jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
That assessment is itself often made post-hoc, though. The dabbler who hits on an interesting connection by chance is often retroactively written into history as a generalist who purposely scoured the world far and wide for that knowledge to connect to their project (sometimes people even convince themselves that that's what they were doing all along).

Same with what makes one a "dilettante" versus "Renaissance man", I think: it's more or less a retrospective judgment, and the main factor is how much your output impresses people. The mediocre would-be Renaissance man is a dilettante, and the dilettante who does impressive things is a Renaissance man.
When I interviewed at Microsoft, they recommended reading this book -- I doubt it helped at all, but it's a great read (as is the sequel) if you haven't read it.

There's a real sense of history too, some of the problems illustrate how far we've come: like talking about transferring a whole megabyte several miles as a challenge.
(also, is is "long haul" not "long hall")
I think I'm playing the smart person :) Who really knows, smart and idiotic are all perceptions in the minds of others.

Semmelweis who was influential in the idea that germs spread disease was jailed for insanity because of it. Was he smart or an idiot?

I went into the meeting wanting to kill OS standardization and it worked. I got my way but whether standardization is better / worse, who knows?
To do this you probably want to ensure that the webserver output buffer, PHP's output buffer, and possibly even the TCP stack buffer (if they are all different sizes) are filled with enough test data to get flushed and sent to the browser before calling sleep(), otherwise you won't see much in the client.

On a slightly related note tuning these 3 values and setting them to sizes appropriate for the content you are serving can increase your webservers performance.
thanks for pointing that out, that does seem like a good idea and I will look into that
liberal office, the hated enemy of every single self respecting conservative
/s
Yeah, but that the half a cent doesn't add up to the energy expended in looking at the website!
For most projects you won't save money by using AWS or Rackspace. You are better of with dedicated/colo servers, unless you have managed servers or rackspace servers.

For CPU intensive tasks AWS is a good option, for CDN AWS & Rackspace are both good choices depending on your needs.

I am currently using AWS, for our next project I plan on using a hybrid solution VPS/Dedicated server-AWS CDN-Rackspace CDN.

Having used dedicated servers, AWS, and Rackspace. This is how I see AWS & Rackspace.

AWS

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Very powerful configurations available for CPU intensive tasks

- Inexpensive CDN with SSL & CNAME support

- Disk space can be expanded without additional RAM/CPU

- Good load balancers

Cons:

- Poor disk read/write performance [i.e. slow DB performance]

- Very expensive compared to hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- Instances are expensive

- No Customer Service (i'm not talking about technical support just basic customer service) unless you pay for expensive support contracts

- RAM/CPU can't be expanded without upgrading into a package you might not need

- Limited to 1 IP address per instance, which means you are limited to 1 SSL site per instance (you could use SNI, but many browsers still don't support it)

Rackspace

Pros:

- Easy to add/reduce capacity

- Better disk read/write performance than AWS

- Inexpensive Akamai CDN

Cons:

- Very expensive compared to dedicated/colo hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy hardware)

- Disk space can't be expanded without purchasing more RAM/CPU

- Cloudfiles (file storage) hosting is very expensive

- Bandwidth is very expensive

- CPU/Bundles are expensive

- CDN doesn't yet support CNAME

- IP Addresses are expensive

(This is off the top of my head, I might have missed something.)
Not really. Streaming video tends to use byte-range requests (introduced in HTTP 1.1) because you want be able to to drag the video play head/cursor to an arbitrary location. For example, iOS uses this mechanism.
Melissa Chan is a Gordon Chang-level troll. Not a journalist.

Wire me $1000 and I'll produce video testimony of an Asian-looking person alleging literally any atrocity you want by China/Russia/Iran.

Unverifiable testimony not made under oath and grainy Google Earth screenshots are simply not reliable evidence in the current year.

As for actual evidence, PRC publishes their census data online for everyone to see. If you don't believe that, you can look up "Ürümqi street" on YouTube and get a ballpark figure for how many Turkic people and cultures are represented there. If you still think there is Holocaust 2.0 going on in Xinjiang, you are ideologically poisoned beyond reason.
What are you looking to do? Tripod-in-the-sky? Acrobatic crazy stuff? Cruising around?

Speaking for myself, I wanted to feel like I was piloting something, not just stiffly moving a camera around. I thought I wanted long flight times but have since realized that I really wanted acrobatic ability.

A 2S TinyWhoop drone is about $100-150 and is very durable. I wouldn't call it indestructible, because you can definitely break it if you try, but it will bounce off things or even plummet from the sky. It can't carry a GoPro unfortunately but it's a good pick for learning. The costs will come from ground equipment like your radio or goggles, which can be reused on future drones.

One of the newer "toothpick" drones could carry an Insta360 Go.

There's currently a few big shifts in drones right now:

- ExpressLRS: Open source radio control protocol. Range will exceed your battery.

- HDZero / SharkByte: DJI alternative for HD video. Not as good quality but slightly more open (although not truly open).

- "Sub 250" - Upcoming US FAA regulations put sub 250g drones in a special category, which could have some use.
lsub and octopus: http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html
Hi everyone,

I just wanted to show off my WIP programming language Cognate, which I thought you might find interesting. It takes inspiration from Factor and Joy, but uses prefix notation. The compiler ignores words starting with lowercase, allowing comments embedded into statements. It is a dynamic, garbage collected language oriented around higher order functions.
I guess that when I want something better that doesn't exist, the only possibility is to just make it instead.
> but by this logic I should keep all my money under the mattress instead of the bank, no?

More like "by this logic I should keep all my money under the mattress instead of in a jar in my cousin's pantry, no?"

Slack isn't a secure vault for data, it's a communications tool. They obviously have some amount of security but that's not their purpose, whereas a bank is intended to store money.

I think running your own IRC is a perfectly acceptable solution if you value your data.
Careful, that has basically zero in the way of authorization/authentication. Putting business logic in there on a standard deploy is asking for trouble, especially if malicious accounts have access.
And then you have you setup something like ZNC so people can catch up to history while offline.
Amazingly, the top comment on this post discusses philosophy of mortality, based on the ToS of corporations.
I knew bcrypt was tunable, and I guess I was hoping someone from Slack would actually pop up and say how their bcrypt was tuned (which I guess means what the cost factor is). But you do have some good info, I wasn't aware of what expected cost factors were and how secure a single password would be at those cost factors.

I'm assuming that your "8 character password" is assuming a randomly-generated password. I'm curious what the expected cost would be of breaking a particularly weak one (e.g. a human-generated password, based on dictionary words although perhaps with mnemonic devices or letter/number substitutions). The paper you linked says their hardware computed 6511 passwords per second at a cost factor of 5, and based on the cycle costs listed, I'm thinking it does 52 passwords per second at a cost factor of 12. Assuming a particularly weak password, I don't know how many passwords a brute-forcer would expect to have to try before hitting the correct one.
This is from Bloomberg Business's Energy section not USA Today, this article is written for people who are familiar with the energy market and the units of megawatts and million metric tons of coal.

You would be complaining if every article written for a technical audience had to take a paragraph and explain how many songs or movies X TB could hold.
I'm fascinated by exposes of stock market rigging. Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" was one of the best things I've read about it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393351599/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

This columnist seems to be using the word "rigged" in a much narrower sense (a small discount being given to large purchases of foreign shares). When talking about stock market rigging, this really seems to be just a small part of the larger problem.
> banning public bins (only recently re-introduced)

They were banned in train stations and other similar areas, for the fairly sensible reason that they'd been used to hide bombs in those locations in the past.
> If we don't like what they're telling us to do, we can always pick different people.

On what basis are the voters supposed to make that decision? What we see is that our representatives take money from defense contractors and then do what those defense contractors want them to do. If they have a good reason for that they aren't sharing it.

That's the problem you're ignoring. "We can't tell you because it's a secret" is something they can trivially say when the actual reason is blatant corruption. Doing what defense contractors want for the same reason we subsidize corn in Iowa is indistinguishable from having an actual reason when the actual reason is secret. Which means we either have to assume that having no public reason implies corruption, or have no defense from corruption and consequently prolific corruption. And we can't have a corrupt and unaccountable military, that is totally crazy.

So what you're really saying is that they either have to give us the reason (or end the programs) or we need to "pick different people". Which is kind of what I'm saying.

> But anyway, the military isn't going to do the same thing they've always done with intelligence -- liaise with civilian government orgs to gather intel and ultimately launch operations based on that intel.

What operations? There is no military operation you can launch to prevent someone from breaking into a computer when you don't even know they've done it until after it's already over. You don't have a time machine.

This isn't a military problem. Look at the real world analogy of what they're afraid of: It's like a foreign government having a spy infiltrate an American company and steal their private documents. The defense from that has to be from inside that company. You can't solve it from the top down.
https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/

tldr; you have to set the hook yourself
with unit tests ! nice !
Heardgard and Frontline are usually all that anyone needs.
The temporary lack of GNU tools and packages, both of which are entirely relieved by MacPorts, is FAR outweighed by working native commercial software (Photoshop, Office, VMware, etc) and the excellent hardware support. Try calling Lenovo with a Linux issue. I'm not 16 anymore and I don't have time for that shit.

Even as good as cygwin can get, it will always pale in comparison to OS X as a "UNIX," and even as good as Linux can get, it's still going to be a pain in the fucking ass and not have commercial software.

Given OS X wasn't an option, I would still choose Linux over Windows though.
The Facebook message you want to revoke is the Facebook message someone is going to take a screen-shot of.

The idea that any posts anywhere are going to be revocable seems to me to ultimately be a fantasy Facebook uses to impel people to deposit all their data on Facebook (and Facebook corporation itself saves all the information that's ever posted on the site, oddly enough).

Developing distributed social networks would be easier if you drop any efforts at revoking data. I suppose that's my idea.
Perhaps it's because the article is two years old, but the whole thing just seems ridiculous.

It really feels like the points he's making here has to do more with what he's used to and his expectations, rather than actual value or solid issues.

His complaints seem to amount to 'OS X sucks, it's not Windows OR Linux!', 'TextMate sucks, it's not Vim at all!', 'Keyboard shortcuts are different and I get confused', and 'There's no Linux package manager' (1. It's not Linux; 2. There are tons of them, take your pick). He goes on to complain that 'fully removing' an application requires shareware (to delete the extra preferences, which don't affect performance), ignoring the fact that Windows installs leave DLL files and registry entries scattered around (which do affect performance).

Then he starts complaining that BSD isn't Linux. He complains about where Python is (does it really matter? there's a symlink in /usr/bin/python). He installs MacPorts and then seem to complain that it's in a different location. He complains that it's not a framework/bundle (but MacPorts does install frameworks/bundles).

He talks about hardware design, assuming that the only selling point of Apple's hardware is aesthetics (whereas the design of the laptops makes them feel solid and reliable, rather than cheap and flimsy like most plastic PC laptops). Of course, unibody laptops weren't being made (or at least, weren't popular) when he had his, but that's even moreso a tick in Apple's favor.

He makes a few valid points (e.g. crappy German keyboard layouts, which I can't speak to), but it all has the air of someone who's so invested in their current platform(s) that they've become frustrated and angry when faced with something different, like an American visiting Europe and complaining that they can't get a genuine triple baconator and everyone speaks some funny language they don't understand.
I was in a startup that built a MySQL/Spring/Wicket app, and I'm building a Mongo/Play one right now. So, point by point:

1) Java isn't amenable to pre-installed hosting like PHP is. You usually deal with machine images that you have to prepare yourself. Jetty 7 + Nginx is the going coin, it's quick and easy

2) Java is outright the best performing language of the ones currently used for web development with any degree of frequency (PHP, Python and Ruby being the other ones I'd mention). There's 10+ years of optimization and garbage collection research in those VM's, and language is statically typed, which increases verbosity yes, but also performance

3) If you extend the view beyond start-ups, Java isn't just getting used - the world runs on it. If it's a web app of any meaningful size, there's a 90%+ it's written or getting written in Java. The only other language that has this wide an acceptance level is PHP, which is a different animal entirely. Not to disrespect RoR or Django, but their overall share of the web development market is negligible

Keeping in mind the bias that comes from 12+ years of dealing in Java, here's a quick pro-con for what it's worth:

pro =>
- Java is fast. Very fast
- Tool support is unrivaled. It's hard to appreciate what an IDE can do to speed up your work until you've gotten your first couple dozen IntelliJ keystrokes in the muscle memory. RoR is not faster to write than Java (a frequent claim)
- Library support is unrivaled as well. Whatever it is, there's already a library for it, usually quite well-documented, and most questions that come up are googlable on the spot (something I sorely miss when I have to work Rails on occasion)
- with the entry of Play, speed and ease of web development is approaching dynamic languages: write, hit reload, be done
- knowledge and people to hire are available widely
- the JVM is also home to Scala and Clojure. Starting in Java and moving to Scala is a pattern these days

con =>
- it's wordy and, compared to, say, Ruby or Scala, downright ugly. Not a big deal as far as start-up success is concerned, mostly a hacker bragging right. Nothing wrong with bragging as long as it doesn't get in the way of getting stuff done
- generics and collection syntax is unwieldy. IDE support takes care of some of that, but not all
- there's arcane stuff one needs to get used to - a learning curve of sorts. Again, mitigated by the widely available documentation and Google support

hope this helps.

- z
Just try to market an integrated office suite called "Office"

Microsoft owns the trademark to something like "Microsoft Office" not the actual word Office, right?

Also, doesn't OpenOffice still exist?
A tollbooth was taken off this road about 3-4 months ago that was a major congestion point - 2 years of historical data is largely useless I think.
How about our good friend, C ?
So the browser doesn't scroll natively? Don't know the iOs scroll views... Still, an approximation would be nice, it doesn't have to mimic every teeny detail.
I stand corrected. Man that is kind of messed up.

Even if you support that net activity, which is essentially a public welfare, it doesn't belong in the tax code.

I wonder if we'll ever see the day when all of this taxation complexity is unwound and you can actually cleanly see how policy changes affect everyone.
A bit more info on what exactly this "app maker" is/does would be quite helpful. The "about us" and "help" section of the site don't give much useful information. Given some more information, I'd be happy to sign up.
Thank you for putting this all together and making it open source. By the way, will you be releasing an API? I think this API would be really valuable.
Windows 7 is orders of magnitude easier to manage.

A lot of the improvements under the hood the consumer didn't see or notice. One that they might have noticed is the ability for the OS to find proper drivers for pretty much any consumer device from a major manufacturer.

Other than that, there are other features that put W7 was ahead of XP in terms of management ease.
There a subtlety in what I was saying that's being lost (which means you aren't wrong, but what you're stating doesn't necessarily apply specifically to what I was trying to say). You don't round rates, or prices, but you do round accounts because those represent real money. Your account can't actually have a fraction of a cent in it. Either the account it came from keeps the cent, or your account gets it. In a very real way, an account can be thought of as an integer number of cents (because often it's implemented that way). That may or may not make sense for your inventory or service system, where sub-cent rates make sense because the number of units is often greater than one.

To bring this back to the original comment and the items it was referencing, store money (real money, like accounts) in the smallest possible subdivision (cents for USD), but that doesn't need to apply to pricing, which is a potential amount of money. Potential money needs to be changed into real money at the time of a transaction, and real money cares about quantities it's possible to have, and it's not really possible (or at least useful, in most cases) to have less than the smallest possible subdivisible amount of a currency.

You're entirely correct though that you can't assume that cents is enough to accurately model everything to do with a business that works in USD, and ignoring that will result in problems like you showed.
We certainly did not have liberties much beyond modern day China, back in those days you risked your life by unionising.
Hackers only hate on things that they don't think they could have written themselves.
I'm in the US, and definitely appreciate red bull competing with mercedes. If anything, Verstappen got a rough deal in the last race.
Really? Because I dont hear about gang banger 70 year olds. Or 80 year old violent rapists.

This could be warranted for light non-violent crime. Or murders who had a very very good case (like they were brutally bullied or threatened and there is clear proof). Then I believe in rehabilitation. So I guess it really depends on the case. Most probably wont pass that test though.
How do you reconcile cases of wrongful imprisonment?
I think it is safe to assume that they do and have a synergistic effect with pumping people into the criminal justice system. And I do think there is plenty of reform, such as eliminating a for profit motive in incarceration. But putting 100% of the focus and onus on reforming the system is never going to give us the results we want. By the time people have done enough crime to end up on parole or in prison very few are coming back. We need to resolve some of the deeper issues, and they are not easy to solve. How can the government force a family to stay together? They can’t. But they could address lack of economic opportunities. As we know finances are one of the main drivers of failed relationships and homes. We have to admit to ourselves that not every person is cut out for college or a desk job. These people need meaningful work. Instead we export those jobs and import the misery.
And yet, efficient government involvement seems to yield much better results than other countries with "retrograde economies".
http://github.com/mmphosis/kill/blob/master/kill.c
It's a semi-common generic Millions indicator, not specific to finance. I prefer to just use "m" instead.
Very interesting article! As somebody with a rather weak background in mathematics (to put it mildly), I really like the author's style, it is very accessible.

It would have been even nicer, though, if the author had given one or two examples of practical applications. Or would those have been to complex for the intended audience (which very much includes me)?
Yet the older they are the more they test in production.
I wish people were more aware of fees. You pay around 1% of the amount as a fee. Without these fees, everytihng could be 1% cheaper. Imagine every person in the world making 1% more overnight. 1% of your money is a lot.

That is why you will never be able to give money to a friend this way. You give $100, but they receive $99. They give it back after a week, and you receive $98.
They certainly blew up 6/7 years ago when they were a few quid/year to register
agreed, Marketing matters.
How about a combined backup/sync solution for Excel spreadsheets? The sync portion could work like Dropbox, but the daemon would only pay attention to Excel files on a given machine, or in a folder, like a user's home directory. There would be a company account on a website or a locally running web appliance, where users could share spreadsheets, particular pages in a spreadsheet, or even particular cells. This would be combined with an Excel macro that can pull-down such shared data from the account website. Updates to data would only be sent when the spreadsheet is saved and uploaded by the local daemon.

This could even be automated by screen-scraping Excel running on virtualized Windows instances.
I haven't checked their research myself, but I feel like you're missing the point.

It doesn't matter that you can argue about different pressures, or about their confidence level, or anything else.

They ran the numbers. The tests came back "random". They generated definitely random data and people labeled it "streak".

The fact that you can come up with reasons why players ought to be more streaky than random trials is irrelevant. We ran the numbers, and they aren't.
I don't think there is any doubt that a "preemptive" nuclear first strike by the US would have morally and legally been regarded as genocide.

The last time we had a debate on HN on this topic a number of people seemed to think it would have been a good idea - which I found genuinely disturbing. Hopefully I was just being trolled.