skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author is very welcome to start a company that builds software according to these principles. In some domains (databases, network stacks, middleware), he could probably make a killing. In other domains (say, social web applications), he'd get clobbered.

I think this is the problem with appeals to professional ethics. Software is not one profession, and not one industry. It's labeled as such because the software industry changes much more quickly than the job categorization industry does. Nowadays, there's a huge difference between people who write software that helps planes stay in the air vs. those who let you search the web vs. those who write critical storage infrastructure for other companies vs. those who write software that lets you throw sheep at your friends vs. those who let you order from the grocery store with your phone. The best practices and rules of thumb for one industry don't transfer over to another industry. And it's not fair to consumers to make them deal with blindingly fast software that doesn't actually do what they want when they're quite willing to put up with slow, bloated software that does.
Same here! It's perfectly possible to write quality Java code, without trying to cram everything into Spring.
Visual Studio Online is basically TFS online. Think github + CI + Kanban board + Issue tracking online.
Hype Machine's 10th Anniversary Redesign
> ...you did it by accounting all worldwide profit as for US franchises that is not a "correction". [sic]

The corporation is not debating raising wages worldwide, only in the US. Their total corporate revenue (including international revenue) can be included in the calculation of whether it is "affordable". But only the workers in the US should be included in the calculation.

> Profit is not guaranteed!

The focal point of the discussion is that the current distribution of earnings marginalizes the hourly workforce. It does not have to be this way. The napkin math supports the idea that changing the proportions in the distribution could be reasonably accomplished. Furthermore, the napkin math ignores price increases, which would likely be part of any more sophisticated projections.

> That's a complete nonsequitor. And moreover it's a frankly stupid accusation of me you're trying to implicitly make.

People are not "efficient" in the economic sense. They do not make perfect decisions for themselves, even given perfect information. They will compete with each other irrationally, and even against their own best interests. The efficiency of capitalism exploits those traits. We ought to use reasonable policies and regulations to address that.

> The rich may be rich, but divide their riches up somehow perfectly efficiently amongst everybody, and we all get a lot less than our generally-innumerate intuitions are telling us we would.

I'm not arguing for carving up the wealth of the rich and redistributing it. But hourly workers should share in the gains wrought by their labor. As it stands, the top 1% takes an amazingly disproportionate share. [1]

[1] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/22/...
Ask HN: Job feels like 15 variations of a pushup vs. a full body workout
I work at a major tech company here in the bay area where my team works on a layer that's really important to the business. I've worked on this team for nearly 2 years now and feel like I've plateaued in my learning severely. Reading technical blogs, while illuminating, only catalyzed my understanding that what my team is working on is perhaps the most cookie cutter restful service you can expect from any enterprise-y java shop without any frills. This wasn't terrible, because I started the job not even knowing how to do that, but as time has gone by I wonder whether sticking around here will ever allow me to truly "level up" as an engineer. To temporarily combat this, I decided to move my contributions up the value chain beyond features and tackle longer term engagements that would have multiplier effects across the team (architectural enhancements, improving the quality infrastructure, better monitoring) which were fulfilling temporarily, but still felt like I was trying to address a symptom with a bandaid but not the real problem.

I tried to work out a deal with my boss where I'd get more "freedom" to pick and choose projects strategically, but it soon became abundantly clear that my version of "interesting work" and his version of "interesting work" were poles apart. I wonder if I'm just taking crazy pills thinking how other engineers on my team are fine doing the same damn thing every single day for years (with little difference between what a junior and senior person works on). It feels like I've doing 15 different variations of a pushup exercise, when in reality I should be doing a more comprehensive full-body workout. It isn't about being a full-stack developer, but really working on more interesting problems regardless of the language/framework space. Has anyone experience something similar? What do you recommend I do? I pursue projects in my free time but I can't help shake off the feeling that I'd like a higher learning ROI from my employer.
I've been hearing so much about Haskell and category theory, and how they can change the way you think about programming. Thanks so much for this.
> but like the "butt" terminology, I die a little bit every time one of these marketing terms gets coined.

There's a silver lining: the developer for the Cloud to Butt Plus extensions can have more work.
Can you explain how that would help?

Also, it appears that it is indeed about allowing compiled binaries to run unmodified.

> Specifically, Windows Mobile (and yes, that's now officially the name for Windows on phones and sub-8 inch tablets) will include an Android runtime layer that'll let them run existing Android apps (both Java and C++) unmodified.... Astoria will in principle work with any old APK, without requiring the developer to do anything but publish the app in the store—as long as the APK sticks to the APIs that Astoria will provide.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/29/mic...
Global Wind Patterns Visualized
Secret Shutting Down
That's fine, but don't call yourself a software engineer. Programmer or developer sure, but engineers understand the underlying layers. Otherwise when shit really hits the fan you will only be able to throw your hands up and consult stack overflow.
You've listed three very different things there.

For Swift, compare it to C# (depends on personal preference)

For XCode, compare it to Visual Studio (IMO, VS is light years ahead)

For Mac Native, compare to the .NET runtime (IMO .NET is better but it's not as clear cut)
PowerShell ISE is pretty nice. I use it as my main shell.
This looks like a excellent browser. It has a sleak interface and from all the news I hear it may support some very powerful web technologies and will finally be rapid release.

Still, it's a shame that it's still very much close source and Windows only.

"...rather than just open-sourcing EdgeHTML and letting anyone contribute, they’re approving individual “major web entities” in a piecemeal fashion. Microsoft is twisting itself into pretzels to get some of the benefits of being open-source without actually going open-source." - Chris Hoffman | PCWorld
Krugman is far from a dry writer. He just writes about a topic that too many people find dry and inscrutable, sadly.
If I had to make a bet I would predict that we will find that there is life in a number of locations within the solar system (Mars, some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn) and they will all be related to life on earth. The Earth has a cosmic cold and has been sneezing in all directions for billions of years.

One of the interesting things about bacteria is that there are two major lineages here on earth (the archea and the true bacteria). Some people have speculated that one arose on Earth and the other on Mars, but I doubt we will ever find good evidence for this speculation.
Introducing Microsoft Edge: The New Windows 10 Browser
Data Storage Startup Infinidat Raises $150M at $1.2B Valuation
removed it... I just don't like when I sound like a company shill. In this case imho the editor itself actually runs than my trials with brackets and atom... The startup time is actually tolerable, and the editing seems to work a little better too. A few days will determine if I go back to sublime again.
Welcoming Developers to Windows 10
Honestly, I dislike the approach. I don't want to tell my mysql <hello, please allow the user foo to authenticate itself with the password bar> and my webapp <hello webapp, please use the user foo and the password bar for the mysql over there>.

I want to tell the system <look, I have a user foo, and the webapp over there needs access to the mysql over here with that user. Make it so.>

I don't need to know the password my application uses to access the database. I don't WANT that password. No human should ever see this password. And heck, if the system wants to, just swithc passwords every 60 minutes. I don't want to care.
Once a month is way too often. Even if your downtime requirements are "so high", once a month is ridiculous.

For the sake of this example, let's assume you have customers that depend on your server being up, for the product/service they're paying you for.

Tell the customers that you plan on rebooting once a month, and see how they feel about it.
I have to disagree to that one needs syntax highlighting and autofilling to be productive in Agda. I have written a fair amount of agda code in Acme, which has neither. Rather I find these bells and whistles distracting — and prefer giving my complete attention to the task at hand.

I think that writing agda code interactively in Emacs is fine, but it is certainly not the only way to write good agda code. In fact writing without the interactive support encourages better code structure. One is more likely to factor a complicated line into several help terms (using 'where', for example), which makes the code more readable.
8 Reasons Successful People Are Choosing to Wear the Same Thing Every Day
My understanding is that Agda puts much less emphasis on general programming. It's more focused on proving.
"A takeover of Salesforce, which had a market value of nearly $44 billion as of Monday’s close, would be the largest ever of a software company"

There are only a few companies out there who could do this...
Thank you, I saw the erowid page before I posted and only read up to "more than 100 times a normal moderate dose of LSD" before I asked for a citation. Well, at least we know one shouldn't take 3200x the normal dose ;)
It may or may not be a good idea to have Android laptops, but what is going to 'force' Google to do that?
I'm curious, why is my version an after the fact justification, but yours isn't?
How does a developing nation become post-industrialized with basic literacy/numeracy. Honest question.
Thanks for the opportunity. This is an interesting project, and the linked graphs are intriguing:

http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/#

Questions: How are DALYs attributed to various risk factors? Assuming this is extracted from the data itself, what model do you use to isolate causation from correlation?
As an American it's in my interests to have a powerful United States. Sadly the ruling elite of the country have been fixated on military power. I would much prefer policies that promoted soft power, or the ability to co-opt rather than coerce.

Our global tech leadership would be enhanced if the NSA reoriented with a focus much more on its defensive mission, rather than it's offensive capability.

Freedom is our brand, and they are diluting the hell out of it.

Civilization IV is a great teacher of the concept of soft power, known as culture in the game. When you're citizens are happy and your cities are the envy of the world, other nations want to join with you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
Deconstructing AI-Complete Question-Answering: why toy tasks ain't sufficient
There's a very cool implementation of (multi-threaded!) OCaml for the JVM: http://www.ocamljava.org/
What's the boilerplate involved with nested node_modules? Theoretically, it's a waste of hard drive space, but that's rarely a concern.
I thought Googles experiments have showed that this is less of an issue that what people generally think. Most networks pass UDP traffic just fine. And most failures occur early phase enabling reasonable fallback policy to TCP
Apps get full access to Windows APIs. They don't get full access to Google Play APIs.
"See, Bitcoin isn't just for illegal drug purposes. It's also for illegally circuventing currency controls!"

Psychic prediction. In ten years, there will be some jurisdictions where possesion of a copy of the bitcoin ledger will be a criminal offense.
It forces the developer to scale horizontally
The issue is not in 3%. Whole system should be designed with "performance in mind". It's architectural decisions, not just 3% of code, hidden in few fancy functions.
Web app should be designed to insert caching layer or replace logging tool or error handling or email sending. When all is hardcoded into one huge monolith "it works", it will not be so important where are these slow 3%. And when each piece is optimized to be as performant as possible, only then whole app will be awesomely performant. It's not always necessary on the beginning, but to make it possible, each part should be replaceable to more performant and whole architecture should be designed "with performance in mind".
As GNU lover I cannot understand this much of hate toward Microsoft , Why ? Microsoft is the only not spying on you , Google and NSA and every other big name does too.So if you want blame someone there is more name's applicable to blame ( like NSA , Government , Google and etc ) to blame than Microsoft.
Hiring a Software Engineering Manager
FBI agreements with Harris Corp/Boeing and meeting minutes re: Stingrays
May I please have your faster than nlogn sorting algorithm
In dense cities, a lot of property is used for living space (that's what makes them dense) and supply is high (likewise, that's what makes them dense).

As for cause and effect, I'm not ignoring anything. Cause and effect simply doesn't matter here. Are cities dense because they're where people want to live, or do people want to live there because they're dense? It doesn't matter; in the end, people prefer to live there. If people want to live there because it's dense, then it's obvious that people like density. If it's dense because people want to live there, then that means more people get to live in a desirable place, and the fact that people try to go there means that it's worth the extra cost. Either way: density is better.
The JVM is much more sophisticated than the CLR. Its GCs and JIT are many, many years ahead of the CLR's.
Down votes for pointing this out? Must be Microsoft employees or partners. Wish HN had a way of filtering votes given the source domain. I have the karma, but the chilling effect on new users could be nontrivial.
It seems Microsoft has influenced JavaScript/ES v6 with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. Given the vast TypeScript code based that MS wrote for SharePoint 365, Visual Studio Online/Code, etc. it seems more than logical. But, read on:

BRENDAN [Eich (JavaScript creator)]: Again, TypeScript is
smart because it’s embracing and extending. Let’s hope
Microsoft doesn’t try to extinguish. That’s the third E.

JAMISON: [Laughs]

BRENDAN: I don’t think they will. I think they actually
bought into JavaScript at some level. And I’ve talked to
people like Anders Hejlsberg about this.

But Brendan Eich answered to my thread by replying to a parent:

ES6 and the Harmony agenda influenced TypeScript. Where
TS went its own way on things like open modules, MS has
promised to track the Ecma standard versions ASAP.
In particular, TS classes were purely an extension to
ES6's design, while ES6 was not frozen. There was not
feedback the other way, at least not phrased in terms of
TS -- the MS folks on TC39 had to make more generalized
arguments for changing the draft ES6 spec.

Maybe after more people know about Visual Studio Code some others share the "German angst" about their common business tactics a bit too. I would prefer if they don't turn JavaScript into C# Trojan horse style. Hopefully things have changed since Satya Nadella took over.

You can read the full thread there, it's just 3 days old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442011
That's probably a good lesson in why one (i.e. me) shouldn't switch units in the middle of something.
Preparing food at home is not actually cheaper than Macdonalds -- I defy you to create a double cheeseburger for $1. (The beef alone would cost over $1 at Walmart -- roughly $6/lb. Macdonald's gets its beef a lot cheaper.) The food at home is possibly healthier, but healthy food is even more expensive. That said, I doubt people will baulk at paying $1.05 (after all they are paying sales tax on it in many cases).
Update: for those of you who feel like some practice on a real AWS environment would help, here is my hands-on Laboratory.

https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web-services/labs/aws-machin...
Secret Shuts Down
It was designed by telcos for telcos; I don't know if they ever got around to using it. It can't be used in the normal Internet because it doesn't pass through NATs.
Not to mention, on mobile browsers as soon as you zoom in the text, to save the wasted space with the logo on the left, the logo also gets bigger and move to the middle of the screen, covering the text.
MS has always had great ideas and technology waiting in the wings. The problem was always they could never ship it.

Nadella's contribution is to make it possible to ship this sort of thing. Shipping this under Ballmer would have been a miracle.
Zoom-Transition Between NSViews on OS X (OpenSource)
That's incredibly naive. Most business owners won't eat the cost. They'll cut hours. How do I know? Because I used to work in the fast food industry as a GM. Whenever CA increased the min wage, the first thing our owner would do is ask us how much more this was going to cost us, then he'd instruct us to cut the number of hours scheduled. Because in fast food, it's not like it only affects the workers making minimum wage, it bumps the entire pay scale. So if min wage is raised by $1, everyone working hourly gets a $1 bump. For a restaurant that has say 100 man hours of labor a day, that means $100 extra cost per day right out of the owner's pocket. Multiply that by 365 and you have a pissed off owner. He can't always raise prices, and labor costs are the largest controllable expense. So what happens is that each store manager is told that they need to make everyone work harder, and they have to cut $100 worth of labor each day. So the survivors get more money, but they get worked harder; the losers get their hours cut, or they don't get hired as the positions/hours are not replaced when attrition occurs. TANSTAAFL!
> If you reduce the value of your currency by 25%

It is the dollar that has appreciated, not the yen that has depreciated. The dollar has appreciated against most currencies in the last year – probably because people expect interest rate hikes this year. It has nothing to do with Japan per se.
Announcing Slow 4
Hmm, I don't like this name, it's still trying to be something special.

I surmised from the chatter until now that Edge would be called "Internet", "My Internet", or "Browse" or some other non-program entity thing. And quite frankly, that made me shiver a bit for Firefox and (less so) for Chrome.

See, what if Microsoft plain-wrapped their browser, made it seamless and ubiquitous? Perhaps this is what they were envisioning with the original Active Desktop style integration? (And no, I'm not talking about Metro tiles, blurgh.) A successful plain-wrapped browser is like an unstoppable ideology for me, there's no name to put to the enemy. Internet Explorer could be demonized - it had a marketdroid-crafted icon, it had a NAME.

I honestly can't conceive of what such a plain-wrapped browser experience would look because I like having multiple browser windows and I like tabbed browser windows. It does need to work something like an application, at least for me. For that matter, we can't continue Fisher Price'ing up our user experiences, apps like browsers need to be productivity focused and not cater to the 3 year olds and other neophytes. That Metro Internet Explorer browser experience in Windows 8 was a joke. Take up way WAY less screen real estate with the browser chrome, cut it out with hip, annoying animations, show me my information and be quick about it.

I feel the PRODUCT NAME needs to go - Edge needs to fade away and just be there in the background as a vaguely recognizable, essential, but rather bland and uninteresting part of the overall computing experience. If Edge did fade into the background and become this trusty thing with its own signature user experience and pleasant signature flourishes or painting style or whatever, then it would more easily make the jump to new devices, autos, televisions, billboards, etc. The exact same bland, trusty experience would be expected everywhere.

I feel egos probably drove this naming decision. Oh well, already stumbling out the gate; a visionary needs to wrest control. Hopefully not another opportunity for meaningful change squandered.
20 bullets on AI
They gave an elephant a very large dose, and it died, but they don't know if it was the LSD or the activity or the medical treatment that killed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD

> "Tusko" was also the name of a male Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962,[4] researchers from the University of Oklahoma injected (human use involves oral ingestion) 297 mg of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to him, which is over 1,000 times the dose typical of human recreational use. Within five minutes he collapsed to the ground and one hour and forty minutes later he died. It is believed that the LSD was the cause of his death, although some speculate that the drugs the researchers used in an attempt to revive him may have contributed to his death.
Plus, unlike what most people envision on here, Microsoft intends companies to push AllSigned or RemoteSigned, rather than Unrestricted.

So the company can push their CA and new PS policy in a single GPO, and then all internal PS scripts are signed using an internal CA generated code signing certificate.

This sounds complex but it is actually as simple as running Set-AuthenticodeSignature on each script using the code signing certificate.
New Tools and Runtimes for Any Platform or Device
Requiring any disruption to take broad effect before saying it's a 'disruption' makes that word useless. That would be like saying a crack in a wall doesn't matter till the wall falls over. The real question is whether this is hairline crack that the rebar of their society will keep in place or if it's a crack that's unchecked and will continue to grow?
There is no better way to get to the top of HN than by writing something so deadpan sarcastic that all parties think you're secretly on their side.
Hacker News Frontpage with a 150 point threshold
That is copyright infringement ... a whole different case ...
Learning Idris
Washington believes, and there's probably some truth to it, that the ability to project soft power comes after, or at least in tandem with, hard power guarantees.

The US utilizes soft power all the time and is and has been heavily invested in soft power. But soft power taken too far looks like coups or staged dissent, and America's soft power can sometimes be powerful enough to look like - or actually be - this.

That is to say that the overuse of soft power, or perhaps just the clumsy wielding of it, also dilutes the brand.

The recent investment in Nepal is a great example of soft power done right (IMO).