skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: An average developer's work seems meaningless?
I have been wondering what people need. Most people would love to have a better house, furniture, food, etc. They barely need a better software.

I was a developer for 8 years. I worked in some corporation and some startup, and it's the same issue all around. The product is not really been needed nor used.

I can see that companies like Google had a good impact on the world but they have a good supply of good engineers. They don't need me.

It seems that I would be happier saying making good wood furnitures. But hey that's hard to find a woodworker's job and I guess the paying is a lot less.

I'm somehow lost. Did you ever had the same feeling? What change did you do?
It can't even find my city given city and state, in a state capital! I'll switch just as soon as it learns where the United States is.
An interesting next step to Turning machines I read about recently was Kolmogorov-Uspensky machines. They allow pointers and are nearer to real machines we use. Whilst they still recognising the same languages in polynomial time as Turing machines, for some things they can compute and order of complexity class faster. Turing machines often end up traversing up and down the tape, linearising binary tree lookups for instance, whereas KU can do binary tree lookups in O(log(n)). Both machines do the lookups in P, but KU's particular P can be provably lower.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_machine
Gates Seen Taking Bigger Products Role at Microsoft
How to Build your Startup Idea in 3 Hours
Amazon itself is already very expensive compared to a dedicated server.
> Take this automatic reply message based on some words from your email.

And hopefully you didn't make the mistake of publishing things with your personal google/gmail username, because that might get permanently closed with no recourse.
Stop tpp fast track at least modify it
Minecraft is an interesting choice of example, given that it so heavily borrowed from Infiniminer.
Heroku made the bold decision to design its routing technology to be optimized for things like Node and Go rather than Ruby. So if you are using Ruby on Rails (like RapGenius) Heroku's platform will simply fall short, both in terms of efficiency and flexibility.

XL Dynos let you throw money at the random routing problem which helps routing efficiency at the expense of spend efficiency (b/c they are a lot more expensive and scaling down to 1 XL dyno is still pretty expensive).

In my opinion, if you're using anything other than 1X dynos on Heroku you are compensating for some other part of your stack being broken.

We're probably months away from Heroku having some serious competition in the super easy PAAS space. Heroku's high prices have summoned competitors en masse, and by some stroke of luck Amazon has not really made a serious effort to encroach on Heroku's profits.
I think this plan is very naive. There will always be money for more police and military stuff. North Korea is extreme example. Result of those obstructions would be mostly prosecution of activists.
> We don't do a great job of making the point when you arrive at osm.org, but we aren't competing with Google Maps. We're competing with Navteq/Nokia and other map data providers.

If you want seven billion people using it, it's going to be quite necessary to create a consumer-facing canonical front-end.

I'm sure you can get lots of volunteer hackers to contribute if you throw up an MVP on github.
I find that table super hard to parse :( is that just me?
What does triumph mean in a computing context?

Hackers by their very nature seek mastery over challenging concepts. I think haskell and lisp are similar in the sense that they have long roads to mastery. The average hacker in these languages spends many exhilirating years scaling the tower of knowledge and this journey does a great job of keeping the hacker occupied and mystified. In simpler languages like C / Javascript there is very little in the language with which to immerse yourself. The only recourse for a stirring experience is to go ahead and build something immersive.

Haskell and Lisp are great languages for thinking deep thoughts. Expecting them to dominate the computing landscape is similar to expecting an abstract algebra book for topping the New York times best sellers list.
I like Julia, but their multi-machine stuff needs a jolt.

I spent some time with HDFS.jl and trying to re-do spawn to launch tasks onto a HADOOP/YARN cluster, but couldn't really get @everywhere includes to work.

But oherwise compared say R, which runs on a cluster, the SSH based communication methods of Julia kinda made it difficult to run it anywhere beyond small data land.

It would kick-ass to use on a cluster, if only it could do that & distribute keys on a total order partitioner like radix-sort.
As you say, that extra detail makes it cluttered. I can only speak for myself, but having traveled to completely foreign locations, that extra clutter (that paradox of choice) just adds to the confusion and overwhelmingness of unknown territory.

When I look at OSM for a city that I know well, i'm not nearly as overwhelmed and I do find the information quite handy. Two different use cases, I guess.
The data isn't the problem of Openstreetmap. What's missing is one go-to site with a nice rendering that doesn't try to show off all features and offers a similar feature set as google maps (searching for locations, shops, navigation).
While I get your point, I don't think it's very productive.

The majority of the people who interact with OSM will get a perception of it that's biased by the presentation. Even with the MapQuest Open style, Google Maps, to me, are far more pleasant to look at and easier to understand. The text seems to be rendered in a better, more readable way, and GMaps has a better handle on decreasing contrast for things that aren't that important, allowing more important features to stand out.

You can tell me that I shouldn't care, because you provide such awesome data, and I'm tempted to agree, but my reptilian brain will give me opposite feelings every time I try to look at your maps.
That makes sense, crowd sourcing etc can be used to take risk out of development. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say you don't need copyright though. Most crowd-funded games are still under proprietary licenses. Part of the appeal is getting a game earlier / cheaper than you would at release.

If you allow unlimited redistribution you remove much of that incentive.
I think there is a point to be made for avoiding an ecosystem (without necessarily using a loaded word) due to a perception of low quality of available libraries. This has certainly happened to me in the past.

On the other hand, some stacks, I feel, do help with writing better code. But don't fool yourself that there is a silver bullet.
No, though I would very much like to. Fairly often I drive in areas where good cellular coverage and good map coverage are spotty or even completely absent. I would love an easy to use app that I could run that would allow me to upload data. I also like OSM for the freely-downloadable-ness. Driving in dark (no data) areas I want to download in advance whatever map data is available; and Google makes that much more painful than it need be.
New York City

Quovo: full-stack data mining specialist

Freelance, part-time, intern welcome, possibly transitioning to full time

Quovo is a FinTech Big Data startup (lots of jargon there, we know) that performs aggregation and analytics for investment advisors, foundations, hedge funds, and even everyday investors. Learn more about us at (www.quovo.com).

We're looking for a full-stack developer to work specifically on data mining projects such as screen scraping, website crawling, DOM parsing, etc. Fancy yourself a bit of a hacker? This is the job for you.

Skills and experience:

- Strong understanding of HTTP and webservers

- HTML scraping and other data mining/retrieval experience

- Strong regular expression skills

- PHP, C++, JS knowledge (or similar languages)

- Familiarity with HAR, XPATH, jQuery

Email info@quovo.com with a resume and description of relevant experience, and we'll take it from there...
I've never heard of this. Wikipedia had this about it, which is pretty hilarious; Some teenagers turned the sound into a mobile phone ringtone, which could not be heard by teachers if the phone rang during a class.[38] Mobile phone speakers are capable of producing frequencies above 20 kHz.[39] This ringtone became informally known as "Teen Buzz"[40] or "the Mosquito ringtone" and has since been sold commercially.
TASM from Borland had bunch of macros/shortcut keywords for the patterns you describe. There's dozens of library files to do similar things in MASM as well. mammon_ had written a bunch of macros [1] that do same thing for NASM. See how he exploits NASM's preprocessor for this in his "Extending NASM" article in the Assembly Language Journal, Feb/Mar 1998, Issue 3. He also demonstrates how do all the control structures in NASM's preprocessor (for, if, switch/case, while, do/while, etc.).

[1] http://mammon.github.io/Text/nasm_apj.txt
Amazon and AWS is down and many of the big players seem to be down.
Lisp isn't even all that unique any more. Garbage collection, closures, REPL & macros are all available in other languages these days. Scala for instance has all these features.
asmttpd - 0.04

Using Document Root: htdocs/
An error has occured, exiting
It's not the Internet, it's Hacker News, which has rules and guidelines to promote civility and maximize signal to noise. So what false ideology is being planted, and to what end?
Well yes, but for some organisations -- namely those without inhouse ops expertise -- it makes sense. I've done some work for a non-profit that pays over $3K per month to Heroku and it's probably worth it given the cost and risk to migrate off.

One also pays quite a high tax to use, say, Ruby vs, well, just about any other language implementation except for Python and non-HHVM PHP (see for example http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/). Many would defend the use of Ruby as entirely justified on the grounds of productivity.

The point is, there are inefficiencies all over the place and most consider them not worth optimising out.
The Secret to a Successful Mobile Game Launch
Open Source Software is Important for Modern Science
This is a very important point.

I found it very true that different people learn in different way from my effort on sharing the details of programming and math with fellow co-worker and interns too.

Try make 30 people grab the same details (programming/details) and you will learn a lot about what you teach about and also on how people learn.

When i understand that, i ultimately understand the reason why there is so much debate and on going discussion about some particular details: much of our confusion were caused by lost of context in communication.

[edit: typo]
Like my home IP address or my e-mail address, I believe my full name is not very private data. If it allows people to know that I own an iThingy, or to relate my surname to my MAC address, then so be it. I accept this is not private data, I do not use my surname or email as a password.

Calling you computer "Fitzgerald John Kennedy's MacBook" will not reveal any critical information about you.

If I prefer to enforce my own naming conventions (which do not reveal my name), it is mostly because I love naming things myself, and making up naming rules.

If you are looking for a better way to name a laptop/smartphone, please define the "goals" of naming.
It's hard to tell what your mix of sales is, but assuming that the bulk of your customers are on the $9.99 or $19.99/month plans, you're probably not grossing more than 3 or 4 thousand per month.

Similar to EverPix, you have storage/bandwidth/hosting fees associated with it, so right now, it's not enough to keep a full time person employed.

Try selling it on Flipppa - because it brings in revenue, you could probably get about 1-2x your yearly revenue as a sales price.
The map comparison tool is quite excellent. I'd love to use this tool for testing generic sites.

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=39.7203&lat=43.58538&zoom=...
This reasoning only holds if all technologies are equally good and all lead to rapidly building stable, specification-correct and easily maintainable applications in all situations. Sadly this is not the case - poor development happens much more frequently than not and we should constantly be examining our tools to understand why and to improve our work.
Do you get this problem if you use a different browser for the other gmail account?
You forget the essential feature of Google Maps: advertising - the reason for giving you the other features.

Map data is free but serving maps is a service... Either you pay for it, suffer advertising or do it yourself - the first and last options are available from Openstreetmap.
On my iPad Mini Retina on iOS 7.0.4 they look perfectly fine for me, I wonder what's wrong there?
Sure, I didn't know about that until someone else pointed it out to me just now. I agree it's a beautiful rendering. It's paid though. That point aside, Sneak said what I meant to. If the goal is to have 7 billion people using OSM, this needs to be out of the box / default. Usability can't be an afterthought or something that's left up to the developer (if the goal is that sort of penetration)
“You can buy a plaid shirt at Abercrombie that’s like $70,” said Daniela Donayre, 17, standing in a Topshop in Manhattan. “Or I can go to Forever 21 and buy the same shirt for $20.”

Or they can go to a thrift shop and get one for $2. That's what my daughter and half her friends do. It's even worse after that Macklemore song.
You are arguing for the sake of arguing, and making bad arguments as a result. If you eat vegetables instead of beef you will save a lot of water. You will get the same amount of food, with far less water use.
To sum it up:

CL: Extensible, industry proven language with many implementations on many platforms. Big standards body which still only defines what is proven to be good by the test of time.

Clojure: An opinionated experiment with a single implementation that might just as well have been a library for CL (we do have STM libraries though, so there isn't really a point).

ABCL is a CL implementation for the JVM.
Here is a different set of measures that puts JavaScript first, followed by Java http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/01/22/language-rankings-1-14...
What would a 'cover' of a game be?
You can make a game which is very very similar to Duke Nukem as long as you don't reuse characters , assets or code from the original.
Try http://open.mapquest.com/
Sure but since they have been working as expert witnesses for the government and similar and they know what they are talking about, it will be hard for the state attorney to make it disappear.

Media will play a major role here too and if you consider the juristical failures in Bavaria and the media coverage there, it would be pretty stupid for the state attorney to try something questionable here.
wow that's very cool!
It's funny that the few entities we'd be more inclined to trust are the ones that go out of their way to make sure we don't have to trust them: Firefox Sync does client-side encryption so you don't have to trust the server, Persona does authentication via an identity provider so you don't have to trust persona.org...
ISS will soon contain the coldest spot in the known universe
This idea of modeling multiple concurrent things in the world (TCP connections) with multiple concurrent and isolated things in your application is very popular.

That is often the point of Erlang (and now Elixir) and other Actor based frameworks -- starting to think in terms of actors and mailboxes to model your problem.

Now it doesn't have to be about Erlang. You can spawn OS processes, or threads, or processes on different machines and use RabbitQM or 0MQ. Erlang and Elixir gets you the ability to spawn millions of isolated processes. Typically this not possible if using regular OS processes or even threads. It is possible with goroutines in Go for example, but those are not isolated.

If anything just being aware of this mode of developing when today callback-based concurrency and async/deferred/promise is talked about is important. I think it is a better way to model a problem in most cases.
What's the issue? Any additions would be covered by a succession of additional copyrights.
Sounds like a fluff piece. It first tells us that this language is the "One Programming Language to Rule Them All", but then it adds:

> "That said, it isn’t for everyone. Bezanson says it’s not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it’s better suited to technical computing.".

So what is it? Is this the supposed "One true language", or is it just another language with a narrow scientific focus?
In most of Europe, actually, laws can be retroactive... What is forbidden is a harsher criminal law. For example, creating an incrimination by law after a crime has been committed is a harsher criminal law and is forbidden. But if the legislator wishes to repeal a criminal law, the new softer law can be retroactive. It's called retroactivity in mitius.

I don't know if it's the same in Germany, but it's probable[1]. If so, then yes, the german legislator can make this case disapear completly by making the laws on the subject softer.

[1] Actually, I used to think that this rule was universal, because it seemed to be common sense... but that rule might not exist in countries of Common Law ?
Tell that to anyone who cloned any Nintendo game ever, even if they recreated everything.
Clothing seems far less about pimping your brand and more about wearing good looking, well-fit items nowadays. It's great. When I was in high school around 2000 I was a skinny kid. I couldn't find ANYTHING that fit well except for Diesel. Everything else was sized via the "fat American" standard where a small would be a medium nowadays. Now there are tons of places to get well fit affordable stuff. Uniqlo, AA, H&M, Forever21, etc.
Fashion and politics are very important.

E.g. LISP was ascendant until the '80s when it was blamed for the business failures of various overhyped expert system companies, part of that AI winter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#The_setbacks_of_the_...

Read up on e.g. the history of LISP at JPL: it's termination with extreme prejudice was basically done on a political whim.

This is not to say the Scheme and Common Lisp communities didn't get massively and almost/perhaps terminally wedged in the following periods, but that's another story. Many of us old time Lispers say look at Clojure for the likely successful future of Lisp.

And of course read our host's essay on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
The build-out costs are probably offset by how low mall rent is these days. You could take the same idea when it comes to food, look at how many flat screen televisions are inside a B-dubs or how much more it probably costs to built a Chipotle or Panera than it does a Subway. No wonder a meal at the previous two costs $10+, and Chipotle is considering raising prices because sales are so high. But the million dollars it costs to build the restaurant over 5 years is probably a drop in the bucket compared to food and employee costs.
This attitude leads to a world full of crap, where everything crashes all the time and is slow like hell, while still costing megadollars.

We don't ask doctors, plumbers or auto mechanics to "just get the job done". We ask them to do it right.
It's google's turf. They can screw everyone including themselves and enjoy through the whole process.

Either submit yourself to Google's rules or move on to another platform where someone else will eventually and likely will screw you up too.

So use other man's platform for what's it good for. Even better - build the better platform yourself and become the king of a game.

Until then - you're the little servant in someone else's kingdom.

Bitching is futile.
An idiot learns bayesian analysis part 2
I have been using OSM for 7 years and I really love the project. Nevertheless, the biggest issue I have when it is compared to GMaps is not the content nor rendering (those are relatively straightforward to change)... it is the geocoder + routing. There is not a good geocoder for OSM, period. Until we can put an address, like we can in GMaps, and get a pin in the right location, it will always be an option that is not a 100% replacement. Same with routing.

Don't get me wrong, it has its uses, but those two components are too critical to ignore or even advocate for full replacement.
I notice that they all (Google, OSM, Yandex) have comprehensive coverage of buildings and house numbers (though you might have to zoom to see them). I'm guessing this is open government data that's been imported, as I don't recall seeing them in the UK much.
i dont think so..
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Should Evernote’s iOS App Look Like This?
Not all programming is fun, in fact the vast majority is boring, and the software that gets produced is boring, but it is still important.

Just because you aren't a part of Google or some other ubiquitous, well known company, doesn't mean a product that you're a part of producing isn't important. You may not see the implications of all of the software you develop, and some software that has the biggest impact, no one even knows about.

There is always a good reason to program, and considering the current disparity of good engineers, you don't need to be amazing to make a difference, just be good.
Yes, please. I'd argue for all copyrights to expire at 20 years after publication. The idea that there's a perpetual right to intellectual "property" is a very dangerous one to a free society and to freedom of expression. There's no inherent right to own ideas. That's a legal construct created to encourage sharing of those ideas.

But the idea that a 20-year limit is too short to encourage authors and musicians and game developers to create new creative work is ludicrous. If anything, the essentially unlimited copyright of today encourages less creative output and less innovation. Why develop any new characters or stories if you've got multiple generations worth of copyright left to go? Keep pumping out the sequels.
I don't understand. Are you arguing that Fox News should be regulated? I'm not. There's no large information asymmetry there, as surely those who can pay $10,000+ for an advertisement know what they are getting into. (You as the viewer are not the customer.)

Or are you arguing that nothing should be regulated?

If the clothes you bought from Wal-Mart violated consumer protection regulations, then sue them. If you think there should be laws in place, then talk to your legislative representatives.

(Edit: Wal-Mart is subject to OSHA, the FSA issues food product regulations, its money order business is regulated by the FDIC, and so on. You confuse, I think, "some regulation" with "completely regulated.")

There's a long history behind the reason for regulations, stretching back to the muck racking journalism of the 1800s. Do you disagree with all of it?

And I really don't understand your "dog fashion standards" issue. Where's the information asymmetry? Where's the time lag which can be exploited by unscrupulous dog hair dressers?
On the other hand, I gained 50lbs from when I was a 'skinny kid' in high school and nothing at Abercrombie even fits.