skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, whenever I buy a car, I read the manual. If it's second-hand, I download the manual.

Heck, even when I have a rental car for a single day, I will read the manual. Maybe not every page, but I will skim it for gotchas (and if I have time, the whole thing).

Maybe it's just the engineer in me, but it's what I do.

Come on guys, as computer engineers/programmers/developers/whatever, surely professional pride at least would mean we at least read the README and/or the manual, before putting something into production?
So your argument is -- some humans being possessed of what we seem to be calling angelic altruism, and some humans being not so blessed -- that, rather than finding some means of rule which accommodates both dispositions, we should overturn all governments and seek not to replace them with anything? You fascinate me. How do you imagine this working?
I don't see it approaching that even with the lines of code for their existing packages. For instance, this is old and out of date, but you could extrapolate a ballpark estimate out of it... looks like back in 2007 or so JDK was about 6 million LoC (http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/OpenJdkDevGuide/OpenJdkDev...). Even if it increased tenfold since then, it's barely making a dent in that 500 million LoC number.
this was posted 3 years ago as well. It's interesting to compare the comments. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Lisphp
Yeah it's got to be off by at least 3 orders of magnitude. 500K LOC might be industry standard bloat, but it should be doable in 50K if you hire good programmers.

But 500M is not credible, unless you are doing things like counting auto-generated code and open source libraries. Even then, you would have to be using 100,000 open source libraries to get near 500M LOC :)
Site's back up. Tentative to repost considering the comments above.
But here's direct link - he may even take questions if anybody wants to write in and submit - http://www.replyall.me/s/C-Ax
You have no problem with what I was asking, just the way in which I asked it, and perpetuated this whole thread to press into me that I wasn't abjectly deferential humble and thankful enough to the great overlords of HN for deigning to bother to waste their time on an obviously worthless scumbag like me.

THAT is petty and obnoxious. and it is to that I say, "get fucked." Criticizing superficial aspects about my manner, instead of the content of my question is the very definition of petty.
This is where my hypothesis comes in. Instead of a database, they're codgening a small class and adding it to their codebase for every registered user, and recompiling the entire site immediately following that operation, blocking requests until the recompilation is complete. This hypothesis neatly explains both the terrible performance and the unimaginable LoC estimation.

:)
It's hard to imagine that even those could total more than a small fraction of the purported 500 MLOC. The JDK is only a few million lines of code.
What was the site written in?
I appreciate the post and I think it's insightful, but I think the real question is how did you get it on the front page of hacker news!

I think that would be a very good next post to write about :)
> I didn't even say 'bad,' I said 'more meh.'

I didn't say "bad" either.................. I said "awesome", which is in stark contrast to "more meh"................

> Furthermore, I didn't say that liking go makes you hate other languages, or that you should hate go if you like other languages...

I didn't say you did. My implication was that people don't have to fit your mold of the world: I enjoy programming in many different kinds of languages. i.e., I liked Go at the outset even though I had previously done significant work in a static typed language with a rich type system.
Somewhat surprisingly, Visual Studio 2012 has 50 million lines of code. [0]

It's kind of weird to think that VS 2012 has more lines of code than Windows XP.

[0]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/20/the-...
It's funny how a monopoly will pretend they’re not a monopoly while the non-monopolies try to pretend they are.
Dropping some acid is effective though, the statement that you can do 8 years of therapy in 8 hours still holds - but like any drug, it's a tool - what you do with that tool/power is entirely up to you.
I can think of several engineers I would consider "best and brightest" for something like this. To my knowledge, not one of them posts on HN. Get over yourself.
I wonder if in that case you should explain the valid reasons for the variance in the section detailing the breakdown. Like you said, you might not get the opportunity to explain it and perhaps it could be a potential red flag.
Amount and stupidness of bugs in fb says otherwise
Sounds like a load of crap to me. Seriously, 500 million lines of code? I bet not even mission-critical code written to power NASA spacecraft and satellites are anywhere near that length.

I propose they give the project to the HN community, divide up the $400 million figure amongst the participants and give us a weekend and I bet we'll have more to show than that of the so-called developers the government hired.

I am not underestimating the complexity of such a site, but seriously, it's not like it hasn't been done elsewhere to a degree. if I can do Internet banking, the a site for providing healthcare can be built a lot easier. They're both of similar scale and security requirements I would imagine.

This site seems like the greatest scam ever perpetuated. I bet the contractors are laughing themselves to the bank literally as we speak. Even though it's bad publicity, money is a higher priority than credibility for some businesses out there it would seem. Is it any wonder people don't trust the government? They can't even hire competent people to build them a website. This seems to be a recurring theme for local councils and governments elsewhere as well, so it's not just the US this is happening.

People need to get mad about this. That's $400 million dollars that could have been invested elsewhere like medical research, charities, food programs, rehabilitation for the homeless... A $400 million mistake has been made, and another $400 million will probably be spent before it's even ready.

What a waste of money.
They said "should" not "would."
What’s your definition of “no use”? I’m quite confused by that. When I was last walking through a museum I felt tremendous joy and very much loved looking at everything. That’s a use, right? That makes those are pieces useful. It should be quite obvious that things capable of doing that acquire value.

Sometimes that gets a bit ridiculous but a blanket claim that art has no use (or, even more specifically, that Banksy’s art has no use) seems equally ridiculous.
Post MS2013 and the viable alternatives for C++
There's no way that's true.

No possible way. For a website. Did they write their own operating system from scratch? And database?
I... dunno guys. Multiple disparate systems designed by separate government contractors who no doubt pumped up their work estimates tutu get even bigger contracts. Remember this is a $400 mil project. Maybe I spent too long in the government but this doesn't seem unrealistic to me.
I thoroughly enjoyed On Writing. To me, it captures the entrepreneur ethos and demonstrates why perseverance and just doing are two of the most important keys to success.
I'm pretty sure they'd all fit in my basement.
Will look in to it.
Or half the developers were coding yet everyone was designing.
No, what gives you that impression? It is python, running on Google AppEngine
Yeah, after reading that article, I get the very strong feeling that these "federal consultants" are in for a second round of greedy-greedy-grabfest. They're throwing insane sounding numbers out there so that they can justify egregious compensation. Someone needs to call these people out on their bluff, there is no way that this terrible site is even close to the LoC numbers they're throwing out there.

I'm so sick of seeing contractors fleece our government (and by extent, us) by pulling the wool over the eyes of those who don't know any better and making sweetheart arrangements.
Sun Tzu - Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak
One thing I always do is try to scope a database for the problem. This site[1] has been a valuable resource for myself and colleague who were evaluation the best way to store/access our data depending on what we need back.

[1] - http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis
Don't forget to add in the lines of code for the Linux kernel on which they are running and the MySQL database etc etc.

I kept reading the article and on the last you find this gem:

According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size.

That to me suggests the number is bogus, because it is so obviously a quote from someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
To specify the format/encoding of the hypertext?

HTTP was around before I was, hence the question.

If we just want to transfer generic files, maybe we should create a file transfer protocol.
We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to combat click fraud. Clearly someone pulling in 2,500 - 5,000 a month via click fraud is a 'small potatoes' to the big ad networks but I'm sure a lot of people have made lifestyle businesses with it. Common fraud patterns are clicks from AWS or foreign hosting facilities. Or waves of clicks on a single ad from a swath of subscribers.
Even if they counted PHP's lines of code, that would only throw on less than a million more lines.

I strongly suspect that somebody is full of shit.
Our latent search isn't fully rolled out. In some of our other products this works very well.

Samuru we had to balance Speed against all of the latent search we could do. And we do a few tricks to make the latent search not impact the Main search, but Weather is slow when you work in the volume we do because we can't cache every Geo, and National weather service isn't fast.
Amazon have a Kindle product that is an Android fork with serious market share. I don't know if Google has anything in the Kindle market place with GMail etc.
It really feels like, "SCOTUS cannot judge this law because the law says SCOTUS cannot judge this law. And, you know, it's the law."
Also of note is that stored procedures are supported in a variety of languages, including Javascript, so it's quite easy to handle cases where the surprisingly broad range of core JSON functions and operators [1] doesn't include what you need.

PostgreSQL has also recently added a key-value store type [2] with semantics reminiscent of Redis. The impression I get is that they're gunning for the NoSQL kids in general, and this pleases me; while I grant it is sometimes possible and necessary to obtain new insight in a field by ignoring all that's gone before, I very much doubt this is one of those times, and I am therefore delighted to see a properly engineered database engine gain more or less the entirety of the features which draw interest to the NoSQL crowd in the first place.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-json.htm...
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/hstore.html
Living in bangkok
He considered using goto instead of structured programming harmful. Which was right. People love to use that article like a strawman, ignoring the actual content and context.
The USPTO should see this as an opportunity to have a mail-in form which would create redundancy and also obscure these problems.
Or perhaps it is the base 100 form of a base 2 number with 32 digits.
Add your blog's Twitter handle and URL to the post! That's an easy way to get more exposure. That said, good work in building a following quickly
What is shocking to me is the lack of environmental predictions in this article.
How am I being fatuous? It is obviously false that there is any sort of guarantee that errors have to be dealt with if the compiler allows some indeterminate number of functions (unless there's a list somewhere) to be exceptions to the rule.
I always thought the reason capital gains are taxed (and more importantly, should be taxed higher) is that most capital gains are essentially rent-seeking in nature. As in, they add no further wealth to the system but through successively higher valuations, extract money from it.

The reason we do NOT tax capital gains (and shouldn't) at a much higher rate is that to some degree you want investment in the future and also "that some kinds of capital gains are really income in disguise" - ie. that not all wealth creation is appropriately valued through trade (or appropriately timed).
While I completely agree with you in general, a nit pick:

> I bet not even mission-critical code written to power NASA spacecraft and satellites are anywhere near that length.

That doesn't seem like a good example. You want to keep the code in those kinds of things to a minimum, and that's probably not too hard.
What a pile of BS.

They're so moronic that they built the thing such that registration of the userbase would take more than a hundred years.

Stop coddling the state, they're not going to do it right, they don't welcome the debate, they don't care, they won't present a balanced budget, the debt default is constitutionally prohibited, the war on drugs is a war on people, their wars are so obviously wrong that there are more soldier suicides than deaths in combat, the military burns more oil than the entire population of india, socialism doesn't suddenly work when the current regime tries it....
Oh never mind, go ahead and keep wasting your time listening to sociopaths and participating in silly, futile politics; I'll just make a greasemonkey script to filter out all stories with "Obama" in them, and be on my merry way.
Google maps and Google earth are used extensively for imagery analysis and intelligence work. They aren't working with the maps team so much as using it as a tool.
Assembly, to protect your privacy.
Got that. Was just plugging our app =)
More encodings:

http://[0:0:0:0:0:ffff:b8ac:a4a]

http://asdf:qwerty@3098282570/

http://asdf:qwerty@[0:0:0:0:0:ffff:b8ac:a4a]:80

(Might get a security/phishing warning on the last two links in some browsers.)
I am curious, what were the barriers (apart from financial) like when you moved to San Francisco? This is assuming you moved your startup over to SF. I ask this since I am starting up in India, and increasingly thinking to relocate to Silicon Valley.
Save time with this simple highlight-and-share Chrome extension
Central Asia (incl. Former Soviet Republics)
Dick Cheney altered implanted heart device to prevent terrorist hack attacks
ha. I'll bet it's: LoC * Num_servers = 500M

At least, that sounds like a great way to charge gubbmints by LoC.
Who told them to use vanilla php to make everything , 500 million lines of code is an astounding amount of code .
Next step put up a disclosure/FOI request for the source code of the healthcare.gov so that we can know what they were writing in there.
>but if google can instantly translate English to Swahili

This is the problem, they can't. They can do the 80% to make it understandable but the last 20% is always the hard bit.

It'll happen one day, but it might be up there with the singularity for when it's viable. Fully understanding a paper to grade might equal AI intelligence on par with humans.

Not to say perhaps a quick hack, like a 80% grader that the teachers quickly look over to check and correct might be a game changer.
"One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly."

Yikes! I don't think these "experts" are going to be fixing this anytime soon.
From what I understand, it used to be a fork of XMBC. I think the ability to do the client/server model is possible with XBMC, but very hard to do out of the box.

But I agree - plex was worth the purchase of the mobile app.
MIT's 'Kinect of the Future' Device Tracks People Through Walls
What are people's thoughts on primarily using online forum posts as sources? Personally, I think it's part of the picture, but I'm not sure how much of the picture. I would think the best methods are not going to be posted on forums as free information, but this is an assumption...
While 500 million sounds really far fetched, this is the point at which projects explode with bloat and repeated code:

> the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors work together.

Factor in dealing with the multitude of state laws and companies they are interacting with, and you have a recipe for problems.

A lot of armchair quarterback technologists, but not a lot of precedent to compare computerizing a healthcare system in this way to.
VS 2012 does a lot more.
I sort of flashed back to the scene in Office Space where they try to get the guy selling magazine subscriptions to tell them how to launder money :-).

Everyone knows the first step to laundering money is to open an Italian restaurant :-)
New Hampshire baby!
Let me rephrase my original statement. We need to segregate data from a single format/layout.

I do not think the analogy to spreadsheets applies here. There are (at least) thousands of perspectives on/presentations of scientific data that are completely meaningless. In that case the perspective and presentation matters (though the sharing the original data opens up the opportunity for others to find new perspectives as well, though at the moment they do need to 'plot their own charts')

That said, once the author has chosen the perspective that perspective will be conveyed via some medium. At that point the data should be able to stand on its own. I used the word presentation, but 'layout' is probably closer to what I meant. If we take my use of presentation literally then we agree and this is why someone posting slides for a talk without also posting the talk is a terrible idea.

With regard to expertise, I would argue that everyone is an expert on what format/layout they find easier to use (sort of like why we let people move their windows around in a window manager instead of forcing them all full screen, re: tablets are major offenders here). I'm not talking about letting people change the words here or put the legend for figure 1 with the data for figure 3.
$800 pays for roughly one day's worth of work for a senior developer in the US. One thousand lines of working, debugged code (which is presumably what's being paid for) sounds like an awful lot of code for one person to write in a day, if the problem domain has any degree of complexity. Some parts of healthcare.gov could be quite complex, e.g., interfacing to other government systems whose APIs are not well documented.

And I agree with the people who think that 500M lines of code is unlikely. Judging by some of the statistics that were cited in other comments (e.g., "Windows XP was 45 million lines of code"), this may be more lines of code than Microsoft has written since the company was founded (many of the lines of code in XP were originally from NT, etc.).
Purportedly, Google has recently started banning YouTube accounts that are associated through common linkage in Adsense to other YouTube accounts which were banned. So this firewall you mention is not as strong as it may have once been.
Three comma splices in two paragraphs? Good Lord.
As 37 signals said: scratch your own itch.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Whats_Your_Problem.php
Very nice Color Schema Generator
maybe check out Cal Newport's blog http://calnewport.com/blog/ and/or his book "So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" for a sense of perspective on finding a job you love. His philosophy, to paraphrase inartfully, is that we've been fed a load of bunkum about passion being the be and end all of a career; that passion actually comes after the fact of putting in the grunt work of becoming successful.

Well, a lot more could be said...

The point is not to mistake boredom, lack of passion, burn out for hating your current career. There may be legitimate reasons for hating it of course.
Here is a big list of side project ideas.

http://theinternetwishlist.com/
Pretty sure that is a direct rectal extraction number not a real number. If there were 500 million lines of code you would have a prima facie case for fraud on the part of the contractor since government contractors are required to use best industry practices and no industry practice supports 10x code expansion.
Robert Shiller’s Nobel and accepting/improving imperfect financial markets
I don't think "making out like bandits" is accurate at all. Tenured academics don't seem like they make all that much money and I think most would make more in corporate.
Triathlon deaths on rise, but why?
Less than 10 million lines of code are required to fly an F-35 -- and that is C++.

Who is the contractor responsible for this? Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth-scandal-a-1b-w...
The best thing you can do is write this up, with details. Put it on the net.
I haven't seen or used any of the mentioned tools, but I have found http://nciku.com to be useful on many occasions.
Agreed.

All those videos of Android demo or prototype units clearly showed Android was a Blackberry clone (just look at that tiny touchpad for navigating around Android OS) and changed its design direction after iPhone made its appearance.
It would be interesting to see Shuttleworth clarify, or retract his statements if incorrect, but I won't hold my breath. I imagine he'll quietly ignore it rather than address it. Lennart is already a whipping-boy[1] of the open source community, so it's not like people won't jump to assume what Mark says is true, regardless of the actual veracity.

[1]: He developed PulseAudio. He gets a lot of flak for that, for various reasons, but I think most of it is that any new system will have a period of instability based on the technology, implementation, and use. It's used in all the major distros now, AFAIK.
The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.
I actually do understand clean energy, and these nuclear powered vessels to which I refer have already been built and fitted.
What better use for them than to clean our oceans?
umm another naive solution for this would be to go from the center to any arbitrary end, do not cross on to the lake just wait around 2-3 meters from the bank and wait for the monster.
Once the monster reaches the bank just in a straight line to the other side.

This way you will have to cover 2r distance where as the monster will cover 3.14r (pi*r ) distance .

You will be able to out run a monster around 1.57 times your speed.
Sure it is not that good enough but if your calculus isn't that good (To be honest calculus is the last thing on your mind when a monster is chasing you) and the monster is slow then you will be able to out run him.
It was more or less just a funny, but not so well-received. So hard to convey lols through text.

But, your point, it's really easy to be creative without it, I would argue against.

You can't teach creativity. You can't learn creativity. Creativity is something you're born with and developed subconsciously. You can't consciously be creative. You can consciously think out of the box, sure, but as a true creative individual myself, there's such a fine line between the two.