skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> After I announced that Kojitsu was shutting down a lot of people asked if I would open source the codebase. I decided not to. Not because I’m possessive over the code, but because I don’t have the time to maintain it.

> I don’t want to just throw some code over a wall, then turn my back and head off into the sunset. Open source projects are only successful if they have a healthy community around them. Open sourcing the codebase so that it can rot out in the open wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Sometimes it’s better to just let things die.

I strenuously disagree. Software is not a piece of fruit; it doesn't rot. If no-one ends up using it, it doesn't stink up the room; it just doesn't get used. But if it is not released, then it is dead, and the world is a slightly worse place.

If you really don't intend to use your code again, what's the harm in dumping it in a public repo? Maybe someone will pick it up; maybe someone won't. Macht's nichts.
Asking for what they owe you is fine, even asking for more is acceptable. It is the threat of an unrelated negative that is blackmail. And that the quickest way to make people unhelpful and if you leave a trace of it, its going to ruin your chances in court.

So no upside just downsides, so don't do that part of "else I am telling the world".
What does an actuary do? And what programming do you do?
“We have a very large honeypot, where we have, at any given time, over 5m emulations towards the Internet,” states Stiansen. “Meaning we emulate over 5m users, severs, infrastructures on the Internet. We mimic a bank. We put in place honeypots to mimic Microsoft Exchange servers, Linux systems, ATMs. We try to mimic as much as we can of the infrastructure online to make it look attractive to be attacked.” From an interview with the CTO at Norse http://realbusiness.co.uk/article/27070-ipviking-map-cybercr...
I wouldn't, but that's because Cloudspace gives everyone a choice of Apple hardware, since that's generally the best choice for development work. If someone wants a ThinkPad that badly, I bet they could have one :D

That being said, if your company is asking you to do work and isn't giving you the right tools or support, maybe that should raise eyebrows. It's not about the laptop, it's about supporting employees in their efforts to Get Shit Done.
I'm a fighter pilot.

Best place to get news about the trends shaping our world, and muse over natl security implications.
Wow, this is really powerful. Way to early in the day to go drown all the feels in alcohol too: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/
Founder here again. This is super cool. I haven't been able to get too much detail on it yet. Most of the health exchanges haven't gone far because they start with government of foundation funding and then have no business model, but with these guys behind it, they actually make sense.

We'd be thrilled if we could focus on building a really good product for making medical data useful for patients instead of building infrastructure for moving it around.
Actually, I guess what I meant is that there can be a massive delay between the time that the patent is filed and when it is granted (or rejected), during which time you are protected, and it doesn't count against the patent life.

My boss, who is a biomedical researcher, has had a patent in this kind of limbo for 11 years. He's long since moved on (he doesn't even work at that institution any more), but the university's IP lawyers have been playing ping-pong with the patent office for over a decade.

If he can achieve this without caring at all, imagine what well-funded pharma lawyers could do.
There is always going to be someone better than you. I'd say just start working on your site's JS, you have no idea how much you'll learn in the process :)
You sound like a shill for Epic.

This business challenge is only going to be solved by startups, because all of the existing players rely on it being such a fucked system. They're not going to fix anything.
A similar thought occurred to me when I read this article. By not making a clear distinction between innovative, true "startup" enterprises and new small businesses following established business models, it's easy to make a grave error when looking at the data. Yes, there may be fewer small businesses starting. But I think a lot of that has to do with consolidation in industries such as retail, hospitality, and food services.

Back in the 1970s, there were thousands of small, independently owned grocery and retail stores that have been pushed out by large chains. I don't fault people for preferring to buy their food and clothing from large, brightly lit, lavishly appointed and stocked stores with low prices. Personally, I wouldn't choose to buy my groceries at a rinky-dinky corner store that was common in this country forth years ago when I had the option of shopping at a modern Super Target. But that means that people aren't opening small stores and small restaurants, and small inns like they used to.

But the loss of those businesses as entrepreneurship opportunities may have drained a little bit of the color out of our country's culture, it hasn't affected our innovation engine very much. If anything, the demands that larger scale enterprises like Target and Kroger and Chipotle and Holiday Inn Express for efficiency and logistics have spurred American innovation on, and the expansion of these companies have made the average US consumer's life better by bringing them a better selection of higher-quality products and services at lower prices, increasing everyone's standard of living. (Admittedly, at the cost of a degree of homogeneity).

So we could have fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs to start successful new businesses, but still have expanding opportunity for a certain type of entrepreneur to start truly innovative companies opening up brand new markets and doing that "disruption" thing. We'd have to take a closer look, and separate out new dry cleaners and dentists offices from technological innovators.
I don't disagree, but unfortunately believing that humans - no matter how logical CS people tend to be - will always think completely logical and rational is a flawed line of thinking.

Yes, people _should_ get over changes in version number, but in reality they don't. So library authors cater to reality, not how they wish things should be. That is the problem, and why semvar is broken. Not in principle it isn't, but in how it actually functions in the hands of humans.
I'm a mechanical engineer, working in product development. I have an interest in programming to the extent that I can try to automate some tedious tasks, but very little formal training. I'm definitely a long ways from being a "hacker" as its known here.

I agree with all of your reasons for visiting HN. I've mentioned this before on another thread, but the guideline that posts should be "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"[1] tends to produce a lot of content that I find interesting, and I'm sure there are many more people like us here.

One thing that I will add is that I wish that people posted more non-programming jobs in the monthly Who's Hiring. Even if you just posted the approximate job title it'd be better than omitting it entirely. Every month I control+F>"mechanincal engineer", and there are almost never more than one or two posts, despite the fact that I see some of the same companies posting these positions on different job boards.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It happened a week after their annual review cycle. Their version is that it was just removing underperforming staff. They also claim that they plan to grow their workforce by 20% this year (the layoffs was 5% of the workforce).

EDIT: Also, their RnD program is still going strong, especially so with the new engines and the plan for their 10m diameter rocket.
I doubt you will find historical data sets that are 'big data'. If stone, paper or clay tablets are your storage medium, you will find it hard to buy the stuff to store a terabyte of data on, even if you could generate it (4k of text on a page is 250,000,000 pages in a terabyte)

There are small interesting data sets, for example in the archives of the Dutch east India company. http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/das/EnglishIntro: This site presents tables which give a virtually complete survey of the direct shipping between the Netherlands and Asia between 1595-1795"

For larger data sets, it probably isn't that hard to find daily weather measurements stretching over a century or more.

Also, churches may have large data sets of births, deaths and marriages that can be mined.

In all cases, for historical data, I think the 'be mined' part will be more of a challenge than the software part (e.g. figuring out why more people from region X ended up on ships to Asia in years Y to Z)
There's a host of possible reasons. They could have discovered they hired too many people, for example.
You go directly from "tech firms wiped out apocalypse" to "64000 plaintiffs [..] $5 million each" and don't notice the disconnect?

Frankly, that needs to happen, and not only when theres cause. We need a Netflix chaos monkey that breaks up big companies and redistributes their wealth to let creative destruction create something better.
Rethinking enterprise software: The Rise of 'Ultraprise'
Across the industry, the number of employees affected is easily in the high hundreds of thousands, at a direct cost to them of tens of thousands of dollars per year. So billions to maybe low tens of billions is not an unreasonable range. And would that get trebled under California employment law?
That's a good idea that we are tinkering with. However, the economics of the app store aren't awesome.

At an average revenue of say $1.50 per sale, we need sustained sales of like 10,000 or more units per month. We are in the 100-200 sales a month currently. I can see us getting to 500 sales a month maybe, but growing sales 50-100x is not something we have figured out how to do.

At some point we would run up against the low revenue per sale and lack of recurring revenue. I have some ideas, but I don't see it being much more than a $10,000-$25,000 per year app.
Keychain and App State iOS
Does anyone know why so relativly many attacks come from the Netherlands? After running this for about 5 minutes it is the number one origin of attack at the moment.
The loss of up to 200 jobs at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is due to firing of “low performer” employees as part of its annual review process, and not layoffs, the company’s president said July 26. [1]

That sounds like trying to dodge officially having a layoff, or pretty shitty company culture. I wonder what other SpaceX employees think of the matter. I didn't see much news about it.

[1] http://www.spacenews.com/article/launch-report/41428spacex-s...
A case like this leaves institutional scar tissue. There will be new sections in HR policy manuals and training programs. Executives will be gun-shy about any conversations that even come close to those at the heart of this lawsuit. There will definitely be an effect.

For a while. As time passes and this case fades from memory I expect such collusion to eventually happen again.
Yeah without even mentioning the book he's talking about,I'm not sure if he is talking about "Instant typeahead.js" (listed under his name on Amazon) or some other book he already pulled; I assume the latter, since he made it seem like he already delisted? But he should really make that clear if that is the case, lest anyone think he is denigrating some other book he wrote that doesn't suck.

In any case... it is possible to publish a book about how to use typeahead.js? whoa. All these kids need to get off my lawn.
It means wheel in portuguese too (and probably spanish).
Wow! Discover one weird reason to upvote clickbait on HN!
Yes, it's true that the tech industry has bad optics right now, and that this probably looks like ridiculous entitlement to just about everyone else.

That's a shame, because collusion of this sort is illegal, full stop. If our industry "complains" about it, and wins, this precedent sends a very clear message to companies - including, and perhaps especially, those in other industries - that wage-fixing pacts of this sort are not tolerated. This may not completely stop other companies from attempting similar antics, but it certainly changes the cost-benefit analysis.
Graduate student who does code but in a non-cs field, I use this site to stay in the know about tech, which has practical value for job interviews.
Has anyone tried it ? I was interested on how does it matches up to Phabricator ?
We've used SemVer for Julia for a while now and it seems fine. However, versioning and compatibility are still hard problems and a perennial, unavoidable pain. The way I like to think of it is this:

- patch: forwards and backwards compatible – only bug fixes, no new features, no changing existing features.

- minor: backwards compatible – new features allowed, but old code should keep working.

- major: all bets are off.

This is pretty much what the SemVer spec says, and it's hard to imagine what else you could do. The significance of forwards compatibility for patch versions is that if you bump a patch version and find that it was problematic, you should be able to revert back to a lower patch version without breaking new code that's been written since the bump.

The thing is, it's still a judgement call what constitutes a bug fix. If you're fixing a segfault, that's a no brainer – no one (sane) was relying on something segfaulting. If you're changing a behavior from one potentially reasonable behavior to the one that was actually documented, then, yeah, that might not be "just a bug fix" – people might be relying on it. So we're super conservative about "fixing" even fairly bad behavior in patch releases. Still, the only way to make sure an application keeps working exactly the same is to use the same exact versions – down to the patch level.

The FerVer "spec" is barely coherent, I'm not sure how anyone could consider that something to follow. SlimVer basically just gets rid of things in SemVer that you don't have to use anyway. Pre-release versions – especially release candidates – are incredibly useful. You tag 1.2.3-rc1 and if no issues crop up in a week, then that becomes your 1.2.3 release (1.2.3-rc1 and 1.2.3 are exactly the same); if issues do crop up, then you fix them and tag 1.2.3-rc2 in a week and repeat.

I also think that pre-1.0 versions are useful: just treat the minor version like a major version. For 0.1.2 => 0.1.3 you only fix bugs but for 0.1.3 => 0.2.0 anything goes. There's no point in doing feature-only, backwards compatible releases while you're still working out the API for something, and 0.x releases are for precisely that kind of exploratory period.
If the OP did actual work, and was an official hire with either verbal or written contract, then he would have already been compensated for his time. (Otherwise that would be a violation of the law, and I seriously doubt a startup is trying to get away with not paying for work done "on the clock")

If the OP did actual work, and was not an official hire with either verbal or written contract, then he was an eager beaver and jumped-the-gun, which is understandable, but ultimately would be his mistake. (I refer back to my gardener example above).

People seem to be arguing the startup owes him some sort of severance -- which is ridiculous unless it was in his employment agreement.

The OP will look back on this and learn some valuable and long lasting lessons from this ordeal.
It was a book I wrote on how to make money online. Detailing what I have done in the past and continue to do.

Fair point about the context, I will update the post now.
... Or get ready to compete a little? ;) Like getting to a level which justifies your high price and differentiates you from that cheap labor from Asia?
> Unfortunately our software isn't well-specified enough to allow the computer to determine version numbers automatically yet. To make this a reality, you'd need Haskell-level type safety, along with specifying other constraints, like "this fn is O(log(n)) or better".

Isn't this going to be impossible for the same reason the Halting Problem is unsolvable?
Hm. I had never heard of "preservation" as a category in itself, other than as a synonym for safety. But I come from a distributed systems/network protocol background, many years ago, so all of the landmarks have moved. Not sure what the distinction buys you, though.
I'm a pathologist. I code for a hobby. Building a software product slowly in my spare time.
Sure you're drinking your VOSS but can you afford a home in SF? I would say it's a middle class aspiration to raise a family near your work. You'd be in for an "insane commute" if you had 3 kids and tried to work in the valley.

Engineer's pay pales in comparison to the value they create. That's an issue.

Average office drone X probably shouldn't even have a job so yeah, they shouldn't expect to get paid as much as a developer at Google.
right, also I had hope there is an element of enjoy what you do - looking at a sucker heavy brick with ridiculous battery life just kills it all.
Seemed to be a big enough market for it, enough that Packt wanted one written at least!
> Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.

What spare time? Have you tried laboring for long periods of time in very unpleasant conditions? The majority of humanity is engaged in a daily struggle for survival (in fact, for most of them our original state as hunter-gatherers would probably be an improvement). For the majority this condition is not a choice, but mostly a circumstance of the birth lottery.
Semver is busted because it makes builds non-deterministic. Building the same code tomorrow may fail if a third party dependency publishes a change violating semver.

For example: https://github.com/bower/bower/issues/1404#issuecomment-4876...

I unfortunately can only complain, I have no solution to offer.
You had me until "Duplicate dependencies are bad". The reason every package manager except npm and Apple's bundles are a piece of shit is because they attempt to install random dependent garbage globally and by default.
and then pay taxes on it, so there goes ~40%, leaving $2250/person.
The only real effect of bankruptcy would be that guys like Page and Brin would be worth $13 billion instead of $26.

Assuming that it would actually bankrupt them, how does bankruptcy cost jobs?

The cash goes to employees who will likely spend / re-invest in the startup economy, this will likely create more jobs as there are economies of scale in software companies.

The capital remains and would be sold to a new owner... since these companies are profitable the jobs remain and the company just has a lower bank account with new owners.

If you had the opportunity to buy Google/Apple/Adobe for 50 cents on the dollar, why would you fire everyone? It makes no sense, they are all extremely profitable companies.
IANAL, but I don't think this is going to fly in court given that (4 times) more than 50 people were let go at once. If it looks like a layoff and quacks like a layoff, I don't think the judge or a jury is going to care what SpaceX calls it.

Kind of surprised a company that is so on the ball technically would fuck something like this up; it is definitely going to end up costing them way more than 2 months severance to everyone (plus whatever they were owed -- some people claim they didn't even get that) would have.
>Their version is that it was just removing under performing staff.

It's too bad we won't know if there was a formal employee review process in place and if these employees were aware that they were "underperforming".
I guess you are right and I looked too superficially at what they do.
Cool, I may have to check them out. At the least this gives me a reason to stop putting off learning ruby :)
I had two concerns when this was made public:

that this was a laughably low amount considering the scope of the collusion and the time-scale over which it happened.

that it looks like a good deal to all the companies concerned on two fronts - 325 Million is a pittance compared to what Apple, Google or Adobe make in a month.
and the perception of the non-tech folks that this is about the rich whining about not getting caviar rather than a real issue.

At least the first one is being addressed (somewhat). I hope the final settlement really makes them hurt financially so that it becomes one more item in the HR manual - "thou shalt not enter into illegal no-hire agreements even when pressured by an asshole" .

For the second issue there needs to be some effort put in towards communicating with the non-programmer public and educating them about why shit like this is a VERY bad idea no matter who does it or who is impacted.
These are great. I'm a week off shipping a product that is primarily delivered via email, to C-suite'ers. Most of these people check all email on their phone, so these are an amazing help in shipping the MVP.
Very true, execution of a health exchange infrastructure has been riddled with troubles in the past.

Interfacing with patient data is still a great idea, practically nonexistent today. a central location for data will only make your service more robust and require less integration.
Well, the company always wants to say it is a performance based firing, that reduces the company unemployment insurance liability. However, the companies don't get the final say in the matter.
First: This is pretty sweet, Jeremy. Glad to see this.

Second: How well does it scale for developing large sites (for whatever value of "large" seems useful for discussion).

One of the things I really like about Ramaze is that I can start with basically a Rack app, spin it off to a simple Ramaze app, and keep expanding and refactoring it as requirements call for.

Is there some app size or level of app complexity beyond which Roda would not be a sensible choice? You say it has a plugin system; is it really battle-ready? (I'm going to guess Yes because of who wrote it, but I'd like to hear any additional thoughts on it.)

I get the impression that Roda lends itself to building large sites that are a collection of sub-sites or services; you're never really building a single big monolithic app.

Side note: For fast syntax highlighting you could use embedded gists.

https://github.com/blairvanderhoof/gist-embed
Wow. So many attacks. Running this site is going to DOS my phone.
Very nice! Just a shame most of these will not work with gmail since it blocks internal style sheets.
Needs Missile Command sounds.

Of course the internet does not route in "as the crow flies" lines like this is showing. There is routing.
Glad we could help out!