skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love the inline PDF preview, and overall it's quite clean.

But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.

If you want to consider making it more generic:

Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.

Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).

You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.

If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).
"Maybe someone can point out issues with this thinking (besides those addressed in the blog post)."

Howsabout the one that was addressed in the blog post, namely that SOA is going to slow down your process?

Premature optimization indeed.
You can set the currency for the client which will update the invoice. Hope this works for you.
Honest question - why do financial data feeds (stock data) cost so much? Ideally, this is public information, so they should be available for free (or a nominal cost), no?
I think that one of the reasons we see so much bad code, is that customers have a very hard time evaluating the quality of the code, and therefore both problems could be solved by learning more people how to write code.

I feel that I can write as bad code as I want to, and still get away with it (not that I do it), since nobody realizes it is bad until another programmer works on it which might be years later, or even never.

If bad programmers were identified easier, they would be forced to go out of business or start to make better programs! And with more people that can actually code, people wouldn't be forced to choose the bad programmers.
Unicode ^ str
Fluke 75 had a removable yellow case circa '86. My father had one.
I don't think it can fail entirely, because it's not even clear what failure for Bitcoin would look like. Even if the value of a BTC plummets overnight, it's still useful as an intermediary, which is what all the big Bitcoin startups are using it for.

The only failure scenario for Bitcoin that I can see is a technological one: if someone finds a way to break transaction integrity, that would be very bad. But the basic premise is sound, so even if Bitcoin falls in this manner, some other cryptographic value transfer system will continue to exist.
Lovely, pretty misleading article for people who don't have this functionality unlocked.
S-plus: stats needs a real but dedicated language
R: S-plus isn't free or enough like lisp
And he's 25. I know that's not super young but he speaks with a tone that makes me think he is more experienced than his age would let on.
> Where I worked, we had complete system crashes which could be traced back "incorrect" usage of this very class

Ah, yes. The ultimate abstraction failure - a bad library is one that requires you not only understand its abstraction, but you understand its implementation and the underlying layer in such meticulous detail that you could re-write the entire thing from scratch.

See also webforms.

Worse than useless.
Ask HN: how to come up with a decent SaaS idea?
I have a team of friends who are all coders and/or designers. We're all eager to use our talents and to get started validating an idea against the market with the ultimate goal of living the patio11 dream. But that's the problem, we don't have any decent ideas.

We can't seem to find an idea which is:

-Business to business (ie mobile games and other consumer offerings might be sexy but boring business apps have a greater chance of making money)

-Realistically doable by a team of 3-4 people in a few months time using ramen money to bootstrap (so no schemes to reinvent logistics by creating P2P drone delivery networks or stuff like that)

-Actually needed by a certain industry (Facebook for cats, and all that)

-Not already served well by another company (ie I had an idea for an email-based CRM to follow up on people, but why bother when Contactually seems to do an excellent job already?)

So, please help us, Oh mighty HN. How might we hatch a great, or at least workable, idea so we can use our tech talents to create something of value for an unsexy but worthy industry and become just as cool as patio11?
100 years isn't all that long. If race doesn't matter, we'll still be thinking and writing about the slow march toward that state, and I suspect the election of a black president will show up in that story.
When you say "Even an atheist must admit that there's a certain satisfaction that comes from helping other people (even anonymously) that really has no limit." you imply that theists have a reason to being altruistic (an probably will?) while atheists don't (and probably won't). Altruism and faith are not correlated, hence I disagree to the way you worded that.
Kotlin's brilliance is how much less it's trying to do. It's truly narrowly focused on fixing what's broken in Java—not introducing an entirely new language that happens to compile to the JVM. That'll make adopting it in organizations much easier, converting code to it much easier, and so on.

That said, I never figured out why Xtend (http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/) never caught on, and it delivered most of what Kotlin is now offering, but with an even more Java-like syntax right out-of-the-box. Since Kotlin and Xtend are very, very similar, I suspect that Kotlin's ability to genuinely succeed will be mostly based on JetBrains' popularity how strongly they push it.
Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. After a successful invasion the state of Kuwait was annexed and claimed as the 19th province of Iraq.

It wasn't tolerated and eventually corrected, but it still happened.
It might be the least ambitious new language of the last ten years!
I second Eloquent Javascript. It's the book I recommend to JS beginners. Secrets of the Javascript Ninja by John Resig & Bear Bibealt is another good one once you get past the terrible title.

I will checkout Learning Javascript Design Patterns on your recommendation. I bookmarked that book a while ago but forgot to return and give it a read.
Not in my experience. I'd imagine it varies somewhat from car to car.
I don't have any problems with their handling of their own employee. My problem, considering the facts as reported by the Seattle PI, is with their own "dredging" into a non-employee hotmail account and chat logs
That wouldn't be donatj's fault, it would be the fault of the culture holding their people back. Maybe JJ should look inward instead of outward for a solution.
Insight Data Science Fellows Program launches New York session
It should be noted that at least some cases which previously required template meta programming can now be done in a more natural style with constexpr. A constexpr function can be evaluated at compile time, this means that its return value can be used in places that require a compile time constant.

constexpr functions where quite restrictive in C++11. They could pretty much only contain a single expression and a return. C++14 significantly relaxes these restrictions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B14#Relaxed_constexpr_res...

Type-level meta programming is still confined to using templates though...
nice to see someone trying to fix contenteditable as an api, thanks for the hard work and sharing it!
Nodejs module patterns
Plus, its interoperation with Java is so seamless, that adoption is both gradual and natural.
I'm excited about using this in my next project. Love the fact they kept it simple with this one.
I know what you're saying and I have no problem paying for the media I consume. I use such services and I believe Popcorn Time demonstrates precisely how terrible they are. I do have a problem waiting months after a new release is lucky enough to hit CinemaNow to pay $4.99 to watch a movie within 48 hours. They have the gall to offer the film for "purchase" for $19 first. Maybe gouging is a better term.

Worse still are the cable companies (some of whom are owned by these very entertainment companies). I can forget about trying to watch that movie on CinemaNow in the evenings when my cable company shapes the traffic of competing video streaming services.

I'm not arguing that copyright is useful. I don't think I have the intimate familiarity with the various laws to argue that it isn't. I'm just surprised that things could be better, as demonstrated by Popcorn Time, and yet they are not so that an industry can continue to extract money from the status quo... a bar they set themselves with the legislation they create.
But there are not. A sector being new is not a constraint on the individuals.

Plus, pleading about inexperience seems a little late. It's 2014. The Mythical Man Month was written what, 40 years ago? Maybe I'm off and it's 30. Still?

Honestly as I think about it, that is a book everyone should read. Managing software development is a more valuable skill than the actual development.
The Garbage Man
I'm curious, have you ever got distributed transactions - particularly ones over WCF and the like - working? I've found that wile TransactionScope works like a dream in the trivial case, it becomes disproportionately hairy and frustrating as you start trying to use such elaborate features.
If you can afford the luxury, it sounds like it's time to visit a therapist. Good luck to you sir.
Randomness will not help you guys,
look at what a horde of monkeys do on the game when left alone:

http://popox.github.io/2048/
If only we could collect all this and give it to this guy

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/garbage-man
Thank you for the excellent feedback.

German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:

https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/31
https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/29

There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.

https://www.facebook.com/invoiceninja

Thanks again!!
Hi all,

I have created my second Python script, and would appreciate comments, contributions or just someone to discuss it with, as i am sure it can be optimized in many ways, as it is a part of my learning. The script is for configuring UNIX/Linux machines with shell scripts with Python - So pretty much a Python way of Fucking shell scripts.

I added it to Github so you can view it there:
https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py :-)

Sincerely,
Anders
I'm generally for strong labour protection laws but as you point out with such demand from programmers in the area nobody needs a job at this company, they take it because they want it and they can leave relatively easily at any time.
Your argument doesn't seem to address my point. You're saying if the interface isn't good you're at the wrong level of abstraction. Okay. How does that contradict the idea that the interface is everything for creating a successful SOA?
Reduce work, try sports and something like Yoga to bring your body and mind back on track. Don't forget to socialize with your friends on a regular basis :)
Yay, giant Flash bullshit as a background element!

Also, blatant marketing spam...
The Emerging Wave of Decentralized Applications
> i'm guessing a more robust feature set for a monthly fee?

Taking a cut of payments is another obvious one.
does it necessarily have to be equal representation?
White House launches climate data project, calls on data innovators
Agreed. Books that focus on teaching syntax and common use cases really fall flat for me. The best programming books teach you how to think in the syntax of the language. Eloquent Javascript [1] does a good job of that and is also free.

The best programming book at teaching a practical contemporary language in depth while teaching you to think with it is Metaprogramming Ruby. That's a great read for anyone considering writing a book to teach a programming language. And the best book I've ever read on thinking about programming comprehensively is SICP. Which again, I would recommend reading at least half of if you are going to write a book teaching a language.

1. http://eloquentjavascript.net/
> I have a mentor who says this is normal and he has also burned out many times.

Many times certainly not. Don't forget that you could just accept an easy job for a while.
Direct link to the background image:

https://backgrounds.wetransfer.net/wetransfer_jerbs_1680x105...
Exactly; it wasn't tolerated, it made Iraq a pariah state, and it was quickly corrected.

See anything like that happen with Russia's annexation of Crimea?
Windows XP Will Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Nah, I took it as an opportunity to educate him. He learned that I am not a linux guy, and that there's actually lots of unix operating systems. And then he learned that mysql isn't the linux database, it is just a database and that he should use postgresql instead.
So don't?
Xerox PARC was not dangerous. The danger for Xerox was the different between seeing an opportunity for the future or a threat to their current business model. If PARC had never existed, the same things with minor differences would have happened some years later.
Well, you took a swing at it and you missed. You can give yourself credit for that at least.

Everything else is managing your expectations. There's something about being 22 that's tough -- lots of people are advancing in their careers, and you're just starting out.

So don't drink the Kool-Aid. Forget about the valley. Don't be greedy. Once you learn to enjoy your life again and have confidence that you can be a positive contributing member of society, reconsider the mantle. Emotional stability is like muscle power -- you must build it over time with care. And you need an abnormal amount of emotional stability to handle SV startups.

Good luck.

EDIT for a missing 'to' :)
Unless I'm missing something, shouldn't this be titled "How I paid someone $200 to make an OS X app for me"?
> Ehrsam was also pretty adamant that Bitcoin isn't a way around existing laws. The first generation of Bitcoin firms were run by amateurs; the second gen (...) are run by people who have spent their lives working in banking and securities. (...) As always, the guys making the big money in a gold rush aren't the gold miners, it's the guys selling the shovels...

This. Anarchists (crypto- and not) developed Bitcoin environment as a way to go around the laws, but now as it matures into a real tool, it's being taken over by people who are serious about making money. It's both a victory and a failure of Bitcoin - we have a potentially interesting new financial tool, but all the promises that "Central Banking / Feds can shove it" remain unfulfilled.
Am I the only one that was hoping I could fill in the bracket by clicking on a team to see the probabilities of different matchups (vs. the overall probability of each individual team for each round)?
"The Art Bell Connection"

Most unsurprising headline EVAR. Put another layer of tinfoil on those hats, kiddos.
Never used sqlite for websites, but wouldn't this problem be better handled by caching? I.e. completely bypass the database, especially for users who will never log in.

E.g. Varnish.
Exercise. Running. Meditation. Fuck what other people think. We've all got problems, mate. Suck it up.
Ask HN: What's a simple online business that my parents can run?
Background: my mom was a journalist, but left her job to be a homemaker. My dad is a hardware/software engineer, in his early 50s. They're looking for a type of business to start together, rather than working day jobs into old age. Some things they are considering are running a Kumon franchise, family restaurant, etc.

However, I thought they would be better off running something online. For example, eBay importer, dropshipper, etc. Does HN have any suggestions? Have any similar experiences?
I'm sorry that I cannot read your letter more thoroughly right now, but I'll give you one little piece of advice after reading the first couple of paragraphs. A word of warning, basically:

Remember what inspired you down your path, and where that path took you. You got your inspiration in the same place you are asking for advice now. So, please take all the advice you will get here with a grain of salt.

Nobody practices what they preach.

If you know who your friends are, and who loves you - those are the people you should listen to.
The purpose is mainly the idea.

If such a tower were built, it would indeed be a huge waste of natural resources; but it would improve our engineering abilities.
A great way to engage the Reality Distortion Field. Which is certainly functional. And at least faintly creepy.

But I am thinking--where would I put my Ham Radio Antenna?
There is a balance, and it swings heavily in the direction of never ever ever compromising security.
Like you, I also have "world changing" ideas to make people's lives easier and healthier

I hear that a lot in the startup scene where I live. It's bullshit.

First and foremost, an idea is never world-changing. It's the execution of the idea that changes things. Until it has been executed successfully and actually changed the world, all it is is an idea. The impact can only be assessed later.

Secondly, most people don't have ideas that will make "other people's" lives better for some nebulous concept of "other people". Ideas that work are born from problems you see every day - usually pains that you suffer yourself, but equally pains that you see your loved ones or co-workers struggling with over and over again. Unless you have direct, first-hand experience of something it's very difficult to see a way to solve it because you don't know what will make it better.

It sounds very much like you're putting yourself under a huge amount of pressure. Find a way to stop doing that. Find something that you think will be interesting, fun, and will also contribute to the social good and make the world a better place for a few people. If you're working on something that has real potential, other people will soon start to put the pressure on for you.
How do you propose they handle the scenario then where a driver receives a bill for entering the zone on a particular day, but then claims they were never driving on that day? Ordinarily they could retrieve the photo and use that to confirm the charge.
I think that trophy is won pretty handily by Go.
If we're gonna be fair and balanced, let's not forget targeted assassinations. See also: works by Jeremy Scahill
I have no association to this site...

Just liked the idea.
>Now imagine a world where everybody has a basic ability to develop software.

Pointless, I think. They'll only be able to make the most basic of software. Existing programmers complain about bad code and naive solutions already. This will only compound the issue.

I'm not sure if programming teaches critical thinking, reading and writing any better than the existing subjects we have.
Raise Your Own Edible Insects With This Free Kit
An interesting discussion came up after the .NET Glimpse library included opt-out analytics:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/getglimpse-dev/KA95n...

A big part of the decision is opt-out vs. opt-in, and how it would even be possible to make opt-in return meaningful results in a library. Also, one of the main problems was managing the expectations of the users of the library, many of whom would only install it through a packaging system which provides little means of documenting that tracking is included and enabled by default.

Here is the initial thread sharing a user's surprise:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/getglimpse-dev/7WgpX...
I pasted on Pastebin because of 2000 characters limit. Thanks a lot to everyone who took time to hear me and thought of helping me out with kind words and motivation.
"About us" should really be.... about you, not some strange mix of "features" and "technology".

Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.

It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.
Agreed - summing all of the center values (presumably the chances of a team winning the championship) you get 90%. There's a whole 10% unaccounted for.
You mean, except Dart.
Serious question - is there a way to filter out all of these annoying 2048 games that pop up every day, in my HN settings?
Neuroscientific testings : How Poor Mobile Performance Hurts Your Brand
Actually this app allows you to enter your company details and then its detail will be placed at the top of the invoice (like you suggested)

In the demo you can't see that because you didn't enter your company details
I wanted to say Go as well, but compared to any other possibly-mainstream languages, Go is very innovative - it has fibres/goroutines, channels, and structural typing/lack of class-based inheritance!
It sounds like you are trying too hard to feel validated and you want immediate success. You have written a very long piece including your entire background, the success of your peers compared to yourself, the positions and awards you have gotten in various competitions (for better or worse). You sound entirely focused on accolades and achievements yet you have only been going at this for at most 1/2 years.

You need to calm down and slow down. You are only 22/23. You have so much time ahead of you and you have to walk before you can run. You have burned yourself out by too high expectations. It's not as easy as having an idea, hacking away at it for a few months and then reaping the reward.

I would suggest lowering your expectations over the short term and trying to come up with some realistic goals for the next few months. Not "launch great project in 6 months" but "talk to 5 people about the validity of feature X in the 7 days" etc.

You've already helped yourself by acknowledging the problem, writing about it and telling your family and friends.
Get a team! Seriously, it sounds you're basically working alone most of the time. This doesn't work for most people (including me) - find a small, "doable" project, doesn't have to be world changing, that you and some other people can complete (complete = getting to measurable result) in a month or two. Even if it fails, you're still in a mentally & emotionally better situation than before. Don't put too much pressure on yourself, you've got time for those world-changing projects later on.