skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a really great metaphor for how to manage complexity in abstraction.

We're all familiar with spaghetti code--you know, functional flow that winds its way through the source files and ends up in a big tangle.

"Aha!" we say, "This is awful, let's fix it."

So, we build all these layers of abstraction, with the hope that we can swap out any layer at random and things will be fine. This is lasagna code, and ends up being a gooey mess whenever you try to change a layer--you can always add layers, mind you, but actually removing one in the middle can prove to be quite messy.

The fix is ravioli code: Little self-contained bits of code with small, well-defined boundaries and implementations well-isolated from the outside world only communicating through messages.

~

The author does make a valid point, though: debugging through lots of abstractions is kind of a pain in the neck, and depending on the app a bunch of custom concrete code can be a lot simpler to maintain.

That's the siren song, though...that code is much easier to deal with until it isn't and then you're screwed.
If you are new to bitcoin-related sites, you might find this story legitimate. But anyone that reads the article will see there is a basic flaw: DDoS attacks do not give access to the server, they just make the service inaccessible. If you read past (paid) articles about this very same service, you will see claims about how secure the system is, and how expert everyone that developed it is. The same was claimed by inputs.io, I'm sure you have read about that story earlier.

The thing is, if you want to use bitcoin, you cannot trust third parties to hold your coins for you. If you want to support bitcoin in your business, you cannot trust other sites to handle the payment for you. Yes, it is not convenient. But you have everything available to handle this yourself and, yes, you will need someone competent to do that for you if you are not into it. Bitcoin is not meant for the average user or the unaware merchant and it might never be, people need to start accepting this fact.
The Groupon Trap
From Entrepreneur.com: 6 Tools Your Business Should Invest in for 2014
As a minor counterexample, Jenny McCarthy is also pretty wealthy and has access to good doctors, should she want to talk to them.
Code Obfuscation is Worthless
Store entire content of the WW Web within just 75 grams of DNA material.
For a programming language the "technical implementation" is, by far, the most important piece. No language that I'm aware of has been able to "win" without being ready for production use when the market was ready for it.

I don't think any amount of promotion is going to do your language any good unless it's ready for use when people see your promotion. And then, if it's ready for use and has a nice place in the market then I doubt you'll need much more promotion than what I've listed above and some success stories to show it works.

Are you really saying that you want to take your language and market it to the top? That's just not going to happen unless your Microsoft, Apple, etc. Unfortunately, you likely don't control enough of a necessary piece of the infrastructure to force people into your language.

Go down the TIOBE list and answer for yourself when each language was first developed, when it was production ready, when it caught on, and how much and what type of marketing was needed to put it in the top 50? I think you'll find promotion of the language itself was not very important to its success, but being ready for real use at the right time was.

(Is your language ready for production use?)
Let me ask the question everyone else is - when will I have the time to do this? Haha.
For Kepler SP1 on Windows it's:

alt+h, a, i, right, right, right, shift+tab, right, tab, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, shift+end, ctrl+c, alt+f4, win+r, c, m, d, enter, r, m, d, i, r, space, alt+space, e, p, /, s, /, q, enter
I’m going to define “good” as the 90th percentile
among the player pool you’re competing against.

This is a very interesting definition of "good". Appropriate for Chess, but has interesting ramifications elsewhere.
Improv: affordable yet powerful open hardware engineering board
A new web application for passive tech professionals
Hey HackerNews Community,

This is my first time posting and wanted to get the opinions of smart and ambitious entrepreneurs that dwell here. I’m starting up a website called http://www.ubercapable.com/professionals.html, for passive tech professionals that want a buffer between them and recruiters or people who are looking for tech co-founders. It's currently in beta and active.

The way it works is when you sign up we create an email address for you. And when anyone emails you at this email address they will have to pay certain price to reach you. We will then send you a notification in which you could accept or deny this request

When you accept this request we will link you and requester up to engage in conversation with them and the money they paid to talk will be waiting for you.
Kind of on topic, but I'm a web developer who is partnered with a designer in NYC. I'm already working remotely (a few hours away) and it is really great. I'm in my mid 20s and don't have kids or a relationship at the moment. I've always wanted to travel and I'd rather do it while I am young. I've been thinking of taking 6 months and going around the world, staying at any location for 2-4 weeks. I want to continue working remotely at that time but my big concern is that I'm just going to be sitting in a hotel room working at these beautiful places and not have any time to explore. Or the other way around and I will be having too much fun to get any real work done.

Any HN'ers have any experience or stories doing something similar?
This isn't reddit. There's no downvote on stories for (most) users on HN.
Certainly not gross radiation poisoning as the symptoms of that (swelling, lesions) are pretty unmistakable. Mild poisoning like polonium, if done over months or years can be harder to spot.

What I find interesting is that in the US the government is exceptionally diligent about pursuing the deaths of people it cares about (scientists working on state projects, politicians, Etc.) which the FBI (national police) investigates rather than the local police force.

Clearly these are people who are of interest to India's national defense (nuclear submarine engineers?) is there not a national police that would make it their mission to solve these questions?
' Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.'

I don't see anything male about any of these words, I know many women who can be accurately described by these words, as well as many men who cannot. Why is the author conflating being male with these descriptions? I find the assertion that those words are indeed "male-gendered" very disturbing.
Writing a C++ compiler is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

My Google SoC project (ages ago) involved generating code to be ABI compatible with C++ virtual table layouts. This spec gave me nightmares: http://mentorembedded.github.io/cxx-abi/abi.html#vtable.

My favorite part is this sentence: "The rules for constructing virtual tables of the class are a combination of the rules from Categories 2 and 3, and can generally be determined inductively."

Ah yes, very comforting. The rules can be generally determined inductively (except of course, when they can't be!)
If you are changing your meidicene dosage as a result of this test, then please go ahead, and get the STUPID out of the gene pool.

Someone has been promised something here and the FDA is getting involved in order to make it happen. Real world example....A small biopharmaceutical company had invented a delivery mechanism to deliver a dopamine agonist (well studied and been around for years) that provided constant drug delivery, relieving the up and down symptoms of Parkinson's disease. There was 98% retention in the Phase 3 trials. The "drug" was submitted to the FDA, along with the $1 million to look at the application, and never approved in the US. Conveniently other well-known US big pharma companies came out with a similar delivery system with new drugs. Someone has the FDA in there hip pocket in this case somewhere.
A kaleidoscope powered by your mic and camcorder (Firefox / Chrome).
I've been remote for the past 5 months and I love it. I'm more productive and I feel like I work more just because the convenience of being at home.

Also, I'm starting my own company and reading this helped me understand how others do it. I'm glad this is working out and hope that more people figure this out.

Many companies I've worked for have this outdated mindset that you need to be in an office together in order to make things work. The reality is you don't. Yes, you miss out on some of the local stuff that an office can provide. Like drama, politics, and petty bickering. But I would rather bitch about someone from home......in my jammies. :)
well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?
To add to this, it would not be in India's best interest to publicize any security issue within its nuclear complex.

Especially if that information would inflame a nuclear neighbor, with which there is already confrontational history.

I am also not sure how mentioning a competing nation that has been in direct dispute with the target nation is offensive, specifically in the context of listing nations that may have interest in the issue.
If I did see something that suggested a possibility of something, I would go the direction of what you mentioned in the last paragraph.

Although I agree with the FDA's actions, a consumer getting a thorough genetic exam is possibly what prompted this. Check out the artidcle http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-25/fda-tells-google-ba.... Turns out United Healthcare raised a concern which I believe is might be money-related. If your test results suggest a high possibility of some health issue from an non-FDA approved company and you requested a more accurate test, then I can see the health insurance companies getting involved.
Even though I moved from a Timex 2068 to a 386 SX PC, I was the only computer guy with a PC, all my high school computer friends owned Amigas.

So I got to use them every now and then, on the gaming/demo coding/music parties we used to organize.

The Amiga exposure spoiled me to always prefer GUI based applications to CLI ones, given the choice. :)

I tried to do the best I could on my PC, by booting straight into Windows, with a minimal MS-DOS configuration.

On Linux distributions I was always looking for GUI solutions to UNIX System V workflows.

Sometimes I wonder how would computing look like if Commodore managed to sell the Amiga properly.
I agree with most of what this article is saying, but the existence of YC is a perfect counter-argument. Although I've disagreed with PG regarding his opinions on "Zuckerberg-likeness" being important in founders, I know that YC selects for merit above all else.

How do I know this? Because PG has stated many times that he is excited about founders from the University of Waterloo in Canada, which used to be unknown on the international level. Clearly, after having met some incredibly talented founders, the YC team has calibrated its "prestige" ranking to match their observations based upon UW founder success.

To me, this is as close as one can get to a merit based system. Hire based on reputation, but adjust your reputation based upon the data you collect in real time. And most importantly, give everyone a fair chance. Never disqualify anyone preemptively without viewing their application.

Furthermore, as far as VCs are involved, there can be no better stamp on your resume than having gone through a program like YC.

Now, the counterpoint to all this is that, ideally, you should be able to crowd source/bootstrap this whole thing as a solo founder because you have merit. I think we are definitely moving in that direction, but some ventures will always be more capital intensive in terms of burn rate. As such, incubators and VCs will still be the "safe" path for fast growing and/or very ambitious companies.
At least you read the whole article. More than I can say for a lot of responses so far.

You said "almost entirely wrong". What did I get right?
Maybe, but not nearly as harmful as nearly all of those X considered harmful articles were.
Paul Carr's news site NSFW Corp joins with Silicon Valley-backed PandoDaily
Oscar: Auto-Adding Groceries To Your Grocery List
Michael Hastings Car Was ‘Hacked’
This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in.

In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working as hard. I had a friend who moved to Japan, and despite the fact that his wife was native Japanese, because she was 31 and married, she was practically unemployable. And the best he could do was get a job at coffee shop speaking English to customers. After 10 months, they moved back to the US. He hates Japan because there is no meritocracy whatsoever. Everything is based on age.

There may not be a lot of women who are CEOs of startups, but it's getting better every day, and the corporate ladder is very rewarding to smart women and minorities, at least in Silicon Valley and probably other places like NYC, LA, etc. My wife, who is in finance, went from Senior Manager to Senior Director is 3 years because she's very, very smart and the CFO recognized this and rewarded her aptly. Her bonus was >$100,000 for the 3rd year in a row, and I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women, and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well. If she were living in any other country in the world, who knows if she would have been given as lucrative of an opportunity.

So sure, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good meritocracy here, and as I said, getting better every year.
Diagnosing the true cause of someone's "gluten allergy" would allow them to start eating gluten again. Since gluten is pretty much everywhere, I'd say that'd be a nice quality of life improvement.
Insights from an app-developer veteran: Think simple, low-risk
It's complicated. Jewish is a religion as well as an ethnicity.

The much-before-CE cult turned into a religion turned into one of the longest running breeding experiments we have. The historical focus on internal tribal mating self-selected certain superpowers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) that come in quite handy these days.
Given the choice between being hacked, losing your reputation and millions of dollars; or having someone on call 24/7 to move USB sticks across an air gap; I'd choose the latter.

I've seen fast food joints and parking lots with 24/7 attendants, it can't possibly cost more than $100,000 a year.
PandoDaily Acquires NSFWCORP
Having a free market, which allows the inventor to be first to market, is an inherent means of appreciating innovation. Compare and contrast with ideal communism. Patents are really just a way to strengthen and extend this inherent benefit.
Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications:

http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html

I own a copy of the OS/2 Galactic Civilizations 2.
Our Responsibility As Developers
I am currently following a compiler class, and I must say that I am really amazed and impressed. For an assignment, we of course had to write an interpreter for our own mini language. The fealing you have after creating this interpreter was overwhelming.

For the lexer and parser, we used SableCC, an object oriented framework that generates a compiler in Java. I've never used anything else (yacc, lex, etc), so I can't compare the tool, but it provides a rich, useful and easy interface to use.
Where oh where did I say anything about "alternative to existing licensed medical technology"? Where has 23AM indicated such a thing whereby I'm supporting that argument by proxy?

Where did I or 23AM indicate that they had a cure for anything whatsoever?

The answers are "nowhere", "nowhere", and "nowhere".
As far as I can tell, you could translate that as "existing product". Given A and B, if A is already legally marketed, and B is basically the same thing, B has a lower bar to clear. Googling for "legally marketed predicate" turns up results like a 501(k) for a catheter[1] that the manufacturer says is "substantially equivalent" to another catheter already on the market.

[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf/K963092.pdf
In use on his personal site: http://namuol.github.io/

Konami: up up down down left right left right b a

God-mode: i d d q d

google: g o o g l e
Advice to anyone jumping into writing compilers, just pick a functional language, specially ML family.

Symbolic manipulation of data structures is plain joy, compared to what is required in C or Pascal family of languages.
This looks really cool and sleek! I may just use this somewhere.
It is useful for forcing all writes out to the storage device. If you device is battery/UPS backed, has enough capacity to flush its buffers (to disk or to flash memory) after a power loss, that is sufficient to (eventually) get your data on disk (yes,the drive may fail, but if that happens after the data has hit the platter, you have no guarantees, either)

From what I understand, that behaviour is in spec (for me, borderline, at best, but I don't make that spec) according to http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fsy... ("physical write from the buffer cache", not "physical write to the disk") and, AFAIK, is what others do, too (http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/mystery.html)

Edit: http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/Feb/msg00072..., referenced from that ridiculous fish post, gives more background info.
The article was written by a woman, so why would you assume it was written by a man? We're discussing ideas, yes, and those ideas have a lot to do with gender.
Show HN: Color in your browser console
Intelligent GZIP
I post all my tools/libraries publicly on github. I would never have so much hubris as to post some "framework" I created for some site as "The Getify Framework" that everyone else should use. That's completely contrary to the message I'm trying to get out.

Ironically, the site I vaguely referred to in the post WAS actually fully open-sourced. But NOT so that people could look at that code and say "Ah, he's saying that I should always do that same thing with every site I build".
I'm not talking about confirming transactions of merchant customers. I'm talking about confirming withdrawals from the merchant accounts.
I'm most curious to see how 23andMe is going to respond to this, because the more technical-regulatory language in this letter says essentially that in FDA's opinion the device is Class III (the highest risk of all medical device/diagnostics) and would require a PMA, unless 23andMe provides the evidence that allow FDA to de novo classify the device as Class II.

A Class III ruling would destroy the personal genomics market, because it would mean extensive clincial testing and documentation about the development of the device. I hope it doesn't stand.
I think you got at least the following things right:

* when a project has extremely high performance requiremets, rolling your own often makes sense.

* some frameworks do make really bad long term tradeoffs in the name of getting started quickly. (ironically though, I don't think any of the frameworks you listed fall into this category)

* if you have something that you're guaranteed is only going to be maintained by yourself (ie your own blog) then a lot of what you've said becomes "not wrong"

There are probably other things, but those are the two that come immediately to mind.
This is disingenuous. The FDA doesn't claim 23AM markets a "cure" either.
Thanks! Did you have fun shocking us for Halloween? We've put the lab notes up for that now http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-halloween
And whoever is running this proxy will _promise_ not to log any sensitive information (API keys not the least) or otherwise use/modify the response for their own ends?

Not to mention that the API endpoint is HTTP only, meaning everything is broadcast in the clear.

Also, cross origin requests are perfectly possible without this library, it's precisely why we use JSONP and CORS.

When it comes to security, this library is a collection of anti-patterns. As well as the JS anti-pattern of not overwriting native objects, such as XMLHttpRequest in this context.
Secondhand market allows users to resell used iOS/Android Apps, Steam Games
Well, get back to me when negligence is punished like fraud, since the impact on the victim can be just as drastic regardless of tortfeasor's intent or lack of same.
Welp. I wouldn't have made cheet.js if I knew about Mousetrap.

Oh well, it was just a fun one-night project anyway. :)
I thought the article would be a conversation about the value of frameworks versus libraries, opinionated versus generalized. Which is an interesting conversation and worth having. I was very disappointed.

Instead I saw someone proudly bragging about reinventing the wheel and NIH syndrome. Which is mind-boggling.
i found it interesting that depreciation is expected on your property and houses are expected to have no resale value.
I know it makes for a better headline to say $1M stolen, but unless actual USD was taken in the theft, I wish these headlines would say "X BTC stolen, valued at $Y."

But then again, the headline made it to the front page and got me to comment...
- a country has a single language

Really? Do people actually believe this?

Some "common" counties off the top of my head:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23...
Care to provide pointers on the correlations (research paper, whatever)?