skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The moneyquote:

"We made incorrect assumptions about the Express.js API without digging further into its code base. As a result, our misuse of the Express.js API was the ultimate root cause of our performance issue."

This situation is my biggest challenge with software these days. The advice to "just use FooMumbleAPI!" is rampant and yet the quality of the implemented APIs and the amount of review they have had varies all over the map. Consequently any decision to use such an API seems to require one first read and review the entire implementation of the API, otherwise you get the experience that NetFlix had. That is made worse by good APIs where you spend all that time reviewing them only to note they are well written, but each version which could have not so clued in people committing changes might need another review. So you can't just leave it there. And when you find the 'bad' ones, you can send a note to the project (which can respond anywhere from "great, thanks for the review!" to "if you don't like it why not send us a pull request with what you think is a better version.")

What this means in practice is that companies that use open source extensively in their operation, become slower and slower to innovate as they are carrying the weight of a thousand different systems of checks on code quality and robustness, which people using closed source will start delivering faster and faster as they effectively partition the review/quality question to the person selling them the software and they focus on their product innovation.

There was an interesting, if unwitting, simulation of this going on inside Google when I left, where people could check-in changes to the code base that would have huge impacts across the company causing other projects to slow to a halt (in terms of their own goals) while they ported to the new way of doing things. In this future world changes, like the recently hotly debated systemd change, will incur costs while the users of the systems stop to re-implement in the new context, and there isn't anything to prevent them from paying this cost again and again. A particularly Machievellan proprietary source vendor might fund programmers to create disruptive changes to expressly inflict such costs on their non-customers.

I know, too tin hat, but it is what I see coming.
Is this really a problem? Responsive design is extremely popular among startups.

I highly doubt most modern websites don't support 1366x768. Every front-end team I've worked with tests on iPads and smaller screens. I have a feeling the OP speculating and making blanket stereotypes against designers. But these designers almost always work with front-end developers who take usability seriously and any good teams have feedback loops to correct these issues.
https://www.eventjoy.com/aboutus

"We’re backed by Ticketmaster and Y Combinator"

or "owned by Ticketmaster"?
The problem with experimenting on the global scale is that we don't have a control to compare to, and also that we all live there.
> Heh, that's really interesting! Do you have a link to your work?

I do and I don't. I actually wrote a lot of these things in VB.NET 4-5 years ago and I've recently returned to the .NET world, so I'm in the process of converting it to C#.

There's a ton I haven't converted yet (Option types, lazy thunks that use LINQ, Parser monads, LINQ Trees, etc.), and there's a ton I'm going to let die out. :)

Here's a work-in-progress: https://github.com/steego/Steego.NET
Likely some people would be interested, but it seems fairly unlikely that a mass market would actually pay money for it.

Once you go from "all debian and ubuntu users" subset "those that use xrdp" subset "those that need to customize their configuration" subset "those that are willing to pay money", you probably don't have a lot of people left ;-)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004J4XGN6?btkr=1 - The Lean Startup is received wisdom on MVP. On the positive side, you've built a product and shipped. Now you can do it again, but with a product people actually will pay money for.
This is a really interesting experiment, although personally I'd find using:

var ab = tuple("a","b");

awful. It's very hard to read what is going on here- someone else reading your code would be utterly confused. The method name starts with a lowercase character, and I'm not sure I like the possibility to omit class names for static classes (granted this is not your invention but a new C# feature right?); to me it would seem it is missing the 'new' keyword.

I'd rather use Tuple.Create<T1,T2>(T1 first, T2 second) until they add proper support for:

var ab = ("a","b");
Apples and oranges. There's a big difference between starting an "educational institution" and sharing knowledge or otherwise teaching for pay as an individual.

And, in the case of the boot camps you mentioned, it kind of argues against your original point. That is, they apparently ran afoul of the regulations because of their attempts to make it a business that could be classified as an institution versus there being individuals who could have generated income from their labor, if not for some onerous regulation.

More relevantly, no one would have stopped any "teacher" from creating Udemy style online courses on their own domain.

That situation in CA is intresting though. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for sharing.
Uber and the Media debate
I agree. Sometimes we do take the reductionist approach, take the Apollo guidance software or seL4 as examples. However, when winging it gets you results that are almost as good in a fraction of the time, you can't be surprised at the prevailing method of software 'engineering'.
Yes, net neutrality is conservative. That’s the problem
I do. Maybe I'm just one and every other person on Earth thinks otherwise, but I just can't see the "catastrophic" unless it is stated in relation to how radical this climate change is and in what direction.

Many more people die now from cold weather than from warm weather. So maybe a little rise in temperature is a good thing. And historic evidence shows that warmer climate meant more productive crops in the middle ages and in the roman empire.

Maybe I am wrong, but I would need more solid evidence of the catastrophic consequences of climate change before sentencing millions of people to death because we choose to spend money fighting climate change instead of fighting malaria or improving access to clean water.
> How they're monitored/dealt with is not an algorithm problem

Sure it is; what inputs go into producing the ultimate decision and how those inputs are processed is an algorithm problem. Particularly, whether and when output is sent to one or more humans requesting input, and how input from those human(s) is factored into the ultimate decision is an algorithm problem.

The fact that the decision algorithms at issue often do not involve human assessment as part of the input set when they should is a defect in the algorithms' fitness for their intended purposes.
You are 100% correct, I forgot about that extra group (that doesn't need to be there).

That being said, most frameworks don't have multiple matching routes, and I can't imagine that many people miss them. I've never used a framework that supported that, and I can't say I've ever felt I've missed out. Middleware is the right approach to that problem generally.
I really like this line: "Start thinking of whitespace as the default — everything starts as whitespace, until you take it away by adding a page element." - speaking as someone whose design sense and skills are dreadful.
I uh, don't think you know what you're talking about. I have production Go code running right now.
Another factor is to consider what's expected for a city bike for a daily commute.

It needs front and rear lights, fenders, chain guard, and likely a built-in lock. It also needs to be able to stand up to being outside in the rain for long periods of time.

While a bike in the US, used only for sunny days and by people who aren't wearing office clothes, and which is stored in the garage or basement, doesn't have the same requirements.
why give away the web version?
That's awesome. I've futzed around with OpenSCAD a bit, and the OP is talking about a workflow similar to what I had in mind for my projects.

What's neat is that you can generate a set of parts once (in code). You then assemble those parts (functions, really) into 3D shapes for visualization. And you lay out those same parts in a plane for 2D fabrication.

The main difficulty I had was that it seems to be necessary to calculate everything. As a simple example, suppose I've got a triangle-shaped part, and stick the flat side of it on a square part. What's the distance from the tip of triangle to the opposite flat side of the square? OpenSCAD knows, in some sense, because it drew it. But inside my OpenSCAD script, I don't, and I have to calculate the geometry in my code.

If there was some way to specify and capture the position of that point (or whatever), then it would be much easier to connect parts together.
Press Release: Art of Bitcoin by Ray Istre
Press Release:

November 19, 2014
Ray Istre (Pronounced 'East'), Artist
www.rayistre.com
Email: ray@rayistre.com
Phone: 337-384-5612

Ray Istre has been busy working on art. His most recent series is related to money and Bitcoin in particular. The artist has had an interest in various forms of money for a long time and his gold and silver related cartoons are seen on Kitco.com, the number one gold and silver web site in the world. He now brings his visual abilities to the world of Bitcoin and is perfectly willing to do business in the new currency.

His most recent works are mixed media paintings combining realistic, pop imagery with abstract design and coloring. The art incorporates designs from US Currency, such as Franklins portrait in the One Hundred Dollar Bill as well as George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Each of these leaders had significant opinions and history related to money and its use in the United States. "The combination of iconic imagery and colorful abstract design is related to things we as humans understand as well as things we may not understand" says the artist.

"Bitcoin is a form of money as more retailers, artists and service related businesses accept it as payment" Istre says. His work is featured on the popular web site, Bit Premier ( www.bitpremier.com ), where there are many luxury items including jewelry and real estate to buy with Bitcoin.

The artists work can be seen at www.artpal.com/ray. The art is available in the form of Framed Prints, Stretched Canvas or on Coffee Mugs. See more of his art work at www.rayistre.com. The original works of art are available by contacting the artist directly by email at ray@rayistre.com. He accepts Bitcoin as payment for the original works of art.
When I first heard this, I took it as something along the lines of:

"Men have a low opinion of women, and women perceive this, and see no path to achievement in their own right, bound as they are by the perception of their gender, so they remit and play the game, decorating themselves and seek achievement by association with a man (e.g. any number of political wives, often from more successful families than their husbands). We would be better to advise them to reject this line of thinking." I took it as implicit that women who chose the "descent and modest and discreet" path would then preserve a (subversive) path to achievement.

Not exactly a progressive feminist view, in the modern context, but I imagine consistent with what he would tell his own daughter. The Stoics would have been aware of notable female leaders and thus would consider themselves foolish if they did not admit that a women could be equal if not superior to men within any given group, in terms of intrinsic reasoning capacity.
Muusical is basically a product hunt for music with a nice playlist feature, where you can add songs from different sites like youtube, vimeo and soundcloud. We've been working on this for the last few months. This is a nights and weekends project so far. I'm the developer and my buddy Toms is the designer. We'd love to hear what you think of our work.
Which one, 11000 years ago there were two miles of ice where I sit typing this. That kinda sucked for the locals. Left some cool hiking terrain.

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

This caused the death of millions when Genghis Kahn's men needed to immigrate somewhere due to climate change. We'll probably kill a similar percentage of various cities in the next big climate change.

The climate never has been constant and there is no "the official correct climate".

Trying to force people is likely to result in war which is likely to, overall, kill more people than letting it do its thing. We're running out of stuff to economically burn anyway. Its not like we're only 0.0001% burned up or even 10% burned up. Soon enough, talking about rationing something we no longer have access to burn will be quite pointless. Voluntarily saving some for later is likely to have a pretty decent economic impact. Social engineering by modification of tax law is likely to save more centimeters of ocean than any strictly environmental or behavioral regs.
Live Twitter Stream of CODER Workshop 2014 on Space Debris
Next you're going to request the title gets changed to "Ticketmaster is hiring"? :-)
> what do you think of having some level of Professional
> Association ala the Bar or the Professional Engineering
>association)

I think that at the point where warranties are required, such a certification will come into existence because companies will demand it.
There was no debate; the developer of cdrtools was just an asshole who (for example) refused to let users specify their CD-ROM drive by its actual /dev entry because he thought Linux should use (scsibus,target,lun) to identify devices like Solaris did. Eventually he fucked up the licensing of cdrtools enough that distros couldn't legally distribute it, Debian forked the last legally-distributable version under a new name, and all the other distros switched to their fork.
Architecture, engineering, and the law are all well over 6,000 years old.

People have changed less (ed: more slowly) than you might think. Consider, people where applying makeup 6,000 years ago and there is some evidence the practice is ~100,000 years old.
Why doubt the amount that can be received from Gratipay? What do you need to see to consider using it for PyPy funding? Would a promise of, say $500/week, be enough to make it worth a bother?
The only problem with this statement is that I have also spent time around people who were young and bright. They definitely showed great potential. But due to environment, 10-15 years later, I feel that their IQ may have actually dropped or at least not developed to reach it's full potential.

All this to say, I'm not combatting the notion that genetics plays a role, but am suggesting there is more to the picture.
Kitchensurfing Lead iOS Engineer
Kitchensurfing - New York, New York
http://www.kitchensurfing.com
Full Time
--------------------------------------------------

What we're doing:

- Kitchensurfing is an online marketplace where users can find outstanding local chefs to cook for them, at home. Our core mission is twofold: to provide a platform for chefs to grow their independent businesses, while making it possible for people to connect over great food.

- Line chefs at the nicest restaurants in the world make at most $12-15/hour, yet the food they make is sold to diners at a hefty markup. We're trying to bridge the gap.

- People are conditioned to expect great food in restaurants — and rarely elsewhere. We want to change the way people eat, while preserving the efficiency and hospitality of a great restaurant experience.

- Most internet service companies attempt to decrease human interaction through software efficiency. We’re building a company that does the opposite. We think there's something magical about having a chef in your kitchen while you relax and enjoy the company of your guests.

How we're doing it:

- We’re committed to code quality and productivity. With those values in mind, we pair program, test drive and practice continuous integration in a Rails/iOS environment. We don't work 'startup hours', just normal ones.

- We're a small team (currently 8 engineers). We rotate often between pairs and across projects.

- We deploy code whenever we finish a feature. As an example, last week we deployed to production 34 times.

Who we're looking for:

- You're interested in working with iOS and pair programming the majority of the time. You want to write tests for any feature you implement.

- You're more interested in building a great product and shipping features than you are in figuring out the cleverest solution to a problem.
Health care problems worth solving: Falls in hospitals
Nice job & congratulations on shipping! Some brief feedback before I start field testing :-) this...

- Would love the ability to save a collection of favorites, maybe add folders or tagging?

- I often get asked to create list of recommended craft beers and so would like the ability to share these lists easily

- Your data will be sparse to start with, but I'd be interested in knowing how many other users put beers into their favorites (I find the BeerAdvocate listings a bit tedious to wade through...)

- Not sure you want to, but the professional brewers I speak to are interested in a lower-cost alternative to Untappd [0] and you might be able to build a business here?

- Maybe this is an East Coast US thing, but there's a growing trend to pair beers with cheese [1]; maybe that's too specific a request but allowing used to add notes to the beers (meta data beyond BeerAdvocate) might be useful

Good luck!

[0] https://untappd.com/business
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/beer-cheese-pairing...
Another great writeup - I'm only one data point, but I've been waiting to ask someone for a copy for Christmas, so you might hopefully see another spike around then.
That's fair enough. I knew implementing it this way would ruffle a few feathers, and I totally understand why. I too would love to see ("a","b"), and proper pattern matching... and ..

This was a weekend project that kind of grew over the past few days. Initially I wasn't going to make everything lowercase, but I started thinking about the fact that a lot of these functions are now essentially global and the potential for clashes in real code. So I felt having a core set of useful functions that look more like the lowercase keywords of C# rather than library methods would work better. It definitely won't be everybody's cup of tea though.
Let’s build an awesome charting app for JIRA
How Facebook’s Programming Tools Are Remaking Wikipedia, Baidu and Box
So they actually "lurk"?
> On the other hand, maybe galaxies are just naturally inimical to life

Gamma ray bursts would be more likely in a galaxy and those are inimical to life.
We have something that loads up, via requires, the action (or route) that should be run when a URL is encountered.
Where does your social network data come from? Twitter? Does the popularity depend on how many people are sharing the links?
A couple short stories: Arthur C. Clarke's "Crusade" is set on a starless planet between galaxies. A.E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" has as a minor plot point the idea that a civilization developing in a single-planet solar system extremely far away from any others would never develop interstellar travel because there would be no stepping stones.
It's a typical human short-sightedness/availability heuristic. People can act if you shove the consequences directly into their faces. All it took is two planes crashing into skyscrapers to start two wars and reinvent both transportation and information security (for better or worse). But the climate change goes too slow, you can't really see the consequences, you need to trust the specialists, and that's where things fall down. Doubly so if you have democracy, since you can't really do anything important if you keep asking everyone for opinion.
The 3rd biggest web host, Digital Ocean seems to be a fan!

https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/460844653424541696
Sounds like "The Science Fair" (1971) by Vernor Vinge.
I am pretty sure this is a widely acknowledged assumption among most scientists, considering our current understanding of the formation of planets, stars, and galaxies.
Seeing how this isn't a Show HN post, wouldn't it be more prudent to log issues on the Github page rather than in HN comments?
Indeed, and it's actually been a fantastic learning experience in itself.

And yes, I do have one or two other ideas that aren't as niche and more to do with real-world applications needed by many more people - something which I was intending to move on to after I'd completed this one.

Thanks for the link to that book. :)
> I used to occasionally hang around on 4four

Nice. 4four's still going, but it's very quiet these days. Killed by the Facebook behemoth. That's life, it was fun while it lasted :)
A cool. I knew there was some type of thread support. I figured most PHP devs would be more comfortable with the short running "page" concept rather than diving into threads and long-running stateful apps.

Anyway, I feel the same way about PHP. It's simple and easy and if you use it for the right job then it just works great. I think a lot of the hate is based on old, sloppy PHP code. Modern PHP apps are organized and use frameworks that don't look radically different from more popular languages.
"The climate has changed for billions of years in all sorts of ways."

Yes, but not at the current and predicted rate. Many of the ecosystems we depend on for food will not be able to adapt quickly enough and thus collapse.
... and ten years later, when the new research comes up, you'd get sued by whoever owns local wildlife lifecycle which you inadvertently affected without permission.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/25/wedg/
Wormhole – An example for writing idiomatic/maintainable/structured Go web apps
To add to those excellent points, the Andromeda galaxy is visible with the naked eye, making it another type of smudge ("Little Cloud", to use an early name) that might be seen by a lone star in a galactic cluster.
This is revised and updated from my original post 2 years ago on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4629317
I've now compiled this into a book of 82 letters showing every self-help method I tried.
My amateur-level knowledge of geological history suggests that a warmer, wetter, and higher-CO2 atmosphere--such as that found in the Carboniferous Period prior to the rainforest collapse or the Middle Miocene prior to its extinction event--would support greater total biomass and a wider variety of viable species than current conditions.

In other words, the climate change that everyone is frantically trying to reverse would probably be better for the biosphere, and for humanity in general. For specific humans with well-established property interests on or near the oceanic coasts, the current climate trends will be disastrous.

If every organism on the planet had a vote, Earth would overwhelmingly be in favor of more anthropogenic CO2 emission. Of course, only the humans understand the potential downsides, such as temperature-triggered methane clathrate decomposition that may have already been a contributing factor for two planetary extinction events, including the Permian-Triassic (the worst).

~Obviously, the solution is to ignore the CO2, dig up all the methane hydrates, and turn them into useful plastics before the temperate rise causes them to melt.~
Native code modules I assume.
The author appears active in the thread, so we needn't worry.