skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I often watch other developers look to make their lives more complex by trying to solve problems which aren't there. Why? Because the obvious solution is simple and boring. In any other culture that would be crazy. In programming culture, it seems to be the norm.
Some highlights from the FAQ:
"Instead of charging the device from pc with electricity you will charge our device ( WiFiEX) with internet from your home-wifi."

also: "And yes , we will also try to cover the whole planet with satellites for sure"
FUNNY TWERK VIDEO OMG WHO IS THIS RAPPER
ITS A WEIRD DUDE NAME CASH MOLLY THAT PUT A TWERK VIDEO TOGTHER BUT ITS SO ANIMATED I DONT TAKE HIM SERIOUS WHY SHOULD HE EVEN BE A RAPPER LOL MUST WATCH !!!! http://youtu.be/K3DnT5B9NkI
> Ouch. We're just a few hackers trying to fix broken developer tools.

And we (gwillen and anyone who agrees with his comment, myself included) are just a few hackers who are tired of having the rug pulled under their feet when $CORP inevitably comes with the big bucks and all claims made by the founders in the early days of the company mysteriously disappear from the homepage.

Talk is cheap.
This I strongly agree with: what we want now is a RESTful JSON API for email retrieval and querying. IMAP was hairy 20 years ago and is stuck with its design choices forever.

But I can't see such a thing taking off unless it's Free.
My first job out of college was a software engineering gig at FedEx, and this is one of many popular stories I would hear around the office.

Another popular one was that Fred Smith had the idea of FedEx for a college paper while he was at Yale, and that the professor gave him a C on the paper and said it was a bad idea.
For me, there have been more than one. I'll list them in the order I read them. I have them all in an eBook form to read in my Kindle App on my Nexus 7.
1) Clean Code
2) Pragmatic Programmer
3) Patterns for Enterprise Application Architecture

There's some overlap in contents, but I feel they complement each other very well.
I'm interested in knowing how GitHost are hosting GitLab CI. I'm currently using GLCI to run integration tests in Vagrant VMs, which unfortunately means most "cloud" hosting is out.

joshfng (Assuming you are from GitHost). Do you know if your environment would support this?
FWIW, inboxapp is self-hosted and under AGPL, so it's forkable.
I really am at a loss to think of something that email as a standard (and SMTP as a protocol) is lacking that requires a replacement.

Postage. Solve the spam problem with economics. Can't be done with SMTP.
It's not even an argument point, but just being used as a way to call someone a name without owning it.
Are you in a position to request that these two videos are removed from the privileged access section of the GV Library? Definitely the top two videos I wanted to watch from there, and it seems like better security practices is a win for everybody.
* http://www.gv.com/lib/security-for-startups
* http://www.gv.com/lib/advanced-security-for-startups
"M$" is a shorthand for "Microsoft" - is not just shorthand, it's a sophomoric statement with commentary. If you don't know that, use words and phrases you understand.
Watch Submarine Exploration Live
My personal best was "Release Messiah". To this day I still cringe.
Whereas the bankers on the other side of the issue are known for their honesty and integrity...
I'm more curious why giant fonts are a trend

If you imagine that page on a phone screen, you'd find that the font size is probably a lot more normal than it is large. If you're expecting > 50% of traffic on mobile then that's the use-case you optimise for.
ANIMATED TWERK VIDEO THIS GUY FUNNY HE SURE HE NOT A COMEDIAN NOT A RAPPER
Perhaps I missed it, but what's the business model? Is it the (forthcoming) SaaS version?
PubSub is definitely a promising model for future APIs. This is just the beta API release, and we wanted to get feedback on the delta sync protocol first.
Why wouldn't it be true? $5000 was as useless as $0 would be, as they needed $24000 to cover fuel expenses for the next week. So if he lost the gamble, there would be no change in ultimate outcome.
Random question: If the specially blessed form names for user signup is 'username' and 'new-password', what's the name of the field that's "password again" (for typos)?
"I have no idea why this is on HN."

I believe its a really good example of how to manipulate statistics to meet a predetermined conclusion. I'm not sure if there was one number in the entire article that wasn't manipulated into propaganda. The text prose was OK but the manipulation of statistics was masterful.

Here's one example. If a skinny biker, hit pedestrian me, at a "normal" speed maybe 10 MPH, the kinetic impact would be similar (for me, anyway) to a normal size person hitting me in the hallway. Oh we'd both get knocked down, and if I was 80 like my grandma, or 8 like my kid, it might kill, and maybe 1 in 100 odds someone would break a bone, but the fatality rate per accident would hover near enough zero. In comparison, hit a pedestrian on a 45 (really more like 60) MPH country road and the only question is if they'll be enough left to fill a coffin or not, so we'll call that near 100% fatality rate per accident. So the fixation on comparing fatality rates is meaningless. There's more to a good day than merely not dying in a bike-ped accident and I have no great desire to be hit over and over and "its OK because I wasn't killed and my desire to wear spandex is more important than your desire to live". "Well sorry I killed your kid or grandma but statistically they don't count." That's not really a culture to aspire to.

Another example is the fixation on counts without discussing percentages. Lets see, on my commute home about 60000 of my closest friends and I will drive on that major interstate over the course of the entire commute, while what, maybe a handful of bikers will spend hours taking the surface streets? So if bikes were rabid death machines I'd still expect the death counts to be spectacularly higher for cars than bikers because practically no one bikes. The death count from a rounding error will in fact approach zero. That doesn't mean Russian Roulette is a great game to recommend and the authors observation is meaningless.

I have mixed feelings in that my opinions and biases generally match the authors, because I like to ride my bike (although I ride safely, which even I admit is unusual for bikers), but I can't decide if I should complain about the evils of propaganda or compliment the guy on doing a near legendarily good job at generating propaganda. You have to respect competence, even if its doing something evil. You can always learn something from competence. Just don't confuse successful competence with good ethics. Life isn't as simple as merely success = goodness.
Mutuals.

I was involved in setting one up at university (http://www.srcf.ucam.org/) and it's still running long past the time I had anything to do with it. I believe it's a good model for "community" internet services, by definition run in the interests of the users.

It's not impossible for one to sell out, but it requires the members (customers) to vote for it. In the case of the UK building societies, by bribing them with the capital reserves that were turned out to be essential to keeping the mortgage system running.
Definitely different. This was a 22ish yr old woman. I don't remember the street.
Well, a JIT-compiled program can be substantially faster than an AOT-compiled one, given that running time is large enough. Which it is for services on 24/7 (that's more throughput, but you get my drift)
Go ahead with Digital Ocean for small to medium scale application. Managing and migration is easy there. More over the support is pretty good.
I wonder if some of this is the bored engineer phenomenon? I find that when I'm writing actually difficult code, it almost always comes out clean, simple and easy to read.

It's when I'm churning out ridiculous amounts of front-end kluge that I start over-engineering or introducing complexity and indirection where it's totally unnecessary.

This seems like a particularly cogent hypothesis for the web, where a majority of the programming is not very intellectually stimulating* but is simultaneously time-consuming and mentally taxing.

* IMO and in my experience, mileage may vary. And this isn't to say you don't need to be intelligent. But requiring mental energy != intellectually stimulating.
The strongest statement you can make to this effect is to preferentially take _my_ money over VC money. Words on this particular subject have been reduced to having no value with most people.
Looks like they just copied another feature as usual from some competitive OS and made it sound like something new.
I got rid of chronic pain I had for 4 years in 4 weeks by reading "The Divided Mind" by John Sarno. I'd highly recommend it.

And, as other's have pointed out, a wandering mind is part of meditation. The beneficial part of meditation comes from that act of noticing your wandering mind and bringing it back to focus.
Some reasons from experience that developers over-do complexity:
a) Someone at some point in the past told them to plan ahead
b) They aren't sure about a feature (or perhaps about the future of a feature) and hedge against inaction
c) Management does not manicure their task focus and/or priorities
Sienfeld to Soprano -- not tech but interesting
One particular point of developer inequality and technical debt that I see get ignored is people with the social credit or track that lets them only create new things as opposed to those that have to do maintenance.

I find the latter often appreciate the place and purpose of types more clearly than the former, even if the former would benefit as well from having concise encodings of intent in the design and creation phase.

This bias is prevalent in dyn-lang/consulting-oriented communities, often because they are churning out projects and dumping them on their clients/employers.
12% difference in performance can be huge.
For example, in 100m sprint race, Usain Bolt is 'only' 12% faster than me.
Dive Into Python - http://www.diveintopython.net/

Some of the examples are a bit dated now, and this type of immersive learning at intermediate/advanced levels is increasingly common (e.g. the Head First series, Codecademy, etc) but when this book came out it was rare to have this learning method presented for anything other than the most beginning levels of a language.
Works great with d3.js too. Couldn't've made this map of the early days of the Ukraine crisis[0] without Natural Earth.

Also helpful to that end: the Global Administrative Areas[1] database.

Finally, it would've been impossible to even start getting my head around how to go about these things if it wasn't for this amazing tutorial by Mike Bostock[2].

[0] http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/03/the-noo...

[1] http://www.gadm.org

[2] http://bost.ocks.org/mike/map/
In the early 1970s if you took a secret plane trip alone and came back with 27k you probably didn't go to Vegas...
You do know that the US still imports 1/2 of it's oil, right? (about 6 million barrels per day in imports, http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_neti_a_ep00_IMN_mbblpd_...)

However, all countries in the world without oil have to buy their oil in USD ... so they first convert their local-currency to USD, and then purchase oil, driving USD currency demand.
A short list:

- Trying to making small payments is terrible; the only way to tell whether a transaction requires fees is to try it, see it fail, and parse the error message to figure out the fee amount.

- The "order" abstraction is bad because it assumes customers will always pay the exact order amount, which is false because users make mistakes (especially since the order page instructs the customer to add miner's fees, and if they do, the amount will be wrong and the order gets reported to us as "mispaid"). I had to put a lot of time into writing our own documentation about how order statuses work, particularly mispaid orders - from trial-and-error that unfortunately had to include some bad customer experiences. Perhaps the worst problem is that when a customer makes multiple payments on an order, they show up in the web interface, but not in the API.

- When you request an email address on the payment page, Coinbase doesn't check that it's a valid address.

- choose_price on orders doesn't work.

- The API just needs more consistency. There are entities with statuses named "complete", "completed", and "Complete". There are things called "hash" and "hsh". The order API gives a number of confirmations for a transaction, but the transaction API doesn't.
Some problems fit more cleanly into code than others. These get more attention when it's clear that a cleaner solution is yet unimplemented.
As horrible as it sounds, I started with the Austin, TX craigslist for my first groupings of folks, which paid terrible and had horrible projects. I'm not in Austin, but I could meet folks in town.

But I did cycle through a lot of folks, and I also tried to leverage every project into a better project.

Also, I answer questions on a facebook group, and that has led to new work contacts. Just being generally helpful and occasionally asking for work netted me a lot of work.

Finally, I just generally network, talk about what I do, make a point to talk to other folks who do what I do when I meet them in my larger life. That's created my best connections. One guy I met doing audio on a movie set hooked me up with a company that turned into a high 5 figure client.

I find it especially valuable to be able to hook up folks I know who are looking for work with people who need work done, at whatever level. People generally find that super useful... it is harder to do when just starting out, but I still get work from the guy I got hired to replace me at the first of my crappiest jobs.

I do that mostly because it makes me happy to see my friends find work or folks fill a need in their businesses, but folks don't usually forget people who build good relationships for them. So, IMO, it is good to know other freelancers or people who want to freelance... you get a lot more calls if most times that you turn down a project you can shuffle it to someone else :D
I guess I'm a little confused here. As far as I can tell this isn't an email platform; it's a service that wraps IMAP and POP and exposes RESTful services.

The grand claims in the text makes me think they're going to provide something that replaces email addresses and provides a better protocol than IMAP but that's not what's going on as far as I can tell.

Am I missing anything? I'm not trying to be an ass and IMAP and POP suck to deal with but there are hundreds of libraries that do it with very little work required. IMAP should certainly be replaced with something better but I don't see a proposal for such a thing.
Sure, here's the stats:

Version 12.17
Build 1863
Platform x64
System Windows 7

The problem manifests itself as the maps being entirely blue.
SERPWoo Is That Jacked Dude Who Steals Your Girlfriend - SEO Rank Tracker
> Do you still not believe most email is formatted at 78 characters? Really? I've stated my reasoning, you haven't refuted that or explained any alternative.

You've essentially stated that you don't know either (you haven't really read your users' emails, have you?), and I have explained why it doesn't matter anyhow, so I don't see any need to refute anything.

> No, we've already discussed why they're worse and you haven't even attempted to rebut it.

No, we haven't.

> they not representative of common email use cases

(a) Yes, they are - are you maybe confusing use cases (what it's for) with workflows (how it's applied to that use case)?

(b) How exactly is that even relevant? Because linux kernel developers are not representative of email users, it's fine to break email in a way that doesn't work for linux kernel developers? I mean, kinda my whole initial point was that exactly that is terrible engineering.

> for the same reasons I have mentioned earlier

Actually, you haven't.

> which you have not refuted in any way.

As such, there is little to refute.

> They do, but displaying email is a critical part of email clients.

so?

> Another part of email list etiquette:

Part of that is that you sincerely try to understand the other side's position, don't quote out of context, don't misrepresent, don't just repeat talking points without actually considering and addressing the other side's arguments, question your own implicit assumptions, ... - that avoids the frustration that you are seeing there.
So we have two websites on the same server (same IP, using SNI), siteA has SSL, siteB doesn't. Google will attempt to crawl https://siteB/ (which will return siteA's content! in a browser you would get a warning about the certificate being wrong). Since there are no links anywhere that point to https://siteB why does google crawl it? This is technically a configuration / apache error, but google should not be crawling https websites when their domain does not match the certificate.
First, I wasn't trying to set public policy. I was offering experience not anecdotes. I've walked 20+ miles a week for 15+ years. I've observed a lot of behavior.

Yes, on occasion cyclists stop for me when I'm in the crosswalk, but it's the exception.

I quoted information about cyclists, because you know, I was replying to a comment about cyclists.
I don't agree with your line of reasoning.

There are a lot of not only interesting but also commercially viable things right here in our solar system. We have several huge balls of fuel, each of which has many orders of magnitude more energy that humanity has harnessed in our entire history.

There are planets that we can build on and adapt to, or potentially adapt to us.

There are millions of floating gold mines with more mineral riches than than exist in the entirety of earth.

Regarding the distances, I don't think they are as big as you are putting them out to be. If you look at the ratio of how far we need to travel to get somewhere interesting(moon, mars, comet, etc) over how fast we can travel( 36,000 MPH+) and compare that to the ratio of the European wind powered ships speed vs a trip to the new world, you'd see that the solar system is not at all outside of our reach and there are many precedents to speak to humanities willingness to make sure trips.
New Yorkers Confess Who the Last Person They Said 'I Love You' Was
Ask HN: Are There any Interesting Jobs in Traffic Engineering for a CS Major?
I've got 2 semesters left to finish up my CS degree. I'm 30 and I've got about 8 years experience as a freelance programmer.

I'm interested in solving problems related to traffic engineering. I don't have the time/money to go back to school again to get civil engineering degree, so maybe something like working on traffic simulation software?
Another perspective, of course not statistical, but interesting: https://vimeo.com/77084110
It's optimized for mobile. I"m reading it on an iPhone and it's perfect.
I think if the gp had said "As a business owner, it's in your best interests...", there would be less to argue about (without really changing the meaning).

I think it's likely that he had little interest in the online presence of his business, but he must also have missed opportunities to better manage it (I'm thinking of information from a chamber of commerce or similar, or just conversations with people).
Because self-hosting a mail service is totally something my mom can do...

(As the sibling comment notes, I'm talking from the perspective of the end user, not that of a technologist. We need to remember who we're ultimately building these things for...)
I think the reason there's so much technical debt is largely because the amount it would cost to actually build quality software... is too high. We could not afford it. Like, as a society. Our society is built on crappy software.

I think it's just a utopian fantasy to think that if only the right hypercard-like tool could be created, then the cost of building quality software would go down.

Or at any rate, actually: Let's agree that the web is built on an enormous stack of kludges upon kludges. (These kludges are both in code frameworks that people use to build things on the web, and in the fundamental protocols of the web itself). The reason it is this way is, again, because by the time it is recognized what a problem this is, it would simply be too expensive to rebuild the web from scratch. We can't afford it.

To build this utopian hypercard-like stack which allow just anyone to build web things, and be so high-quality that it just worked without having to understand the things it's abstracted on top of, and to maintain it as web technology and desires continue to evolve, etc.... would be such an expensive undertaking, with such a high risk of failure, that it has no way to succeed in that fantasy of making the web all around cheaper.

We see posts like this come up here from time to time, written by non-programmers who have some kind of belief that programmers _like_ complexity, that programmers are _opposed_ to making things easy and simple. I totally don't see "modern programmer culture fetish[izing] complexity" -- rather, on HN, I think it's pretty clear that modern programmer culture fetishizes simplicity. It's just that simplicity is _hard_. (And people chasing simplicity often end up over-abstracting, and just winding up with an even worse form of complexity). Succesful software that is powerful and reliable and simple takes skill and it takes time. And skill and time cost money.

We've built an economy and a society that is entirely based on crappy software, because the economy could not bear the cost of as much quality software as we have crappy software, and the crappy software provides short-term efficiencies that make people money. (and i'm not talking about programmers,I'm talking about the 'domain' businesses which could not afford to run without software 'automation' anymore, even though it's all crappy)
Would it be possible to include google spreadsheets as an input source?
Skiff - Python wrapper/library for DigitalOcean's v2 API
Freshdesk’s Scalability and 4 Words of Warning That Lead to Hope
Not so much what OpenStreetMap has done, but simply due to the nature of the project one big difference is, that OSM maps what is on the ground. So there isn't going to be a discussion if that river is relevant or not, if there is a river you map it. Other things like opening hours here are usually also easy to verify, IF you do so. So it will be more if it belongs into the database or not, but even if it doesn't there is often no big harm if tags aren't misused.

And then there are Quality assurance tools:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance

Right now most of them are more geared toward detecting accidental errors, but it is pretty safe to say that once OSM becomes more popular there will also be tools optimized to detect vandalism.

I also feel like it's a lot easier to get in touch with the community, at least here in Germany: http://www.openstreetmap.de/community.html I actually still haven't found a simple German Wikipedia Forum where I could just discuss a page, which is something that really helps new users.
"parked in such a way that a cyclist doesn't even see a pedestrian about to cross or vice versa until the last minute"

As an (old?) driver Ive had some pretty terrifying moments with school kids in the same situation. Bikers and drivers should be working together to fix that not turn it into a biker only or driver only (or pedestrian only?) issue.
Pavlok is a habit-forming wearable that will shock you
"Our goal was to allow regular people without extensive training to easily and quickly build useful software. This was the spirit of languages like COBOL, Visual Basic, and HyperCard."

I think that this slightly overstates the matter. Having peered into the guts of some payroll code, I question whether it was easily built. Could we say

"To allow application developers to concentrate on the complexities of the problem domain rather than on those of the computing environment."?

[edit: rephrased my first sentence.]