skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comment reminded me of the "architecture astronaut" post by Joel Spolsky[1]:

"Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away."

Yes there might be two points on your compass but the "interesting" point is the one that's drawn to the magnetic pole of the planet. Cushman, you're a rhetoric astronaut.

1 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
Mojolicious starts out as Flask/Sinatra, with some added options to grow beyond that.

It does pride itself as a batteries-included, modular framework. And one that doesn't pull in loads of dependencies. Which I can appreciate on one hand, on the other, you do reinvent a lot of stuff that would be on CPAN.

(But, well, looking at the dependency list of Moose alone…)
I've been on both sides of public project hearings, representing proponents who want to build or expand a project, and project opponents who want to block or reduce the expansion of a project. NIMBYism is very real, from folks who may just oppose a project on principle unrelated to actual negative effects (I see this a lot on transit projects from folks who are just opposed to public transportation) to folks who may be uninformed. It can be extremely frustrating when I have the facts on my side (and even the experts on the other side agree with me), but there is still opposition based based on "feelings."

That said, the public process in general (aside from NIMBYs) is necessary and useful. The most prominent example from my experience is the public opposition marshaled by Cambridge MA against the original "Scheme Z" Charles River crossing plan for the Big Dig. From an engineering point-of-view, it made perfect sense, but it would have been a hideous monstrosity that the city would have been stuck with for 50 years. The opposition made the project go back to the drawing board and resulted in the iconic Zakim bridge. The public process worked.

In my own direct experience, there have been times when me or my team missed something on an analysis (we may have mistaken a home for a garage for example) and the public process makes us aware of that so we can properly account for impacts. It works. Yet the process can be hijacked by NIMBY's and if those opponents know who to work the politics, it can cause real problems.

The problem is trying to separate the NIMBYs from the legitimate concerns. Planners and public staff have been trying to deal with this for decades with no real progress. If you eliminate the public process, you get the original Boston Central Artery where the state came in, bulldozed entire neighborhoods at pennies on the dollar, and constructed an eyesore that divided the city for decades. With the process, you get the Big Dig where a whole bunch of interests use Section 4(f), NEPA, MEPA, and Army Corp of Engineer regulations to blackmail the project into funding dozens of pet projects.

This is definitely an area in need of disruption. If you have ideas, get them out there.
http://www.zdnet.com/no-personal-data-on-google-apps-norway-...

If trends like this continue there is good potential for selfhosted personal clouds.
Isn't this basically the same as OpenID?
Exactly that.

I'm genuinely surprised at some of the things people haven't quite grasped about Windows 8. To put it simply:

Windows 8 is the same as Windows 7 but it has a new interface layer (Metro) which replaces the start menu and adds an app store for Metro and normal apps. Everything you did in Windows 7 is just the same bar the start button.
The author is the founder of Buffer, which has both a product, and cash flow, and in fact had both quite early on. I also suspect that many of their customers are businesses (but I'm not sure.) So his experience would seem contradict what you're saying.

Why do you think it's necessary to incorporate early if you're taking money for a service/product?
European finance, insurance, banking, news agencies, e-commerce and market research companies. We're talking large companies on the same scale.
You're spot on. My basic expectation is that software that I write today will run 10 years from now, unmodified. Things like this give me 'upgrade fever', the fear that if I upgrade a machine something will break and I won't find out about it until it is too late. So I stick to writing software like that in compiled languages now. That requires a bit more work (ok, sometimes a lot more work) but the increased reliability across upgrades is worth it for me.

Other than that language itself being incompatible with previous releases there is the added burden of having to maintain a whole ecosystem, not unlike many frameworks and their plug-ins.

Many people will write some module or other and will make it available for others to build on, and then an upgrade will break the module. The module creators have since moved on and are no longer supporting their brainchildren.

Fortunately with open source you actually can fix these problems - most of the time - but there is not always time or opportunity to do so.

Backwards compatibility is what made microsoft a dominant market force, I believe that you mess with it at your peril.
Be careful what you wish for. The extreme alternative is Java, whose slavish obsession with backwards compatibility has effectively crippled the language. There's enough cruft in the standard library to keep newbies guessing for years, plus fundamental language design failures like type erasure and "beans".

At some point you need to burn bridges in order to move forward. Doing this frequently destroys the community. Never doing it also destroys the community, it just takes longer.

Personally, I think Python is managing pretty well. Yes, it's occasionally painful, but it's less painful than stagnation.
I've been trying to get a sense of popularity. All I can find is the "TIOBE Programming Community Index." I looked at the chart for the last 10 years of numbers.

Perl started declining in 2005. PHP's popularity seems to have been 2004-2010. Ruby's was 2007-2010, though it seems to be making a comeback. Python's was 2004-2011, and it again seems to be on the rise again. Those are relative numbers. In absolute numbers, PHP is ranked higher than VB, then Python, Perl, Ruby, and Javascript.

It doesn't seem reasonable to really talk of peak usage over the last 10 years. It might be possible to talk about "most mentioned by the popular bloggers", but that's also a different metric.
The issue is that Safari moves at a much slower pace than Webkit itself these days and the webkit blog gives little information about the Safari side of things.
Definitely.

I've been doing it for years. You can use a WebDAV share in Apache and mount it from Windows XP and above. That's pretty much DropBox with COTS software there.

I switched to Skydrive in 2009 though as it's just easier and it (at the time) supposed machine->machine replication with Live Mesh.
I don't think this is true, at least in the broad sense you've suggested here. There are lawyers on HN that will correct me when I say this:

There are, in many states, special-case rules for "single member" LLCs. There are also special rules in places for single-shareholder corporations. Those special-case rules largely impact the manner in which equity in the company is handled when resolving debts.

Meanwhile: there is a very widespread misunderstanding of how liability protection in corporations of all sorts work. The protection you get from a Corp/LLC is from contract liability: third parties cannot attach themselves to the assets of company owners to settle debts. But liability shields afford no protection against torts, including contracts entered in bad faith. If you own a company and the company enters into fraudulent contracts, you can still lose your house in the ensuing legal drama.
While your at it, don't buy insurance, wear a seatbelt, or back up your files. Most likely nothing bad will happen if you consider the odds.
Sorry. I meant "I couldn't see".

When I move a second window to left-half of the screen with Cmd+opt+Left, it just resizes and moves there on top of the previous window, the 2 windows aren't tiled one at the top, one at the bottom of the left-half of the screen. I assumed that's what it should do.
This discussion is framed very weirdly, almost to the extent of meaninglessness because the language is so imprecise. Asking "is hacking good" is like asking "is evolution good for people when it produces everything from terrible worms that blind people by living and eating their eyes to fantastic bacteria that allows us to digest all kinds of crazy foods?"

Systems always have weaknesses and systems always change. Sometimes we improve the weaknesses for fun or profit or usefulness, sometimes we attack them for fun or profit or malice.
> The Safari Technologies Evangelist actually does speak at one conference: WWDC. And the videos from that conference are available online …if you sign on the dotted line.

What dotted line? A free developer account lets you access all WWDC videos since 2010.
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A published hash sum on its own only protects against non-malicious errors in the download. This is of limited use, since even regular HTTP is verified with a 16 bit CRC checksum.

Distributing a hash check over HTTPS would offer some protection against man in the middle style attacks, to the extent that TLS protects against man in the middle attacks, but accomplishes nothing if the server has been compromised.

Distributing a signature of the download gives stronger protection, because the private key can be kept offline and encrypted except when in use. Breaking into a server and overwriting a few files is easier than breaking into someone's laptop in the brief moment where they unlock their keypair to sign a release.
It's kind of amazing how much certain data (in this case, a record in DNS) comes to mean to people. And how much we come to rely on that little bit of data. And really, how much we trust the DNS system and it's maintainers. "Ruling the world" might be difficult, but "ruling the internet" appears to be a matter of controlling DNS and then mimicking well-known sites well enough to install arbitrary software on every PC and device on the planet via a nefarious auto-update. It's the ultimate MITM attack. Even better if you can take over the DNS system for a short period, get a few million installs, then put the system back.

tl;dr: He who controls the DNS, controls the universe.
The FLOPS/watt ratio might be higher than regular servers or desktop machines (might be, its not clear), but for a lot of small scale homebrewed deployments it's not realistic to expect linear scaling (given the problems/algorithms/available amount of development time/expertise) - in practice decent single-core performance is important.

Ie. in many cases if you have the development and ops expertise to get stuff to scale to many cores, then you probably have the budget to get more serious hardware.
Well the science was deliberately concocted to allow for the recreation of naval sail sea battles (ships that can only shoot "broadsides" because of the physics of the propulsion system, for example), but it was so well done that I didn't care (in fact is was rather fun).
If you cut down a GPU to only 64 "cores" and only 700 MHz it may very well consume only 5 W. e.g. AMD Brazos/Kabini.
Impressive stuff, though what struck me was the results, least accuracy wise and what rounding they using:

Pi is 3.14159 26535 89793 238....

So I do wonder what rounding they are using, even truncating as I have (next digit 4 so good place to do that) then can see the last digit should at least be 8, worst case 7 and 6!! There again this may be a convention or result of the methord to calulate Pi.

As for floats, well, for accuracy I'd go with cdecimal right there, though is it as accurate. I suspect it is the formular used that induces the minute error in results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
#21 reference
It's painful to do corp-corp business without a corporation. Many large corporations will, when dealing with sole proprietorships, do crazy things like withhold taxes. Some companies may refuse to work with you altogether and instead demand that you work through a subcontracting arrangement with an existing vendor. Other companies will require you to maintain different liability insurance coverage, or have insurance requirements that are not easily available to new sole proprietorships.

(I've seen friends deal with this nonsense even after they got LLCs; I've also seen this nonsense resolved with LLCs).

Since early '05, I've been a principal at a business that bills large contracts year-round to companies of all sizes --- more on the 1000+ employees level, but lots of startups and small tech companies too. The idea that incorporation helps deal with corp-corp business is not a myth, and no appeal to "that guy's company must be doing business with corporations and he deferred incorporation" changes that.
State of the NAS: private clouds and an app platform
I fail to see the apple / Steve Jobs connection here.
If you have partners, get vesting taken care of immediately. Don't do business with partners that won't agree to vest.

You can set up a vesting (or equivalent buyback) structure with an LLC, but it might not be "LegalZoom-easy".

The longer you wait on vesting, the harder it is to get it set up. Don't wait.
How would I log in from a friend's computer with Persona? How about from an Internet cafe; how safe would it be?
Persona looks like something that lock's you into a certain device or at least makes it harder to log in on device's that are not your own.

I'd rather they made OpenID less scarry (to average Joe) instead.
Although I think you're right, I can't understand why they didn't try to "fix" OpenID and started a new thing instead.

http://xkcd.com/927/

That said, I'd love they succeed and we have finally something that works well and it's not under company-X's control.
It's just an analogy, I'm sure everyone understands what he meant.
This chart makes it clear how big the difference is: http://bit.ly/Qcrv3R
Living an extra mile away from your lawyer also makes it harder and more expensive to do business, because you'll pay extra for gasoline.

The question is, "how much more expensive", and the answer W.R.T. plain-vanilla LLCs where the transition to C-Corporation is uncontested by all the members and all the members are still active is, "not very".

I'm sure you can easily rack up more than $10k in conversion costs if you let things get complicated, but I'd like a cost breakdown or even just a citation to a source for the idea that LLCs add $10k to C-Corp costs in the common case.
> Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the [skeuomorphism] issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...
When you run Slackware you learn Linux.

The problem, however, is that no other Linux distribution looks like Slackware anymore. Everyone has moved to Sys V init first and then some to Upstart, systemd, and others. Other distributions have sophisticated package managers and source package formats. Other distributions use PAM for authentication.

So, effectively, when you learn Slackware, you learn Slackware. If you have to use Linux in the real world, you might as well learn a widely-used distribution such as a Debian derivative. Or Red Hat if you like suits.
I really don't understand where this oft-repeated FUD about Moose having a lot of deps comes from. Take a look at the list of deps on https://metacpan.org/release/Moose

I count 18 direct dependencies, 2 of which are core. If you look at the full expanded deps list at http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=Moose it's not many more, especially since most of the 2nd (or more) order deps are core modules like ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Test::More, etc.

For extra added irony, a bunch of the Moose deps are tiny modules we extracted from Moose or Class::MOP in order to make their functionality availability _without having to install Moose_. This includes Class::Load(::XS), Package::Stash(::XS), Devel::GlobalDestruction, Package::DeprecationManager, Eval::Closure, and Dist::CheckConflicts.

Had we just note bothered to break things up we'd have to deal with a lot less complaining.
We tried to do something along these lines with journly.com. We've since pivoted away and are working on something else, but I agree it's still a problem that needs to be solved.
Since when has Siri been "an embarrassment for Apple?"
Forstall seems to be a "copy" of Jobs. I am not sure if it's a good thing.
Just out of curiosity, how do you manage to converse with other people in the real world?
We were a Delaware LLC headquartered in NYC and did not run into any $1000 publication requirement; we did the online Delaware thing, and because we're in a legal-heavy sector of the industry, we've had our stuff looked over pretty carefully since then.
It's not who controls the spice, its the one who can disrupt the flow.
Turbolinks - I wouldn't trust these numbers...
No, hackers in general are not heroes though they (or I should say we) seem to have huge egos and would like to think they are heroes. There's nothing heroic about jail breaking phones and tablets. There's nothing about being a hacker that is in itself heroic. There are however a number of hackers whose work is based on idealistic beliefs and/or for what they believe is for the good of the public and what they do could be considered heroic and so they may be labelled heroes but are hackers heroes? No. I don't like the the fact that someone would try to say they're heroes and the fact that this article landed on the front page here smacks of hacker egotism. Are doctors, school teachers, stock brokers, entrepreneurs, or barbers heroes? Of course not! You could certainly twist your reasoning like a pretzel to argue they are but the truth is these are just people and not all people are heroic and your profession doesn't make you a hero. There are doctors who are in it for the money and there are doctors who want to make a difference. Neither type is heroic in and of itself. To simply go against the grain, question the status quo, and work against the current state of things is not necessarily heroic.

Hackers are not heroes. Certain individuals out there are heroes. They aren't all hackers. They're people from all walks of life and professions, at varying skill levels who do something at great risk, who often sacrifice something, and do something for the good of one or many people. The term hero can be very subjective and I am not comfortable labeling a group of people or even a subset of a group of people as heroes. The fact that someone wrote an article like this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Hackers, you're not heroes. Only heroes are heroes.
Have you read David Foster Wallace's take[1] on this issue? To me[2] it seems like a good case for a form of prescriptivism. I do have to admit that I'm a huge fan of DFW and am surprised anyone was able to write an interesting article about the "linguistic wars", so maybe that colors my opinion somewhat.

[1] http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-007... [1a]

[1a] PDF warning

[2] Someone with no background in or knowledge of linguistics
What is wrong with paying rent in Switzerland? I've lived in several countries and here (Geneva) they handle rent payments pretty well, it's just doing it online/taking one paper to the atm (with UBS), honestly I see no faults in that
Maybe Apple has a "if you take the different parts of Steve Job's management style in isolation, they start to look horrible" problem.
The Twitter Love Necklace (from UK hackathon)
I love this book but I'm not sure "Hacker's Delight" is really a proper name for it. More like "The Bit Twiddler's Guide To Fame And Fortune"
"Shipping a traditional desktop application is an epic pain in the ass compared to shipping a Metro-style app."

No, it's not. Desktop software installation and update packaging is a solved problem. On top of it... Multitude hosting and payment processing providers to choose from, nobody puts any restrictions on whether your app aligns with store owner's overall strategy, how/whether you can process payments outside the store, better margins, etc. "Ease of discovery" is overrated: maybe store makes it easier for big partners to be more prominent, but the more it grows the more it becomes just another silo, and you still must do your own legwork to market your app, making 25-30% cut look even worse. So, yeah, Windows does take a route to become more closed platform.
Renaming a Database in Mysql
What's funny is that you make the same mistake you are mocking: assuming that Go players are so close to perfect that they could never make a mistake.
Its a movie! Its all about the story! Galactica and Star Wars have "fighter planes" purely so that the narrative can have "Heros" and "Loose Cannons". Could Kara Thrace have had her mysterious journey if she was in a 100-crew missile cruiser? Could farm-boy-done-good take out the death star in even the millenium falcon - and would we care? And then there is Galactica itself: the lost ship, the fortress in the wilderness. I'm sure my literary friends could tell me the specific term for the narrative role it plays the way I can tell you which Design Pattern accept(foo) belongs too. I saw Ron Moore's GDC talk and nothing in Galactica was by accident except Boomer being a Cylon.
Are there any good descriptions for how Persona works? I can find plenty of developer documentation on this site, but I can't seem to find a good, concise description of what parties are involved and what the protocol is, etc.

(Maybe I'm not looking deep enough? Anyway, thanks in advance.)
Well, I think the biggest argument against Arch or Gentoo (even though I like both and actually am using Arch right now) is that you can't/don't want to use it for a production server.

Frugalware may do a better job for that (if you love Arch Linux, but don't want to use it on production you should give it a look!), but still isn't Slackware.
Maybe catching up to WSGI and Rack, but that's about it.
pylint is probably the most commonly used:

http://www.logilab.org/857
> Rootkits, lawsuits and me-too products seems to be what they specialize in nowadays.

Didn't wait for that. The issue with Sony is that they're historically utterly incompetent on the software side of things. I swore off Sony products after getting a NetMD. The software for that POS was so absolutely terrible it makes iTunes look good, snappy and user-friendly.
Divvy has seems pretty dead to me, I haven't seen any new features in months? maybe years? It works well, but after seeing the new crop of window managers, it's too simple. The configuration isn't the most flexible and not easy to sync configurations between computers.
Great response.

I'd add that it's worth Googling for "piercing corporate veil LLC", as well.