skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
COBOL was a massive success. It is deployed everywhere and runs everything.

COBOL was a massive failure. It had a goal of producing a language that business people could use directly with no intervening programmers by being "English-like" and friendly. This totally and utterly failed.

These things are not contradictions.

Further, everything I know that was designed to be "English-like", cut out the programmers, and let the business people program directly has been a total and utter failure, on that metric. By contrast, there's a number of things that business people directly use all the time without programmers, like Excel macros, that aren't trying to attain friendliness through "being like English". Maybe there's something out there that has done both, but I've not heard of it.

I don't criticize COBOL for trying. It was an experiment that had to be tried, and I have strong opinions about it precisely because COBOL and others provide me the data points with which to have an opinion. But its popularity among programmers doesn't establish that it was successful in letting business people code directly.
The obvious rejoinder is that those decision points make the difference between a failed startup and a multi-billion dollar company.

As empiricists, though, it's worth asking if there are any real examples of companies exploiting hidden market opportunities thanks to a diversity of viewpoints. A lack of examples wouldn't be quite damning--maybe there's just not enough diversity at all to rise above the noise level--but it'd be a useful test of how valuable diversity actually can be.

This all stands apart from moral and ideological reasons to try to foster diversity, which are in my view more compelling but are understandably less effective when it comes to influencing decision makers.
They applied crushed mica to some of the illustrations, and the book description says it was particularly effective in pictures of the wings.

Also, I like the bear suit.
thanks ryan. happy to answer any questions on here. Just tap the orange button to access the tool.
I'm not sure how relevant Windows / Linux experience is. Apple is responsible for the graphics driver on OSX. AMD may write much of the code, but it doesn't go out the door until Apple is happy with it.
Until the TPP takes effect around 2019.
VeriSign, GeoTrust, Thawte and RapidSSL are all Symnantec? What a racket. Clever work, Certsimple.
Thank you, I know that you can do that. My concern is more of a soft question: in practice, in production, isn't that what you always end up doing anyway? And if that's the case, how much of meteor's coolness is lost in the process? If I'm going to be writing rpcs for all writes, why not just use some websocket library?
Sorry, but my experience shows the opposite.

I've worked in multiple jobs where some piece of software was an incredibly complex ball of mud, where things were left without refactoring because no-one currently in the company understands how they work, and no-one can spare the time to do the refactor properly. Where changing a method or property unexpectedly breaks some other, apparently unrelated feature. Needless to say, this made adding new features a pretty risky affair.

This happens all too frequently to believe in your 99% statistic. For example, it happens with some pieces of software at my current job.
Apache Drill 1.0 – Schema-Free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop and NoSQL
Wandering Thoughts – General Tools API
We don't have any specific agency plans, but since our pricing is site based, an agency can push out multiple sites for clients and let them upgrade as necessary. Happy to chat further - finbarr [@] getshogun.com.
It's not clear to me whether this solution is stable. The air flow looks very turbulent. Maybe if the air vents are blowing at a slightly different speed or if you have a few empty seats, the dynamics change a lot and you go back to a chaotic circulation pattern. Also, most airplanes have individual vents as well that can be adjusted... how would those affect the flow?
Same here, hard to read so I won’t try. Why do people use light gray on white? If you want people to read what you write, make it easy.
Mostly its small things, one major one that took me by surprise but is now long fixed was:

If you sell physical goods and you put it in a box or wrapper, which you do because shipping, you need to have a membership with one of many private recycling firms that are part of one of the overarching systems (green dot, resy etc.). You never send anything to this company, this company never does anything directly for you. They only ask you once a year to tell them how many tons of cardboard, plastic, and metal you used to package your goods. Then you pay them according to that amount. If you are below a certain amount you pay a minimum fee.*

New regulations and changes are also a major pain:

One of the newer things is that you can't use google analytics on your webshop. If you want to use it it can only be anonymized, you need to state some legal BS in your terms and conditions and you need to make a direct contract with google in order for it to be legal...

The button that finally seals the deal has to have a specific text on which the lawyers are still fighting which of the options actually is legal to use.

For each of those you could receive a legal notice from anyone that is remotely competing (read: any other business) with a heap of legal fees attached that could put you out of business.

* Fun Fact: There's already a recycling surcharge on all the boxes you buy. The customer also pays for the recycling of his waste.
Related: the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
This is nuts, if there are jobs they can be employed and pay tax, at min wage or above.

As it is, this will likely be jobs provided by cerco at el which will displace the bottom paid jobs.

From a tax POV it makes no sense, from a jobs POV it makes no sense.
Obama Task Force Lays Out Plan to Save Honeybees
Yes: http://www.netcraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/certauth_...

And thanks!
Wow. Looks great!
I think you're misinterpreting what he said. He simply stated "Do not underpay me".

No one deserves to be underpaid. It's not an outrageous demand, in fact, he is just demanding baseline respect.
As a dev working in Austin, I'd say that's about right, especially when you consider the cost-of-living difference: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+washingt...
Foodscovery Aims to Be the Goldbely of Europe
Why didn't you use your impressive Masters in Aeroacoustical Engineering and obviously superior intellect and knowledge to solve the fucking problem years ago?

You had to piss on the kid's effort and interest in solving a problem. I have to tell you, as a mentor to a great FIRST Robotics team, this is precisely the kind of attitude that can utterly destroy a kid.

Unbelievable.
I value diversity. A lot.

But I dislike the studies that suggest diversity improves financial performance, because I find the conclusions are too politically convenient. Most of the ones I read suggest a sketchy correlation at best. Yet people talk as if it's as conclusive as global warming.

Yes, the diversity of founders can be the reason for a startup's success. There are also many examples where it wasn't needed: Apple, Microsoft, Samsung.
When you hit publish on the demo, it publishes your modified page to demo.getshogun.com/your-demo-uuid.

Documentation definitely needs some work!

The integration is platform specific. For example, if you're using rails you just drop in a gem and it works. I'm the CTO so please feel free to reach out with any more questions - finbarr [@] getshogun.com.
the problem is more on the money and product/marketing side than on the engineering side.

while working on banks that would hold true. a engineer was worth revenue per month while the system was up.

on silicon valey, the engineer is worth a lot as soon as the product is live, but then that means IPO or something and now he is worthless. Remember that most companies in the valley do not even have the concept of revenue...

And when the company does have revenue, then the issue shifts from the money to the product side. The engineer is the guy building the factories. and product can use a better or new factory because they have the talent to build it. but there is nothing they want to build, because, well, they have revenue with the old one, so why bother?

now, when you see all that, it is easy to understand why the engineer VPs on the top drive them to exhaustion. because they know in the end the short term in a engineer work life is all that matters to his financial/product peers.
Maybe the reason no one has done it is because it was already determined to not be worth the resources required to research, develop, and implement?

EDIT: I'm just asking an honest question here.
You forgot the brackets: ((((())))).
True, but it is at least 18 times more worth reading than most of the stuff that turns up.
Blogspam. Source is http://www.mathistopheles.co.uk/maths/covering-all-the-bases...
You're correct.

A person to whom a section 49 notice has been given is guilty of an offence if he knowingly fails, in accordance with the notice, to make the disclosure required by virtue of the giving of the notice.

In proceedings against any person for an offence under this section, if it is shown that that person was in possession of a key to any protected information at any time before the time of the giving of the section 49 notice, that person shall be taken for the purposes of those proceedings to have continued to be in possession of that key at all subsequent times, unless it is shown that the key was not in his possession after the giving of the notice and before the time by which he was required to disclose it.

For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if:

* sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and

* the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

There's also a 2/5 year sentence maximum.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/section/53
They at least have finally began to switch to marketing ECDSA certificates as the main difference now, especially as SHA1 certs becomes obsolete. Last time I checked Symantec's site I actually have to specifically look for SGC to find this stuff now.
Worth noting that CertSimple is a competitor of Symantec, and can't offer SGC certificates, so they are basically whinging that their competitor is marketing their certificates on a feature people don't need.

That's basically par for the course when selling to businesses, especially where non-technical people are in a position of deciding whether to buy, and which vendor to chose from.

It'd also be nice if HackerNews wasn't quite so populated with thinly veiled ads for companies disguised as blog posts.
Dealing with time zone issues in code has driven me batty more than a few times.
Is there a way to advance by complete slides and not have to click for every intra-slide transition?

It took 47 clicks to get to slide 11 and the deck has 115 slides.
In line with these points but more nuts and bolts: if you want people who won't leave within at least N years, give them N-year guaranteed contracts that can be terminated only for cause/good reason (these are terms with specific legal meaning). Since I will have agreed in advance to the pay rate for each year, you can't undervalue me unless I'm complicit, and you can't lay me off just because your company is doing poorly. At the same time, I can't pick up and leave "right when I become most valuable". If both sides want greater security than an at-will termless contract offers, the solution is in the contract, not the interview.
Hey guys! Thanks for checking us out :)

We have multiple goals we want to achieve with GitHelp, the first one is helping busy open source maintainers to manage all the questions and support requests that comes to them from different sources like GitHub issues, Twitter, Mailing lists, StackOverflow, forums, or even requests for audio and video conversation in one place. You can think of it as ZenDesk for open source projects.

The other side of that is for the benefit of developers, by matching them with the best experts and increase their chance of getting the best answers they need as fast as possible. But we don't just depend on matching developers requests with experts. We think there's enough content on the internet from resources like Documentation, Tutorial sites, StackOverflow questions, and blogs that we can match your request with a content/link that can help you without nagging someone.

This beta version of GitHelp have the core of the product. Developers can create help requests and we match them with the open source maintainers and maintainers/hackers can reply.

What's next for GitHelp is the dashboard for maintainers to manage the all requests and collaborate on that, the matching with content, also the payment is coming up very soon. We focused on the Ruby community right now, but we'll expand to other communities soon like JavaScript. Please let us know what you think!
Not sure I understand the relevance. Especially when it is contrasted with API level thinking, which would hit this question equally oddly.
Was this a "brain rape"?
We are living in the midst of the early phases of a biotechnology revolution every bit as profound and transformative as the computing revolution from the 1970s on. It is less apparent than it might be to the average person in the street because (a) next to no-one really spends much time thinking about medical research unless they have to, which is a whole massive issue with our society in and of itself, (b) regulatory burdens on medical technology ensures that the clinic is 10-20 years behind the bounds of the possible in the labs. Medical tourism does its part to help keep that delay lower than it might, but it's still a huge burden, and a huge cost in life - especially now that the upward curve of progress is potentially so steep.

The potential to be able to treat aging and begin to bring it under medical control within the next 20 years - IF the right research fields begin to dominate the mainstream, IF the funding arises, IF the public wakes up and regards aging research in the same was as they regard cancer research - is very real. That is why people like me spend time and effort to bang the drum, conduct grassroots fundraisers, and support progress in SENS-like rejuvenation research focused on repair of the cellular and tissue damage thought to cause aging. For example, clearance of senescent cells, an approach which has just now reached the point of credible demonstrations in normal mice, but needs much more support to make it into the mainstream. Is Calico funding this? No, not yet, and they won't until it gets more support:

http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.htm...

Advocates and the research community are making progress, great progress when you look at 2015 in comparison to the state of things in 2005, but we need more people to take the step, become philanthropists, and materially support this and other early-stage research with the aim of bringing medicine under medical control. That support really does make a difference.
doulCi iOS 8.3 bypass iCloud activation lock – pangu8pangu8
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback. We worked really hard on this!
Which One Are You: Sprinter vs. Marathoner Video Infographic
> The two major diseases people on planes should be worried about are measles and chickenpox. Both of which have excellent vaccines to prevent illness.

Unless you're too young or sick to get the vaccine, or the vaccine is ineffective.

I just flew on an 11 hour flight with my 4 month old, and my biggest concern was measles since she can't be vaccinated yet.
The ability of the company to modify the agreement without your approval or knowledge is written into the agreement. It basically does nothing at all from a legal perspective.
How to Provision an API with ExpressJS and MongoDB
> "which could be done even by someone without Masters/PhD level CFD knowledge"

Uh yeah, that's kind of the point here?
Well over a dozen times from ~1998--2010.
Subscribe to the Onlinehändler News and maybe Trusted Shops newsletters. They send a lot of spam but also the latest verdicts in law regarding online shops. This is for when your business is already running. Better than nothing.
Asmttpd – Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly
“Big indie” Kickstarters are killing actual indies
The fact that software engineering applies to so many fields is exactly the reason why I often find it problematic when it's treated as 'one thing' in a discussion. While the process of writing software looks deceptively uniform (files with code), the purpose of said software can be anything in reality (and it can even be used to create an entire virtual representation of (a) reality).

Perhaps 'software' is too broad a concept to discuss without qualifiers?

It's a bit like lumping together essayists, lawyers, analysts, journalists, poets, novelists, philosophers, etc. under the label 'writers', and then try to have a meaningful discussion about hiring practices, writing standards and writing tools. This doesn't really make, as the requirements of a junior reporter are quite different from those of a junior lawyer. The fact that they both write words on paper doesn't change that.

I suppose they could discuss the quality of different pens. Our equivalent to that might be code editors...
So if he really wants a useful product, he should make a small insert you can put into your air vent on the plane to at least create the "protective airflow" for yourself.
Alternate view: being out of the workforce makes it difficult to get back into the habits of working. Getting up getting ready, going out and doing something keep you ready for opportunities as opposed to zombie surfing on the Internet all the day.

Also, I understand your viewpoint but your words are overheated - "evil"? Really? The proposal is hardly advocating for the return of the workhouse.
Companies will never value employees as much as employees value themselves.

If programmers can get a promotion and a 20% raise by switching employers, and a 3% raise by staying, why would they stay?

I find it funny that startups would expect to attract "missionaries" when most of them lack missions of any substance.
A productive development environment with Docker on OS X
Ada, of course. Are you saying it wasn't at the forefront of your mind? If I sound patronizing it's because I am.
It is certainly possible, but you really don't know. Especially given that the numbers are so small, any false negatives would affect the data quite a bit. And you are making very strong claims with very precise measurements that are drawn from a very error-filled data source.

A better source would be a survey sent to YC companies, or perhaps data from some internal YC database. That will have its own sampling issues, but the accuracy will be leaps and bounds above Crunchbase.
Serious question: does Meteor scale well in these days?
If they gave you that number there would be no developers, silly.

They can't give you usage numbers when there is no significant user base, and they don't want to discourage you from writing software for it by providing you with the knowledge you will make no profit from it. :P
TAI (weighted average of atomic clocks, correcting for relativistic effects due to altitude) is the basis for UTC, and is currently 35 seconds ahead of UTC.

Prior to 1972, UTC and TAI used different definitions of a second (UTC used a definition based on positions of celestial bodies while TAI used a definition based on the hyperfine transition of cesium, and the two were periodically manually "stepped" back into sync). As of 1972 they use the same definition of the second (TAI's definition, which is also the SI definition), and a final "step" was applied to cause the difference in the two times to be an integer number of TAI seconds. That created an offset of 10 seconds, which has since grown with the addition of 25 (and soon to be 26) positive and zero negative leap seconds to UTC.
Who in the world would sign such a contract? The only employee would be one that couldn't get a better deal elsewhere and the only employer would be one you wouldn't want to work for.
Could anyone link me a HelloWorld for the following use:

Chrome extension that can use the devtools.network api
(Bonus points) if it shows how to work with Selenium
How This Entrepreneur Built and Launched a Udemy Competitor in 3 Days
Seriously? $6 is a lot of money in India? A ticket in a movie theater costs more than that in India these days.
The authors doubt that too, which is why "getting documents notarized" is in the checklist.
You are looking in the wrong place. The requirement I mentioned is enforced by the Department of Labor, not USCIS. It's part of the "labor certification" process, which is a pre-requisite to the H1B application. See this page:

http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm

Specifically:

>>H-1B dependent employers and willful violator employers must attest to the following three elements addressing non-displacement and recruitment of U.S. workers:

>>-- The employer will not displace any similarly employed U.S. worker within 90 days before or after applying for H-1B status, or an extension of status for any H-1B worker;

>>-- ...

>>-- The employer, before applying for H-1B status for any alien worker pursuant to an H-1B LCA, took good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for the job for which the alien worker is sought, at wages at least equal to those offered to the H-1B worker. Also, the employer will offer the job to any U.S. worker who applies and is equally or better qualified than the H-1B worker. This attestation does not apply if the H-1B worker is a "priority worker" (see Section 203(b) (1) (A), (B), or (C) of the INA).
NonStop and its ilk involve complex hardware engineering, not merely software. But software is Google's forte, not hardware. I wouldn't expect Google to reinvent legacy HA systems, if only because engineering HA systems like those isn't their business.
It seems like CSI always has the most laughable faux code/terminology. I've heard that writers have internal competitions to see who can get the most ridiculous dialogue in, "gui interface in visual basic" etc.
I can't express how awesome this really is. Bringing diversity to the tech world is a tough and touchy topic these days. Being a black engineer at a leading company in the Bay, see this issue first hand. This aligns well with the tech initiative the Obama just proposed. Also, seeing how Telegraph academy is partnered with Hack Reactor, the leading coding school around, I know the outcomes will be good! I should know, I was an instructor at Hack Reactor. This is going to be awesome!
White House seek tech talent to fix federal websites
Hoe gezond is een vetarm dieet?
There are multiple definitions of the word 'container'. In the case of Borg, 'container' referred to the kernel resource isolation component, which is completely orthogonal to how the apps were packaged. Borg aggressively shared packages between jobs on the machine where possible.

Being able to strictly apportion resources between the different jobs on a machine (and decide who gets starved in the event that the scheduler has overcommitted the machine) means you can squeeze more out of a given server (by safely getting its utilization closer to 100%)

There are other definitions of the word 'container' that are closer to 'virtual machine' and include things like a disk image which is much harder to share, but that's not what's being discussed in the context of Borg. (Not sure about Kubernetes, that's after my time)
Really? Your social life must be non-existant. I'm not exactly a party animal and I've caught clips of it dozens of times and friends houses.
There's no excuse for insecure defaults.