skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hm. It sounds a little like Google would be doing really bad to seize control over their infrastructure. But since they do, the whole Android world has improved, at least in my opinion. Think about the upgrade complains we had a few years back. As far as I know that's gone now.(?) So I think it's actually good what Google is doing in that regard.

From my own experience with developing FOSS is also that other people don't try to integrate their solutions into your system. Everybody heads off and makes their own stuff.

Stupid forking is no problem for a project like GCC. But Android is a brand name. And if other people fork it and head off doing their own stuff and fail, then it is always Android that fails.

And really as a developer I also fight for the freedom of software, but as an end user I want to be able to go to a shop and buy an "Android phone" and it just works. Therefore, yes, please, Google take control! Good job!
Borges - The Immortal:

"Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world."

Honestly, just about all of Borges' fictions are really neat for the technically minded. Highly recommended!
$30 is cheap enough for most people that they wouldn't expect warranties and excellent build quality.
Have you tried BeautifulSoup?
If you think about it in that context i.e. "everyone around me is making $200/mo and they live reasonably well, I've now made 250 times that in day, which is average income for next 20 years, for X days, I can now retire and maybe let the heat die down a little"
The "distressed babies" line was incredibly lame. First, statistically, a company with thousands of workers will have some people with expensive health problems and get hit with some insurance surcharges. It sucks, but it's how today's system is. Second, even if it weren't so, it's hard for it not to sound like you're blaming babies. It's beyond sleazy at a human level, which is what got him, publicity-wise. And, not entirely unrelatedly, it's the sound of a CEO trying not to take responsibility for what happens at their company, which is always a bad sign.

</picking-on-easy-targets>
I agree. The core fundamental concepts and abstractions are relatively stable (most innovation seems to be happening in the Haskell/FP camp), as well as the programming languages being used. Even the newer widely-used languages (Javascript, Python, etc.) are old by now.

What changes are lot are the actual frameworks and libraries. E.g., while Java is twenty years old now, Hadoop, JAX-RS, Hibernate, etc. did not exist then. And while Java will probably still be in wide use in twenty years, those libraries and frameworks will have been replaced except in legacy code.

I think the only 'platform' that has been stable for ever is UNIX. People are still using libc, POSIX (ok, SUS), etc.
I'd definitely pick Foundation over Dune, in my personal opinion. I still hold the Foundation series up as the pinnacle of SciFi.
Do you think ubuntu will be hiring package maintainers to rewrite all the init scripts so it can continue importing debian packages into universe?
Enterprise IT departments are diverse as well. They are not monolithic as we portray it to be.

I've not seen any big non-tech company totally dependent on one programming stack. They spread their bets. One can see people sitting next to each other working on Node.js and Visual Basic.

If anything to go by what I've seen and provided competent people are making the decision, they try to use right tools for the right job.
Snowden documents show British digital spies use viruses and 'honey traps'
http://www.downapp.com/

There are more examples of apps just like this that came before (this is the only one that comes to mind at the moment), the only way I would be remotely interested is if they figured a way to solve the inherent problem of selecting all/some of your friends as crushes to see who had you as a crush, and then what happens when someone legitimately adds the person who was just checking everyone's crushes.
On the Incorrect Framing of Astronomical Probabilities
Why would they use an xbox for YouTube rather than using a tablet in conjunction with an Apple TV or Chromecast? Is it just because the xbox is already there and always turned on?
did you ever looked in the passenger sunscreen?

also, how do a web site email their customers and issue a recall on their private information that was already illegally shared away?

your analogy is awful.

furthermore, the precedent is already set. just look at the millions of european sites and their cookie warnings... its the same thing. why google should be exempt in this case which is essentially the same thing?
Yes, that is why yo never do that, regardless if its in a SP or in the calling code.
The experiment is over.
Thanks to everyone who participated.

Well, that was interesting.
Detailed Tutorial for Building ASP.Net Web API RESTful Service (11 Parts)
Ask HN: What should I learn to stay relevant in the next 5 – 10 years?
I am currently an iOS developer looking broaden my horizons. I'm currently learning Javascript as it seems to be the next big thing. What would you suggest ?
> Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of The World

Totally agree with this.

I think Murakami's writing has become repetitive and bloated in the last couple of decades (and even sort of creepy, in a bad way); he basically seems to have been writing on autopilot for many years. It's always a little annoying to see him trotted out as a great author by mentioning his recent stuff.

His early stuff, however, is much better: tighter, more subtle, more interesting, less overwrought. "Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of The World" is my favorite. It's weird, thoughtful, and sad in way that doesn't feel manipulative or artificial.
Learn Java. Java 8 looks exciting.
Same here, I just got 14 MBs of errors.html and nothing else.
The difference between Social Security and an annuity is that Social Security charges too little and promises payouts of too much. It cannot sustain the payouts which are promised in 2014 from revenues available to it in 2014 or the investment returns reasonably possible as a result of those revenues (and its accumulated capital). It must therefore increase the amount of revenues it receives, by a) increasing the SS tax rate and b) increasing the number of people who pay into SS until c) it inevitably defaults on promises to some portion of beneficiaries, for example by adopting e.g. means testing and retroactively stating that people born after a certain day will get the payout they've been promised their entire lives iff they have less income/wealth than $INSERT_CUTOFF and, if they exceed that, they'll receive $CONSOLATION_PRIZE_FORMULA instead.

Did you know that Social Security taxes were once 2.25% of income? Before they were 4.5%? Before they were 6.9%? Before they were 8.1%? Before they were 15.3%? That's where we are in 2014.

To be fair, while Social Security is clearly not an annuity, as of 2014 it isn't yet in default of its obligations. There's some dispute about what year that will inevitably happen. It will not be described as a default when it does, but rather tweaking a few formulas to protect America's most vulnerable citizens.

Edit: Social Security also has some "constructive default" options which are available outside of the program, because it is coextensive with the taxing power of the federal government. For example, SS benefits were once untaxed but are now taxed. There exist plausible ways by which every dollar promised of SS benefits can be "paid" but in which many get immediately recaptured by the government, which avoids formally adjusting the terms of the promise but which is indistinguishable from default in its impact on e.g. your family's budgeting process in 2070.

Another option is inflating away the insolvency. Japan will probably do this. It will pay out every yen of the promised monthly 200,000 yen due to pensioners, but pay it with yen which buy half as many apples as they did back when the pensioners were working.
The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield
Me too. It's ridiculous and empty.
Look at it from a Fortune 500 perspective (yes obviously exceptions and I'm not saying I agree or disagree). Do we want to run all or part of our business on an open source tool/project which may or may not have a large community around it and may or may not be around tomorrow or do we use the company who is financially committed to X tool and has virtually unlimited money in the bank?

This doesn't just apply to Microsoft... look at the money Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc. bring in. As the saying goes "No one has been fired for using X software before".

"What happens when (say) .NET isn't the best tool for a particular job?"

So like when you need to write something in Python (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) or Node.js (http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/)? Yea that is all supported in VS by Microsoft. Most people don't realize at some point over the last few years they changed from the MS or screw off attitude to a more let's support what we can one. They have also started opening sourcing a lot of their stuff.

I came from Unix/Linux/PHP and Perl at the time and once I got the hang of C# and Visual Studio I have not looked back.
This would mean that life is an episode in a Monte-Carlo simulation traversing the state space of all possible human lifes.

The story also suggests that the simulation is heavily parallel and complete knowledge of all episodes (rather all paths) makes you god.
Why would you need to store the historical versions of the stored procedures in a migrations folder? Wouldn't it be better to treat the stored procs like any other code, create a .sql file for each and keep them in version control? And then you can have a migration script that re-creates all the procs when you do an update.
Totally agree that their Murakami selection is an awful book, and nothing Murakami's written in years has been any good, but he used to (20+ years ago) be a bit better...

[The Amazon tagline, "From the Modern Japanese Master" is certainly pretty cringe-inducing. >< ]

In general the entire list seems very uninspired, like it was generated by someone tallying up blog posts and fan-favorite lists, rather than being an informed opinion by someone that's actually read and thought about a lot of books...
this would probably be possible in etherum. might even be a killer app because it establishes a completely transparent and trustable ponzi scheme, which might not work out terribly different from giving loans in the end...
People complain because these are not rules destined for a democratic republic. They are as draconian as it can get and just aiming to silence opposing ideas and evidence exposing government of corruption.
Even I am learning Java Script. Plus I am web developer so started learning Laravel - PHP framework.
As others have said, there is a heuristic flame war detector. It seems that a penalty is applied if an item has more than 40 comments, and fewer points than comments. It's actually a good idea, but it has many false positives.

That said, if people want to comment on something but don't think it's worth upvoting, maybe it really doesn't belong on the front page.
> Catcher in the Rye and On the Road are two books I was looking forward to reading (not being English-based meant I didn't get to read them on high school) and found dull.

I feel the same way about Catcher in the Rye. I didn't grow up with it and when I picked it up as an adult I found it dull dull dull. I'm pretty sure that with enough digging one might find something interesting here, but it's buried too deep for me. Much like anything by James Joyce, this seems to be a book for Lit majors.
Check this out : http://commoncrawl.org/

Its not exactly what you are looking for but might help you.
I'm not sure where that fits in either, but the point I took away from the story is; Don't think too hard about Nixon. It was clear or at least not as unclear, that he was not in his best mental condition. One of the problems is, what about the current head of US state? How would you know if he/she isn't in his best condition?

Regarding the two-man rule, my idea of the "Two Person Concept" is to prevent that a single operator would launch an attack by himself or in "error" (whatever that constitutes, I do not know). I interpret Major Hering's question as a separate issue from the "Two Person Concept".
I'm sure our friend the flappy bird developer feels the same way. With insults thrown his way constantly over the game and a massive popularity he wasn't ready for, I'm sure he wishes he was anonymous as well.
Seems similar to bang with friends. Except the bang part.
An art school lesson
Functional programming is gonna get big with concurrency becoming more popular
The fact that Microsoft stopped developing a technology that hardly anybody used isn't a surprise, I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed.
By the way how any democratic republic can materialize a rule of "immunity for TIB precidency for any dispute over it's ruling taken without court orders"?
Parent brings a good point: How do you define your strategic advantage, when you're nullifying the one of your code? It's hard to come to investors if you say "Anyone can make exactly our software within minutes". Do you have Android-like trademarks which would prevent others from doing it?
Oh great an ad hominem. Now google "Asma Bint Marwan" (hardly the only one[1]), and if you have any integrity whatsoever, apologize.

[1] Others executed for criticism ("poetry" about muhammad as it's generally called in the hadith) include "Abu Afak", "Al Nadr ibn al-Harith", "Uqba bin Abu Muayt", "Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf", "Abu Rafi' ibn Abi Al-Huqaiq", "Fartana" and I doubt this is anywhere near the full list.

Note that this was most definitely NOT common practice during those times. You should read some of the texts that survive from Roman fora in the same area. Let me tell you Romans are not afraid -at all- of calling the head of the army a coward, and comparing them to dog entrails (I assume that's not a compliment). Same sort of things are regularly said about the governors and so on. And in at least one instance that did not even lead
Pretty bleak stuff. Great idea, but it's the same as it was with the Big Society Network - take a bunch of stuff that's already happening, chuck it all together under one banner, add an 'advisory board' of heavy hitters who may-or-may-not have something to actually do with it, bingo: A Policy.
Free air (A spoken word poetry on Vipassana meditation by Buddy Wakefield)
Agreed, there is far too much English-language and US fiction from the 20C in this list for it to be taken seriously. It's like top 100 film ratings on imdb - too distorted by the list-makers' parochial (in time and space) viewpoint to be useful. Recent fiction written in English has far too much weight in this list.

A well-read life would start at the Iliad and the Meditations and other classics (all available for free) and work up from there, not Lemony Snicket!
The notification center is one of the features I've been missing. Nice job!
It is not a secret or military court, but a civil one. And yes, we're fighting against it.

Also, the European Court of Justice is currently in the process of deciding whether the data retention directive violates basic rights. From what has been heared from the court lately, things look as if the directive will be shot down at least in part.
Here's me doing the HN thing and analyzing the code sample rather than the article itself. Sorry in advance.

But if you're going to do this trick and you use a code compiler of any sort, you'll need to assign the value of that clientLeft somewhere. Otherwise your compiler will notice it not doing anything and helpfully optimize it away. So your users in production will see your layout bug and you'll never be able to reproduce it in development.

JavaScript is awesome.

As to the article itself, I'd prefer to see a comment on a line as wacky as this one. It's one well-intentioned lop away from vanishing from that git blame entirely, and then six hours of debugging and research away from finding its way back into place.

Trying to sift through file history to understand what's going on is hard enough on code I wrote myself only a year ago. I wouldn't want to rely on it as the only way of digging into a large shared code base. Yikes.
Solve two nearly insurmountable problems and you have a winner:

1) Make it impossible to game.
2) Chicken and egg.

I have no idea how to solve these problems, but it's a concept ripe for disruption if you do.
Indeed, egg talking to himself would be better. Otherwise our existential problem isn't clarified just moved up one level of conscience.
Props for your effort!

What I dislike (not specifically about your project, that is!) is the idea that, as a society, we're incentivized to increasingly hide behind our screens instead of growing some balls an actually live in the "real life". Here, we're talking about dating. The other current topic: how we intend to fight democracy-destroying mass surveillance by (apparently) simply sitting behind our screens.
My problem with Xbox 360 is it's selection of games. My wife bought the console for us two years ago and the only games we've played with it have been Skyrim and GTA V, which are also available for PS3. Almost all of the games available are in this so called 'dudebro' category: fps, sports etc.

What are missing are the japanese weird and arty, or colorful and playable games that are available for Playstation or Wii. The games I remember from my childhood (Mario, Zelda) or some absolutely mindblowing ideas like Journey.
Rather ironic.. considering a detox diet is snake-oil BS designed to lure idiots with money.
I managed to get through it without making the link before it was pointed out in the ending. I guess I was just lucky.
Technical decisions should not be made on "which technology sounds cool on CV" basis.

Unless there is strong reason, codebase should be in one language. Having it in multiple languages makes learning curve for newcommers unnecessary steep, especially if the company is willing to hire juniors. It also makes maintenance more difficult and expensive. Too many languages will also force your people to have very shallow knowledge.

We are going to do this one module in python should be done either cause you consider to move to python altogether or because the usual language is really bad fit. "Someone wants to learn it" is both bad reason and unprofessional.
Harry Potter books there. They are good, but then it's about 100 books to read in a lifetime. Just my opinion.
There is no steamroller.

I know many programmers feel this way, but in my humble opinion it is a fallacy, and not a very healthy one.

No-one can deny that our industry is evolving at breakneck speed, and it is an exhilarating place to be. But just because there's a new technology every week on HN doesn't mean that we are losing old ones at a similar rate.

It is perfectly possible to have done nothing but C or Java for your entire career and yet remain extremely employable. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are highly paid COBOL jobs still out there, nursing some vast banking-industry mainframe which is too precious to risk replacing.

In fact I'm hard pressed to think of any programming language which I would dare declare 'dead' in a HN comment.

But even if you're a specialist in something which you feel is in decline, or for which there are newer, snazzier replacements, you've got every opportunity to learn something new, taking as long as you like to do so. There's extensive documentation for every technology under the sun available for free on the internet, and an army of friendly, helpful people willing to provide help and advice without expecting anything in return.

In fact, it's entirely possible you could even get paid to cross-train. In my own company we use RoR for which (in England at least) demand far outstrips supply. I've paid PHP developers to learn Rails, and I would consider anyone with an in-depth knowledge of any language as potentially employable.

Really, the only way an experienced developer is going to end up flipping burgers or flying a manager's desk is because they have lost the desire to learn - ie fallen out of love with programming in general. I believe few people work in this industry for money alone - you either love programming or you don't do it - and if you love it then you will pick up new technologies out of sheer intellectual curiosity.

Feverishly reading HN every day and feeling threatened by the emergence of every new 'next best thing' is not a good idea. I would advise anyone feeling this way to take a chill pill and remember why they took up programming in the first place.
Ahem. Bitcoin isn't anonymous. So bitcoin can actually be "hot".

Thus, I'm not sure if buying from a random stranger (as opposed to somebody you know or a big exchange) is such a good idea.
Why not limit it to say 3 friends?
You can't have a crush on every friend (you might want to bang them, but not crush?)?
> What's the point of comments then if your general rule is that it should be fine to edit code without changing the comments?

Not without changing the comments. Without stopping to ponder how two paragraphs of comments fit into the code changes. The comments (aside from API documentation) should annotate the code, not the other way around.
Doesn't work on Linux.
Solaris had an init system like systemd for some years, called SMF. It was first released in 2005, the same year Apple released launchd.

It features service dependencies, log collection, fault detection and much more. One of the biggest differences is probably the usage of config files. SMF uses XML files to describe the service and its variables and a program called svcprop to edit variables and create new instances of the service. These can then be managed with svcadm.
Did anyone see if runit was ever considered? Perhaps it was considered a better alternative to just stick with sysv vs changing to runit?
Joel's article from 2002 is highly relevant here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
First I was going to write "That's not true". Then I reread the article. That steamroller is a really slow one. :)
You could also argue that this project helps society move in a way you prefer. Once you get to "mutual crush" and ideally start dating, my assumption would be that those dates would be in "real life".
Zed actually fixed it - this joke will run and run. Smashing.
The .NET framework[0] is always useful and I think it's here to stay for a long while. You'd be able to write mobile apps using Xamarin or business apps for Windows. Also apps for the new Ubuntu mobile OS will be possible.

Personally I find Go[1] interesting and it's something I'm hoping to pick up in the coming year. It seems like a fun language, well suited for building web services that handle lots of traffic.

Lua[2] might also be nice to learn. It's used for scripting in a lot of games. For example: in World of Warcraft you can create your own Lua add-ons. Lua can be easily integrated into your own apps / games, since it's just a small C library. It might be a good language to learn if gaming interests you, since lots of games make use of Lua in some way.

And as someone else already mentioned in this thread: functional programming will become bigger in the future. You can use the functional programming style with .NET if you choose to learn the F# language.

---

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)
that policy is status quo at IBM
cron's @reboot is very handy