jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
You can say what you want, but many strange things happend that day.

Like the free-fall speed of the buildings:
http://www.drjudywood.com/articles/BBE/BilliardBalls.html

The odd 'toasting' and sometimes sudden rusting of 1400 cars about 7 blocks away.. sometimes even engine blocks are missing?!?

http://www.drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/StarWarsBeam5.html
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/moretoastedcars.html

And what about the 'dustification' of

http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/Image43.jpg
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/Image44.jpg
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/Image45.jpg
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/Image46.jpg
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/Image47.jpg

Animation:
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/dewpics/dustspire.gif

More 'dustification':
http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/StarWarsBeam3.html

You can say what you want, but I find seeing the type of massive steel beams used in those building turning to dust and blowing away in the wind in just seconds very, very odd. Were does the energy come from? Especially because the steel to which this is happening is 'standing alone', seemingly untouched, suddenly going 'poof'..!?!

Not saying that I agree with the described causes on that web page.. but I am quite certain it isn't caused by a plane crash an hour or so earlier.
This just makes me thinking that people just have misplaced talent. Just imagine if cancer research and solving aids was as approachable as building things with toothpicks, we'd probably be way further than we are in solving the world's problems.
I agree with everything you said, but I found most disturbing in the article was: "You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it."

So when Beats®, Monster Cable® and Bose® trick the weak-minded into overpaying for commodity products, that is a good thing?

"The value added is in the brand — how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained" Gee, we used to call that the "rip-off"
i assumed that was intentional, but now that i think about it you're probably right.
> What does 'nice' actually mean? It's famous for being a low-entropy word.

Brooke Allen got a bit of attention on HN recently with a post he wrote (incidentally called "How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire"), but that's not the one I mean to point to here. Instead I mean to point to an earlier one in which he touches on the fickleness of "nice". < http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... >
Gov't contracts are only something like one-third of SpaceX's revenues.
That sucks. I thought I was the only guy who had to have those kinds of experiences. :-)

In my case it was years ago, and since then my situation has improved dramatically. The things that seemed to help were:

1) Identifying the kinds of people I worked well with in the past and pitching those kinds of people on projects (I did some of this by learning the Meyers-Briggs function stack, which unfortunately doesn't have an axis of evil but is otherwise helpful in finding new clients who are somewhat similar to clients I liked in the past; ENFPs are a perennial favorite)

2) Identifying non-profits and other less rip-offy types of clients and showing them how I could help them

3) Saving enough money that I didn't have to work with any given client

4) Establishing firm policies like "You will pay 100% down if X and Y conditions are not met or do not apply, or if the total is below $N; otherwise 50% down and 50% prior to delivery"

5) Doing background-checking on all new clients, especially if they have fired one of my kind before (I usually call up the fired guy).

#4 really rides on your reputation, so you may wish to have references on hand to give to potential clients.

I'm celebrating my ninth year as a solo freelancer in rural California and things couldn't get much better, so I hope this helps you somehow.
You could make it a redirect service for npm modules.

e.g. https://js.org/express 301 redirects to https://www.npmjs.com/package/express

Another idea is a blog. One of my favorite blogs is http://npmawesome.com/
and Poland is not your target. I'ts quite sad, but and true.

Working as Python developer with 4 years of experience. Close to 23.000 eur(net), and used to think it's quite good, after this message it's no longer true. Thanks guys ;)
Upvotes are literally a +/-1 of agreement. It's a bit of a tough crowd (probably related to the subject matter), but either way, comments are meant to add something to the discussion.
I'm a programmer from Russia, Moscow.
My salary is ~$3000USD per month, I think its average picture.
Findbugs, the popular Java tool I linked to in another comment, explains the bug like this:

"A random value from 0 to 1 is being coerced to the integer value 0. You probably want to multiple the random value by something else before coercing it to an integer, or use the Random.nextInt(n) method."

That's about as good an explanation as you'd get from anyone.

The way I see it is this. Simple bugs like this happen because _human beings are flawed._ All it takes is a momentary lapse of concentration and you've put the cast in the wrong place in a method you don't write a test for because you're in a hurry, and all it's doing is generating a random number with a standard API so why bother? (Or it's something you wouldn't normally even test for, like assuming something is re-entrant when it isn't)

We're inevitably going to make a certain number of mistakes a day, and it's our duty to put systems into place that catch those mistakes before they cause any more damage than they should.
Yes - I'm talking about net income. I've a small mistake:
~ 10.000 Euro (not $) / year this is ~ 14.000$ / year.
what does prevent bots to actually executed javascript and simulate a click? For example using http://www.phantomjs.org/ ?
You made my night! Welcome :)
That's the gist of it. It should point out how fucked up the patent system in the US is. Also, it was originally patented in 1992, and it's just now being legislated with.

What I imagine happened is some programmers at a now defunct company wanted to get their names on a patent because it's cool. They come up with the most generic algorithm ever, easily get it patented, and then they get to brag to their drinking buddies.

Then, the company they work for goes out of business/gets bought and the patent is transferred to a patent troll like this Bedrock company who then try to find where it 'infringes'.

That's all my imagination, but similar things have happened.

What I just learned with this article is the Bedrock company is no longer active...how can you win a case when you're not even an active company anymore!?

Note: I don't have a tremendous amount of sympathy for any large company like Google, Oracle, Apple, Amazon, etc. who get sued for silly patent 'infringements' because they would do the same in a heartbeat. ALL software patents should be abolished.
How were they able to get back online? Deploying to another AWS site or to another cloud provider? Presumably they didn't own enough servers themselves?

At what point did they make the call that the outage was too serious and they would lose all data since the last backup and start migrating? Had they pre-planned for it, or was it ad-hoc? Will they stay where they are now and use Amazon US East as their failover or migrate back in due course? Or rearchitect to handle this in future?

(thanks, re: name).

Is it just luck that the problem which happened was one they prepared for instead of one they didn't?
No, it's not like Python/Ruby/etc dependencies. You use your own git; dependencies are submodules in your git repo. shellfire deliberately is not designed to be installed in `/usr/lib` or wherever. In this sense, it's more like Go. Going down the git route gives fine-grained control over which dependency versions one uses.

This makes development completely independent of the `/usr`, etc of the machine your own. If you clone your repo from your laptop to someone else's desktop, no need to to install deps, no need even for a working network env - valuable if you're in one of those places that breaks Ruby because they uses a Windows proxy (eg most UK Gov setups).

You don't have to fatten; you can just deploy by exporting your git repo. That sort of route would be perfectly acceptable for most enterprise work. Still no need to install deps, as everything is relatively-pathed.
Or as stated in Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Says who? Definitely not Jesus himself as quoted in the New Testament (his words, directly quoted):

Matthew 5:17-18

"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished."

The "law or the prophets" is, of course, everything written in the Old Testament, where different chapters were attributed to the different prophets already in Jesus' time.

He makes it even stronger:

"Ye have heard that it was said, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery': but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28)

Verily, read thine Bible, if you believe it's inspired by God. Read it yourself. Don't believe what others interpret.

Or maybe accept that we shouldn't take that book too seriously?
"hours of intense focus"? really? Most software developers I know - highly paid ones - rarely put in more than 4 hours at stretch ever. The 'pomodoro' technique popular a few years ago focused on getting people to work for 25 minutes at a stretch.

I'm not saying the work is not sometimes mentally taxing - it is. But so are other jobs. CPAs trying to juggle way too much info days before tax day - and tax day doesn't move - you can't push that back - the pressure mounts and there's nothing you can do about it. MANY software projects get pushed back days/weeks just because of any number of factors (some big, some trivial).

And... it's not mentally taxing to some people. There are things I sweat in development that other people do with their eyes closed. And vice versa - I've cleaned up projects in a few days that a small team of people "fired on all cylinders" to get done (and failed).

As I replied elsewhere effort and value are pretty disconnected.
a box filled with rocks does not need locks
> That said, obviously they should have brought in the campaign website team...

That's called cronyism, and, for the most part, it's either against the law, or will get you destroyed in the media. One of the biggest challenges in government is that, for those of us in startup-land, the process goes something like: "I need to hire someone, I'll call my friend who I know does good work". You can't really do that in the government, or everyone who isn't your friend won't be happy.

The standard federal contracting route is certainly a mess as well. The underlying belief that everything can be reduced to a series of checkboxes, and whoever can check the boxes the cheapest wins leads to a disaster.

Hopefully, one of the outcomes of all of this is we rethink how the government software (and other sorts of procurement) process is done.
Germany has the same problem. Many haven't even learned to read english since everything else in germany is dubbed. Very frustrating. Here in sweden most things are written in english though so no problem. No one even thinks twice before writing comments in code. English is the standard.
Those countries are not alike. Norway, Finland and Denmark are all very restrictive in immigration matters.
More explanation on their blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-...
> The essence, perhaps... with none of the nuance or shading

Precisely why the worlds problems are all solvable on Twitter.
Very reminiscent of the Teleport access proxy which started out as a SSH proxy but now also supports a bunch of other protocols: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport
Too many years ago, I wrote something in-house, now lost, titled "Type integer considered harmful". I was arguing for the idea that everything should have an explicit range, written

foo: 0..100;

This was around the time Ada was being designed. The way I wanted this to work is that the size of intermediate variables was determined by the compiler, with the following rules:

- Unless a named typed variable result will overflow, no unnamed intermediate variable can overflow. The compiler must size intermediate temporary values accordingly.

- If this requires a larger intermediate variable than the machine can provide, a compile error is reported.

The implication is that you often need longer integers than you'd expect. Expressions such as

x = a + b - c

x = (a + b) / c

with signed values, all, say, 32-bit integers, can overflow in a+b without overflowing x.
So such expressions have to be computed in 64 bits, then checked for overflow. This eliminates hidden overflow in intermediates. An expression with only one operator never overflows in a recoverable way, so it just has to be checked, not expanded.

That was written in an era when there were computers in use with word sizes of 8, 12, 16, 18, 24, 32, 36, 48, 60, and 64 bits. So word size was more of a practical issue than it is now, when non power of 2 machines have died off. Also, machines of that era tended to be slower on longer values. Much slower on some machines which had to do double-length arithmetic in software. Thus, there was a performance hit for this approach, which was the main objection.
> You’ll find that in nearly every US jurisdiction assessed value is a percentage of market value, often a very small one.

That's definitely not the case in my municipality (North-East USA).

Tax assessments are as close to market value as you can get, considering that they are only being appraised every 5 years (I think, it may be 3 years). So there's obviously some lag if the market booms or busts. But overall it's pretty damn close to market prices and averages out over the long term.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Need to ensure you keep your tongue straight when partitioning or restoring databases, migrating/splitting to new apps etc.
I'm not sure if the book covers this, but I'm more curious about technical details like why Java was chosen as the language and why Dalvik as the VM (I know, "it wasn't the JDK/JRE", but then why not a different language?), and other interesting choices (Linux for the kernel, for example).
I had this issue happen with my AT&T DSL line. I even got to the point where a technician was supposed to come out and look at the line but he never showed up.

I called back, I jumped through all their hoops, and then they eventually connected me to another more advanced department who just looked a few things up, said "ok, here's the problem, hold on gonna put this order through to fix it."

Within 2 minutes my connection was back to 6Mbit. Whatever they did they were able to do it COMPLETELY REMOTELY. I never found out what was going on but I suspect I may have ended up on some sort of black list, maybe because of torrents or some other traffic profiling.

It blew my mind. I suffered that speed for nearly 3 months before getting it fixed.
Just a little information on the source from http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute

- The Institute states that it favors policies "that are consistent with the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, and peace."

In 2006 Cato raised approximately $612,000 from the following 26 corporate supporters:

Altria (the report identifies Altria Corporate Services as the contributor)

American Petroleum Institute

Amerisure Companies

Amgen

Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Comcast Corporation

Consumer Electronic Association

Ebay Inc

ExxonMobil

FedEx Corporation

Freedom Communications

General Motors

Honda North America

Korea International Trade Association

Microsoft

National Association of Software and Service Companies

Pepco Holdings Inc.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

TimeWarner

Toyota Motor Corporation

UST Inc

Verisign

Verizon Communications

Visa USA Inc

Volkswagen of America

Wal-Mart Stores
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute
If you want to get this fixed, you should call their number and get a technician dispatched. He can put a test set on your line at the demarc outside your house. If the SnR is bad, or someone did something dumb like put a bridge tap on your loop, he'll know.

If you want to prove that ATT sucks, congrats. Mission accomplished. Problem is, we already knew that. Go ahead and move ISPs. Don't be all that alarmed when the lawn guy cuts the cable vision line that Your cable provider buried the whopping 3" below the soil, as required by their policies. Don't be alarmed when their front line support requires you to restart your modem. Don't be alarmed when the experience still isn't what you expect as a network engineer.

Front line support sucks because it's designed to handle calls from people who really do need to be instructed to reboot their modem. If you want effective support, you have to recognize that you are the exception to the rule, not the standard.
Just answer one thing:

Do Jewish slaughter laws call for the animal to be conscious when having its throat cut, and do you think this is preferable to being stunned?

That is, if you HAD to kill your pet dog by cutting its throat, would you want it to be stunned or not?

I probably used Kosher and Halal incorrectly, but suffice it to say that slaughter of conscious animals is widely practiced in the Jewish and Muslim faiths. To ask another question: Do you think western slaughterhouses adopted captive-bolt stunning because they were bored, or because it granted a small reprieve at the end of the farming cycle?
The government certainly /can/ tell you "how to care for a member of your tribe" if that member is a minor. The ritual circumcision Hitchens references led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. The government should let /adults/ practice their religion as they choose, but there would certainly be a rational basis for concluding that this particular practice unnecessarily endangers a third party: children who lack the ability to say, "No, thank you! I'm Buddhist." The same goes for Christian sects that disapprove of medicine. Sure, adults can turn down medical treatment for /themselves/, but if they do so for their children they could (and should) go to jail for child endangerment. A civil libertarian should want to protect everyone's right to liberty, the right to do whatever they wish /without harming others./ In these cases, the religious parents' choices often do harm their children, who are too young to object.
Creating a collaborative organization to design, engineer, and massively produce this stuff is absolutely nothing to scoff at. Process is essential to modern human enterprise--ask any of the hundreds of endlessly delayed Kickstarter projects that routinely fail to turn a prototype into something that can be shipped. If this were simple, there would be many Apples run by many "promoters." Instead there is only one.
Exactly! Syntax matters!

Haskell's syntax is radically different because it matters that it is. It's not different to obfuscate or be obstructionist.

It's different because it's better, for the features of the language. Function application via whitespace is a key feature to make automatic currying pleasant. Automatic currying is a key feature to make partial application pleasant. The patterns continue.

Haskell's syntax wasn't chosen by throwing darts at a dartboard. It wasn't chosen to upset C programmers. It was chosen to optimize simplicity and clarity of code that uses the language.

It missed the mark occasionally, but overall it did a good job. Syntax does matter, and Haskell is proof that using higher levels of abstraction benefits greatly from syntax that encourages it.
What about haveged? Is that good enough for crypto? http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/
For anyone thinking, "O good the government is here to investigate and get our money back" I wouldn't get too excited I'd say this is more likely them wanting to investigate Silk Road related Bitcoin activity than any desire to help those screwed by Gox.
Chapter 9 of _Cryptography Engineering_ leads off with a dozen or so paragraphs on why crypto software doesn't use real random.
> Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements?

Since "forever"? When I ran an ISP in '95, peering was pretty much top of the agenda from day one given that bandwidth is such a huge cost centre. The only reason we never tried to charge site providers for peering was that we didn't get large enough before we sold our dial up customers.

> It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'

That's a horrible analogy. Comcast is not selling the chicken, they're selling access to the local roads that gets you to the freeways that can get you to the McDonalds, or any other business. Comcasts customers are not paying for a specific level of access to McDonalds.

But since you're using that kind of analogy, many suppliers pay for shelf positions in large super market chains, for the same reasons site site operators sometimes pay ISPs for more direct access: both sides know who is most dependent on the improved access.
That was a concern of mine initially, so I've began sourcing images solely from public domain or with consent of the photographer (getting the legal documents for that was a headache)
I thought the same thing. This comment on crypto.stackexchange.com[1] shed a bit of light for me:

Yup, entropy sources may even have a particular bias to bits valued 0 or 1.
Normally you need at least a whitening technique to get something looking
like a random number. Feeding that as a seed into a PRNG is certainly
helping to get the right quality. Be careful not to confuse a source of
entropy with a secure random number generator.

[1] http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/726/what-is-the-us...
Same here. But I don't even use it and default to LibreOffice all the time (I only use Linux nowadays).
This reminds me of a brilliant april fools joke the german Linux Magazin pulled off back in 2001 where they suggested that a backdoor was added to the Linux networking stack disguised in many harmless looking patches

http://www.linux-magazin.de/Heft-Abo/Ausgaben/2001/04/Big-Br...

if you can read german.
Two days left at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. General Engineering (aka Enterprise Systems Engineering). Worst decision of my life. Thank goodness I'm graduating early, thus only wasting 3.5 years of my life as opposed to the typical 4 or 5 years.
A future of DRM "protected" apps (the Apple App Store) is scarier than web apps to me.

I really don't like how the author alludes that Apple is doing something different when really its strategy is ultimately Chrome OS in a prettier shade of lipstick.
I find the impatience of many entrepreneurs to be disturbing and confusing. Many seem to expect to build something and cash out within a few years. But creating something so quickly worthy of sale is extremely hard work. How could you work so hard on something unless you loved it? If you loved it so much, why would you want to sell it?

I think there is currently a unique opportunities for entrepreneurs to create businesses that utilize their most prized passions, experiences, and relationships; and that keep them busy and fed for their entire lives.

Life is long. What's wrong with something great taking 10 years to build? Or 20. Look at long it has taken Apple to hit their stride! But, the only way to achieve such endurance is to follow what you love.

At the same time, life is short. Why waste one moment doing something you don't love?