skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a fan and student of estimation techniques, but this is more of an argument for always having releasable software.
Ask HN: What it takes to go beyond the traditional mechanical engineering?
I read an article "The Death March of Mechanical Engineering" also I am inspired by Elon Musk, I think traditional mechanical engineering is definitely dying and how to actually find and explore the multidisciplinary one
> go (Google must be joking if they actually consider it for system programming)

I am curious what led the author to be dismissive of Go in such a strongly negative manner. Lack of generics? Disagree with certain language design choices? Too many cuddly caricatures of gophers?
Stop talking about yourself
Transaction is only reverted if the migration fails. Stellar helps you if your migration succeeds but does the wrong thing (deleting wrong column, missing WHERE in UPDATE statement).
Man jailed for filming in cinema
In this hypothetical scenario? Any number of nonfunctional requirements.
My dynamics professor mentioned to me that most of the physics world considered themselves to have conquered human knowledge at the end of the 19th century. The famous apocryphal quote from the head of the patent office saying that everything that could have been invented, had, comes to mind. (http://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everyt...)

I found out from another professor that the first had actually wanted to go into physics in his young life, but was encouraged to get into engineering, since hard science had basically been played out. Of course, the early 20th century took off, and we have the classic picture of Einstein seated with all the other great scientists of the day. This is the group my prof could have rubbed shoulders with, and he was apparently a little bitter about it. I probably would have been too.
Of course the higher value a thing has, the less you need to quantify that it has high value. Conversely, the lower your margin, the more you need to control it to within an inch of its life. You could even say that if it needs estimating it maybe isn't worth doing.
My estimate is that you've created a false dichotomy to avoid the very large area between pure research and pressing a button, where estimation can provide value.
Totally agree, peoples needs to know how it works before starting using it.
Go hasn't been intended for "systems programming" for quite a while. It is a general purpose language.
What if you're writing a migration that includes DML, and it fails partway through? Wouldn't it be good to be able to restore the DB state automatically and try again?
Nice writing.
It is good to see more and more apps trying to do the right thing and really port an app, and not just make an idiotic 1:1 copy of the iOS version.
Interestingly they don't show MySQL benchmarks in the readme; I suspect it might be because the MySQL implementation is pretty basic

https://github.com/fastmonkeys/stellar/blob/master/stellar/o...
It is very impressive. If you think about it though, you realize there's not limit to how good this scheme can be (for singleplayer) -- the limitation is essentially the bandwidth. Now the impressive part is that they can adapt to bandwidth conditions and do it all while keeping the premise of required computations < mobile capacity << actual game.
I think that part of the problem is that when people say "estimate" in our profession, they're thinking of capital-E-Estimates. With a whole bunch of theatre and disruption and danger and political nonsense.

It's not the informed prediction of the value of some unobservable variable that upsets us. It's the larger picture around it.
So no added business value can be conveyed in stories?
Yes, because all products today are designed and for multiple cloud vendors. Come on.......
I enjoyed that greatly! Thank you for the link.
How do I take a selfie with it ?
> Until most Chinese start believing their government is evil, and that there is a much better, more free way to live, not much will change.

Is their government evil? It seems to me that their government has been hugely successful in bringing about economic growth and spreading that wealth effectively. There is corruption within the government and the equivalent of a dynasty going on at the leadership level, but evil seems an incorrect assessment.

Also is there an example of a much better more free way to live (that continues to work at China's scale)?
Hema-Imager smartphone thermal attachment nearing $100k on Kickstarter
> Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!

I am taking it, so that I can use it whenever and wherever I want, without being afraid of "copyright" holders. Not ideal, but hey, such is life these days.
> A product however, can be released "when it's done", so there is no real need to estimate.
> The additional benefit is also that it can be released when the developers feel that the product is ready for release,
> unlike a project, where there is a lot of pressure to deliver things.

This view probably depends on your definition of "estimate", whether it's being done at an individual developers level or whether it's being done at a team/product level.

For team/product level (as another commentator mentioned) if you don't have a cost/benefit analysis then you don't know if the work being done is worth doing, and you may run out of money before your product is "done".

Additionally, (the article mentions this but it's worth expanding on) other bits of the organisation need to co-ordinate and depend on knowing status and when the product will be ready. To take an extreme example an enterprise software company might need to know with more than six months notice in order to start planning and preparing sales, marketing and PR teams for the coming release.
That may be true for us. But for Chris Knight, the environment that he can use for self-sufficiency includes the surrounding human population and their food.
Holy smokes! This is nifty, I hope the project continues to live on because it really helps me understand complex topics easier.
Ask HN: How to actually build a multidisciplinary career by self-study?
Traditional education is dying, I need help on how to actually build a multi-disciplinary self study curriculum
The Opportunity Analysis Canvas
Do you have a reference for that papal quote that you can link?

I say this because I was under the strong impression no one believed the earth to be flat. Yet the myth persists, much to my annoyance.

If you can't back that up, could you please remove it, to avoid spreading rumour?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

Of course, if a pope actually did say such a thing, I cheerfully withdraw my comment.

Note: I just checked the amazon reviews of that book. They claim it is rife with error.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/031...
The use case which this really excites me about is automated testing from the GUI level. If the performance is good enough, this would be really useful for restoring DB state in between tests.
Goldman Sachs.
What UE4 can do is very impressive. But when it comes to real time photo realism I think path tracing is even more impressive. For example this Brigade 3.0 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y
Well it's essentially the same algorithm on a different side. FPS clients predict the server state and here it's the server predicting client state. The methods to predict/deal with prediction error/etc are directly applicable to both.
and here is the link to the "high res" picture of the setup 4000x2000:
http://www.datastax.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/cluster_c...
Generally the hardest thing with version control on a database (for an evolving codebase) is separating unrelated changes - such as schema changes vs content updates - and branching and merging those changes in sync with the code dependencies. Another issue is non-destructively replaying development changes into test/production environments.

So for example, you might have a feature branch that includes some schema changes and some value modifications, and a content branch that includes a bunch of inserts into a few content tables that happen to include foreign key references to each other (so you need to maintain referential integrity when replaying those updates/inserts).

I don't see anything in the description that indicates this tool address those problems. For me, those are really the only problems that a DB version control system ought to be focused on. Speed of snapshotting is not all that important in a development environment as you typically work on a cut-down dataset anyway. A minute or so to take a snapshot a few times a day isn't a huge deal, whereas taking more frequent snapshots doesn't seem like something that adds any value, if it doesn't address any of the other problems.
How can one get that 20-25 gallons of water figure?

I don't know much about agriculture/life-cycle of water, but say you water your rice field – then some of the water is absorbed by rice so that it can grow, but the rest clearly must stay in the ground, evaporate, and then come back down as rain, no? How does a serving of rice then use up 20-25 gallons of water?
I need some clarifications. I think there are two definitions of systems being used here :

- low-level hardware control (c,D,...) implicitely concurrent
- explicitely concurrent higher level components (go, erlang maybe)
About California lemon lawyers firm
Those properties are not mutually exclusive.
Why does the author compare it to Git? The functions this software performs are no where near those performed by Git. Nor it is a proper version control system.
Which Pope would that be? Wikipedia only mentions there was some sort of 8th Century controversy, but what little survives doesn't touch on the shape of the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Early_Middle_Ages Hard to imagine this wouldn't be mentioned. I also noticed the reviews and reception of A World Lit Only by Fire are scathing, and if what they cite is correct, appropriately so.

It's my understanding its shape as a sphere was well accepted for a very long time, e.g. Wikipedia, citing a 1995 German PhD dissertation says "A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that 'since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth.'"

See further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth or the book I just found, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Flat-Earth-Columbus-Historia...), about how modern era "historians" created out of whole cloth the idea that it was thought to be flat back then. See the latter Wikipedia article over the issue with Columbus, which had to do with his incorrect estimation of the earth's circumference. If not for the convenient location of "the new world", he and his crews would have perished since he had the distance to the Far East off by a factor of 4. While his contemporaries weren't exactly sure of the circumference, they knew his voyage as envisioned would have ended in ruin.
JavaEE8 Everything you need to know by Markus Eisele
The Ice Balloon (2010)
GPU Marching Cubes in WebGL
Where I work we have weekly sessions to plan the week's work. We ask our customer to put stories in order of value to them. It might look like this:

A
B
C
D
---- week marker ----

Then we perform a quick estimate for each of the stories. We can talk them over quickly, ask clarifying questions and so on. Because of research on the unpacking effect, I like to make sure to say aloud the sort of subtasks I think will be involved, but sometimes we don't.

We quickly do a "shoot out" and then simultaneously reveal our point estimates for the story we're estimating. On divergence we explain our reasoning. Sometimes it takes a few rounds to reach a consensus.

So after this process, it might look like this:

A 4 points
---- week marker ----
B 2 points
C 1 point
D 1 point

Because we've got velocity of 4 points.

At this point the customer can change the order of stories. They might decide that having stories B, C and D is actually better than having story A by itself.

Just trading purely on value or on estimated effort/complexity doesn't give you the full picture. It's the ratio of the two per-story and between stories that helps a customer make the best-informed decision.
Hail Wikipedia for it is the source of all truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming_language
Nice and free. Thanks a lot. Will suggest you to add Gittip. Might help you in releasing some more similar projects for free.
I wrote about some related ideas on my blog earlier this year.

http://0fps.net/2014/02/26/replication-in-networked-games-sp...

You can do quite a bit of latency hiding without even having to speculatively predict things by just shifting the rendered state of the world in time.
AzureConf 2014: An Azure Community Event and My Azure Search Talk
Most of this is documented since start. Did you actually read the docs?

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/docu...
Resolving Action Dependencies: Comparing JavaScript and Go Implementations
This doesn't pass the smell test for me either. I'm running a Python Django server with a primarily write load on an EC2 small instance, and easily exceeding 50 requests per second, with very low load on the box.
Strange that there isn't a comparison between Pollen and TeX/LateX in the documentation..
Is there any way to work out a priori whether or not two variables alias the same memory? (I assume that aliasing pertains to memory overlap within widths the maximum size of memory addressable by the CPU in one instruction.)
You just supposed that to be true without really explaining WHY you think that's true.

> What's more, it's already happening right now

No it's not. The birth rate in the US has been steadily declining over the last century. Unemployment rates over the last 80 years oscillate around 6-7% pretty consistently.

So... why do you think that?
And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

It was actually Adobe who introduced beautiful typography to the Mac [0]. Adobe's software was the brains of the original Apple LaserWriter.

Without Adobe, the Mac would not have been able to do vector fonts, and they would have had to settle for printing Mac's default bitmap fonts which looked every bit as bad on paper as everybody else's bitmap fonts.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postscript_fonts
As I read it that's one AWS server of unknown size serving ~500rps of an application of unknown complexity. Tripled when using PyPy (whatever that is).

Maybe a very small instance serving something fairly complex?
Burning for a Python Challenge
Just make an image gray in all browsers
the text is from 2005 I wonder when they have added the file... (is created timestamp based on installation date?)
How to stop a lion with a chair
I think that's what the project is using. But I also thought Panoramio required people submit photos to it, it doesn't just pick up every photo it can find online (like Google Images does). I've never uploaded anything to Panoramio but I've taken a ton of pictures.
Suppose I'm working on a new feature branch and I run a bunch of migrations and add new data. Then I need to go make a bug fix on the master branch. Using Stellar, I could just take a snapshot before starting my feature branch, restore the DB state, do my bug fix, then go back to the DB as it was in my feature branch. I haven't tried Stellar yet, but this seems like a scenario where it would be useful. (And definitely not supported through Postgres transactions.)
But - mobile bandwidth is so small! I can believe the number of events may be larger in mobile, but on my wired desktop I can consume scores of megabytes in seconds. 'Digital media consumption' sounds like bytes not views.
TLDR

Twitter built a DSL for writing spam detection algorithms.
Nevertheless, many of the design decisions make sense in that context.

For example: the difference in initialisation of simple data types vs slices and maps. For an application programmer these are weird inconsistencies. But they make sense in the domain.

Or the way error handling works. Very tedious to have to do-check, do-check, and not be able to have automatic upwards delegation. But in system programming it's about robustness, not ease of development. A database server can't just restart if it has a file or memory problem. There needs to be a solution and it needs to be immediately next to the problem.
Why Going All-In on Your Startup Might Not Be the Best Idea
From the code:

INSERT INTO %s.%s SELECT * FROM %s.%s

Yeah, good luck with that.
I'm thinking not so far down. It'll be terribly valuable to 'dial up' a molecule for industry, transportation (lubricants, fuels), business. Imagine a printer toner cartridge that never got empty! SO there's money to be made. Food can't be far behind.
According to this table you need 2500 liters of water per 1 kg of rice:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-muc...

25 gallons per serving seems to be underestimated.
That's the problem - are they the same ways everyone in your meeting uses? How much time is wasted on each 'conference call' working out who's there, who has the number, where's Bob!
Routing with Secretary
From other humans: learn by doing by joining at least two communities of doers with open docs and a formal mechanism for good work to be identified and promoted.
To elaborate on what this comment may be referring to. A Ripple (cryptocurrency) fork was recently released with the name of Stellar.
> Why are we not in a live feedback loop with the compiler?

> what about an exchangeable tree format that doesn't suck?

> create an AST in XML

> But tree structure editors? I don't even know of any. I suspect we'll always be editing parts of the tree as text anyway, especially expressions, it's just natural when the primary interface is the keyboard.

I really think it's time for you to discover Lisp ;). Take a good look at the language, s-expressions (your "tree format that doesn't suck"), Emacs with SLIME and paredit (the tree structure text editor with live feedback loop with the compiler).

Since you said you were playing with ASTs in XML, I think this will be an excellent introduction: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html.
As I stated, my take-home tests are post-phone screen. The idea of hiring a programmer without seeing non-trivial code is stupid. If a dev has a body of publicly-available work IMO a take-home test might not be necessary, but it depends on the nature of those works.

For doctors and lawyers there are known sources of publicly-available information regarding their history, background, cases, etc. and the referral system is more formalized than for developers.
11 Important Skills You Need to Become Successful
I don't think airport security is interested in a bunch of wires, pcb's and buttons as long as there aren't any explosives attached to it. The idea of the scanner is to see the explosives, not the detonator (you could use about anything with a battery for that).
"These days"? You mean these days, when we have instant access to millions of Eiffel tower photos through a device not larger than a pocket mirror, yet life is a suffocating grind because some of those images are not licensed for redistribution.

Copyright is the quintessential first-world problem, I guess.
C and Go both classified as high level system language, but I can't deny the fact that C allows for finer control over machine usage so it's hard to put Go in the same bag.
I saw one in Helsinki main train station.
I don’t want anyone to damage the environment. But we got an unfair advantage and now denying that advantage to others is blatantly unfair without any kind of compensation. We have to pay others. That’s my view on this.
Similarly the Azure Search appears to be a competitor to Amazon CloudSearch. I'm not aware of a Lucene based search offering from Google, however.
Sure it can. User story: "The software is orders of magnitude too slow. Rewrite it from the ground up using scalable technologies."
So, it appears to just copy tables around within the database. I wouldn't want to use this on a DB over a few MB in size. Sure, restores are "fast" (a table rename), but copies are not so much.

I can't imagine this would be kind to a production database (lots of cleanup from copied & deleted tables), and would consume a lot more space than a gripped logical backup of the tables in question.
how does this compare to time travel queries? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Temporal_database#...
Yeah, I read it as 500 rps per instance, which is not unreasonable for AWS.
You're correct.

Japanese isn't a phonetic language as such, it's syllables, with only the vowels and 'n' allowed to be alone, the rest are a consonant follow with a vowel (although the vowel is often omitted in speech), and there aren't very many of the. Therefore there are a zillion homonyms (and puns) and a lot of inherent ambiguity, which is addressed by context and, as you note, except for children, using full kanji (adopted Chinese ideographs). Publications for older children frequently use kanji with small kana to the right side called furigana for the kanji they're still learning.

That said, as I understand it there are many fewer kanji that literate Japanese need to learn compare to the Chinese, about 1,800 by the time they graduate from high school.

Japan also wasn't extremely isolationist until 4 decades into the Tokugawa Shogunate, so it's really a period of 1641 to 1853, and as Wikipedia puts it, correctly to my knowledge, it "maintained limited-scale trade and diplomatic relations with China, Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and the Netherlands".
Property rights don't exist in a vacuum - they're made by us humans in our heads, just like intellectual property.

Get rid of the government and you could take my house just by showing up with a bigger gun than me.

Only thing I could do is get together with my friends and neighbours to form an armed gang for mutual property rights enforcement, AKA a government.
A very quick google didn't make it obvious how Fortran avoids this issue. Can anyone explain?
C# Open Source Managed Operating System
I would prefer not to do re-implementation of a legacy system as a project. For a start legacy systems often have a lot of dead features that nobody uses any more, so we risk wasting time implementing things nobody needs. A 6 month backlog also sometimes means a build-it-all and release approach which means 6 months before we start using the replacement in production.

I prefer to take a strangler application approach http://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html Start replacing small parts of the legacy system in production as rapidly as possible. Then move across bits of functionality bit by bit until enough functionality has been moved to turn the old system off. This also allows you to rapidly get benefit from new functionality that the old system did not have, or improved performance for the most critical parts of the system, without getting bogged down in implementing lots of rarely used features.

I would constantly be looking for the highest value features to add or replace from the old system and use estimation as a tool to aid prioritisation of those.
Fighting cyber crime in the US – Infographic
Thanks for your feedback about Linode.
Lisp has been doing live feedback like the 70s since the 70s. It's time to move on from lisp machine.
> He turns the question back on me. If there was no Secret, or an app like it, where would this anonymous poster go for catharsis? Where would he share his struggle with mental illness?

He could do it by snail-mail: http://postsecret.com/