skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Engineering is about applying heuristics and rules to solve problems. You build a bridge in one way one time, then you build a similar bridge elsewhere in a very similar manner. The same thing happens in software, but only in the boring areas. Software is far more varied, and far more interesting. But most of the interesting parts are under the hood or otherwise invisible (such as the mechanics of actually making the software, which generally not a standardized process).

Imagine if software was physically manifested and somehow translated into familiar aspects of life. Going to buy a car you wouldn't see a lineup of several incrementally different models from different companies, instead you'd see: a bicycle; a tank; a bamboo framed solar powered moped held together by duct tape; a rocketship; a jet pack; a houseboat on top of an enormous tracked crawler; and a pair of rollerskates (both for the left foot). Also, half of them are free, a quarter of them can be bought for cash, and the remaining quarter cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit and can only be purchased through very elaborate contract negotiations (and there's no rhyme nor reason which is which, because the rocketship is actually free, and the rollerskates is one of the crazy expensive ones).

That's software, and that's just a tiny pocket of it. The entire software industry is basically fractally weird in the same fashion, but on a much larger scale. It's commonplace for some metrics to differ between direct competitors by not just percentage points but by orders of magnitude. It's also commonplace for competing products to offer entirely different paradigms of use. Imagine considering buying one of two different hammers, one of which is an ordinary hammer, while the other somehow submerges and infuses your surroundings in a bubble of liquid glue 1 light year in radius, then rapidly cures just the portion of glue you want to cause two things to stick together, then instantly vacuums up the uncured glue remaining in the bubble. That's the scale and weirdness of differences between SQL and NoSQL, or between systems built on node.js and java, for example. But we accept that as if it's normal, and the end user never really sees it. HN is a perfect example. As a user you can't really tell what HN was written in, and you can't discern a difference between its underlying structure and, say, how facebook works (except at a functional and UX level). But underneath HN is written in Arc by a tiny team and facebook is written by an army of devs on PHP and makes use of custom PHP compilers.
Lego Occupy Central display recreates protests in miniature detail
The neuroscience of adolescent violence, suicide, mental illness and concussions
Graham wrote his comparison between programmers and painters, but I think writer is far more appropriate, in terms of tools and process. If you have a couple of hours to kill, "Hemingway on Writing" is an awesome short read. Big chunks of it adapt really well to writing code, if you're look for it.
“Shaka, When the Walls Fell: Star Trek Traces Limits of Human Communication”
“A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes” [pdf]
This looks nice! As others have mentioned, more details on what exactly "fully managed" and "optimized" entails. I don't think the pricing is quite worth it just for removing the server provisioning aspect (because others do that for cheaper), but if you can automagically make my queries run faster without me needing to think about it, then you're onto something. If that's the selling point, I'd love to be able to find more details about it!
> dissuading authors from writing by suppressing their earnings.

I take it you do not know what the median author makes from writing a book. Lets just say if an author was also a rational economic agent they would flip burgers rather than write books.
Just goes to show how unoptimized video playback on Adobe Flash Player apparently is after all those years.
Learning AWS with 10 online courses
Agreed, there is only one argument provided by this page and it's based on a false pretense, a straw man. Making this page very ineffective.
Yes, that is true, it's a limited sample size, but it agrees with what I've seen from various sites that measure browser popularity. Having better numbers would be good.
After a year or so of near constant dependency hell problems with Haskell, I stabilized all my setups on GHC7.8.3 and the associated Stackage inclusive, and it all... just... works...

I can finally go and write some relevant code now.
ah, reading about it now, it's not deception on apple's part it's user error for not using the correct safari settings.

that's what i meant when i said there was no way this was done on purpose - apple care far too much about their credibility to pull that sort of stunt.
same concept as applied to other human cultures: Aztecs, Incas, Native Americans, Africans - they're all considered 'at one with nature', superior to European culture, when in fact they were just as bad (and in some cases) worse than the culture that displaced or enslaved them.

We've gone from one end of the spectrum to another w/ regard to our perceptions of 'other'.
The argument presented is very weak. Yes, the service file is smaller and simpler, but I actually understand perfectly the init file, whereas to understand how systemd processes the service file I'd have to actually read all of systemd's source code.

Programs have many bugs. I'd rather debug that shell script than debug systemd.
People can be extremely wrong even if they were extremely right in the past. And the opposite
Show HN: Milkshake – Real-time playlists with friends over websockets
I recently cythonized the performance critical parts of a numpy/scipy based project with much success.

One does not necessarily need to get you hands dirty writing c-extensions ( although it can be a good exercise to learn the CPython API ).

In cython, you just need to sprinkle some static types to the inner loops and bump the speed up.
IBM has its place, especially in the big enterprise. However, more and more I'm seeing that's not the case.

Working for a big insurance co., we're seeing a big shift toward a "devops-like culture", and a lot of the time that means less IBM.

IBM not only needs to refresh their offerings, they need to refresh their image. The common feeling around here is IBM products are slow, buggy, and pieced together quickly from a ton of other acquisitions who are then "IBM-ized" together.

They look beautiful on paper, in a way that speaks to both execs and real tech people alike. But once you build it out and start trying to support it...
Not too many options surprisingly...

Linux from scratch has a runit-for-lfs project here:
https://code.google.com/p/runit-for-lfs/

github mirror:
https://github.com/inthecloud247/runit-for-lfs

I've also been keeping an eye on voidlinux: http://www.voidlinux.eu
The Washington Post has detailed information on the States.
Here's Virginia:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states...
Thanks for the idea. I'll pass that along to my editors at O'Reilly. :)
Where Would Instagram Be Without Filters? Lost in the Uncanny Valley
> all I want is a simple modern data store that can handle arrays and blobs

I'm curious in what way Postgresql doesn't fit that, for you. Is it not "simple"?
How much configuration changes do we have access to behind the scenes? Any chance the pg_hba.conf is available to the owner? Similarly, do we have access to create additional roles/users?
You should tell them right away. Be honest and upfront. Sleep easy at night. Work without it hanging over your head. Here’s why:

- The person who you inform may have others within their organization to update. It reflects badly on them too when they find out last minute something won't be on time and can break all of their internal assumptions about their timeline. They have goals too.

- Delays pile up. 2 days here, 4 there, a week on that other thing… before you know it you’re a month behind schedule. It’s much easier to discuss things incrementally than it is to spring the totality of all delays on them when they believe they’re much closer to a completion date than they really are. “But we’re only a week away, how is it going to take another MONTH?”

- Finally, though we’d all like to think otherwise… clients often make some changes during projects. When those changes occur and you’re already on the same timeline, it’s much easier to discuss how the changes the client is requesting are going to affect the delivery date. This helps with their confidence in you, and their capacity for accurate internal debate about project changes/additions and what it will do to the delivery date.

Estimating development time is incredibly difficult; most methods involve some kind of padding which is obviously not an exact science. There are always hidden rabbit holes, unexpected problems and tasks that were completely unaccounted for. If you’re transparent with the client and communicate when there is good news (hey, check out the xyz feature we just finished) as well as bad news like delays, most of them will understand.
Thriving in an Amazon world
To SQL, or to NoSQL …: That Is STILL the Database Question
Was going to mention this as well. Samsung Ventures has also invested. Good potential in the mobile space.
As much as I love the Fedora folks, I think this is going to backfire. It comes off as even more condescending than the Debian-fork it mocks, and condescension is already one of the gripes people have.

NB not taking a position, just making a prediction
I second the "Slip once, and slip hard" tip. Saying "one more day" a second/third time as it is both confusing and annoying to others.
Still working on that. It should be complete before the printed/ebook is available in January.

FWIW, the code for the visualizations (but not the libraries) is neither minified nor concatenated, so you can access it directly from a web inspector.
Be careful doing this. One of the things I've done to shoot myself in the foot, career-wise, is to repeatedly take more interesting jobs at lower salaries. As a result, I don't have an increasing salary history and expectations. I was blown away when I discovered that the good salary I thought I had was 20% lower than the average in my location for my experience.
Acch, why not let people look at the abstract before downloading the PDF? http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6423
and here I was hoping to read something about coffee! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Wave_Coffee
Scala Best Practices
That's a poor choice of name, too.
FWIW, this is what I do when I'm looking up air flights:
- Create a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.
- Setup a PPTP VPN [1]
- Login and verify you're now in x location (where x is the region you created the droplet).
- Search, find appropriate flight.
- Repeat with another region if needed.
- (optional) Login without a VPN and book your ticket.

This is particularly helpful for Expedia.

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-setu...
Solar Energy Prices See Double-digit Declines in 2013
The Comet up close  - pics
There is a just-before-storage cache (through which the CDN edge requests) which reduces requests per object, but it does not affect the number of hot objects per disk. With Haystack each object is fully available with sane performance in degraded state. This means 1/3 I/O per disk, whereas F4 only has 1 easily available full copy, which means 100% load on one disk per object stored.

Hope that makes sense - let me know if not.
from the page:

[edit/clarification]
Since this seems to be one of the most prominent critiques, we'd like to clarify this point.
With lack of time and patience we refer to our possibility to be involved in a complex
bureaucratic system like the one governing Debian. While we respect this way of working,
we think that our time is better invested in new directions, also according to our expertise.
Note that O'Reilly books have their own site, and seem to do rather well.
I think millstone is exaggerating a bit as most programs people write normally can be rewritten without too much pain in a static language with a rich type system. That said, there are some examples of times where your program asks for clever type system features (that are not always enabled by default or add to the learning curve) or where different type system features don't play nice together (so its hard to have both features in a single static language, but in a dynamic language you can use one style of programming at a time and never notice the problem).

In the first category, one example is programs requiring higher-rank polymorphism. They are always allowed in untyped languages but in Haskell this feature is hidden behind a language pragma to keep type inference simpler by default.

On the second category, an example I like is parametric polymorphism vs subtyping. The type system gets really tricky if you try to use both at the same time so most static languages either limit the polymorphism or don't allow subtyping. ON the other hand, in a dynamic language you can use both styles if you want, although you have to do so at your own risk.
HONESTY and just do your best. Be apologetic.
OpenRC is interesting. Also compare with a runit example of managing sendmail from the runit-for-lfs project:

#!/bin/sh
sv check slapd postgresql mysql >/dev/null || exit 0
exec /usr/sbin/sendmail -bs -bd -q5m start

https://github.com/inthecloud247/runit-for-lfs/blob/master/b...
IBM will pay a chipmaker GlobalFoundries $1.5B to take its chip division
Short answer, because I've said it before: You can't vote on Debian issues without becoming a Debian Developer; that title requires a multistep process that takes between months and years. Debian publishes the stats at nm.debian.org, and there is general agreement that the length of the process is a problem, but not on how to solve it.
> GOG: Requires approval

That's actually a plus for both users and developers. GOG have high acceptance bar usually quality wise, so it makes each release more notable (i.e. they try to avoid the flood of low quality releases which no one can keep track of). So if you pass the bar - you are likely to get some attention, while on Steam your release can be simply lost in the noise.
Any software installed on the system can add root CAs to both of them.
Sure, debug that shell script, but then don't forget to propagate the fix to all the shell scripts.

The shell script approach violates the DRY principle--it's probably super similar to some 50 other init scripts on the same system. systemd, in principle, removes the boilerplate so that the bug would only have to be fixed once.
How do you communicate if you won't hit an estimate?

Immediately, with brutal honesty, and positively.

1. Immediately: Never delay communication. Most people will be less upset about the schedule than the fact that they weren't informed.

2. With Brutal Honesty: Explain exactly what's going on. You may end up with a pleasant surprise. "Oh, can we just have xyz then?" or "How can we reduce the scope?" or " How can we help you make this easier." An informed customer/boss is a resource to be used.

3. Positively: Find a way to deliver something by the deadline. "ABC will be delivered as planned on October 31, but we have run into unexpected issues with Feature xyz, so it may not be fully implemented at that time." sounds a whole lot better than, "We won't hit the October 31 deadline." You may even give them options in terms of features & dates. They may not like it, but once they make a decision, they feel more a part of it and you will have bought some goodwill for a while.
How Wave Is Making Over a Million Small Business Owners Happier
Totally OT here, but do you know why there seemed to be a big movement away from stream ciphers sometime the 90s? I remember at some point around 2000 reading an article saying that RC4 was suspect because it was a stream cipher, as block ciphers are considered more secure. Similarly TLS contained only a single stream cipher, and my understanding is that eSTREAM happened because NIST seemed uninterested in stream ciphers.
This looks great--thank you!

Does anyone use ActiveMerchant? I looked at it several years ago and it seemed to be just a mess: scanty documentation, hard to install/set up, lots of bugs. So I've always gone with rolling my own payment code (usually Stripe, sometimes PayPal), and it'd be nice to stop that, one way or another. It seems like ActiveMerchant will be Payola's main competitor.
The preview looks nice and worth waiting to see the final app.Signed up :)
When your spreadsheet is a web app, you don't need to sync. Because there is no native app to sync to.

That's a whole lot easier than figuring out how to do sync.
This is Awesome Ben! You should have posted it at a more active time on HN.
So meta of me to find this on Hacker News! I run Map Happy, and yeah, we have a syndication relationship with BI. Thanks for being so kind to link back to the original piece... though it would have been nice to see our site headlined instead of the BI piece. :)

Obviously, there are a lot of strategic PR rationales behind it.
perhaps just freedom of choice, knowing that you aren't just being forced to do something
Good point. "Other" used to be intrinsically evil and in need of our enlightenment. Now it's intrinsically superior. Neither is true.
Supposedly a USB OTG cable + ethernet adaptor will work.

But that is a big hack.
If the whole database is 2GB, can you get a server big enough to have all your data in memory, or at least the hot part of your data? That would be better.
I'd try the Academic Bookstore which has a large stock of books of all sorts: www.akateeminenkirjakauppa.fi/. See also, http://www.bookstoreguide.org/2007/10/akateeminen-kirjakaupp.... The website can be navigated in English, Swedish, and Finnish. The book series you appear to be looking for, Matikka, can be found via the on site search engine.
Proper protection of Config files
Well now we are up to three, arguably distinct needs:

- version control

- backup

- syncing

Syncing can, like backup, be had with software and services that are dedicated to that end. I just use Dropbox, though I'm not that worried about privacy. I guess something could be built "from scratch" with rsync, if the ready-made alternatives arent satisfactory?
No problem anstar! I have updated the page, I was able to reproduce the issue and have moved the auto-renew box down so now it doesn't select the auto-renew when pressing down on the form.. That's the short-term fix, longer term fix I'll look into implementing later.
How did you get "other programmers" as the villain in Aleynikov's disgusting tale? Just wondering.
“It's road trip”: Commemorate the moment with this exclusive Apple shirt
Strange Seeds on Distant Shores
Likewise, mostly because it would probably help me understand what CBPV actually is!
I'm not a writer, so I'll defer to you on that perspective. As a reader, I love publishers and editors. I've waded into the self-published world more than most, and I don't see myself buying self-published work again in the future without significant (outlier-level) crowd-sourced reviews like Wool or The Martian.
It's not about being productive. It's about engaging a younger generation into programming.
This is an amazing effort! Now to clojure compatibility. You can only gain by making it clojure compatible. What would be the possible reasons to diverge? Another one: what are your plans for namespaces and code packaging and distribution? What are your thoughts about a build system? I think the world doesn't need another build and package distribution system. Which one would you reuse?
Caloric deficit determines how much weight you gain or lose, but the macros determine how much fat is stored.

I've gained a ton of lean muscle mass while lowering body fat, solely by eating high protein/fat diet.
I tried that in the end. ALMOST made a mickey mouse. Almost.
I find that most of the credit card issuers don't automatically convert to USD -- this usually happens more on the merchant end. The problem is that you don't know if the online merchant is doing this or not... it's a lot easier, say, if you're sitting down at a restaurant and find it happening.
Videoplaza sold to telecom company Telstra for  500 MSEK
I think this is a great comment on data visualization. And there is one part that I want to highlight as relevant to me right now:

> Far better, then, to use a generalized data library that allows you to manipulate your visual tools with endless freedom. D3 is a great example of such a library. If you're writing a data visualization tutorial in JavaScript that uses anything but D3 you have a burden of proof to demonstrate why. This is not because D3 is the end-all-be-all of charting libraries, but rather because any tutorial based on the limited selection of possibilities afforded by anything else is simply not a data visualization tutorial. It's a charting options tutorial (also valuable, but far narrower in scope).

Yes! When I saw this article was based on flotr2, I immediately checked to see if it was based on D3. It was not (correct me if I'm wrong) and I was a bit disappointed because flotr2 appears to be all about charting, but data visualization is much more than just charting.

I'm looking for a good charting package right now, but my requirements are that it's based on D3 so that I don't have to introduce two different libraries when I need some data visualization that goes beyond mere charting. So NVD3 appears to be my choice at the moment.
> Imagine buying something on a website, but instead of entering your credit card number, you are redirected to your credit card company's website. You "sign-in-with Visa" by entering your account password.

"Verified by Visa" and "MasterCard SecureCode": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure
This is very good advice. I will work on creating a 1-click demo account. I have the developer board up for anyone to see, but having the demo account will transition users using the software faster vs creating an account. I like the heroku deploy idea. I'm actually working on setting up cloud-formation scripts so you can launch w/ Chef + EC2.
1. You can commit as a way to record a "working state" to go back if you break too much stuff, and rebase to squash it before pushing if necessary.

2. If your commit is too big, you should probably rethink it in smaller steps
How I built and launched my 1st iPhone app with Treehouse + online tutoring
Dronecode Likely to Include Larger Role for Linux in UAVs
Academic research mentioned in the VMware KB:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/248.pdf
https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/435.pdf
NaNoGenMo is back for 2014
Liked the design and your idea. Implement in well and you will grow fast! Thumb up!
Build Your Own Google Analytics Dashboard in Excel for Free
PicoBrew – Counter-top home brewing machine
This is done on LinkedIn by LEO also. Fun stuff :)
What do you mean by hiding the source code? Once you have a license, nothing in the source will be hidden.
Why is everything government related on HN now propaganda or fueled by conspiracy theory?
I've used it often; results tend to be variable. Sometimes it's $0, $5, and sometimes I've got $100+.
Crate Lets Developers Set Up Big Data Back Ends in Minutes
Depends on what you mean by 'big'. Physically it is not too big for typical applications. 'mentally' it may be too big for some developers. After a while then greenspun's tenth rule kicks in...

'Common Lisp' also does not mean it needs the full language. Some applications use subsets.
How is tech "weak"?
SPMP - Software Project Management Plan?

SQAP - Software Quality Assurance Plan?

SCMP - Software Configuration Management Plan?

SRS - Software Requirements Specification?

I've seen "engineering" defined as "statics, dynamics, and thermodynamics", but what you've listed sounds much more like engineering to me.