skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@timr:

> Well, first off, you're just shifting the goalposts and redefining what it means to "program" to suit your needs: it's inconvenient for your argument that there's now software that does what programmers used to do, so you just call those things something else.

Definitely not. I think "website automation" is among the simplest kinds of software automation and historically it has not required a significant amount of programming.

> But it doesn't matter, because you can't run from the core of the argument: it isn't limited to static HTML & CSS. Want web forms, but don't know how to write software or use databases? There's Wufoo, and dozens of others. Want to send email? Mailgun. Mailchimp. Want to accept payments? Paypal, Stripe. Want to show an interactive map with stuff on it? Google maps has you covered. Want to implement search on your website, but don't know anything about search? Swiftype will do that. So will Google site search. Need a sophisticated customer analytics system. OK. That'll be one line of javascript, please.

That's a stretch. Wufoo, PayPal, Stripe, Mailgun, Google Maps, and MailChimp are not going to cover 100% of use cases, nor do they all come free. You're also ignoring that many of these services are alternatives, not integrations (MailChimp, PayPal, Stripe, Mailgun, Google Maps), of older services (AWeber, Authorize, MapQuest) that filled the same function, and a few of them are filling a need that simply didn't exist before prior automation tools (MailChimp for email lists, Stripe for payment processing). It's not a zero-sum game, nor do the same players stay on top throughout time.

> And what's more: it's only a matter of time before someone rolls all of these tools together into a pointy clicky interface that eliminates the token integration work (assuming they haven't already). There's no part of your argument that is safe from the trends that have been driving our industry.

I actually mentioned that in the post: "For every API that wraps around a business process, there's an application yet to be written (and an API around that application in due time)." You seem to think there's some end point, where most software will just be done and most activity automated. I doubt that will ever be the case.

> True, but like I said before: almost nobody needs that. There's always going to be the need for complex software...it's just not clear how many people will be asking for it.

You seem to imply that in the future, most non-complex (i.e. average) software will just either exist or be generated on demand. That seems far-fetched - there are programs orders of magnitudes simpler than "software generators" that routinely need to be adjusted and tuned to produce correct output (as will all the automated APIs in the future).
That's also where the anti-trust lawyers come in. And you should be grateful for them.
Yeah, I have to agree: whether or not you can explain it to me here, that page does not explain to me what I'm buying, why I'd want to buy it, or what I can use it for exactly.

Seems cool, but better marketing is required.

*edit: See: https://tent.io/docs -- that breakdown is actually one of the better explanations of any protocol I've ever seen. Clear, succinct, concise. Really a thing of beauty. Cupcake needs to be explained in the same way. Shoot, I wish everything was explained that well.
Not if you are prepared to buy more RAM (or disk space for swapping) as the program is running.
"© 2013 Tent.is, LLC. Tent is a trademark of Tent.is, LLC."
Protocol name is trademarked.

Good for the protocol or bad?
> Especially OS X and iOS, which are both 0% open source

http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1084/

http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-61/ (and a lot is shared with OS X, such as the xnu kernel)

http://www.cups.org
haven't experienced anything like that/ or maybe some websites use some kind of graphic heavy elements causing the browser (Chrome) to switch back and forth between integrated and dedicated graphic card; causing the sluggish feeling?
I want to learn how to design websites. Where do I begin?
Now that is a damn valuable link!
I intend to look into this sort of thing a lot more for my future travels. Just being able to give the middle finger to luggage overages & have a bed to sleep on instead of an airport bench during a 6 hr layover from midnight till 6am might make all the difference. And I wont have to turn off my ebook reader when the ship starts moving!
Design is aesthetically great but from skimming the copywriting (twice) I have no idea what the product does.
Pure's stylesheets are already minified, the only result of re-minifying them is that the copyright will be removed: http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css
I have no idea what these guys are selling, but their website is beautiful.
Microsoft buys Nokia's Devices and Services Unit
I think "free food" and "all you can eat" has the effect of making many people completely unreasonable in their eating habits.

The cafeteria near the gift shop wasn't too bad. I appreciated the hospitality :)
Their claim is true so long as they don't snatch the key from you when you access the MEGA website.
I think the title is a reference to Dabblers And Blowhards: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Microsoft to acquire Nokia
And this is where it gets all farcical.
Expect bigger orgs
Nokia acquired by Microsoft
I have web, mail (so-so, testing only) and a super early concept of a distributed service monitor for rpi users (pi-up) in use a bit now. I'll reach out, would love to see more and so nice to see something like this out there!
Others have mentioned that you should be more descriptive about your product. I have another suggestion:

The name and design of the site are at odds. Either change the design (show an increasingly full plate of cupcakes?) or the name. A green tree is _not_ what I was anticipating when I clicked on "cupcake.io".
If you live somewhere with a decent internet connection and don't travel often you may have forgotten that lots of places still have slow or unreliable internet connections. Most of those people probably have JavaScript enabled too, but every extra request required to use the site is a point of failure.

I'll be the first to advocate requiring JavaScript when doing so significantly increases value, but for content sites please at least include the main content directly in the HTML.
Can you understand AAVE?
The conventional wisdom I've been given has indeed be using smart cards for key management. Id love to know if this idea is still the best way.
The difference is that a pidgin is a temporary, makeshift language to facilitate communication between peoples who speak different languages natively, whereas a creole is a language that people actually live in. The word "pidgin", though, often gets attached to a temporary patois and remains attached even after the language progresses to a creole. Sometimes a pidgin will hang around even after the conditions that created it have gone away. The South Seas English pidgin hung around as a regional lingua franca for a long time, partly because it was handy even when not dealing with English speakers, and partly because it was a mark of distinction among the people that the English in Australia had exploited. Eventually, though, it did creolize -- Tok Pisin came from that pidgin, but it is not a pidgin any longer.

Hawaaiian Creole English (the academic name for the language) is still generally referred to by its speakers as "Pidgin", even though the progression from pidgin to creole was documented almost as soon as the first plantation immigrants had kids old enough to talk. (Many African creoles are similarly still called "Pidgin" by their speakers, even though the language is not a pidgin per se.) The parents of those children spoke a pidgin; the words were mostly English (with the odd word drawn from Japanese or one of the Philippine languages by concensus), but the grammar was extremely simplified and the structure (head-first, head-final, etc.) tended to reflect the speaker's native tongue.

You can trade and get work done in a pidgin, but you can't communicate with much subtlety, and the kids needed something they could chat in. The kids (all young children are linguistic geniuses compared to us older folk) quickly developed grammar that was consistent and had rules. You could speak the language well, or speak it badly.

It's difficult to make a grammatical error in a pidgin; errors are mostly about vocabulary. A creole, on the other hand, is a real language. You can get all of the words right, but still make mistakes -- mistakes of the sort that the yellow big ball would be in English. Dey bin stay buy in Hawaaiian Creole is "they were buying" ("bin" puts it into the past tense and "stay" makes it continuous/progressive); dey stay bin buy is gibberish (it would mean something like "they are still finished buying").
Tell that 'Even in Russia people's rights are not as easily taken away.' stuff to anyone that is gay, bisexual, or their close friends.
I honestly can't tell whether the last sentence was intended to be a punchline or not. But if so, good job!
I'd assume either LaTeX or Markdown + pandoc.
Well, this makes all the speculation about Elop succeeding Ballmer that much more interesting.
Reverse eBay anyone?
I know a lot of Hacker News readers haven't worked in a truly huge company but this kind of distopia feels me with despair. Big bureaucracies are should destroying.
Gee, we didn't see that coming.
Kickstarter coming to NZ and Australia
So, most of the failures in your first link did not result in loss of human life.

There are cases where I need to have software that absolutely cannot fail--and in those cases, I'm going to have a process, and I'm going to have a test suite, and I'm going to have a justification for all the code that makes it into production.

Some bozo with a software engineering license is not somehow magically going to save my ass in that case, and having those things in place let me hire whoever can write code.

This sounds well and good, but again, most of these disasters are the result of bad systems engineering--one of the most famous software errors, the Therac-25 race condition, actually killed people and could have been prevented with hardware failsafes. Having qualified software engineers is at once both overkill and not enough if you're actually serious.

Just look at all the nice folks in IT with Microsoft certs.
His TED talk explaining motivations and methods, etc., is worth a watch: http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculptur...
These are reasonable reasons to believe alien life exists, right?
JMicron. Figures. You ought to put one of their SSDs in one of those adapters and have a completely broken storage system.
Wow, interesting timing. I wonder if Elop will end up in the running for CEO of MS as part of this.
So Elop was in fact a Trojan Horse?

Wonder what this does to the already strained MSFT vendor relationships. You could now almost guarantee vendors will start to completely dump Windows on ARM and possibly even look for alternatives to Windows x86.
msft is buying "Nokia’s Devices & Services". nokia does other things as well, for example, nokia-siemens-network (NSN) is a significant player in the EPC (enhanced-packet-core) market as well...
> "Will we have 'visual FoxPro' for the web?"

IMO we've already seen the automation of web-CRUD. It used to be a lot of work to set up even a simple CRUD app on the web, now a brain-dead simple CRUD app is 15 minutes in skilled hands.

This differs from Visual FoxPro substantially. Our jobs are being automated, but instead of automating into the hands of an army of lay users, it's automating into the hands of a few skilled practitioners.

The productivity of the modern web programmer is at least an order of magnitude beyond where we were 10 years ago. What used to take a veritable army of CS majors takes 3 people and a fridge full of Red Bull.

Our tools and processes are getting better every day. So far "stuff that needs to be done" seems to be outpacing "increasing efficiency per programmer", but I doubt that will hold true forever.
I so badly wanted this to be an api for ordering cupcakes.

From the description I couldn't tell what service is being sold but I'm fairly sure it isn't an api for cupcakes. Damn.
I don't understand what the all negativity over these changes is about. Has a significant amount of mainstream Android features being incorporated into play been from the ecosystem, rather than Google? If so, I can see how this could result in a worse end-user experience. But if not, how does providing timely updates and a less fragmented ecosystem such a horrible outcome? Feel free to enlighten me if I'm missing something.
I for one am very excited. We've always wanted to do a kickstarter to launch our electricity monitor to a wider market.

Right now we're forced to keep our production and our team small and costs high due to one off sales. Then again, our costs are still lower than industrial competitors but not low enough for casual users.

http://gridspy.com
That was more or less expected...

But I think it is really sad too. I really enjoyed the pre-Microsoft Nokia, I had account in their dev forums, and loved their SDKs, community, Sybian, whatnot.

To me, when they suddenly dropped Sybian while they were still ahead AND expanding in some markets (like Brazil, Russia...) and switched to MS, it was really sad, and I felt like they dropped the ball.

Their Lumia phones DO pull some interesting hardware sometimes, but it was never the same.

Now with MS outright buying them, not only the ball is dropped, but kicked way out of the stadium.
What else is part of Nokia other than their 'Nokia Devices & Services'?
More here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/Sep13/09-02An...
I squash all my stylesheets into one giant .css file to serve rather than a bunch of individual stylesheets. A side-effect of squashing + minifying (which is done every time I generate my website) is that all comments are removed.

You are correct, that notice is not present, but I did not remove it intentionally. To be honest, I didn't read the LICENSE.md of Pure CSS. Shame on me :)

Feel free to file a bug against this at:
https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com
MS has only been good at backwards compatibility when it is in their best interest. Usually because a major partner was the one using an undocumented API with millions of users. In this case it was a person hacking some code together on a product less than a month old with probably only a few thousand people using the app that broke.
Yep, this looks more like Sony buying Ericsson out (and leaving Ericsson with a very nice, profitable core business)
Microsoft is becoming more and more of an integrated software and hardware company than a purely software one. Maybe it's time to change the name to something without the "soft".
I think this has been expected since the Nokia Windows Phone bet. I suspect that this is not unrelated to the Ballmer departure.

I'm not sure it does either company much good. If anything it looks to me like a panic move of two companies who while from te outside they seem huge and successful to many are actually seeing the writing on the wal and have no real plan for the future.

This won't make Microsoft competitive with Apple where it wants to be despite the hopes of Redmond.
Talented beast
~$7 Billion for the device & services business and Nokia's patents. Seems like a good price now, but one you wouldn't have ever predicted before 2007 & the launch of the iPhone.

In 2003 Nokia was worth $245 billion[1]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/the-sad-tale-of-nokias-sink...
Why is this not reported in mainstream media yet?
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out! As far as it being a new distro is concerned, my goal was to make it as simple and powerful as possible. Simplicity means being able to have a clean download and install process, prepackaged for those who might be intimidated by having to install Linux on their own. Also being able to control package versioning and selection is critical for ensuring the dashboard remains as stable as possible. Powerful because it allows for many cool utilities to be installed, configured and ready to go with minimal intervention. For example, one of the existing utilities allows the RPI to cache log writes in RAM, reducing SD card wear which is critical when using the Pi. So there are many ways to dress up a system like arkOS. I acknowledge that making it its own distro is a more thorough solution than it would be otherwise, but at the end of the day I feel it is the one that allows for the best end user experience.
Two reasons.

First: I have 2x30" screens. I don't want to go down.

Second: I can't put multiple HDDs and SSDs in an iMac.

The new system replaces a 24" iMac I bought in 2008. It made it for 5 years; the only upgrades were extra RAM when new and swapping the HDD for an SSD about 2.5 years into its lifetime.

I don't know how long I'll keep this one. Under Australia's small business equipment rules, it's already fully depreciated. So there's no accounting purpose to hold onto it if I don't want to.
> If your statement were true, i'd rip off the volunteer organisations that I _volunteer_ in ... because they don't pay me enough.

Presumably, you volunteer because you aren't interested in getting money from them. In that case, you wouldn't feel that the wages you're getting are unfair and thus wouldn't feel motivated to steal.
Or Microsofthard? I'm not very good at this.
Now I'm hungry for cupcakes. :(
There was certainly a time that people wrote assembler, and even machine code, directly.

People of course still do write assembler directly (but not as much as they used to!), but I don't think many have written machine code directly for a while. (Maybe for some specialized hardware?).

But yeah, it's good to note that this underlying sort of vm code wasn't intended to be written by humans... but I wouldn't say the customers were wrong, exactly, to successfully use it to do high business value things with the product they were locked into, that they couldn't otherwise.

It does make one think how happy the customers would have been if the vendor had provided an actually intended fleible scripting or 'macro' language, and then to think about the aspects of the market that still didn't lead to the vendor doing so.
This is a terrible, terrible website. Not because of the design (which is pretty), but because I have absolutely no clue what you're offering. I know that you want $5/month (for what? Who knows?), that you're expanding the amount of storage that you have, and that "Cupcake is part of the growing Tent ecosystem." Oh....okay....WHAT THE F@#K IS THAT?!

You know those annoying TV commercials where you're left with no idea what product the commercial was trying to advertise? This is the web equivalent. Just horrible.
My greatest deterrent is the OS upgrade. I've been mulling over whether to just buy a Mac, or to build a Hackintosh. I would like the upgrade ability, but I would also prefer to not have to worry about accidentally upgrading my OS and having a few hour downtime every so often.
"From January 2008 to September 2010, Elop worked for Microsoft as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. It was during this time that Microsoft's Business Division released Office 2010.[15]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

Don't believe he'll be the next CEO but certainly a possibility given his previous engagement with MSFT...
- here.com maps

- mobile broadband

- r&d

citation: http://press.nokia.com/2013/09/03/nokia-to-sell-devices-serv...
Arbitrary changes? But then how can we ensure that you are charged the proper price for tethering bandwidth versus phone bandwidth? How can we ensure you are paying the right price to blacklist phone numbers? My goodness what if you remove the default apps from the phone? No, that won't do at all.
To everyone speculating about what this means for the possibility of Elop succeeding Ballmer: this means that Elop is succeeding Ballmer. End of story.

edit: I would love to know why this is getting downvoted.

edit2: fair enough.

Two key facts:

1. Microsoft needs a new CEO.

They have a limited pool to choose from. The following are seemingly reasonable candidates:

- Mark Zuckerberg (never going to happen, he wouldn't agree to it)

- Steve Sinofsky (that ship has sailed)

- Tony Bates (seems like a reasonable choice; relative outsider, smart, has a tech background)

- Another member of Steve's SLT (some would be better than others. I think a sizable portion of the company would revolt if KT was chosen).

- Sheryl Sandberg (doubt it, since I think she's gunning for the US Senate)

- Carly Fiorina (MS's board would never agree to it)

- Stephen Elop (reasonably obvious choice: insider, devices experience, has CEO experience, but there's that pesky Nokia thing)

2. Microsoft has a new, relatively large, soon-to-be-on-the-board activist share holder in ValueAct. ValueAct will have a significant amount of authority over yea'ing or nay'ing acquisitions and over who the new CEO will be.

I can't imagine there's any way Elop would agree to working under someone else again. He also seems like a not-unreasonable choice for CEO of Microsoft, outside of the fact that he hasn't exactly made Nokia back into a rip-roaring success, and doesn't represent much of a change from business as usual at Microsoft.
Easy Way To Download Videos From YouTube Without Any Software Or Plugin
Well, if you've got an experiment that can distinguish MW Interpretation of QM from other interpretations of QM, go ahead and propose it!
The release came out 15 minutes ago. They are simply not that fast.
That kills my hopes for a Nokia Android phone.

Also, Elop seems like the least interesting character to succeed Ballmer. What does he bring to the table? What has he done? Guy looks like a careerist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Career
Any anglo accent should be fine, and perhaps also a light Russian one. (Data points are Patrick Collison and an unnamed Russian founder.) Best? Perhaps Estuary English, but only PG has data to back this up.

"In the debate that surrounded a 1993 article about Estuary English, a London businessman claimed that Received Pronunciation was perceived as unfriendly, so Estuary English was now preferred for commercial purposes."

David Crystal, "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language", p.327

The smartest founder of all should be able to precisely adjust his accent for maximum karma.
You mean "Nosoft"?
How do you get that?

"Learn English well enough that people have no trouble understanding you" is the advice. What isn't actionable about that?