skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you fix it?

I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing on their promises.
Is there any value anymore in using a platform or service like Heroku or MongoHQ? You could get a decent VM for as little as $5, and deployment isn't really as much of a pain anymore. IMO, using all these different services takes more time, is more expensive, and is less flexible.
Glad to hear this. When did geeks start looking like yuppies?
This is what happens when you privatize massive industries without proper processes in place... Most of these people inherited billion dollar businesses when the Soviet Union crumbled.
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They should have opened the bidding process to Elance, they could have found someone to do the back-end for like 5K. ;)

ETA:

> And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem."

For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.
why just those two options? someone singing out loud might just be happy, not mentally ill. It's not a term I use lightly in the UK: see the mental health act.
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I'm very excited about this technology. 2014 or 2015 might be "the year of VR".

Let's hope that the technological challenges in commercialization are dealt with swiftly. Then we will experience a boom in VR games and applications.
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post-hoc rationalisation?
Would this help APOE4 folks as well?
This was one of the reasons I traded in my other smartphones and went with a BlackBerry Q10. Privacy and human rights issues.

Another reason is because it has the best smartphone OS of any I've tried (but I digress).
It is not to long, but as long as the author thought it needed to be. The simple fact you mention, obviously is not thet known to people - that's why they write mails to him. And he wrote this post he can point them to now, so they learn too.

And it also is obviously necessary, because people expect private answers. And the also expect answers to emails. And that's totally ok, because it is ok to be wrong. It only becomes a problem, if they don't accept the answer they get including the link to that article.
I like Stephen Collins' take on it - http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/...
Then it won't match. Your only hope of getting exactly the same binary is to use the same compiler with all the same settings.
XMPP supports signing of messages, and for push notifications OTR is great.
> This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine.

You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.

> Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.

I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway. That's why I said I would be fine with a well designed web app to replace mailing lists.
What did it for me was a TED talk of Gladwell, a good few years ago. It was a talk about marketing and the point he wanted to make was that diversification (multiple lines of the same product) was the answer. I took it for granted at the time - and having read "The Tipping Point" before then, I felt he was the man to follow. But having tried it it in the real world, I realised most of what he was saying just didn't hold.
Given that there was an effective hiatus for the period of the war, and the number of regime changes coming out of the way, most of the diplomats would have been different (though that would be the case even if the UN _was_ a reheated League of Nations).
Virtual Reality headsets have had a long history of not being as successful as they should have been. Anyone remember Virtuality, as in the company?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(gaming)

Their products were amazing for the time but they just did not catch on. I never understood why. (However, I did subsequently learn that their games were not actually stereo vision!) It is a bit like 3D - amazing cinema experiences but the TV sets and cameras just did not find buyers. Actually VRML is in the same category - excellent 3D but with nobody able to see the point of it, develop content for it or share the vision of what it is all about.

Although the original Virtuality products were headline grabbing, they did not generate any demand for the 3D headset market that did exist after they came out. In the early 1990's there were several brands of affordable VR headsets that were at a good technology level for the time (when TV's still had CRTs LCD displays were impressive). I thought everyone would want these things, not just gamers but normal 'soccer moms' (one brand of headset could work like a heads up display so you could do things like the washing up whilst still watching TV).

Based on previous history I expect this new fangled headset to fail. I hope it does not, however, I don't believe that wonder technology or having exceptional games is going to crack the nut this time round. A new killer application is needed.
Not to mention its awful responsiveness.

Just sayin ;)
It's funny. Unix was also meant as an IDE (persistency, logic, machine and user interfaces). It seems they all were trying to reach the same goal in their own way.
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It definitely seems like the amount of money the government spends on projects like this starts out at something outrageous no matter how complex.
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Site just crashed my IE8.

Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.
Also, I'm pretty sure pull requests wind up as notifications for anyone who is watching the repo, not just people listed as contributors.

Even if I'm wrong, comments on pull requests are certainly notifications for everyone who is watching the repo.
Interestingly CGI is a Canadian company...
In my experience this stuff is not nearly as popular with actual nerds/geeks/hackers as it is with MBA/CEO/executives.
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Now that is "1% of 1% of 1%", literally.
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After 20,000 hours you get so good you can read in the bath without getting the pages wet. At that point you are ready to turn pro.
I'll never understand how it's possible that government web sites cost so much, yet usually look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack (at least in my country). I always get the feeling that companies that win the contracts are somehow related to people responsible for the decision, it's like "Hey, it's not our money, so let's milk the budget as much as possible!".
So this is interesting - unable to compete on price, because a low price products are not trusted to be safe, they compete on free products (as a proxy for a discount).

Doesn't this make any agreement to stop offering giveaways akin to price fixing?
It seems to work okay on SCSS files, although I can't say if they are officially supported or not.
The six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.
I love that Go is getting the kind of attention and use that leads to the creation of a framework like this from a relatively well known company. Although I can agree with some other comments here that it doesn't particularly feel native to Go.
They are using A123 (or rather B456 now) cells. You can tell this pretty easily by doing a google image search for "a123 cylindrical cells" and comparing the pictures in the blog post.
"What I find issue with is that people will completely dislike a solution for the brand alone. I've seen this for years when I've suggested/supported Mono in Linux."

To be fair, Mono never delivered on its promises. There must be tonnes of .Net applications that Linux users would have been thrilled to get on their platform. Yet the only ones I have seen running on Mono were the ones that were specifically targeting Mono, not ones that were running on windows and just happened to find their way to Linux.

So, either most .Net applications are crap that no one really cares about or they were tied to the windows platform.
Of course, it could just be blind, unmotivated hatred, but that's not how I've perceived it.
Yes, there are languages that also have these features, the puzzling part is why not all of them do (except those that may have good design reasons not to).
Early mode VR had significant problems with motion sickness.

The technology just was not good enough, even if it was good for the time.
Smalltalk is incredibly cool, but I think one of the main things stunting it is it doesn't have a great free implementation. The only modern smalltalk environment I've used which felt like a serious environment was VisualWorks, and to download that you have to fill out a form and you can only use it under a "personal use" license.

Squeak, despite being impressive, has always felt like a toy. I like Pharo in spirit, but GUI wise, it looks really off. If I can use a weird metaphor to describe it: it's like reading a brilliant PhD thesis written in Comic Sans. That's what the GUI reminds me of. The content is brilliant, but the presentation really leaves you scratching your head. I know it's not fair to judge an entire development environment off its aesthetics, but people are going to do it anyway.
As long as he got some relief, I am happy that he wrote it.

In any case: the fact that people may expect answers does not imply he is rude not giving them.
Maybe ditching one's certs can become the new warrant canary.
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You've obviously not tried an oculus rift. If you had you would not have typed that - I 100% guarantee it.
I never saw UNIX as an IDE, given its command line interface with ed and vi as editors.
It's not scientific, but criticism of this kind of rationalization often applies the term "just-so story", as does the Chabris review that started this discussion. It's borrowed from Kipling, who told fanciful but childishly plausible tales of "How the Camel Got His Hump", etc.
You mean that "static typing allow better tools"? That's a fact ;) It allows IDEs to do smarter autocomplete, better refactorings, more static error checks, etc.
Do you really need to drink eight cups of water a day?
I'm all for it -- good old free market and whatnot, but... how exactly would one pick the most promissing project? Do we have any undisputable metric of project progress (both completeness and quality) yet?

Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
Java is a commonly used language, but not very popular according to a Hacker News poll from 2012:

https://i.imgur.com/toGKy21.jpg

In fact, it's likability percentage is worse than PHP!

I think the issue may stem from the fact that given a choice, few people use Java in their own projects but have no choice at work.
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In my opinion the most important thing you can do for happiness is to have purpose. If you don't have a cause you are willing to dedicate your life to, something that you will give it your all to see realized, then you are not really living, you are just surviving, and when you reflect upon your life you'll feel emptiness.
CGI Federal is run mostly independently to get around the laws preventing foreign companies from bidding on US government contracts. Source: I used to work there.
I think that this plus open source. If anything should be open source it's anything built for governments.

I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
I'd say the propensity towards generating myths is going to accellerate for two reasons: first, migating all that data is not an easy task - we barely have an upgrade path for simple data such as images. As a result a lot of it is going to be lost. Secondly, we have vast amounts of data but don't have corresponding vast amounts of information or knowledge. Our inability to distil truth from all the mountain of data will ensure that myth fills in all the annoying gaps.

Update: the big and important stuff is likely to remain unscathed but as we see in the thread about Malcolm Gladwell we already have instant myth making on a time period of only a few months or years.
I've always honestly thought that blogging should be thought of as a tool of thinking and exploration. It helps you refine your ideas by forcing to make vague things more precise. This improves your thinking, identifies gaps in your knowledge, invites the input of others. To me blogging is absolutely invaluable.

I'm biased though because I was a blogger from the start. Maybe the cost of blogging for me is negligible, while it might be more significant to you. My suggestion is to not to overthink it. Use the blog as a tool to outsource your thinking. Instead of guessing what people will like, write anything and see what happens. Then learn from that.

Just my $0.02.
It is not official part of Android SDK, which only supports Java 6 officially, so not possible to use in our enterprise projects.

Thanks for the tips, though.
Banks do pretty much the same thing with their internships... which, of course, just makes it even bigger argument against this type of modern slavery...
We've got a parable in our country about a lazy bastard, that couldn't do anything out of laziness to the point of dying from hunger. One day a woman offers to help him, to give him shelter and food. To which the lazy man asks in response ... will you soak my bread? (sounds much better in Romanian)

Fuck dude. You're a developer. If you want productivity, make shit happen.
As has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago:

https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov

You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...

So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?
OP asked for a specific point. You wrote: "his remarks about easy versus difficult problem solving relied on a preliminary study that failed replication when applied to a larger experimental group, a fact he omitted from his book". Could a layperson work out which specific point you're referring to and then understand it? Perhaps you'd care to elaborate.
All I can say is I'm so glad they didn't drop the 'e'
How much of America's wealth is that?
It's because they're procured based on verifiable requirements, and yet there's no way to specify a verifiable requirement for user interaction.

Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract.

The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
I wanted to ask the same question. I've read most of Seth's blog and all of pg's essays, what do I read now?
Couldn't this be a failed solar system with this as it's sun that just wasn't big enough to ignite?
I'd be happy if they were actually "wasting it on technology", but this seems like corrupt money, going into the pockets of big corporations for very little and poor work. They probably charge at least 10x what it's worth on the market, and do work that is worse than the average on the market. It helps that the people signing these contracts are either clueless or don't care, since it's not their money.
Example: microcontrollers and embedded systems.

Some time ago there was a shift towards c++,but a large percent are returning back to c.

That's what i recall from surveys from UBM, the company that runs eetimes.com .
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There is Java and there is the JVM. Both are doing well, but Java is progressing slowly, and more and more developers -why actually now what they are doing- are looking into alternatives. These may also be languages running on the JVM though.

Java as a languages is getting old, in terms of concepts and verbosity.

Functional programming is what is -the next big thing-. And most java-only developers don't know how todo that.

While it is still thriving, there is an unstoppable move to newer, more functional languages (which can run on the JVM too).
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I'm afraid you are spot on. I often realize the bs and then keep on reading, because
A) Its so fun.
B) I hope I might still learn something useful.

I suspect school and teachers are part of the problem. Even at the best universities I would spot professors claiming things which were obviously wrong or not based on strong scientific evidence but presented as if. So all you can do is keeping to plow on hoping you learn more truth than not.

Ok, so, as someone who admits to read this stuff I would like to ask. Is there anyone who was able to break their addiction? And if so, what helped?

Also, is there a good book review source which spots "insight porn". I usually check Amazon before buying a book to check if its outright bullshit but that approach doesn't work all that well.
I think the significant difference between 'new scientist' weekly news and many others is they stick to reporting, and leave the proselytising to others - though they often people a space to make their claims.
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I went to an event they held in London recently and got to try one out. They seem to have a working product right now and are in the process of firming up their supply and manufacturing, and polishing the software.

They acknowledge their phone won't be perfect, but they want to improve as they go and they seem to be making a lot of strides already in stuff like mineral sourcing and labour practices.

It has a dual-sim and I'm pretty sure the guy said it would work internationally.
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Imagine what this community could build with more than half a billion dollars!
Good thing we are giving the federal government control over the healthcare system ( and positioning them to take even more control as we move towards single payer ). I am sure they won't screw it up like they have the the roll out of this small portion of the system.

Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down.
Java is the common, business oriented language of today. How do you you think it's not like the original COmmon Business Oriented Language? It's being used by the same sorts of guys to write the same sorts of apps, no?
If so, then what?

Just because X is bad (I'm assuming you think religion is bad) and Y facilitates/rehabilitates/resembles X doesn't mean that Y must be wrong. Just because science historically hasn't been the perfect antithesis of science doesn't mean that science is religion, nor vice versa. It's just an inevitable consequence of the fact that people aren't perfect.

History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is often criticized by hardcore atheists like Dawkins, because it draws attention to similarities and relationships between science and religion, throughout history and sometimes even in the modern age. Yeah, that can be a bit embarrassing to some. But it's not the historians' fault that a lot of European scientists in the early modern period casually crossed the boundary between science and religion every day. Whatever religious beliefs they had does not lessen the importance or correctness of their discoveries in any way.

If you don't like someone telling you a true story because your opponents would love to tell it, too, that's your problem. Lots of dictators also hate it when people tell true stories about them, but we tell them anyway because the stories are true.
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Maybe this was pre-seeded by my thoughts of Amazon trying to get startups drug-dependant on their stack but did anyone else see the penis at the beginning of the video?
The field of popular nutrition is exploding with this. "Warrior diet" and "Paleo diet" are two recent ideas that come to mind.

But as I type this it occurs to me: This might extend to beyond nerds. This effect might be what is addictive about Oprah or Dr. Phil (relationship insights), or even the bobble-heads on tv talking about the latest source of their political rage, or even sports junkies.
http://i.imgur.com/5Tzwgtb.jpg
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Yep, I was thinking about it.
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I would urge readers to refrain from the kneejerk reaction 'it's happening all over now'. What is happening in the Western world (rise of inequality due to skills being prized higher owing to technological change) is very different to what happened in Russia.

There a band of people connected to the government (first it was party apparatchiks, then friends of Putin) plundered resources owned by the state. And almost all of them have to do with stuff being pulled out of the ground.
this is an absurd waste of taxpayer money. we shouldn't let the government and their contractors get away with this sort of robbery. it is no wonder we are so far in debt as a nation.
Fun idea! Too easy for us Swedes though, as the names of almost all of IKEA's furniture are Swedish words.
Interesting. I had a look at your Start-Up. It looks very interesting, but I'm not a developer and would love to see something that could display my social contributions the way you're doing it for developers.

Do you have anything like this on the cards?
Nope. Pretty much welcome to reality.
I wonder if this will create any sort of advantages for players?

Back on COD:MW2 I put my XBOX on the DMZ, and that made me seem to have a better connection in the eyes of the P2P networking structure. This resulted in me always being chose as the lobby host. Essentially giving me the advantage of having ~0ms ping.
Not much. A fraction of Americans have negative net worths. If you have no debts and a nickel in your pocket, you're worth more than all of them put together. It's an oft-used misleading statistic.