skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example seems to prove just the opposite, i.e. only in trivial applications such as web search client API is the API design trivial compared to the implementation. In complex systems, such as programming languages, IDEs, operating systems and scalable search engines, good API design is paramount to managing complexity.

Some good discussion on API design:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3720
http://www.infoq.com/articles/API-Design-Joshua-Bloch
Top 5 Secrets Of The Moon
> Problem solved.

Except it's not because the problem's still there for everyone else. Do you really that being shielded yourself but allowing your non-techy friends and family to be tracked is a 'solved' problem?
LG’s New Range of Smart Home Appliances Could be a Hackers’ Playground
Does it use lib MailCore?
The Stanford chips are biomimetic, trying to copy how the brain is thought to work. Artificial Learning's are machine-learning theoretic, embodying proven ML algorithms in hardware.
I'm definitely using a broad view of causality, yes. Whether that's excessive or not I think depends on what you're trying to achieve. I think of it from the perspective of- would I like to encourage or discourage whatever is happening?

> If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it.

That sorta implies (to me) that a lot of people are doing things that genuinely change the world, in the high-criteria sense. Is that really true, though? I think the world would definitely be a richer place if we had a lot more "simplistic browser games"- elegant, engaging, entertaining. I can't say in advance what that would lead to, but I'm sure a world with 100 different versions of 2048 (and I don't mean direct copies, but different games altogether that were addictive, compelling and fun in different ways) would be a relatively more interesting world.

And it'll only take a couple of days per person, no? So why isn't this already the case? Why aren't we awash in this stuff? Is it because most people are busy working on more meaningful things? (Objectively I think we can say things like ending malaria, improving education, project: water, etc are all 'more meaningful' in an anthropocentric sense... but is that what most people are working on?)

sorry for wordiness
May I ask how plain old ASP.NET is not ideal? What are the main scalability problems you've encountered?

Your link shows some things they decided to do to make it work; which of these problems would have been avoided using other tools? Which of these problems could not have been solved by using a more suitable architecture (using ASP.NET techniques)?

Thanks for any insight.
Simple code is simple to fix, but without some layers of abstraction there will likely be so much of it that understanding is hampered along a different dimension.

Quantity of code can be reduced by increased complexity of the code, at some sweet spot between the two is your ideal, code that is neither so dense that you can't read it any more and code that is not so verbose that you're going to be overwhelmed by the quantity.

It's never black-or-white, it is always a trade off.
Couldnt get it working with chrome/firefox.
5 Reasons to Love 'Mad Men's' New Star: The IBM 360
> P.S. Everyone who notes "Google Analytics is easy to evade" are correct but missing the broader point -- the majority of web users will never do that.

This is an important point here because it's in stark contrast with Google e-mail. Google's e-mail servers are exceptionally difficult to evade.

I am (apparently) able to evade Google's attempts to track my web browsing habits with Google Analytics. I can take responsiblity for that myself.

This is a technically difficult opt-out process is IMHO against the spirit of "don't be evil", but at least there is an option.

On the other hand, I am totally unable to prevent Google from building an accurate profile of my e-mail habits. The only way I can opt-out here is by significantly curtailing my e-mail habits (or by insisting on PGP, which will have the same effect). This is significantly more frightening to me - I have no choice.
Self-healing plastic mimics blood clotting
10 SEO Myths Reviewed By Bing
The vast majority of people don't pay for an email client.

A niche client doesn't have an eco system full of plugins and hacks, so it better be fully featured.
Rethinking data entry
Disclaimer: I am writing this form a Linux machine that I use for web development. Fedora, lightdm, i3wm, i3status, dmenu.

Despite being a big fan of opensource and how much I love Linux I think a OSx machine is far more productive, for these reasons:

* It just works.
I am well aware that linux is way better than 5 years ago and works just fine on most systems, but I am yet to not need some sort of tweak and configuration to run Linux on a laptop, to the Linux is defense considering that number of target platforms it is inevitable.

* Adobe creative suit.
Yes, there is alternatives, inkescape, gimp, and others but they're still way behind.

* It's still nix.
I am not going into technical difference or the background and what not, from a users perspective, I can install Homebrew and use most of nix tools.

* More visualization options
You can't visualize OSx on Linux or Windows for legal and practical reasons but you can still run Windows and OSx on Mac.

Obviously these are mostly only an issue if you are involved with front-end development where you need design and cross-browser compatibility tests and such, if you're doing only back-end, Linux works just fine once you get it run and learn to stop spending time to tweak it.
GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)
From the security point of view, i can confirm this. The team i was working on found a large number (+100) of exploitable binaries in Debian, most of them, in scientific packages.
I'm pretty sure this was incredibly popular in China around 2005. Pick your favourite artists song and pay for it with existing phone credit. Then force your family and friends to listen each time they call...
In Gen I you could just save before attempting to catch one, so if you did kill it you could just restart from your save point. You couldn't really do this in Gen II for the Legendary Dogs because they showed up randomly, and sometimes you had the horrible decision of; never catch Entei or redo those last 3 hours of cave...
I would amend you statement by saying that more experienced developers are generally proficient at writing at a higher level of abstraction, but are more importantly also better at choosing the correct level of abstraction for the job.

I think that's really the key. When I peek into a well designed system that really fits the bill, the feeling I usually get is 'how sensible', not 'wow, this is a really great way to abstract the problem!' or 'this is kind of complicated, but very well designed!'.

The same sentiment applies pretty much everywhere, though. Humans draw their intellectual power from the ability to generalize, and so we see the same phenomena across disciplines. Writing? Most really effective writing is carefully constructed to include just the right statements, using just the right words, and nothing more.

Circuit design? Same thing. You can wire a circuit that will work (or not) in many, many ways. But when someone with experience runs across the work of an amateur, even if it's a functional circuit, it's very rare that he/she can't list off a bunch of ways the design could be fundamentally improved.

Carpentry? Yup. You can hack and nail and drill and glue something together that will work. Or--and I've seen this a lot--you can get a mechanical engineer to produce a profoundly complicated and structurally sound deck made with laser cutters and brackets made on a 6-axis CNC mill, but a seasoned carpenter can produce a much more elegant solution using a skill saw, a drill and a pencil.
Unfortunately I can't pay the mortgage by hopes and dreams.
It doesn't help when you need to target DX9 cards that only have OpenGL 2.1 drivers.
Totally agree. I usually like what Yossi writes, but I don't agree with this. SW engineering best practices in my mind are all about writing clear, easy-to-understand code, keeping it as simple as possible - i.e. nothing like what he calls best practices.
I wanted to see how hard it was, so I tried it, and the CAPTCHA was fairly straightforward, it wasn't even difficult. I got it first try, maybe you didn't notice you ONLY need to type the letters under the circles?
Email notifications are universal. Many disparate services all can push out transactional emails, which are then aggregated in one place.

To replace email, you would need to create something which is as universally adopted. Good luck!
To actually get the money and end it, instead of spending a lot more extra time, effort and money throughout the appeals process.
Can IT Pros Capitalise On The Digital Currency Revolution?
What skills do you need to work in digital currencies?
Source code here https://github.com/lpinca/binb
I've been looking at your posting history and I'm curious - what is your connection with the cosmosup.com web site?
Depending on how one defines 'intelligence' and 'life', it's quite possible even now to program 'life' that's more intelligent than anything else on the planet, and in some senses even more intelligent than humans. Google's search algorithm, for instance.

So the chance of consciously designed life existing out there seem high, if even one alien civilisation has developed sufficiently to be able to create machines capable of thriving and reproducing in space.
Technical debt is often irrelevant in scientific code. It's one-off code for a specific experiment. In many cases, once the paper is published nobody will ever run the code again. That's not always true, but it often is.
Totally agree. I would personally not pay $20 for the unknown.
I think it's a lot about curiosity and not necessarily to laugh at the author.

I doubt you'd do this experiment again, but an idea might be to ask those who clicked why they did it and what they were expecting to find.
Java code can be hard to read if you are just using an editor. Its usually a must to use an IDE when working on a large Java project, they make things like finding stuff really easier.
As with newer versions of Spring and Hibernate, you can mostly do with only annotations and zero xml configuration.
Research in India suggests Google search results can influence an election
Portugal Steel Promove Seminário Sobre Estruturas Metálicas em Castelo Branco
A feature without a use case still unfortunately. There are some in the PEP, but given how little code is Py3-only, no one has written anything notable that I've seen that makes use of these.
Seriously. It seems like there have been more neophytes willing to come out against mature practice like factory methods and other artifacts of polymorphic architecture. Oh well, complaining probably triggers a seratonin release or something for them.
Lock-free Data Structures. Part 2. Basics: Atomicity and Atomic Primitives (C++)
I am surprised the author call himself a "programmer" and judge that "... Many programmers have no real substance in their work - the job is trivial ...". On what is based such judgment? Personal experience? Then it is totally biased.

He is also saying that "A scientist has his science to worry about ..." which is quite a demeaning of the job that a programmer has to go through in comparison: The programmer has to understand his field AND the domain: the scientist's field. Sure it might 'only' be to get the knowledge from the scientist. But doing away with software abstraction for the sake of writing simple (simplistic) code is hiding the fact that if the code is to be worked on in the future, it will be a giant spaghetti monster.

The author might as well write VB macros in MS Excel. :p
OK, I'll bite: This is from [2010], so rather old.

What changed to make this relevant now?
The ubiquity of the modern beep
Mysterious Rock Lines Found In Peru Predate Ancient Nazca Lines By Centuries
Cepth – no single point of failure, scalable at exabytes and free
Most of the bioinformatics I work with write short scripts to count thing up (and some need my help to write a couple of nested loops after doing it for 4 years). Hardly difficult stuff.
I assume that https://twitter.com/safety/status/465797191869554688 is in relation to this, where they call it a bug. I'm very surprised that they don't have any automated tests for this functionality, though.
Grant proposal for the first electronic digital computer (1940)
The vast majority of people don't seek out or even buy alternatives. The vast majority is incapable of configuring their own mail client and usually don't have enough mail to require anything beyond what any client offers.

The people that do on the other hand and are therefore part of the potential audience are much more likely to sign and encrypt emails.
I don't think there is any effort to attack any "mail problem" since this is for Mac only. No, this is just another company trying to make money out of making emails beautiful for set of users in the computer-industry.
Still no support for Exchange. Sigh.

I know it's a PITA to work with, but let's face it, the business opportunity is huge.

* Fancy mail clients for IMAP/POP: hundreds.

* Fancy mail clients for Exchange: zero.

* Every Exchange account out there is a corporate/business user, which means s/he is much easier to monetize (and on a large scale).

Inb4 "Exchange is proprietary-closed-blablabla": Mail.app works fine with it, so it can be done. Clearly it's just too boring for the cool kids to hack on.
Astronomers Find Sun’s ‘Long-Lost Brother’
OSX - I can't say I've used Linux enough lately but in terms of shell power, there's very little that I'm missing on OSX, especially with the active Homebrew community.

However, my affinity for OSX is also tied to the hardware...and so much of the pleasure in computing is tied to how well the Apple hardware works, regardless of the software.
I've really wanted to like this app, and to try it, but the reviews on the App Store are absolutely appalling - most complaining that the app is effectively useless. This is combined with a very steep purchase price.

Add to that the fact that I tweeted the MailPilot twitter account many times about this and never got a single reply, and this is a definite NO PURCHASE.

I really want to find that this app is great, but I'm not willing to ignore a mountain of evidence just because this is what I want to believe. Caveat Emptor, Buyer Beware.

Has anyone here actually used MailPilot sufficiently to counter those numerous negative AppStore reviews?
The huge cost of developing drugs
Hi,
We are working in a project that also uses Bluetooth Low Energy for nearby interaction (though is not a chat). So we do some similar stuff to have Beacons advertising in the background. Due to the demand we saw here, we decided to open source our library which is called AltBeacon. You can find it in https://github.com/CharruaLabs/AltBeacon , we need contributors so feel free to check it and contribute.
Spotty solar power management platform could crash the grid
That would be a very stupid thing to do, but you might have someone respond with "I have forwarded this to the appropriate people in Google."
When people say that a company did something, it usually means that it was an executive decision, not the unauthorized actions of a single employee. It'd be like saying that the NSA divulged its own secrets, just because Snowden was their employee.
Unfortunately the fact that it doesn't appear to store any mail locally (and some appstore reviews back this up) is a non-starter for anyone (including me) who ever wants to do email on a poor connection.

I've been using Airmail [1] to do essentially everything you can do with Mailpilot, though with not as clean a UI, with pretty good success.

[1] http://airmailapp.com/
I agree of course, I just think a scientist taking a more thoughtful approach > a scientist taking a sloppy approach > a "software engineer" taking an overly thoughtful approach. Because the latter could have written ~200K LOC spread in 5 directories and you'd need a debugger to tell which piece of code calls which.
Yes that's true. Check https://github.com/CharruaLabs/AltBeacon to understand how it's done.
Just checked out PlentyOfFish.com The UI has a distinct 90's feel to it. If you check out okCupid, it looks more up to date. May be this is the craigslist of dating sites.
I have three business partners. That's a lot like three extra marriages: You have to "learn" the other person, understand their wants and needs (often unspoken), learn how to communicate effectively with each, etc.

They have spouses, and we all have kids. And we have employees. My extended family is far larger than I'd ever dreamed....
It's surprising there is no comment about wrong scientific code: code which apparently does one thing, but actually doesn't, and may produce harmful results.

(By "bad" code, I understand code which doesn't meet best practices)

It's very easy to accidentally produce wrong scientific code, partly since scientists are doing research. They use novel mathematical algorithms to solve hard problems, and it's not typically obvious what output is expected. It's not CRUD.

In this sense, the sins of the scientific programmer might actually be important - fragile code which crashes when something is wrong could be considered good - this may help to avoid publishing wrong code.
Much of the work was before that, but there's also https://github.com/iimarckus/pokered and https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal to consider now (working source code).
Science is supposed to be reproducible. Writing a script that runs once on a specific machine is unlikely to achieve that.
Keep in mind that ASP.NET 1.0 was published in January 2002 and PoF was launched in 2003. It was actually a side project to learn the latest hot technology.
Whereas, of course, he should have been hudibrastic [0]:

A spyplane quietly in flight
At angels great, not infinite
Of course results in filling chips
And vex'd controllers passing slips

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudibrastic
There is nothing to patent, is just iOS Bluetooth Low Energy.
> My personal feeling is that, yes abstractions are extraordinarily powerful, but only when they are good and only when we understand them.

Certainly. Saying "I have created an abstraction" only works in conjunction with "I actually understand the problem on an abstract level, and I am familiar enough with the existing codebase." However, thinking that "amateur code", with bad or no data structures ("I actually want to use a dictionary, but let's have a 15-cases if/ifelsif/else expression instead"), 5-screen long functions, badly named variables and functions, state all over the place is "better" is folly. It isn't, it's just as terrible if not worse, and usually extremely brittle. Not to mention usually impossible to unit-test properly.
"Best Practice" isn't just about the code aesthetics, but things like source control, testing, assumptions made, documentation etc.

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... gives some nice advice.
I really wish programming would get over its "OOP style" madness. If you are writing C++ or even Java that uses, rather than creates, an object hierarchy, then just write in procedural style with functional decomposition.
Hard to argue with such numbers... However I just created a test profile and the experience is less than stellar (many items in the French site appear in English, and I just received an email with the following title: "&&recievername%% résultats du test POF", etc.)

Obviously, users don't care for those kinds of details; what we'd like to know is: what do users actually care about? (in general, and specifically for a dating site)
Lets see how peaceful humans are after we've finished burning through the available fossil fuels. It's relatively easy to be peaceful while you have copious wealth.
> Same with Google Analytics.

I always use Piwik [0] - it's excellent, open-source and most of all: it respects your users' privacy by not letting any third party like Google track them.

My advice: Use it too and let your users know that you do so because you respect them.

[0] http://piwik.org
i agree with your sentiment but not how you have literally worded it - there are plenty of serious use cases listed in the PEP, eg typechecking by itself is rather useful in other languages, but it is perhaps hard to imagine how useful this feature will be if no existing libraries support it, and there is no common standard defining what any of the annotations could mean.

on the other hand, this could be quite useful for large (proprietary?) python codebases where common standards can be defined and rolled out and enforced.
I think this is an experience thing as well.

To me this post sums it up well:
https://medium.com/p/db854689243
> Valve's cut was never smaller compared to competitors.

Compared to the traditional brick & mortar channels which came before it? Yes, it sure was!
The HTML5 canvas was created by Apple alone for use in their “Dashboard” product, and later ported to their Safari browser. Then other browsers decided to adopt it as well, because it supported a number of use cases which the browsers didn’t have another good solution for.

This is pretty much the opposite of “design by committee”.
I work with scientists who self-trained in application development. They use design patterns and factory methods just like the next programmer because they have learned what is practical. We all started out writing shitty code but some of us had a need and a venue to refine the skill to the point that our employers could sell our work products. Researchers rarely see that pressure.
Since I get called out I'll elaborate on my thoughts on this...

I can understand and appreciate the intention and the potential to learn and share something useful from such an 'experiment'. It's a topic I'm actually quite interested in.

I just disagree with using a bait-and-switch which doesn't deliver anything of value to an unknowing participant. It'd be cooler if the links led to genuine articles along with a footnote explaining that there's an experiment running on the side. That just seems more fair and wouldn't impact the result.

I'll laugh off a rick-rolling from a mate but I don't need the distraction from a company I don't have much of a relationship with. No hard feelings but hence the unfollow.
Why Foreign Spies Target IT Workers
That's why I came up with the idea to make a huge repository (http://codingstyleguide.com) of programming conventions, "best practices", etc for any language. Where anyone (scientist, experts and newbies) can visit this platform and take a look at the "best" conventions to use.
Space Invaders in Perl 6
I know a lot of programmers who don't really do much real work. In particular one place that I worked they seemed to spend half the day promoting recycling, drinking water, and eating healthy; taking walks; playing chess; napping; talking about stand-up desks, etc. Maybe the OP works/has worked in a place like that.
That is very true. I re-read my comment and realized it might come across as being critical of folks in academia not caring about technical debt, which was not the intention.

Technical debt in these scenarios is usually limited to a single paper cycle (or maybe 2). This is avoided with simple practices such as planning out your code with comments before writing it, not copy-pasting code into 3 or 4 places, etc. There isn't much overhead, but it saves a fair bit of time debugging issues caused by human error. It also ensures you write as little code as necessary for the problem at hand.

I completely agree that when it's just a single paper, there is not much need to ensure you have an elegant library which can be re-used.
China Can Expropriate Alibaba's Business – And It Just Might
'polyporum' would be genitive plural 'of the octopuses'. The more usual nominative plural would 'polypi'