skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The reason I chose today to drop out was because of a conversation I had with pg last week. He said bluntly that Octopart's chances of getting funding were worse if I stayed in grad school."

Classic. Top story the day I started, "I Dropped Out of Grad School Today" @sam (octopart) [0],[1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070223035643/http://octopart.c...
People thinking and saying that this only works for small teams should take a look at how many devs are listed in OpenBSD's latest release announcement.

Hint: it's more than 2, more than 3, and more than 50.
MS Access - Learn it first!

Why?

The first few reasons that come to mind:

1) To quote a friend of mine, “If a 50 year old boilermaker can work it out, then anyone can.”

2) MS Access will more than likely be installed on your computer at work.

3) Almost all "startup" type programs will need databasing of some sort.

4) It has macros and modules (VBA - Visual Basic for Applications)

5) As you start to learn Visual Basic for Application you can use this to potentially automate things at work as it available across Word and Excel.

Read these to get started:

Database basics [1]

This article provides a brief overview of databases -- what they are, why you might want to use one, and what the different parts of a database do.

Database design basics [2]

A properly designed database provides you with access to up-to-date, accurate information.

Learn the structure of an Access database [3]

Becoming familiar with the tables, forms, queries, and other objects in a database can make it easier to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as entering data into a form, adding or removing tables, finding and replacing data, and running queries.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Database-basics-2C5...

[2] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Database-design-bas...

[3] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-the-structure...
What’s the right time for your startup to build in house tools?
SSL can be intercepted though so it wouldn't be the target of this theoretical ban.
As far as I remember (and I may be wrong), the specific quote from David Cameron was about banning encryption that can't be backdoored, so that the government can look at things if they need to.

Obviously I'm completely against that, because once there's a backdoor, it's all too easy to collect by default, instead of only when "needed".

With this clarification though, lots of this tech would still work. Most things based on TLS will continue to work, if every computer has to have a government CA certificate installed to allow MITMs. Hopefully HTTP Public Key Pinning will become more prevalent if this looks likely to happen.
How on earth is that weird?
Until I got to Pivotal Labs, developing on a single branch seemed impossible. Now it seems obvious.

That said, I'm anchoring a project where my predecessors chose a feature-branch model. I have a motto that "sometimes it's better to be consistent than correct". Done properly, it's not too hard, but in practice that's because we don't have a large team and we still rebase on and merge back to master frequently.
8 Presentation Tips for Donald Trump
Disavow+Service
You started Feb 22, technically that's a different date. :)

The Archive.org page nearest my join date leads with the "Show HN" post for Dropbox, though I actually joined a month earlier in March 2007.

Another top story from that day asks if people realized the up and down arrows were clickable and used for voting purposes.
View page source.

<script>
$(function () {
var 火 = new Firebase("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/");
var ໆ = "http://news.ycombinator.com/";
$("#誤").hide();
$("form").submit(function () {
火.child("v0/user/" + $("#username").val()).on("value", function(結果) {
var 人 = 結果.val();
if (人 && 人.created) {
var 時 = new Date(人.created * 1e3);
var YYYYMMDDhhmmss = 時.toISOString().slice(0,19).replace(/[-T:]/g,"");
var ꜛ = "https://web.archive.org/web/".concat(YYYYMMDDhhmmss, "/", ໆ);
$('body').fadeOut();
location = ꜛ;
} else {
$("#誤").show();
}
});
return false;
});
});

/* ASCII art omitted to save space */
</script>

Wow, non-latin characters for variable names.

And if you'd like to learn some Chinese, here is the definition of all Chinese characters appeared above.

火 = fire
誤 = error / mistake
時 = time
結果 = result (a term / expression with figurative meaning)
果 = fruit
人 = human / person

---

My pick: 'HNSearch – old HN search engine – will be shut down later today'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404972
The original literature on reviews that gets everyone hot and bothered describes something very different from what is done in practice.

Formal meetings with scribes and reviewers and procedures and checklists are not the same as "here, check out this patch and merge it if you like it".

I haven't kept up with research and I don't know if anyone has shown that TDD + pair programming is a reasonable substitute for full-blown code reviews in terms of bug yield.

Now that I think of it, what I saw was an inversion of the classic CVS commit-bit model. CVS-based opensource projects typically have a praetorian guard who review everything before it gets committed.

What I've generally seen is the reverse: soliciting opinions from other teams with little context or familiarity with the original codebase. So they take days or weeks to respond and when they do, it's quite cursory.
Ask HN: Intermediate/Advanced books for web developers
As a follow up to a comment on another post about the lack of intermediate/advanced books for web developers, I'd like to kick off a discussion of such books[1].

I'll start: High-Performance Browser Networking, an excellent intermediate-level books that delves into the specifics of various web protocols: HTTP, WebSocket, XMLHttpRequest, etc, and how to tweak them for performance [2].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9910440

2. http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545
Thanks! That's exciting reading.
That's pretty awesome! Reminds me of a conversation I had with my grandfather last year - he told me did a few years of programming on IBM mainframes with punch cards in his 20s, before switching and becoming an accountant.
The UK Crypto mailing list has some discussion.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/ukcrypto

EG: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/2015-Ma...

But there's quite a lot of useful discussion there.
Thanks for mentioning explainshell.com I occasionally run into commands I've not seen before and end up wading through man pages, this is way more terse.
In Poland the legal motorway speed limit is 90mph(which means there is a lot of traffic moving at 100-110mph). In neighboring Germany you can drive much faster than that. An 80mph tyre would be useless.
Silicon Valley's Dirty Secret
Given current trends, I'm guessing national root certificate as a license to MITM all traffic.
Plus ça change.

This was top story for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211630
Hey Mohamed! I'm really glad you're making a startup. When I started my first startup, I had no idea how to make "mywebsite.com" link up to my actual website - the whole process was a mystery to me. It was like wandering around in a dark room and bumping into the furniture and walls.

I got the business started with just a simple Bootstrap template and PHP form, and it worked great! After around 6 months of learning new things every day through the Internet, chat rooms, etc, all in an effort to improve the website, I felt like one of those days I just found the light switch, and the whole room was illuminated.

Nowadays I can work on my own schedule on coding projects that I truly enjoy doing. Two years ago, I didn't even know what I was capable of building. There were certainly those days where it all feels a bit overwhelming, but like another great commenter pointed out here, perseverance is key.
Isn't that what buffering is for?

Surely the average data plan could handle ~300kbps streaming with enough of an overhead such that buffering would make interruptions extremely unlikely?

I'd take that over having noticeably degraded sound quality almost all the time with radio.
Building a “brain-dead” key-value store
Apple Gets Set to Launch iOS 9 from Beta Release in September 2015
How to Accelerate Customer Experience Testing for Apple iOS 9 Release
Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those.

We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.
On 1) I choose Knockout.js a few years ago and I still use it for everything (they have proven backwards compatibility, they've been around a while, the core devs are friendly, it's "modern" (3.3 added components and such) and it plays well with others (jQuery particulary, you can wrap jquery plugins in 15-20 lines of code and lo-dash), it's also 'just' MVVM so it doesn't impose any structure you don't really need, checkout https://vimeo.com/97519516 for what people do with it.

2) Agree on every point, 80% of the stuff I do day to day could have been done with Delphi 5 by dragging two components onto a canvas and connecting a data source and then going for coffee, We have the ability to render 3D scenes in the browser but paginating through a datagrid is still none-standard.
Dear Mohamed,

do you think you'll be able to use your specific insight into the prison system as a basis for your idea? I bet there are many problems waiting to be solved.

Prisons are big money, especially in the US.

Greetings and all the best for your journey to YC
Setting up something like XAMPP is not as friction filled as setting up something like a *NIX development / production environment. In some cases you could get away with using shared hosting or spinning up a simple DigitalOcean LEMP box to some degree.

On another note:

I personally prefer to recommend Python due to a lot less friction, and semesters of helping students with learning C as their first language: "Don't forget the semicolon, don't forget the parenthesis, don't forget the curly brace." All things Python lacks, and with a good editor, their white spacing would be automatically formatted, and at least when they get to their next language they format their code a lot nicer. But that's just my experience helping out students.

A lot of wonderful languages are perfect for first time programming languages. One of our teachers uses Processing for his Intro to Programming course. It's so easy to just download and install Processing, compared to downloading and setting up Java (at least in Windows).
The most rose-tinted of nostalgia, absolutely mystifying. I remember AM and cassettes too and they sounded pretty bad, though listenably so. Even Spotify's lower quality is streets ahead; their high quality is indistinguishable from CD for almost anyone.
This is... some pretty weird advice.
Learn MS Access first? Really?

First, it's just a database system coupled with macros. That's not the most important thing you'll want to learn if you want to build a startup. The frontend and/or backend logic are the most interesting, not "macros" to run on your database.

Then, VBA is pretty horrible for a beginner and he's probably going to want to deploy his service at some point (and MS solutions are not exactly the easiest to deploy for a beginner)
> A bit off-topic, but the more I think along these lines, the more I imagine the ideal music delivery medium being dry multitrack recordings with mixing and reverb supplied as metadata that's then applied with real-time audio processing. That'd be pretty wild!

That sounds a bit like MIDI. =)
Game Intelligence in Team Sports
And that wouldn't be a bad thing; seccomp could do with a simpler user interface (in addition to the current, more powerfull one).
I'm also reminded of an interview with an actor who said that cocaine didn't add much to his life, since he'd get the same rush from walking onstage each night, without having to spend $100 before or suffer a crash after.
Cortana comes from the Halo games, where she is an AI, portrayed as a female. I don't find it weird at all. Then again, in my language we must use male or female for things forcefully, so Siri is also female for me.
Go GC: Latency Problem Solved [pdf]
Because a piece of software is usually, and grammatically correct as far as English goes, referred to as it
> Most things based on TLS will continue to work, if every computer has to have a government CA certificate installed to allow MITMs.

And the following day, there will ba a Chrome+Firefox extension that highlights when the government CA certificate has been used - so that you know EXACTLY when you are MITMd. Isn't it good?
Should designers code? [Podcast]
Sorry for the late reply! Since the original upstream packages are all open source, there's pretty much no point in mirroring. The major value of such business is mainly commercial support, which includes maintaining compatibility and solving the problems that clients have with packages.
I'd like to say that everything about coding is not startup. There is a life for code outside startups.
We hear you on the cooling feature and hope to integrate that in a v2. It's a huge technical challenge - and the reason why there is no other solution in the market that works.
For now you can connect with your home thermostat, AC or fans so the can be set at the right temperature when you are in bed.
This is great! Reminds one of just how fast time flies.
Melancholy aside, this[0] was #1 on the day I finally created an account.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220353
The most unrealistic part is

> Youtube fails to load with a secure connection error.

YouTube still refuses to use anything more recent than RC4 encryption, so, if Cameron would ban all secure encryption, YouTube would probably still work.
That would be TLS traffic at most (Good luck adding those certificates to curl, MUAs, etc. for example).

That's far from being the only encryption system available - SSH doesn't even have a concept of "root certificate" to MITM with.
If the other comment isn't enough, I say -1 to Access too. Please head straight to real technologies that will allow you to make things, e.g. HTML/CSS/JS, and whatever back-end you like (PHP, Java, Node...).
1. it works
2. they're used to it
3. there isn't enough reason to change
4. lots of infrastructure would need rebuilt if they changed
I'll fully accept that it's Teds experience that this works for OpenBSD. I'd be hesitant to draw any conclusions from that concerning the viability of the same process for any other project or organisation.

An open source project with highly motivated and capable developers and a benevolent dictator in charge functions differently from other projects and organisations. A process needs to be attuned to the people, and the relations between those involved, involved.
We rebase main branch into feature branches constantly. We rebase to squash reviewed features, and then ff down to the main branch to integrate the feature. If something doesn't integrate well, we commit the appropriate fixes locally, squash locally (if necessary) and pull/rebase/repeat on changes.

It sounds crazy now that I write it down, but it really keeps our commits clean.
This would happen to me as well! I tried all the different heating blankets and covers and that was a recurring issue. We hope to solve this with sensors and software.
Neato! Given that Bemmu live in Japan, I think he intended using the Kanji characters as Japanese characters, although they were originally derived from traditional Chinese (still used in Taiwan).
I'm wondering why there isn't more research towards reducing the side-effects of drugs.

I mean, drugs are clearly a product that has certain desirable properties. So why aren't we improving the product, rather than trying to keep people away from it?
Sleep IQ is definitely the most similar product in the market. We admire what they have done and believe we can take it a step further with more advanced technology and also a product that can fit any mattress regardless of the brand.

The integration with SmartThings is a good point and we hope to see more competitor products moving in this direction as the smart home ecosystem continues to grow. We just announced our integration with SmartThings recently and have already heard from many customers that want to see us integration with Wink next.
Linus is very talented. He is also a raging singularity of abuse who gets tolerated for it because he is extremely talented. I worry a little bit about logic which suggests that anyone who is insufficiently Linuxian in dealing with other people is thereby assumed simply to care less about programming.
Sure you can set triggers as you prefer and need. Everything is customizable to your routine. If you don't have a very clear pattern in your routine you might want to skip certain integrations and trigger events only for the moments when you actually fall asleep or wake up (which Luna can detect) vs. getting in or out of bed. And also set a time window for them.
“HomeJoy could see labor classification as a stumbling block” (2013)
Huh? I am sure he is completely fine having his music streamed over the analogue airwaves on FM Radio stations. Now THAT isn't exactly great quality...
Ask HN: Generalist or a specialist?
I keep getting hit by "You'll end up no where if you want to do everything. Stick to one. Be a specialist"

In a constant battle between wanting to pursue many things and mastering one thing only.

Follow the heart or the mind ? The passion or the "reality" ?
... Don't do this.
I can hardly believe it. a map from 1983 atlas clearly shows it: http://samlib.ru/img/b/balxzinabalxzin_i_a/mappointstreangle..., and that's just 1 to 10,000,000 map
Hey Mohamed.

I am interested in how someone who is not an engineer/investor/etc even came to hear about Hacker News?
At some point, you have to trust your dependencies. I cannot audit every dependency of our system.
> I think he intended using the Kanji characters as Japanese characters, although they were originally derived from traditional Chinese (still used in Taiwan).

And in Hong Kong where I live.

I can't read Japanese, so the characters above just happened to retain its meaning after being imported to the Japanese language. I know that many don't.
what a shame all those people underneath dont understand what hes talking about. as a musician i agree about the sound quality, and im amazed to see all these people saying they cant hear the difference! really ? well, i can hear the difference but the reason i dont want my tracks on google or spotify or any of that is because i was never given a choice whether i wanted my records on there.

googles NDA with the PRS http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/sep/03/youtu... - no musician in the UK had a choice about this and none of them are allowed to see how much their tracks earn from streaming.

neil youngs pono is highly unfortunate, and its a testament to peoples total misunderstanding that he managed to pull in more than a million dollars in donations to create the format, when there was already a format called FLAC, which had been around for years, and did what he wanted.
Who are the security services employed by? I certainly wouldn't call them private industry!

Did you mean to say it's not elected government officials? Just curious, because I definitely consider a country's intelligence apparatus to be completely and wholly part of its "government", and would be surprised to find someone who didn't.
Feel free to show any industry material promoting the sound quality of 12" 45rpm. They were only ever pushed as having more content than a 7" 45rpm.
Nanosatellites may soon communicate with Soldiers
The gulf between Neil Young and anyting resembling consensual reality seems vast. Wealth sure can be isolating.
Soma.fm and Spotify and Python mashup
Yes. Creative people creating ads are paid billions in fees every year to make useless things. Businesses buying advertising are just that stupid. They love to spend money on useless things instead of useful ones. I mean, who doesn't?
~"Don't make the mistake of defining yourself by your job, just know that your job makes you better than these other people with a different job"
Awesome. One of the first posts was "Google Removes http:// from Chrome". I remember that!
Agreed, there's too much white noise. Rain doesn't sound like that.

A slider to adjust the level of white noise (and maybe some other spectral properties) could be just the ticket.
Suggestions like banning strong encryption is a form of ritual abuse. It is meant to get the public used to the idea of pervasive surveillance. That pervasive surveillance will be carried out through a continuation of what existed before the Snowden revelations, which was a successful Straussian confection of fake freedom, carefully managed.
Yeah I was going to have that as an example in my comment, but even then that seems unrealistic to me. Why wouldn't the big tech companies simply not do that? The UK needs them more than they need the UK, and if you took away the country's access to Facebook for more than an hour you'd have a riot on your hands.
Yes, I know it is a thing – but it shouldn’t be. That’s the issue. Brand equity is abusing emotions to make people buy worse products for a higher price.
But a Country's intelligence apparatus doesn't 'govern'. I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative but it seems to me that there is a clear and obvious distinction between a government and the organisations tasked by it to provide intelligence.
Bitcoin hit $4!
>G'day, Mohamed don't make the mistake of defining yourself by your job.

Why not? A jail guard sounds very, very badass.
I have just reduced the level of the underlying white noise that plays along the rain samples. Please try again. Hit the television icon to increase the level of that white noise.

But please understand this is a white noise machine too. The rain sounds that have been selected - especially the heavier rain sounds - do include a high level of white noise, naturally.
Don’t Lose Your Money – Adjust Your App Marketing with App Store Optimization
No shortage of irony in that sentence...
Is this in reference to people who are software engineers who work for big businesses that are mostly marketing, sales and advertising driven and who would not have a job if it weren't for what they're criticizing in this thread?
I don't get your argument. You start off with a 'sigh' as if this is a trivially solved problem and anyone else is just being awkward, and then you admit that this only holds when you don't care about consistency, and on top of that, only when you don't really have a complex parallelism problem in the first place!

The actual answer to your question 'what's wrong with using lock-free data structures?' is really simple - what's wrong with them is that they don't provide atomicity, consistency nor isolation under composition.
Somebody needs to visit a qualified audiologist.
I love PHP. I really do. Everyone knows about its flaws in syntax, function names, argument order, and so on, but as someone who learned PHP and used only it for years certain paradigms and programming styles it uses really messed me (and I think others) up when switching languages:

- arrays are hashmaps/multi-dimensional aka one-size fits all (no need for more complicated data structures)

- everything is single-request and single-process (no lifetime management or persistent state, lower need to worry about memory leaks, no threads or processes, no real timers or async)

- copy on write
Apparently I joined the day PG and Jessica got married:

https://twitter.com/kn0thing/statuses/824631187

I wasn't at the wedding! ;-)