skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome."

As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning. The constraints are what breed elegance; there is no such thing as an elegant solution when there is no shape to the problem. It's nice if the constraints are prioritized so you know what to give up if you can't satisfy them all. But there's nothing quite like saying "Yeah, we did this thing in two weeks that everyone assumed was impossible, and we did it without a binary push" or "Through our clever architecture, we accomplished with one server what everyone thought required a whole rack."

I believe design is the same way. The designs I've seen where the dictum is "Let your creativity run wild!" tend to be uninspired, while the ones I've seen where it's "This is what the user is trying to accomplish, and we have a 4 inch screen and 10 seconds to hook them" are often much more creative.

As a manager, the constraints are annoying. But one consequence of that is that setting firm constraints will tend to shift your culture from being manager-centric to being engineer- and designer-centric, which IMHO is a good thing.
Show HN: My startup – Fosslancer, open source software freelancer
in case you're anxious to try this out, worth noting that
"To get access to the web version, you will have to buy the desktop version on Steam or the Android version later today"
UK to use Open Document Format for government documents
A system that facilitates follow up care for patients is a good idea.
It's clearly in the patients best interest. It's in the hospitals best interest as well.
A number of hospitals are doing this already though, using their social workers to arrange follow up care and making sure the patients go. There are also "bundlers" who are doing this, but I suppose they could outsource some of their work to a company like boardrounds. Sometimes a more hands on approach is required, especially when dealing with the elderly.
It's possible, over time, for a pure tech solution to this problem. Ideally it would be integrated within the hospitals EMR (really tough, given the reluctance of EMR's to work with outside solution providers, but I think that will change over time), set up the appointment, and maybe go as far as setting up transportation as well - like integrating with Stat (http://signup.stat.com/ - i have no connection with this company, just a thought). Over the next 10-20 years you will also have a relatively more mobile savvy elderly patient population, which will help this, and other solutions, grow.
>Never heard anyone say Dart's package system is better than NPM

neither do I - just say Dart has good dedicated (npm is for JS AFAIK) package system

>Latency makes Eclipse unusable on every machine I've tried

It's not as good as lets say IntelliJ (best IDE I've ever seen) but it's "good enough"

Besides - it seems long term goal for Dart team is chromedeveditor https://github.com/dart-lang/chromedeveditor (another point for Dart it's open source) which will be pretty fast when DartVM will come to Chrome
> I want my children to understand perspective. You can't grieve for every individual injustice in the world, you can only strive to make it better overall.

Totally agree.
I found the article helpful overall, I understand it must have been difficult to write it, so I'm giving it more leeway
Met Benjamin at a health event in New York, and was really impressed by him, the team, and the service. Really smart guys tackling one of the biggest issues in healthcare, patient compliance and follow-up. Congrats on the press and funding!
Because the H1B process is pretty broken right now. Very skilled people can be denied a visa because the quota is filled with less talented developers that got lucky.
You're on point. I cite AFS in the paper (http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf). I used AFS at Stanford.
Budgeting is particularly interesting in a situation where you receive funding. It seems it would be much easier to budget in a bootstrap situation, where growth is likely happening a bit more slowly. You're slowly adding a person(engineer, marketer, salesperson, etc.) here and there as you go along(as needed), buying more servers, etc.

I would assume budgeting is a bit different in a situation where you receive a massive cash infusion. You want to spend all of it to grow even more quickly but the effects of spending may be harder to measure(because you're spending soo much soo quickly). So do you just replicate the growth strategy used in the "bootstrap" phase or do you adopt a new one?

In a situation involving a massive round of funding(relative to the current size of the company), wouldn't it be difficult to attribute any problems supposedly associated with the increased budget to a "bad budgeting process"? That is to say, if the growth isn't happening, then there's no guarantee that just by adding more money to "growth" that "growth" will happen. You may have just pointlessly hired managers, salespeople, engineers and bought more servers and whatnot, for growth that wasn't going to happen in the first place.

To put it a different way, when the profits don't catch up with spending, was the problem really the budgeting process? Or with the market itself? Or some other factor entirely?

Basically, how do you identify a bad budgeting process in a situation where some entity just externally infused a bunch of capital?
OpenStack purist Mirantis joins with Oracle against common enemy Red Hat
It's a MVP of the larger concept of a highly distributed cloud. This feature runs in a much larger project. It took me a few days to write it, and got your attention! :)
This was based on empirical survey with over 80 companies (startups, medium size and big enterprises), and this is also in line with our personal experience managing thousands of servers at AWS.
After 15 years at MS, this guy is probably unemployable anywhere else unless he is open to learning new things and retraining.

I've not seen the video so I don't know what he was really doing in Microsoft, but you know that there are other places where Microsoft software is used outside Microsoft, right?
I don't get whz he should be unemployable anywhere else..
The video is pretty cool, but make sure to read the rest of the page. Most exciting of all is this last note: "We will attempt our next water landing on flight 13 of Falcon 9, but with a low probability of success. Flights 14 and 15 will attempt to land on a solid surface with an improved probability of success."

That "solid surface" will presumably be a barge. Very exciting stuff.

Edit: The "loss of hull integrity" also answers a common question of "why not use parachutes". Even if they could land the stage softly enough with a reasonable amount of parachutes, the stage has trouble surviving tipping over in the ocean after landing. It needs to land and remain upright, but using parachutes you will often get some lateral velocity that would cause a tip-over. They need more control than parachutes can provide (and that's all ignoring the problems of salt water).
I think a big weakness of this article is that it goes from talking about horrible treats from random people to unconscious bias of coworkers without a clear transition. People skimming the article might think that she was getting threats from coworkers. The unconscious bias of developers and the toxicity of the gaming community are very different problems.
> Symfony2 instance handles 700 req/s with an average response time at 30 ms

That is amazing, even if they're using it only as a REST server.
The creatures archive goes as far back as 2000.
Indeed. It's a much different prospect to have to not only develop some new piece of technology but also build a business around it, figure out how to transition from your day job on the one hand to being handed enough money to make a lot of those risks and problems go away if you're successful on the other hand. It changes the risk/reward equation for someone talented enough to maybe develop this sort of thing in their spare time.
Thanks! Hadn't seen this. `toRead.enqueue(_)`
It's a journalist from Crimea, Nobody you should consider to be fully informed with what rebels do. I can imagine he's now a kind of a war reporter, but in wars there are a lot of rumors. Nothing can be more probable than that somebody actually saw the crash and produced the rumor that that's an achievement of the rebels and the journalist repeated it.
How does the Feminist movement square itself with the fact that many women actually like being prized for their beauty and sex appeal?

I'd like to start a campaign called "It's cool." It would require some form of an indicator. A sticker or button perhaps? Women who like having their beauty and/or sex appeal noticed could wear it on their person. Posters with these women could have it on display. Men would know, "It's cool" she likes that I appreciate her looks.

Would this satisfy the Feminists? Doubtful. More than likely these women would be attacked and ridiculed for what makes them happy.
Thanks for that, I'll have a look and mention it if I make a follow-up post.

I think that good small projects can be plug-ins to bigger projects, or a library that someone use in a project.
Eek. I didn't intend to sound trollish. I was on a mobile earlier and it didn't encourage great eloquence.

I greatly admire Ellsberg's courage and moral consistency.
And if you want to try things out yourself, iq has created a playground for you here: https://www.shadertoy.com/
I am open but companies are not :-(
Have you considered that for a lot of people the ads aren't obnoxious because they actually help keep them up to date on new releases?
Can the Su-25 intercept and shoot down a 777?
Do you mean "still only maintained by the one"
Or just that the originator still participates?

If the former, I don't really think there are any. If the latter, there are tons of examples ranging from Dropbox to Facebook. The "still only" is almost antithetical to anything beyond very small scale success.
Yes, that is exactly my stance. Find another hobby outside of playing with people's money.
I'm not on the inside of cockroachDB's raft implementation, but typically you've got a single thread processing AppendEntries requests in a defined order, exactly one at a time, to guarantee the same order of execution on every node. There might be some small savings from doing a couple of updates concurrently here and there but your overall flow should be single threaded.

As far as the address space and big SSDs thing.. I'd be willing to gamble on linux supporting mmap up to the biggest devices on the market, one way or another. Heck, there's only 16 more bits after that 47 before every FS under VFS has to be rewritten, right?
My biggest issue with code navigation on Github is that there doesn't seem to be a way to traverse the file tree without navigating through each directory.

It makes getting an overall sense of the organization of the project a bit of a hurdle until you actually clone the repo and look through it (which is too much work if I'm just glancing at something quickly).

For both new-to-project and new-to-programming folks, I'd argue this is very important as it's a scaffolding mechanism for learning the new system.
Nah, I don't assume it. Hence 'may' and 'attempts'. But the explanation is simple enough. If you can discover what it takes to code a mind then you're also going to learn some of the systemic faults that minds, qua minds, can develop. Of course, I could be wrong about this. It could be that mental diseases are all purely down to hardware issues (brain health). But it seems like a bad bet. For example: addiction, or at least specific types of addiction, depend on people's culture and choices.
No, this would have been September '59, most likely, after the Lunik II landing.

They did it right under Khrushchev's nose.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZhgFUyCOhHcC&pg=PA205&lpg...
Thank you. Your work is impressive and it is good to see someone putting forth a technical explanation like that. Much appreciated.
Show HN: A Pomodoro Timer built on the Yo API
I built a Pomodoro Timer on top of the greatest app of our times (Yo).

http://pomodoryo.herokuapp.com/

It is running on Heroku and waiting for your yos.

See the code here https://github.com/thebrettd/pomodoryo
So back when I was running numerical simulations of pop III stellar evolution (which is rather a long time ago now), the interesting thing is that, in comparison to pop II and I, the extreme metal paucity means that you can have (a) stable and extremely long-lived very dim, very small stars, verging on being warmed up gas giants, and (b) very large and extremely short-lived stars, which will supernova or otherwise give way to instability on the order of a few million years after core ignition.

You can then work back to speculative mass functions (distribution of mass in the population) by asking (a) how many large, short-lived stars you need to generate the observed metallicity of pop II, and (b) how many extremely small dim objects you'd need to fill out the missing mass without having so many that someone would have seen them by now. The latter is an interesting line of thinking; what is the upper density bound on (for example) 0.1M objects to make both the solar system's continued existence and an inability to see these things plausible.

You can also look at the paucity of candidates for ~1M extremely low metallicity stars (there are just a couple out there known that could be pop III candidates) as another constraint on the pop III mass function. Any pop III ~1M stars would have a lifetime longer than that of the universe to date, or at least such was the case in my models.

Research on missing mass and pop III has moved on considerably from those days of course.
> the information is only used to flag malicious activity and is never used anywhere else at Google.

But does it say the information is anonymized and promptly deleted, and nothing is logged?
>We had one customer at MySQL who paid us voluntarily. Craigslist. So Craig Newmark sent us $10,000 saying, "I don't find anything to buy in your offerings, but I love you guys and I would like to support you, so here's $10,000." And that was the reminder to us that we had no good business model.
Also, it looks like there are grants available to even get you started with some capital so it doesn't come out of pocket. Even better.
I know. It remains to be seen if WebGL won't join VRML in a few years.
Wouldn't making it harder for that small toxic contingent to be heard improve the situation?
I'm not refuting that women are harassed, I'm taking offense at it being used as an excuse to disparage the male gender. That is no spin, that is calling out unacceptable behavior.

Please read the thread located here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070237
> I can see why that trade-off was made.

But why not allow users to make their own choice and disable the privacy compromise easily?
Thanks! Any questions just let me know :)
You may like this Chrome extension called Octotree. It adds a hierarchy on the left hand side of the page:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjah...
But the men aren't presented that way because they're objects of sexual desire for the target audience, they're strong and tough and agile to fill the player's fantasy of power and control. Besides, the argument that men are portrayed the same way quickly breaks down when you compare male "functional" armor and female "sexy" armor, which is a common trope in a lot of games.
Compared to the real functional languages (Haskell), the only reason I can think of that scala is called a functional language is because the community would be insecure in their smugness otherwise. You can totally use scala as a better java dipping into FP occasionally as you would in C#. It's not like say F#, which really forces you into a functional mindset.

Post functional is as vacuous as post modern, ultimately these labels are not meaningful.
Not sure if the Twitter acquisition has any part in this, but worth pointing out:
https://whispersystems.org/blog/welcome/

EDIT: Having said that, MAN I love these folks. I wish they got along better with the F-Droid community[1], but hopefully that will eventually get sorted out :)

[1]: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/281
Another space game coming out this year that will heavily use procedural generation to re-create the milky way galaxy is Elite: Dangerous. I'm in the beta and it already looks great despite many features not yet being activated for the beta players.
When I was a kid, I was quite active in the soda race forums and the community there. In fact, my first open source project was a library for generating soda constructor models programmatically.

For example, it let you write text:
http://sodaplay.com/creators/russellsprouts/items/font

Some good creators, I'm sure there are many more I'm forgetting:

http://sodaplay.com/creators/mmaarrkkuuss

http://sodaplay.com/creators/edlinfan

http://sodaplay.com/creators/grape

http://sodaplay.com/creators/jeckyll

http://sodaplay.com/creators/im_an_alien

http://sodaplay.com/creators/phider

http://sodaplay.com/creators/lectvay

http://warptera.com/

Many models are made up of motors with legs attached. Here are some interesting ones:

http://sodaplay.com/creators/motors

http://sodaplay.com/creators/other_motors

Also of interest, this paper empirically discovers the physics behind it: http://falcoprof.altervista.org/dispense/sodamathspaperfull....
> That "solid surface" will presumably be a barge. Very exciting stuff.

I get nerd chills from the level of precision needed to bring a launch vehicle from hypersonic->subsonic speeds to a target that size, and land to reuse the vehicle.
I wasn't actually - never used Qt (been stuck in win32 and Wx). Thanks for pointing it out :)
Open Source as a Habit
Now what would be really interesting is to have some sort of rudimentary evolution in a game like this. Star systems, planet geology, flora, fauna, everything.
Do you have a link to any discussion on that?

It looks like the docs still suggest the method used in the blog post:
https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ngResource/service/$resource

"It is important to realize that invoking a $resource object method immediately returns an empty reference [...] Once the data is returned from the server the existing reference is populated with the actual data. This is a useful trick since usually the resource is assigned to a model which is then rendered by the view. [...] This means that in most cases one never has to write a callback function for the action methods."
Fair point. They can order things on your behalf, but cannot easily order things for THEMSELVES on your behalf since they can't enter a new shipping address without reentering the card number. But that doesn't totally eliminate the risk. They could be prepared to swipe the stuff off your porch when it's delivered (since they could predict when this would be) or they could use their power to simply harass you.
We're writing a book on our $100,000 App Store Journey – Check it out
Awesome, I was hoping somebody made this already. Thanks!
The challenge is getting AC current, not DC as with the mega-moto shield.
I upvoted your comment because you make some valid points, e.g. caching should be kept orthogonal to the document format, which needs to be kept simple above almost all else.

I upvoted only after some hesitation, though, because of the unnecessary snark about stupidity. I think that's what you were downvoted for.
That bothered me too. They clearly aren't simulating atoms here.
My pleasure Nick. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions.
the attack is interesting, however what I am surprised is they have written 12 page paper on it ! the entire content of the paper can be rewritten to well within 4 pages
Hey YouTube! 750 indies have signed their declaration of war
I speculate that this one iced up because the vehicle flew a much higher trajectory than the previous vehicle, as visually noticed from the launch webcast. This meant that the first stage spent more time higher in the atmosphere.
At a school like CMU it's hard for me to believe they'd cancel a researcher's talk because it wasn't properly disclosed. It'd create a headache for the IP team, but they wouldn't cancel the talk. That just makes them look awful.
I might be a bit late to the party, but if anyone is interested in copying the Stack Overflow setup, we're offering startups free software, 60k in Azure credits for accelerator-backed companies and engineering mentoring, if required. Find me at felixrieseberg.com or felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com and I can set you up.
I always think about it from an artistic standpoint. Art forms are almost defined by their constraints: movies can't use text, literature can't use pictures, ice sculpting can't use clay, mosaics can't use paint.

Of course, art is also about breaking out of those constraints and creating new mediums. But that seems more about finding a new set of constraints rather than eliminating them entirely. Decide to break free from the canvas and paint an entire mountainside? Great, now you have to consider things like the angles from which you can see the work, the way the lighting will fall, how long you have to complete the work and show people before the work succumbs to the weather, etc.

So I agree that creativity is strongest when operating within constraints.
this was brilliant, I'm going to send a link to your post to my fiance and have her read this to make her understand how I work.
Scala's capabilities are not really comparable to OCaml, which doesn't even have traits. JavaScript has many influences beyond Self, and is enough of a mishmash even in its original form to have its own point in the list (at best, a not very similar descendant of self).
In theory (and hopefully) but all of the non-sexy stuff ends up as political wedge issues. And when that happens we have people like Palin decrying research on fruit flies in Paris, France.
Boca Web Entrepreneur Raphael Caixeta, 23, Dies in Motorcycle Crash
I'm very impressed that you can fly from the surface of one planet to another seamlessly. Sure the science of partitioning space and changing levels of detail based on distance isn't that difficult, but it is rarely implemented.
I really wish I had a good business model for my open source product (a database publishing software). I am doing my living from it - quite ok - (selling support), but I think I could do much more. If there is someone from Berlin, Germany with ideas or knowledge in that area, I'd be more than happy to talk to you about that (even might pay you for that).
Thanks for the mirror.

Know of any novel techniques/rehashing of old techniques that have been developed since?
> common question of "why not use parachutes"

My typical answer to this is to mention Mars and the very thin atmosphere. There's no point in SpaceX developing technology that they can't use on Mars.
I benchmarked lmdb vs. leveldb once and on a write-heavy workload leveldb destroys lmdb (think 10x better perf).

The author of LMDB makes pretty bold performance claims and people are too eager to believe them.

You shouldn't propagate those claims unless you've done benchmarking to verify them.
> Are there any articles about how an engine like this is built?

It isn't that different, the only real change is how you handle edge conditions, as you can have finer detail so need to filter less.

Minecraft doesn't use blocks to simplify world generation, it uses blocks to simplify world modification by the user. The blocks restrict you making it easier (oddly enough) to create things.
Being in Toronto probably helps that. I'm sure there are parts of town where it'd be better to keep walking, but downtown isn't like that.
Grants are only for full-time academics.
Moon landings, too. While Musk has his sight set on Mars, I can't imagine he'd turn down the opportunity to beat NASA to a lunar return.