skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mother was [1] a serial entrepreneur. She is also a serial hobbyist, which is to say that she procrastinates unknown work (like finishing projects) with known work (like starting projects). Unfortunately, a trait she passed on to me, but I seem to be getting out of it. It's a lot of hard work. And career coaching.

It caused/causes some stress between my parents, but they are still constantly brainstorming on business ideas. It was a pretty common refrain in our household, "awww, look at that, they put a Steak-and-Shake exactly where we were thinking of one." Whatever my mother lacked in execution and my father in will, there was still a healthy appreciation for the entrepreneurial spirit.

So these days, they are both extremely supportive of my endeavors. And I've found myself a group of friends who are the same. Having a supportive social circle is incredibly important.

If you have folks in your life that you know are scared, little rodents, content to show up to a J.O.B. every day and do what they are told, unable to imagine how anyone else could ever want anything differently, then just don't talk to them. By this point, people are used to the "boring job" story [2], so if they ask what you do for a living (which itself is kind of a bullshit question) just tell them "I'm in computers" or "I'm in sales". If they press, "oh, you wouldn't find it interesting". Because even though it is interesting, they won't find it so.

And then go home and work your ass off.

[1] "was" in the sense that she mostly seems to have finally found success in consulting for non-profit fundraising, not in the sense that she is no more.

[2] http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
> Also, off-topic, but can we have a google/product launch video without the corny piano soundtrack.

I think we can thank Apple for that.
Can't wait to try out Rust on sever though. I'd like to have compiled, performant, small footprint and simple http REST server written in language that is not Go or Haskel.

EDIT: I said not Go, because I don't like its type system, and whenever I have to cast something to interface I have a strong flashback from the old Java 1.3 days. On the other hand. It's purely personal opinion.
Based on my previous experience working on an init replacement, "forking" is probably not flexible enough. It turns out there are just enough daemons that either don't fork or fork but don't exit, but where you still need to wait for a pidfile, that it's a bad idea to assume one implies the other.
People here don't seem to inderstand wuite why people use spreadsheets.

I knew someone who ised the spreadsheet supplied with MS Works (a truly hateful piece of software) to create fax cover sheets and notice signs and printed letters.

The spreadsheet was also used to creat Bills of material for electronic subcontracting. These would be printed out and then only the paper copy was relevant. (This worked better than you might think - that paperwork system had been refined over years and all the kinks ironed out. Everyone knew if a part had been ordered, arrived, booked in, kitted, issued to the shop floor, paid for by us and paid for as a final product by the customer. Moving from that paperwork system to sage line 100 was painful and produced a lot of confusion and kludges.

So, people like spreadsheets because they can get stuff done. To you it might seem like they're hammering in nails with the handle of a screwdriver, but the answer is to make better documentation and better software.

(Also I see people using screwdrivers and other handtools and I wonder why noone ever told them how to do it properly.)
Ah ok, they only talk about our Car Industry, as always.

I don't see any other business that has "experimental software engineering" in germany.
And yes we have some lighthouses, like every other country too.
Use EFF's Privacy Badger. Easier to deal with when problems appear.

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
The image used in the article doesn't convey the design well.

Click through the first link (http://www.paperclipdesign.hk/paperclip_armrest.html) to see better pictures of their two-tiered solution to the problem of armrest sharing.
> I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car.

Los Angeles. Possibly more.

> And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot of them have road problems.

Sure they were. Not from scratch, but incrementally. Its true that because it was incremental and not ground-up, and mostly affected new development and re-development, that cities that were major cities pre-car (like NYC) look very different than newer cities (Los Angeles).

> U.S. cities are spread out because of suburbanization.

"Suburbanization" is an effect, not a cause. Designing for cars is a (but not the only) cause.
Ask HN: Advise for career changer in mid-thirties
Hi HN, I would like to ask for your advice. I see a lot of information for younger people but not as much for older career changers. I am a former chemical engineer turned programmer a couple of years ago, currently doing web development full time (Python/Django)

I have been trying to compensate for my lack of formal training by following the Stanford CS program as many courses are available online. I can’t believe all those excellent courses are available for free (thanks Coursera!). In particular I have been enjoying the lower level stuff compared to my day-to-day job as a web dev. The cryptography, networks, algorithms, FP and compilers courses have all been real eye openers for me (look mom, built a compiler!).

Anyway, I don’t have any mentors or the like to bounce my ideas, so that’s why I am posting here. I am thinking about contributing to open source projects to get more experience, and perhaps switching jobs to something related to my new interests?

I am also thinking about focusing on newer fields, where you are not expected to have 10 years of experience to get in the door. List includes: security (not easy, but very interested, I think I can leverage my web dev background, probably will start the Matasano challenges soon), SDN, cryptocurrencies…got to focus…but definitely not chasing the next web framework…

Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks.
I'm actually rather happy with the Apple philosophy of not opening APIs early and supporting them as long as possible when they've been made public, rather than having to check my app against 6 levels of API stability... thank you very much.
It uses cgroups to contain forking daemons somewhat and detect certain kinds of failure, but it doesn't use them to work out when the daemon's finished starting and is ready, which is what the blog post mainly seems to be about.
Marketing is part of execution.
If I had millions I would pay people like you to teach people like them how to "do it properly". Or even just implement it properly with lots of comments and docs and maybe a talky video.
Since Go will gladly handle said requirements, is this last point simply arbitrary?

As Go and Rust share a lot of similarities, what is it about Go that's so unappealing for this use case?
It does nothing just like Google's own DNT option in Chrome does nothing to its own web properties. It's almost like Google is begging for this sort of stuff to turn into regulations against them, because clearly they can't be trusted to do the right thing.
You are going to have to, first, make the mass transit so awesome that people voluntarily leave their cars behind to get on the train.

As you get more cars off the road, other people will use the open roads to travel into the city.

Note that "you have to make mass transit awesome enough that people use it" is not "make driving suck." You will never make any headway in a democracy by telling the majority of the people they should re-arrange their lives to follow your utopian model.
Better yet, I think the fact that it's using the wrong rawgit url is stopping the store page from working, since every time I try to purchase, this message comes up.
So, a lot of ideas are thrown here without any real use cases.People say "mocks are bad,whitebox testing is bad".But how can I unit test anything without mocks?

let's take javascript.I cant generate mocks from my code,i have to write them.I have this data access object that takes a connnection.

var dao=new Dao(connection);
dao.getById(1,function(err,res){ console.log(res) });

Tell me how do I unit test getById in isolation without mocking connection,without doing whitebox testing,without knowing what actually happens in my getById.

the obvious thing here is to spy on a hypothetic connection.query, fake a db call and return a predictable result.I cant do anything without a mock.
I've come to the conclusion that HN voting/ranking is like Google search engine ranking: you're not supposed to know how it works. If you did, people would game the system.

So it's a magic act. As a programmer, this frustrates me terribly. I just emailed dang yesterday because I had submitted something that shot up, got a lot of attention, then died just as suddenly. Hell, I didn't know, I thought the system was broken or something. Turns out I was flagged.

The upvote thing you mention is especially annoying. You click the little button, you're expecting something to happen. That's the nature of clicking little buttons on computer interfaces.

Hell-banning also drives me nuts, for similar reasons. Computers should serve us, not the other way around. [insert long discussion here about having to manage a site with a zillion users, and how it's easy for me to rant about this but I should walk a mile in dang's shoes, etc.]
> That's a pretty weak argument considering that syslog is entirely UDP and is bound to drop log data, sometimes en masse, most likely even silently. Not a good idea.

rsyslog and syslog-ng have support for TCP

> Why not use something like multilog or svlogd

Additional point of failure.

> and wire up a tiny processor for it to kick logging data over someplace using something like rsync?

Additional point of failure (processor); additional point of failure (rsync/ssh); non-realtime log replication (which is bad for breaking/progressive system failure/etc).

> To boot, syslog is annoying to tune, depending on your particular implementation.

All of the examples you list are easier to learn about, tweak, and monitor than the suggestions you've proposed, however.

> On an nginx server that services 2TB/mo worth of transit (which is distinctly possible since I've got infrastructure in production that does this), there's a good chance that you'll be stretching some of these limits a bit.

If you're dealing with 2 TB/mo in transit, you're probably capable enough to understand the risks with centralized log management and mitigate/monitor them ahead of time.
That is true not only of Germany, but of many (most?) European countries. In Poland, if your company goes bankrupt, the social stigma will be with you for years.
Out of curiosity, why is it that you wouldn't want Go for such a task? Is it the lack of maturity, dislike for the language itself?
How do you test your system's response to error conditions? Do you have hooks in your integrated system to force errors (throw exceptions, violate contracts, etc.)?
My impression on the U.S. startup world has been "either you go (very) big or you die/fail". In Germany, in contrast, it is perfectly fine for a startup to earn a million or less a year, and never even aspire to earn billions, as long as it pays the bills and you employ some people. Thus I conclude that it is "harder" to fail if your expectations are not unrealistically high. Also, as Tomte has pointed out, company bankruptcy does not equal personal bankruptcy.

On the other hand, I only know the U.S. startup world from what I've read, so I might be totally off there. So please correct me if I'm wrong.
The Pursuit of Happy Hours
Resisting a REST – Designing the Iconfinder API 2.0
...so now it devolves into a fight between who gets the upper deck and who gets the lower deck

...and what happens if the person on the lower deck wants to move their arm? they bang into the other person's arm

how about airlines actually give us more space?
Maybe if you personally go bankrupt. If your startup company goes bankrupt, I highly doubt it.
That's a very good point and a good reason why anyone who wants to "fix" this problem should build on spreadsheets.
5 Elements of The Great Kick-off Meeting
The US concentrates way too much on the consumer side of innovation, whereas Germany seeks to improve and optimize the whole cycle of its manufacturing, without necessarily aiming to put something on the shelves immediately. This makes Germany a much more predictable and less volatile economy.
Why would you buffer udp packets?
I love EUSPRIG.

Another website people interested in spreadsheet erros might like is Ray Panko's spreadsheet research

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/
> Apple has no dominant position in smartphones

Where do you live ? Inform yourself (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comS...). Apple has 41.6% when the second one, Samsung has 26.7%
> One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D

For most people the driving commute is the most unpleasant part of their life.

> I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself!

Driving over 200mph has never been safe (and rarely been legal) on the public roads; if that's where you did it you were recklessly endangering the lives of others (I'm sure you thought you were perfectly safe; everyone does right up until the point they crash). If you did it on a track or other controlled environment, guess what: those places will still exist. Just as people still ride horses for pleasure, people will still drive cars. But those of us who just want to get to work in one piece will be able to.
In Denmark it depends on the legal structure of your business. Personal debts are much harder to discharge in bankruptcy than in the U.S., and cause much longer-lasting trouble. But it's fairly easy to set up a limited-liability company, and in that case your personal finances are insulated from what happens to the business, like in the U.S. For example if an ApS you were owner of went bankrupt, it wouldn't impact your personal credit, and you wouldn't be personally responsible for the debt. As a result it's quite common for even low-turnover one-person freelance businesses to be incorporated as an ApS rather than performed as a sole proprietor (roughly like the use of LLCs in the United States).
> That may not be what they're "for" (wtf does that even mean?)

It means that “[mocks are] a way to allow you to test code that you can't improve right now” and “[mocks are] a stepping-stone for testing and improving a large existing codebase” is a mischaracterisation of the role and benefits of mocks.

If using them like that is useful for you then that’s great, but it’s misleading to say that that’s why “they’re there”.

Steve Freeman & Nat Pryce’s book [0], for example, is an excellent illustration of what mocks are for.

[0] http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/
Opt Out of Acxiom Marketing Data Collection
I'm willing to be convinced that Germany dominates in innovation but that would require a definition of 'innovation' and some data. Until then, count me skeptical.
Can anyone explain a rational and practical way to achieve the worldview the European courts are looking to impose? Regardless of whether one thinks one should have the right to be forgotten (or whatever one thinks that means), I don't see any path here which actually accomplishes anything other than constraining businesses large enough to care about EU regulators and allowing all other players to do whatever.
Why? Months of hard work can surely negate months of other hard work.
The real reason Silicon Valley can't win in Washington
My problem with it is that it tends to put things in the wrong perspective. Should we judge things by comparing them to other crappy products, or by a reasonable expectation of what things should be like independent of that? If it's the latter, then what's the point of comparing it with the former? It just gives a false sense of "it's not so bad after all."
If I remember Rust binaries, due to default static linking end up rather large. There is work to remove all unnecessary things from libstd into other libraries.

That said, I can't wait for rust teepee server to land, it shapes up to be a rather interesting project.
Why are Fujitsu and Toshiba growing lettuce in semiconductor plants?
New York City is the most obvious example, but most large east-coast cities were large pre-car. And many cities made major infrastructural changes in light of the car, mostly in the form of the addition of elevated highways, some of which are now being torn out again because of their negative effects on neighborhood continuity, urban fabric, etc. Examples of the former would include the I-395 underpass/mixing bowl into DC and chunk of I-5 that separates downtown Seattle from Capitol Hill, and examples of the latter include the ripping out of the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco and (likely) the Alaska Way viaduct, also in Seattle.
Cascaded split for more than one separator?
"They're all wrong", followed by listing three mechanisms provided by systemd that get this right (socket activation, the dbus method, the notify method). The underlying problem is that there's no solution that's portable across init systems. That's not systemd's problem - ever other init system has also failed in this respect.
Git: Merging the right way
> Always write formulae in a way that they can be copied across or down whilst pointing to the right places. This can be achieved through use of one or more $ signs to fix a reference.

Except if you are using modern version of Excel, don't general use $ references for this, go one step further and use names (for fixed individual datapoints where you would use two $s) or named tables with named columns (for the most common use of single $ references.) This is more self-explanatory and less error-prone.
Probably the GC. Rust once finished and proved should be safe for concurrent usage AND without GC cleanup. That's a major feat of engineering.
Quit? Before it makes you quit?

If your schedules and other priorities are against fixing broken code, I'd be leery of your organization's long-term health. If you're in for the long haul--and at my current gig I certainly am--then eliminating bad code (and any code as tightly coupled as what you describe) is the only sane option. Because it'll kill you eventually.
I don't think it's a big deal that Apple reserves some API functionality for their own apps — you can always re-create this from scratch, after all. They just aren't ready to fully support the popover controller API on iPhone. I'd rather that Apple be committed to every public API they publish (they aren't, but anything in that direction is a good thing).

What I don't like about this is how they chose to implement the restriction. Messy, hacky and inelegant.
I believe that a large factor in how it works has to do with the average karma score of the voters. (Visible on your profile page). From what I have been able to determine the higher your average score the more weight your votes have, and the longer it takes for your comments and/or submissions to fall down the page.

This seems to be designed to reward people who make consistently good submissions and comments, although it also has the bad effect on making it quite penalizing to make a comment that goes against the groupthink.

I think that other factors that may have an impact are age of your HN account, and your total karma count. So long story short votes by older accounts that make quality submissions and comments are worth more.
More space? Sure, as long as you're willing to pay more.
I would strongly recommend reading Clay Christensen's book How will you measure your life? He discusses a general approach to working out what you want to do with your life without telling you what he thinks you should do.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Will-Measure-Your-Life/dp/006220...
However they acted differently for the wakelock api. In Android, there is a private api that allowed access to a list of wakelocks, which was used by many apps to provide the user with more information about what is keeping the system awake. However, their was a security implication (this was a real concern), so 4.4 made the api both private and inaccessible. (Private apis by default you can't use, but you can get around it by getting a reference using language-features). Unlike the sms situation though, they didn't provide a replacement api without the security issue. So now you need to root the phone in order to access the list of wakelocks.

While this may not affect most of the users of these apps, this is quite unfortunate, because these applications were especially handy on non-stock phones, which usually aren't easily rootable.
Assuming this is an actual rather than rhetorical question, I'd recommend Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...
Cute, but even as terse as this comment is its sentiment is incorrect.

Mocks, almost by their very nature, encourage coupling. Ask yourself the question "What tends to get mocked? " Answer: Objects which are difficult and/or heavy to instantiate, but which are outside of your direct control and cannot be changed, e.g.: database connections, network sockets, etc.

So when you want to write tests around this you are almost forced to mock them out. So you instantiate those classes (as mocks) in your test class, so that the code under test. There are now two references to that class: one in the test, and one in the code being tested.

This is coupling. QED.
Apple Developer Indifference
So far as I can tell, if you want a fancy ORM, you're using a mainstream web language like Ruby or Python. Golang is obviously more mature on the HTTP serverside than Rust, but it is nowhere close to Rails, and is particularly weak on persistence. My understanding is that the same is true of Clojure, too.
Note, however, that suburbanization is a post-car phenomenon.
Banking startup Simple seems to be struggling to sign up active users
The point is how you incorporate your startup. If you do it as Einzelunternehmer/GbR to avoid having to raise 25k € just for providing the base capital, then you're fully liable for anything that happens with your personal assets.

Now you have e.g. a data breach, or your entire inventory goes down in a flood/fire/accident and you're not properly insured (most private insurances will not cover your business assets, even if your business is in your home), you're out of luck.

And as we're speaking of capital: in the Valley, you basically have to have a good business plan, a sales pitch and a bit of luck and you'll be bathed in cash (at least, this is my impression of reading here). In Germany, no luck obtaining a larger credit or startup financing as long as you don't put up your house or car as collateral.
At the same time way more startups funding in Denmark are based on loans not investments and sometimes you have to personally vouch for that :)
It's a Java 5 subset, but we have plans for Java 8.
Re xamarin - it's a good product targeted for c# devs
I'm fine accepting the article's conclusion, but I missed the reference to the "repeated studies" it mentions. Anyone know which these are? (Is it in the links to places like asme.org?)
That's a major feat of engineering

Absolutely, but it's not a reason to not use Go. The web is probably the platform with the least possible damage caused by GC.

It's OK if people like the language and want to use it for web development, though. I'm personally pretty excited about it, because I'm not a huge fan of Go and Rust looks pretty neat.
That happens to me when the driver is braking later than I would have. However I suspect that self-driving cars will, at least initially, be much more conservative and defensive that most human drivers, so that effect may not be triggered as often as you suspect.