skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't think that. But that's because over ten years of listening to people talk about how companies, markets, and entrepreneurship function have drilled it into me that that's not how reality works.

1. Who is "people"? Who comes to your site? Where do they come from? Why are they here? How many came because a friend told them it was useful?

2. How many "visitors" become "users"? How do you define that? How many of your users find your site useful? How can you tell?

3. How many of those people are telling their friends? How much success are they having? How many of those friends actually become users?

Answering these questions, and improving the answers over time, is called "marketing". Most successful web companies have marketers. In your case, what you probably want is a high Net Promoter Score [1]. You should know what yours is. You shouldn't be asking HN for advice; you should be asking your customers what it would take to make them spread the word. (This is essentially what gwintrob's comment above is suggesting. You should do that.)

Do you need to give them better features? Do you need to make it less buggy? Do you need to streamline the workflow? Do you need to give them help in explaining it to others? Do you need to suggest ways they can promote you?

Maybe what you need is a better site. That's possible. But you need to know.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
> Hierarchies usually start out small. But, when new features are added and scope creeps, they get deeper and more abstract and messier.

We have real issues with some complex class hierarchies that another team likes - they keep adding yet another abstract subclass of an abstract subclass to handle more cases, so you can end up following logic up and down multiple levels of classes when reading code, and missing one overridden statement can dramatically change the outcome.
Stolen Tesla Splits In Half And Explodes After Crashing In West Hollywood
That obnoxious spinner is used for Mr. Tinkles, the Asshole Of Notification. Because even after Mr. Tinkles starts ringing out, he has no idea what to say. So when you click on him to make him shut the hell up, he still hasn't loaded the hundred bytes of your notification, and you have to look at that stupid spinner while all of Google's horrifying social storage infrastructure lurches into action. And because Mr. Tinkles is part of Google's all-in Social Death Pact, you have to load that image on every Google property: Gmail, Maps, Drive, Search, everything.
It seems like that as time has gone on, the intelligence apparatus in the US and closely allied countries has come to depend more and more on holding any and all information on anything.

It's their leverage and it's their ability to control and influence events. Even small concessions are probably felt to be too much, and I imagine to many in the CIA and elsewhere, a cold war domino effect mentality still permeates.

It's ridiculous, and it undermines a free flow of knowledge that our society desperately needs to function effectively. However, it only seems to be increasing in scope, and I believe the people related are more concerned about their positions and power rather than the long term viability of our country.

Addenum: Perhaps worse, is that behaviors like this from the CIA, FBI, and NSA give ample diplomatic ammunition to every totalitarian and oppressive state on the planet and it legitimizes their actions. Even more so, they can argue that they were at least transparent about it rather than lying to the public. It's sad to think that a place that used to stand for freedom from oppression can more and more be used as a justification for it.
Thanks.

And yet, nothing you said really rejects my made up explanation, even more, it supports it (the visual center stops sending information as it lacks input, and synchronization attempts begin).
For various reasons I've been doing a lot of cardio for the last year. I just started lifting weights again and it's true that I don't read docs while lifting.
TSA: don't bring uncharged devices from oversea
Anyone have experience with del.icio.us (now delicious.com)? I've wanted to try it for some time to discover links based on what I've bookmarked, but am hesitant because of privacy concerns and what have you.
A Casino Town Rolls the Dice on High-Tech
At some point in life we become so busy with something else that we stop keeping up to date with the latest trends. Suddenly we realize everything has changed and has become foreign and complicated. We feel stupid; incapable of catching up. We feel old.

But listen, it's crucial to ignore this fear, because it's wrong. We don't really lose our ability to learn way until retirement (and for the lucky ones, even past it).

When you decide to stop looking back, and decide to bravely dive into the big unknown, you realize "you still got it".

Been there, done that. I still got it ;)
One nice upside to the (often negative) impression of PHP is that when you put in some time and produce something kinda cool, you get a lot of positive attention from the community. I experienced this myself on a project to create a multi-processing library for php (https://github.com/shaneharter/PHP-Daemon)
Who You Calling a Techie?
Atomic transactions are one of several strategies for handling this problem, and not always the right answer.

Starbucks is a good analogy (http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html). If Starbucks were transactional, you would have to stand there at with the money on the counter and wait until your drink was finished, then exchange at the exact same time. Even the mental image is ridiculous.

In practice, it makes much more sense to allow the system to enter certain inconsistent states and then remediate them. Out of an ingredient? Refund the money. Can't pay? Pull the drink out of the queue, or just write it off. This can involve some cost, but less cost than than the throughput you'd lose by enforcing consistency.

For your specific example of a goods delivery service, most take-out restaurants fly in the face of these claims: you can pay the driver in cash when they arrive. They are willing to accept the risk that you made your order fraudulently, won't pay, etc. because it's still better for them to have your business.

If you reserved a time-slot or inventory for someone whose credit card is declined, so what? Just un-reserve it. It's not hard to UPDATE a row in a database. The system was in an inconsistent state for 10 seconds. Big whoop. (You might have turned down a legitimate customer, but only if they were consuming the last resource, and if demand is that high, another customer will buy the item.)

Notice that Ticketmater and most airlines will hold your seats (i.e. leave the system in an inconsistent state) for up to 15 minutes while you enter your card details. Hell, Ticketmaster can easily reverse a transaction at any point up until the moment your ticket is scanned at the door. So could an airline, and they often do.

The classic example of account balances isn't necessarily the case either - banks can INSERT records of individual transactions. Since addition is commutative, race conditions are irrelevant. Balances are then calculated nightly offline by playing back the transaction records. I guess that's a form of locking, but even if it weren't, the balance isn't the source of truth - the transactions are, and the balance can be recomputed.

Banks also don't hide the complexities of transaction processing. Your "current balance" is different from your "available balance" and your most recent transactions show as pending anyway.

You don't need transactions as often as you think you do.
No need for deals. Just stick to the basics, and avoid sugar and other crap.

> And I don't want to hear about eating some form of beans 5 days/week, eating healthy implies variety.

Vegetables can be pretty cheap, if you stick to what's in season. Beans are a good start, add lentils, potatoes, carrots, etc. Offal makes for cheap protein (but is not to everyone's taste).
As long as you don't need to remove items or update their costs often.
I think what one might crudely call the "audiophile phase beef" is not about the comb-filtering that results from misalignment but the non-linear phase response of most crossovers, before the signal hits the air. Most act somewhat like an all-pass filter: a flat frequency response but varying delay across the frequency spectrum. This doesn't affect frequency sweeps or white noise, but results in impulses and clicks being smeared out in time or ringing a bit. The thought among some is that this is audible on percussion sounds, but experimental evidence is dubious as far as I can see. There are some references in the classic Douglas Self crossover book: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D9l6JWKKSzUC&lpg=SA2-PA14...

A similar argument which I think more people would agree with is that reflex-loading a speaker hurts the low-frequency group delay, the lack of which is one reason suggested for the supposed clarity of the classic NS10 monitor:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/yamahans10.ht...
The primary point of this thread is that it is hard to be very productive for 6 or 7 hours a day, let alone 10. Also I gather most people here are talking about working remotely.
"all you can do without burning out."

If I may, this sounds to me like if you assumed that everyone should be working just one step below burn out limit. And this seems to be shared by so many people. I wonder what is the rationale behind it? Is it a way to maximise income? or to make sure the 1billionth chance to be a new Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is not lost?

For me, as a French, it seems obvious that we should be very far from the burn out limit most of the time, we should be close to the balance between happiness and boredom, while keeping a sufficient income.
I'm 31 and can relate to some of this. Learning new technologies is fun when it's a genuine step forward, or something new to explore. It's not fun when it's just "how we do things here" bullshit that you have to take in because some 27-year-old "wunderkind" (who isn't that great, but is politically protected) called those shots that way. There are a lot of new technologies that aren't impressive, or are obvious bad ideas (ORMs).

The lack of coherence in the software career is troubling. See, what we're not told is that (at least under closed allocation) 4/5 of us are going to be bench-warmers, given low-importance evaluative projects, and what determines whether a person gets promoted to something real, or gets enough clout to direct his career and protect his specialties, is mostly politics, not merit. (This can be afforded because, put to genuine work, good programmers are worth $500k-2M/year to the business, and great programmers are worth $2-10M. So low utilization is quite affordable with programmer salaries at their current level.) The result of this is that we have to job-hop until we find jobs where we "click" (find like-minded people, or win the political lottery, or just come in at the right time) every 1-3 years. It's not fun to change jobs constantly, but there's often no other way to have a legit career in this industry.

The other thing that's really shitty is that employers demand specialization and high-quality work in job candidates, but refuse to recognize specialties once the person is on board. In terms of work experience, most companies don't eat their own dogfood. This is also why software firms have a terrible record on internal promotion. Even they would rather hire, for a high-impact position, a mercenary who only did cool stuff over the loser "team player" who let them load him up with grunt work.

I think it's time to consider some form of collective action. I don't want an old-style union (with wages set by seniority alone) because that tends toward mediocrity. I think our model needs to be more like the Hollywood model (Screen Actors Guild, worker-side talent agents). We're generating a lot of value, but ultimately the people who decide what to do with our work aren't using it to improve the world or the state of technology, but to cut jobs. We're in the business of helping executive assholes unemploy people, and that just fucking sucks. We need to take charge of this industry and make it work on our terms, not theirs.
I didn't mean to call you out personally. I think we've all made that mistake before. My point was more that even if something is technically replicable, there is value in making it super easy for the non-technical user.
Every fifth pivot is chosen to be an actual median.
Sorry that was a typo.
Linux's DistroWatch site stumbles
Most of the tools you talk about will be old before you get a job, don't even bother. Among the people that know how to use them (and most know only a few of them) very few know how to actually program. They only regurgitate patterns they learned by heart. They're lost when they're left on their own. There are good odds you can do better.

My advice is keep the fundamental books close to you and practice a lot. Programming is mastered by practicing, not by reading blog posts, never forget that. Filter the noise. And most importantly : have fun. Mastery will come as a byproduct, don't even worry about that. You can trust your crave for knowledge, it will always lead you on the right path.

I'm probably not the most knowledgeable out there but you can reach to me if you want to talk.
I'm 27, used to be in tech like the biggest nerd of them all. But not anymore, frankly I'm tired of all of the changes that happened in the industry - it's not that I'm tired of learning but it's that the changes lack substance. Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz improvisation, it's just learning new keywords to do the same crap because the old keywords have been remapped.

I'm reminded by a writing blog, like writers of popular fiction, programmers aren't creating technology anymore but we are simply selling a idea (e.g., Martha Stewart for home furnishings flash sales sites, fear of missing out for Facebook/Instagram, diversion or outlet for teenage aggression/frustration for iPhone games) that validates a user's idea that is wrapped around technology. Hence, tech trends surrounds consumer tech instead of system programming now and new web frameworks sprouts by the day that emphasize shaving the man-hours of a routine set of mundane tasks down by a fraction of an hour for the benefit of the agile burn-down chart.

This is not meant to be depressing nor cynical comment but a liberating one for me. Too often, I or I have witnessed a lot of my mostly younger peers try to reconcile the art and commerce, or to put in blunt way, have our cake and eat it too. I see that as a cowardice or indecisive but perhaps necessary stage in one's journey of growth, not to commit yourself and not to express your personal values through the imperfect tradeoff's and limited circumstances of a finite professional life - but be swayed by the arbitrary trinkets that one's professional guild assigns and equating its idea of worth to your self worth.

VB/Pythonistas/Rails/Node.js I've seen them come and go like names on the Billboards charts moving to VH1's "Behind the Music/Where are They Now?". I'm convinced now that you have two routes in this business, 1) make your programming craft secondary to the development of your domain expertise, so learn finance, SEO or sales whatever is the main objective of your business, 2) make your programming craft your domain business and work at companies where their business is the software.
the global marketplace will also bring more change to our industry. I just got let go from a contract because the owner had 5 people on the team from overseas (India and Egypt) getting paid 1/4 my salary. They were also willing to work all hours of the day, weekends, and us holidays.

Open source has made it so businesses don't really need to hire engineers anymore, only developers good enough to make changes to a system engineered for free. As the older generation dies out and the younger generation starts businesses, it will only get worse.

This is why I started my own business and totally quit development (aside from my own business).
the official site has windows and linux versions(32 bit)

http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.c...
⧆An Introduction to Category Theory
Check out http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Item_Generation_Tutorial for a slightly more complex system that IMO is a lot more flexible and can give some truly astronomical drop rates on exceptionally rare items (i.e. Zod runes, Tyrael's Might sacred armor).

The trick D2 uses is using a table similar to this:

TreasureClass Item1 Prob1 Item2 Prob2 Item3 Prob3 ...
runes23 zod 1 runes22 5000
runes22 cham 1 runes21 5000
runes21 jah 1 ber 1 runes20 5000
...

As you can see, some of the items are actually TreasureClasses, which have their own entries. Whenever the item picker lands on a TreasureClass, it drops to the corresponding table row and "rolls the dice" again, so to speak. This is repeated until the item picker lands on an actual item.

If you look at TreasureClassEx.txt from Diablo II, you'll see that they further use this system to calculate nodrop rates, item generation per act/per difficulty, etc. Pretty cool once you wrap your head around it!
Get a lawyer, it will almost certainly be cheaper than paying your defunct company's debt (unless you were a sole proprietorship, in which case you are probably on the hook still).
I wonder how similar the seismographic readings would be to a legitimate earthquake-induced tsunami.
Honestly, I feel like they could satisfy 90% of mobile users with just a few lines of CSS to make it a bit more responsive. Having to zoom, pan, and squint on my iPhone is so frustrating.
What's the sugar for the third?
You greatly overestimate the care one judge can muster about the prison system. They are complicit at best, and we have already seen a couple judges convicted for sending innocent 'customers' to private prisons in which they held stock on from which they received kickbacks.
Genetic material of 1918 influenza is now circulating in 8 strains of bird flu
I dislike many of the recent revelations about the intelligence community's activities, but if this guy based a freedom of information request on information that he only knew about due to his access to classified information, then he did in fact mishandle classified information. You are only allowed to use classified information to perform your duties at work.

I agree that there should be things in place to protect legitimate whistle blowers, but that doesn't even seem to come into play here.

Then again, we don't know the complete story, so I reserve judgement.
> One of the lovely things about being older is having the confidence to be able to be able to point out that the latest fad is just a warmed-over rehash of something old.

Sane advice. I'm 39, and I'm rather stunned to see 27yr olds calling themselves "old" and disillusioned with tech and what not ... let alone 17!

If you like to build things, hone your system level thinking .. which lasts longer than Angular/Backbone/whatever. (Heck I'm working with the intention of obsoleting them, based on old Smalltalk ideas!) If you like to build things the possibility of which average society has no idea of, hone your algorithmic thinking. I'm certainly more productive today than I was, say, a decade ago because I chose to focus on the ideas rather than specific tools during that time. I'm confident I can work with any tool at hand due to exactly what rayiner says. Good debugging skills, for example, don't die because you need to approach it scientifically.

rayiner - while you're right about the "if you know .." part, many companies today ask for specific skills and hirers don't know enough to say "we need guys to work on a Java code base, you know Smalltalk, you can handle it, hop onboard". So it is up to us tech folks who give these job specifications to hint at the broader kind of people we can accept.
Boom is a small, high quality journal put out by UC Press. The whole issue of Boom this quarter is devoted to the San Francisco tech influx, and it is excellent (http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/summer-2014/)

They have articles from both pro-growth and anti-growth people, including Rebecca Solnit, whose piece on Google buses in the February LRB really touched a nerve.
Think of a Balance Sheet vs. Profit and Loss. Yes, I had a good base of assets after I left. But after that, I wanted to make sure I made more than I spent. Too many founders get lucky and blow it all. Think about sustainability.

Doing what you want, having no employees, and generating enough income for all your fun is a worthy goal!
Just wanted to say I completely agree. The extremely heavy bolding is very distracting.
So the New York Times isn't a private company then? Just repeating "private company" is meaningless as a justification for well...just about anything. You'll have to find a different point to argue.
Really intrigued by the community this links to. I guess there is a bulletin board for everything.
The whole discussion of women+tech is insulting!

Guys weren't baby fed tech! They just grab it and have fun with it.

Girls can grab it all the same: it's just knowledge. Computers and books are as available to girls as to boys.

I don't say in the 70's when computer access was limited, perhaps boys could jostle to gain access to the computer console better than girls; but the reality is that at that time, girls would just shun and mock boys interested in computers: geeks and nerds never have been "popular". I'm not sure it has much changed for a long time, until they realized that big money could be made by some in computers.

And even now, it only goes as far as how much money is made in computing.

If you look at: http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/

You see that computing startups are the ones that are less likely to be still operating after 4 years (at 37%). Therefore I'm not surprised that girls are not interested in computing!

If you want more girls in computing, then make it more profitable and more reliable. Eliminate the risk!
And yet, (A) is simply not true, see the other mentioned study of chess players in the fulltext, a previous study involving Hambrick which found many top players falling short of 10k and many inferior players exceeding 10k, for a net explained variance of not-that-much.
You have to design around such constraints.

You can emulate transactions to a certain extent by marking things are "incomplete" (which may result in things being invisible in some contexts) until they can be marked as complete across all services — an operation which cannot be atomic, but which can be "atomic enough" – or aborted. Versioning may be an option.

Sometimes you need "all or nothing" state management in a single microservice: You want to do "POST /object" multiple times and then cancel all of them on failure, for example. In one app we have a data import process which populates a microservice with a complex data model with many 1:n and n:m relationships. Instead of doing multiple REST calls (POST and so on), we build a "batch" object, which is essentially a JSON document. This batch lives in the microservice and acts like a persistent transaction. When we want to apply the changes, we tell the service to commit the batch. If the batch cannot be applied because it conflicts — ie., changes have been made by someone else since the batch started — the entire batch is dropped and the import starts from scratch. It's not terribly elegant or efficient, but it's fairly simple.
I bet it does...