skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy speaks to my soul.

A couple years ago I worked on a project that tried to put a 40+ page printed form online. The form is complex. The form has a lot of intricate guidance and notes, and sections that must or must not be completed based on previous sections or fields.

I threw together a form builder by re-purposing old code from a side project that took me two years to polish. My proof of concept let an admin change guidance on the fly, without touching HTML. Fields could be re-sequenced, data types changed. Business rules could be linked to fields dynamically, and applied to single fields or entire form sections. Data was saved to a SQL Server (already in wide use in the estate). My proof of concept took 4 weeks, and on the basis of that I estimated a 6 month project. When I presented the idea it was viewed as being too complex, and therefore too risky.

So the dev team just started hacking it out, field by field, and saving the whole form into Mongo as a single, nested document. Guidance was hard-coded into the HTML. It was fast, and at the start everyone was awed.

Of course soon after the customer decided that the guidance for the printed form wasn't appropriate for the online version. And of course the customer wanted to analyse data across all forms. What was a 6 month piece of work took 3 years. And still no ability to analyse data nested in Mongo documents. Any change requires hours of re-work, regression tests and sign-off.

All because agile.

In my 20's I'd have been emotionally destroyed. Ego like an aeroplane into the side of a mountain. No survivors, call of the search. Happily I'm in my mid-40's. I know better, and I know better than challenging an inexperienced project lead that has too much authority. So I move on. There's always a project that's more suited to my style of work (slow).
Wages where? Certainly not in China. Perhaps American wages are stagnating because they are getting closer to the average while at the same time the average wage is skyrocketing.
I've learned my lesson since then, and will do in the future.

I think it was just protecting my friend's time, and not bringing him anything that I didn't feel 100% "hell yeah this is totally your thing".

I'd like an introduction from me to be seen as a real endorsement.
Looks neat. I'll have to try it out first before thinking about buying it.

I've been using Gollum, a project from github. It's basically a wiki using ruby brick and git to serve the md pages. I think the hassle is having to start up gollum to use the wiki and having it run.

And I keep different subjects in different repos so switching between each repo and relaunching gollum is a hassle. The code highlight isn't so great with other languages such as Erlang iirc.

Does this just have one hierarchical page in each notebook? Say the python book, it seems like there's say a collection of pages, each of those pages cannot have nested pages?
EU Changes VAT Rules for Digital Products
What did SafeKiddo see in the Kill Bill API's that was lacking in Braintree's own recurring/subscription API's?
I suspect that many startup people got their first business experience selling weed.
Example Code: Websockets with Cowboy and Elixir
They're special and only ycombinator companies are allowed to post those. See 'job ad' on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Radius - San Francisco

Radius is a fast-growing, venture-backed startup in the heart of San Francisco. We're developing breakthrough technologies that make it easier for all companies – large and small, established and pioneering – to understand and do business with each other.

Opportunities

-Data Software Engineer
-Aggregation Engineer
-Integrations Engineer
-Front-End Software Engineer
-Senior DevOps Engineer

Apply here: https://radius.com/jobs/
No. I've been browsing 10 hours a day for the last 15 years and never got addicted.
I see no correlation between typing fast and being a good programmer.

I mean how much do you even have to type to program, if I produce a page of good code in a day, thats a good day, and it doesn't take long to type.
It's from a DNSimple DoS attack
Let's do some arithmetic for you. At 125k/8%, you're giving up $50k salary for 8% equity. At 100k/15%, you're giving up $75k salary for 15% equity.

But it isn't 15%. If it's a typical 4 year vesting, it's only 3.75% per year. So you're giving up $75k salary for 3.75% equity in the company. That implies a current valuation of $75k/0.0375 = $2M.

But you are a minority shareholder. You could do a great job, deliver a great MVP, and then be fired after 11 months with nothing (if it's a typical 1 year cliff). The founder could give a sweetheart deal to friend investors, diluting your equity. Your shares are common, not the preferred an investor would get.

So the CURRENT VALUATION of the company needs to be a lot more than $2M, for this to be a sensible risk for you to take.

There are two disasters that can happen to you. The startup could fail and your equity is worth nothing. The startup could be a smash hit success, and you get cheated due to your status as minority shareholder.

So you'd be better off keeping the job that pays $75k more CASH, and investing the difference.

I doubt his idea is that super-brilliant. The fact that he went this far without a technical co-founder shows that he doesn't really value that aspect of the business. You'd be better off saving/investing the extra $75k salary, and then self-angel-investing in your own startup later, where you could be a TRUE co-founder.

Also, as the above people said, a co-founder does not normally draw a salary at the beginning. They are expected to work for equity only, which seems like an idiot move for someone who could get $100k+ CASH as an employee. To give up that much salary, you'd need to be getting half of the equity or even be a controlling shareholder.

So, keep the job that pays $175k, save up the difference, and invest in your own startup someday where you could be a TRUE co-founder.
Speed, is a constant demand. The rate that we are creating new frameworks, languages and platforms is an all time high. We toss them away as quick as we build them, by the time its reaching mainstream adoption we are refactoring the core, and expecting developers to adopt the changes before they master the first mature iteration. Born to die software is here and its going to cause a massive fracturing. If we adopt reverse compatiblity maybe we can offset the repercussions. I expect my code to start to deprecate in atleast 6 months in some manner.
Nobel prize contender San Thang cut from Australian CSIRO
Macmillan opens up treasure chest of scientific knowledge to society
Most XML libraries have an option to disable external entity loading. But this is not enough. Libraries should be secure by default, not by toggling an obscure option. (On a related note, why do we still have so many templating engines that don't block XSS by default?)

Recent versions of libxml (2.9.0+) disable external entity loading by default, so any implementation based on libxml (such as PHP's SimpleXML) should be secure as long as the defaults are left untouched. But if you use an XML parser implemented natively in another language, or one that links to an older version of libxml, you should look really carefully at the default settings.
I also like the mix of stories and subject in HN, but when one subject saturate the front page I use hnapp to filter the other stories. For example you can subscribe to the rss of http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1
Are you envisioning cards as widgets that leverage the API of a partner app or are they just re-formatted mobile web views embedded within another app? For example, Uber wouldn't have worked unless they also built all of the payment and user account/rating functionality into an embeddable mobile web view. Once you're there, you might as well support mobile web.
Lack of design in software nowadays was cited as a problem in the post. I agree, and I think there's a lot of not-classically educated hands out there that wouldn't know a good design document from bad. Nor would they have any practical knowledge of a combination of: how to structure code in large code bases, test their code, converse about/apply software patterns, document their API's for public consumption, RAII, SOLID, TDD, etc. So, I think there's little hope for improvement in software quality/design/success metrics/etc.

Big up-front design only satisfies document weight tests and typically does not stay up to date with the software. So, just simply saying "we need more design" is not going to get us anywhere but hell.

Self-documenting code is a nice idea, but scales only so much in a large codebase. UML is a bear to produce and maintain, and I only really like it in whiteboard discussions, not actually drawn in a tool.

Wikis devolve into a mess of disconnected ideas.

Successful teams I've been on tend to rally and organize designs around the already generated documentation (like JSDoc or JavaDoc), but those docs often only focus on the user-facing API's and leave the internals as a partially documented wasteland.

A few teams I've been on had a scribe, which was sweet, but not usually.

What patterns of design and documentation actually work well for you in real-world, large project/team scenarios?

Regarding needing an aged "adult in the room" to guide the fledgling developers to glory, as I think the OP suggests is an answer to the problems ... Well, in my many experiences where imparting wisdom from on-high was the goal, that has been a miserable failure. It was all because said "senior architect" or whatever the title was invariably only cared about blessing random big decisions randomly/destructively and had otherwise checked out to walk his dog after lunch and otherwise coast during his pre-retirement. All I can say is, God bless 'em.

I do NOT count on age as a factor, only that a developer has reached a certain point of experience in their career. What I DO count on is one person who can enforce a clear vision with passion. Who holds the torch for your team? Is their grip shaky or firm? Where are we headed? Are we headed there with conviction? Does the end goal still seem plausible to all hands after every step we take? If you have proven you've got the chops and can back up all your assertions with creditable past successes and/or literature, you can rule your team and demand excellence - YOUR excellence! Pick a darn direction and let's go! I have total respect for that someone that has a coherent vision AND can communicate it.

Agile methodologies sound plausible to address design and software productivity issues, but I have yet to see exceptional results from an agile project vs waterfall. This is probably just because software is a hard thing to do well in any case, and is subject to political winds, funding, ineffective product owner, etc.
Perfect pitch means knowing absolute versus relative frequency.

Most people have no (or very little) sense of absolute pitch - if you get asked to sing / hum / whistle a song, you'll start on any random old note. You'll get the relative pitches right - the change in pitch between notes - but not the absolute.

(To be pedantic, you'll get the ratio of the frequencies approximately right)

Someone with perfect pitch can identify "that note is the A# below middle C", for instance. But not necessarily that accurately. " not the greatest at determining tunings by ear " just means that he's not very good at it. So he may identify that A# as a C or something.
CSIRO is the premier Australian research organisation.
While I have little experience with it, I know the goal of the defusedxml package (see https://pypi.python.org/pypi/defusedxml ) is to make it so that teams like yours can worry less about these details.

It has a module which "acts as an example how you could protect code that uses lxml.etree. It implements a custom Element class that filters out Entity instances, a custom parser factory and a thread local storage for parser instances. It also has a check_docinfo() function which inspects a tree for internal or external DTDs and entity declarations."

It sounds like it would have defused your example of lxml, and perhaps a few others you haven't considered.
USD Wallets on Coinbase
Yea, the article kinda reads like "bad programmers are bad, and I'm a code master, and the kids don't program like me, and they're bad-bad-bad. their fast is so slow. my slow is so fast."

It's weird how he like does this thing where he equates their fast with thoughtlessness, and his slow with actual fast.

That being said, I'm all about white-boarding, project planning, and clearing out dependencies, but if an engineer is slowly coding something without any deliverables, chances are their going to hit a wall near the deadline. I've seen this happen too many times.
Really liked this part:
" And the latest clever development tools, no matter how clever, cannot replace the best practices and real-life collaboration that built cathedrals, railroads, and feature-length films."
If memory serves, Terragen also used Perlin noise by default, unless you imported your own bitmaps or selected a different algorithm. :)
I recommend Richard Sennett's book The Craftsman, which talks about both the history of craft and software.
There are plenty of other apps available already - TouchDown [0] and Nine [1] are the two I've heard the most positive reviews about (I don't know anyone who uses Accompli).

[0]: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/smartphones/review-touchdow...
[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/12/hands-on-nine-is-a-c...]
I've always wondered why stating that blacks are better at certain sports is not considered racist toward other races?

Anyway, when people and scientists are punished for expressing thoughts just because some find those offensive (think about Darwin, Freud, and many others), then we're turning the wheel of history backward. More and more so, we're living in times when people are becoming afraid to freely share their opinions - motivated or not, scientific or not. The only true way to prove somebody wrong is use science and not twist their arms (or tongues).
Louisiana back in the 80s/early 90s had very lax drinking laws: the drinking age was 18 and they had "drive thru" daiquiri stores. I think they gave that up for highway money, but the culture still hangs around.

In contrast, many states in the north are now zero tolerance states. The limit is quite low, and the penalties are quite harsh. Well, that pales in comparison to Japan, where you would probably lose your job if caught (and they have a very low limit also).
Hacking Confessions
Thank god - there are others out there speaking my language. The ideas of dysrythmia are spot on.

Totally fantastic - an insight well put. Thank you
I think this is a fascinating experiment and will be interested to see how this goes. Many people look at Open Source and say "Why would I pay ChargeBee or Recurly $300 or $3000 per month when this is free?" Seems like a no brainer. But when it's running your billing and it's driving $100,000 or $1 million a month in revenue then it's looked at from an entirely different view. Saving $1000 a month is great but if it means you are missing out on $5000 or $10,000 because you can't support a business model then it isn't such a great proposition. Now I'm not saying Kill Bill is better or worse than the alternatives. Just that open source solutions where the effects on productivity and revenue are so clear are judged by a different type of measurement than other areas.

Good luck!
Is PGP Usable Yet? (Joke Site)
Offtopic but I'm curious - how do you parse "he jumped off of the dock"? To me that would say he was on the dock and jumped off it (into water or whatever), so equivalent to "he jumped off the dock".

I would parse it as "on" in a sentence like "he based his site off of facebook".
I've seen mistype rates of close to 20% without the second field. Still, my boss won't allow me to put in the second field because he feels it would hurt the user experience.
Practicing effective self-review
Proportional to karma?
If you are talking about the "jobs" link at the top of every page, then
those are essentially advertisements from YC-funded companies looking to
hire people. You can't up-vote, flag, or comment on them. Think of them
as a clickable banner advertisement that starts at position #6 on the
front page, and quickly sinks. When you realize that the success of YC
funded companies is what pays for the existence of HN, then the job ads
makes sense.

The HN site guidelines linked at the bottom of every page say to not use
HN for contacting or communicating with YC, or YC funded companies. This
pretty much explains why comments are disabled on the advertisements.

HN also has automated, monthly "Who Is Hiring?" and "Freelancing/Seeking
Freelancer?" posts available to everyone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
It would probably be something less suspect like Magic cards.
Pure sine wave? Not very good. A violin? Much better. My violin? Very high.
> Secondary DNS Provider

You can do that anyway - just delegate the status subdomain as a new zone

> we're unable to add subdomains for existing customers of Fastly

Seems like a bad choice of CDN provider...

> your precious SPF slots

'slots'? You just add another `include` section - there is no number of slots. And even if there was, you don't want email being addressed from a fake looking domain.

The benefits of having a dedicated domain are far and few between. Particularly the reasons listed here are poor ones. It is far more beneficial to use a single trusted domain than to create a confusing mix of domains which look possibly fake.
Texting (and talking on phone) while driving are still legal in Texas. Texas road deaths are double the OECD average.
The issue that caused Linus to argue memcpy should just act like memmove involved old binaries breaking with new kernels, so the compiler's behaviour wasn't an issue there.
Show HN: Recover lost JPEGs with an HDD surface scan
Requires line of sight, is expensive, has high latency, and is somewhat flaky.

I know someone who has this service in San Francisco - they only have it because it's literally their only option besides ADSL.
I recently wrote a little intro to parser combinators in Haskell. It may be of interest to readers here: https://gist.github.com/tel/df3fa3df530f593646a0

In particular I exploit the structure of a parser combinator type as a monad transformer.
Yes I agree, what bothers me is that instead of that we are getting micro-code bloating instructions such as PEXT and PDEP.
Life expectancy simply means that 50% of those people will be dead by 100. It could be that 99% of them are dead by 110.

That's a perfectly plausible distribution. Japan, for example, has over 50k 100+ inhabitants (and probably 0 over 120).
Yes, it's based on Java and far from perfect but it's the best Postgres client available today.
Snowden Awarded 'Alternative Nobel Prize'
Yeah, absolutely wrong nomenclature and it would be better to call it:

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

> Wu wei is an important concept in Taoism that literally means non-action or non-doing ie. "effortless doing"

Set goal, think and explore a little, rest a lot and wait until you get clear picture. Then and only then start coding.

Pros: No burnouts, less stress, etc, and constantly moving forward (in contrast to 2 steps forward 1 step back cycle) what results in overall faster progress.

Cons: Personally it's sometimes pain in the ass to wait, but it's important to understand -> not to be obsessed with job. Get a hobby, do something else and let unconscious part of your brain deal with what needs to be done -> mind blowing discovery for me that actually works, but still have to get used to this concept :-)
> I largely agree w/ the argument here, but "slow" is going to be self-defeating nomenclature, and is also inaccurate. Business doesn't want slow. So if we're pitching slow, we're setting ourselves up to lose and the speed-hackers are going to win.

Agreed. The ideas in this article are sound, but I'm not sold on this "slow programming" term. It's more like "careful" programming, or how about "care-full" programming, in which you put your full amount of care into every character you write.

The reason we've been able to speed things up is because of these tools, like CI systems and test frameworks. Faster iteration means getting results back faster and that means you can spend more time thinking about the problem and less time implementing it. That is the major benefit of what the author calls "fast programming" and it's something he glossed over completely. Just because you move fast doesn't mean you can't be careful along the way. You just need tools that extend your own visibility in order to catch problems faster and more accurately solve them.
But NextSTEP didn't fail. It succeeded, in the biggest, most spectacular way I can imagine an operating system would. So, design does matter. Design seems to matter a great deal at Apple, so that backs up your other point that most other businesses could care less about their software's design and that NextSTEP at Apple is an exception.
Owning is the *new* Sharing
I guess it is touch typing if you define touch typing as any kind of typing without looking, but it isn't what most people think of touch typing, I don't have any sort of "rest" or "home" position.
Ironically, I guess its also affecting quite a few AngualrJS customers as well since they use their service:

https://twitter.com/angularjs
I'm amused that that's the first thing to come to mind. I certainly went to schools with plenty of more criminal elements, but the first thing to come to mind was definitely the kids who marked up candy bars and sold them for pocket cash.
I'm sorry but you're incorrect. Mozilla's Firefox was originally called Phoenix, and it was created because Mozilla the browser was a dog-slow encumbered monstrosity of Netscape's attempt to create an all-in-one solution for the web. Firefox was essentially competing with Mozilla Suite, but it wasn't so much "competing" as filling a necessary role: a browser that didn't suck.

Mozilla Suite was also not created to compete with Internet Explorer. In fact, Internet Explorer was created to compete with Netscape, which was the dominant browser for years until IE finally knocked it off its catbird seat. It never recovered because IE offered a simple, fast browsing experience, even if it sucked dick at actually rendering content.

In this vein, Phoenix was created in the model of Internet Explorer. So in a way you could say it competed, but in actual fact it was competing against its own progenitor.

Reflecting more on 'competition': the browser wars nearly destroyed the web as we know it as each browser introduced incompatible proprietary extensions which were then picked up (badly) by each other over time. The lack of standards, or good implementations of standards, severely hampered the adoption of more advanced technology. Firefox continues that tradition today by pushing more and more features that IE can't support; we're just lucky that Firefox is the dominant browser now, and that people are now used to upgrading their browser virtually every week.
Never anything like that. I usually capitalized on whatever fads were around. I went to middle school in the early 90s so it was things like those MagicEye books. I'd buy a box of them from the publisher and sell them for retail price at ( back then ) 200% markup.
I would guess it's running at like a thousand FPS, could be wrong though.