skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've said this before. The fact that these people (government and it's contractors) are going to have and handle our most intimate information AND that the IRS is also in the loop scares the living daylights out of me. The level of incompetence being revealed here is almost without description.

To go all the way up to opening day, have these problems and then offer that five million lines of code need to be redone is, well, I'm at a loss for words. I am trying to think about how badly one could fuck up five million lines of, say, Python. That's a lot of code. It's almost like saying that you set out to write a portal for the ACA and mistakenly wrote an navigation system for a new spacecraft.

In many ways this is great. I can't think of a better example of how bad big government can be and often is. It is hard to argue with what is unfolding before our very eyes: An attempt at centralized control that succeeded on the legislative front but is failing miserably in execution due to nothing less than incompetence at all levels. And, to boot, it is costing hundreds of millions and will probably cost billions if it doesn't implode under it's own mess.

Look at this in sharp contrast with what I happen to think would have been a far better approach: Free market decentralized healthcare. All they had to do is open interstate borders to launch all available companies into competition and slowly open other gates in order to promote free and open competition. Yes, judicious regulations would have been required here and there, but always with the goal of having an ecosystem that is as free as reasonably possible.

In this scenario at worst the government would launch a open-source projects to develop open and well-debated APIs for publishing and sharing all pertinent information. Various sites could then connect to any available insurance company through these standard API's in order to gather, present and sell insurance to anyone. Instead of having a badly executed centralized attempt to develop a portal you'd have thousands of entrepreneurs jump into the fray for an opportunity to offer the best possible services. Very soon the best-in-breed services would rise to the top and continually evolve better and better offerings.

Cheaper, faster, better. All three.

Instead we got this shit.
Saying 'iOS is more closed' doesn't make Android meaningfully open.
Nice story, but the important part is missing: Did it work? Did people accept that? Is it already replaced by something else now?
Central America is everything from Guatemala to Panama and doesn't include Mexico.
On iOS in particular it has been proven when it comes to web apps, from a performance perspective they can never truly be as fast or faster than a native app due to the security restrictions around JIT.

I just tried it out and Fastmail have done a good job, probably as good as you can get with a web based interface. In terms of speed, I think they are referring to user interface response and page load times, not actually faster than native speeds because due to limitations in regards to how pages are loaded, although the title does seem to deliberately suggest otherwise.

I would love to see some benchmarks and tests as to how fast the new Fastmail is though.
Surely not. Better question: is "vandalism" without criminal trespass or property damage actually a crime? If it's on private property, and the property owner enjoys the painting, it seems like it'd be quite a stretch for the state to establish that the artist damaged the property by creating it.
I can just imagine some clueless bureaucrat bragging to his colleagues that his project has 500 million lines of code.
An oldie but a goodie.

I used to follow his blog, but he ended up writing a bit to prolifically for me. His RSS subscription fell to my normal behavior of cutting those that I've fallen behind on for 30-60 days (and I refuse to read out of order). Shame, it was interesting reading, I was just strapped for time for a few months.
A very good point that I did not consider, I remember getting very good feedback from my teachers - It would appear I underestimated the size of the problem.
Yeah, that's the best example I could come up with at the time of writing the comment. It's been a long day today, and I don't mind the nit-pick, you are right.
Google used 'Android is open' as a dishonest slogan to convince developers that it wasn't just a power play.

That is why they are being criticized. It's not about who is more open. It's that Google misled everyone about their intentions.
It's especially useful for some IPv6 addresses.
I pulled the example from the air to make a point, but you are correct, the last 20% is 80% of the work...

See the comment by aaron695 who made a very good point about feedback.

I wonder though if there is some easy fruit at the bottom of the tree i.e. elementary school - where I gather grading is probably a lower burden and easier to formalise - although I am probably again greatly understating the problem.
Aha, my bad. Thanks for the correction.

It makes more sense now that I think about it; I'm almost a month early for it to be Nov. 17th.
Apple hasn't abused anything.
Anandtech's Surface Pro 2 Review
Not that I really care, but you have no category that fits Taiwan. It is not really China and not Southeast Asia
Meh, I beg to differ. To each their own, I suppose.
Anandtech's Surface 2 Review
That, or someone to maintain a generic shim/interface so that the proprietary services are interchangeable
Simply measuring the web site in 'lines of code' as if that's meaningful indicates that it's a quote by someone who is not aware of how modern programming works.
For my inner web designer this reads like "I want to see my blog in three different themes". Cost: A few minutes.
The entirety of the source code available in the debian repositories as of lenny is 324 million lines of code: [source](http://gsyc.es/~frivas/paper.pdf).
Wow, more of us here in SE Asia than in Western Europe? Interesting.
Site is down; there is apparently no cache available. Could someone please post items 1-9?
How is exchanging money now for more money later any less earning income than exchanging labor now for money (now or later)—the idea that the extra money earned by the former means is somehow "not income" and should not be taxed while the money earned by the latter means is "income" and should be taxed is ludicrous.

Economically, neither interest earned nor payment recieved from the sale of goods and services in an efficient market is a gain, but if you define income in terms of economic gains then nothing but rents extracted via market inefficiencies and outright gifts are income.
It's still relatively early morning in Western Europe (7:26 AM in Barcelona, where I am.)
It's best to keep the code in everything to the minimum!
Some people have way too much time on their hands and obviously can't tell the difference between comedy and actual racism. Jimmy made the joke because China by far out of any other country owns a substantial chunk of US debt. He was making fun of a bad situation by saying we should kill the Chinese, while in bad taste, Jimmy wasn't being serious...
Mumbai is the place to be for a lot of people, but maybe not for core tech and programmers. We don't have a very strong programming community here (though we are trying to build one). We don't have as many tech events and communities as Bangalore.
Mumbai has quite a few startups, but again, there are far more in Bangalore.
And the worst thing is Mumbai is quite a bit more expensive to live. The rents are very high, probably double of the Bangalore rates. And you don't really get higher salaries to balance this out.

This has been my experience with Mumbai. You may be happy here, depending on what job you get here, and what circle of geeks and friends you find around here. In general, it is a much more happening place than Bangalore.

Edit: Obviously, both of these options are far better than Jaipur. Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi are the places to be for working in tech. You can probably add Pune, Chennai and maybe Hyderabad to that list, but that's it.
I am in Indonesia (but from the US).
I can see why one would think they know everything about a field just because one "has a good general knowledge of the field, up to date with recent research, and have publications of your own" for the following fact (noted by Donald Rumsfeld)

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."
It's definitely a lot worse than that.

500 million lines of code would represent nearly every line of code that has ever gone into all shipped Microsoft software spanning 37 years.
Here's an example:

Let's imagine a hypothetical world where Company A owns 80% of the smartphone market and the rest is divided between the also-rans.

Now imagine that app developers can't profitably make a 1st rate app without getting the income from company A's app store (But can port the app to other OSes for extra income). If company A starts to use this situation to make it harder to port apps to other companies OSes via strongarm tactics, then company A is abusing its monopoly position of being the only profitable way to make an app.

Today's world is nothing like that, but it's an example of how near-total marketshare is not necessary for anti-trust to come into play. There is a certain point at which you have a large enough market share, that certain other players in the market must deal with you to get the volume needed to compete, particularly in high-volume, high-upfront cost industries (which many types of software qualify as).
Open Source Systems Performance
I doubt you'd get it from an FOIA request. I believe there's an exemption that covers work like this.
How else would credit history (and credit in general) work?
It's 7 AM in Poland as of time you wrote it :)
The author was all-praises on Google for its actions.

"Not having to package everything into a major OS update means Google can get features out to more users much faster and more frequently than before. ... This should all lead to a more unified, less fragmented, healthier Android ecosystem."
Agreed. While it sounds cool to bring in a "dream team" of technical experts to save the day, it seems likely that additional non-technical issues are at play besides (or in addition to) the technical incompetence of the contractor.

Here's an alternate scenario:

1. The government agency that hired the contractors does not completely understand the business requirements in a way that allows them to effectively communicate them to the contractor. This could be due to numerous factors outside their control such as changing legislation or perhaps because the ACA is so large (900+ pages) and relatively new that there are few experts who understand the minute details sufficiently to specify how the exchange should work.

2. New requirements emerge at the last minute, requiring the contractor to make significant changes. While it is recognized that additional schedule time would be needed to sufficiently implement and test the required features, there is enormous pressure (political and otherwise) to adhere to the October 1 release date, so the implementation of the features is rushed and QA is skipped.

3. There are dependencies on legacy government and commercial systems that are outside the control of the contracting agency and the contractor. The functionality of these systems impact reliability and performance, introduce strange bugs, etc.

5. The software is delivered on time but is woefully inadequate.

While I wouldn't rule out the incompetence of the technical staff, these types of issues can often be traceable to problems that are more in the realm of management.
The world should calm down. Take a few years to review what we've done in last 50 years.
Then there is also retina vs non-retina displays, the next site redesign, glossy vs matte screens, and non-color calibrated displays. Then there are different browsers, operating systems, and fonts installed.

It is almost as funny as the request that a logo must use the "Pantone 1337" color. It probably is not representable in RGB and nobody has a color-calibrated screen.
I have the same problem. I also thought Google is punishing me for using an iphone, just like they did with maps ;)
I am living in Indonesia at the moment (West Jakarta, probably not far from you). Might be worth those of us in the area who follow HN to do a meetup of some sort? (My email is chris.travers@gmail.com)
Wicd.net Now Points to Launchpad
> To go all the way up to opening day, have these problems and then offer that five million lines of code need to be redone is, well, I'm at a loss for words.

There was an article on here last week (I think, my memory might be failing to that end) interviewing some individuals who claimed to be former contractors for CGI Federal. They also claimed that CMS, the agency responsible for integration (with no integration experience) essentially demanded that they perform no testing on the system until about 5 days before October 1st. I don't know how true these claims are, but given the nature of this whole fiasco, it somehow doesn't seem all that surprising.

> Look at this in sharp contrast with what I happen to think would have been a far better approach: Free market decentralized healthcare.

Yeah, and the US government seems to favor regional monopolies that almost cleanly map to congressional districts. Maybe there's a correlation and someone's getting a kickback somewhere along the lines...

> Cheaper, faster, better. All three.

> Instead we got this shit.

More expensive, slower, worse.

I do have to wonder. If the government elects to go the route of a single payer system after they've largely screwed up the launch of this mess (and remember, ACA isn't fully implemented--the last bits of the law don't come into effect until 2018), is anyone is going to trust them at this point to do so?
To give more info on this: http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Persistent+L2ARC

Basically, L2ARC is "Level 2 Advanced Replacement Cache" for ZFS, where level 1 is in RAM, and level 2 is on an SSD (usually a cheap/large MLC SSD, as opposed to an expensive/small SLC SSD for ZIL). Basically, it's using a SSD to act as a huge cache for reads, so they don't have to be serviced by a slower spinning rust array.

Prior to this change, after every system reboot, the L2ARC would be cleared and not used/filled until reads from disk happened. On a system that is rebooted frequently (or even infrequently), this can result in slower performance until the cache has been primed.

My understanding is that that with this change reads can happen from the L2ARC devices after a reboot (the "persistence"), which removes the ramp up of usefulness of the L2ARC.
And those are what?
Yes, I thought the same, especially interesting because I would assume that many Canadian techies moved to Seattle or the valley.

Also interesting that there are soon as many HN members outside the US as within (if this survey reflects the truth).
Losing your data is never "I good problem to have". Even for a small startup, such a thing can easily kill all the momentum you've built up.
"Brain drain", possibly?

More likely selection bias though.
I think this is a really nice overview for WebRTC: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/
There is a section around standards and protocols.
Awesome Flat Design Gallery
Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so

Not really. You will have your mainline Abdroid implementation shutdown if you do this. Google is clearly doing this to make forking a very risky proposition for device manufacturers. It's the antithesis to open.
+1 for Hong Kong!
What about the equivalent suggestions with those same terms staring with "Men..."
Hacker, cracker... I still don't know how to use 6 chopsticks!
Scaling Communication at a Growing Startup
The linux kernel is ~15 million LOC. That also doesn't make a dent in 500 mil.
For the sake of argument, imagine they did calculate the (average??) speed limit for each downhill segment.

Then what?

They hide anyone who goes over that speed from the leaderboard, so the leaderboard is full of people who managed to average precisely the speed limit?

Or as soon as someone goes over the average they hide the whole leaderboard like they do for flagged segments now?

My proposal is that they should hide the leaderboard for all segments over (say) 3% average negative gradient. Simple physics predicts that -3% gradient will put you over the speed limit in most jurisdictions, and it's much simpler to work out.
Incorporating Quiet Into UX Design Process
That's just not true. Contractors are only required to deliver what they proposed and the government agreed to.
The difference is that Erlang has process isolation: a panic is guaranteed not to mess up the state of any other process, because there is no shared state. This is what makes reliable self-repair possible. In Go, there is one giant shared mutable heap shared between all goroutines. So there is no guarantee that a panicked goroutine left the heap in an orderly state such that self-repair is possible.

Erlang actors and goroutines are very very different.
HealthCare.gov design firm
Again the argument that Government paid for code must be released under an Open License - all of the speculation and questions here would get wiped out by a simple git push from the right contractor.

And we could more fruitfully spend our time contributing to the automated test pack.
General tip: Never say never.
Op has a good point there that shadows are not usually black in tint but the opposite hue from highlights. Black has its uses though when you are not painting a painting.
Hello Malaysian here as well!
Shuttleworth has a response:

https://plus.google.com/116812394236590806058/posts/ZxiHd4Qx...
Interactions + Mentions. Finding/creating hash tags that are relevant to your interests or you think will help you generate hype or momentum. (common sayings, trendings.) Getting retweets from credible blogs or other people (with similar interests and large followings) helps a lot. After you have a following, it's about what you do to shape them that's important in order to get the feedback you need and build more followers.
That's a lot of eating your own dog food
LazyMeter Shutting Down on November 15
Ours is not the only corner of the industry - there are still a great many places where programmer productivity is measured by LOC or some other bullshit metric.

Hell, when I worked at Amazon my manager used sprint story points as individual productivity metrics. Oh God.

Our industry doesn't have a consensus on much of anything, least of all anything regarding counting lines of code.
Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
You're partly right, but in regards to the Gmail app, what I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail. Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.

But I do not agree with people that claim Android is not open. Building an operating system is a big challenge and stock Android is enough for anyone to fork and do whatever they want. I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android. I ended up installing Amazon's Appstore on it, which is not as good as Google Play, but at least they've got special offers :-)
The sad part is that it sounds like they're already being paid to do so - they were quoted as being Federal Contractors.

We really need a public peer review system for technical contracting of government projects. This is getting insane. These schmucks fleeced 500 million from our government (us) for a barely functioning website, and now some snake oil contractors are going to come in to "fix it" and fleece us for even more.
Go didn't stick for me either.

Go is interesting and I really enjoyed channels, but no generic programming really disappointed me. I guess supporting the generic paradigm is pretty tricky (C++/Java templates/generics aren't dear to my heart), but not being able to implement map/filter/reduce functions...
> And Dijkstra considered goto harmful. He wasn't right either.

He was right. The kind of goto he specifically and clearly elucidates in his paper has utterly vanished from modern programming.

He's not talking about Torvalds using a little `goto` to jump to the error-handling at the end of a function. He's talking about unstructured programming: gotos that jump across procedure boundaries, or where "procedure boundary" isn't even a meaningful concept.
I never found the conflicts with interfaces issue that Russ Cox raised to be convincing. Just require that the sum type be destructured before calling methods on it. This is what Rust and Scala, both of which have something akin to Go's interfaces, do.

The bigger issue is that having a zero value for every type does indeed conflict with not having null pointers. I feel that pervasive zero values box the language design in so heavily that the convenience they add doesn't pull the weight, but Go's designers evidently disagree. In any case, Go's language semantics are so based around zero values (e.g. indexing a nil map returns zero values instead of panicking for some reason) that they can't be removed without massive changes to the entire semantics.
The sad thing is that the site being bad should be really tangential to the politics. I personally would love to see outright socialized healthcare, where everyone was mandatorally enrolled in a government created program. I feel like we'd have the most leverage to bring costs down under a centralized and non-profit system. However, this system being as broken as it is - and costing as much as it has - did nothing to help that cause, even though it should be tangential to it. Very frustrating.
Is it possible its different for DoD contractors? I ask because Lockheed in Sunnyvale took some heat (I believe a fine and a restriction on being able to bid on contracts for a period of time) for failing to use 'established industry practice' in the testing and delivery of what ever it was they were delivered. My neighbor at the time worked for them and recounted the gruesome (or in this case non-standard) details. I never really thought to question whether or not it was actually written that way, it just made sense that it would be. When I was with Intel and Intel was building milspec 8080s there were a list of standards that had to be met and all of the test equipment was calibrated based on that as well. Seemed like a pretty natural part of the government contracting business.

So you're saying that Contractors are under no obligation to meet standards? Or just that this contractor would be exempted? Or perhaps software in general would be exempted?

( Apparently NIST is involved somewhat : http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applica... )
No more sources | openDemocracy
Also, who's to say an 18% descent segment is any less dangerous than a 3% descent being ridden by beginners going after a segment?

Isaac Newton.

(In his second law.) Don't misunderstand me: I think 3% descents are dangerous too. But the increased speed an 18% descent gives is more dangerous than a crash at lower speed.

Also, being an "awesome descender" doesn't make you safe - in some cases it means you just crash at higher speeds. Vincenzo Nibali is possibly the best (road) descender in the world at the moment (eg 2013 Giro exploits, his attack on the 2012 Milan-San Remo Poggio descent) and yet he crashed in the World Championship road race, and it was only luck that saved him from serious injury.