skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. He should look at data from Japan, along with other countries. When I was in Tokyo the trains and buses were all spread out and things ran on-time; you can literally watch the train arrive as the est. time of arrival clicked down to zero. Buses were similarly on-time and never bunched up. Not once did I see this pattern while I travelled around Japan for 15 days.

When I arrived back in Denver the first thing I noticed were 2 light-rail trains that arrived about 5 seconds apart from each other. Buses also get similar bunched up.

Denver isn't anywhere near London's density; I wonder if this is more related to the system in place and ethnocentric factors such as the pride that Japanese operators seemed to have at running everything as precisely as possible.
> Let me tell you something. Of all the time I have ever used DVCSes, over the last twenty years if we count Smalltalk changesets and twelve or so if you don’t, I have wanted to have the full history while offline a grand total of maybe about six times. And this is merely going down over time as bandwidth gets ever more readily available. If you work as a field tech, or on a space station, or in a submarine or something, then okay, sure, this is a huge feature for you.

Or if you're a Kiln customer, and their site is taking 4 minutes to load a page, assuming it's not just down...

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Seriously, though, I don't see where the author is going with his rant. It doesn't say much, and almost seems like a snide jab at Git and GitHub.

None of his points are very good. Yeah, it doesn't take a DVCS to treat the whole repo as a unit. But right now they're the only ones who do. A hypothetical patch to SVN doesn't help me much.

Also, I know from experience that SVN is horrible at binary files, and especially horrible at large binary files. I'm not saying Git and Mercurial are great, but they're no worse than SVN.

The entire section about the amount of books and documentation is just silly. There was a LOT more subversion info around than "just the Red book". I owned two books, and I know we had a few different ones floating around the office, not to mention boatloads of tutorials and guides online.

It's also funny how he makes fun of GitHub's git tutorial, but doesn't mention Kiln's Mercurial and Git tutorials. He also rips on GitHub's pull requests, but fails to mention that they work better than Kiln's.

But it's great to see the founder of Kiln telling everybody not to use the technology his company is based on...
I can easily write a tool to automatically convert CamelCasedVariables to underscored_variables, or vice versa. The fact that I have not done so indicates that I don't care.

The important thing is that the variable names be chosen to facilitate human understanding of the code.
And this is a conversation about English common names and literature.
"
1 - Create a large-ish file (1MB) outside of the Dropbox folder

2 - Monitor the network usage of the Dropbox application to see if it sends enough data that it could be that file

"

I can not really say if Dropbox steals them or not. But if i were a Dropbox engineer and want to know about those newly created files, i wouldn't want to send the whole file to server at all.

- Send file name with its extension

- Send file size

Compare these to dropbox's blacklist file (imagination only) in another server. If there are any matches, mark user as "whateveryouwant"

As long as there is a network activity when a new file created, it is and will always be suspicious to its users.
AKA curse of being an awesome narcissist
Speaking of which, does anyone run apps like this with a different user than their own?

I'm thinking of something like

/home/dropbox drwxrwx--- dropbox <youruser>
I would guess you've never browsed through clientsfromhell.net.

Being honest, polite, and knowledgeable doesn't change the fact that the person who hires you may be ignorant, too busy, dead set on cheating you, or needs to assert his/her sense of control by insisting on changing something you considered finished.
plyr does more than dplyr (I perfer dplyr)

reshape does more than reshape2 which does more than tidyr

They actually get more refined and are different creatures with similar features and not different versions.
I don't get why this is being downvoted. There's substantial research to indicate the strong hiring biases at play in standard American hiring practices. Study after study after study. I get why we would all like to think ourselves virtuous. But the problem here isn't a lack of virtue, it's the zillion cognitive biases that creep in unless we take active countermeasures.
Seems the personal (cost-free) edition now includes all engine features[1], including native plugins. That's changed since 4.6, I think. Though the license mentions some "metrics collection" in the free version, as well as the compulsory splash screen remaining, or at least it did when I looked at the license page[2], which now seems to have AWOLed

[1]http://unity3d.com/unity/engine-features

[2]http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula
Quote:

"A simple protocol can give us an idea of whether data is being sent to Dropbox:

1. Create a large-ish file (1MB) outside of the Dropbox folder

2. Monitor the network usage of the Dropbox application to see if it sends enough data that it could be that file

3. Repeat with many different files, etc.

Doing exactly that, Dropbox only sent a few hundred KB after “accessing” the target file. Seems unlikely that Dropbox is uploading files outside your Dropbox folder."

This test approach has a problem. A more realistic test would be to place a well-compressed file, one that by definition cannot be made smaller, on Dropbox and see what the system traffic size is for that file. For an optimally compressed file, if the system is reading the entire file, the read size will more or less equal the file size.
Using PaintCode to dynamically create images in Title Challenge
There is a story that when the animators of Avatar The Last Airbender were working on the Beach episode, they knew that if they drew the outfits the way they wanted, they would be told to tone it down. So they drew everyone in outfits far too revealing for a children's program. When, as predicted, they were told to draw something more conservative they went ahead and animated the scenes the way they originally envisioned them. The censors, satisfied that they had done their job, accepted the revised scenes.
Back in the days I worked a while as a web designer, spent my days in Photoshop, learned all the shortcuts.

So I was showing the design to this client who always wanted to modify things, and he said he doesn't like the orange a lot and if we can tweak it. I had a red layer, and a yellow layer over it with opacity, so I clicked on the yellow layer, and started pressing random numbers on the numpad (pressing numbers changes the value of the layer's opacity) so the colors were jumping randomly from red to orange to yellow and the hues in between, finally I settled back on the exact value that was before, and that seemed to satisfy the client. The color was now perfect.
I've always assumed "All rights reserved" was just a redundant part of the copyright declaration (it's already copyrighted, what else can you possibly reserve without e.g. trademark or patent law etc?), and that the explicit copyright license that usually follows and grants exceptions to the copyright is all that matters.

I hadn't thought about it much until now though, perhaps that assumption is wrong in some jurisdictions.
These would be great in hospitals, not just for patients, but also people that work on the night shift and never see much daylight.
According to the Register, that bastion of quality journalism...
I think a misconception I am seeing people have, please correct me if I'm wrong, is with the understanding of distributions. You could re-invest 100% of what isn't going to founder salaries into the business, however if $100k is going towards founders then they receive $20k and Indie.vc receives $80k. Is that correct?
our assumption is that we'd need to wave our rights to distributions should an equity financing come together.
Well, sure, when part of a team, make a decision and go with it. But most of the time these debates on HN just disappear down a hole of people arguing past each other and caring far too much about something that doesn't matter.
Interestingly, the end of article poll has very different results,

- CamelCase 43.84% (1,117 votes)

- underscores 56.16% (1,431 votes)

The beginning poll still is still within half a percent of your numbers as of now.

Apparently, people who prefer underscores are more likely to follow through. ;)
Was that video supposed to clear things up?

I kept trying to figure out how both the Earth and Sun were standing still.
No, I'm not a field tech. I'm a hacker. I work where I am and when I'm in the mood. In a pavilon at the park and idea strikes? Hack! At home and my internet goes out? No Problem!
I stopped by the indie.vc meetup in Portland to discuss this, and found the idea fascinating. I strongly believe that it's going to fill a missing piece in modern startup investment, and could end up being a very important program in the future, because frankly, it's a better fit for most startups.

I'm not saying there's no place for VC, but I think it's been a big mistake to plug it into ideas that simply don't make sense for it. There's a reason my copy of "Nothing Ventured" has a pair of dice on the cover. VC is designed for high-risk high-capital projects (the Intels and Lyfts of the world), and yet we continue to use it for things it was never designed for, like low-capital web startups that don't really require a lot of labor and simply need to find a niche in their market (let's face it, it's almost impossible to predict your market beforehand).

The consequence is startups that are either an enormous success or a complete failure, with zero room for deviance. There's a big hole between enormous success and complete failure, and in practice the vast majority of startups land in it. When we don't provide investment devices that work for that middle area (but scale to potential for enormous success when discovered), it's no surprise to me that we assume 90% failure rates in the industry, and end up with startups that fly way off the handle, sacrificing sustainability at the altar of "growth".

The Indie.vc proposal IMHO fills that massive hole by allowing for the possibility of moderate success. If your company doesn't go IPO but still makes a profit, you don't get stuck in a trap where you're forced to keep raising money to prevent disaster (which you're dishonestly selling as a growth opportunity), sell (often an acqui-hire that shuts down a perfectly good business) or go into an asset sale to pay off the investors. Running on that treadmill destroys a lot of perfectly good companies.

Neocities is in this boat. We've turned down quite a few offers from VCs because the terms were too dangerous for us, and I'm assuming many other startups are in a similar place. We need some investment and help to grow, but I refuse to do that at the expense of our great users. They deserve better than to lose their sites because I used them as poker chips to gamble the size of our market niche. If we get big, great, but moderate success is great too. Today's investment devices are simply too dangerous.

IMHO, that's the way startups should operate, and that's the way our investment devices should work. Indie.vc is a really great idea.
I find that I view camelCase as one word and camel_case as two words. The '_' works as a separator not a joiner. Since we can only keep four or five words in our working memory it's better for me to use camelCase.

It's possible that with more exposure to underscore_case I would eventually start treating it as one word.
I only implemented as a simple autocomplete for a simple tag search. We actually have over 1400 tags but only about 140 are actually active for searching, I think that's actually an oversight on our end. You can go to https://www.visualcv.com/resume-samples/directory# for all the tags, rails and .net are both on there
but then you lose the ability to git bisect, blame etc, which is the root comment's advantage of doing git.

I've worked on a project where the git repository was man gigabytes - because at some point someone decided to put some binary files in the repository, which periodically got updated - now years on the repository's about 10GB, and you can't really delete the stuff clogging it up without rewriting history from years prior and making the 200 devs life hell.

Importantly, you do need all that history, because there are commits from the same time that are relevant.
Are these complaints all against DVCS? It seems a lot of them if not all are just shortcomings of currently available offerings (git/mercurial) whereas the author is directing them at DVCS directly.
Samsung Galaxy S6 sacrificed what it does best in its war with Apple
I'll guess that you don't use "provably correct" functional programming out of scorn for trendhopping etc. Am I right?
The trick with the lightbox is that it could probably just occur in the main content pane--as it is now, especially on larger monitors, it looks like it is sized incorrectly.
PEP8 also says "Class names should normally use the CapWords convention."
I started out programming with a Commodore 64 and having instant access to BASIC when I turned on the machine was really awesome. As a professional developer now, I appreciate the low level knowledge that learning on the C64 provided, but the more important thing was low barrier of entry to development tools.

There is a currently a very low barrier of entry access point for programming on everyone's computers currently in the form of the web browser. You can view the source for any web page and change things around in the dev tools and console.

Too many people yearn for the good old days of low level access yet are quick to dismiss Javascript as "toy" language. In the old days BASIC was just a toy too. The "real" programmers wrote their code in assembly.
Another version of this story that I love uses the Russian Navy:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/05/12/417064.aspx
I wish I could play this playlist on YouTube though, as my TV won't let me load this site :-(

Congrats for this, it's superb and really well done. Loved all the videos I watched!
It may work well enough.
Well, I mean, the author goes on to make a bunch of salient points like the difficulty of diffs of nested directories (solved in [1] but not widely implemented) and saving all of the binary blobs in every checkout (solved by [2] which has not "won out").

I think the big thing with DVCSes is that you can pretend you have a client-server model with a handful of directories on your local machine. At one point at my present job I replayed a bunch of SVN history through Hg so that I could by-hand divide the work that had been done into a few named branches; this helped me to figure out where things had "gone wrong" in the project. It was really effective to just have a day of SVN update, hg diff, copy files to ../branch_name, commit to hg, rinse, repeat. What I really needed was indeed the "killer feature" that he's saying -- sane branching and merging -- but the fact that it was all easily contained in my filesystem was a nice plus.

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ecprice/papers/confluent_swat.pdf

[2] http://darcs.net/Internals/CacheSystem#lazy-repositories-and...
In part I have thought about Indie.vc as an option more for the connections to the people, and a bank wouldn't care for investing in us at this point, however people who understand internet business models more likely would.
ESCORT TOURS – Golden Diamond Escort
>In fact, the simplicity of the older systems usually lead to greater stability.

Remember when that control tower in Chicago got attacked by some crazed employee? Do you know why there isn't just a simple DR switch over? Because the system is so antiquated, something like that is too problematic to implement. Thus all the cancelled flights for a week at the world's busiest airport.

>ESPECIALLY when people's lives are on the line.

Its more risky to have a pig with lipstick system run by COBOL graybeards one foot in the grave than to run things properly in a modern system with modern redundancy and modern features. Last I heard, the code that runs many of these systems is non-auditable because its just a pile of spaghetti code on top of spaghetti code. Its "works" in the same way an 80 year lady on her third hip can "walk."
> Qt, JavaFX, Xamarin Forms, any SDL based GUI

I don't want to spend money on the side projects I'm just playing with, but it would be nice to have them cross-platform (including mobile). Do any of those options still apply? IIRC Xamarin is expensive and there's no free way to run Java on iOS? All the SDL-based GUIs I've seen have looked awful.

Qt would be lovely - what does using it from Android Java look like? I remember messing with the Qt Java bindings a while ago and finding them a bit ropey.
The best part of the whole article was the line:

>> "If you say something’s hard, and everyone starts screaming at you—sometimes literally—that it’s easy, then it’s really hard.
(define this-looks-the-best_To-Me true)

(if this-looks-the-best_To-Me
(do
(setq you-like-flexibility true)
(vote-poll :lisp-formatting)))

If you follow the normal Lisp pattern of mostly one case and '-' for separation, allowed because Lisps/s-expressions allow the use of the normally reserved '-', I think you get the clearest code. See Clojure for a Lisp that breaks up the sea of Lots of Irritating Sets of Parenthesis if that bothers you.
>“At Berkshire, we can — without incurring taxes or much in the way of other costs — move huge sums from businesses that have limited opportunities for incremental investment to other sectors with greater promise

This accounts most of his overperformance over others. Insurance companies are big and steady moneymakers in Berkshire and they generate money even in downturns. This means that Buffet has money when prices are cheap. He can remove banks from the equation altogether. That alone is worth of several percentage points in profits above competition.
Conversational English ability. Ability to meet deadlines. Communication skills, particularly with regards to regular progress updates and what is required from the counterparty to meet deadlines. Whatever the inverse of being a flake is.

Self-starter: the ability to drive the work forward without being explicitly directed on every step which needs to happen. (For example, a client who says "Make multi-factor authentication happen." does not want to have to explain to you how to use Twilio and, in many circumstances, doesn't even want to have to make the decision to use Twilio. They just want you to Figure That Out For Me. The successful remote consultant would be able to say "We have options for this. The most straightforward one is using cell phones. I recommend we do that and use Twilio for it -- low cost and we'll be up and running quickly. I estimate two days of work required for integration." "OK." two days pass "As promised, MFA now works in the system. See here. Any comments?")

There exist many developers in the world who would be stumped about that instruction and reply "I need a spec for the multi-factor authentication screens." Often, their expectation for level of detail required in that spec would spell out every form element, database object, SQL query, and JSON POST required to make the feature happen.

I'd recommend not being one of them. You get dramatically better work, clients, and bill rates. (For a further bump on all three dimensions, position yourself as the person who can tell a client that they need to have multi-factor authentication and how they're going to want to have you implement it.)
When are you running something that's optimized to use all of: CPU, memory, storage? Maybe with something like Riak, I suppose.

Compare to one of (reserved instances @ no up-front):

(memory): r3.8xlarge: 32vCPU (xeon e5-2670 v2) / 244GB / 6.4TB @ $1.3760/hr (time to cost inversion with spec rounded $10k server: ~302 days)

(compute): c4.8xlarge: 36vCPU (xeon e5-2666 v3 haswell) / 60GB / EBS storage @ 1.3760/hr (time to cost inversion with spec rounded $10k server: ... ~302 days)

(storage): hs1.8xlarge: 16vCPU / 117GB / 48TB SSD @ $2.5740/hr (time to cost inversion with the 24 of the $10k servers needed to reach that density: ....10 years)

Hell, if storage is your thing, 48TB of 800GB Seagate 1200 SSD's alone would cost you $155,026 -- you wouldn't beat AWS's storage cost here until 6.8 years in. And that's not including the rest of the box to drive them.

> So instead of 100 servers, you need 30, or more probably 20.

Okay, then. $10k * 25 (split the difference, yeah?) vs. 100 * $.05/hr... $250k immediate outlay; you start getting cheaper than AWS (discounting labor, datacenter fees, and replacement hardware -- because I doubt your servers are going to last this long) in just under six years.
I see, thank you for clarifying. Somehow, I think the word "cash flow" gave me the impression that this was based on revenues, not distributions.

Can you clarify what distributions means? So if the founders pay themselves a salary, that counts as distributions?
I thought that one's mind is the API to the human body.
I think you missed the spot. "Just remove the duck" is a pattern not an anti-pattern. What it addresses is the urge of some supervisors to ask for some change just to show that they have done a thorough review, while the said change are actually detrimental to the product.

> memory leaks, off-by-one errors, and mis-spelled variable names

The above don't fall into the review comments that are being avoided as these are valuable suggestions.
The GWT Project didn't get accepted either. I'm not sure what process they use, but we didn't get any favoritism despite >100k active monthly devs.

Perhaps they decided to promote orgs that were even more underserved?
Who Cares about GET vs. POST? NoREST
I studied CS, and mathematical software verification and functional languages where mandatory in my uni.

Unless you are an engineer by accident, I would say you should be as prepared as you could be (albeit new to the field).

Honestly, the stance you share in this topic is why normal people historically has not seen computers and software as a reliable thing and continue to use half-assed software such as Windows for example.
I believe there was some stabbing as well. I remember the queen flirting with the pawns when she captured them before knifing them.