skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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.

It matters quite a bit when the issue of desirability of dense cities was raised as support for the claim uphtread that "cities need to get more dense"; if desirability is a cause of density rather than its effect, the desirability of existing dense cities does not support the claim that not-currently-dense cities need to get more dense.
Good grief, I didn't plan to defend Macdonald's, but this sounds delusional to me. If you're trying to get food cheaply, unless your labor is pretty much free and you're incredibly efficient I very much doubt this is true.

Assuming I were to prepare a home cooked meal from scratch, the chances I would get away with less than 1h of labor (including driving to markets, shopping, and preparation) alone justifies eating out (at a restaurant, forget Macdonalds).

Certainly eating home-cooked food is healthier. And it's probably more delicious. And cooking can be enjoyable, but not as a daily grind. But don't make the cost argument unless your time is free.
Cinder is hiring a hands-on EE (board level)-devices to cook amazing food
> manage your memory

BEAM has a load of different memory allocators. Reading this [0] gives an idea of the piece of work the BEAM vm is.

[0]: http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394545171...
I'm guessing you were not around in the nineties and early twothousands when MS was screwing us (Open Source) over big time.

As for the spying bit; I don't believe that one iota. Of course they spy as much as everyone else, they just hide/spin/sell it better.
I wonder how UI accessibility for people with disabilities, e.g. blind people, is going to work for these ported apps. That is, will the UI of an ANdroid app ported to Windows Phone be as accessible as it was on Android, or as accessible as a native Windows Phone equivalent would be? Hopefully they didn't do this half-assed and ignore accessibility altogether.
I think it depends on what kind of application you're building, as well as other factors like team size, experience, and time. Microservices aren't magic pixie dust you sprinkle over your applications to suddenly make them simpler and "web-scale". They have a cost in management and maintenance. You can end up taking microservices too far, just as you can end up making the monolith too monolithic.

Having your core API all be part of a single application is great. It's my impression that for a lot of applications you can't really achieve good decoupling of resources, so trying to break it up into multiple services ends up bringing you a lot of pain. Maybe this is my lack of experience showing, I'd love to be proven wrong.

I'm currently a fan of having a big/medium app that does everything that cannot be decoupled easily, and breaking everything else into services. This is a happy medium, because you don't have to worry about managing tons of services, but you also don't have to worry about having an absurdly complicated monolith.
If your network is so about to fall apart under load, or so broken due to network issues, or your servers are so overloaded that you start seeing appreciable packet loss with UDP internally at a site, then chances are the last thing you want is loading your system even more and slowing things down by retransmitting samples that are obsolete in a couple of seconds anyway....

Serious exceptions, sure, retry. But serious exceptions are rare. What's not rare is sampled memory usage, cpu usage etc..
Here is Paul Krugman writing in a book review in 2014:

"Almost nobody predicted the immense economic crisis that overtook the United States and Europe in 2008. If someone claims that he did, ask how many other crises he predicted that didn’t end up happening."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/why-wer...

Then read hedge fund billionaire Druckenmiller's transcript linked in this article below.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-10/druckenmil...

Then read about billionaire Ray Dalio here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/25/mastering-the-m...

Krugman didn't 2008-2009 coming. Many people did.

I think QE + ZIRP saved us from a catastrophe in 2008-2009. Instead of thinking what got us to a point where such heavy-handed financial tools were necessary and moving away from the cliff, we've just used the QE tool over and over again. QE1,2,twist,3. QE in Japan. QE in Europe. The Chinese have yet to openly go down this path.

I don't in any way believe that Krugman knows what is coming. (I don't either.)
From a different perspective, any physical currency has the disadvantage of exposing its owner/handler to the same old problems: (s)he can be physically (often violently) separated from it, any transaction needs physical encounter between the two parties (which hinders both anonymity and trading at a distance), along with minor problems such as secure storage, forging, authorities controlling it, etc.

That's one of the often overlooked reasons why a cryptocurrency is so radically different (and such a good fit for the XXIst century).
Ask HN: How will Quantum computing change me as a developer?
How should I change as a software developer if Quantum computing will be more prevalent?
There's no need to unify the installation of those domain-specific package managers - those packages just need to provide proper machine-readable metadata to make it possible to build distribution packages out of them so there's no need to create another 10 package-datasilos outside of the system's package-manager's control.

The very idea of placing dependencies in a local location (or even worse in a global location but not controlled by the system package-manager) is so rotten from the core - it simply deserves to die.

What was once supposed to be a tool for developers to have easy access to dependencies has now crept into the area of operation and deploying uncontrollable stuff (Docker containers, 3rd party package managers, statically linked applications, manually built packages, …) into production systems has become the norm.
Digitizing DIY: Lowe’s to Offer 3D Printing Services at Orchard Supply Hardware
I can just hear the chuckling in the Linux and Mac communities now.
Will you have administrator privileges? And side loading? Otherwise it is of no use at all.
It is not completely true. Sometimes a critical mass is required.

I'd be happy to bike to work. It is not a very long commute and the exercise would do wonders to my sedentary self. Though, I will not risk my life to the maniacs on the road.[1] A few people do, but many don't, so no cyclist lane is going to get build that I could use.

[1] Cyclist like to say it is more the perception than reality. Still, one pedestrian or cyclist per week get killed in this town, by public transportation alone.
Odd, I could have sworn they provided a "Buy on the App Store" or similar but I just read through their marketing guidelines and you are right. Well then part of my argument doesn't hold up but still I feel like developers are doing this on purpose (obstructing the price and/or the fact it is paid not free) to hide that from you until after you get excited about the product/app.
The MIT License arguably protects against patent litigation (in contrast to BSD).

People who have an issue with the MIT License (on the patent issue) fall into one of two categories:

a) People who've put it in the same category with BSD in their heads at some point, associating with it the same shared caveat about patents, and

b) People who understand the distinction between the two but are unsatisfied with how terse it is (especially in contrast to e.g., Apache 2.0). This isn't helped by the fact that the MIT License doesn't actually use the word "patent", and the closest it gets to saying "irrevocable" is "without restriction"/"without limitation".

In any case, Microsoft also included a custom patent grant at the time they announced the CLR's availability on GitHub and its new, more agreeable license terms. (Unfortunately it doesn't include the word "irrevocable", either.)
Video notes: how Zenefits hyperscaled from 1 to 100 sales reps in 2014
Blackberry tried to run Android apps directly on Blackberry. Microsoft is just giving you an easy way to migrate your apps. It's a different thing.
Still he has a point. Kids will toy around with Google Docs but when push comes to shove when they're hired by PWC or Deloitte, Microsoft Office is where it's at.

Google Docs doesn't hold a candle against it while LibreOffice can barely sneeze in front of it.
Microsoft used this adorable robot to show off new HoloLens features
Very cool editor but be warned the download archive is a zipbomb (no root directory).
also http://greenscreen.io/
It's weird that this isn't the biggest news out of all the announcements today. Seems like an Electron fork is more interesting.

Having Android APKs work unmodified (minus Google APIs) is pretty neat, but has been done before (BB, Jola).

The real interesting part is the the Objective-C toolchain. Seems like they have an emulation layer for UIKit, Foundation and other frameworks. Probably hard for them to keep up with changes and I expect a lot of growing pains for early adopters.

Great news overall, I can finally add a proper Windows Phone/10 target for libGDX. Makes RoboVM more versatile as well :D
I knew the mod community around the game would provide value long past the original game.

Did I say I never donated to mod authors?
Did you ask?

I'm not pissy, but it sounds like perhaps you are.
Microsoft wants to put ads on the Windows 10 lock screen
What exactly happens if you just refuse to work more than forty hours a week? I mean, obviously you won't get promoted, but promotion at that price isn't worth having. Do you get fired? The reason I ask is that I've heard in countries like that it's very difficult to fire an employee, so I was wondering how those two aspects of work go together.
Actually, The Paul Krugman delusion is the illusion that people have that they have much more insight in economics and economic policy than Paul Krugman, despite never having studied economics, or read a textbook or a journal in economics.
Electron is just what lets you run a Node app outside of a browser.
One example is Skype on Windows. It now takes several minutes to load when it used to be a few seconds. Also I find mobile hard to use for everything because there are 10 second delays between every trivial task you want to do and it adds up.
>Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?

The .Net plaform that's used by enteprises and devs also in the Unix/OS X world?
Vendoring works great for us, we keep everything in one big repo and it's open source. The problem is that the current tooling for managing this is horrible.
don't forget about https://www.fstar-lang.org/
I don't know much about how this works, but it looks like that's exactly it.

https://github.com/OneGet/ChocolateyProvider
You're right again. Your method is especially powerful on the personal level.

When it comes to propaganda and the media, however, this method doesn't work. Sensationalism and click-bait rule, and that calls for conflict and sound-bites.

Some times this conflict is manufactured, sometimes it isn't...but it's always sensationalized.

I'd argue this trend has played a significant role in the destruction of our collective abilities to tolerate negativity, and it's also (in some remote way) been a factor in creating these filter bubbles we're discussing right now.

TLDR: why do a proper, level-headed discussion exploring why women feel a certain way, when you could have a high-stakes, emotional, back-forth debate with highly-quotable 1-liners?
"No." -Donald Knuth

Edit: Now, now, I'm pretty sure he has said that at least once in his life.
It's more than that. Scroll half way down on my link above, check out the screenshots and video.

Visual Studio Code is more like an offline version of Visual Studio Online (the editor part), 2 years later.
Looks like it works with any number, like 900: https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=900 . So cool!
Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company. He was perfect before the internet came to be and before the rise of mobile devices. Ballmer, is in fact, what sunk Microsoft for a better part of a decade or more.

Nadella is doing MS good. For one, he understands market dynamics better than Ballmer did and is willing to gamble. As a C# developer of 10 years, this is the first time Microsoft actually "spiced up" their product line. Offering up robust tooling like Visual Studio Community (which is just a free version of Professional) shows me Microsoft is committed to the platform. Now, with Visual Studio Code, it will make my work better since I'm 99% on a Mac these days. The next few months will be interesting. :)
How to Interview a Software Developer
The benefit of using Python to start out with is that you can get data on actual usage patterns before committing to an overall system architecture. If you just rewrite individual hot segments of the code without considering the overall system, you're missing a lot of the point.

To pick on Twitter since their evolution of the product is fairly public - when they started, the product concept was "Oh, let's post a status through an SMS and it'll be visible on a webpage." A database-backed Rails architecture is perfectly reasonable for this. Except that then they were like "...and you can follow people", and then people started using it as a broadcast medium, and they wanted to search for trending topics, and then they opened it up to developers who all wanted an API, and then they closed it to developers, and now it's a big brand-advertising platform designed to engage directly with your customers.

They ended up switching to the JVM, and got a huge amount of flack in the meantime around "Why the hell would you build a messaging architecture in Ruby on Rails?" But the point is that they didn't set out to build a messaging architecture; they set out to build a site where you could post your status update on a website. If they had built a site to do that in J2EE, they would've been equally fucked, probably even moreso. The reason they can build an efficient system now is because they have a lot of data about exactly how it's going to be used, which operations need to be fast, which operations will be performed frequently, and how much data total will be flowing through the system.
A server is just a name. Just because a host machine needs to go down doesn't mean that the "server" has to go down.
In that scenario I'd never have just a single server, be it Linux, Windows, BSD, or anything else.

Being in a situation where you're completely unable to restart a machine without losing money, is being in a situation where you're living on a knife edge regardless. A single hardware failure and you're in deep trouble.

I've been in exactly that situation (the entire company rested on a single Ubuntu server), it was really unpleasant and management didn't do a thing about it until we started getting sector errors which the RAID controller's error handling was struggling to cope with (after that incident and the downtime, management shelled out for four physical boxes, a SAN, VMWare licenses, and a setup with 15 minute rollbacks and dynamic migrations if a physical server died).
Apple is also too expensive, by design, for 80% of the markets in developing countries.
> For XCode, compare it to Visual Studio (IMO, VS is light years ahead)

I agree. VS is the best IDE I've ever used by far.

> For Mac Native, compare to the .NET runtime (IMO .NET is better but it's not as clear cut)

The only thing I wish is that MS made it a bit easier to make .NET transparent for the user. Occasionally you need to install a version of the runtime when you install a new program, it'd be nice if that was all "built-in" and taken care of instead of adding another step to the installation.
WPF?! You cannot be serious.
Is turning off hard disks harmful?
GoPro acquired a virtual reality company
>If a quantum computer could be built with just 50 quantum bits (qubits), no combination of today's TOP500 supercomputers could successfully outperform it.

I would really, really like to know how they came up with this.
Requiring a disruption to at least barely register is pretty fair though. Bitcoin itself barely registers as an economic disruption (though it's got a lot of coverage for its reputational relation to criminals and scams), and this "disruption" barely registers in relation to something that barely registers.

This article is a press release for a book.
How to improve productivity with money?
A few weeks ago I've read yet another blog post about productivity. The author claims that deploying a third monitor onto your desk does not increase your productivity anymore (in contrast to adding a second screen). Even worse, he argued that adding the third screen will decrease your productivity. Business people would call this negative marginal profit.
There has been an intense discussion on hn whether this claim is justified or not and this shouldn't be the place to continue the primarily opinion based discussion.

However, this discussion led to my question: How can you improve your productivity by spending money?
Have you ever thought about how to spend your money efficiently in order to increase your productivity? Or have you ever bought something to increase your productivity and finally decreased it with that move?
Please let me know!
"Threatens to disrupt".
You think that the MCD board of directors gets all the profits? McDonalds is a publicly held corp, and pays dividends to shareholders, not to the board.
Notably, ICQ was implemented over UDP, though IIRC they basically implemented most of the features of TCP on top of UDP when creating their protocol.
Introducing the $100 challenge: what would you do with $100?
How much do Unicorn horns fetch on the black market?
That's not entirely fair. D wave is attempting to use quantum effects anneal to solutions faster than a classical computer would. It's not what we would usually think of as a quantum computer, but its in the right ball park. No?
Or treating the GoF book as a bible, which is my personal pet peeve.
PVS-Studio: Analysis of Godot Engine's Source Code
This is the CLR and .NET class libs. Unlike Silveright they have been supported for 15 years already, and will be aggresively developed in the future too. Besides, they've just been opensourced, even if this IDE project dies, those will stick around as long as Java will...
Show HN: WhatShouldICost.com Use GitHub to find out what you're worth
Admins were notified (at least here) and you can revert the updates[1].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9jtXZ7TYbs
Woah, amazing.

Here's a fun article about reviving supposedly 250 million year old spores trapped in salt crystals: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~bi1/Bi1__Micro-_to_Macro-Biology...
Slightly OT:

What is stopping the development of unmanned cargo aircraft?

If SpaceX can deliver cargo autonomously to the space station, I somehow fail to believe that flying an unmanned 747 from one airstrip to another is exceedingly complex.

To be clear, I mean that the aircraft is autonomous, not that it is flown by a remote pilot.

Once these systems are shown to be safer than human flown cargo planes, they technology will be widespread. After a decade of implementation, it can then spread to passenger transport as the ultimate auto-pilot. The pilot then just becomes the flight director, and takes over in case there are any failures.

Sadly, I'm sure the Burj high stack of regulatory documents prevent even experimentation in this field, let alone commercial implementation.
> ... always ... waiting in the wings ... ship

This sounds like you're speaking from inside experience. I would _love_ to hear more of this back story. Seriously, to anyone, write it up.
It's still a desktop application.

Just built with web technologies vs natively compiled binaries, which is an implementation detail that shouldn't matter to the end user, in my opinion.
I don't understand why the restaurant waited until there was a wage hike to do that. If they were able to cut hours and make the remaining people work harder in order to make up for the extra costs due to minimum wage, couldn't they have cut hours and made the remaining people work harder long before that, when instead of the savings going to offset a new expense, they would have gone into profit?
Secret Is Going to Shut Down
Do you believe that? If so, why?
Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls
The editor is a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of VS Online.
This is something Canonical and Ubuntu have been trying to do for a while. It's definitely interesting to think about as phones become the de factor computing devices.
that's basically what conemu brings
I've had a difficult time getting a real answer on this, an the HN crowd seems pretty well-educated, so I'll pose the question here: Do we even have a high degree of certainty that quantum computing is possible? I thought that Bohmian Mechanics was still on the table as possible description of the physical world.
I have the largest cable provider in the country and when I click "watch TV on my laptop" it launches Silverlight. (It sucks, by the way). But people pretending the thing isn't used and isn't supported are really grasping at straws here.

If you're going to bring a plastic knife to a watergun fight, at least point it in the right direction...

You know who didn't (and does not) support Silverlight? Developers!

We moved on from Silverlight well before Microsoft did. That's the important distinction when you talk about sunsetting technologies. Microsoft's track record here is FAR better than that of Google or Apple.
These Micro Robots Can Haul 2,000 Times Their Weight
Java, with Oracle at the wheel, is not going anywhere. They've added closures in 8, big deal.

C# is centuries ahead of Java 8, and with even more to come faster. And I'm saying that as an old Java dev (for 8 years up until 2008 or so) who have only dabbled in C#.
Two thoughts here. I love the contrast between Apple and Microsoft. That is Microsoft frequently announces products/technologies with no shipping dates. While on the other side of the spectrum Apple builds out their products in secrecy announcing only when they have a ship date. As a developer building on their platforms I prefer Apple's approach as it lowers my risk of developing against a vapourware product.

Second, I'm betting Microsoft announced this before its ready in order to get out ahead of Apple and Android's mobile dominance and be seen as a leader in mobile. Though, I'd also bet that given where current technology is Apple's Continuity approach provides the better experience today. But, no doubt what Microsoft showed is the future.
Wow, looks like a nice place to work
> started afresh with all of Java's learned lessons taken into account

I don't think that's really historically accurate. Java and C# were pretty similar back in 2002. The .NET team was more willing to add complexity and occasionally make breaking changes, like generics in CLR 2.0.
"Will start making apps using dotnet technologies"

Like Tomboy [1]

Or Banshee [2]

Or F-Spot [3]

Man.. That would suck. We're so happy that no one created Linux apps using .Net technology - like - 10 years ago.

1: https://git.gnome.org/browse/tomboy/commit/?id=9cc88c78834f1...

2: https://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/commit/?id=1547f9414005...

3: https://git.gnome.org/browse/f-spot/commit/?id=8cde63b4136f8...
The world's largest image database for public domain pictures
The web SDK "applies to: Skype for Business 2015" only.
This is not an API for regular Skype accounts.

The Skype for Business allows external communication though, so... it will be possible to create integrations for regular users, right?
Great. Because what we need are more service companies.