skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if this will start a trend, where major sites will stop accepting/editing/suffering comments, and will just push their headache to Facebook. RIP comments 1994-2014.
US public employees would never tolerate these kinds of hours. You can't get them to work 40 hours, for the most part.
I have a very bright friend who works for a hedge fund. He's a Stanford engineering grad with an MBA from a top 10 school, and he had considerable success in his engineering career before shifting to finance several years ago.

He spends most of his waking life analyzing about six medtech companies. That's right, only six. One might assume that he knows a few things about each company.

And yet, whenever he recommends buying or selling one of their stocks, he's wrong almost exactly 50% of the time. (I actually track his predictions.)

You might be good at picking individual stocks, but I don't think he is. And if he isn't, I don't think most people would be either--myself included. I'll stick to the index funds.
Ericsson – How to Reinvent a $38B Company
I love when arguments are decided by/proven by runnable code examples.
No, he's right. It's people from that side of the aisle who are most interested in forcing employers to do things like offer paid maternity leave and birth control. That's paternalism, at least the way I see it.
As Ericsson begins to move downstream and directly compete with tech companies like IBM and HP, the next few years are going to be bloody interesting in that trillion-dollar intersection of telecom, IT and media.
Let me just comment that US Democrats are a little right of right, and nowhere near "far left". It's a small point, but as the discussion resolves around global comparisons, it's an important one.

I also find the extreme feelings towards organized labour in the US somewhat bemusing... what's the alternative? Waiting for fast food chains and supermarkets to decide to increase pay, sick days and holidays, and reduce hours out of "efficiency reasons"? Or maybe wait for invisible hand-me-downs?
What startup delay and RAM usage do you think is just too large to be acceptable for a small script, no matter how good a language/compiler is in other respects?
DevOps Ninjas – please help us scale to 1M requests/min
Mesosphere Google Cloud Platform, Integrates Google’s Kubernetes
Who is Amdahl, why should I care, and does he expand on this argument or is it your interpretation of a more generalized law?

Going to search for it, but I'd still like to hear your response.
"... Inbox was designed to be 'mobile first' and use "'Material Design' animations, ... each new version of Chrome broke assumptions and broke animations we had running previously ..."

Cognitive friction.

"... Cognitive friction doesn't come from technology,
but from the people who control technology. The are
the masters because they know how to think in ways
that are sympathetic to silicon, and they imagine
that everyone thinks in the same way. ..."
Alan Cooper

"... The Web, as a platform for competing with mobile-style interfaces, is in a rickety state at the moment, where performance is non-deterministic not only across browsers, but across versions ..."

*"... As engineers, they think more about gears
than aout leather, so the interface to the human
user is expressed in those 'implementation' terms,
which is why I call products designed this way as
having an *implementation model*. ..."
Alan Cooper

For those who have read, "The Inmates are running the Asylum", SAMS, Al Cooper, 2003. Welcome to the dancing bear.
The main idea behind Mesosphere has always been to allow developers to treat a data center like a single computer — with Mesos and other software packages abstracting much of the basic devops work away. Some companies that currently use Mesos are Twitter and Airbnb.
The existence of accelerators (including GPUs) indicates that all attempts thus far at building a general-purpose processor have failed. If they had succeeded, then they would be efficient at running the algorithms delegated to accelerators, and there would be no market for accelerators.

This is nonsense. I started writing several examples mocking this logic, but erased them because I think the original quote sufficiently proves the point.
Mesosphere Snags OrlyAtomics
I think false.

I have the same frustrations. When I had Google Voice without Hangouts, it was a buzz after I texted and a clear message that the 'message failed to be sent...retrying'. I was able to use the long press to resend immediately, view the message details or cancel the message. I really enjoyed the feedback I got with them.

I've now upgraded to Hangouts and I can't tell in low-connectivity settings whether I need to intervene or not. I'd prefer some easy feedback messages which I can identify action on. I expect network failure...but I'm honestly worried when I see Hangouts/Google Voice/phone failure.
i use it myself in a couple projects. mainly my quantizer lib [1]

[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js
People typically resort to misquoting and misconstruing only if they can't find a good counterargument to one's actual views. So if someone has a post responding to being misconstrued, I take it as an indicator of good (and possibly controversial) thinking.

Sam Harris is often the victim of this sort of attack. He's become quite experienced at handling it, although he's had to spend significant time doing so. [1][2]

1. http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-the-mechanics-of-defam...

2. http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controve...
Engineers love challenges, and no challenge is more ambitious or ridiculous than building an operating system at the scale of the datacenter.
The solution to deadlocking is using async all the way down - i.e. don't use .Result.
you can also tell C# not to resume on the same context after an async call by using .ConfigureAwait(false) on the tasks, thus preventing two locks on a context, and the deadlock.

The author states two threads accessing a single resource is a race-condition, but that's only true when the threads are competing for that resource - in the case outlined in the article, it would be sequential, and only one thread would be accessing the resource at one time. No race condition.

I think it's not too wise to think of async/await as a special coroutine which never uses multiple threads, but as an easy way to write synchronous code and have it execute asyncronously. If you need fine control over what threads are used, maybe you're better off controlling it manually.
The example in the post is because full UUIDs are uncomfortably long for URLs, and have more entropy than is necessary for the application in question.
KdExploitMe: A kernel driver to practice writing exploits against
Seriously, "What does it feel like to have a meat log in your pants 24/7?". Wow.
there is a "b" class of berkshire hathaway shares that track almost identically with the "a" class that cost $214k:

https://www.google.com/finance?cid=9614464

the b shares are currently selling for $143/share
Thank you! HN is not Reddit, and I'm happy down vote can be used as a "I don't agree with you button".
Dying to Know
The idea of being dox'ed is so scary to me.
>FWIW, one of the most commonly believed things about Japan (domestically and internationally) that I believe is dangerously false is some variant of "Japan is not good at coming up with original ideas. It is good at perfecting ideas made elsewhere."

Did anyone ever really believe that? When a company is new to a market or behind the market leader they tend to copy the leader and add their own small innovations. That's what the Japanese did in the '70s and '80s. When they took the lead in an industry they were the ones doing the innovation, for the most part.

I remember the "Japan is going to take over the world!" days. American companies (and workers) were fond of saying the Japanese never had an original idea, but even then it was obviously sour grapes from incumbents facing determined competition.

You hear the same thing about China today, and it's just as wrong.
lol then you have not lived here long enough. not many people here really boast about it because we all know bc transit is a dysfunctional garbage trainwreck. yes outages are common, bus drivers are jerks, its filled with weird fucking people all the time. I don't know any native vancouverite who'd claim it was anywhere close to the best. Yeah, it's pretty great if you come from Detroit or some far off remote city in the states.
Yeah, I hear you. At least general webdevs usually no longer have to worry about feature phones - now that was a pain. (But even that's not true in the game industry - I know companies who still make a decent part of their revenue doing Flash Lite work. Flash Lite!)

There are clients pushing the bar though - Uniqlo comes to mind...
I read somewhere that the demand for engineers increases by 18% every year while the supply output only increases by 2%.
Heh. Yeah, if you value your free time at all I don't think the games industry is right for you in any country.
realistically, this is unlikely to ever happen for both technical and political reasons.

Theres certainly no immediate path forwards towards that end goal at the moment.

Dart2js, atscript and other compile to javascript things are where its going to be at for the forseeable future.
The parent is referring to the fact that Guido van Rossum (the Benevolent Dictator For Life of Python) is pretty down on functional programming in Python. You can read some of the history (from the horse's mouth) here: http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/04/origins-of-python...

TL;DR - "I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think."

Python, IMO, has flutters of functional programming in it. But its broken closures, lack of uncripppled anonymous functions and lack of tail-call optimization are pretty damning strikes against calling Python's support for functional programming similar to its support for imperative or OO paradigms. It just isn't. Yeah, we get `map` and `filter`, big whoop. :-)
It is creepy that it is so easy to spy on people. Perhaps this is a good representation of what it is like for the intelligence agencies.
SEO Woocommerce Πως να δημοσιεύσετε ένα προιόν στο E-shop – SEO – WEB DESIGN
Wups, yeah, it occurs to me that a factory function would transfer ownership so a unique_ptr is a more appropriate return value.

You could imagine another example where the goal of the factory function is to construct an object and then set one of two or more other owned pointers to the value. You still want something to hold ownership of the pointer, but don't know its eventual home until after some complicated logic finishes, and don't want to pay the copy constructor cost. That might make a better illustration (or technically, you'd use operator= instead of release(), but same basic point).
> I could not agree more with your first paragraph. The only other language I've used that I've had that experience with was Haskell, and while there are good arguments to be made for using Haskell in production, it should be obvious that's not a language that will ever become mainstream.

I don't think it is at all obvious that Haskell won't become mainstream. It's already exerted a tremendous influence over many other mainstream languages and there's only so long that can happen before people just start going directly to the source of the innovations (or one of its direct descendants).
Ask HN: Innovations in office applications
Does anybody know startups in the area of office applications? What's new happens in this area? It seems to me that the most recent improvement of office applications was collaborative editing. What's more?
why is it that Samsung has been able to capitalize on this while Sharp or Sony has not? If this was a 80% software problem, why is Samsung still doing so well, and likely to continue even though their software capacity won't beat any American startup?
The C++03 equivalent to unique_ptr is boost::scoped_ptr. It has some corner cases that are not as elegant as unique_ptr, but it was still good enough for Google for many years, until C++11 was greenlit in production.
We're fond of Jacques but don't believe quite everything he says. :)

Flags kill a post at any level whenever there are enough of them.
At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented.

Do you really think people are arguing from that perspective?

Maybe "to whom much has been given, much shall be required" works as a moral principle, but when talking about business transactions and programmers increasing company income, 'much shall be required from the more talented' meaning 'required by your boss, who will pocket the income from your work instead of you having it' that seems more 'exploitative' than 'enlightened'.

Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it.
How is shift working similar to split sleep? One is working arbitrary schedules, the other could be seen as "I go to bed at 8pm with the sun, and happen to wake up every night at like midnight to work for a few hours and then pass out again". They're entirely different shapes.

Yes, it's reasonable to say we shouldn't take medical advice from historians; but, finding your most creative times of the day isn't really a medical thing, it's a "what works for me" or "what I've noticed about myself" sort of perspective.

How do we measure creativity anyway?
You regularly sleep nine and a half hours at night? Maybe waking up at 3 and 4 is when your body's ready to wake up, since it's been 6 or 7 hours.
Add Chinese and other dark skinned Southeast Asians to that list and they will all agree.
In that case I stand corrected - I thought I remembered reading that in the guidelines.

Downvotes instead of comments is still a personal peeve but I guess I can't chide people for it on HN, lol.
http://plumlife.com

It's a fun product :)
The PRUs are a waste of perfectly good silicon until there is a C compiler for them. I haven't seen any project outside of TI's demos that uses these in any advanced fashion.

It sounds like an excellent idea. Completely separate processors on the same memory bus that allow higher IO speeds than the main processor. But since it can only be coded in assembly, Altera SOCs are much more attractive. Instead of cortex M4s, there is an FPGA on the same chip. Instead of making the interprocessor feature a crippled afterthought, the FPGA/ARM interface is central to the system, and the bus can be made as wide as practical. Since you can create the precise peripheral to suit your application on the FPGA, its kind of a blank slate.

Edit: As it turns out, there is now a C compiler for the PRU, 3 years after the hardware was released.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/PRU-ICSS_Getting_Sta...
I don't know your friend so I can't say why he's right/wrong 50% of the time. But I'd say that's pretty typical with analysts in the financial industry. It's really tough to blend quantitative and qualitative analysis together, but IMO this is a requirement to make consistently good investment choices. I think this is the secret behind Warren Buffett. Most of Wall Street though tends to focus on the quantitative (and only a few quarters out) and they tend to be highly influenced by each other, trends and sentiment.

Again, I generally agree with the advice of going with low-cost index funds for the vast majority of people. However, I do think that there are some people (albeit not many) with the right background, skills, training and commitment who can consistently beat the markets (ie., this was the thesis of Peter Lynch's book Beating the Street).
Brianna Wu's Master Plan for Changing Game Dev
s/imitate/induce/
Codis: A proxy-based Redis cluster solution
I've worked in restaurants. They're disgusting. If health inspectors could be flies on the wall, they'd give every restaurant an "F".

What would happen when buying food from people who have zero regulation and are competing with each other to save on costs?

When you increase competition, you create a race to the bottom. Price has to decrease or people go out of business, and they will end up cutting corners.

By contrast, Uber is self-regulated. They have a lot of ways to keep drivers accountable (GPS, for example).

With Airbnb, you might be put in a shitty place, but it's not going to make you sick if someone skimps on the quality.

Food is totally different. Not only are you begging regulators to crack down on you and force your vendors to get food licenses, you're definitely putting customers at risk.

Are you going to monitor the conditions of the home kitchens? Are you going to make sure there aren't any rats, or that food doesn't sit out in the "danger zone" of temperatures, or that they throw away expired food? Or that they don't store food in boxes on the floor?

You can have ratings, but you can't always taste danger in your food. Many incidents of food poisoning happen after a perfectly enjoyable meal.

I don't know about Canada, but in the US, you'd also be the delight of any lawsuit-happy lawyer. If you're advertising these services, making the connection, and taking a cut of the proceeds, you're going to be responsible for vetting the vendors.

All of that in mind, you should already have an airtight liability-insurance policy.
Umm, no, absolutely 100% backwards. Inbox was designed 100% as a goal directed product based on making the user more efficient and satisfying his needs, technical decisions came later. Product design was done by product managers and interaction designers by taking into account usability study feedback. We didn't just have engineers making stuff up cause they liked it, our users told use what their email pain points were. None of the internal presentations on Inbox's development by the designers mention the client implementation details. It's not the inmates running it, it's the people outside the asylum. The basic facts on the ground. Most access to email is going mobile. The design is to fit the users as they are coming.

If we designed product features based on technical decisions, we would not have had so much trouble, because we would have simply picked the lowest common denominator we could get away with to deliver the product and not pushed on sharp edges in the stack.

We take a design based on how the product must or should behave, the engineers do not run the show.

As an aside, I value the Web not because of implementation details (I'm not a particular fan of CSS or JS) but because of high level properties it has that native mobile apps do not have. That's why I'd rather see a return to web applications over time. Web apps produce positive net externalities that native silos do not.

These don't matter for the short term, or the individual, but they matter collectively over the long term for society. I may not be able to access content siloed to apps 30 years from now, but I'll probably still be able to find Web content indexed and stored on archive.org

I view developing for the Web as planting trees in a forest that is logged for value over time by society, by businesses, that extract value. We are caretakers of it, and should put back into it so that the those who come after us can derive value as well.

I'm not sure how developing a native iOS app, for example, will help our grandkids the way making an open ecosystem and publishing lots of content that can be freely indexed, mashed up, and repurposed will. I imagine future archaelogists will have a much easier time digging up value from the Web than trying to dig up App Stores for information.
Navigate Google Maps with gestures
Ask HN: Best platform for ecommerce website?
Hi, I am looking for a platform to build a ecommerce website for software. I am no web developer - the only websites I have built were in ASP.Net webforms. I am looking for a platform with MINIMUM coding and a large number of plugin available. I need strong integration with services such as paypal, stripe, google checkout etc. So far the only ones I have found is Wordpress and Drupal. Is there other options?
Does uber operate in any country with a decent taxi infrastructure?
I'm wondering because everybody always complains how bad the normal taxi services are.

Where I live the taxi service is excellent (maybe a bit expensive). Clean big cars, excellent drivers, no need to wait for a cab, you just call them and somebody comes pick you up.

And also remember that taxis are allowed to drive different lanes in the city than normal cars.
How does uber deal with that? Probably horrible drive times during rush hour?
Or is the city infrastructure/roads also sucky in places which need uber to "disrupt the horrible taxi service"?

OTOH I live in Finland where these sorts of things "just work".
Having used both, I don't think Go and Erlang are even close in comparison. Go's lack of go routine isolation and error handling will never allow it to properly handle the problems Erlang was designed for without a lot of defensive programming and pain. Start 20,000->30,000 go routines and have one of them crash, taking down the other 29,999 go routines and now try and debug that problem in production? Go tries to advertise that it was built writing important services in, but it's shared everything model really argues against that. Erlang's hot code loading, runtime inspection, production quality REPL, and process isolation makes it a completely different language than Go. Until Go routines and channels get way way better, I would never attempt to write a distributed server that needs high availability in Go, it is just too fragile atm.

On the other side of the coin, if I wanted to write a simple command line tool quickly that was easy to deploy to many servers, Go might be a great choice, where Erlang is a bit painful for small and simple programs.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
Except for "static binaries" (which isn't clear what benefits you desire out of them), java has all those things.

The other choices are certainly there.
At Java ONE MongoDB developers mentioned they have clients still running on Java 5, thus they cannot fully embrace Java 8 for the time being.
Microsoft Office's powerful vba scripting system pretty much killed off most software looking to compete with it on the windows platform. You can easily access COM features with it and custom features required can be easily made. You can even do web scraping with it in excel. A lot of software in the finance industry uses a combination of excel + windows + vba as no other office software has such integration and powerful features.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1337/
Bcompiler – Bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothing (2002)
The resubmission detector doesn't catch trailing slashes. It's not the most robust thing.
I do hope I am wrong; but isn't this like creating a version of Map for every possible permutation of the primitive types?

I.e. MapIntInt MapIntShort MapShortBool etc. because you cannot write Map<int, short> and somehow think that the overhead of boxing (Map<Integer, Short>) is unbearable.
I'm not sure about that, any software engineer could work in a sweatshop, the reverse isn't true.
Care to elaborate? I believe it has been publicly stated in the past by the team that this is something being actively worked towards once OilPan (or whatever it's called) is finished? Has this changed?
It should be noted that most of these comments are likely preseeded by the creators.

Ew.
For unique IDs in databases, you want them to have common prefixes such that they are kept in rough time order in the database's backend, otherwise your indexes can end up huge and degrade performance (especially in MySQL, that's where we got bitten by it). That's where Type 1s are great, but of course this article shows a major downside.