skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is usually a "colossal error" to write your own in-house closed-source/proprietary language, no matter how small or large the language is.

The main reason is exactly as the article states, maintainability.

> As time wore on, our technical debt finally began to come due. Compilers like Wasabi and their associated runtime libraries are highly complex pieces of software. We hadn’t open-sourced it, so this meant any investment had to be done by us at the expense of our main revenue-generating products. While we were busy working on exciting new things, Wasabi stagnated. It was a huge dependency that required a full-time developer — not cheap for a company of our size. It occasionally barfed on a piece of code that was completely reasonable to humans. It was slow to compile. Visual Studio wasn’t able to easily edit or attach a debugger to FogBugz. Just documenting it was a chore
Heh, "Decent" is more likely to make me apply than "Competitive" because it shows that they know what good developers cost and are acknowledging they're not paying top rate.
What we learned when we learned about work
The thing is, autonomous vehicles don't need to take the taxi niche frontally. Here's how it goes, if legislation is too slow:

1. families buy one autonomous car instead of several driven ones: when dad's arrived at work, the car goes back to become mom's car for the day. With a nice twist: when the car goes and fetch kids from soccer, mom doesn't have to be in it.

2. People pool cars privately: one car for a couple of families if they're light users, X/Y cars for X families for more intensive users. It's shared property, neither a taxi activity nor even a company providing a service.

2bis. Some AirBnB of autonomous cars facilitates mutual lending of cars, in parallel with the development of privately organized pools

3. Cars are leased instead of bought upfront, from companies embedded with the AirBnB-of-autonomous-cars. What you have now is effectively an autonomous taxi company.

The economic pressure to get rid of drivers will be enormous. Sure, car makers and drivers won't like it, but all of the money that won't go there will be up for grab by other sectors. Think of trucks: not only autonomous trucks will drive 23h a day, but everyone who sells anything moved by truck will have their margin augmented by skipping drivers' salaries.
I highly recommend Dragon Ball Z Abridged[1] to anyone who has watched the original. Comedy gold.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EC7B047181AD013
Code? Sure, probably not. But JSON? Certainly I've come across requests with more than 2MB of JSON.

(You might consider it an abuse of the format, but it is not completely without reason.)

ST3 (well, the plugin for doing it) breezed through prettifying and un-prettifying of the data.
Not sure why it tries to replace virtualenv which is already obsolete in favor of pyvenv which is built-in.
There's a lot of talk about historical accuracy with regard to Apple's decision. Hence it's in context to post what exactly that flag represented to the people at the time of secession. When I lived in the South I never saw anyone other than white people flying that flag. It didn't represent pride to non-whites and the declarations of white people that it was part of their heritage went along with talk about 'those' people.

Here are some things I experienced while living in the South. My first promotion ever was when I worked as a bag boy in a grocery store. I was promoted because, "There's nothing but a bunch of sorry niggers working here so I'm giving it to you." I was told once by an evangelical, white Christian that black churches didn't really count as Christian because they don't truly believe. They don't have the commitment that we do. I was told by another person that slaves were treated well and that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

These are all anecdotes but the impression left was indelible. The people telling me these things were nice people. People I never suspected of harboring such feelings. Whenever the Confederate flag is flown or defended in anyway I think it is appropriate to remind people of just what secession meant to the people at the time. I typically encounter defensive reactions to such reminders and this means, at least to me, that more reminders are needed.
This is why the over regulated environment you probably loathe exists. Businesses are simply not able to self-regulate due to their greed and lack of social empathy and therefore the will of the people (government) have to regulate them - possibly into non-existence.

You will be the victim of your own hubris when the populist majority brings the pitchforks and sucks you dry. And you should know better - the government mainly exists to subsidize outsized risks and ventures by those with influence - the wealthy.

With that - you are trying to destory the existing banking structure so more power to you.
I use emacs but might try atom when it's a true replacement possibility. How can I know it's crossed the threshold?
A link directly to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5c81QJ-uRo
Yes, as long as you know who used a vehicle, chances of getting it thrashed are easily manageable.
WPP, Snapchat, Daily Mail Form Marketing Agency Truffle Pig
Uber lauches UberFIRST-AID
Oh, it applies to Disney and Mickey Mouse, it's unfortunately just not applied to them.
Does it tell a story
Great list of links. You have done the research! Personally, I have used ocropy to great effect. Right now, I am moving beyond forms at work and researching cartographic map vectorization using deep learning techniques. There is little science papers on the subject however. Have you done any research on that by any chance?
Interview with the founder of Swyft: “don't start a company to make money.“
Millennials to Snake People (for Safari)
Crosswords+Worksheets+|+HistoryOnTheNet
Safari version of the popular Chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...
I still think the fact that even most people with a 4-year degree still haven't done a compilers course is the core problem. Both other times we've had this discussion I haven't noticed anyone popping up to say "Yeah, I've written like 3 compilers and Wasabi was just an insane idea." (Of course, the Internet being what it is, someone will probably say that now. But the point is I haven't seen it before I asked for it.) A lot of people are doing the cost/benefit analysis with an order of magnitude or two too much in the "cost" column. Yeah, of course it looks insane then... but the problem is the analysis, not the reality.

Compilers just aren't that magically hard and difficult. I'll cop to not having written a true compiler yet but I've written a number of interpreters, and I've written all the pieces several times (compile to AST, interpret, serialize back out, just never had the whole shebang needed at once).

If you're reading this, and you're still in a position where you can take a compilers course, take it! It's one of the most brutally pragmatic courses in the whole of computer science and it's a shame how it's withered. (Even if, like me, you'll probably write more interpreters than compilers. And nowadays you really ought to have a good reason not to pick an existing serialization off-the-shelf. But it's still useful stuff.) It's one of those things that is the difference between a wizard and a code monkey.

(If I said that too concisely for your tastes, see: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food... )
While I see that as a strength it might be a double edged sword. I installed a few packages I thought were necessary and soon Atom was crashing constantly and was riddled with bugs. I think it's possible that too many people have the ability to control core pieces of what makes Atom so good and as a result the experience degrades.
Question is: what happens when an Uber driver gets beaten in Paris, and another Uber driver comes to rescue him being called by UberFIRST-AID ?

-> The guy driving the ambulance hits him.
You seem to have all of your values backwards.

Technological innovation CREATES value, doesn't destroy it. It necessarily disrupts the status quo and pisses people off, and that takes courage, but does not make the innovator a bad person. It makes them a very courageous person, worthy of all admiration.

On the other hand, you might call a bad person someone who expects that everyone else is obliged to feed him. One who throws "responsibilities" at those who refuse to work for him. One who morally manipulates people into doing what pleases him. I'd call this a bad person, although I personally don't believe that evil exists, so I am more likely to call that person plain stupid.
> They've already approved these apps. They already have the people to approve these apps.

The truth is Apple approves a ton of stuff that is clearly and directly against clauses of the App Store rules. They seem to exist mostly to let Apple pull your app later and have a pre-defined reason. Enforcement is incredibly inconsistent, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was some pretty racist stuff that had been there before this event; despite hate apps being against policy.

> Incorrect. They've already demonstrated they want to do this. After all, you had to have people find and remove these apps in the first place

But they don't have to critically examine the game to understand the context, only determine if it contains a confederate flag. Hell, maybe they used a program to dissect app bundles and scan all images to see if they match the flag and probably ban those.
Introducing the Alexa Skills Kit
That's basically Netflix to me as well, and I am in the US. I wouldn't pay for it because I don't see much value in it, but there seems to be more on it that appeals to my wife so at least it gets used.
static or read-mostly.
Polar bears eat dolphins and freeze the leftovers
Why would Amazon refuse to sell the Confederate flag but not Nazi merchandise?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/25/us-usa-shooting-so...
What am I missing? This is an internal language designed as an incremental improvement over VB that gave them cross-platform common codebase. It lasted 10 years: that's 19,932 in SaaS years. When they transitioned off of it, they did it not with a rewrite, but with mechanical translation.

It seems like a spectacular success story.
I'm really looking forward to emacs-like tab behavior and also now that the rate of change will slow down we'll likely see the best quality extensions rise to the top and stabilize a bit.

Also looking forward to seeing Facebook's fork of Atom for React...
If egregious trampling of rights, terrorist actions and murder are the prerequisites, then ALL of the US flags should be removed.
Dunno about desktop, but as far as Android is concerned, tess-two is a fork of Tesseract tools for Android: https://github.com/rmtheis/tess-two

This dude did a pretty nice writeup on getting it going: http://gaut.am/making-an-ocr-android-app-using-tesseract/
I think it's perfectly legitimate for a company to build those things when it's not their core business, provided that A. They hire people who are legitimate experts and give them free reign to work on it, and B. They open-source it.

A lot of quality compilers and databases have come from software companies whose primary business is neither a compiler nor a database.
None of these services seem to address my number one concern with sharing my WiFi - I don't want my IP address associated with guest activities. The last thing I need are frivolous IP threats or cops busting down my door because someone did something illegal through my WiFi point (even if I am ultimately cleared of the charges).

What I'd really like to see is a service like this that pipes guests through a VPN instead of just setting them loose on the internet directly from my connection.
This is a neat little EMF detector. I love seeing Android hobbyist creations. I'm trying to think of uses, but maybe it would make a neat toy, all on its own. You could wander around, and explore the world in terms of EM fields from various sources. Now I want to make one.

---

Edit: Thanks for changing the HN title.

Cue shocked reaction that our smartphones continue to process data, update apps, background process things, and collect garbage when the screen is off. This title is so link-baity that it makes me want to not click the link.
I believe you need to call them.
Big Brother 17X01: Season 17 Premiere, Part 1
So a displayed salary range (perhaps $5-15k in swing?) in any case offers something more tangible/clear than 'competitive'?

I could certainly agree with that. It doesn't confine a company to a certain $x, but isn't as opaque as the bog standard 'competitive.'
Eh. Why is 1.0 out already? Keyboard layouts which use AltGr are still broken.

E.g. I can't type '@', '\', and 'µ'. Yes, I can't write metadata annotations or escape some characters.
I really want to like Atom but it's such a pity that they went for CoffeeScript instead of plain ES5/ES6.
Inside the Sony hack (Part 1)
Right! And this isn't even a compiler, the way most people think of "compilers". It's a transpiler to three target languages each of which has an extraordinarily full-featured runtime. Two of which are (a) widely available and (b) as source languages, awful.
"Under sail" simulator – deep ocean ambience.
I have basicaly been running this "experiment" for the last 20 years. It began with (e.g., text-only) browsers that do not source content from other domains automatically, then I started blocking ads via DNS in response to today's "locked-down" computers like smartphones. I just do not see ads. I often need not even visit a webpage. I just download the content I want, directly, using a custom filter.

Do long load times, visual distractions and page clutter matter?

I posit only when you are accustomed to _not_ experiencing these things.

For me, it is difficult to voluntarily choose 38 connections (how many DNS lookups is that?) and 11 second load times after experiencing 2 second load time and connection to one IP only.

I still find it shocking how many connections today's "average" webpages make to third party domains. It was not always this way. I doubt it would have been feasible with yesterday's bandwidth and memory. Somehow things ramped up to the point of absurdity and it's as if no one noticed.

If there is a "moral dilemma" it should amongst with the ad/tracking folks.
Jellyfish force themselves to be symmetrical
Show HN: Web Worker that encodes MP3 in real-time from microphone
A lot of people complain about the slowness of the Dom/JavaScript backend, but I see a lot of potential for some really cool things, like integrated juPyter notebooks, semi wysiwyg rendering of latex and markdown and maybe drawing rendering trees or other creative things.
Two quick comments. One, there's been a lot of primitives added since I knew APL some decades ago, some of which would be rather hard to type with a 2741 selectric (equals underbar slash?), and some like jot-dieresis and tilde-dieresis where I think they were just really bored one night and trying to think up the silliest possible overstrikes. Two, how do you get rid of the "pop-up APL keyboard" once you pop it up? Hint: you don't need it, click the Primer tab and you can enter symbols from there.
Good news, I actually do know everyone who was part of the original build of Wasabi! None of them left because of the language. I think this accounts for everyone who was there at the time:

1. Original author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-country and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time.

2. Second author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-state and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time (see a pattern?). Later came back because Fog Creek offered remote work. Went on to author the blog post we're talking about.

3. Developer left to go work on Stack Exchange (me!)

4. Developer left to go make the world a better place at Khan Academy

5. 2x developer left to go work on Trello

I think that was all of us. People move on in the course of 5+ years. Turns out most of those reasons don't have to do with programming language.

FWIW, I think Wasabi was a bad decision and I'm not going to defend it. But I really don't like these massive assumptions about people's motivations for leaving.
Is there a useable demo?
I'm not saying you are wrong. Building the era of custom tools just for your company, only to do specific jobs is long gone. This is for a lot of factors of risk in a business.

It would work, if management didn't treat programmers as a replaceable cogs in a wheel. But the day you seek to make the craft of programming a commodity that could be done anyone, you need a ecosystem whose knowledge is available to everyone. Only then would you get reasonable expertise at affordable prices to finish your projects.

The opposite is to make so programmers so special that the knowledge of specific tools is available only to them. This definitely puts programmers in a lot more special position to negotiate pay and other things at will. Because the very existence of a business depends on them.
Thank you! I can't be the only one here psyched to read a case study like this.
Apple has proven, time and again, that it heavily favors censorship in the name of profits. The real issue we should be talking about is the de-facto monopoly Apple has because of their hardware device success (e.g. iPhone), and how and when this monopoly will be prevented from censoring the speech and content of millions of lives.

Or do we expect monopolistic censorship to be the new norm of the future? Disgusting.
1. Maybe Uber doesn't look like a technological advancement compared to Google, but Uber is an enormous technological advancement over the status quo in the industry.

2. Uber is breaking the very foundations of the monopolization of the taxi industry. The only monopoly they will maintain moving forward is through customer loyalty based upon perceived value. If Uber falters, there is very little protecting them from a competitor gobbling up their market share.
I was a little slow. It took me until 28 to have the epiphany. What finally brought me there was a diagnosis of hypertension and a realization that I hadn't dated in close to 6 years.

Now I'm close to 48. Having more control over my time is worth more to me than the possibility of a big pay day.
Kyle Kingsbury is one of my heroes.
how about something like sqlite3?

https://www.sqlite.org/download.html

shows the amalgamation, which is the main thing you'd build, having a 5.4 MB sqlite3.c file. I can easily see someone making a change to it if they wanted slightly different behavior - or to consult it for canonical behavior - and I was pleased I could glance through it in Sublime.
Sorry, but nine-hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, it's a complete and total waste of resources to write a proprietary language or runtime enviroment to solve a non-core business problem.
Mm, it does suggest value in an acknowledging way.

Any other words/phrases you've seen in your job travels/perusings haha (for better or worse)?
Amazon opens voice recognition tech, announces $100M in funding for developers
Can't upvote this enough. My takeaway from this gem is that we need to keep thinking about our craft even as we evolve our technologies, and we need to have the courage to stand up for it. The hardest thing in the world to see is your own point of view because you have to step outside of it to see it.
the package ecosystem isn't on par yet, but the package DEVELOPMENT ecosystem far surpasses sublime in every way imaginable.

I really did not enjoy writing plugins for sublime. The development/debugging/testing experience isn't especially pleasant.
How many trello alternatives do we need, really?
Stories about this device have been posted to HN periodically, going back at least 5 years - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bomb%20detector&dateRange=all

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070732

Shocking that these things are still out there.
> Why is a relative path in the PYTHONPATH necessarily bad practice? It's not a rhetorical question, I am genuinely curious.

Among other things, what happens if your Python code changes its working directory, then subsequently tries to import a module? Consequences range from "doesn't work" to "introduces a security vulnerability by running arbitrary Python code from an untrusted directory".
Nature+Time+-+YouTube
Ah, I hadn't thought of using it that way. Seems like a working solution, even though it's not the problem that the PEP is meant to solve.
You talk funny :)

I didn't get where you're going with all of this, though.
It's the Cycle of Bloat.

1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo!
2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo!
3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's
not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because
the original product wasn't big enough.)
4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well,
here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the
base system is that much better! Woo!
5. Repeat 3 and 4 a few times.
6. Crap, this tool is all bloated and slow. I'm going to go
create a small, fast, minimalist solution!

Repeat indefinitely.

See also: "minimalist web framework", "minimalist Linux distribution", "minimalist programming language".
Lexus hoverboard
Or chat tool, or bug tracker, or... The list goes on. Basically, focus on your core business. If you spend more than ~10% of your time building infrastructure tools, someone else probably does it better, for cheaper.
Unfortunately, the general zeitgeist of the times seems to be that a person's politics are somehow a litmus test for whether or not they should be listened to at all, about anything.

Normally this would just be a quirk, but the fact is that a lot of technical people here on HN and other places would happily throw the baby out with the bath water just because they disagree with somebody's politics.

It's stupid and unprofessional. With so many companies focusing on such technically boring problems, image management is perhaps legitimately more of a business concern than having the best tech available.

So, unfortunately, we have people with dissenting opinions but excellent work slandered or ostracized...even if their opinions are actually worth considering. Then again, that just means that those of us who are more genuinely tolerant will have an edge during hiring. :)

Also, on ESR in particular:

You have to understand that, rightly or wrongly, his worldview is long-term Culture War. Literally anything which prevents The Right People from breeding faster (homosexuality) or defending themselves (attacks on the 2nd amendment) or arguing (kafkatraps) is suspect. Because he's playing for keeps, he'll do whatever it takes (including, perhaps, being less than perfectly equal in presentations on things) to further his agenda. That's just how it is, and it doesn't reflect on his technical contriubtions or aptitude at all.

Hell, the bitch of it is, he's even arguably correct on some of his cultural points, if he himself (much less his detractors) didn't spend so much time sounding so disagreeable and grumpy and wingnutty.

Anyways, it's just a sign of the times, as I said. It seems that most people are unable to handle a mental model which accounts for biased or unreliable narrators while still allowing the work of those narrators to be taken advantage of.