skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>I've had many real-life situations where I successfully chain-deleted thousands of lines of legacy code and replaced it with some sub-100-line method that simply worked. All that without understanding how legacy code works. You're wondering what's the secret here? Instead of trying to deduce the undocumented logic behind legacy code I gathered current requirements and implemented them in the simplest way possible.

Except one of the main reasons legacy code tends to be so long is that it deals with tens/hundreds of small edge-cases or bugs that your "sub-100-line method" simply cannot account for. So what you are doing when you re-write the legacy code without even understanding what it does is regressing the product by several years in terms of maturity and stability. Your new code will face the same problems the legacy code did, except it will break. And then you will have to start adding to it...

Now, it is absolutely possible that those edge-cases and bugs that the legacy code dealt with are no longer an issue: maybe they were added back in Windows XP days, and your users no longer use Windows XP, or something. In that case, yes, go ahead and rewrite it. But you need to think about and understand what it does first, and why.
Whoops, thanks! I just added that. I assume eventually the mods will switch this to the NYT headline, but I didn't think it conveyed much information.
Ah, I've been trying to do just this.

Version 1: http://github.com/akkartik/wart

Version 2 (in progress): https://github.com/akkartik/wart/tree/master/literate
If you're using other AWS services, then this makes a lot of sense. It saves you the hassle of setting multiple redis nodes on EC2 and the (admittedly low) maintenance.

I think it's a good move on their part.
Love the views. Waiting for more!!
No, c'mon, I won't login with twitter or facebook.
Yes, even grass-root is not a very translatable word.
I gave my child a macbook without parental control in age of 3.
It's Tinder (gotinder.com) for the job search!
That was totally the take away for me. If a fake is this good, there's no way I'm going to be able to spot it without a LOT of domain knowledge.
So the engineers pushing forward the video connection standard should wait for a giant monopoly to change its terrible ways before they make any progress? Come on.
I can't tell if you're joking - it's meant precisely for people whose "data center" IS AWS, for exactly the reason you gave.
And the position of the sun relative to the building is also a simple formula based on time of year. Given that this is the country that gave us freakin' Stone Henge you have to expect that someone remembered that there is a formula to predict exactly where the sun will be relative to a spot in England every day of the year. The clever ones actually used that to tell them what day it was since they couldn't be bothered to invent the wrist watch.
Make sure to resubmit with [FIXED] so I can give it a shot.
> I'm willing to bet that the best security mechanisms you have at your disposal have been cracked, breached or otherwise compromised. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that they hold secret mathematical breakthroughs that render half or all of the encryption algorithms the public are aware of useless.

Paradoxically, if that is true, I think it could work to strengthen the average American's privacy.

If the NSA has made significant advances in cryptography that allows them to read pretty much anything, the focus will undoubtedly be placed on "national interests" - intercepting and reading high-level communications from friends and enemies alike.

More importantly, though, the NSA would want to ensure everyone keeps using the encryption they know how to break. If a twenty-year old systems administrator discovered and leaked that the NSA can break AES, the NSA would lose that significant advantage.

So, at least in the short term, the NSA being able to read everything would likely mean they read nothing of mine!
Yeah, I see how it's good PR for Uber. I'm just not sure that it does anything to tackle the actual issue of NFL players driving drunk, endangering themselves and others.
It's funny how all these things that have been in Android forever and were criticized for their battery draining powers are suddenly the latest and greatest reason why Apple phones are the best. It's just the way it goes, remember 7 inch tablets? Worst thing ever and everyone lists reasons why. Until Apple made one. Marketshare means everything! Until Android stole that, now market share is a false signal. King of profits! Until Samsung took that too. Keep moving that goal post.
This is an interesting article because though the rewrite killed Netscape, the rewrite became Firefox, possibly the most popular browser in the world.

It became that way because developers were able to run laps round Microsoft (who clung to an old, bad codebase).

And because it was a redesign not just a rewrite, and the redesign redefined what browsers did.

Firefox, as we use it today is a rewrite of that rewrite, with god forbid far less features than the original!

I wonder, with a little more money behind Netscape, and without anti-competitive MS browser bundling, would Joel's piece look so correct in hindsight?
It sounds good, but players have already had a program in place to help them. This app might help a little, but I don't think it will solve the problem.

And they can afford taxis and car services.

Football players have this "I can do anything" mentality that gets them into trouble. This mind set also makes them good football players.

The problem is the tension that exists between the employee and the employer. The employer doesn't want the employee to know what they do. The employer will use any information he can to gain an upper hand.

Players hide injuries, then pay cash to non-team doctors.

They will continue to hide their partying activities as well.
Thirty Days of Honesty
I would guess that a "snug receiver with multiple HDMI inputs and outputs" would also be snug in the model produced after the connector upgrade.

It sounds like the receiver engineers didn't leave enough room between their connectors - regardless of the size.
Not necessarily.

You can replace parts of an application with webservice calls, for instance.
> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection.

> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.

> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.

While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.

1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?

2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?
>The current format suggests that they would have to also use your site and select ME as someone THEY want to be interviewed by which makes no sense.

How does this make no sense? I think the idea is to save both parties from having to express premature rejection to the other.
Sounds you are being hit with hard end of the OO code stick or Java.
Sadly, federated identity has been co-opted in service of "tracking" by the centralized silos mentioned.
I don't think there's nearly enough under the hood. This site needs more code.
So they're not posting anything about her online, but she's got more social-media accounts than the average American? How does proclaiming her existence to the digital world's user lists protect her from "facial recognition, Facebook profiling, and corporate data mining"? Like any human - when she reaches the age where these things become relevant, she'll either use the ones these companies have known about for a decade, or she'll create her own account that Mom & Dad aren't monitoring.
Meet The Team That Picked Group Lunches Over $3,000 Bonuses
This is very cool! I could have really used this during my time at university. :)

How about as a next step adding revisions to formulas and making them commentable, working sort of like gists?
Does this scarf make me look sexy? and other questions out of context (podcast)
Why not just test if High Speed Sync works? That seems to be the indicator that initiated looking for these other differences.
It's mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I believe after you posted. Basically, the apps don't control when they can do their background fetching. It's up to the OS, which uses your usage patterns to determine how often backgrounding can occur. So, beyond the setting where you can disable this functionality, the intent is you use your apps like normal and it adjusts itself to your patterns.
Apple to Block Phone Features at ‘Sensitive Events’
Good on them for doing this, its missing one substantial configuration option though: Redis Authentication. Security groups are great, but it would be comforting to have some challenge when hitting cache.
Was about to say it deploys to Linux but I assume the editor doesn't run on Linux. Having a couple of decades alternating between serious game development and just dabbling I can't stress enough how big the delta between Unity and competing products is. A great indicator is all of the new kickstarter projects from big names in the business switching to Unity. Richard Garriot, The new wasteland game, etc...
We have no way of knowing that.

But I can imagine we'd living in a very different environment, had Netscape succeeded.
Well unless you roll with a Micro instance (213mb of RAM and dismal performance), the price for a Small on-demand instance (1.3GB memory) is ~$54 per month. You save quite a bit by going with a reserved instance, where you pay about $70 up-front but then your monthly instance price is almost halved, coming in at around $32 per/mo.

Either way, it's going to be more cost-effective at a lower level to go with something like Redis-to-go, Openredis, etc... if you need something simple.

Long story short, if you're on Heroku and (like me) were thinking/hoping that this might be a nice alternative to the various add-ons available ... I don't think that the juice is worth the squeeze. One, you have to administer and maintain things yourself (which is trivial for something like this, so not a big deal) but the pricing doesn't line up. The Redis providers leading the market today are able to do so because they provision the heavy-hitter EC2 nodes and then chop them up.

It's important to note though you can get a free micro instance for a year on the free usage tier. Micro's are like the section-8 housing of the server world, but free is free and beggars can't be choosers ;)
You forget a few things. On Android can't the app just run forever and decide on its own how often to poll the servers? This is a different thing. The OS decides when to schedule things if the app supports it.

Also battery life has improved a great deal since the first Android or iPhone device came out. What may have been true years ago isn't necessarily an issue anymore.
5 P's of Growth - The Process of a Growth Hacker
Little Errors That Can Cause Big Disasters
Trashing the ‘i’ for ‘us’
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7157/asus-pq321q-ultrahd-4k-mo...
I would like to respectfully disagree. Calling a cab is a nightmare, at least in San Francisco, prior to Uber. You were put on hold for several minutes, you had to explain where you were, the driver could not show up or show up extremely late.

When you are inebriated, these steps can easily be considered overwhelming and lead to many people not wanting to go through the process.

In contrast to open phone > tap uber app > tap call cab. The difference is night and day, and I think that's why the program will succeed now when it has failed before.
I was interviewing candidates for an entry level web developer position.

I asked the candidates to describe one difference between a GET and POST in HTTP. Only about 20% of the candidates could respond with anything that made sense. It's a great quick filter for backend heavy development.
A New Take on Startup Incubation
N-gram Analysis of the New York Times Weddings Section
Anonymity probably matters more to someone who is likely to be recognized by a cab driver. Especially one with a video camera in the car (most major metropolitan cab companies).

Uber, on the other hand, make a point of distinguishing their drivers from the rabble. If they can establish trust with the athletes that whether or not they are recognized, they will never be talked about, recorded, etc. it may help with the adoption of the service.

Plus, Uber have also positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand. Hailing or calling for a cab may feel like it is below the station of a professional athlete. Uber have positioned themselves to be a sort of modern, distributed chauffeur.

They are all small things, but both as a PR win, and a potential tool in the box of the NFL who are desperate to get a handle on the off-field bad-choices of their athletes, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.
Wealth, Not Robots, Makes Us Lazy
It definitely does not target to be a mainstream tool, but there are certain cases where you may be reserved to act. In addition to personality and cultural attitudes, your current position and your relationships with the people with whom you are interested may hinder you to make the first move. You may simply want to keep it discreet.

Some example situations; you left your previous position and you want to come back, but are reserved to make the first move back to your previous boss. You are a well known programmer, and you are well connected to people, but you are reserved to make the first move. You want to hire your service provider, you want to hire your client, you want to hire a competitor etc. I accept that in majority of the cases employers and employers don't hesitate to make the first move, but I just try to contemplate some cases where Jobrupt may work. Finally this is just an experimental idea, and if it works for some people in some communities it will be worth the effort.
The theory is that the OS will arbitrate. In practice, well, we'll see how well that works.
Sure, except for minor details like, you know, Apple still making more money on phones than Samsung, the mini having around 40% greater screen area than the 7" Android tablets, Apple never having actually had or claimed to have a market share lead in smartphones. Plus the fact we don't know what the effects of iOS7 will be on battery life yet. You know, minor little niggles like that.
To play devil's advocate, it's not the call-and-ride part that's difficult - it's the next day that's an actual hassle.

Depending on where you live, you need to call a cab to take you back, and depending on where that is, the cab may show up late, if at all. Then you have to hope that you car is still where you left it, and not towed or booted.

None of this excuses drunk driving, of course. The solution is to make plans, instead of just driving to the bar and assuming you'll figure out what to do later.
It isn't just that people depend on the features, you frequently lose track of which features were created for who, and for what reason. Sometimes it's just easier to keep things in motion, rather than start over and wait for someone to scream. (A case can be made for both)
You use a controlled amount, and you use less glue.

This saves cost, but is also better engineering. The glue has data sheets and tests and you know you're meeting the engineering requirements. Some glues 'dissolve' / 'melt' the surfaces to be bonded, and you only need a thin smear to get a good bond.

You need to control stuff like glue or conformal coating over a run of X thousand units, otherwise you find people can use crates of the stuff.

Having said all that: Maybe it's just what was drawn on the CAD drawings, and it's been followed faithfully by workers ever since, and there's no actual reason for it other than the CAD worker chose something that looked nice and not confusing.
good work !
>> I'm seeing a market here. Smartphones that emit a cloud of weed/acid to enhance the experience.

I'm pretty sure you won the best comment game today.
Useful and simple. Congrats!
What a great idea!

I haven't done the 'sign up for everything' piece, but my wife and I have made a conscious effort to minimize what we post about our daughter online. We don't refer to her by name, we don't tag her in photos, we minimize photos of her. Now, we both have active online lives, so we talk about her online, but hopefully in a respectful manner. Sometimes it is really hard to resist sharing that cute photo, simply because sites, FB in particular, make sharing so easy, but I think we've found a path that works for us.

I think a lot of parents, especially less privacy aware and/or tech savvy ones, are not aware of what they are doing for their kids when they post photos online. (Just as few non technical folks I have talked to know that the links at the top of Google search results are ads.) They just want to share information (mostly pictures) with friends and families.
8 bits isn't "current", if you want "current" you get 10 bit panels. If you want "better than bargain basement" you get 10 bit panels.

At least where I live one of the differences between the TVs that CostCo sells and the ones that others sell are 8 bit (CostCo) vs 10 bit (others) panels.
Firefox OS Reactions
It would probably be best if the other-driver also had a mask that mimicked the likeness of the player's face.
People talk about stealth candidates in politics. I suspect that phrase will take on new meaning in the future. We'll have candidates whose histories will have been protected from public knowledge in this way.
haha. No it just struck me as strange that someone clearly not constrained by finances would chose to read on an iphone.
Android's New Secret Weapon
There's a service in my city that does this for 30 or 40 bucks depending on how far they have to go. Minus the hangover pills, anyway. I always wonder what the insurance situation is, but however un(der)-insured they may be, it has to be better than the alternative.
Public Data Extortion scheme using Paypal still live
Hello,

I recently had a traffic ticket, nothing too serious just license plate issues. However I "uncovered" a huge extortion scheme going on and supported by Paypal. This website is crawling public data (such as court records, traffic tickets) and then gets it index by Google. The idea is to publicly shame people and extort money to remove the data from the website. The surprising part is that it processes payments with Paypal ...

It's obviously a scam that's been going on for a while and already brought to Paypal's attention on their forum: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Payments-Archive/Illegal-Website-using-Paypal/td-p/649217

The person behind it is running several other extortion websites, so I guess it is somehow a profitable business.

Paypal is usually over cautious (to say the least) to disable/freeze legit accounts but this one is still up and running.

I understand that the data is public so you can probably crawl it (need to check some robots.txt before confirming it) but using that to extort money is probably not that legal.

Anyway this is my discovery of the day.
+1
Great Work OP!!!
How so? You can know all the state you want, but iOS is still going to display that one static image. If the user is returning from background into a photo gallery, it's still going to show your default image. If the user is opening the app directly into a conversation, it's still going to show your default image.

I don't see how backgrounding solves any of this.
Hmm, this doesn't work in Chrome on your https page, because you load JavaScript (MathJax) with http and Chrome refuses to do that...
> favorite frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal

Cough

> instead of spending between 30 minutes to 12 hours on it like you are doing right now

I'd say, half an hour is awfully a lot for even for a manual provisioning with `apt-get install wordpress` or `tar xvzf wordpress*.tar`.
I've never tried Plan9. Doing searches over deep source code hierarchies has been my most recent experience with the inefficiency of the directory tree (nevermind the inefficiency of overly-complex source code). Really, there's no fundamental reason why `find /usr -name foo` has to take all day. While installing software, also, I was struck by how long it took, while it was apparently updating all the filesystem metadata. For the problem of long installs, I had a brainstorm: what if userspace could hand the filesystem an entire archive in a single transaction, and let the filesystem handle materializing it into a directory tree at its leisure? Just give the filesystem a tarball, rather than the application having to piece together the subtree step by tiny step? It would certainly make it more ACID, and it's not like tarfiles are bleeding-edge technology. Maybe that's a good project for someone who wants to hack filesystems.
Just to add some context, the author also wrote a quantified self article about documenting every thing her daughter did [1] (time, food taken, diaper wetness, color of urine, thickness of poop, sleep habits, etc). These are not your standard parents.

1: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...
I know I don't have the expertise to argue with Joel Spolsky about software engineering, and while I agree that rewriting from scratch is a huge strategic mistake, it is hardly the worst.

Have any of you ever worked for a large engineering firm with a sizable operating budget? There are many "strategic" errors that happen on the daily basis in those kind of shops that range from software stack choices to engineering process drowned in bureaucracy. Rewriting code is hardly the worst.

Also, don't assume that even though rewriting code is bad for business, it's bad overall.

You iterate, and learn from mistakes you made that were caused by the lack of experience at the time previous code was written.

You de-couple components during a rewrite and eliminate unnecessary features, drastically improving maintainability.

You make it easier for other programmers (and yourself) to read the code.

You can alter core platform pieces, make tech stack alterations, and eliminate reliance on legacy components during a rewrite.

The list goes on...
>NFL players are some of the highest-paid in any profession in the world, most of which could rent a limo for the entirety of the night whenever they go out and it wouldn't be a drop in the bucket against their earnings. But, they don't...

Well to be fair, a lot of players in the NFL only make it in the league for a few years if they are lucky and make closer to the league minimum. I would think a lot of software developers stand to make more money over their careers than some of these guys do.

That's to say, not everyone playing in the NFL right now stands to retire with millions of dollars in the bank, especially if they have the mentality of renting a limo everytime they go out.
Octopart Pocket Electronics Reference PCB
All About The Art Of The Heart-Stopping Thank You Notes
Thanks for the concept 'premature rejection'. Especially between some connections, premature rejection becomes a risk no one wants to take.