skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the history, hope it helps.

I wrote the original version of the npm registry in a day or two on top of CouchDB. I built it quickly and didn't think much about scale.

Isaacs continued to improve and maintain that code. At one point he even wrote up an open standard for generic js package registries for CommonJS but they didn't seem to care (they were too busy arguing about promises).

At the time I wrote the initial code I was employed at CouchOne and we had a small CouchDB hosting platform operated by Jason Smith which is where we ran the registry free of charge. Later on, after CouchOne was aquired by Membase and became Couchbase, it decided to break off the hosting company and give/sell it to Jason Smith, which became IrisCouch.

IrisCouch continued to run the registry for free for several years. They had no venture funding and limited resources but they provided this service for our community anyway. They announced a product for enterprise (hosted) NPM but as far as I know it wasn't really marketed or sold. Last year IrisCouch was acquired by Nodejitsu.

Nodejitsu continued to host the registry for free. Some time last year the infrastructure hit a breaking point, mostly around CouchDB. Remember, I wrote this in a weekend when less than a hundred node packages existed. Many of the semantics from me and Isaacs' initial "prototype" persisted until just a few weeks ago. For instance, this single database held all the package binaries, for every version of a package, attached to the document for that package.

Once the registry started to have serious stability issues a few things happened. Isaacs started to work on ways to improve the reliability by changing how the registry worked and Nodejitsu sought community support for keeping the current registry up. At some point Isaacs also decided it would be best if he worked on NPM full time and built NPM Inc.

In the early days we weren't thinking about 58K modules, that was just crazy, we were just figuring out the simplest way to store a couple packages the node community was writing. Since founding this company Isaacs has already managed to re-write the way the registry works to fit the kind of load we have now.

Nodejitsu is now free of the financial burden that was dragging them down as well and Isaacs' new infrastructure can keep the registry up more cheaply than the previous system and more reliably.
StackMob shutting down on May 11, 2014
I love that you called your gem "hologram". That's appropriate and... truly outrageous?
Gilt charting course to IPO
If that was true then people wouldn't be trying so hard to build alternatives.
In 2006 I created a site that allowed you to upload, categorize, and play your MP3s. I was solving a problem I had where a recent hard drive failure caused me to lose ALL of my music.

The site actually got big really fast because in 2006 no real competitors existed and SEO was very easy (then).

It failed for a few reasons:

One, before the site I didn't know how to program. I actually taught myself how to program in PHP/MySQL/JS to launch the site. The code was very shitty and so was the design.

Two, I didn't understand just how much bandwidth this would consume. I ran this out of my downtown 1 bed room apartment on a PC built in 1999. Sometimes I'd wake up from parties and see people passed out next to it with beer bottles and weed on top of it. Eventually my Dad donated a DL380 to me, but the bigger problem was I ran this on a business class DSL line. Playback and uploads were terrible. Sometimes I would actually disconnect the server from my modem so I could do online gaming.

Three, I had no idea about how to make money online or find investors. I had no plans other than just build it cause its cool.

In the end it worked out really well. I discontinued the site and continued my career in development.
There are upcoming ARMv8 cores that are 64-bit. I doubt we'll see Go as a fully "endorsed" Android language any time soon, but by the time it potentially happens, 64-bit ARM may be ubiquitous.
Mental antibodies is a GREAT phrase. Kudos.
Engineering sales: How to talk with potential customers
Presumably those people aren't writing their own custom Bitcoin client libraries.
I'm not sure that's an apples-to-apples comparison.

In both cases, there is one physical good which, when stolen, deprives you off the money. With cash, it's the physical notes. With Bitcoin, it's the private keys in the wallet (or private key to unlock the wallet's private keys). Making backups of the keys can protect against accidental data loss, but not against theft, as it increases attack surface (i.e. number of locations where the same money can be stolen from).

There is still an advantage here favoring Bitcoin, though: if the key is stolen and you know this, you still have a chance to preserve the wallet's holdings: just generate new keys (addresses) and broadcast a transaction of all the wallet's money to those addresses. If you can get the message to the network's nodes faster than the attacker, the money will be "signed away" before they can use it, and such attempts will be rejected as double-spends.

There is no corresponding feature for physical cash.
Examples (genuinely curious)? In my casual experience, it seems to be easier to use than gems or pip and has much larger ecosystem than anything else I have tried, which is the #1 selling point of a package manager IMHO. A good package manager (by my standards) should have:

1. super easy publishing
2. A package for practically everything you can think of and if not, see #1
3. Most of the market share for its particular language so that you can be reasonably sure a particular module maintainer has an up to date package
> Note that the US unlinked in 1970 and the last year that the GINI coefficient improved was 1973. FDR temporarily unlinked in 1933 and we had the great depression [1].

The U.S. domestic economy unlinked in 1933, permanently. Only international trade continued to use gold-backed currency, and it is that aspect which was finally eliminated in 1973.

Likewise you have mixed up your cause/effect for the Great Depression, which started 4 years before 1933. On the contrary, the very election of FDR in 1932 was due to the economic crisis, and the unlinking of gold reserves was in response to the depression, not the cause of it.

One funny thing is that many people who are otherwise economically intelligent get so confused with gold. Holding currency to a gold standard by some fixed price would be called "price control" in any other context, and we already know price controls to be bad policy. By unlinking currency from gold we can well and truly "let the market efficiently decide".

The biggest irony for me with regard to Bitcoin is that it proves the fiat concept. Bitcoin is literally worth nothing more than what people think it's worth; there's no physical thing of intrinsic worth underlying it after all. But this is of course more or less exactly the claim for fiat currency.
I was excited because I thought I was going to read a novel argument, but no, it's the same opinion everyone else holds. :)
You can, you can also add a CA to all operating systems as well.
Maybe this works for server stuff, but if you are doing client-side JS I feel like adding this sort of layering as more trouble than its worth.

But when it comes to JS, I'm a minimalist.
My company uses Concur and it works pretty well. They have an iPhone app I can take pics of my receipts with and auto upload them and attach them to expense reports. It is pretty easy and works fine here with Chrome on OSX.
The superhuman deduction in the middle, the general tone of self-absorption, and the Batman-villain userid. Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't like coffee script for the same reason - it adds extra processing steps and runs different code than I write in the browser. While it cleans things up, I personally haven't worked on a Javascript project that would benefit from what I see as only incremental improvements to "cruft," which can be just as easily implemented with functions and continuations/monads.
> Do you really think, or even have proof which shows, that playing with dolls or wearing dresses is biologically, not socially, "male"?

I belive there were some experiments with babies by Trond Diseth that showed that babies have a natural tedency towards interacting with gender specific toys.
First of all, drawing a line between IDEs and text editors is a surefire way to ignore the kind of innovation that is happening with regard to text-editing. If you insist on doing this then in your search for innovation you've drawn a box so narrow that you should not be surprised to find nothing in it. There are only so many pure text-editing actions with positive ROI and E&V mastered the bulk of them long ago. Even so, E&V haven't been standing still. It's true they refuse to innovate in certain directions:

1. Out-of-the-box integration with modern toolsets (0-configuration documentation, smart autocomplete, build, debug, jump-to-definition, etc)

2. Present an interface that is easily discoverable by GUI-minded folk

3. Take advantage of the opportunities afforded by non-textual displays

but each of these is done "poorly" in E&V for a good reason, as per your text editor / IDE distinction. They can't change these things without stepping on the toes of their power users (i.e. all of them) and leaving behind part of what made them great, which is why this kind of innovation is happening away from E&V. Most of the apps I listed address between 1 and 3 of the above issues. Just because the young upstart editors don't support keyboard input and customization with the fluidity of E&V doesn't mean they are purely derivative. They do something that a lot of people want done that E&V don't do, and they do it well. That's what innovation is all about.

So I ask again what it is that you would consider innovation and why the projects I listed don't count.
Running "./configure && make && make install" usually results in a working installation of whatever package you are attempting to compile.

followed by

the auto tools are constantly a thorn in the side of users and developers alike.

Which is it? Do the autotools "usually [result] in a working installation" or are they "constantly a thorn in [our sides]?"
The Go NaCl stuff is not about Chrome.
Adding a single root to locally installed copies of a web browser is only really useful for 2 things: testing an SSL configuration for development, and deploying your own CA to all computers on an intranet to so you can MITM their traffic without throwing up warnings.

For a bit of fun, compare the warnings about a self-signed certificate in Firefox with those triggered by attempting to download a self-signed certificate with the CA:true bit set.
Malware called The Mask? Infecting computers in Spanish-speaking countries?

Must... not... make... luchador joke...
Minority set-asides wouldn't be my answer. It seems the government needs the best contractors it can get.

You'll notice that private companies never do that stuff because they suffer if they don't get results.
http://feross.org/resume
The fact that Microsoft responded with "no comment" is very disturbing -- I would have hoped for an unconditional denial, and the fact that they apparently didn't give one is significant.
The pre-installed search engines are ads. They [Mozilla] are being paid to promote a product [Google Search]. That being said, it is not a form of advertisement that is particularly obtrusive, and it is "opt-out" - you are not prevented from removing search engines from the drop-down list if you so choose.

I personally take objection to ads when they take away from the usability of the product, when they are of a form that could be used to infect my computer, and/or when they are of a form that can be used to pass on data to third parties. (Un?)fortunately, this covers the majority of advertisements on websites: a large chunk of ads are pop-up, pop-over, are flash (both for battery life and exploits), redirect to untrusted websites (exploits), and/or use content hosted by third parties.

As such, my worry for this is: what happens if someone buys a spot that takes you to a page that exploits your computer then redirects to (for example) facebook? I hope that the bar (price for a spot) will be high enough to discourage this, but I don't know...
I love the comment about RGB to grayscale... I don't have any experience in this type of work but it was pretty obvious to me that you can't divide by 3. That would mean it doesn't matter what value you give each color...Red would be the same as Green and Blue... Who would ever think this?
think of it as something like creating a pool using WeakReferences in java, you're telling the GC that it's ok to collect that object so you're not using up extra ram, but you still get the performance benefit of re-using objects.

(Go's implementation is potentially more efficient as you're not creating the extra WeakReference<> object, as you would be in java).
edit I wasn't able to edit the above comment, but I was referring to the US and Europe above, not the UK and Europe.
Wow.

There are a lot of negative comments that I find surprisingly imbalanced in how they view the employer-employee relationship.

Employers have the balance of power in almost any working relationship, and should take some responsibility in creating satisfactory employment conditions. Allowing bad management to mishandle employees is an abuse of that power. If a new employee doesn't choose to speak to HR, it's most likely because HR are doing a crap job of making new employees aware of what support they offer, if any.

Apple (the company) certainly wouldn't think for one second about breaching contracts where the benefit outweighed the risk of legal consequences. We might say "that's just business". So, why should you personally care about breaching contracts if turning up to work has such a strongly negative effect on your life?

I personally want to say to this guy: well done, you did the right thing for yourself. Find yourself better employment.

Sorry that this job didn't work out, and I'm sorry it was so bad that you felt you had to take a (small, temporary) hit to your reputation, but if you needed to get out of there so bad, it was worth it: best of luck for the future :)
Esmerelda's Imagination (2011)
StackMob is shutting down
Well, this is a bit concerning. How are the investors plan to get that money back? Something tells me we will not like the solution.
He probably is wealthy from the Twitter IPO, but regardless of that travel is not that expensive if you stay away from beachfront suites and luxury events like the Olympics. My roommate spent two months this summer in Europe, and I think he spent something like $6k in total. He just stayed in hostels and traveled by train whenever possible. That's maybe not dirt cheap, but consider that a lot of people in America blow $10k on a one week trip.

The problem for most people on this forum is probably not money--it's time. I'm sure many readers here have $6k to spend on a vacation. How many have two full months off work a year, on top of all the other normal days off and sick time? I'd wager only a very, very small minority, especially among those in the US.
You can specify what version you want.
That doesn't necessarily imply that version will continue to be available.
Ruby has the same problem with "yanked" versions of gems.
I don't have many problems with the auto* toolkit.

Yet, there is one problem which has cost me lots of money for buying beer and getting myself filled up: why can't auto* check for all libraries and then output an aggregated "libx,liby and libz missing, libfoo outdated" instead of the configure - apt-get - configure - apt-get cycle?
While I'm sure he thought it was a story worth telling, walking out without making any attempt at reconciliation was just unprofessional.

What's worse, potential clients are going to Google his name, find this and then wonder if he'll bail on a project as well.
Thanks for the links!

My current code is pretty trivial; dropping in a pair of standard shaders and tweaking the code would probably be sufficient.

WebGL is interesting, but it only just got support in IE11 [1]. My only current project with a web requirement would need to support older browsers, including older mobile browsers, and Safari and Android browsers also lack support.

But it doesn't hurt to prepare for the future. :)

[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl
> This sounds a bit narcissistic.

I know. That's the trouble with talking about growing up or being highly intelligent, you end up sounding like a narcissistic prick.

Even saying something like "I've tested in the top 1-2% of dozens of aptitude and intelligence tests" sounds like I'm lording it over those who haven't. But I don't think it's really all that different than saying "I'm taller than 99% of the population". Except tall people, or people with some other exceptional attribute can get together and commiserate about their exceptional attribute without the kinds of social stigma attached to it that intelligence does.

It's very hard to have an honest discussion about being smart without diving into lots of euphemisms and using lots of humbling verbiage.

Most people's problems are simple. They just don't want to fix them because the emotional cost for them is high. So they endlessly try to find ways to solve their problems with the minimum of emotional impact and they make no progress. Getting past your own emotions to make forward progress with your life is the best skill almost anybody can make with respect to solving the problems in their life.

It's not easy, and I don't mean to minimize the impact emotions have. It was definitely a difficult skill for me to learn (and I'm still learning it).

But take money, every single person's money problem is solved with the very simple "don't spend more than you earn". Yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of pages written on financial advice and dealing with personal debt. We think it's a complicate topic, and we treat it like it is, but it's not.

I've found that most problems people deal with are similar.

I'm pretty overweight, and when I think it's a problem, I come up with all kinds of excuses about it and how to solve it and endlessly mill about not doing anything. But it's hilariously simple for me to solve: exercise more, eat less. But I struggle with it like many people struggle with money or relationships or whatever.
This just sounds like they're trying to jump on the Flappy Bird hype bandwagon some more. I doubt most people would continue to submit a review after accidentally reaching the page from a "dark pattern".

The reviews are posted because people like trying to be funny and have enjoyed some of the other reviews (read some of them!).
Thanks for sharing that, it does make everything clear.

If it helps, I didn't see anything in the API documentation to suggest that the currency in the balance transaction (which is type of a Stripe record we don't understand and have never had to consider before) would be different to that of the charge. Checking the API Reference page as I write this, it currently refers to "pence" in the left-hand column when describing the amount and fees, even though the example in the right-hand column says "usd", and it gives no description at all for the currency field.

A quick clarification in those API docs, including an explicit mention that balance transactions are operating in terms of your pay-out currency where charges are in terms of your pay-in currency, might help a lot here. I imagine this, along with how to navigate from a charge to the corresponding balance transaction, will be FAQs for anyone implementing multiple currencies...
A Survival Guide to Mars
I definitely make mistakes, so one tactic I use is liberal use of code comments. I start with a comment about what the overall task is about, so that I can keep perspective, and then I will use a series of "TODO ..." comments to break things down into smaller steps.

The nice thing about this is, some of those survive revisions and can then be line comments which explain the next few lines of code:

# Frob the Foo.womble, so that Bar gets its input
# in the format it expects

Similarly, I have grown to use commit messages longer than one line, even if I expect to later rebase it together with something else.
Of course, the semicolons. Neither assembly nor python use semicolons, so by my logic they must be identical too?

Control flow, method invocations, variables, arrays, boolean logic operators, and general syntax are similar enough that you can look at the JS code and figure out what it is doing.
What about a botnet of modern ASIC rigs?
...TD Ameritrade is a bank.
Even know this title is an exageration I just would like to state to Mozilla that: if you want to make money from me, just ask and I'll probably pay.
Also not true: Apple doesn't get "Engagement" data from the app, so that part of the ranking formula is wrong.
I'm seeing some projects shipping without configure which is annoying.
Wait, what? I've been downloading, untarring, configuring, making, etc since as long as I've known anything about any unix. Since when is this the wrong way to do it?
I don't see the issue here. Node has Joyent as a backing and it's doing fine.
That was Eric Raymond's signature, not Linus'.
How portable is nix? I haven't looked into it much, but from a (possibly mistaken) first impression it looks more like a replacement for yum or apt than for autotools. Despite being crufty, what I find valuable about autotools is that, given one source directory, I can successfully compile and link the package on many things: various distributions of Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, OS X, nearly whatever else you care to dream up. Does Nix actually do that (or target it, if not yet)?
If this happens, I hope that the initial presentation is entirely through Moz, and that no information is transmitted nor "leaks" to the third party until there is an actual, manual user click/selection.

I don't want my browser launches to be "leaked" to sponsors.

A first reaction. I need to read about this, more.
What he really means is take an average R=B=G=((R+B+G)/3), when you really need to convert it to YUV and use only the Y channel.
A little time spent learning how to use a server and build an actual scaling infrastructure, and Heroku turns into dust for dumb dorks. Heroku is the MSFT of servers, lock yourself in, and prepare to feel the bind as it gets tighter.

Seriously people, DIY, it isn't hard. Let the "180 websites in 180 days" [1] girl use Heroku, she's giddy to get anything working. Real hackers should not be satisfied with lock-in, ridiculous prices that correlate with the ineptitude of the user-base, potential downtime on top of AWS normal downtime (what Heroku uses in the background.) If you're serious about your business, Heroku makes no sense at all, lest you be a non-technical cofounder, and it makes you feel 'safe.'

[1] http://jenniferdewalt.com/
> which is true of every authentication scheme I'm aware of except for perhaps PGP

I am not getting your point about PGP. Using PGP as Identity authentication? Wouldn't it just be the same as running your own IdP?
So William Safire != James Joyce.

There's some truth to this idea but it's much weaker in the proglang domain, I think. The problem is that, unlike innate faculties like natural language, in formalized systems like math, proglang proficiency is highly correlated with being creative. The Faulkner-Hemingway example doesn't quite work in math (Leaving aside exceptional prodigies like Ramanujan).

As a side thought, can I add that I abasolutely detest Hemingway's bombastic, macho personality. His interaction with Fitzgerald was famously appalling, quite different from the Woody Allen's nostalgic characterization.
How about just asking me if I want to become a paying customer? Please accept my money on the conditions that you keep the web open and provide an ad-free service