skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer and designer I think agile methodology is a nice add-on for traditional workflows in startups. I love how it encourages interdisciplinary work. But I believe it took an unexpected turn towards treating the technical side of things as a mere commodity.

Last weekend I attended Startup Weekend event, looking to have fun trying to build something fast from a simple idea pitch. First day more than 80% of the crowd were business / marketing peoples. Designers were scarce and half of the few developers disappeared during the second day. Maybe I’m a masochist but decided to stay until the end, I figured I’d learn something about the agile event fauna. And I did: in most cases the agile methodology is stepping on top of rational thinking.

Do before you think and fail fast is good, only when you know how to do.

Last time I was on SW I had a lot of fun, but last weekend’s experience was somewhat sad. Gurus and their new methodologies might have some to teach, but will never replace rational thinking.
> and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless.

This is the big problem with education. I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right" which somehow has become crowd friendly. Instead better performance testing and easier firing is what we need, especially in my hometown of Chicago. Public sector unions have interests that go against those of taxpayers by default. Until we fix unions we won't fix education.
Great suggestion! The difference between being on a CDN and not is really night and day. Every serious site deserves to be on a CDN. Your users will thank you for the faster page loads. :-)
PERL -> PHP -> Rails -> (node|go)

I say PERL advisedly, since the Perl I write in is nothing like the horrors perpetrated circa 2001.

I have friends in the ruby community who're also looking forward to the uncaring hordes stampeding elsewhere. After all, these are people who managed to make PHP4 look like a worse language than it actually was :)
This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects privately).

Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point.

Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.
There is a contingent of managers who feel that users talking to devs is somehow a threat.
Places where people care about this (like HPC) already have customized kernels that run with large pages by default and don't suffer from the poor quality of TempleOS.

See https://software.sandia.gov/trac/kitten for an example.
Getting back into the (right) deliverables business
I quickly clicked back to get the author's surname, and didn't pay enough attention. Also, I'm subconsciously sexist and have to make an effort to refer to the unknown and anonymous with gender-neutral pronouns (obviously!)

I'm usually better than that:)
Or you can write a web crawel in logo fetch, sort and regexp the 'Show' articles :-)

The point of the post is to make it easier, since the 'Show' tag is used more often than not!

I like the idea, would make the frontpage clearer.
Just makes me more depressed about the facebook acquisition.
Call me pessimistic, but I think the last thing underprivileged education needs is a bunch of douchey "fail fast" startup types "disrupting" a problem they could never understand.
I'd add that the concept of the "story" and the fact that it needs a title of the format "As a <party> I need <functionality> because it add <some business value>." That practice is quite powerful. It continues to amaze me how many project managers are content starting and promising delivery of a project without a clear Definition of Done or any understanding how all this effort will add value to the company/product.
On top of that, "Killing legacy code and rewriting hacks into permanent solutions yields speed improvements!"
The union contracts are really out of control. For those that aren't aware, research "rubber rooms". Hundreds of teachers in NYC are literally paid to come and sit in empty rooms and do nothing while they wait years to be reviewed because the districts don't have the ability to fire teachers.
MobileJS – A one day conference about the mobile and embedded web in Barcelona
A one day conference about the JavaScript mobile revolution. Talks, demos, workshops, expert tables with test devices, and more packed into a single day of JavaScript awesomeness.
I wish more places would adopt Ars Technica's model where you can pay to not see ads. I think ad antipathy is a long-term trend the industry should adjust to but it would break the revenue model at some places – e.g. it costs more to for an online-only New York Times subscription than for online+paper because the business has been dominated by print advertisements for so long.
Neutron Stars Rip Each Other Apart to Form a Black Hole – Awsome Forces at Work
I would suggest you do a bit more research on the roots of the civil war. You could start with the Wikipedia page on Siad Barre, the dictator who was ousted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siad_Barre

Illuminating quotes, "the government forbade clanism and stressed loyalty to the central authorities", "Barre also sought to eradicate the importance of clan (qabil) affiliation within government and civil society".

I can advocate Xeer as a functional model of non-state governance in exactly the same way that parliamentary democracy did not become defunct after the Revolutionary War and that liberal democracy did not sing its swan song after the overthrow of the Shah or during the Lebanese civil war.
There is an attempt to find a proper jurisdiction: "A case is always heard at the lowest level of the clan that is possible. This ranges from the qoys (nuclear family), up through the reer (closest relatives), jilib (first diya group), and laaf (sub-clan) to the qolo (clan)."
I imagine it was because making good choices and judgments about who deserves it is difficult. Making sure the money is spent in a manner that matters, as opposed to given away as salaries to a bunch of consulting groups, is very hard.
Melt of Key Antarctic Glaciers "Unstoppable" – Scientific American
I'm sure he means that doing it responsibly (having the money actually be spent correctly and not wasted or lining other peoples pockets) actually takes a lot of time and effort.
I think it was like that originally, but now it is just another set of cargo cult rituals, with new management buzzwords.

The problem remains that managers in most companies cannot reliably discern the difference between valuable work product and the physical evidence of completely wasted time. They cannot tell at a glance whether the code and/or architecture is museum-quality or DailyWTF fodder. They cannot tell when the entire development team is colluding to implement mortgage-driven development. The fundamental flaw in the system is that managers and developers do not think in compatible ways. To the manager, a developer might as well be an alien, asking him for more cows and sharper scalpels. To a developer, the manager might as well be an alien, asking him to drop his pants and hop up onto the Probulator.

What is really needed is someone with both pointy hair and a neckbeard, who can translate easily between the people who need to cover their asses and justify their own existence, and the people who need both rational objectivity and aesthetic merit in their work. Both sides are needed, because honestly I have known too many co-workers that cannot seem to fathom that they don't get paid unless the work they do can somehow add value to the things the company actually sells to people outside the company.

The artist usually doesn't know when to sign the thing and ship it to the gallery, and the gallery salesman often has no idea what the piece is actually worth when a customer shows up to make an offer.
Could we do this by devoting 30% of industry-wide developer time to creating faster infrastructure? Yes, perhaps we could.

Would it only cost an individual developer 30% of his/her time to write on-the-metal software rather than use all the abstractions? No way. 80%, maybe. Those abstractions save us an amazing amount of work. That's why we use them.
I guess comparing to CloudFront would be helpful, too. If you've gone so far as hosting on S3, serving through CloudFront is about 5 minutes of additional effort.
That way, I could swap out devices or distribute my code to others, without having to worry so much about hardware integration. That sounds valuable from my personal perspective.

It is valuable, but has the downside of coupling to a closed-source third-party cloud.

Perhaps a better goal would be to encourage a public collection of CoAP- or OSC-based interfaces for these various end-point devices.

Crowsnest is encouraging people to write and submit such end-point code; better that it be workable with OSS infrastructure.
I never quite understand arguments like yours. As aquark pointed out, it's 'frameworks all the way down' anyways. Unless you're a one-of-a-kind master, you're always relying on multiple levels of abstraction.

I don't know who pointed it out, but I find that a good rule of thumb is to master at least one layer of abstraction below the 'current' one. So in the case of React, you'd first make sure you are proficient with javascript, the DOM, and how the web works.

If your point is to underline that using frameworks without understanding them is a bad thing, I fully agree. But arguing that 'these things' (frameworks) are bad just seems silly.

Clearly some clever people at Facebook found it useful to abstract certain things in a certain way, and many other people (some clever) like their approach. They've actively considered IanDrake's problem (in fact, they talk about this in their talk on React), and felt that their solution was good.

If I can build a performant client-side-heavy web-app in half the time because of React, I'm doing the client a service, not a disservice.
Thanks for the feedback! Now that we've got the core deploy / rollback tooling in place, we're definitely looking for ways to plug into other common workflows (git, Dropbox, etc.). Stay tuned!
I can guarantee Bill's reason is because he wants the money he provides to be used as efficiently as possible. You want the most benefit to be provided for your dollar. You want to donate to the organization who can use your funds at 70% efficiency, and not one that will use it at 7% efficiency, otherwise you are providing less good for your dollar.
A statistical model can't justify high salaries for executives, so it's not rational...so what?

The market has decided what an executive is worth and that's good enough for me. There is no better system. Markets can act irrational because it is the result of human behavior, which is often irrational.

Take all the irrationality out of humans and nothing of great achievement happens. No Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, no Bugatti Veyron, no guys in squirrel suits flying down mountains....

Thanks, but I'll keep my free market with the penalty that some irrationality makes a few people here and there a little more wealthy than they deserve.
Yeah, that is alway the main issue. Getting people to talk to each other is very challenging.
If you use an admittedly over simplistic explanation of DevOps as getting someone who understands the final deployment environment to sit nearby the people who are making stuff.
Then define Scrum as having someone who has some idea what the customers want sitting there too.
You can get a ton done with just doing that. Sure it's always better if everyone knows everything.

That was one of the things that makes small startup teams powerful. They spend very little time talking to people who are not empowered to make decisions.
Running Varnish is fun for these reasons. And of course reading Poul-Henning Kamp's clearly-stated opinions. :-)
They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems

How ironic. You write off an entire group of people because of their background as not being able to understand a problem and then throw out the privilege (AKA: "You are being preemptively blacklisted from this argument) card. In a thread about education.

Seriously?
>Guess what I do now?

Exobiologist at Weyland Industries?
I bet you he was speaking in the context of it being difficult to donate money effectively to see the most positive outcome.
Why Fighting for IRR Everyday of Your Life is So Important
Experiments like this expose a really fundamental problem with how Americans approach the issue of poverty. We're convinced that the solution to poverty is education and funding education, because it has to be to validate our political assumptions. For a liberal, it would be tough to swallow the idea that cultural dysfunction (fatherless kids and the gangs that fill that power vacuum) is a root cause. For conservatives, it would be tough to swallow the idea that free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die. So we pump ever more money into education, and blame teachers for not solving problems that are totally outside the scope of their ability to solve.
The thing is, for the web you should not need frameworks at all. A couple of libs maybe, but what we are seeing now is getting ridiculous.
Skynet provides cloud infrastructure for IoT applications, but Crowsnest is aiming to have a few additional things on top of that:

- a rich ecosystem of device integrations,
- a framework for quickly creating new integrations, and
- an API that abstracts these devices into organized classes with
their capabilities

We are actually strongly considering Skynet as a core tool of our backend to manage all of our machine-to-machine messaging.
Giving money is easy, but I guess he (and Zuckerberg) wants to give money where it makes a difference.

In this case it looks like it didn't make a difference -> failed gift.
Based on his other comments, I assume he was referring to the challenges of finding the right places to spend money--places where the money will have the most positive effect. It's easy to give money away. Goodness knows there are endless people and organizations who would gladly take it. What's much harder is knowing ahead of time what impact a given donation will have. Or, to put it differently, knowing how effective a charity is at advancing its stated mission.
I deleted my moves account last weekend and exported all my data, i dont trust facebook with all this data.. but then i logged in into google and saw this: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory

Man man, what was i naive.
Normally, inner loops are executed more times than outer loops, but in this program the inner loops are skipped (because of the continue statements) when constraints fail in the the outer loops. The five loops are executed a total of 69, 1265, 520, 890 and 109 times respectively (I put counter in each loop, all counters were initialized before any of the loops begin).

Python is great for simple problems like this. I wrote this program while waiting for my daughter to come downstairs to be driven to school this morning.
Conflicts are handled more elegantly than a simple overwrite. There are many ways to spin off a conflicted copy. This article covers the most common way: https://www.dropbox.com/help/36/en

Dropbox is pretty good about never losing data. It can be suggested that this is one of the most interesting or valuable parts of its technology. Its practical use of bandwidth is another.
Another upcoming method to avoid callback hell that is my personal favorite is harmony generators and yield. Reminds me so much of C# async. Two great libraries can handle it today on beta versions of node [1,2]. I have only used suspend. See this gist for comparison https://gist.github.com/codystebbins/a2c354d25ce28879bfe1.

With generators try/catch can be used, avoiding a lot of the redundant error handling. Crabdude's library can avoid the overhead of try/catch [3].

And if developers want static typing, they should check out TypeScript. Works great with node.

[1] https://github.com/jmar777/suspend
[2] https://github.com/visionmedia/co
[3] https://github.com/CrabDude/trycatch
Depends on the purpose, I always find rails more fun due to large community contribution and huge number of gems that work well, very convenient active record etc.
It's a funny analogy since such claims are generally being uttered by people who never needed a dump truck in the first place.
I think I said that it did in my post, and I was wrong. Will update
OpenResty consistently handles 5 times more connections than Node.js, without requiring any of the continuation passing nonsense. As usual, popularity doesn't reflect upon quality at all -- Node.js is the Kim Kardashian of web frameworks.
A git deployment would be great. Similar to heroku I guess.
Applying corporate logic to education is a mistake. In Finland there are no private schools, and the education system is ranked among the highest in the world.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...
US Navy develops world’s worst e-reader
Only the embassies of friendly/allied countries as far as I can tell. I'm sure the list of bugged embassies is a lot longer - there's a lot of notable omissions there.
SAP uses Rails for some of its products.
The ethnicity of the workers who pick the fruit is of lesser concern than the wages they agree to work for.
Am I the only one who read "Overslapping Bitches"?
From the article in The New Yorker, Ras Baraka is paraphrased as saying:

"The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it included no systemic assault on poverty."

Poverty truly is this issue.

Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers"
is not the solution, as this case proves.

Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left behind," to use the phrase of yesterday.

I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the West and South sides of Chicago for nine years.

I also say this as a member of the human race.
I totally agree with you, but jargon of all kinds just sounds funny to people unaccustomed to it, regardless of its difficulty to understand!
You know you're using a machine properly when you don't just blow the TLB. You blow the TLB for the TLB. I was pretty skeptical when my coworkers insisted my code did this, until I collected some great Intel performance counter data and, indeed, I blew the 2nd level TLB. Good read: http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-cpu
If the two datasets with different access speed requirements are disjoint, you can just run two instances of redis. One for the high-latency gruntwork, one for the low-latency GETs.

If the datasets aren't disjoint, then you're trying to do fast and slow ops with the same data, which - if you need accurate values - is going to be mildly hairy even if multithreaded, since you'll need to somehow lock the data while you do the slow op (which will exclude the GETs, causing high latency), or you'll need some kind of transaction-based stable view to operate on (e.g. transactional memory?)
I don't find it slippery.
> When you create a donation that impacts potentially an auth record and a user account (if they create one), a donation, as well a it could end up touching the event, participant, team, or organization itself. Now, do you make all those data changes as a series of nouns with actions that you must do in some particular workflow and order? Or, do you have a higher level verb that you throw input at and it returns a result, doing whatever it needs to do in the process? Or do you have a noun with a single verb that starts to feel a lot like RPC?

Well, you have a noun "donation". Whether it has multiple or single verbs depends on what operations make sense against that noun. Though it seems like that it would support multiple verbs.

There is no guarantee in REST that an operation on one resource has no effect on other resources. In fact, its quite common for operations to effect other resources.

> I would expect in REST you might have to hit multiple nouns to change all the state appropriately and I'm not sure there is a good mechanism to enforce that it happens correctly according to the desired workflow.

The method is that in this case, the "donation" resources would support appropriate verbs, and the other nouns which could not be changed independently which might be changed as a result of actions on the donation resource would not need verbs to support those changes, but would change as a result of the course of implementing the actions on the donation resource.

People seem to think of REST in terms of mapping to RDBMSs with resources as analogous records in base tables in a normalized schema against which you conduct CRUD operations. But, if you have to think of REST in RDBMS terms, its a better analogy to think of the resources exposed by an API as records in a set of potentially updatable, potentially denormalized, and potentially overlapping views rather than base tables.
++ this effort. I'm looking forward to replacing my current BitTorrent Sync (btsync) setup with Syncthing.
I'll take that bet.

We gain a lot with "the huge stack of abstraction". The OS gives us a ton of "goodies" for free (memory abstraction, process/thread safety, networking, etc) and the languages/libraries give us more goodies (the ability to focus on higher-level tasks rather than "bit twiddling"). One could also point to the fact that your team is taking advantage of hundreds (thousands?) of domain experts in every aspect of the stack to get the "best" solution.

I would argue that it's not "30% time". It's the accumulated time of each level of abstraction you are using combined. It is very likely the case that one team couldn't rewrite the web application stack "from the metal up" and offer significant improvements.
Wow. $100 million.

Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and have your project funded forever.

What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations.

Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could just write a check to somebody.

Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems.

Maybe.
My point was that making a full understanding of the students' plight a prerequisite to helping them is a mistake. I teach programming to a low-income high school in the South side of Chicago. I am male and "white" and was born and raised in a different country far away in quite a different culture. I cannot even begin to understand the problems these kids are facing everyday.

Yet, there I am helping them, raising money for equipment, buying them rPi's, trying to teach them Python, implementing software for their FRC robot and trying to act as an all around mentor.

My cost to the CPS is negative (I bring in all the money, $1k-$2k here, from my company). This is the solution I'm talking about. Of course, my impact is minimal. But money from donors such as Zuckerberg could be used to create bigger grassroots efforts and amplify the impact greatly.

Ask yourself: What is the solution that YOU suggest? Reading the thread I was only one concrete suggestions, using the $100M to open a calling center in the area. Is that the best we can do?