served me well, longer than any other list application. The list app I like best is org-mode in Emacs. Sadly it is not in the cloud (and requires Emacs). TaskUp.com looks really polished. Good Job.
Works really smoothly, seems very thoughtfully put together.

Only criticism would that the "accept request to share location" action button is labelled "share", which I initially glossed over, assuming that it meant "share to social network".
Tangentially related to the parent topic- I have grown to appreciate "tasks" in Outlook mostly because of three features
1. the ability to flag an email as a task
2. ease of right click and adjust follow up date "today, tomorrow, this week, this month etc".
3. attach/link emails and other docs within tasks, so I can group related material together (OK mostly needed because Outlook search isn't as good as gmail :)

I only use Outlook at work and while I'd much rather use gmail for mail management I do want those features for task management- without mail integration any task list is not quite there. (I process my inbox to empty as I find email makes a very poor task manager despite the vast numbers of folk who use it as such...)

Edit: just found you can do 1. above in gmail, open the email and hit "shift+t" it includes a link to the email.
What's interesting is how much of this can be traced back to one simple word: agile.

As software development has moved to very short release cycles the importance of a fluid persistence approach is paramount. Gone are the days of fixed ER diagrams, DDLs and migration scripts for many small to medium and even large projects. Likewise having to wait for a DBA/Ops team to make changes on your behalf is never going to work. There just isn't the time for all of this when you are releasing to production every two weeks.

The databases that can best adapt to these conditions will be the ones that do well in the future.
I think the best solution would be for more companies to publish a page on their website telling people what to do if they find a security problem, like GitHub and 37signals do (Google and Facebook also offer a bounty).

I guess a problem with this is stating where the line is drawn. It might be difficult to promise not to sue well-intentioned researchers without reducing their ability to sue people with malicious intentions.
I love the pricing scheme. Most web based services start at several dollars a month (probably because of card processing fees) or an expensive yearly signup. For a simple task app like this, I would not pay several dollars a month and a yearly lump sum would be 'risky'.

I know the service provider is probably paying a huge % of card processing fees though. I wonder if there is a service that would handle 'subscription micro-payments' for cheap services like this (eg. combine all your micro-payments onto one bill to save fees)?
Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote.

Why do you think most of the software we build now is like putting a man on the moon? I think it's nothing like that.

Maybe I should read Brook's book (I've enjoyed MMM), but your article doesn't make a strong case for it.
Like the "Video playing" checkbox on the left? ;-)
A Practical Guide to Use Spine.JS in Real World App
By Twitter for iPhone, too. Is that the iPhone -6S then?
Actor model / queses are at odds with modern CPU desisn - LMAX Architecture
I'm quite surprised more task list apps are coming out, I would have thought the market was over-saturated by them.

I'm also surprised HN doesn't advocate for a very good tast/list manager: www.checkvist.com, which can be entirely controlled via the command line and offers a ton of features (note: I am only a user, not an employee).
The verbosity of java allows an IDE like eclipse to exist. I agree that's very hard to program java without a powerful IDE, but there are a lot of things that you can do only with a static typed language and a IDE like eclipse. It's a fair trade. Could you ellaborate on the link between IDE dependency and the spawn a whole caste of very mediocre programmers? (english is not my first language, so sorry if anything I wrote sounds rude)
one big problem that i found most software development methodology ignore is
whether you are the developer or the client (the IT department hiring contracting the developer)

you have to agree on an offer/contract, which include scope + price/cost

how can i be lean or agile or whatever, if i am bound by a contract from the start ... making change requests mean that me the IT department failed to deliver on time and on budget, which eventually leads to bad annual reviews ...

having the have a contract or a signed offer approved by business, enforces the water fall model, an internal IT department have to do this to protect itself from the client when a change request is made later on ...

of course i am only speaking on the situation where you work in an IT department and getting your software developed by external vendors
Finland's Education Lesson: Equity Over Excellence
overview --

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/koka/2012-overv...
I agree, especially because many of the reasons for the older, less cutting edge technology used in space boil down to high levels of radiation. Building a small 2kg probe, launching via a weather balloon and then exploring a desert on earth would certainly be hugely educational (not to mention fun) but the constraints would be very different to those on a Mars mission and so the end result would look VERY different.
Are you saying you can't imagine yourself with those fears? That's fair enough. To claim, however, that no 16 year old male could behave that way seems absurd. I myself provide a counterexample; perhaps I am not real to you :) (My social anxiety - described so well by this post - extended well into adulthood and even now in my late 20s I still suffer from occasional social anxiety.)
Happiness is when your cheeks hurt from smiling too much. Happiness is riding a jet ski. Happiness is enjoying a beer with your friends. Happiness is accomplishing something difficult. Happiness is looking forward to whatever you're doing today.

To me, that's happiness.
How Gen Y is changing the corporate workplace
Oh interesting: In the Domain Name System, these domains use an ASCII representation consisting of the prefix xn-- followed by the Punycode translation of the Unicode representation of the language-specific alphabet or script glyphs. For example, the Cyrillic name of Russia's IDN ccTLD is рф. In Punycode representation, this is plai, and its DNS name is xn--plai. I had assumed that domain registrars would be more careful of people buying really short domains that way, since the difference in price is huge. Well I'm off to buy xn--g5g.org (ⅹ.org) :)
Some software is extensively designed up front, like embedded avionics programs. The resources are made available because folks like the FAA demand it.

Why don't we employ rigorous software engineering principles to, say, iOS games? It would be a waste. It could be done, but in practice, people just don't care as much if a game on their phone crashes as they do if an airplane they're riding in crashes.

There's a wide spectrum of software out there, needing varying levels of robustness. There's not a lot that can be said about software development as a whole along these lines; inadequate design for an online banking site might be excessive design for a llama costume competition voting site.
Because no words are without context.
While I fully agree that we underestimate kids, I've got to say that my three-year-old spent a gleeful half hour riding up and down escalators back in March, and was sad when we said he had to stop. Little kids can be surprisingly smart and still be amused by simple, repetitive things that would bore adults out of their skulls.
Is there a mobile version yet? This looks pretty cool, but if it's not mobile, I would venture to say it doesn't meet most people's needs.
Would be interesting to see numbers of time actually taken. It is my understanding that in Japan it isn't unusual for an employee to not take so much as a sick day for years - and don't even mention vacation. The corporate culture is so "dedicated" that's it's really unhealthy.
They corrected the title: "Photosynthesis-like process found in insects": "The original headline of the piece incorrectly implied that the researchers had discovered evidence of photosynthesis in aphids. In fact, photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide to be 'fixed' and turned into organic compounds."
Echoer debuts Android app and content partner program for local discovery
There is at least MetNet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetNet) which aims to swarm of measurement devices on Mars surface. They are going to use immobile measurement platforms.
> I suppose with infinite money you can make quite a lot of approaches work. You could have an army double check every line of code. Instead of pair programming, why not have 10 programmers look over each others shoulders?

Bingo: it's all about the economics of various tradeoffs. If I have a company that puts together web sites for small companies in the area, and we have NASA style coding standards, we're going to completely price ourselves out of the market. If NASA applied "little web shop" coding standards to their projects, they'd be lucky to get anything up in the air before it exploded.

The important thing is to be on the curve though, not behind it, meaning to make the best of the tradeoffs the economics of what you're doing push you towards.
Your essay was unbalanced, yes open source sucks in the way you complained about, but Microsoft sucks even worse in some ways (if not quite as badly in others). Complaining about something in isolation is easy; everything sucks compared to perfection. But how is it compared to the real alternatives.
I got by with purchasing "international editions" from India on eBay, which had the same content in English, but with cheaper quality printing and no color. It was about $15 for a normally $150 book. Between that and downloading PDFs of other textbooks, I got through each semester with just around $50 of textbook budget.
Rebuilding Rails Build Your Own Ruby Web Framework
Blood cells converted into chemical sensors
You are not even in the same zip code as the point I'm trying to make, which, I guess, sort of makes my point.

Nobody says you have to write iOS games using the same methodology as avionics, what somebody is trying to say is that random walk will only get you so far...

iOS is a pretty bad example btw, because iOS is very much a Cathedral and has a designer and architect who cares and who is in control.

That's precisely why don't need to use autoconf to compile stuff for iOS.
Ovizart - web-based PCAP analysis tool
If the job requires using and committing to open source, the employer is looking for involvement in open source projects. Otherwise, the employer is looking for a vague indicator of "gets it" (at minimum gets Git and at least one language.) If the employer is evaluating code quality, they are looking for someone who codes similarly -- neither significantly worse nor better along any axis. This last level of code analysis is a sign that the employer has a weak culture and is unable to teach its standards, or is so strapped for time that the position requires immediate productivity. Therefore it's not worth worrying about the last kind of Github inspection.
Ask HN: Is Fulfillment by Amazon worth it just to target Prime members?
My company already works with a fulfillment company and we're already a seller on Amazon.

I'm considering of using Fulfillment by Amazon just to target Prime members for our Amazon listings. Not surprisingly, Prime members spend more.

Was anyone in the same boat?

Was there any significant improvements in your profits over selling as a regular seller on Amazon?
I'd have to agree here. It's a cool concept, but I just couldn't justify paying for it. It's possible that if there was a free limited version that I could play with, I'd get hooked and then be willing to pay the monthly rate. But then, I am a Senior Developer... maybe this is meant more for Project Managers. The project managers that I work with though, wouldn't be nearly technical enough to understand most of what comes through on Stack Overflow: "MVC what?" :)
I don't think that's quite fair on Fowler. C&B was published only 2 years before his book on XP, The Toyota Way was published in 2001 as well.

Really many of ideas which we've come to associate with "Agile"-like methods only really started to become codified about the end of the 1980's in more traditional manufacturing. I don't think it's too surprising that it's taken the software industry another 10 years for this stuff to become mainstream.

Also from your other comment above...

> Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ?

I'm sure FreeBSD would be a lot better if you gave it $25 billion USD over 11 years as well.

It takes more than just good will and intelligent people to produce high quality results.
Ruby on Rails off track?
No, autoconf happened because UNIX abandonned the cathedral model and went bazaar.
Who said anything about Microsoft ?
I've been using my own bash scripts for a few years to manage local VMs with KVM for dev and I have exactly 6 commands in 249 lines (excluding blank and comments) and never needed more: image, create, start, stop, delete, list. Where can I collect my $250 USD?
What you could do is have dedicated drones which are essentially movable instruments, so you can have co-operation on tasks and say teams of 3 or 4 (one vaporises, the other has the spectrometer. One drills, the other has the reagents and so on)

If you enter this paradigm then you can eliminate costs such as that long arm which you need to position the instrument package. That arm in of itself is an engineering marvel and it requires a lot of careful design to make sure that it doesn't malfunction. (remember you have a not so light weight at the end, the torque due to that is huge and you have a complex assembly consisting linkages to transfer torque and so on...)

The idea of this is to see how simple and redundant you can make things. If for the cost of that arm we could have one small team of rovers wouldn't it be worth it? Wouldn't it jump start exploration?
Clickable : http://www.redline.cc

This seems like a nice way to report visual bugs and would be pretty useful for us instead of sharing screen through skype or making a printscreen before adding info around it.
But how does your solution integrates with someone already having a bug tracker solution (for everything not visual). Can you integrate with other platforms?

How do you handle "replay" of the bug? I mean if I have a div not loading properly on my firefox browser, how will the developper "see" the bug if he loads the page in another browser or even another version/OS. Do you "print" what's displayed when the designer reports the bug?

EDIT: My bad, you already indicate you only support Pivotal Tracker for now !
So if someone stole your phone and you didn't have tracking, you could try emailing them with this as a replyto?
I was about to write that as well, Apple are using less Apple APSL themselves and moving to wards Apache 2.0 License, and using more BSD / MIT equivalent. Since the Table only includes GPL / LGPL and the not used APSL no wonder why the numbers are dropping.
It amazes me that the argument against this is by attacking some "standard-bearer of his cause." Let's not ask how it is compared to existing alternatives, or to 'perfection', but rather the potential alternatives. Your argument is akin to "stop talking about 'engines'; horse-drawn carriages might suck, but so does walking."
> That's precisely why don't need to use autoconf to compile stuff for iOS.

You don't need it to compile stuff for one specific version of Debian with packages X, Y and Z installed, either. You're comparing apples to oranges.
I think it's perfectly fair.

UNIX was originally written as pair-programming.

Brooks refers to agile in The Mythical Man-Month (he didn't invent it, check his references)
Standard operating procedure.

Everyone knows that if you don't try to protect your trademark, you end up losing it.

The logos are somewhat similar, and I'm also not surprised that nothing came of this.

The "threat to sue over the letter 'e'" is an exaggeration to get pageviews, and this article should be deleted.
Buying Twitter followers - Good or Bad?
:) it is entirely possible that this feels like what a high school english pupil would write about the event, as this is possibly the first piece of "creative writing" I've done since high school. Although, while creative, it's largely based in what happened/how I felt about the incident during and reflecting on it afterwards.

I'd have loved to have shouted something like that, but I've my own social awkwardness to deal with too!
XMPP is cooked into the platform. I wonder how hard would it be to use it with other implementations.

PGP is probably too complicated for the average user. I wouldn't like to expose people to that (and failing to do so while relying on it would open a lot of attack vectors)
I Google everything
I left a comment to that effect as well, about mistakes in API interface design - a topic that all developers learn the hard way and isn't well covered or written about.
I almost posted that at the top-level of this thread, but it was your comment, not the original article, that prompted the train of thought behind my comment. I wasn't arguing with you.
This is not a warning to avoid large corporations, just an observation ...

When you work at BigCo, your daily activities and your goals involve operating the machine that BigCo is, and becoming part of that machine. You may be a programmer, or software engineer, or technical staff member, or Sales Guy or Web Dude[1]. You may code in some language or collate TPS reports. But your main job is to serve the machine, regardless of what the machine produces.

At SmallCo success is defined and recognizable by shipping, internally or externally. At BigCo success is defined and recognizable by how many people know you, and how many weeks of vacation your grade is given.

Do you work at BigCo or SmallCo? William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways[2], had a rule for guessing whether a restaurant was going to be good or generic, and that was to count wall calendars; the more calendars, the better the restaurant[3].

You can recognize BigCo by sheer physical size, but also by walking around the cubes and counting company certificates on cube walls. The more certificates of relationship training, management training and Microsoft training that you find, the Bigger the Co. Those certificates are there because those employees are learning and demonstrating the skills of operating, and being a cog in, BigCo.

You can also recognize how far into the machine individuals have progressed, by measuring the ratio of animal books[4] to certificates.

[1] http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways

[3] http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/431488

[4] http://oreilly.com/
I take nothing away from what he did and I'm one of those people who dislike it when some people belittle what he did. He did the browser and the protocol and the url scheme. The excellence of NeXTSTEP helped. I only recently learned that a lot of the design of html, in terms of deciding how to fit sgml to markup the "Web" was also Dave Raggett. So people who say TBL "copied" SGML are wrong in two ways. There was also Calliau. Then all the other html "tags" that came afterwards, with NSCA Mosaic and Netscape and then W3C additions. Andreessen famously suggesting img etc. But TBL joined html with what else it needed to take over.
Silence if I won't get interrupted. Otherwise, I have mix of 80s, 90s and techno. I also like sound tracks to some techie/pseudo techie movies (ie:social network,pirates of SV etc)
Farmville, slot machines, Modern Warfare 3, and Halo 7 would all like to raise objections. Adults find amusement in similarly mindless tasks. Adults don't find escalators amusing only because a lifetime of experience has made them common. A trip to Atlantic City or Vegas on the other hand somehow turns losing money into entertainment.
Maybe, but that shit isn't easy.

In this particular case, auto-scaling would be too slow, so you'd have to do something more clever. And ticketing obviously has strong consistency issues, so that removes another set of optimizations.

And of course, you'd still have to do all the load testing to make sure your chosen back end really performed correctly, which is a large fraction of the scaling work.
I'm willing to up vote anything that is being bootstrapped by one hard working person! Cheers!
orangecat example is type safe, your example trades a "compile time" error for a runtime error.
This is a great example of standing up for yourself while emphasizing the mutual interest of both parties. As this letter helps demonstrate, sometimes reacting with humor and kindness is the best way to deal posturing.
Business Development: What is it really?
Adambenayoun, thanks for your UX/UI remarks. I agree with most of them.

Regarding the message and use cases - I'm trying to explain this in a section below the slides. "Technology research tool", "IT buzzword monitor", "Analysis and reports", etc. Isn't this visible/clear enough? What would you suggest to make it more eye-catching?
Thanks again for all your feedback :)
When OpenBSD replaced GNU libtool with a home grown perl version, it was so much faster I believe it literally cut days off machine time off a full ports build. For smaller packages, with tiny C files, running libtool.sh takes longer than running the compiler does. The majority of build time for some of those packages is still running configure, testing for things like <stdio.h>, which the package provides no workaround when missing. The OpenBSD project alone has spent years of machine time to running configure and libtool.

As for doing its job well, the failure mode of configure "you can't build this" is abysmal. Just give me a fucking Makefile, I'll fix it myself. I love packages that come with Makefiles that don't work. I pop "-I/usr/local/include" into CFLAGS, run make again, and boom. Done. Trying to do the same with configure? Forget about it. --with-include-dir or whatever doesn't work, because it's really running some bogus test in the background which expects /bin/bash to exist and so on and so forth.