skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OTOH, the greatest asset you have competing against the company that's going to put you out of business is your legacy code.

Every line in your legacy code is there for a reason. Sometimes the reasons are bad, but often they're there because of some very valuable lesson you learned from a customer, a mistake you made that your competitor is also likely to eventually make. Throwing away your legacy code means that it's likely you'll make the same mistake again.
How the co-creator of MySQL came to love databases
A Customer Is Your MVP – A Talk on Making Products that Sell
...or it's rebranding to match the name of its parent company, Japanese-based Rakuten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten
I was at a small Sichuan mountain village wedding a few weeks back. Several "exotic" dancers and the village drag queen and a magician. All locals. Great performances. The most fun I've had at a Chinese weeding ;)
Good isn't good enough
This attitude strikes me as wasteful. By all means, if a system has shortcomings, and you can afford to build a new system with fewer shortcomings, and migrate to it, then do that; but by itself, "it's old" is not a reason to rewrite something.
Good point. Designers are always giving fre psd's away. Maybe they could do the same, but for Linux UI components.

But you know, it might be that they work primarily in photoshop, which is runs on Windows / Mac OS??
i think its a lot more to do with how you're told to do something. Additionally - this effect strongly varies from person to person - you might be better off titling your post "the pysch....impacts MY productivity". Working in the corporate world and on startups I've seen 3 types of people -all equally productive (mind you im not talking about how happy they were or how much fun they had - but since your point is productivity lets stick with that).

Type 1 - entrpreneurs/intrapreneurs - these were the kinds who figured out their way within organizations to make their own niche - do whatever they truly felt like doing - and people typically let them do their own thing - because they delivered results. Of course they had to play the occasional bit of politics - but that is a part of any job or field, and you're never working in a vaccuum where this wont affect you.

Type 2 - the 50/50s - these are people who can overtime become Type 1s - they like beign given some goal or target and a genera framework / project to work on - and then take it from there - checking in every now and then but mostly figuring their way out - and being allowed to figure their way out.

Type 3 - the TaskRabbits - these are the folks that make up i'd say 60-80% of a company (depending on the industry and company culture it can vary.. a creative agency might have a lower percentage as opposed to say ..a bank). They work with strictly defined rules, have goals and targets defined for them. They usually (atleast the non mediocre ones) try had to get their goals met within that time frame - and wouldn´t be able to perform as well without having all that structure set up for them.
I wouldn't call them crazy. Rakuten is a Japanese brand that bought Buy.com. I believe they're just consolidating. Is it an unmemorable, weird name? Yeah, but it isn't like someone sat in a room and said "You know what I think? I think Rakuten would sound much better than Buy."

Bad ideas and poor execution happen a lot, but this was a planned move that has some meaning behind it.
I use a 5 bay Synology Nas with three 3TB drives in it atm in what Synology call Synology Hybrid Raid (easy auto set up/1 disk fault tolerance).

The software on it is highly configurable and you can install third party addon's, plus I use the web station as a local web server which makes it easy to test mobile dev.

It's a little expensive but generally considered to be the best in that range (in terms of hardware/software/storage). The 1GB Ram is enough to stream to multiple devices, even if the server's doing some other stuff on it's own (downloading content or whatever).

If that's overkill in terms of space or price Synology make smaller ones with the same software.

Review on Small Net Builder: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31774-synolog...

DSM Info: http://www.synology.com/dsm/dsm_for_home.php?lang=us
You're confusing innovation in features with innovation in basic architecture.

But the premise of the article doesn't even require innovation in features. It just requires changes that change behavior that sites then depend on and that you have to reverse-engineer.

And reverse-engineering is very time-consuming and slow. If all possible competitors have to reverse-engineer to become viable, that puts in place a huge barrier to competition.

Note that WebKit already behaves this way in various cases: their transitions draft proposal was very vague (as in, what they described could have been figured out in a few afternoons by someone playing with the functionality and their developer docs) and then the editors (Apple employees, note) did nothing to improve it for a few years, forcing everyone else to reverse-engineer WebKit to implement this "standard"...
why cant "just pay the bills" be meaningful? - for more than 70% of the world thats very meaningful. Its also flawed to assume that everyone on HN is someone sitting in the valley with a bunch of job offers.
ah, there you go: "while the company’s EBIT margin (a measure of profitability) improved from -12 per cent of sales in 2011 to -8 per cent in 2012, operating losses as a lump sum still increased from €60m in 2011 to €90m last year"
Show HN: a simple way to track customers and sales for individuals
Legacy code will also tend to have had many of its bugs ironed out, since it's been in operation for so long. New code will have a whole new set of coding errors hidden in it, and you'll have to go through that ironing-out all over again.
I made a new years resolution to build a side project that generates income. I have no problems of coming up with ideas, but I could improve my "launch-percentage".

Usually, when I get an idea, I start building it right away. When my mana runs out (typically in few days), I lose the interest and forget my new project.

This time I am trying to focus on things that helps me finishing and launching the project:
- Keep the scope of the project as minimal as possible
- Test one hypothesis at a time, if it validates, build another feature and launch it
- Make sure to launch the project before the mana runs out

When the year is over, I'm hoping that I have a side project that generates income, I'm a better write and I have hands-on experience on internet marketing.

You can read more from my blog: http://www.rebelcode.net/2013/01/01/in-2013-i-will-build-a-s...
Beautiful: stroll.js - CSS3 scroll effects.
Let's picture a similar situation 20 years ago: I own the domain "books.com" but my company is called Amazon. I own the domain "movies.com", but I choose to name my company Netflix.

Believe me, we'll get used to the Rakuten name.
Check out http://www.jobfluent.com/ as well :)
The problem with Buy.com is that "buy" is a word (or call to action), not a brand. I've probably seen the buy.com URL around here or there, but the word is so pedestrian, it doesn't ring any bells.
"Buy" would be "Bai" in Japanese. It depends entirely on the audience and the brand.

Maybe it'll be marketed as Rakuten in Japan and Buy.com in the West?
For me, Angular displays the right balance beween complexity and ease of use. After getting past some of barriers (the transclusion docs could be more easily explained, specially with some images), I find it pretty easy to use, and it's great for complex apps. Never used Ember though, after using Spring for so long, dependency injection comes naturally.

Some people mention Backbone, I think it's great if you're very comfortable with JS, otherwise you'll end up replicating bits of other frameworks by hand or using lots of 3rd parties (ex: databinding, validation, complex model interaction, view cleanup).

Anyway, take a few days to get the feel of each and choose according.
Origin Of The Abbreviation I18n For "Internationalization"
Chef/Puppet/Stackscripts/Salt/etc, and develop your own load balancing? Why on earth would you do that instead of just using HAProxy?
Only a creator culture can save us from ourselves
"Why would you not stop and refuel?" Because otherwise I would never have bothered to read the article. As a potential Tesla owner in a cold climate, I want to know these things. I want to know how the car will perform if I abuse it in an emergency, without actually having to abuse it myself as a test.
But "buy.com" is a brand, and extremely valuable both as a brand and as a domain.
I think that wasting money on solved problems is, essentially, bonkers.

Sure, it's nice to have the latest and greatest. But I don't think it gives you magical powers. You still need to do all the other stuff.

That, and the well-known problems with rewriting (the track record is notso hotso) mean that really, the onus for making a case to rewrite is on the rewriters.
Maybe designers do that because it is a much more direct way to get hired or land a contract. Doing design for something like LibreOffice or Gnome has a really long turn-around time and your efforts are somewhat dependent on your teammates. Then, if your design is released, your potential employers/clients need to translate what you just did to how it is relevant to them. OTOH if you just redesign their website, that is a direct solicitation to them.
Perhaps you just worded that sloppily, but why do you consider curing "some disease", like, say, schizophrenia or Alzheimer's, would not be "actually doing" something?
Show HN: peer to peer location sharing
If you are using wsgiref don't forget the patch

__import__('BaseHTTPServer').BaseHTTPRequestHandler.address_string = lambda x:x.client_address[0]
Rakuten also bought Play.com, the UK store selling video games, DVDs and music. Whilst Rakuten is now pushed pretty heavily on the site, the URL is still Play.com and the Play.com branding remains.

Curious as to why they wouldn't/aren't do(ing) the same for Buy.com?
it sounds like this is an interesting article, but on my android this website was barely usable. the feed on the right took up more space than the actual article and the header was huge. maybe it renders better on other phones, but for a site of the size of pando, they really should address a broader base for usability
It's easier for English speakers to remember buy.com than rakuten (or whatever their name is).

It's weird to go to buy.com and see a different name plastered all over the screen.

They have a right to call their business whatever they like, but for God's sake, why throw away a perfectly good brand?
You can't really compare salary without taking into account the cost of living there
I thought I knew enough git, but the other day I was still able to lose my changes...

Suppose I'm in master and already modified a file, and now I notice that it would be better to work on a devel branch with those changes, so I could pull upstream changes from master and merge locally. I think I did something like this:

git stash
git checkout -b devel
git stash apply
git add file.txt
git commit -m "XYZ new changes"

git checkout master
git fetch
git rebase origin/master (to avoid an empty merge, changes
upstream were in independent files)
git merge devel (to get commit "XYZ")

In the end of this, I had lost my changes in file.txt.
Finding the Best Time to Blog: An Experiment
>I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free.

Simple.

Because if they did assist with FOSS projects much of the time they would be dealing with developers who (a) think they know what users want better (b) have no respect for designers and (c) believe obscure feature X is more important than UI.

Remember this is the same group of people e.g. on Slashdot/Reddit who think the iPad is an overpriced toy and think people are sheep for buying it.
It's them same with Samwers clone of Square, Payleven. They send you a cardreader immediatly but before you can use it you have to sign 5 different paperworks and wait for approvals. Just sad and the reason iZettle is still the only Square-a-like in Europe.
The Programmers Idea Book
Another side of the same approach is just starting to hack bits out in to their own services. Really the key point that you identified is trying to find the internal interfaces of the code, and fracturing the monolithic codebase along those lines.
I think this is a crucial point we all overlook in our rush to throw out the legacy code and 'do it right this time.' We're thinking, 'but we'll have unit tests so we'll catch the bugs.' But in reality, some get through and they tend to be a real pain in the ass.

I know this probably means that I don't unit test right. It also obviously means I don't code right, because I have bugs. The point is, these are facts of (real) life, and to be successful you have to manage the reality. Often this means that the best course of action is to stick with the legacy code.
> the company that's going to put you out of business won't have any legacy code

Code becomes legacy pretty quickly, in my experience... Architectural decisions that were obvious before you had real customers rarely stand up to real usage.

The company that's "going to put you out of business" also doesn't currently have any working or revenue-generating code, and are unlikely to immediately understand the architectural challenges...

> I think you need to have a really good excuse not to completely rebuild your product from scratch every now and again

It pretty much just doesn't work in the real world; how's that for an excuse? As other people have said, you need to scaffold interfaces, and rebuild small parts. Any company that isn't continually reinvesting in making their codebase better will accumulate technical debt pretty fast; but the throw it away and start from scratch approach rarely works on big systems.
My 2 week old iPhone 5 had the same problem - home button never worked properly from day one. As this was my first Apple purchase it took me that long to validate that this wasn't normal behaviour after comparing with other iPhone 5s. At the Apple store they just replaced it without any questions.
Rakuten seems to be buying many online retailers recently. They've also bought Priceminister in France. Renaming buy.com, and maybe later Priceminister, might be part of an effort to unify all these online retailers under one recognizable name.
"...Knowing how to actually write code will someday be as rare as those who know how to use a slide rule now..." Well, maybe then they will start paying actual real money.
Personally, I don't think "rakuten" is any wierder than Toyota or Nissan. It might take some time getting used to but rakuten is a name that has branding potential, what is "buy"? For a similar analogy, try imagining a company that sells computers calling itself computer. I think we'd all agree a rebranding would probably be in order.
I shop online all the time, I've never been to buy.com
Help me start with BitCoin. Send donations 1Fh1dxCL5NpuhMu6c7Zpm1TJ1WGoYJYvxb
I looked in to Pay Mill a few months ago when I was setting up my website. Being in the UK we couldn't use stripe and so it initialy looked like a good option but then when you dig into it you find its no different than a merchant account. Ultimately I went with paypal as I could set it up quickly and then move to another option later on when the idea is validated.

We are now raman profitable and so when stripe launches over here i will probably move to it but if it doesn't we are now in a position with trading history to get a merchant account.
Swapping a broken device for one that's already been repaired is far more efficient, isn't it? Except for some cosmetic wear and tear, they're all identical.

You don't have to wait, they don't have to worry about giving you back "your" specific device after it's been repaired. They can just wipe the data and put it on the pile of refurbs.
Judging by the length, article author apparently gets paid by the word.
Ölümcül Geçmiş No Tell Motel izle - Türkçe Dublaj
I still don't quite understand how you manage version control with entire system images.

You just uniquely name the environment, for example with a version number, and/or use a snapshot-capable datastore.

I guess you could just write a changelog, but that requires a large amount of self-discipline to ensure that the changelog exactly matches system state.

Definitely don't do this.

Let's say you discover some minor instability, and discover that it was introduced 8 months ago, but the changelog for that image was completely innocuous. Can you do anything other than throw out all 8 months' worth of images and try to work your way back to present via the changelogs?

If you write a test that can trigger the issue and replay the test against past images ("regression test") then you will identify exactly where the issue was introduced. The key thing is: don't have manually configured what-not in production. Keep it versioned, keep it solid, keep it known.

Puppet-like systems have the same issue...

Exactly. This is my point. They don't really deliver on the promise of decent automation, because they are inherently patchwork/partial-scope in approach.
The queen is just a humorous tradition in any modern civilized country. Your argument is quite stupid.
I agree it's disgusting. So, the best way to deal with it is very simple: utterly ignore them. Those patents aren't worth the paper they are printed on, prior art abounds. The hobbyist community won't care about those patents at all, but any other commercial entity they plan to sue will wipe them out with their portfolio, CNC stuff is a patent minefield. Okuma, Heidenhain, Bosch, Deckel and tons of other very large, very wealthy and established companies will not be impressed at all and have enough patents of their own that they could probably stop them from going to market at all if they desired to do so.

Additive or subtractive, it's a detail and lots of these companies are active in both fields.

I really don't see the problem. Simply ignore them, beat them on price and features and they'll go to their deserved end, which is to cease to exist.

And if you want to speed it up then you should sue them for taking what's yours (if you were a contributor to some bit that made it into their commercial offering), a lawsuit testing the GPL in that fashion is overdue anyway. Probably they'll fold before it goes to trial, as they always do.
Help me start with Paypal - send donations to alex.bosworth at gmail.com

This is the same thing - bitcoin is money. If you want some to mess around with though, you can buy some http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/
You wouldn't call it "just paying the bills" if it was meaningful. Meaningful in this context means something that you would do for free. At least, that's how I define it.

That's not to say that 70% of the world's struggle is meaningless. It means survival.

Also, you don't have to be in the valley to wish for meaningful work. I'm not and I do look for work that I enjoy doing.
We see 2:1 male to female ratios all the time, and no one bats an eye. But when it gets flipped we need to figure out why?

Simple probability. A 2:1 male environment is completely reasonable in a gender neutral process, whereas a 2:1 female environment is exceedingly unlikely to occur under such a process.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5233153
I loaded a self-written novel (about 260 pages) into LibreOffice and went to Print Preview and it hung.

Loaded it into Office and it worked fine.
Ditto. I always figured buy.com a site that snapped up the domain in the early days and either was just a shopping portal, reseller or affiliate site.

Maybe this was due to poor marketing on Buy.com's part?
I feel your pain.

I don't know if this helps but if you really require card processing facilities you should consider other merchant banks as opposed to the high-street ones which are willing to take more risks. I have had a few successful applications for organisations with no trading history on FDMS (First Data Merchant Services).

GoCardless seems like a great option but I just don't see it working on B2C websites. On the other hand, B2B seems very feasible.
This is a fantastic idea! Just like chess puzzles, only for git. Would be a great deliberate practice tool.
Thanks for answering. In my case, I'm looking more at the Hetzner VPS offering, because it's in the same price range and has better specs than the equivalent Linode.
This is why it is important for the for the founders of a successful open source project to register the trade mark. See the current issue with the python trademark in Europe for another example. It may be possible to still register the trade mark if you can supply evidence that the open source project came first and it could confuse your customers, again see what the python guys are doing in there case.
I personally would rather just roll out my own (simple) subscription system using Paypal or something, because the 30% cut that Google takes on Play Store purchases is a bit too much.
What Would Happen if a Huge Asteroid Hit Your City
Given that FOSS developers are, in some sense, their own users, (a) and (c) are not always unjustified.

For my personal use case for LibreOffice specifically, I don't give a damn how ugly it is, and I'm willing to have some patience if it's a bit slow, but crashing or hanging on a 160-page document is unacceptable. So adding a designer to the project wouldn't add any value to me.
Something to think about - Rakuten means optimism in Japan, but it's an opportunity to build a brand everywhere else. The Rakuten brand is a "empty glass" which means the company can brand itself in any way it wants.
Maybe they’re rewriting the site infrastructure in Rakudo at the same time…
When that day will come many people will not have jobs xD just saying..
Amazon used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control in Germany
>The company that built Draw Something? (I forget their name).

OMGPOP
RESTful web services for the mentally unstable
Maybe, maybe not. I've never been presented with any evidence that supports that view. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I've got no reason to believe you're right. And vice versa.
I get the same feeling; probably just because 'buy' is just a too generic term.
Apples (VCs) to oranges (seed investors / incubators).

For a VC 2 out of 400 would be spectacularly bad, for an incubator to have 2 winners of that magnitude is actually really good and there are a few others that have already exited (Heroku, YC08 iirc for instance) that increase that even further.

Add in stripe and the current crop of 'hot' stuff and YC is looking pretty good.

But you still can't compare it with a VC, it's a different model, different risk/reward.
I'm still annoyed that years later there's no open source Gmail clone (threaded Web mail client).
It certainly is doable

In my case there were added difficulties:

- The project ran on embedded hw (hence it does not have a user interface, only interface is with hw devices)

- There was a lack of problem domain understanding, so it's not - like in LibreOffice case, for example, 'this is a list of paragraphs', but 'we don't know what's this piece of data' because if refers to a specific domain of knowledge

Not to mention unit tests (both writing and running) are more painful in C++ than in Python for example
The rebranding of 'Farnell' to 'element 14' was far dumber than this.
I think I'd rephrase that to:

The company that's going to put you out of business is using an early version of their own legacy code.

It's not always obvious when you should attempt a rewrite from scratch. Having done a few refactorings, I've noticed one desirable trait in good code bases: If you can implement new logic easily in a few lines of code, it's probably a good design. But if you need to get out the surgeon's knife and write tons of new code every time you want to implement new logic, it might be fundamentally flawed enough to warrant a complete rewrite. A good design is adaptable and will allow you to be resilient against newcomers.