skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cat-v.org is operated by stanley lieber and hosted by myself; sl is very very careful to limit modifications to things that were either expressly in uriel's todo list or else so obviously uriel-like that their omission would be glaring.
Bitcoin 2.0: Unleash The Sidechains
Plugins is an interesting approach. But I wonder how friendly it is to non expert users. Same with the writing your own part.
If his primary criteria for "suckage" is non-reliability through unnecessary complexity, he has some decent points.

But such lists are a slippery slope from insightful reflection to axe grinding. It's one thing to debate simplicity and the qualities that emerge in simple software solutions. That is valuable. It is quite another to say that all software sucks and "features" are useless. That's in the eye of the beholder.

Perfectionists tend to be frustrated by the observation that if you want to get paid to build software (as opposed to coding for artistic purposes), the market really doesn't care about internal simplicity, they care about features and qualities. Even more frustrating, the market doesn't value reliability over all other qualities: people have, can, and will pay for something that only works some of the time. Otherwise we wouldn't have had much of an automobile or early PC market.

I am saddened to hear the author is no longer with us, due to suicide. I would have enjoyed him debating his claims on HN.
Does it represent a conflict of interest to build that software in my spare time and then try to sell it to my existing company as a solution?

In my opinion, no. Unless you've cross some proprietary line which would allow them to try to sue you for it anyway, use whatever leverage you feel you have for your own benefit.
Very impressive. But why is the pledge goal so low?
Surely you are kidding? This isn't just any space-x launch.
Yep, 'optimistic updates' is the term I like. Alex Maccaw wrote a good article on the subject a few years back:

http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/async_ui
That is pretty bizarre--though I don't know if I'm ready to concede that it's more bizarre than Pennsylvania. Until recently you couldn't buy liquor or wine (but beer was okay, for some reason) on Sundays in Pennslvania unless you were being served in a restaurant. For a real spectacle of oddity you need to see the bottle shop dance[1] that I describe in another comment.

I don't think I've ever seen a beer with an ABV above 1% and below 4%. What kinds/brands of beer are these?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613369
How to survive Apple’s 7 day cliff and get more app downloads
"Right-to-use" sounds like something people could get behind.

Congress needs to pass "Right-to-use" patent reform to prevent Saudi oil companies from buying up patents that increase gas mileage and preventing US companies from developing them into products.

I don't think this has ever actually happened, but current patent law would allow it.
I don't think there's anything special about what DueDil are doing.

Basic company information is public domain, and available to download in bulk [1] or via URI [2]

Companies House also offer a free app for iOS and Android [3] providing some additional info, e.g. details of directors and filing histories. If you delve into it, that is all served by a JSON API.

Accounts data has recently been opened up for free [4], providing info on about 60% of companies (all those that file accounts electronically, from what I gather) but the data is in (i)XBRL format, and I don't know how amenable it is to statistical analysis.

Documents are my biggest pain at the moment. I believe annual returns, etc. should be public domain, and I think it is wrong that Companies House have the authority to charge for access to them.

[1] http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html

[2] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/about/miscellaneous/URI.sht...

[3] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/mobile-app/

[4] http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_accountsdata.html
Same could be said of any animal? And just because animals don't express our sort of technology doesn't mean they can't.
That was the best i had - I'm terrible at naming stuff ;)
Give it a few days, maybe something will pop for you. Insisting on a .com name makes it a lot harder to find a decent name though.
Unreal4 seems way more flexible in this regard than previous versions of the engine, but I haven't played about with it enough to be sure.

In any case, the limitation was never down to the scripting method, more the way that the engine was designed and what it specialises in. Remember that full licence holders had the C++ source.
I think quite a few people are missing the use of the term "harmful".

His words are from a developer standpoint with unix philosophy.

One tool does one thing well, those tools are licensed in a way that means you can contribute safely without being a lawyer and the code is not needlessly complex.

The Suckless crew have software that suits such philosophies perfectly, check out dwm and ii.

http://suckless.org/

His ideas are not for your grandma, they're for elitists.
I was excited until I saw it needed pip intervention. Not that Python is bad, but mixing environments raises skepticism in me. However, it is a fantastic idea.
YeahKIA: You appear to be hellbanned, FYI.

YeahKIA's comment: Plugins is an interesting approach. But I wonder how friendly it is to non expert users. Same with the writing your own part.
Trading security for performance seems to be a recurring issue among many projects.
Further research does not always yield the right answer, but it a a damn sight better than flagging something popular based on no information.

Even the slightest look into this would have revealed why it is special.
Interesting. Can you tell a little bit more about your 'hierarchy of models'? How does state trickle down to child-models, etc?
To piggyback: thanks for the context khm and sorry for giving you server maintenance issues on a Saturday morning...I've come across cat-v entries in random Google searches (today I was looking for UNIX books) and I figured it was a site that had been used to getting Slashdotted.
I love that flat files are considered less complex, but SQL DBs are bad.... I would love to know under which criteria that is true for the author. Is it "music I listened to last week"?
I think they want to blow past it -- the Micro team set their pledge goal at $50k, and ended up raising something like 2 million (last I checked).

Their costs might also be particularly low, given that they are printing & laminating the circuits, and (clearly) already have the tech required to do that in place.
Why not indeed. Many times all that is required is a few files written to /tmp atomically mv'd in place. Also, see git's design[0] and how it makes operations like fetch/push completely trivial. Also, how redis reliably dumps and appends.

[0]: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals
Yes, after it becomes normal to silence "unapproved" speech through private means, it won't be long until we see suggestions for the same to be done by the government.
This is a similar approach to what we're doing, except I went with Ractive for the view layer instead of React.

How do you handle failed PUT/POST/DELETEs and cases where the user is offline? This has been our biggest hurdle; mainly because when users feel like what they're using is a desktop app they think less about internet connectivity and assume the app should work offline (oy).

Currently I have the model save revisions of its data (one large document) through pouchdb but any solution with offline capabilities at some point needs to figure out conflict resolutions. I haven't got too far into conflicts/diffs but I'm curious if that's something you guys dealt with.
>> "I like it. It means people know how much others are earning."

That might seem fine if you are earning a decent salary but if you are working a shitty job to make ends meet it can be embarrassing. It's the main reason people find it rude to discuss each others salaries.
Software complexity either comes from people not doing the hard work, or contemplation, to pan down their ideas to the simplest possible construct... or later allowing cancerous developments. It has little to do with tools used for implementation. Pretty much everything on the left side of that table can be used to produce beautiful, simple, elegant software.
Who Really Owns The Internet?
Many companies have clauses in your offer/contract for situations like this. They often own what you do in your spare time as well as while you are on the clock, as the lines are often blurred.

I think the first step would be to talk to HR (or if you don't want to do that, take a look at your contract, read it closely, or hire a lawyer) to see what would happen if worst came to worst (if your company took legal action, regardless of if you develop it while working for them, or shortly after quitting).
Update on Linksys WRT1900AC support for OpenWRT
We don't really deal with it at all yet. Good warning! That said, given the nature of our app, I think that for us, displaying an error bar on top and caching the last PUT/POST/DELETE in a slow retry loop is probably enough - it's a content-heavy app, so people will understand that the content comes from the internet. I hope. :-)

So, in short, you're ahead of us here.
What's the definition of 'harmful' here? Unreliability?
Harmful: GPL, LGPL, Apache Software License, MPL, CC.

Less Harmful: ISC, MIT/X, BSD, CC0, public domain.

Yes, giving users even a smidgen of freedom like the GPL does is harmful. Who could say the terrible things that would happen if we don't keep the peasants well whipped and in their place.

People like him have gone on to be so circumpolitical in their defense of letting developer do anything they want that their licences have ended up recreating the huge inefficient Soviet design bureaus of the 1960's. Places where you had 5,000 people doing the work of 50.

You needn't look further than the closed source juggernauts like google, apple and microsoft to see how inefficient and wasteful they are with the human capital at their disposal. Open source projects still manage to beat them much of the time with 1/1000th the personnel and virtually no funding.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted:

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/58_gay_arab_linguists_ouste...
The Past, Present and Future of Streaming Music
Be very careful when adding too many features, because if you ever want to take them away (to simplify the site / UX) your users will hate you.

Just changing the look of a page will usually make people go crazy. Ebay's yellow background story is something that developers can learn from: http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch
There is also a todomvc with undo using baconjs. It's pretty neat when you can use Bacon model:

https://github.com/hura/todomvc-react-baconjs
Sure, adding features that hurt your stability and your chances of growth is a terrible idea. Many a company has made that mistake before, and ended up with an unworkable product.

We do have to make sure that, with the features we have, the product is actually viable though. There's also many projects out there that just won't get anywhere because there is no compelling reason to use them over the alternatives.

For instance, I know of a small data visualization project that happens to have far better performance than KineticJS and D3: It was built precisely because those two libraries were tried, but just didn't provide the right frame rates for what a team was trying to do. The problem is that the current implementation's only interactive features are pan and zoom: Not even an event on mouseover. Want to highlight something based on a search? No dice. This makes the library so narrow in its applications that the project just can't capture users.

an MVP should be minimum, but we can't forget it must also be viable.
I was lucky enough to hear Gary give this talk in January at CUSEC and it was even better in person. Everyone in the room was clearly hanging off his every word, the actual technical content was pretty insightful and his humour was spot on.
Thanks! Understandable. I feel the same way.
This was just the easiest and fastest way to do it for me.
But yeah, maybe I will try to pack everything into one big zsh plugin file in the future.
I wonder whether I might not be able to convince you that RSA is less conservative than ECC. Certainly, I haven't once tested a piece of real-world software that got it right. Did you see that just the other day, a team managed to resurrect the PKCS1v15 padding oracle in JSSE? Is RSA plus OAEP really simpler than just using a curve to derive a key to encrypt with?
I joined a small company that had made this mistake horribly and many times over. The entire product was just a mess of half-baked incoherent features. It looked like many were put in to satisfy customer requests while others were just there to be able to say "It's got X!" without thought to the rest of the product. There were even two duplicated features in different places with different names. The worst part (well, best from my point of view) was that a lot of them didn't actually work correctly. They didn't have testing. That gave me license to chop a lot of it away with the justification of "If anyone was using this they would have told us it was broken. They didn't so they aren't. Get rid of it.". In those days we had feedback like "It's free and worth every penny". Now it's more like "I introduced it to my colleague and he was impressed, expect another sale soon". The feature set now is smaller than it was then, and looks less impressive when it's itemized, but what's left is more focused on a narrower type of user in one profession, more powerful and cleanly integrated into an elegant, usable product.
Your penis is getting in the way of my science
> But I wonder how friendly it is to non expert users.

Can't say from my own experience but browser extensions and IDE/Editor plugins seem to work well. If your customer is a business they might have developers to implement plugins.

Naturally it all depends on the type of product and type of customers. If your product is an online service then an API is your extension point.
“That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price — which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development — so the incentive to experiment and create is severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited.”

I read this and wondered if the patent system could be reformed to have a standardised rate for all licensees, similar to what is attempted with FRAND patents, but enforced with teeth across all of them.
Ask HN: Good colocation service providers in Atlanta?
Hello HN!

Can anyone recommend any good (in terms of pricing and service) colocation service providers in Atlanta GA?
cat-v.org runs werc[1], a minimalist web not-framework written by Uriel in the rc shell[2], served by rc-httpd[3], a web daemon also written in the rc shell, by eekee.

The site is served by a single plan 9 virtual machine hosted by myself and maintained by stanley lieber. Further website optimization is not particularly high on our to-do list. Anyone who wants to donate CDN services or front-end varnish machines is welcome to get in touch.

[1] http://werc.cat-v.org/
[2] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc‎
[3] http://man.cat-v.org/9front/8/rc-httpd
Mind and habitat: Nuclear and climate threats, and the possibility of hope
er ... extensive :-)
We have no more but also no less reason to trust individuals who are not NHS employees from breaching data protection law than individuals who are NHS employees, and have access to much more sensitive data.

On a pedantic note, the data was split by postcode district and age, with the average postcode district being 20,000 people. I still agree that's not data you'd want on a private insurers' database because they could de-anonymise outliers like the only 97 year old man, and others with partial knowledge of their hospital visit history, but it would be a lot of work making it usable for granting or denying insurance to particular individuals. Especially when it's probably easier to gain illicit access to the non-anonymised records than gain and make sense of illicit access to the anonymised records.
I hit the paywall.
3 tips para ser un trading de Forex profesional
Si lo que estás buscando es la manera profesional de poder convertirte en un profesional de Forex, estás en el lugar correcto. Hoy en día ser un trading de Forex es algo que realmente todos podemos alcanzar, ya que contamos con la facilidad de poder acercarnos a mucha información totalmente gratis en Internet, incluso para poder ser un trader Forex profesional no es necesario que nos movamos de nuestro hogar o de nuestra oficina.
You're truly of the opinion that the parent comment, particularly the above portion, doesn't strongly imply that the process of obtaining a degree increases your ability to learn?

I don't think that is what the parent comment is saying. There are a lot more psychological issues you need to deal with when going it alone. You can spend a lot of time and energy overcoming these issues, or you can go to college and not have to deal with them, or you can ignore them and end up with serious deficiencies.

For example there are going to be areas of software development that you dislike (for me anything networking or db related) but are very important to your overall development. Will you invest the time required in the areas you dislike?

If you really don't like algorithms will you spend the 300+ hours on it that you should? Quite a lot of people who study via college can and do. A rare few people going it alone can.
I like French Republican Calendar [1] much more for some reason. Months are 30 day each, no 7-day weeks, 10-day decades instead, so any day of the year is the same day of the "week" and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days are simply treated as "special days" (sansculottides), so it would be pretty easy to deal with them in any accounting software as well. The whole calendar has very nice spirit to it, each month is named in due to climatic effects of this one (at least it happens so in my location, and weather happens to change exactly according to this calendar, not Gregorian one), and each day of the year also has it's own name (something natural, like tree or fruit, no human names or something, which I find really cool). I really really like that symbolism. Such a calendar isn't just boring list of numbers, but something truly beautiful.

So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
It's worth noting that the Russians have already set precedent for denying access to their air space under this treaty by canceling scheduled US surveillance flights during the build up on the Crimean border.

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/17/russia-blocks-...
Flatbook, Airbnb for summer sublets
Absolutely. The worst ones are special purpose features that help you do one narrowly defined task very efficiently. One way to add special new things is a 'labs' option like Google where you put easy requests in which don't fit with the rest of the program and it's clear to the user they aren't proper stable features.
A full license for UDK is quite pricey, so isn't really germane to this discussion.

If you need to develop in C++ then your cost structure (in cash or opportunity cost) means that worrying about paying $1500 for a development tool won't even move the needle.

Maya / Max seat $5000+ (and devs tend to need them too)

Unity's biggest payoff is in workflow. If what you care about is the most polygons on the screen then UDK or Cryengine will win. If you care about the price of getting something out the door and it isn't an FPS then Unity clearly wins.
What's 'Cazenove' doing on Google's London map?
Reading a lot of books about obscure areas of CS is great and all, but real skill (applied programming) comes down to practice. Pick challenging projects that force you to learn about new topics (i.e. low level networking, graphics, UI, REST API's, etc...). Make sure you take the time to write large (relatively) programs in different types of languages (object oriented, functional, etc...).

I always found the best way to learn and RETAIN the knowledge is to utilize it while reading some new topic. For me I purchase books on Amazon, watch Coursera and iTunesU courses, and then created a few applications or open source libraries based on this information.
An example: a phenomenon that I think has come into play gradually over the past 3-5 years: national news broadcasts lead stories are based on the weather.

"3rd highest temperature seen in 5 yrs"

"4th coldest winter since 2001"

"2nd highest rainfall in March in the past 12 years"

etc etc

PS on a secondary note: shame on the news services for leading with weather so often. I guess it's laziness. No need to spend time, resources, expertise on investigating actual news.
That's the whole point. It means people are more acutely aware of the inequality of income in society.
This is related to something that I pondered about yesterday.
In main stream languages, imperative programs require you to read the whole thing, while functional programs allow you to look at a function and derive its meaning only from its implementation: there can't be another influence on the outcome, as there are no side effects and types are -- in ML/Haskell family members -- precise. So referential transparency, in a sense helps you to read code depth-first, only looking at the relevant bits now.

As soon as you branch off from basic type systems and add in, for instance, subtyping or type classes or existential quantification, this ability is getting weakened. Now, in order to understand what a piece of code does, you need to understand some context: 'which implementation is it?', 'what do the possible implementations have in common?'. The effects of this small complexities add up until there's too much information to be kept in biological memory at the same time, the oldest thunk of information gets purged.

I do think that typed and pure languages have big advantages here: the information that I need is available immediately from looking at the type of the reference to it. If the types aren't funky, I can assume that it will terminate, throw no exception, not suffer from data races -- I can exclusively think about what it does, not how (btw, I'm not having one specific reference language in mind right now, I'm just thinking about what would be possible).
Finland had prohibition from 1919 to 1932, when the state alcohol monopoly was created after a referendum, according to the internets, anyways.
Analysis of d2i_X509 reuse
And time invalidates this how? Databases are old, better stop using them? I've been in the gamification space since before we had that term. It went through a typical hype cycle a couple of years ago but it's just now starting to click with businesses and consumers.