skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should note, I have seen that site before. Looking at your comparison pictures, I have a couple of thoughts:

1) I am very aware that machining and casting makes higher quality parts. My point is that for all mechanisms there comes a point where the quality is "good enough".

2) The printed gears you linked to have abysmal quality. My 3 year old printer has made vastly superior parts. See this thingiverse part, with many high quality print examples from home printers:
http://www.thingiverse.com/make:17409

I also used to be of the opinion that CNC machining was so superior as to render 3D printing useless. I looked at those stringy prints and said it would never be useful. But then, I slogged for years making CNC machined parts (see some examples of my parts here: http://www.tlalexander.com/files/portfolio.pdf ) and eventually decided to buy a 3D printer. I make more stuff now than I ever did when I had daily access to a CNC.

But as far as quality - notice how that stringy gearbox you linked to still seems to work? Sure, one is more photogenic, but the goal of a gearbox is to transmit power not win a beauty contents. Meanwhile I have been using a printed gear on my 3D printer's extrusion system for over 2 years with no sign of failure. The application is low speed but medium torque, and I see no wear or signs of weakening. The printed gear satisfied the requirements of the mechanism.

When I think of 3D printing, it reminds me of manufacturing in the 1940's. Parts were clunkier then, like the seat hinge on an old Volkswagen Beetle. But clunky works - often better. Newer techniques might make smaller hinges, but the one from the old beetle still works well. Sometimes higher quality isn't necessary to make something. A designer may choose to make something clunkier so that it can be made at home on a basic printer.

Another example- I use this coat rack and lamp mount every day:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16485
Sad to hear about it.

I bought it every month since the early 90's until it went digital. Alongside Computer Shopper UK edition and The C User's Journal (latter The C/C++ User's Journal), Dr Dobbs was my door to the computing world.

In a country where BBS were too expensive for most families and the Internet was yet to come, I waited religiously for the next issue delivery.
It's really interesting to think about how impractical it would be to ensure that you can trust a piece of software. Unless you go down to the lowest levels and validate what every machine instruction is doing (which I certainly don't know how to do, nor plan on doing), you really just have to trust that it all does what you expect.

Good thing people are trustworthy, right?
I believe this is not the case in the US, at least in my experience. In South Africa people say "shame" to express pity for someone else (or even just when something is adorable) but when I say it hear I get weird looks :)
This, then, is the price of adblock?
So sad. I remember many days pouring over articles and code in Dr Dobbs.

Is the the DVD6 ( https://store.drdobbs.com/product/13/Dr.-Dobb%27s-Developer-... )
the final/everything release of the older content? Just wondering if there will be a final one or is that it?
before jQuery I always defined an ID method like:

function ID(id) { return document.getElementById(id); }

saved some typing. I'll always try to use jQuery now though, bigger problems to solve.. few extra bytes to download is not that bad...
As a business model, why would you want to? The Ebola startup project didn't get enough funding, so maintain the status quote. I say this with a sarcastic tone (not being a troll here) I know, but effectively in a high-brow way the article is saying the same thing IMH(umble)O.
And it's so effective I forget it's running until I use a web browser without (like say my iPad) and realize how much ads some sites have.
ARM Challenging Intel in the Server Market: An Overview
All manner of controls and monitors could be secreted this way in the OSes of all the devices we all use day to day. It isn't very far fetched to suggest that the hack, in software, can create an updatable backdoor. This way every piece of software on the planet can be KTH bugged without any possibility of detection by any mortal engineer anywhere.

Man, if you weren't paranoid about security already, this will keep you up at night compiling your systems from source. If you think you have a clean compiler that is.. I think I might just wait for the non-mortal engineer to save us all.
In the 90's, Dr. Dobb's was a front-to-back read for me every month; it exposed me to so many programming ideas while I was still in high school and college, and it's sad to see it go. I think I kept my paper subscription going until that came to an end. It joins other publications like PC Techniques, Game Developer, and Byte that have a cherished place in my archives from a by-gone past.
I do need JQuery because I want to focus on the application and not nuances of different js implementations. And I want to use the simple selector mechanisms. Then there's plugins, I use those too and many assume/require JQuery.

So no, I disagree. Stupid article.
I know of two main ways to monetize the writing of good tech articles -- conferences and consulting. Consulting happens to be much more enjoyable for me than conferences, so that's the option I chose.

By way of contrast, I started DBMS2 in 2005, and at no point did I come close to thinking of a viable-seeming advertising-based business model.
What I found most interesting from this post was revenue. Here is a respected brand, with reasonable amounts of traffic, and multiple employees (Andrew mentioned himself and a sales team), that is doing < $1M in revenue. Even 4 years ago, they were doing ~$3M in revenue.

This is the reality of most businesses. Yes, most people know they won't be a Facebook or a Instagram, but those insanely high numbers have skewed what "success" means in a lot of people's minds. 99.999% of businesses don't making tens of millions of dollars with a handful of 20-somethings.

Success in business is surviving for a non-trivial amount of time

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201407/jason-fried/the-challenge...
I'm one of the few then. I feel so special! (To be fair, I have to click to start Flash, because I haven't updated it and Firefox says it has security holes, which helps a lot.)
I think we're nearly at confirmation of basic alien life. IIRC there are talks of missions to Europa as early as the 2020's, and I would honestly be surprised if no microbial life was found there. Liquid water, chemical processes that could support chemosynthesis, a likely abundance of organic compounds and protection from radiation and cosmic rays are all critical factors. That may even extend to larger fish-like life...there's a chance that the moon's icy shell releases oxygen into its interior liquid ocean in large enough quantities to promote the freakishly-large growth we enjoy. If we don't discover larger multi-cellular life within our solar system (perhaps also on Titan, though that seems less likely), then it'll be many, many years before we discover it. Interstellar travel is a massive hurdle. =)

Intelligent life, though...that's tricky. Given the size of the universe, it is almost certain that there is other intelligent life but who knows whether or not it survives long enough to come into contact? Discovering another civilization would be one of the most incredible experiences I can imagine, so I certainly hope it happens (peacefully) within my lifetime.
We changed the URL from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-16/apple-stops-online-..., which is about a side effect (Apple halting online sales), to the more general article about the story, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8757165.

Edit: Ok, we'll change it back. Sorry for the mistake.
Politically, Washington is one of the more interesting places I've ever lived - there's a majority for Massachusetts-style spending, but there's also a majority for Texas-style taxation. Combine that with the voter initiative system and a cultural boundary line that has nothing to do with the state boundary line, and you get one hell of a predictable mess.

I assume the state will eventually tip demographically in favor of the coast and end up resembling California, with high income taxes and a pissed-off but powerless interior, but I've got no idea how long that's going to take.
"Running Light Without Overbyte" still remember that title, when reading Dr.Dobb's while waiting for my turn fiddling with a new KIM-1 computer at my friend's house in 1976. A while back... I was a subscriber for many years.

Also I remember Al Stevens writing his columns from his RV, the incident with the exploding tire. Did you know he came up with C# as a language name before Microsoft did?

In those days before the internet DDJ was a welcome sight in the mailbox, every issue had something worth reading.

See you around Dr.Dobb's!
...and then, of course, there's:

http://youmightnotnotneedjquery.com/

or

https://gist.github.com/rwaldron/8720084#file-reasons-md (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7153630)
The theory seems great. The reality is not.

When you do that, you delegate your UX and proper functionning of your app to a third-party app.

The UX can vary according the app. One thing is certain, it won't always be consistent with your app. It is also going to be more complicated for the user (more actions to make, more choices, just because you don't want to add permissions).

The proper functionning is even worse. Did you ever heard about the fragmentation of Android? Well, Intents are where it's worse. Some apps plainly don't work, or are buggy.

Intents are great to save time prototyping something. However, if a feature is central to your app, you are better off ensuring yourself that it works well and is easy to use, something that Intents can't guarantee.

Of course, the permission system is far from ideal, and some people will not install your app because you ask for some permissions. I'd say that's a price to pay for developping on Android.

P.S.: some examples of Intents that don't work so well:

1) sending a mail. Good luck finding how to properly use an Intent that is not handled by text apps and allow you to put attachments

2) picking a photo from gallery and resize. A lot of photo apps are plain broken for that Intent. And I'm not talking about some obscure device on a rooted Android, I'm talking about Google's Nexus, with stock apps.
excellent name.
> Amazon is the most unusual of the big tech companies

I believe Amazon is the only company which includes the CEO's message from its first annual report(1997) where Bezos says that its all about the long term.
@dimva, what company are you mentioning in this comment? WeWork?
Because Apple products are expensive and are known to retain value over time they are a good place for people to dump their rubles knowing that they'll be able to sell the ipads and recoup their cash. But Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag of rubles.
I think it's a matter of scale. The scale of the human race gives us a range of number that are humanly comprehensible.
Their distribution diminishes as they make less and less sense to our scale.
As an aside but related - I bought a Surface Pro 3 and was shocked to discover major issues with its WiFi when you have Hyper-V enabled. Basically WiFi "breaks" whenever you wake the device, and can only be re-enabled through a reboot. (http://winsupersite.com/surface/will-microsoft-ever-fix-surf...)
Setting the record straight on Proof-of-Publication
Would Dr. Dobb's have survived with Google contributor? ( rhetorical question).

Looking at this thread, there would have been a whole bunch of folks who would have paid a few dollars to keep the mag up and running.
These comparisons are almost meaningless - e.g. Apple is worth about the same as Korea's stockmarket, almost as much as China's.
Andrew,

this is sad news. Dr. Dobb's was always a beacon in the computer and software publication landscape, one I grew up with and I've cherished till today.

I still remember the moments of pride and the feeling of recognition when we've seen the first positive reviews of our work in Dr Dobb's many years ago - something that could only be achieved by the high standing and excellent editorial work of the magazine's team and efforts.

While it might be understandable from a financial or commercial point of view that it's better to stop now than later, hopefully there will be an agreement found with one of the big data center providers (IBM, MS, Google, AWS)to keep the current site online and the archives open for the many who certainly will find inspiration and guidance in much of what had been written in Dr Dobb's during almost 40 years.
Ask HN: What questions should I ask a founder before joining a 10 people startup
Hi All - I have been working for a large storage/cloud company for around 4 years and currently looking for another job. I have been interviewing for a while & have been talking to a lot of small size startups too (less than 10 people).

What questions should one ask the founders before joining them ?
10m views, $1m rev. $100/cpm seems like they're overachieving when based purely on views. Nothing to be done there.

It's a shame I've read Dr. Dobbs for I don't know how long. They should sell to someone, keep it alive.
I didnt know that Bezos's invested in Google. Does he still hold the stock?
New Zealand's economy maps closer to New South Wales' economy than NSW does to Western Australia's economy (these are Australian States). If you look on the back of any product for sale in Australia or New Zealand you will see they are made for both markets. Citizens from either country can go and work and live in either country without a visa. None of these apply to the USA and Canada.

Politically New Zealand and Australia are different, but I think a lot of that difference is due to Australian federation and our electoral systems. If New Zealand were to join as an Australian state and use the Australian system of preferential voting (instant runoff) I think we would see a convergence in politics. I don't see New Zealand joining the Australian federation anytime soon, but if there was a desire it could happen pretty easily.
If each computer had a unique hardware private key, that could stop it. But I'm not sure that they do? (Or even if some do, can HTML5 access that somehow?)
Dropping out
I would think the simple life we would see in our solar system would be less sophisticated then bacteria. Confirming plants and animals outside of earth would mean looking beyond our solar system and in 20-30 years we should be able to see the color of the planets Kepler has found. Once we can get a few pixels off a planet we can start to tell if photosynthesis is occurring. So for the first two categories my money is on 15/30. For intelligent life I can't even make a good guess.
I wonder if it's feasible to reference the TLS/SSL session against the session cookie? While the HTTPS session itself is probably transient, you can tell something is up if the same session cookie is being used with two different HTTPS keys.
> Blake also blogged the notes on Peter Thiel's start-up lectures at Stanford.

Which became source material for Zero to One.
I've been using Visual Studio since it was called Visual C++. VS 2013 is one of, if not the buggiest versions I have used. The only responses I seem to see are "It'll be fixed with Roslyn, just wait!"

I'm curious as to what has shifted inside Microsoft. Part of me believes I'm seeing the work of new devs as the old devs have left. Another part believes this is the result of agile taking over. I liked my visual studio with waterfall releases. At least it worked without constant hangs, locks, and crashes.
You changed it to one with an obnoxious autoplaying video. Please add a [video] tag when you do this.
It's pretty easy to have software to be the limiting factor, such that you aren't taking full advantage of your throughput because the data's not there yet.
Listening To Our Customers Almost Killed Our Startup
Great, now all the comments lost context. This is asinine. Don't modify the submissions, or titles.
> You wouldn't use Go to build a game engine

Why not?! Not all game engines need to be the next CryEngine or Unreal.

http://azul3d.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjn3twYB7xQ&list=UU7n_g2xDyS...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzQ2dnVac3Y&list=UU7n_g2xDyS...
> If your app is closed-source then they have no way of verifying you're not downloading all their contacts to their servers.

That's a common fallacy. Even if it is open source someone could still be doing that. In order to be secure you would have to:

A) Download the source yourself
B) Inspect the source
C) Compile the source

Just because you have the source doesn't mean what you get from the Play Store/Amazon App store is 1:1 identical or even similar.

There is secret option D, have someone you trust do A through C and then give you the hash of the resulting compiled file. But two programs compiled on two machines often give different results due to library versions, compiler versions, environmental settings, and so on.
Guy Falls off treadmill
Hey Doug -

We love Vibe. It's a great app and carries a lot of the same features. I think that the advantage of using FullContact for Gmail is being able to interact with your FullContact address book, and then automatically sync that information back to your Google Contacts. But ultimately, it's whatever works best for you. We know that the Vibe team shares our passion for making you awesome with people, and we're happy that they're making great products.
It seems there's a range of opinions on this - no surprise. I find myself frequently, though not exclusively, using my phone (current, iPhone 6+) or tablet for docs while I use my laptop for coding. I know others who do this too. It's all anecdotal, but I don't think of having good mobile support on a docs site as being an edge case.

Also, I work a lot in Django, and love the new site.
[Chris from OpenCorporates here]: Any code you write is your code... and we'd be happy for you to share it by whatever means you want, e.g. by pushing to a public github/gitlab repo.
We did originally plan to do this by default, but in an earlier version of this work some contributors said that they didn't mind OpenCorporates having the benefit, but didn't want proprietary business information companies to have it.

We've got a ticket to add to the manifest and option public_repo field, so that the location of the public repo is easily discoverable, and hope to implement in the next week or so.

The share-alike refers to the underlying data, but again, if you want to make it available to the world under a CC0 licence we have no problem with that.

Hope this clears things up.
C
> I found it a bit irritating that there were no news about the various Microsoft update issues on HN last week.

Why didn't you post one?

(Edit: I hope that didn't sound accusatory; I mean it as a cordial invitation to post good stories that you think belong on HN.)
It's guaranteed to be up for a year at least, and probably much longer after that. If a major host or ibiblio wanted to guarantee its availability by hosting it permanently, I expect UBM (the parent company) would be amenable. Not right now, but perhaps at the one-year mark.
>Otherwise they have no idea what the surcharge ought to be.

Nonsense. The surcharge is the difference between the spot rate and the futures rate with which they hedge. They can easily predict (to a reasonable degree) the volume they need to hedge by estimating their market.
I thought China overtook US (an article on 18 october after googling it)
This is about more than just a build process.

jQuery's imperative DOM manipulation is a horrible way to manage state compared to React.

These tools aren't just "cool things". They were designed to solve really pressing issues related to managing complexity in front-end web applications by eliminating global state in both the DOM or the JS runtime environment. They tend towards a more declarative and functional approach to system design.

A build process that integrates with a versioned package manager is fantastic.
Hack aside, really wonderfully written. Very funny and well explained.
I spent 5 months in Argentina - this is extremely common practice. For anything of value (rent, cars, etc.) everyone uses dollars, because you wouldn't want to be stuck with mountains of pesos then have the value slashed in half again.

Dollars are assumed to be much more stable.
I agree that software engineers certainly have more ability to pirate software, but I doubt that the rates of piracy are any higher than with the general population. For one thing, developers tend to have fairly good salaries, so there's less financial incentive for piracy. Also, you're depriving people in your own industry of income—I certainly wouldn't appreciate it if people pirated my products.

Regarding attorneys: I can't imagine that it's really that prevalent. Anyone who was that litigious would quickly gain a representation as such among the legal community.
It drives me crazy.

I know it's well intentioned, but this power in the hands of a few seems to do more harm than good. Why not just let the populous up/down vote things as they see fit?

I wouldn't have upvoted an article about the general ruble decline (it's not news to me). I would (and did) upvote an article Apple halting Russian sales.
The big lesson of StackExchange 1.0 is that the StackOverflow model does not so much create communities, as give existing communities a migration path. Unfortunately, Dr. Dobbs's legacy is largely a community of readers, not necessarily a community enthusiastic about crowd-source Q and A.
Then where is the improvement over the existing system you're still having to trust both Escrow companies and they still have to trust each other.
It's likely they clean these sites out. I know a company doing a similar report did this. In reality 3 or 4 of the top 10 sites were porn.

Also I found interesting gay porn seemed to be very over represented on mobile internet, about 20%-ish of top porn sites. I found this interesting as in a male world you would expect this to be about 10% so it seemed either gay males watch much more porn or as I assumed, guys would have a look on their phones as this was more private to have a curiosity look...??
Congratulations! Y'all have had a wild ride so far, for being among the coolest and most practical companies in the data space
Native U.S. English speaker here: we do use the word "shame" as GP describes. We use "shame" both to say that someone should be ashamed and also to express general disappointment. (Though we would not use the word to talk about something that's merely adorable.) To my U.S.-English ears, swombat's use of the word "shame" seemed clearly of the "general disappointment" variety.
I admire the idea of transparency on principle but wonder how practical it is long term or under likely scenarios in the future of a company.

And I wonder how that profit compares to similar businesses? And if it is sustainable? (Just to start...)

A quick search provides some rough "data" on other small businesses:
"The average net profits of a small manufacturing wood products business, with $2 million in revenue annually, according to the website "Biz Stats," is 14.56 percent per year. Medical equipment and suppliers, with $2 million in revenue, have a net profit margin of 26.95 percent annually. By contrast, computer and electronics products return a net profit of 53.94 percent, and the food processing sector, according to "Biz Stats," has a net profit margin of 10.28 percent."
(http://smallbusiness.chron.com/average-profit-margin-small-b...)
Sorry if I come across as rude but the original submission "made it" to the frontage as is.

HN needs to stop doing this kind of thing, particularly when the (admittedly ancient infrastructure) doesn't add an "edited" declaration, etc.