skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Start it as a non-profit or an intentionally unprofitable corporation.
> Hire better people. You’ll be able to compete with top startups for talent, because your startup work environment combined with the mission of making this country a better place will be a powerful call.

Not sure the "startup work environment" of macbook pros and free lunch will really help you compete against startups that offer stock options in a profitable company. Selling people on taking a worse deal in order to make the world a "better place" always seems disingenuous to me whether the goals are altruistic (help the American people!) or commercial (re-invent the tablet!)

If I put on my employee hat for a second, this is what the deal sounds like:

1. Work on uninteresting or incredibly regulation-encumbered projects that can't or won't be measured on customer satisfaction. Where do complaints about healthcare.gov go? How are you as an employee of the contractor that made it able to respond to those complaints? At least when its a product 1) people can go to a competing product (show failure), or 2) people can use it because they genuinely want to (show success) and not because its the only game in town.

2. No potential massive IPO (per the description here).

3. Very unlikely you'll get the actual cool perks of adding quirky features you guys come up with together from analyzing customers. Its probably going to be a super refined spec, decided by a bunch of politicians, and since you're working at the lowest bid anyways even if you could afford to work on cool genuine ideas you have, you probably can't afford it.

4. Huge potential for the project to fail for political reasons anyways. (or you'll have to work with other gov contractors on a different part of the project)

5. The reality that some component of the company will have to become good at the "gov contracting game".
What do you mean by 'isomorphic app' ?
I love angular 1.x but can't recommend it given how its team is ready to break everything to follow the latest fads of javascript development. I want something stable,not something that will drastically change with each version. I certainly don't want something "for the future" that requires an asset pipeline because ES6 is "cooler". Truth is, I love angular first and foremost for its dependency injection, but since I wrote my own container, I will probably ditch it,sooner or later.
Yeah, as a music consumer I'm looking forward to using the next dozen music distribution platforms.
www.palantir.com

Seriously, a point-by-point real world counterargument of your comment.
The alternate of frameworks is libraries. Which gives you better overall control while still hiding the details.
Also, in case you want to see the guts of this machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNVIgsbYrA
It has been covered by USAToday, NBC News, etc. If it's not legit, it's a reasonably elaborate hoax. Though the source always seems to be the media company in question, I guess it's still actually up in the air. But, tweets have mentioned Glen Greenwald and others who would be among the most capable of debunking it, and most likely to do so, if it's fake.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chelsea-manning-joins-tw...

http://news.yahoo.com/supporters-help-chelsea-manning-starts...
Yeah, I know of at least one company who spec'd their gateway module for something like 20% message bridging, but expanded use mean they're way beyond that and facing the limitations of their original design. :)
> The hardest part will be understanding the world of contractors

This point cannot be emphasized enough. I've dealt with Medicaid bids and the amount of regulation one must adhere to is unfathomable. This unfortunately makes his next point just as difficult:

> Hire the best computer scientists and data nerds to improve the government from the outside.

Data nerds want to play with data. Comp Sci folks love algorithms and novel implementations. Neither of them like reading 300 page annotated Word documents with multiple revisions about every little thing a system should do, especially when the requirements are not always rational.

So the missing requirement in this list is to first hire a bunch of experienced analysts, project managers, and people who can do the paperwork and make them the bridge between the client and the coders. I would love to work on pure tech. for complex Govt. problems but I do not want the headache of HL7 and MITA 3.0 requirements.

The moment you have a good business team, you will find willing developers. Without a business team with experience, connections, and negotiation skills, you will have a hard time building the product, let alone sell it.
Something to keep in mind is that music "ownership" may be a generational thing. My parents were members of the silent generation (born in the 30s) and they owned very few physical records. And it's not to say they didn't love music, they did -- but the way they enjoyed music was listening to the radio. So if you had a love of opera and classical music you'd listen to WQXR 24/7 (here in NYC) which isn't too different than a millennial who is into streaming.

As a Gen X member we grew up imitating Boomers by buying music in our youth (see side note below). But something to keep in mind is that unlike digital music, this was very much a tactile experience. This was because you were by the physical album as much as the music itself. And if you look at those albums you realize that the package acts as a mini-poster so it was really merchandise (as much as buying a t-shirt).

Also in a pre-digital age you'd get the lyrics included with the album as well. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but in a pre-Google era getting your hand on the lyrics was something that you'd have to work at if you didn't own the album (you might have to go to a sheet music shop, and those weren't in every town).

So streaming (or what we use to call radio) may in fact be the natural order of things. Part of this may also be that music as a medium isn't on the cutting edge of culture anymore. We tend to forget that from say the 60s until the late 80s music was leading the way as a voice for cultural change, but sadly as rock as a genre is now about 65 years old, and even rap is about 35 years old.

So I think the biggest challenge for the music industry isn't technology at this point, but focusing on how to be culturally relevant again. So it's not about a decline in digital sales, but a decline in connecting with their audience.

Side note: It should be noted that while Gen X did buy records we tend to forget that in the 80s the music industry was terrified by declining sales which were attributed to the youth market spending their money on new things like video games. Of course we loved music as much as previous generations did, but thanks to MTV we were experiencing it also as a streaming medium.
Agreed, even using a fraction of remaining oil reserves is dangerous for civilization.

In a sense, these are all symptoms of the underlying problems: population growth, industry growth, consumption of resources (both non-renewable and renewable) at rates that cannot be sustained, and worst of all, the reluctance to think clearly about the longer term and take necessary action.
Louis CK created his very own for his comedy and I prefer it for sure, I know he does as well. You can still get it from all the normal channels, there will just be channels that you can get it better and more direct. I hope it doesn't turn into exclusives though and into a mess, it could if the labels keep with their greed.
Sorry, should have clarified "code-less". I definitely don't like logic in templates (although React is making me re-think that as a strict policy). But I actually meant code as in any code. A line in PHP might be this:

<a href="<?php echo $some_url ?>">Some link</a>

So that "echo" is the code. And the same thing in Jinja is this:

<a href="{{ some_url }}">Some link</a>

In Jinja, it's only HTML + the names of variables (which I guess you could call "data"). I can now take that line and use it with any language that supports Jinja-style syntax (PHP, Node, Python, etc.) It's also not unlikely that a designer will know it.

Also, sometimes when you use PHP, you have to sacrifice correctness or speed for readability. You don't have that problem when you're running templates that were compiled to PHP, rather than hand-written PHP.

Finally, template inheritance is absolutely amazing. Can't live without it now.
I certainly hope those aren't accessible! That's safety-critical hardware, I don't want some overconfident geek messing up their car's driving systems.
I think this is useful for learning how to defend against those trying to influence you. As one of the top salespeople in my field, I can confidently say this tactic is not a necessity.
No, you're missing the whole point. Intelligence doesn't matter because everyone is smart who applies to Google.
I'm relatively certain that despite not seeking an IPO, Palantir is not a nonprofit organization (a key part of the proposal in this article). Maybe I missed that memo though, can you point to their page so I can make a tax-deductible donation?
I rarely ever purchased music. And yet, thanks to Spotify I've been paying ~$10/mo for the last 4 years. For all the hate it gets, its turned people who rarely ever paid for music into paying for it every month.
Does HN still have those frustrating title renaming rules? If so this would be a good time to insist on using them.
That's so bizarre to me. I'm pretty much with Penny Arcade on this: "it's basically infinity dollars." [1] I mean, the idea of "owning" a digital file is a bit nebulous, but streaming offers nothing to me.

Though I'm completely the opposite when it comes to movies, where I'm perfectly happy with streaming. So who knows.

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/05/15
Reminds me of my son's 1st encounter with a balloon. He was in a phase where he liked to drop everything on the floor. We were at a restaurant and he was given a balloon. The look on his face when he "dropped" it was priceless.
> I really don't get what people mean when they say they're against frameworks. Your app that you're making with no framework...how are things structured? Do you just repeat yourself everywhere?

So, there are frameworks and there are libraries. With a framework, you use the structure provided by the framework, and hook pieces of your code into it; with a library, you structure your code to your problem, and use libraries to provide functionality.

Frameworks are generally easier to get started with: they provide a lot, and their pieces generally work well together. But inevitably, the day will come when you need to do something not envisioned by your framework, and then you're stuck: it can be arbitrarily difficult, painful and/or low-performance to do what you need. That last point is also worth mentioning: because a framework tries to be good at providing the same structure for a lot of different problems, it inevitably is a jack of all trades and a master of none. This can end up meaning poor performance, due to needing to call lots of functions to do simple things (imagine some hellacious Java framework with AbstractFactoryVisitorSingletons), or it can be a pain on the programmer, or both.

Meanwhile, libraries are just that…libraries of code that the programmer can use to implement needed functionality. How he stitches them together is up to him.

With a framework, your code lives within someone else's structure; using libraries, other people's code is called by yours.

'How are things structured?' However you want!

Read http://tom.lokhorst.eu/2010/09/why-libraries-are-better-than... for more, and http://www.evanjones.ca/frameworks-necessary-for-large-scale... for an opposing view.
I didn't invest a whole lot of time reading about it, but when they ended support for XP a lot of whining was from business owners who either couldn't or were too cheap to upgrade.
Has this system been committed to a modeling package (like COMSOL, for example) so it could be rapidly optimized for particular use cases?
Not out of a box. There's not a huge difference in environments but automatic porting was never a design goal. React Native follows the mantra "learn once, write anywhere" instead of "write once run anywhere". The main differences are:

* React Native has its own primitive components (Text or View) instead of primitives that map to standard HTML elements (span, div).

* React Native's runtime environment won't have all the browser APIs (DOM, navigation, web storage).

* React Native uses a subset of CSS and exposes it through the JS API instead of relying on the browser's styling (and separate CSS files).

That said, porting components is trivial. If you have a library of core components (Buttons, Menus, TabBars, etc.) then porting just those to the native implementation gets you most of the way there.

It's also possible to alias Text => span, View => div, etc. and use React Native's css-layout library on the web. But that won't help for legacy applications.
You're right. For me, it does point to the fact that most predictions are wrong at some point, right at some point, and irrelevant before and after. The things that was a laptop then (5kg beasts like this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000) were nothing like today's machines. The T1100 seems to have been the first close thing.

It's impressive to think that it took 20 years from that article for notebooks to outsell pc. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/28/laptops-sa... also fun to see how net books are a focus of attention for that article.
I wonder what level of accordance will be needed for a wearable to seriously compete with the current mode of computing.
All the points you raise are about significant issues and you are right in all the concerns you have. But why do you think that we can't combine flexible jobs with all the benefits of the traditional full-time work? Why can't we, as a society, go one step forward towards what we want and set the standard to be that freelancers get insured properly, for example?

* Mind you; we are talking about a particular industry here and we start the discussion with all the facts about our industry. Artists, for example, still don't have a lower-wage.
Note this article is from October 2014.
Actually, the author makes some really good points in the conclusion, "The windows could be individually expanded, of course, or the text in them scrolled, in order to see more. But that took considerably more time and effort than simply thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Windows were a great idea until you compared them with the old-fashioned, uncomputerized desk, at which point it became obvious that they were simply too complicated to be dealt with efficiently. They made life more difficult, not easier, and they will continue to do so until a video display the size of a desktop can make visible a number of complete documents, each in its own window. That is something unlikely to occur, if for no other reason than cost, for at least a decade."

It's true, that windows really started to take off around 1993/1994, with windows for workgroups - coincident with higher resolution monitors. It's also true (to this day), that there are challenges with dealing with documents on a tablet/display screen, that don't exist when you have a sheaf of papers in front of you.

I personally haven't printed anything in 2+ years, but I know there are a lot of people who just can't handle not having everything at their fingertip.

All in all, no as bad a series of predictions as one might think.
I find the the "extra" changes can usually be nailed down and put into a new quote.

Another advantage of fixed price quotes is that you don't need to worry about "do I charge for fixing bugs", or "do I charge for phone calls/emails/conference calls". All of that is included in the quote, making things simpler and fairer for everyone.
The artists are the ones that let the labels make all the sales/straming money. Take 10 decent artists, the label says "ok we like all of you, whoever will sign for the lowest % of music sales/streaming will get signed and promoted and has a good chance to get famous and make that much more from concerts, etc.". Of course they end up making all the sales/streaming money. That's not evil that's just how it works.
They're not public, but I'm pretty sure they're not underbidding anyone. Nor are they bidding on the giant IT projects. Seems more like they're doing specialized work in niches where the government is actively seeking novel solutions (and by the standards of government contracts, these are small projects so they can get away with less specification).
Price is huge. 7,000 for something that doesn't even run the same software? And weighs 5+ kg?

They did to some extent have that $5 option in in the form Of a few floppies in a brief case as the article points out.
Palantir is the exception, not the rule. Most software built within governments, (I work on the finance side of tech projects for the city of New York) are basic crud apps that have to integrate with very old data systems. Most developers are "consultants" that are treated as code monkeys because managers have absolutely no idea about building software - for example, there was a CIO who didn't know what a stored procedure was and didn't understand why they exist after a developer spent time explaining what one was. There are smart developers working on projects, but they are typically not given the freedom to be creative.

EDIT: relevant essay by PG http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Shoutout for Ampersand.js which was mentioned in the article. The modularity is really nice for keeping things flexible so I can swap out parts as our app evolves.

http://ampersandjs.com
Show HN: JS, EcmaScript 6 Playground which runs your JavaScript when you code
Agreed on all points. Compelling.

Kind of a scandal: "US's largest leaker broadcasting from military prison".

I wonder how long the Twitter access will last.
Okay, here is a completely open offer. Somebody says: "give me $10,000 and I will give you nothing back in exchange." I would call this a scam. Not a very good scam, but a scam.
I laughed and cried.
It seems it's a good thing I made a resolution to really grok JavaScript during 2015.

Also, sad to see Ruby usage go down. It's my day-to-day language. But then again, it's just a language/tool.
I think the only people that are really angry about Spotify are the artists. It seems like the way their payments are calculated, they get the short end of the stick.
why don't they send that first coding test to people to do at home
Hadoop: Buenas prácticas de seguridad
I cannot emphasize this enough. To bid for a government contract is a MASSIVE undertaking. Just to win the bid is very, very difficult. The RFP, RFQ, ITB are just a small part of the process and the evaluation process of each bid is not merely the lowest price, but also a combination of responsiveness, history of responsibility and the politics of a selection committee.
Not entirely relevant, but want to offer a different perspective on the topic. As a recruiter, I also used to try out different pricing strategies. It's tough and the winner has continually been contingency (only pay if you hire my candidate). So there are multiple forms of "value-based" pricing and the sky's really the limit in certain forms.
I go to shows, buy vinyl when I can (albeit rarely), and download and stream for everything else. This is what most music junkies do these days, I guess.
I still get asked to sign in when I view that link, but that's besides the point: I wish paywall'd articles weren't accepted here.

Maybe there is a place for paywalls in this world, I just don't think we should be posting links to them here.
Not that this excuses Spotify, but artists got the short end of the stick in the traditional system too.
Right now, it's event driven: input triggers an event, event is handled in component, component state is updated. For the one-way case (that I think is pretty awesome): a zone is set up in the component to detect changes locally in the component (even changes in setTimeout) and update the components template only.

I think there's room for a 2-way like wrapper for the common input use-case (ala ngModel). Still digging in though.

(way more info on change detection in v2: http://victorsavkin.com/post/110170125256/change-detection-i...)
(I worked on healthcare.gov)

Some of my colleagues are doing just this. Stay tuned.
Manning isn't using Twitter directly. An outside group is transcribing phone calls.
Don't Let Techno-Hedonism Waste Your Potential
Congratulations to the music publishing industry. After years of claiming that we didn't actually own the songs we purchased, we finally decided not to purchase songs anymore.
Oh I didn't expect many, I just wanted to know what's been published that uses React. I want to test the apps and see if they live up to the hype. For the past six years, I've tried so many non-Apple frameworks for building iOS apps that I gave up about 6 months ago after Famo.us.
Ah, thought you were talking about some technical limitation. That's a shame, one would think an alternative to LLVM that is not so C-specific would find more use.
Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts:

- the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years)

- the price always comes down

- "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.
I don't believe I'm changing the target. I'm trying to explain that the way that you see the 7th Amendment -- as giving you an ultimate right to a jury trial in all civil cases over $20 -- is simply not what the 7th Amendment does. You can make this argument, that you've asserted $20 in damages and you want your jury, but you will lose. If you would like to see your argument addressed specifically by a court, in the context of arbitration, have a look at https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=842506548303475....

As far as your deposition goes, you don't get to ask any questions. It will last all day, all you get to do is answer questions. You get to ask questions when you take depositions, and you can ask all of the questions that you mentioned, but it won't get you far. After all the discovery is done, they're going to have pretty good circumstantial evidence that you checked the checkbox by virtue of signing up for the account, and you're going to have literally no evidence showing that you didn't. This is not going to make the judge believe you.

Look, at the end of the day, here's what you're up against: 1) a strong policy in favor of arbitration agreements (courts use those exact words in their decisions), 2) a judge who wants cases of her docket, 3) big business with limitless lawyering resources who want to make absolutely sure that the arbitration clause will be enforced.

I'm not saying that you can't beat it. It's possible, and sometimes companies do lose on their motions to compel arbitration. But what I am saying is that you will usually lose. This is a really, really bad thing for consumer rights, and it allows businesses to engage in flagrant unlawful and fraudulent activity with no fear that they will ever have to answer for it out of their wallets. The solution to this problem is not to cover your eyes and ears, ignore the doctrine, and insist that you can beat these clauses in court. You can't. The answer is to get Congress to crack down on predatory arbitration clauses so that businesses have to answer for their wrongdoing in courts like the rest of us do. Maybe that's just as lofty a goal, but at least it recognizes that there is a problem, and it needs to be fixed.
The whole Palantir vs DCGS-A thing seems to fall under both the underbidding and large (although not massive) projects. They're definitely fighting an uphill battle for it though.
Making SVGs Responsive with CSS