skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked at Crudzilla. (Is that the product you're referring to?) I don't really have the time to test-run a new framework right now. Perhaps you could give a quick overview of how you're solving the key problem I identified above? To recap, my argument is: The web stack must be flexible and powerful, because nobody's abstraction layer can anticipate the weird, idiosyncratic little needs of most real-world projects. Thus, the flexibility and power of the dominant tools, like Rails and Django, can't be sacrificed in the name of simplicity. Or if you do make that sacrifice, your tool will only be useful to the tiny subset of applications that fit into your narrow definition of how an app works or what it does.
Wo-jis-ki.
I've read your blog post twice now. I've looked at your website. I've seen your comments here. Still I have no idea what you're proposing or why I would be motivated to use... whatever it is you're trying to convince me to use.

Your message is vague as vague can be. It also doesn't help that the word "algorithm" is sufficiently general to cover any piece of code.
I don't think we have to worry about "everyone" or even a small percentage thereof learning how to code. They won't. It's not that they can't, but it takes more than a couple of hours writing "Hello World" to do anything substantial and most people are not willing to put in the time, day after day, to learn anything substantial.

That being said, I can't imagine anything more human and more powerful than text. If I want to give instructions to a _human_, the best way I know of is to write them down as clearly as possible. If this works with a complex person, why would it not work with an incredibly simple (from an abstract point of view, not implementation) microprocessor. After all, all processors have an extremely limited set of instructions (even CISC ones).

This desire for something that is not text seems misplaced. After all, text is (IMO) certainly better than pairs of numbers indicating operation and data. Writing is one of the greatest human achievements. To dismiss it in favor of touch or something graphically visual is to disregard its power and superiority to both touch and visual systems of communication.

When designing a system, if I am able to give it commands in English (or any other language), this would be vastly superior to anything visual or touch based that I can think of or that the article specifies (or rather doesn't). To take the whole system of a language like English with its complex idea-expression engine and its vast array of words (1 million++) and discard it is ridiculous. Now, we are not currently programming in English, or anything even remotely close (though many languages' grammar follows from natural language somewhat), but I do believe this is, and has been for decades, a goal that may one day be achievable. This is desirable as humans are naturally inclined towards language and those who practice it can be incredibly good communicators (programmers of reality).
Learning Rust the hard way
I can't fault their service offering but their pricing seems very high when compared to similar tools in that segment.

I value Pingdom and Librato Metrics as significantly more valuable for my business and yet statuspage.io is double or even quadruple the price.

Having said all that, it's probably that tools like Librato are significantly underpriced as opposed to statuspage.io being overpriced :)
I don't the author understands programming if he sees object-oriented programming as being in the same bucket as HTML/CSS/JS. OOP is a way to deconstruct problems, just like functional programming, and their beginnings are based on very similar principles.

Any language that fully accepts the object-oriented paradigm lends itself very naturally to functional programming, and vice-versa.
Very sure... we promise we won't pester you. We send a weekly newsletter with challenges, but you can opt-out if it doesn't interest you.
I used to think Wall Street is very evil at sucking up the wealth of the rest of the country to line up the pockets of themselves while creating no real value. Nowadays I am pondering whether Silicon Valley is guilty of similar practices.

We see companies like Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, etc goes IPO and commands a ridiculous valuation while having paltry profit/revenue under the name of "growth stocks", while suburban moms in mid-west buy those stocks up because they read about them on CNBC.

Then the founders/VCs cash out big time and then use the money to prop up the next series of startups, then rinse wash repeat. How much of this is sustainable? Maybe once in a blue moon a company with P/E of 500 is justified because they MAY be the next Google or Apple or Microsoft (ironically, none of those companies ever traded at that kind of P/E themselves, oh my..the days of only taking your company public AFTER you started making tons of money...), but these days when that kind of growth expectation is the norm then obviously most of them are in for a big crash in the future, since we aren't going to have a "next Google" every 6 months.

I wonder if this bubble will deflate slowly or crash and burn like it did back in early 2000s.

Sigh...I'm in my mid-20s and I actually work in SV but I already sound like a old geezer when talking to some of my peers about the tech industry's near term prospects.
FWIW, I had my 2010 mbp motherboard warranty-replaced and the crashes were gone.
Facebook in the Edwardian era
Meta comment: The article:
(a) covers enough relevant topics
(b) using rather ambiguous terminology
(c) while offering sharp opinions
(d) about a world of pain
(e) that we all experience
(f) but can never be solved in general

This is not a bad formula for crafting a blog post that you want to get picked up via HN. It is also a great way to start a discussion that will never end.
> Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Not really. Private property is about ownership, not maintenance. We've already seen that privatization isn't generally enough to encapsulate the negative externalities an activity generates. Further, we've actually seen that in some cases privatization creates for new negative externalities or incentives to ignore negative externalities.
Very interesting read! Especially when we are almost ready (as in next week) to launch our own crowdsourced travel advice platform on http://www.voyando.com.

Let me share what we found during our test period.

We have no 'application process' for experts (flightfox has) which makes the 'crowd' somewhat smaller. In our experience this removal of the process increases the competition and the chances of a better outcome. Take stackoverflow for example: limiting it only to top-programmers would harm the concept. (i see SO as a crowdsourced programming advice platform :-))

Our platform supports more than just flights. We have hotels and complete trips as well. The philosophy of our platform is more on the convenient side of things instead of the 'hacker' mentality that FF has (no pun intended, FF is great for HN crowd I think). Our service could be used by your mom and dad.

Given the fact that we have no selection procedure of experts, a broader range of travel types and aiming to be a convenience service, we are convinced, also looking at our test phase, that crowdsourcing IS the right way to go for us. But hey, only time will tell and maybe you'll see a blogpost about our pivot in 18 months as well!

Congrats to FF for this pivot and the really great and open blogpost.
Brilliant relaunch and rebranding, nice work guys. Going to be amazing seeing where this goes.
Did they dump all the other products?
What lessons beyond "Even major retailers have serious security problems" should a consumer be worried about here?

I don't know much about PCI compliance, but I don't get the idea that it is something I should have to worry about as a user of a credit card.
Re: slower user growth - I wonder how much longer it's taking new twitter bots to find unused handles...
No palm oil is sustainable. I have lived in Malaysia and can tell you that most the five hour drive from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore is spent looking at palm oil plantations. Malaysia is in fact with Indonesia by far the worst offender when it comes to deforestation. Also both countries are highly corrupt. Land grabbing is the norm and politicians and businessmen gain from the losses of the people in villages and the animals in the jungles that once were there.

So please don't say guilt free.
All thanks for the replies. Makes more sense, but I would have put it in as "this defense system needs X amounts of this rare fuel Y each Z" (or, maybe, bring a statistical aspect into it: "the Foo in your bar are wearing out faster than usual. Please make sure you have spare parts"), not as "yes, you have a zillion extremely powerful guns, but if you don't pay rent in time, we, will take your guns away from you.". This, to me, makes this universe feel like some toy system with some all-powerful entity who really is in control (a bit like Q, but less disinterested).

Also, what would an all-powerful entity need that money for? It would have to be some accountant-deity to enjoy such regular payments. Or was that apparent glitch that showed the bill as paid to some part of the fun?
I'm pretty sure you all have this back-asswards. Susan's garage is where google was headquartered in the early days (1998). She didn't get the job because she is Sergey's wife's sister. Sergey met his wife through one of his first employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki
I love how PHP is mentioned in one paragraph in a long interview, yet gets two bullet points and the title here at HN. Hate much?
> Your set includes every piece of closed source software ever installed.

Indeed it does. My machine, my rules.

It is sheer folly to trust cryptographic software without source code. Do we need to fall prey to another RSA fiasco again?
Facebook open sources new android security tool
Geeksphone Revolution specs revealed
Only if the court can prove whether a program halts or not.
Once its available on the windows platform
The following reply does not inspire confidence:

Sorry, this is my fault. These things were defined in the spec before, but we sliced them out for a separate spec, which I was supposed to write and haven't gotten finished yet.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0113.h...
What do we do to make sure these tools are not turned on us?
Ouch! Yes, that can happen, and I'd argue it's pathological. Let me rephrase that series of events as follows:

1. Artificial deadline is set.
2. Artificial deadline is unnecessarily converted into crucial deadline.
3. Code quality suffers, saddling the company with technical debt that costs real money and real opportunities later.

> many of the deadlines are baked into the contracts as deliverables

Oh absolutely. I'm a consultant too, and I do that all the time. I set my contractual deadlines such that I don't have to sacrifice the codebase. Granted, there are exceptions to every rule, and I'm not going to claim I've never, ever accrued technical debt due to a deadline. But I wouldn't make it a philosophy, which the article seems to be doing.
Surefire Ways To Lose A Great Software Engineer
Hi nigerian, apologies for the confusing pricing, we're working on that now. Anything more than one destination is multi-city. So your first example is just international, but the second eg is multi. Your second itinerary should be perfect for our guys.
It is not that much about hate. It is about how development of modern server apps (Ghost, Discourse) is leaving the 'standard' way of doing things and spawning a new generation of apps that will compete with the established PHP-based solutions (WordPress, Drupal, etc.)
Agreed! I'm really curious to know what users are motivating them to put so much effort into this area though.
"Its boggling to me that any company would permit another company on the same network when their work is wholly unrelated."

Not really, you've got a store manager who wants instant access to the same refrigeration alarms and control system his vendor sees and live sales figures all from the same PC. I can totally see it happening.

Wholly unrelated would be the Target store manager (or district mgr or whatever) having access to Walmarts backup generator telemetry.
I often use Newegg. Some in the comments there complained about their customer service. I can't compare, since I don't use Amazon much. But in my case for example when I was buying a motherboard with an Intel chipset recently from Newegg, customer service couldn't help me with verifying whether it's C1 of C2 stepping (C1 has a known USB 3 bug: http://apcmag.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-haswell-lynx-p...). I.e. I couldn't figure it out before buying. That wasn't so pleasant, I had to call the manufacturer after I got the board to verify it. Luckily it happened to be C2. But I still prefer to support Newegg because they staunchly fight patent trolls (unlike Amazon).
Well, they are programmers, I think they are more than conscious about how we (others too, but especially programmers) feel about that! Also, we can always pest them back with auto response filters[1] :-)

[1]: A Croatian (I'm Croatian, too) website made me submit my email for a Web purchase, but they started sending newsletters they have no unsubscribtion mechanism, and they send the newsletter from <newsletter id>-newsletter@..., which I could filter and send to spam (which I also do) , but instead, I forward the email back to them and also send a reply that I'd like to stop receiving these emails. Ironically, they asked me on a few occasions to stop emailing them, I simply respond with the same reply they sent me when I asked to be unsubscribe: "It's automatic, there's nothing I can do about it." There's always a way to fuck with those who try to fuck with you. :-)
I'm trying to think of the economic way to run a robust small scale service. I think you need a way to rapidly spin up a replica service on an entirely different provider.

I'm picturing a setup where you run on a cheap Hetzner host or similar with the DB synced to a slave replica on EC2 or other cloud provider and a build system so that you can spin up a whole replacement infrastructure on EC2 if there is a severe outage or failure in commercial relationship and switchover by changing the DNS settings.
Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)
Google is working on a way to run Chrome apps without the full Chrome process
> I almost failed off chair, I could not believe that someone was able to find the ip.

cloudflare adds a direct.* subdomain that points to your actual IP.
1) Will there be limits on the size of data sets/ what size data are you optimizing for? Some algos focus on hundreds of records, some on billions, and the ideal system for either are quite different (small data works great by transferring data back and forth over http, data with hundreds of thousands of records and up... not so much).

2) Same question as above, but for processing times. Some algos are aimed at operating on the fly and might take ~1 second or less. Others (many that I deal with quite often), might run for days, or even weeks. What sort of processes are you optimizing for, and are long running procs on the radar?

It is an interesting idea, but there is a high bar when competing against my language's package manager, and the 10s of thousands of "algorithms" already out there. Best of luck!
This blog post would have been way better without the ranting style of writing.

It doesn't even get to the point (that programming does not have to be text-based) until halfway into the article.

The title and the objection to other people learning to code are at most tangentially related to that point. Just because there could be better ways to give instructions to machine doesn't mean other people should wait to learn how to instruct machines until those methods are developed.
Being worried or unsure does not give the Government a right to harass people. As we seem to both agree, the prosecutors have too much power and way too little common sense.
Another typo: the link to the source is to "gethub.com/discourse". Funny thing is when I clicked it I assumed GitHub was having another outtage until I scanned the Url more closely.
Firefox added spell check in Oct of 2006 (according to Wikipedia) Nitpicking yes but the modern innovation in browsers didn't start in 2012 with Chrome more like 2005 with the first stable versions of FF. I agree Chrome put the whole market into another fenzy but you clearly missed the years prior when FF was the shit.

Also, MS didn't make IE "just good enough" they integrated the browser into the entire OS! Good or bad, they made a huge bet on the web as the future but when the DOJ essentially slapped them down they said "fuck it" and starved the market for half a decade until FF came around and the government/public had moved on from the whole Netscape fiasco enough for them to start giving a shit again. Why would you innovate on a product with the potential that any "feature" you added would put you back in court against the US Government. No thanks.
So Google is taking their cues from the Internet Explorer playbook.

Having been in (and out) of standards wars at Sun and NetApp it really cries out how challenging doing "standard" stuff is. The original IETF standards process was really powerful at keeping out cruft, it included "fully documented" and "two or three interoperable implementations, of which source code must be available for at least two of them." The goal being that someone could sit down and write an implementation, and two there were at least two pre-existing implementations they could compare against for interoperability issues/questions and testing.

But standards break down when it comes to captured market share. If you're market share capture depends on your "value add", then you don't benefit if anyone can implement the same thing and you have to stay compatible with them.
Cdist 3.0.5 introduces overrides
Good point on the text - we'll make an update... The landing page navigation?

The webcam comment had me laughing for a few minutes. Never really noticed, but it's an easy fix.
Poki a Pocket client for Windows Phone
How is it bad security? As a consumer, there's practically no issue. Data mining for fraud detection is pushed off onto the card provider - not my problem. There's no "direct access to money". It's a bill from a service provider that I can easily dispute. At worst, it's a slight inconvenience if my CC info is compromised.
Looks to me like New Jersey is fishing.

Some of the things they are asking for seem to be beyond the capability of anyone to provide, other than a Supreme Deity.
I've been a Prime subscriber for years now, and have recently been reconsidering my membership. The free 2-day shipping now frequently means 2-day free to the local post office. Once there, it's usually another couple of days before it gets to me (and my office is literally next door to local post office). Not cool, Amazon.
Sounds great, but I saw the video on my iphone, and shared it before accidentally deleting it.
Is there a way to get it back,
even though it was on my iphone?
I am so sad to have lost that touching video!
Also, why has facebook not allowed people to regenerate it if deleted?
thanks :)
Yup. To elaborate more fully, I buy wild-caught fish because of how unsustainably many fish farms are run right now. I buy particular varieties of fish based on what species are most sustainably fished. I buy fish to support the fish industry ("vote with your wallet") in hopes that people will see the demand and continue to pursue & improve fish farming in the future.
github sign in doesn't actually seem to sign me in.
Is there a way to go back to Katas that I've started working on, but haven't completed? (Or is that something I shouldn't be doing?)
> "Programming is a notion to extend human capability, by offloading humanly-infeasible work onto a machine. It is the promise of an amplified knowledge worker. This would be worthy to learn."

With this (correct) notion the author continues until he decides that

> "Meanwhile there are few souls looking to evolve text code into something more humanly intuitive. For example something you can touch, you don’t have to read, or that tells you what the computer is thinking, so you don’t have to think like a computer yourself."

I can't help but feel that what the author really wants is some futuristic kind of AI assistant. Decades of programming progress has resulted in numerous abstractions piled on top of one another in order to minimize the amount of "thinking like a computer" that you have to do. But all abstractions are leaky and when you encounter those leaks you will inevitably have to be able to think like the machine you are trying to communicate with.

Why is it acceptable to say that effective communication with people depends on being able to think like the person you're talking to, but demand that communication with a far more different and limited machine should never require you to compromise on your preferred thought patterns? This is the fundamental fallacy of the natural language programming advocates. They want to use another entity to do things for them but demand all communication with that entity be in their preferred language, on their own terms.
There are plenty of online payment systems that work far, far better than credit cards that cannot, by design, ever have user account information stolen from a retailer.

Why doesn't Target use those payment systems? Wait, I think I know... because their customers don't use those payment systems. Are you saying that customers should "be angry at" themselves?

It has been years since I've used a credit card at a big-box store. They all still take cash.
13 companies control basically all media, therefore only certain viewpoints are acceptable. Which of the 13 owns the onion, they need to know they've got a rogue operative.
If sites started doing this (using a visitor's GPUs and Litecoin more likely), the downside to a consumer is the extra cost in electricity (which goes to electricity co, not the website) and lower lifetime of hardware. If it's all opt-in, it's up to the consumer whether they think it's worth their cost to "support" the website. I don't see an offer of removing ads as a benefit because that can easily be done by just installing AdBlockPlus, the real benefit is feeling good about "supporting" a site. (And unless they happen to have a good GPU they'd probably support the site more by just clicking a few ads, or actually sending them real money via any of the micropayment services including bitcoin.)
Schedule+ launches at Stanford University
A torus is not a hollow sphere. The OP's article stated that the computed surface of the torus was an equipotential surface, meaning that the apparent gravitational force (a combination of actual gravity and centrifugal force) at every point on that surface is straight down into the ground. OP even calculates the strength of the apparent gravity at every point on and around the torus. Assuming the planet started out in this toroidal shape, it would be stable since the net force at every location is "straight down", so there would not be anywhere where pieces would just fly off into space.