skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I down voted you because of the wildly inaccurate use of the term "Marxist". Most of Obama's policies have very little to do with what Marx wrote about; at best, you could call him a socialist on a handful of issues, moderate/mild-conservative on other issues, and a pro-establishment Democrat overriding everything.

Words have specific meanings, and you shouldn't label all of your political opponents "Marxist" (or "communists", "reds", or even "fascists", "neocons", etc) just because some of those labels may have fit some political opponents in the past.
YAGNI refers to _average_ ROI (as well as time to market, reduced complexity/bugs, 2/3 of features never being needed).

If you want to argue that ROI might not hold true in your particular case, you not only need a time machine, but even worse if you view your work in the context of an ongoing program, you have a halting problem to contend with.

Now as a business owner commissioning software, a) potentially shaving a few dimes is much more expensive to me than not having knowable sums going in and out over the next quarter and b) I may take a financial view that is alarmingly short term to many engineers :)
Giving up on the Web, is:

1) blind to all the progress we've made closing the gap with all the other platforms

2) Irresponsible to the future by basically saying "let's drop the only open and common platform we have and let's embrace the corporate fragmented world, let's relive the 80s all over again just because of some short term performance issue!"
The "default" alpha and beta are not the correct ones for a website A/B test.

If you're designing a drug, you'd better be very careful not to accidentally approve something that is useless. It would cost a ton of money and lives in the long run if it was no better than placebo. False rejection of the null is very bad. False acceptance of the null is not so bad.

By contrast, if you're doing an A/B test on a website, you're actually not in bad shape if you accidentally think that a red button is a bit better than a blue button, assuming that they're pretty close. False rejection of the null is okay.

However you are screwed if you miss out on the chance that a red button gives you 50% more conversion. With websites, false acceptance of the null is very bad. It's okay to mistakenly think your button is effective but it's very bad to mistakenly think that the button is ineffective.

Websites have the opposite cost benefit calculation to science generally and shouldn't use the same parameters.
I think he thinks that the population hasn't fully considered what could really happen if it were truly impossible for law enforcement to engage in targeted surveillance.
One of the things I hate the most about Unicode is the CJK unified ideographs. While the Unicode consortium are happy with mapping all those ridiculous emojis in Unicode, they refuse to separate letters of distinct languages. Now, people have a harder time configuring fonts so that Japanese texts don't look Chinese.
Not sure what you mean. Paul's views on the NSA are quite contrarian from the mainstream Republican party.
Not only do I disagree, I would argue its subjective. I much prefer one long article instead of paginated articles and will regularly refuse to continue past the first page on principal.

You may like pagination but I do not, and I would argue its better suited as an option, not dictated by the author.
So Bush was also a socialist?
Overleaf: collaborative LaTeX-based writing and publishing
In low latency usages you are doing everything in your power to avoid RAM access. Preventing preemption by "wasting" CPU resources is a common technique.
Funny how real socialists will vehemently disagree on this whole socialism canard. He's a right-leaning moderate, which unfortunately in the current political climate is tantamount to socialism.
FuzzMeasure – Signal analysis redefined
I know.

The parent comment was implying that "republicans started it" - so no self-identifying republican should be allowed to have a different opinion.

That's a terribly naive point of view and strips the conversation of any nuanced debate if we simply shove candidates in boxes labeled with their political affiliation.
Embedded in academia: http://blog.regehr.org/
It says, "You aren't going to need it". There's no hedging about more-often-than-not in typical YAGNI advocacy, in this thread or otherwise.
Accenture Beats BT, CSC, General Dynamics and Vodafone to £168m NHS Email Contract
Since I've been called out twice on my use of language in this thread alone, I serious need an editor to proof my comments before I submit them from now on.
The 10 Commandments of Good Form Design on the Web
Obama is not a socialist. He's a right-leaning liberal and a staunch defender of the status quo in some ways (though progressive in others, and I'm grateful for having affordable health care as a solopreneur!), but he's not a socialist.
I don't really buy this.

Facebook for example is releasing new versions every 2 weeks and every day I have updates for at least 6 of my apps. I also have built at least 10 apps for enterprise companies and provided you have decent CI have been able to turn around updates in less than a week. It is a different workflow that's for sure. As for Swift being a disaster well that's debatable.

Javascript and other Write Once, Run Anywhere approaches have always been shown to be flawed. They force the lowest common denominator. And on a platform like iOS where users are very picky about polish they will punish developers who have apps that don't feel right.
You can just set your location as US. That would make it work. (Not ideal)
For what it's worth, Kochs are themselves anti-war and pro personal liberty (at least as far as beliefs go: one can argue that removing social insurance may cause a net reduction in personal liberty, but this isn't the place to argue this). While their beliefs are controversial, they are no more controversial than beliefs of other libertarian-leaning groups and individuals. (I don't know if they belief in goodness of individuals, however: in fact, one can easily argue a pro-liberty stance coming from innate evil of individuals as well.)

What is controversial is the Kochs' tactic of backing republican politicians who are themselves pro-war and opposed to personal liberty (along side candidates who oppose wars and support personal liberty, of course): sometimes the "lesser" of two evils is still... evil; even worse, one may be mistaken about what is lesser. This wasn't always this way: Kochs once supported the Libertarian Party and represented its more liberal (in the conventional sense) wing, oddly enough in opposition to its more radical wing led by Ron Paul.

None of this is a defense of libertarian ideas per-se, my own views have evolved on this. Of course that's besides the point of TFA: civil liberties are a core point of classical liberalism, the foundation conservatism, liberalism, and libertarians; this isn't a matter of arguing whether or not healthcare should be socialized (or not), one would hope Rand Paul would be speaking for the majority of senate (across both parties) and not as a maverick.
Open sourcing android was the only option they had as 1)Google support is non existent and 2)they didn't have the hardware or physical distribution at the time and 3)Apple showed the world how mobile operating systems should be done and making their OS closed would be playing a game of metoo which wouldn't let them stand out in any way. Also Google doesn't have any business motive to make profit off android because their whole business model is about selling user data.

if gmails source code is not its value what is it? I'm pretty sure gmails ability to search and functionality are what make it stand out which is easily replicable by taking the source code. If the source code isn't valuable, you're saying it's the brand that's valuable because without the actual product the only thing left is the gmail brand.
If being decent--and "not sticking pandering eye-candy on there for clicks" sure sounds like being decent to me--and serving the customer are in opposition, doing the latter is real problematic.
Why is racing boring?
They typically wont bother with small projects like this afaik. I've had a semi popular one going for a while with no contact from The Tetris Company.
Opera Mini, not the full Opera Mobile browser. Like on iOS, the loophole is that web pages are sent to Opera's servers for processing, therefore the app itself bypasses the restrictions on rendering engines.

It's similar to mobile Chrome's "Data Saver" feature, or Turbo mode in the full Opera Mobile browser. Great for saving data, if you're on a limited connection.

Would be nice if you could set it as the default browser on iOS or WP, too.
WWI was the cause of the demise of pretty much all of Europe, directly resulting in heavy generational damage to Western Europe, kickstarting the communist revolution in Russia (which might have been tolerable in and of itself under Leninist or Trotskyist rule, but was then classifiable as "demise" once Stalin was in power), and (in the end) imposing excessive punishments on Germany post-war that caused severe economic problems and spurred the desire for a return to glory - one promised (and briefly realized) by the Nazi party.
Bush + Obama eschew privacy.

Bush + Obama wage wars on terror.

Bush + Obama spend shit loads of money.

Bush + Obama bail out large corporations.

I don't really care what word you want to use to describe them, but whatever word you pick, it applies to both of them.
> All of the technologies it references (e.g. Cocoa, SpriteKit, the various specific API calls it mentions) are all strictly OS X

I've never heard of Cocoa or SpriteKit, as I'm sure is the case for many others who don't use OS X - when seeing the name of something for the first time nobody thinks "oh that must be for OS X"...
>When you open up a lot of stuff and your competitor uses it freely and gets credit for doing that, but you can't do the same with your competitors' products - what's the outcome?

You mean like how Chrome is bundled with Flash and Java updates on Windows, yet alternate browsers cannot even be made for Chromebooks?

>is only going to force Google to become more closed to stop Microsoft from doing that.

Being "Open" is about principles, no matter the outcome. If you close off something because people are using it, then it was never open in the first place.

It's like saying I offer you $100 on the condition that you won't take it. What would be your reaction if MS restricted Secure Boot on Windows to stop Linux because people are dual booting or switching to it? Or what if they block Chrome on Windows to boost IE/Edge? Would you say they are being forced to do that because Chrome is getting marketshare, like you said Google was forced to close Hangouts and Android?
This still seems to suggest some up-front design though. How do you know that the piracy pricing is going to be a significant risk (as pointed out in 3) unless you think through some of its' design?

Why wouldn't the engineers then go into developing the Storm feature with this knowledge, so that they avoid making any decisions that might cause significant rework when it comes time to implement piracy?

I can't see how they could assess the risk of the piracy feature without having thought it through and then choose not to take any of that thought into account when implementing the storm pricing feature.
You've Been Growth Hacking All Wrong
Thanks - I did try that but I haven't been able to come up with any combination of location and regional settings that works on this phone. Even setting it to US everything doesn't work.
Was that native support, or was it based on OS 9 / Classic emulation? I know that the PowerPC versions of OS X (i.e. every OS X up to and including 10.5) supported running OS 9 software in a sort of emulation layer (though I don't remember if this was first-party or third-party; I do recall PowerPC Macs with OS X having a "Classic Mode" that booted into OS 9, however).
Conspiracy theories and true events are not disjoint sets. Humans do sometimes conspire.
> Zooming doesn't reflow text

I'm a bit confused. Why would you want that? Shouldn't zooming just make things bigger?
> Experience tells us that the rare cases where it does are vastly outweighed by the cases where they do not.

I do not agree with this.

My experience does not match this. As I tell my clients regularly, "Yes, I spent one day implementing that feature. But I spent 4 days talking to your folks trying to figure out what you actually needed, and 3 more days getting ready for what they are about to ask for."

Startup folks are fond of thinking that they have to move too fast for thinking or they are going bankrupt. That's rarely true. And, if it is, you're probably hosed anyway.
Random MathJaX/Markdown Generator
As a user, my policy is simple. Unless there is functionality in the app that I want to use that requires direct OS access, the app doesn't get installed, period.

I care about my privacy and I won't install your app just to get a slightly snappier experience or because you didn't want to make a web version.

There's way to many "apps" that don't deserve to be anything more than a website and I take a hard line when it cones to my privacy.

Ask yourself if this can be done in a website. If the answer is yes, then why aren't you?
Then why does Microsoft say this in their blog post:

>Although the functionality will be very helpful, because it’s “just an app” there will be certain things that Cortana does on Windows phones that won’t work on Android devices or iPhones. Some features require access to the system that aren’t currently possible with iOS or Android, so things like toggling settings or opening apps won’t initially be available in the Cortana companions for those platforms. Similarly, the ability to invoke Cortana hands-free by saying “Hey Cortana” requires special integration with the device’s microphone, so that feature will be limited to Windows Phones and PCs.

Is it a design decision or a platform restriction?
Thank you for biting =)

The players in the first game are likely experts and if a team from the first game plays against a team from the second, the game will be over in less than ten minutes. Its not merely that "someone opted for early aggression", its that when playing at the elite level all players opt for aggression. Its not rock, paper, scissors. Its a game of rock, paper.

The point is that deployed features trump undeployed "it'll be great when its ready" technology.

I'm happy for my competitors to opt for spending money attempting to achieve "good architecture" over "working code".

Ok, so the analogy is kind of shitty. Unlike Age of Empires, spending money on "good architecture" is actually less effective at creating good architecture than writing working code.
> a native app that turns that URL into less-opaque data.

Like a web browser?
It's not one or the other.

Bush was neither a socialist, nor a libertarian but he was definitely pro war and had special interests in the middle east.
> when seeing the name of something for the first time nobody thinks "oh that must be for OS X"

No, but when seeing a few technologies referenced for the first time, your immediate reaction shouldn't be "I bet that's cross-platform" either. And since the screenshots show OS X and the referenced browser (Safari) is an OS X browser, it should be pretty easy to figure out it's an OS X thing.
Either you're following Yagni or you're not.

That much I agree with. What I would dispute is the implication, typical of many pro-YAGNI posters in this thread and elsewhere, that the alternative to YAGNI is somehow diving in and developing everything up-front without reference to the relative risks of requirements changing vs. incurring additional costs by delaying. That is a false dichotomy.

For instance, I can't recall an application I've developed wherein it wasn't clear where to separate responsibilities (i.e. impose boundaries) for the current problem. These separations are generally applicable to future iterations.

I suspect this is where our experience differs. To me, one reasonable guideline for modular design and separation of concerns is that each module should roughly correspond to a unit of change, in the sense that a change in requirements would ideally affect a single module without interfering elsewhere in the system. However, if your basic premise is that you can't tell anything in advance about what your future requirements might be, you might model the current known situation in all kinds of different ways, but some will be much more future-proof than others.

Consider the old chestnut of modelling bank accounts. If you only have to model a balance on a single account, you can have some data structure that stores the balance and some functions to increase or decrease it. As soon as you need to model transfers between accounts, it turns out that the above is a very unhelpful data model, and your emphasis on single accounts was a poor choice. Even the most basic assumptions about likely future applications would have led to a more useful path, but if you follow YAGNI you have to start with a single-account model and then follow an onerous migration procedure precisely when you need to work with multiple accounts for the first time.
Yes.

If you build something with zero customer feedback or marketing channel in place, would you really expect it to blow up right out of the gate?

Ask yourself this question about ANY other business model?

Sure, when the app store got started, you could throw something up and maybe get lucky because the competition wasn't there. That's changed, it's become more competitive and you have to bring more to the table.

This is reflected in any market as it matures. I don't understand why people are freaking out about it. It's entirely possible to build an MVP with a few thousand dollars and a few months. Sure, failure is part of the process, but that's more of a factor due to these companies raising HUGE amounts of money on big visions before launching, failing to achieve product/market fit.

In the VC world, that's a bust and you close up shop. If you're bootstrapped, that's a learning experience and a chance to pivot.
Show HN: Traverse JavaScript object graphs with jQuery
What should GCHQ do? Part 2
> Remove that and you've got a bunch of people who basically believe in the goodness of individuals.

This is an extremely generous characterization and one that I do not feel is borne out by the vigorous "fuck you, I've got mine" platform that's dressed up as a defense of personal liberty. American conservatism had degenerated to this point before the Tea Party, but rarely was it stated so barefacedly.

The liberties of poverty--say, to die rather than impoverish your family when you get cancer, or to doom another generation to subsistence due to the factors in which they are raised--are no liberty at all. And, either through malicious advocacy or through desired inaction, the Tea Party was about that from day one. I was there. (I look rather poorly on historical hagiography, regardless of who the halo's being painted onto.)
Show HN: HealthPoint Plus (an open sourced academic GIS/health project)
This is/was an academic project from several years ago. It was designed to be used by hypothetical community-based healthcare workers to plan patient visits (route optimization), check-in/check-out, record/view data and share information. This was not intended for production, but maybe someone will find it useful to build upon.
Except that Fowler used YAGNI to produce the "Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System" that FAILED MISERABLY. I still don't understand why people continue to listen to him--he has yet to demonstrate a large project he was in charge of that succeeded.

YAGNI gets you the easy 80%. The problem is that YAGNI means you didn't prepare for the hard 20%, and now you're going to get killed.

Of course, YAGNI is really good if you're an ambitious manager since you'll be gone when the 20% comes home to roost.
But "mobile is the future!"

The idea that mobile is categorically the future of everything has been on my valley echo chamber meme death watch list for years.

Everything you say is true. Fundamentally I think it can all be distilled down to:

- "Feudal" platforms -- total control by a single vendor, essentially like a game console rather than a "real computer."

- Heavily restricted both by app store policies and by technical limitations like battery life, etc. Put these together and whole vast areas are just off limits.

- Tiny screen and limited UI -- it's great for quick interactions, but terrible for anything deep or engaging.

Mobile is tremendously useful, but it is not going to replace "everything."

The largest, most profitable, and most transformative company to come out of the web (so far) was Google. For Mobile I personally think it's going to be Uber, since that particular use case is just such an insanely awesome killer app. It's impossible to say for sure, but with the web there was only one Google. Not sure there's going to be another Uber. (Note that I'm not counting Maps, the other killer app for mobile, because that's typically bundled so it's not a third party opportunity.)
Russ Tice, a Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claims Obama's phones were tapped by the NSA starting in 2004 [1]. If true, questions would be raised. Could they have some leverage on him? That's just speculation though, and wouldn't give Obama an excuse for supporting the illegal [2] NSA programs.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama...

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/07/us-usa-security-ns...
Not exactly, the problem was that Canonical collected some money during 2012 to 2013 that was supposedly earmarked for Ubuntu flavors. However, there is no accounting for that money at the moment, though something is being worked on.

There's also the much heated debate about Canonical's IP licensing policy which is quite vague and broad IMHO. It also goes against the FOSS licenses such as the GPL and LGPL. Jonathan bought this up with the Ubuntu CC and has been pursuing this for 3 years, without much luck so far. He raised the issue again recently and has been reprimanded for supposedly using language that violates the CoC, however there has so far been no evidence backing this claim.

Due to the above the CC and Mark Shuttleworth have asked Jonathan to leave leadership positions within Ubuntu.

Disclosure: I'm on the Kubuntu Council, so I might have a biased opinion. These are purely personal views.
Seriously. HN doesn't have much of an American socialist contingent, but even so I'm surprised that this joke gets play at all. I'd probably be a social democrat if I lived in a moral country that supported such a platform, and I sure as heck don't see Obama as being in the right neighborhood, to say nothing of the ballpark.

Obama is arguably to the right of Richard Nixon. Chew on that for a while.
Earlier discussion of the actual source here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606188

Looks like it was quickly knocked off the front page by the flamebait detector thanks to the offtopic toxic comments accusing MS employees of voting up the the post.

http://hnrankings.info/9606188/
“I befriended a con artist and he told me all about his business”
After reading this thread (and others from lowbloodsugar) I would say that I disagree with you here and what I do is similar to what you do. Specifically, I think that architectural choices are only important in a planning phase when they affect how people will collaborate. Architectural choices such as data or system design within that collaborative framework are irrelevant to anything you don't have to build right away.