skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have a few Dalco (swiss server co.) servers in our data-center here in Ticino. They are as good as normal Dell rackmount servers.
"The real culprit is democracy's false promise that it can do anything to change this. Ultimately the masses will only take action if food or shelter is at risk."

Democratic Constitutional Republic, not a pure democracy. The entire existence of the American System was against the European oligarchy and for the establishment of American aristocracy (the founding brothers weren't saints, they were monied land-owning aristocrats).

The real problem is that the oligarchs in the City of London have continually subverted the American System and entangled us abroad (triple entente, anyone?), and have corrupted all our branches of government. The American Constitution, if we actually followed it, provides mechanisms to deal with problems such as this. Namely, the idea of equality under the law. Ah, but the justice system is corrupt to, up to and including SCOTUS.

Please stop conflating democracy with our Constitutional Republic, and also stop vilifying a system that is not in it's proper state, eg, you essentially imply that democracy is a fad because it's been shown to not work, when if fact it has worked in some cases so well that it became a threat to the oligarchs and they actively subverted it.

Our problem is the oligarchs, not the system itself.
Engineering Joke of the Week: The Train Ticket
I never really understood the value in ticketing cyclists, or jay walkers for that matter in NYC. Very few people are getting hurt, even in the densest metropolitan area in the country so why are we so worried about it? Because cyclists can be annoying sometimes? Also the city speed limit went down to 25 mph. Isn't this supposed to take care of many of the collisions? Those of us that are safe cyclists but run red lights are going to be discouraged from riding as it just takes too damn long to cycle around smoggy, loud NYC stopping at every goddamn light. But those of us that are aggressive ass-hole riders are just going to be more likely to unsafely try to evade the police. Which is not hard if you know what you're doing.

It doesn't appear to be about safety, as the statistics clearly indicate that it's currently safe. It appears to be about making money and possibly discourage cycling.
Also worth mentioning, BSDTalk has an interview with Matthew Dillon about the 4.0 release of DragonFly BSD : http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-...
Yeah does anyone remember the facebook App ecosystem?

Remember when facebook was encouraging developers to make apps and then they jammed them all?

Remember how much time/money and effort 100's if not thousands of developers lost? Thanks but no Thanks.
What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

It's really cool to see filmmakers doing their thing, even moreso if they're using really recent tech (3D printing, pixelbars, new camera stabilizers). Is that sufficient?
Oracle Confirms New Java 9 Features
Show HN: React demo featuring isomorphic Flux and progressive enhancement
i don't necessarily disagree with yours as a general statement and i'll admit i jumped a little far to reach my conclusions, but manuel hinds is not simply arguing for human rights either. he's arguing that (democratic) capitalism is the antidote for all our present ills, while at the same time saying technological revolution (fostered by that same capitalism) is the impetus for those ills due to a militant idealization of a technologically simpler and more egalitarian past.

he doesn't attempt at all to address the complexity of balancing the rights of the individual with the stability of the whole society. this is the hard part and he doesn't say anything about it at all. throwing out some rah-rah speech about how we should all be democratic capitalists, even through rough terrain like ours now, doesn't actually make a convincing argument. he also doesn't string together the tidbits of economic data he cites to form a coherent argument for why technological progress leads to our current geopolitical problems, though that's the presumed meat of the article.

that's what i (and seemingly a number of others) was reacting negatively to. even though i'm sympathetic to his line of reasoning, he's anything but convincing.
...and yes I clearly should have written this in machine code and deployed to a Gibson. Thanks for the tips.
Typo on landing page:

> Same project as viewed by two peoeple having different roles

I know... It's niggly!
Oh well, at this point we're moving into subjective opinion.

But you need to write your frontend SPA with JS. And the isomorphic part, if designed from the ground up adds almost no extra code. So, really it's almost free to render first with Node, if you're starting a fresh SPA. I don't see why you wouldn't want to do it.

And we can all agree the ES5 has some warts, so you may as well transpile. Whether it's ClojureScript, Coffee, Type, or anything else doesn't matter, I just think it's a problem solved. Webpack makes debugging them easy with sourcemaps and live-compilation. In fact you can get hot-reloading[1] in React. So your app re-compiles without reloading.

I'm happy with ES6 + Flow. It's all ES6 syntax anyway, works with all libraries, and is fast to write, good looking, and functional.

[1] https://github.com/gaearon/react-hot-loader
Beautiful!

http://www.kittywigs.com/img/blue1.jpg
Writing something in PHP made sense in 2004. Although Erlang was around at the time, it wasn't at all well known.

And no, you are not absolutely right, Facebook is not a PHP (only) shop. Their chat backend is in Erlang and that's a much bigger tell-tale than their legacy code.

Also, a lot of us Erlangers speculate that Facebook bought WhatsApp (not only but also) because of their huge infrastructure know-how and (Erlang) talent.
> Tom is going to call Bob and believe his word over yours, which is morally wrong

Just to be clear here - are you are saying that Tom calling Bob is morally wrong? Or that Tom believing Bob over you is morally wrong?

The former makes sense to me as it is collusion rather than competition.

The latter not so much
Are they actually allocating resources for this? I read it as the police would no longer be giving people a free pass where they used to
It depends a bit on whether they're prepared to move. If they are then it makes sense to learn a niche thing where demand outstrips supply. If they don't live in a big city and need to find work locally it probably makes more sense to learn something popular, or where there is a known local demand.
It boggles my mind that there are multiple multimillion dollar startups who provide nothing more than what PGP delivered in the early 90s. GPG is free. The fact that they are arguing over the originality of the website's wallpaper is just surreal.
Could you elaborate on the "network by default" point? I've been programming for 18 years and my professional network is pathetic. Any problems I have I research online - my network is google search. Unfortunately decent jobs are much harder find through google search.
If the SEC weren't yellow-bellied cowards they might actually do something about this. Too bad regulatory capture and good old bribery and corruption are rampant.
How video game remakes do retro right and wrong
Thank you to everybody is replying here. I and my friends really appreciate that. Thanks!
Design Amazing Single-Page Apps with the New Foundation and Angular JS
> Let's face it, humans need somebody to be on top. We don't know how to function otherwise. At least not for very long.

What's your basis for saying this? Do you have any way of verifying this claim?
>It's really a shame that standardized tests haven't yet evolved beyond multiple choice answers for human-written questions and scored by machines with optical scanners.

They have somewhat, it's called adaptive, or "branched" testing. It is a computer-based test that gives you progressively harder questions to find the limit of your abilities and when you get them wrong it drops the difficulty again in an attempt to try to find out exactly where your knowledge drops off. That's an extremely oversimplified explanation, but you can read the Wikipedia article, which is OK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerized_adaptive_testing

The problem is money, and to be honest, the motivations of who is buying the test (for some clients the testing is just meant to be a professional barrier to entry or to do the bare minimum to comply with a government requirement.) I worked in standardized testing for almost a decade on nearly every kind of test, helping psychometricians and test administrators, so I saw a lot of bad and good tests.
I haven't really given the routing issue too much thought regarding ReactJS.NET. I assumed it would work just as well as my isomorphic apps in NodeJS; one route in server-side land that handles all URLs and returns a View that contains the server-side rendered React app. I maybe missing something for why that wouldn't work in ASP.NET land but like I said, I haven't worked with it that much.

react-router is all right and they've got server-side rendering working but it's still missing one very important facet that is required for most isomorphic apps; the initial server-side render should be capable of fetching whatever data is needed is fully render the page. Right now the best you could do is deliver a page with a spinner if the page requires some data on the initial render. Andrey Popp's react-router-component solved this issue by using react-async which uses fibers to allows for getInitialState to work asynchronously. The react-router guys think the "fibers stuff is stupid"[0] but they're still working on their own solution to the problem.

The only reason I'm still keeping tabs on react-router instead of abandoning it for react-router-component is that it doesn't look like Andrey Popp's is going to be maintaining react-router-component and react-router seems like the only other game in town when it comes to routing in React.

[0] https://github.com/rackt/react-router/issues/57#issuecomment...

P.S. I don't know that much about node and fibers to understand why fibers is stupid but it solves the problem and from what I read about fibers, it seems like the node community just don't like it because it resembles threads and they don't like threads in node.
I work for Transifex, one of the FbStart partners. Startups accepted into the program don't have to give away any equity (neither did we, for that matter). For us, companies simply redeem a code on our site to get 6 or 12 months of the service free, depending on the track. I'd guess other partners have a similar setup.
Hey everyone! I'm the other developer and co-founder of Noodles, a way to cook better. Hit us up with questions or feedback and we'll respond as quickly as we can.

Enjoy cooking!
If I had the time and gumption I'd like to make a paredit-game in emacs to help learn/internalize the motions by rote repetition.

If someone else has more time than I do please run with the idea. I'll help test it!
PHP has composer, though.
It's all very slow for me right now - every command hits the server, which is disappointing.
Yeah, it does suck that you need to install the app before you can rate it. I mean...I understand why they would do this in an attempt to limit review gaming but in this case I often have to install something if I want to give it a bad review. In reality, I just don't install it and move on.
One is in Vienna and one in Barcellona (both from Italy btw). I think this should help in some way.
I for one would love to see more enforcement of jaywalking. I drive through the intersection of Cambridge and First in Cambridge, MA by Lechmere almost every day, and the jaywalkers who ignore their lights to run for the trolley cause far more traffic problems and almost accidents and then cars or bikes.
Check out the deals page on F6S: http://www.f6s.com/deals
Sure. Add an extra dimension with coordinate w to 3d space.

Then just rotate around the (x,y)-plane until z -> -z and w -> -w. Everything in the (x,y)-plane stays the same and z has been inverted.
Yeah, agreed, the code is somewhat gross (also, everything is global!) and the people working on it have poor taste in coding style.

I forked it awhile back, this is the terminal I use now:

http://evilpiepirate.org/git/st.git/
> As a result the fact that IQ tests are more effective at figuring out who to hire than human interviews is no longer actionable by any normal employer.

If it can be established as a fact, its actionable. It can't be assumed to be a fact for the specific jobs it is applied to, however -- and while Griggs may be a leading case, that's pretty clearly the intent of the burden established by the Civil Rights Act for the employer in disparate impact situations.

> But very few companies are in a position to do such research for themselves.

Any company is in the position to do it (or pay to have it done), for very few companies is the expected benefit justify the cost, because the expected utility of general intelligence testing, even where any such benefit is rationally expected to be born out, is pretty low compared to more specific job-focused alternatives that are also easier to demonstrate are job related if they have a disparate impact.
Which is all well and good, but the author of that blog post, the one who stated he would not hesitate to fire Ben if he were an employee, has no problem mocking bisexuals in public presentations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI#t=3059

To date, Bryan Cantrill remains CTO of Joyent. The corporate position appears to be that blatant homophobia by employees is acceptable, but improper pronouns are terminable offenses.
I think that's quite one sided. He rejected the commit because the author didn't sign the contributors agreement. He was following the rules.

His crime was the tone of voice. I don't think it's worth forcing someone off a project for that.
Archaic and impractical. Example: Instead of using Linux' pragmatic approach to function prototypes:

"In function prototypes, include parameter names with their data types.
Although this is not required by the C language, it is preferred in Linux
because it is a simple way to add valuable information for the reader."

OpenBSD enforces this:

"Prototypes should not have variable names associated with the types; i.e.,
void	function(int);
not:
void	function(int a);"

Instead of letting the code tell the parameters' purposes, this now has to be deduced from informal descriptions, or the function definition in some .c file.
Isn't that argument bad for erlang? That you need to pay an atrocious price for erlang know how.
Ah, that is a fair point.
Judging from the name, one can only assume that this toolkit emits events that are never able to make it to an observer.
I don't think that'd odd at all. There's nothing wrong with that image. It does it's job perfectly fine, despite high market cap or fancy partnerships.
This article raises many relevant points.

But the real issue behind all of that is that we lack means to easily implement protocol stacks. Implementing a new protocol (especially in the user space) is a task that can easily eat months or years of your precious time.
I would say the answer depends on Where in Europe your friends are seeking employment. The job market - and the job requirements - are significantly different between Rural Romania, Berlin or an oil field in Norway.

They are 30+. General advice there is to stay away from competing with the 20+ crowd. Compete where age is on your side, which means go into business where you have 10 years experience over the young ones. If you were a carpenter and want to be a programmer, build solutions for the construction industry. If you were a car mechanic, build solutions for the car salesman. You get the idea.

For starters, your friends can choose between getting an education , or trying their luck at "skill". If they want to work for big corporations, education is mandatory. If they want to work for small companies, education isn't going to be as important, but reputation is key. Be sure to never leave a job unfinished, and always ensure your customer is happy. Your happy customers are your salespeople.

If one of your friends are already fluent in HTML/CSS, it's natural to go into the custom wordpress theme coding, etc. This is not really an IT job anymore, but a part of the advertising industry. Pays poorly, and will continue downwards.

Your DSP friend is in better luck. This is a hard, difficult-to-learn skill. Especially if he also understands the advanced math behind it. Good DSP jobs are found in larger industries, so if he doesn't have a math degree, that would be advised. Having a Master's degree and being good at DSP programming will secure a very good future with few competitors.

As for "programming", that's not really one job but a wide field of jobs. Marketing style jobs are plenty and small, and available for both web and mobile. They pay poorly though. Corporate 10000+ hour projects or salaried positions are out there, but almost always require a M Sc.
There are always going to be plenty of 100 hour projects at smaller companies, but it's poor job security.

"Programming" in general is also under very heavy fire from outsourcing to lowest bidder, so I would not advise anyone to start it as a career.

YMMV.
Maybe a modern version: beware of geeks bearing gifts?
I think you are right in describing this as insider trading rather than price-fixing; and it brings up the issue of what to do about the general problem of insider trading.

When there are many routinely violating a law which is very broad, it is generally seen as an argument in favor of getting rid of the law, especially when the law is of dubious or debatable benefit to the public. This is one argument in favor of the legalization of narcotic drugs, and it seems to be a good argument in favor of the legalization of insider trading.

If insider trading were legalized, then BASF's customers could either make discretion an explicit condition of their purchasing contracts, or else sell their information (to futures market participants and analysts). This would raise the table stakes for participating in markets like this, but it is not clear that there would be any substantial negative impact to the efficiency of the market; the additional transparency and increased flow of information might even improve the liquidity of the assets, and smooth price fluctuations through better predictions in then futures market.

I am not the first to make these points, but I would be very interested to hear what HNers think of them.
Feynman explains it well [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
Hi,

I would love to teach both of them Python/NodeJS/Java.

NO FEES! I believe in sharing knowledge for free.

@nrshrivatsan is my twitter handle.

Rest I will tell to them in person.

- Shrivats.
Haha! thanks, fixed! :)
ASP.NET 5 TagHelpers
Rising health spending, new medical technology and the Baumol effect [pdf]
One of the things people should understand is that plea bargains are not binding on the court. Before a plea is accepted, a judge will engage in a plea colloquy, where she will have a conversation with the defendant in open court to make sure that the defendant really understands what he's pleading to. A judge has no obligation to accept a plea she does not think is supported by the evidence, or which she thinks based on the colloquey goes beyond what the defendant is freely admitting to have done.
I'm not sure what others experiences are but for me it's mostly the same but also different in some ways than in the past. The biggest change is that there's more structure in some key places.

For instance there are a few PMs now for very involved projects, and we have engineering managers to make sure we're getting along ok and not falling between the cracks (turns out 100+ people reporting to one person can be tricky), but still remains enormously open.

Most decisions are made in the open (if they legally can be), there's almost always a Pull Request with discussion around it if you want to either take part or just see how that decision came around. The culture is pretty allergic to anything closed. People frequently ask for a URL if they're curious how a decision was made. This makes it much easier to not feel left out as a remote employee (which something like 60% are).

As an engineer I can largely still choose what I work on much in the same way as before: if there's a project spinning up and I want to work on that project and that team wants me and my team is cool with me going I can totally go work on it.

I've actually been encouraged to work on other things lately to get more perspective on the product and work with new people. I don't feel pigeonholed like I have in some other places.

Teams mostly self organize into structures that best work for them. Some teams look fairly traditional. Some use scrum. Some use some other agile methods. Some use nothing. Some work closely with a PM. etc. Use what makes you happy and what makes you productive. Different projects have different needs.

Things may shift around as growth happens (and they have), but largely I feel like the principles have stayed intact. Still the best place I've ever worked.
There are lies, damned lies, and... you know the rest.

It's not necessarily a mathematical error. You can make any set of stats show pretty much anything you want. From that same data, one could conclude that collisions on bicycles only ever occur on intersections, and therefore we need to invest more in underpasses, which are completely safe, as this data shows no collisions in underpasses. Underpasses save lives.

Magic, eh?
I think this is poor advice. "Just starting a business" is not a low-risk path. Yes, there are lots of businessmen making more than programmers, but it's also true that a massive fraction of businesses fail within a few years. It's not fair to just compare the successes there to the entirety of another field.
Probably because he really wants to build an SPA and believes that it provides the best experience for his users. Which might be true.
It definitely is, but I guess if you are already "cool" person you are doing most of the stuff described in book. I would still recommend reading it.
I can't dispute Qt becoming more popular for apps, and even DEs, but I still find that Qt apps AND all the Qt DEs on linux and BSD are horrifically ugly by default. That is harming adoption of Qt more than anything.

It's likely just bad taste and poor theming, but nevertheless, I find that 99% of the apps I use are GTK, and I'd always pick a GTK based DE (Gnome Shell, maybe mate) over KDE or Lumina.
Do dynamic permissions really make sense for projects of this size? (I guess a single project is aimed at a size of =< 8 people)
The point is that all investors should have equal access to information. Of course some investors are more able to fly a surveillance helicopter over a warehouse than others, but there's an equality in principle there: anyone with the money can hire their own helicopter.

If one investor has a friend inside the company and another doesn't, that's different. That's not a difference in resources, that's a difference in how the company itself is treating its investors. It's inequitable on the face; more pragmatically, it makes it much easier for the rich to exploit their advantages if they can just walk up to company officers and bribe them, which exacerbates inequality. Anything the company tells one investor, it is and should be obliged to tell all of them (and all at the same time).
‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Should Apply Worldwide, E.U. Panel Says
Not that I'm aware of. We're a FbStart partner and have been on the partner side of these kinds of benefits packages a few times, and each time, we worked directly with the organization that was giving away the packages (Facebook in this case).