skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Welcome to the real world. Where code is not perfect, but somebody pays for a timeboxed piece of work and legacy code will exist.

You will not come into heaven straight from university and you will have to learn to work in environments like this.

Blame your study for not telling you about how the real world works. Don't blame legacy code because it's something that exist no matter how unicorny the world is.

Negotiating managers and project owners is even more important than just being able to write testable code.

So take your skills and apply them (iteratively) to your current job, or go work at a startup where everything is hip and trendy. But remember you're at the bottom of the ladder right now, and you're the one making things better for companies and yourself.

Also remember the golden rule:

No one wants to pay to refactor code that works into more beautiful code that works.
SpaceX is optimizing costs rather than energy-efficiency. Obviously you need less fuel if you're not doing a soft-landing back.
If I make $10,000 a year yet spend only $1,000, I'd be highly profitable too.

Not worth a lot though, as the subsequent sales showed just how much money they'd lost.
Yes but the problem is most of their revenues come from one thing - advertising. What their leadership is innovating desperately is to have something else people will give them money for. Successful companies have many things they make money on. You can be successful giving everything away for free when you are small and hope to IPO or get WhatsApped. When you are a real company you need lots of things that make money so that no single one of them failing will hurt you.
No, that did not ever happen. I reject to believe. Oh my god, how frightening is this!
> It baffles me why in 2014, some developers still prefer to work as if UNIX System V had just been released.

Because (a) some of us aren't convinced that things like IDEs give a better view of what's going on in the system; (b) some of us think that fundamental tools like terminal emulators, editors and so on should be debugged and stable because we have to earn our mortgage payments using them and chasing the shiny isn't on our job description; (c) any actually useful new idea winds up in Vim anyway.

You want to use a new shiny unproven editor, grand, have a ball. But don't ask me to purely on the basis that it's not new and shiny.
National Basketball Association. this should explain: http://allball.blogs.nba.com/2013/11/13/welcome-to-the-nba-j...
#1 Life is short, so make sure you'll have no regrets when you die

#2 Whether you think you can or can't, you're right

#3 Foolish decisions are often the ones you regret the less
- Visual representation of the code structure

- Ability to select any symbol and find semantic uses of it

- For OO code, being able to visuallize the OO graph usage of certain symbols

- Refactoring across the whole project with semantic knowledge (no, search/replace does does not cut it)

- Navigation in third-party libraries deployed in binary format

- Code completion for static/dynamic languages, while showing tooltip documentation

- Graphical visualization of data structures on the debugger

- Background compilation with static analysis

- unit test debugging infrastructure

- integration with modelling tools

- integration with SCM tooling and being able to interact with them directly from the editor. For example, generating a blame file, with navigation across the file revisions.

- integration with continuous integration servers

- integration of developer workflow with task management servers

As an example of such developer workflows, have the IDE talk to Jira, edit the code, automatically bundle it in a workflow that binds the code changes to the Jira issue being worked on, get a Jenkins notification after the code is checked in and gone through the CI system.

Sure you can get part of it in Emacs, after spending a week configuring plugins, with different levels of maturity, and in the end it is still mostly textual.
Okay, it's clear that sooner or later you are going to outgrow this place.

But, just some advice for you in the meantime: don't be that developer who insists on your standards, no matter how much you feel yourself to be right. If you do that, you're going to be miserable and you won't get a good reference for the next job.

But more importantly, you should take this opportunity to learn about everything in the job that isn't coding. Like teamwork, communication, respect.

Success at the job is not about doing what's right in an abstract sense; it's about doing things that decision makers perceive as valuable. If you feel strongly that they're doing the wrong thing, then you're first going to have to change what they perceive as valuable.

In your programming career, you will often be employed by people who are less mentally agile than yourself. But you're going to have to learn to respect what they know and do well - understand the customer, forge relationships. Computers are so fucking efficient these days that even naive solutions have a lot of value sometimes, so deal with it. (There's always some other programmer who would be appalled at the shortcuts you take; you're not special.)

TL;DR: If you want respect, you have to give respect first.
Microsoft cries out to UK government against open source
Federal judge says it’s okay for the NYPD to spy on Muslims
My 2013 Pro from MSDN doesn't do anything like that.

Edit: I just span up a copy fo the virtual machine snapshot and it didn't say anything even though that had been technically not used and has no network connection.
WTF I get downvoted for this?

Why am I even here.
Not practical. ^[ is a two-key combination, so more RSI-inducing. And you need escape a lot, especially in plain vi.

And the ESC key has been generating ASCII 27 on keyboards for a long time. It's definitely not just terminal emulators.
Getting to Grips with LaTeX
> Android's core is open source.

> So MS would have no problem releasing their source to Bing ?

What is the line from Android to Bing? Does google open source google? gmail?

Asking for open sourcing WinCE or NT kernel would be a valid point. Both are products that date from ~20 years ago so it's probably not gonna happen.

EDIT: also Android is based on Linux code. It would be illegal to distribute it without source
Very true, again highlighting some of the flaws of OPs current workplace.
You can consider it an "artist's statement", something comparable to Kryptos statue. Nothing evil in that, I believe.
Here's a diff of that file from OS X 10.8.5 (Security-55179.13) to 10.9 (Security-55471):
https://gist.github.com/alexyakoubian/9151610/revisions

Check line 631. Appears seemingly out of nowhere.
Use OBS http://obsproject.com/ (Open Broadcaster Software) and stream to a website like justin.tv/twitch.tv.

It's also possible to save to a file, so it's easy to do screen capture for anything else too.
Well, I have to thank you, I have learnt something today and I've only been awake a few hours. I did do a quick bit of research before posting my comment, to make sure I wasn't overshooting the mark, but I didn't see anything about Scala/Clojure web frameworks, so on that regard, thank you for enlightening me.

OP should definitely move away from PHP though.
The fact they say it expires in "Int32.MaxValue" days is worrisome. But hey those stale licenses, we gotta fuck those guys up...
Google earned about $12B on revenue of ~$60B in the 2013 financial year, and trades at $404B.

That's 33 times earnings, and Google isn't growing at 70% a year.

400 million users * $1/year = $400m/year, but WhatsApp's expenses look pretty low. Say earnings of 200m/year

$200m * 33 = ~$6B.

That 70% growth rate makes all the difference.
I am honestly amazed at how feistily every 'hacker' here is defending LaTeX in response to your comment. I agree with you for the most part.

This whole "it's apples to oranges" claim is bullshit. Both Word as well as LaTeX can be used for anything from writing a resume, making a technical paper with a few simple equations, to writing an entire Vector or Linear Algebra textbooks. When you have two options for doing the same task it's very much comparing apples to apples.

Yes, they each were originally built with different objectives and different target markets, but they have since aspired to be usable for all the same things. Of course, they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

But I don't get how do a bunch of folk here feel justified in arguing against someone saying "there's room for improvement" with clear viable suggestions on the details too. I know that hating on MSWord (or MS-anything) is fashionable on HN. But you can't seriously be defending

* the steep learning curve: throw your 14-year-old who's doing a math assignment Word vs your favourite LaTeX editor, see what happens;

* lack of WYSIWYG-like feedback-loops: you have to wait a full minute on decently sized documents to see the result of adding that equation that took you 10 seconds to add;

* syntax holdups: you miss an underscore and your document is broken. All the way through. And can take an hour to fix even if you're skilled. People writing documents that need LaTeX's power aren't always coders, and debugging is not a fun or planned-for activity for anyone.

I also don't for the life of me see why someone has to "be an expert, not just written a couple documents casually in undergrad" to be able to comment on the flaws of a product. They're as much a user as a power user, and obviously the power users went through that stage too. Losing sight of your past difficulties (or being gifted in LaTeX) doesn't make them irrelevant for people not in your current position.

Loosely relevant: I smell hardcore "hacker entitlement" around people using LaTeX and defending it including all its stupid barriers to easy document-creation tooth and nail. Hardcore programmers do this with way too many things (like Linux, and development environments for almost any language). And it's just really frustrating for a lot of people to deal with =/

PS: NeoVim sounds like someone finally got off their high horse (or from whining) and decided to actually make something better. Thanks!
what exactly happened to ICQ? i haven't used it in years and years
Yeah that sucks. I wish you luck with that and will keep my eyes peeled for issues here. We gave 50 seats so trouble like this would be nice to avoid.
It's best practice according to my 1948 GPO telecommunications handbook power always comes from the batteries.

There is an interesting write up on the register about how a London based colo facility does its UPS here

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/21/city_lifeline_london...
Ask HN: To escape management trap hole, what job for truly technical sysadmins?
I have extensive experience managing Linux/Unix and Windows servers. I'm not afraid to fire up a debugger, check strace, go deep down into any stack I'm managing. At my current job I've moved from 3rd-level support to something like a general 4th-level support: many different teams throw problems at me and I figure out what's wrong (again, the software stack doesn't matter, I usually get up to speed quick enough).

So my question to HN is this: what jobs are there where you are expected to know a lot about infrastructure and work on really hard problems without being pushed constantly into management roles when the time for performance review and career discussions come?
Jesus nothing is wrong. Read my comment again. I'm saying it's an apples to oranges comparison. If BASIC is all you need great. If word is all you need great. If you can get by with importing from gnuplot or R or matlab or whatever great. I'm not saying one is superior to the other. I'm saying that when I want to draw a commutative diagram, I'd rather do it in LaTeX with tikz or the xy package.

I'm sick of the "HN strawman." People on these threads need to read and apply basic critical reading and logical skills.

You don't need to tell ME to use the best tools for the job. I've been telling people that for fucking years. I don't why your comment annoyed me so much but it did.
"data:" is also disabled by default in Firefox.
And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?
One could easily remove then fan on the leefblower engine and add a saw blade.
I care about code more than most people

I get the impression that this guy thinks of himself as "a coder". He wants to write code all day long. He wants to write the best code in the world. He wants to write code that's robust and tested and modern and secure and clever...

...and all for the sake of writing code that's interesting to him.

In the real world we have to write code that enables users to do things. That's it. Usually that also means writing code that's tested, secure, robust and so on, but for the sole purpose of making users better able to use our software.

We write things that are secure so that users don't lose their data/privacy/money.

We write things that are tested so that users don't face errors and bugs when they use our software.

We write things that are robust so that users can use our software whenever they need it without it falling over all the time.

If I was the manager of his team and he came to me suggesting "Dependency injection of the database objection into a class" I'd say no too without a good reason - the entire team would need to learn the new code, any code that relies on the old system would need refactors, and so on. But if he came to me and said "If we used an injection pattern we'd be better able to switch to a failover server, we'd be able to add features faster and it'd enable use to use a better security model", I would listen.

A big part of development is actually "sales" - if you can't sell your ideas to your team, you'll not get to implement them, even if they're the right way to do things.
Well, there you go.

This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.
Big difference: Skype had many more than the handful of employees needed to run WhatsApp. Their cost base was hundreds of millions.

WhatsApp seems to run lean and mean, and that makes a big difference in terms of keeping it profitable.
Microsoft killed (or at least delayed, so much that they are not yet here) Linux laptops. I am using a Linux laptop (no M$ tax), but it was not easy to find. And it is not state of the art (HP 635).

Microsoft has forced me to continuously deal with my providers for sending me invoices in a non-standard format (.doc). Because they fought, and are fighting open standards for office documents (I am exclusively using open office / libre office, but that is not a 100% working solution)

Microsoft is one of the biggest extorters using the patent system to tax us all.

I would say that MS is still one of the biggest drags on the world economy: not because their products do not increase productivity (they do!), but because we could be in much better place if they wouldn't have fought open standards.

The damage done is not reversible in a generation: I would say that the economic consequences are more lasting than the ones caused by both World Wars, since those proprietary products have a huge lifespan and have full world penetration, in all economic areas.

So no, I am not about to forget what they have done (and are doing).
Which kid is that? The one that was already missing before the bombing?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/falsely-accused-bombin...
clemensv is right - SL went the way of the Dodo a long time ago. How Microsoft handled the Performance Point server debacle was way worse though.
I like to think that's what lalc was implying. With a language comes community, and PHP's community is unfortunately laden with baggage.
If you can, can you invite me to lobste.rs? It seems like a community that I would be proud to be a part of. Thanks in advance. You can invite me through ygtckr()gmail.com
And with not paying tax - Microsoft has all this money sitting in Europe that it has to pay tax on if it returns to shareholders, or it can waste it on buying companies instead.
Because many of the people that learned those old stuff were young when those tools were new and don't want to learn anything else.

Habits die very slow.
It's about 2x faster in regular CPython 2.7 on my machine.
In pypy it is actually way slower than your original one.

In many cases, pypy cannot be used, because it's not compatible with all the libraries.
Ask HN: private open source social networks for family use?
ICQ was revolutionary at the time. Both in terms of early-game instant messaging, and the deal these guys struck with AOL. I remember everybody talking about it in Israel at the time. (iirc) Four founders in their early twenties each making around $40mil was quite a shock.

Even though it's a bit sad to see things didn't really evolve much since then, the bubble bursted a little later, and those kind of eyeballs-based "business-models" collapsed. I wonder if these kind of deals are the canary of another bubble bursting?

136093
ScientificAmerican, why aren't you recognising white-hats?
How much are all those users paying in phone contracts? A lot more than $40 each. This is Facebook commoditizing its compliments: break the SMS cartel, eventually reduce mobile carriers to ISPs, users pay less for their phone contracts and the money they save goes somewhere else (whether Facebook can capture much of that is another matter).
How To Get Your MVP Funded By A VC
Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made.
I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly formatted chapters written with simplenote. 4) i also could seperate the chapters in files and keep everything in a git repo.

When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.

That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.

I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.

Writing

\begin{itemize}
\item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim
terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
\item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
\end{itemize}

is complicated and you can't read it well. this otoh is very easy to read:

* really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is
better to read because it starts with a clear sign which
is recognized to be a bullet.
* next line, which is also very long.

Easy readability is crucial, because i needed proof readers. The young proof readers could actually get the markdown code and correct my mistakes there (or write comments, starting with another fixme). really rocked with diff.

The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.

I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex.
I agree, that for some people this is not the case.
They could, if:

- Go's unsafe package offered the same capabilities as Oberon's SYSTEM

- It offered a bit more control about GC takes place

Any AOT native compiled language can be used in place of C for user space code. There is hardly any C feature essential for such type of applications.

C can be relegated for kernel space until something better gains more market share.
I'm using this book as a companion to this edX course:

https://courses.edx.org/courses/UTAustinX/UT.5.01x/1T2014/in...
WhatsApp is much better than Skype as an acquisition.

1. It's a single-purpose, specialised application which makes it hard to compete against. Once you can't subtract anymore from a software you are left with the essence of it. If you build that rock-solid you can eliminate any competitive threat on the product front. Kind of like unix utilities.

2. On the network front they played smartly by going after your phone book which makes them network agnostic (Skype, FB, Google, iMessage, BBM are all stuck within their own walls). At this point WhatsApp can just sit back and let network-effects do the work (they have spent 0 on marketing to date).

Between 1 & 2, competing with WhatsApp is hard and they are resilient to disruption. That's a great relief for any tech acquisition.

Another thing I like about WhatsApp is that they didn't do a whole lot other than fixing SMS. They did this by adding group messaging and reducing costs. And for now at least, I don't get any marketing spam on WhatsApp like I do over SMS.

Skype's shelf life was always questionable to me. It was and will remain relatively easier to disrupt.
I think people are leaving, but I'm sure FB are acquiring users faster than they are losing them. Also the standard user doesn't grok the feed personalisation features so they switch off as a result. I left FB post Snoden. My wife has a news feed that she finds uninteresting but is not bothered enough to tune that feed to her benefit. She just visits Facebook less often.
But I thought Microsoft had 'changed'? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281283
Ukraine’s Leader Flees Palace as Protesters Widen Control
Sure, how is it going back in 1974?
you are so smart to use extrinsic in a sentence. please continue to regale me with your knowledge
Does that mean you will start working on Arc as well ?
I agree that that aspect of LaTeX sucks. That said, as a matter of exchanging practical hints: If you haven't yet heard of \includeonly, you should definitely check it out ;)
Mac and the Micro – memories of Ian McNaught-Davis
Better, mobile off. Fix issue in the morning when back on office.
Makerland gives free 3g starter pack for everyone