skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jeff,

You may want to check LIST request statistics over the next few weeks. Between this thread, an Issue for boto, etc. I'm curious if you see a noticeable decline in LIST requests with the attention this has brought. I'm just curious from a data standpoint.
What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them.

I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.

Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
I lived in NYC for 12 years prior to moving to Silicon Valley and spent 8 of those years in the finance industry.

NYC government created a symbiotic relationship with the finance industry. NYC used the tax revenue from the high income earners to build up local infrastructure and make the city a better place. In the 12 years that I was there and the many more that I've been there in the region, the city had improved drastically. This was to the betterment of everyone.

Part of what made NYC great was its transportation infrastructure. It moved millions of people around the city at all times of the day. There was no class structure in the Subways; the 1% rode the subways alongside the service workers. People got a sense that everyone benefited from the increase in income and tax revenue.

This was dramatically different on the west coast. In the Bay Area, the local government create policies (limiting housing specifically) that don't benefit the long term future of the region. Compared to NYC, SF governance is pretty dysfunctional.

When I first moved out here, I was shocked by how lacking the transportation infrastructure was. I always had the vision that Silicon Valley and SF was high tech and that the public transportation infrastructure must be better than NYC. This was not the case. This lead to the high income earners to create a separate transportation system that benefit them (Uber, corporate shuttles, etc). This leads to a lot of friction between the haves and have not.
The fact that Google is willing to steamroll over consensus with its market power even in the face of technical arguments is precisely the problem here.
If you liked Koyaanisqatsi, you'll love Baraka [1] and Samsara [2], both also Ron Fricke.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraka_(film)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsara_(2011_film)
Awesome that OSX support is now official, but is there any benefit to using this process as opposed to using docker-osx? https://github.com/noplay/docker-osx

The official installation process seems more complicated, and I don't really see an advantage.
Can Real Estate Brokerages Survive As Software Eats the World?
It's unlikely to happen but not impossible :) What part of the scenario makes you think this won't happen btw?
This is one of the reasons I'm a loyal Sonic customer, despite paying more dollars for less bandwidth, relative to my friends and coworkers who use, for example, Comcast.
Good to see that crowdsourcing, one of the darlings of web commerce, is getting exposed for what it is: Cheap and crappy. The web capitalists loved the idea of labor competing against itself, maximizing value for the customer and minimizing labor costs. I.e. free work by 90% of the labor.

Good luck with the new system! Although you're doing it for practical reasons, I still applaud you moving away from this practice.
Thanks, yes.
Not in the slightest :) Troll on, friend.
Because the tristate area has far better infrastructure and housing options that includes low-income areas. There is a housing option for almost any income bracket that includes accessible public transit with reasonable commutes to the city, and thus, employment.
Not worthy - not worthy - not worthy.
Link bait into troll...
This should not be this high on my HN feed.
> 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast.

In fact, I disagree with this. The reason is that "elegant" usually means "decoupled" whereas many optimizations actually consists in "recoupling" to take advantage of special cases or to share resources among various decoupled objects.

Designing software to be fast and elegant is actually quite challenging problem. Of course, that makes it even more interesting.
Dogecoin random block reward NOT actually random and some people are "cheating"
> "You hate testing!"

I started working as a Unix sysadmin in 1996, and while I have always written programs, and have been doing so more heavily lately, I never wrote a program with someone else before. All of my programming has either been programs completely written by me, or small patches sent to existing open source projects. The purpose of testing aside from the most rudimentary always eluded me.

A few months ago I wrote my first program along with a good, professional programmer. I would code, he would code, I would code. He was good, but I noticed some of his changes would break my code. It occurred to me that testing is something of a communication device. I create functionality, I implement the test, then I tell other commiters to run the test suite before commiting code. If the tests do not complete, they know their code will break functionality I made.

I guess this is obvious, but when I read top reasons to do TDD etc. it is usually not mentioned as a prominent reason to do testing, if it is mentioned at all. I do not find tests beyond the most simple kind helpful in my code, but it starts becoming more useful when you have other people modifying the code.
"Your code may be elegant, but mine works" - of course it works today, who cares about tomorrow?
I've been a huge FlightFox fan and used them for several big (and complicated) trips - they've gotten me spectacular deals each time. This was all in the competitive phase, btw - haven't tried the new format yet.

One thing I just saw -- they dramatically raised the price if you're doing a "miles flight" -- it's now $99. I suppose I understand the thought process -- if you're not spending $$ on the flight, you're more willing to spend $$ on the consultation?

But honestly it makes me less-likely to use them. I use miles on some flights precisely because I DON'T want to spend any cash. Adding $100 in cash to the cost of the trip feels counter-productive.

Anyway, still a fan of the service, even if I've been priced out of using it :/
"leading teams" is very different from "coding 80 hours a week"

IDEs like Visual Studio and Idea will show you classes, methods and parameters as you type. You only need to know which namespace to use for a given operation.
Opinions may differ, but I don't really see scratching my balls as a public service.
I politely disagree with all 3 of your pressing issues for this decade.

1) Automation of human jobs has been happening since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It may end up being a serious problem for us, but I see no reason why the next ten years will be so different than the last 50. [Edit: Maybe it was a mistake to mention the industrial revolution. My main point is that why will the automation from 2014-2024 be significantly different than the automation from 2004-2014? I agree that automation will continue, but I am skeptical that we'll hit some breaking point.]

2) Solar is getting cheap, I agree. Nonetheless, there's no way in a mere ten years that we can manufacture TW of solar panels and upgrade the grid to handle them. The grid is extremely capital intensive, and power plants and power lines have lifetimes of ~50 years. Again, I agree with your assessment of the trend, but disagree with the timespan. 10 years from now things will look similar to how they look today.

3) Collapse of Western Democracy because of capitalism and pervasive surveillance? It hasn't happened in the last fifty years; what's different about the next ten?
English wasn't my first language this morning.
What if Redis goes down?
Ask HN: How to be proactive in the Software Industry?
It is always said that life doesn't just happen. Rather one has to consciously design and choose everything in life in order to be successful and happier.

I am a 25 year old programmer looking to reinvent myself and take charge of my life.

Please share some tips and suggestions on how to become proactive, especially with respect to the software industry.

How do you keep yourself at the forefront of the industry? How do you focus?
Patriotism and Nationalism, ever popular amongst morons and the cynical sociopaths that would manipulate them.
But isn't one of the promises of docker that you can use the same package regardless of underlying OS?
This is a problem, and I've long mused over possible solutions. Every time I think about it, I come to the conclusion that the solution isn't a new approach to software engineering, a new language that blows away every paradigm, some abstraction that promises to make app development simple, or any other silver bullet.

Indeed, the only "solution" I see is a solution in just the loosest sense. Namely: We continue incrementally improving languages, frameworks, libraries, and coding practices--a process that has been going on since software began. That's a disappointing answer, but I think it's the only answer, and I'll explain why.

The complexity of the tools we use is a result of their great flexibility and power. For example, a Ruby on Rails app is a huge agglomeration of technology, including HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, SCSS, Ruby, the Rails framework, and usually a number of other, project-specific technologies. All of these technologies must be learned (no small task), and their quirky interactions with each other must be managed. One sometimes thinks, "There must be a better way! There must be some abstraction that can hide all this technology." But I challenge anyone to design such a thing.

Each of those technologies is mature. Each one has had tremendous effort put into designing the simplest possible API without sacrificing power and flexibility. Even technologies with a lot of baggage, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, have seen substantial improvements in recent years. Given that, does anyone think they can do better? Can anyone do everything these technologies do and present a radically simplified API? Remember, you can't sacrifice power and flexibility and just support the most common use cases. Almost any application will need at least one thing that's unique or idiosyncratic.

This is why people use Rails (or similar tools) for custom apps instead of Wordpress. Wordpress has many off-the-shelf plugins that provide commonly-needed features. From a site maintainer's perspective, Wordpress abstracts away most of the complex web programming inherent in those features. But for serious app developers, that's almost never good enough. The plugins never seem to work exactly as you need them to, and they rarely talk to each other the way you would like. A short ways into the project, you're forced to either hack up your plugins, which is a maintenance disaster, or code your own plugins, which means you're really just using Wordpress as an inferior Rails substitute.
Show HN: Human Headers
Yes, which is why the data is effectively impossible to interpret. Only the FCC reports speed as a percentage of the plan. http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america
Manage Your Apps with OpenShift Mobile
Sure, here:

http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/article_549b0586-cefc-53a...

Can't see any others at the moment, sorry.

You might be right about forfeiting the right in illegal activities, I don't know.
Good question. It's one that puzzles me every day. While my ethnic background appears to have had no bearing on my life, it most certainly affected my parents' lives.
Bigcommerce Marketing Strategies – February Week 1
I've been thinking about adopting Celery for a new product launch. Not sure if I want to go with the Pre-Order system. However, I believe that Celery also works for Real-time orders.
Tabula-extractor: extract tables from PDF files
And there's an event in San Jose coming this March!

http://nv.scene.org/2014/
Indeed, I realised that as I posted it - the brits were absolutely complicit in it, as per Suez, Egypt, Arab-Israeli, etc. We held the geopolitical crown jewels for a good few hundred years - basically since the East India Company - and the pendulum swayed elsewhere. It always has, it always will, until we learn to follow our better instincts, and get over primitive tribalism... "nations" indeed.
No it's not. If the author's methodologies result in undecipherable code, that's quite relevant to the discussion.
Algorithm Development is Broken
Yes, exactly. And not just lock-in. For those that were around at the time, think of the IE5 tcp shenanigans to make IE seem "faster" when talking to IIS by messing with sequence numbers, sending RST instead of FIN, etc.
I'm not sure why but somehow it hard for non-white to succeed in white society... It is vicious circle.

But I want to point out that belief of newly rich white libertarians that market will solve this in peaceful way is a very dangerous dream. Trotsky said "not believing in force is like not believing in gravity".
trolling. got to be.
Is this creating autoscale groups and such on my behalf? Or is the automation being done by a service in finally.io?
"Job-Hopping" in Silicon Valley
Good move for CVS. A rational clear case can be made that a pharmacy should not be selling products whose primary use is subversion of our health. The notion is in fact rather bazaar. It perforce sends a bad message when a store operating under the aegis of a state license to sell medicine sells something as bad for you as cigarettes.
Good pytest fixtures reference including some new-ish features
Thanks nlh. First, thanks for the feedback on the pricing. We're talking about the miles product right now and will update it very soon. The high price was to account for most miles trips being fairly complex, but we'll segment a little more and offer you much better pricing.

UPDATE: just spoke to the experts and made it $69 for now. We'll change the pricing to be +$19 to use miles, but that'll take a little time. Reason it's more is that the experts have a few tricks that take considerable time.

Great to hear you received value with the competitive format. We still have the top 0.3% of experts from the previous system, they just get paid more and can spend a lot more time on your trip now. But we'll keep analyzing and make sure it's working well.
Yes! I forgot to include that!
Encountered an uncaught exception, too.

http://pastebin.com/UsR21Cqe
Gates Spends Entire First Day Back in Office Trying to Install Windows 8.1
> Doing things elegantly in practice unfortunately adds zero flexibility for non-trivial changes in business direction: you simply can't foresee everything. One swift decision at mid-management level and your elegant framework suddenly becomes an unwieldy Titanic impossible to put into a quick turn.

Yes and no. If you're writing very elegant statically typed functional code like in Haskell or ML, you're going to have to be elegant at the design level, and yes, you might have trouble adapting to new requirements. But if you're in a domain where requirements aren't always set in stone, you're probably using a more dynamic environment where you don't have to be what the OP called "elegant" at the design level (e.g. his unrealistic caching layer example), but you can still write elegant code at the micro level (within functions, classes, etc.), which will almost certainly lead to substantially less technical debt and shouldn't cost much if any more time than quick hacks at the micro level.
There is an "us versus them" mentality in NY/NJ/CT, but there are a few countervailing factors:

1) Liberals on the east coast are more pragmatic/less idealistic than those on the west coast.

2) NY/NJ/CT has had a long time to get used to the negatives of having the banking industry there, and has had a long time to figure out and leverage the positives.

3) In NY/NJ/CT, there is more reliance across classes on shared infrastructure. Those bankers in Long Island take LIRR to work, and pay into a system everyone uses.

4) People who work on Wall Street embrace that they're just in it for the money and are doing "business as usual." Silicon Valley does "business as usual" but puts on this air of "saving the world!" That hypocrisy rubs people the wrong way.

5) I think there is more shared culture in NY/NJ/CT, at least among certain key groups. Remember, this foment about "haves versus have nots" isn't raised by the poor people themselves. It's raised by an intellectual elite. I think there's a much bigger cultural gap between the crunchy hippies at Berkeley that write these sorts of articles and the engineers in Silicon Valley, then there is between the crunchy hippies at Columbia and the bankers on Wall Street.
What would go into building a vessel designed to remove all the junk from the ocean? How would it capture and process the waste?
Actions speak louder than words though.

Apple already have integrated and deployed the Adobe CSS regions stuff, Google say it's just not their priority this year and would have performance implications on mobile. This is the weasel way to say they don't care, much as Apple are here. The devs may feel otherwise, but they are beholden to their managers who will be well aware of the strategic implications of their work.

Google see Chrome as the best way to bust the iOS App Store, and as such Apple will mysteriously make the e-books in WebKit vision more compelling in the near future than the in browser app development one.

I'm not saying I agree with Google here (though more for tech reasons), just that we need to be clear that the web is experiencing a schism, and that there are certain subjects which it is hopeless to expect agreement on. This is one of them.
I don't think my code could ever be considered art; it spends too much time being correct to be beautiful.
Windows, Mac OS X and Android get hacked in Sochi
Right now the automation is done by a service (no autoscaling groups are created on your behalf). Do you have triggers in mind that you would like to create autoscaling groups for you?
I sincerely hope this doesn't happen.

Web software basically runs anywhere and doesn't have to be updated; it has minimal platform dependencies.

Native code, on the other hand, is a 25-year-long story of install/uninstall, sophisticated package/dependency management, chroot jails, and viruses.

I fear that, if web software continues its crawl out of the browser sandbox, we'll get all the disadvantages of native code (security exploits, dependency problems) without any of the advantages (speed, high-performance graphics)
Yeah, I'm sure that if people just nicely asked their oppressors to stop then they would. This is the right idea here. Good job!
While you're perfectly allowed to disagree, it sounds like what you're saying is this:

"Collections of div-soup activated by jQuery plugins are the way to write maintainable web applications that make sense"

It's not as though Javascript has no role whatsoever in custom elements, but really, there's a lot to be said about how this way of working will be a huge improvement over the current jQuery + div-soup status quo.
School quality absolutely has a big impact on how well you do in life, that's not even a question. If you go to a school where most of your classmates read 2 or 3 grades below grade level and your teachers struggle every day to maintain order in the class, much less teach the actual subjects, of course it hurts the students. When you go to a school that is overrun with gangs and you have to take care when walking home from school lest you get gunned down, that certainly makes it far more difficult to do well in school.

A kid's upbringing and environment at home also play very large factors. Truth is that all of those things matter.

I think whether or not someone does well in life is game of probabilities. If you go to a bad school, it lowers your probability of doing well in life. If they have great parents maybe that cancels out that negative, maybe it doesn't. Some people will beat the odds and do well at a bad school with bad parenting. But that doesn't mean that access to a quality school doesn't have a big impact.
Your comment notes the problem of the growing gap between the rich and poor. If anything, though, the last 100 years has been closing the gap between the rich and poor. Today, China and India are much richer relative to the US and the UK than they were 100 years ago. Furthermore, I think the world is far more equal in term of consumption choices. The movies that rich people watch are the same movies that you and I watch. The internet that rich people surf is the same internet that you and I surf. The iPhone that rich people carry in their pockets is the same iPhone that you and I carry in our pockets. The incredible scaling from mass manufacturing and digital goods means that many consumption choices are the same for the rich and poor (not all, of course, but more than in the past).
Fast, good and cheap. Pick two. The author's projects require more fast and cheap than good to be successful. Other projects will have different requirements.
Speed tiers at first? Pretty much all Internet connections today are sold by speed already.
Ask HN: web tool to organize sprint retro meetings?
(TL;DR: wanted: a replacement for (the late) actionitems.us)

In 2011 the dev team I was on went to Pivotal Labs for a few months to bootstrap a rebuild of our company's site, and learn their style of "extreme programming". We used a tool to organize our weekly retrospective meetings which I felt was remarkably useful and easy, but it's since disappeared and I haven't found a web-based replacement.

The site was actionitems.us, it was bare-bones and did just one thing and felt easy to use and understand. In a nutshell:

* users are collected into teams

* team has an upcoming meeting

* team members can submit thoughts/topics for upcoming meeting

* members can rank topics in order of what they'd like to discuss

* members can comment on existing topics

* when meeting starts, ordered topic list is the meeting's agenda

I felt that it was a great tool for our team. It was fast enough to use that any thoughts on the current dev cycle (code, ops, design, administrative, office-related...) could be quickly recorded, and then it got out of the way. No one had to add anything or rank anything or comment, so if you didn't care it didn't intrude.

I haven't found anything like it; does anyone know of a similar tool? Might be a fun open-source project to start if not.
Sooo funny 2 chicks at a seattle Seahawks party.