jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> We had to fire someone doing this as well, he was caught because his "subcontractor" was calling into meetings and had a totally different accent!

This is hysterical. Can you say more about how it happened and the aftermath? How long did it take for suspicions to arise? Did the company confirm the suspicions with data (access logs or anything) or did they just ask him? Did the company treat it as a data breach or just fire the guy and move on?

I doubt it happened but it seems like an opportunity for the company to cut out the middle man and hire the subcontractor directly...
> Finally, you constantly have to work around the limitations of your static site generator.

People have no idea how this simple thing cost so much money in so many companies. The time we spend shoe-horning stuff into stubborn frameworks someone senior, architect, or powerful in general like without having used it is sometimes more than half the budget clients pay for a solution.

And it's not just HTML. It's using Mule for API connection (70% of our time spent fixing Mule, swearing at it or hacking it), using Grails for Java servers (this was horrible and already happened to me twice, I could convince the CEO and bypass the leads to rewrite it in a language we all understood the first time, but the second time the company had to close due to endless productivity sinkholes and 200 employees turn around in 1 year...BECAUSE no one understood what the hell was being done), it's using custom made code generators to consume field lists in very complex models which everyone forgot the workings of 10 years later and new guys spend most of their time for months just hacking the generator to add very low value changes, and the list goes on.

Adding level of indirections to solve simple problems in an evolving system is now something I try to avoid. I even have to fight "geniuses" by telling them that we need to do the dumbest possible solution first and see what we need, rather than one more crazy framework solving a problem we may never have. And I don't always win...
I can vouch for Ruby's practicality as an embedded scripting language. The first time I used it was in a game engine (which, IIRC, also predated Rails) with a C++ core. Writing the high-level game logic in Ruby was pleasant, and hooking into C++ functions that did the heavy lifting kept it performant.
Yes. In the UK you can send a payment reference alongside the payment.

Imagine getting a dozen messages saying

£0.01 From: Your Stalker Ex. Ref: I just want you back!

Or similar. It's a real problem.
Great post,thanks!
This behaviour is normalized for a while, the wall street journal wasn't an outlier back then, but now it seems to be also expected when working for big media outlets, just look at the recent Georgia debacle. Activists disguised as journalists pressure companies to act in their favour or they will throw a fit.
This is a very weird article. It is like the author really wants to believe that this was just an accident.

> forgot to update the GitHub repository

I don't think they "forgot". It was well discussed and people at signal were aware.

> That makes it look as if Signal has been pushing their code updates to git all along

It seems that someone doesn't really understand how software development on teams works if they thought that the whole team just "forgot" to commit their changes and no one noticed. It was expected to everyone I met that they were still using an internal repo.
> and XYZ takes care of managing everything else.

that's external dependencies. I guess that's a nogo for the author.
Boost also has a C++ library: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_0/doc/html/boost_units/E...
Regarding the sheltering: I dunno. The next generation probably isn’t telling you the shit they’re getting into.

Besides that, I spent plenty of Friday evenings staying up until 4 AM playing The Sims (the original game). It’s not like high school kids really have a choice on what they’re doing a lot of times - they don’t have complete freedom of movement.
When I search for SAP HANA, it says it's a column-oriented in-memory analytical RDBMS; is that outdated info? Where is the actual data stored if this is in-memory?
There is a small list of games (and other applications) written using Gambit-C Scheme at:

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Real-w...
Yes it is corrupted by government regulations and interference that have distorted the pricing effect that makes markets work. These are basic economic principles. The problem is people don't understand the pricing effect. When you do it's obvious why problems such as health care exist or why increasing tax rate doesn't increase revenue (Hauser's Law, tax revenue is 18% of GDP no matter what tax rates are).
Nice work. A few things you might consider adding:

1. color stops on gradients are very useful, especially if you use them to denote button states, for example

2. drop shadows can be inset
Am I the only one who does not wish to see universities and colleges become nothing but vocational programs?
Context, please: what's "the Judgment Day Outage"?

(I presume knowing that would explain the purpose of the gedankenexperiment.)
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what you're doing, but should you be in a situation where you need to write copious amounts of markup, Haml makes for an easier workflow to adopt and share with other developers.
"When things start to go wrong, your automatic recovery code will increase the load on your system, and commonly lead you into a spiral of death."

Here is a Battlebots story; When I was competing we would see new teams in the pit area at the beginning of the competition (there were 3 days of preliminaries) that had really nice looking bots. I'd ask them, "So, have you run it full speed into a concrete wall?" And they would either say "Yeah, wow it was amazing ... " and tell some story of mayhem, or "No." (sometimes with a prognostication of confidence in their design skills or their simulations).

Teams that said "No" never made it out of the preliminaries. Not once in my experience.

That story underpins a fundamental truth in systems analysis, "Beat it until it fails before you depend on it."

This is something that Google does really really well by the way, I've watched them turn of 25 core routers simultaneously carrying hundreds of gigabits worth of data, just to verify that what they think will happen, does happen.

You learn not only what breaks, but if you go through the fire drill of bringing it back online, and you take copious notes when people say "Dammit! I need to do 'x' and I can't." your ability to respond will improve.

For very large systems, this can sometimes be the only way to develop this information.

Amazon has clearly had an event of extraordinary magnitude in their data centers. They've no doubt discovered all sorts of tools that they could use to recover more quickly. I would love it if someone from there would post a complete post mortem, but my expectations are low (there is a lot of proprietary benefit in knowing some of this stuff).
It's bipolar - one really great article for 3 inane ones. I'm always surprised how uneven it is.

This one is old, of course, but nothing has changed in the 4 years since it was publised or the 100 years before that.
Definitely check out this article if you want to hear more about how these things are used over at Grooveshark (article by our very own sant0sk1):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008079
We use it to the tune of a few hundred million requests/day
You need to turn on extended globbing for #3 (shopt -s extglob).
could it be that YC invests mostly in people, not ideas? I mean humblebundle team is obviously very talented, they know how to capture interest of masses and they might eventually come up with other ideas in future, start other companies etc. $5k isn't such a high price for YC to maintain some sort of relationship with founders.
That's the part I chuckle at - what do you think your braking distance is at 100MPH? Most places do NOT have roads that are conducive to this as a regular practice.
How long will the $100 Android get OS and security updates? The latest version of iOS works on the 2015 iPhone 6S/original SE.

Apple also releases security updates for phones two years older.

Not to mention that the $100 Android is slow and clunky with worse battery life and a horrible camera.
SEEKING WORK | Montreal | Remote

I help growing companies to start building their technical content.

I'm a technical writer with lots of experience documenting big complicated systems for demanding technical and non-technical audiences. I've documented embedded & FPGA dev tools, machine learning & NLP platforms, radiology workflow systems, and other things.

My experience and projects:

https://github.com/marcpaq

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpaq/

https://egopontem.com

Let me know if you're interested in starting your technical content on the right foot: marcpaq@egopontem.com
Why would i use this over a VPS? A VPS is a similar price and has similar functionality, but doesn't pose a security risk to my home workstation and comes with a slew of other benefits.

The tech looks reasonably cool, but what is the use case?

EDIT: Your site also makes it sound like it is HTTP(S) only. If it's not, you might want to clarify that.
~$1k+ per month from few side projects.

+ pc builder site http://assembleyourpc.net (I created ~1.7 years ago, generates revenue from Adsense and few affiliate programs, 2-6 hours of work (per month))

+ other niche tools : http://portchecker.co and http://signature-maker.net (weekend side projects, 0-2 hours of work(per month))
>At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault?

I mean it is never truly the "AI's fault". It is the fault of the systems that resulted in the biased data and the people who ignored that bias while still delegating the decision making to that AI allowing it to be a tool that propagates those biases. You end up with a dangerous and self-perpetuating system like this:

1. Data is biased against Black people due to historic racism.

2. AI is built of this biased data.

3. AI results in a biased system that disadvantages Black people.

4. Black people get discriminated against due to the results from the AI.

5. New data is now even more biased against Black people.

6. Go to step 1.
Indeed, just about every brand of SSL load balancer was doing it wrong:

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/12/08/poodleagain.html
The recommendation is to make it as slow as you can tolerate, which is based on how fast your web servers are.
None of the technologies you mentioned are boring, pick the right technology for the job and don't worry about what others are using.
I've used a goat service to clean up my backyard in San Francisco. There's a time lapse of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paxvsQOAI48 where you can mainly just see the goats moving around.
There was a time when tail didn't know inotify. It was so, so much better when it learned that trick.

There was also a time when there was a utility called inotail, bridging that gap until tail proper was improved. I very much preferred it over regular tail.
Ya, like an elastic cloud to host your blog
I saw it mentioned someplace (Green Caltrain? SF Streetsblog?) recently. It'd be like a stripped down Dumbarton express.
Using multiple tokens does slow things down, but it is sometimes worth it if you get a bit lucky and make good choices.

These days I generally optimize for fewer lines of code (boilerplate or not), as few dependencies as possible, and a general respect for the CPU cycles needed to run it.
Because its about the futility of conventional investment wisdom.
Next time try to post the link to the project home page instead: http://gitorious.org/fastcgiqt/

Clicking the link and landing inside a repository browser is confusing, disorienting and definitely not helpful.
I would also say that SQLAlchemy with the declarative extension is actually incredibly easy to use.

And once you want to start doing the more complex stuff, SQLAlchemy handles it all just fine, whereas other ORMs tend to fall short rather quickly.
I think dynamic languages, Python in particular, are great for small scale and/or throw-away code like data analysis projects or algorithm prototyping.

However I'd personally be very wary of using them for large scale software systems that need to be maintained over long periods of time, because of this lack of compile time type safety.
Sorry, didn't mean to address you personally. Edited my post.

Also, will study your Oct. 13 blog post on the matter to learn more about the issues.
"How do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the largest market share?" -- no: mainly if it's better suited to the task at hand.

"There are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source."

Which doesn't matter at all, the success of Wikipedia is in the content and the participation of the content creators, not in the open source-ness of the underlying wiki engine.

"And don't forget OSX is based on an open source kernel."

I don't. But that has nothing to do with the success of OS X. Darwin itself never got anywhere.

"Many tools used regularly by developers are open source."

Yes --but those are not replications of existing closed source ones...
I invoke SandGorgon’s law of outsourcing analogies

As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving outsourcing or Indians approaches 1, if Godwin’s law has not already been satisfied
There's an underlying assumption here that there are opportunities to be missed. She's already mostly through HS; this isn't like some isolated homeschooled situation. If you're 16, have an obvious lucrative career path right in front of you, you would be an idiot to spend hours writing AP History reports or whatever, especially if your interest in that topic is low.
Very simple: Don't act as if you're entitled to having any feature you desire implemented for nothing. Offer money or other compensation to the developer(s) to have it implemented.

Either that, or do it yourself (and submit a patch).
I don't know how other countries work, but here in Australia the tax revenue on online gambling (and the media influence of certain investors in it - aka James Packer) makes banning pretty unlikely.

Most countries are trying to unify copyright laws (good or bad). There is no international consensus on online gambling, though.
Sounds like "I do too think this is the way!"
+1 Good points on clarity and communication.
Eesh. Sorry about that. The password was only emailed for debugging during development, since we weren't storing it (plaintext) in the database. It has been fixed :)
here's another good place, altho more of culture rather than the technical stuff.

http://nushackers.org/2011/03/movies-documentaries-and-video...
Is 'Rails for Comedians' a real thing? I tried to google it.
The funny thing is that the Antrophic principle believes in some kind of 'true randomness' in this way - even if it is just about the constants for the otherwise deterministic universe :-)
Not my finest word selection on that one :/
I don't think HSTS completely moots user profiles. Most "good" sites are not going to be storing session data encoded as HSTS timestamps.
What about the fact that they are simple, idiomatic, and require almost no effort to reason about?
These types of interviews are very similar to the Confucian Imperial Examination tests (Keju) of China [0]. The Keju's main purpose was to exclude peasants while giving the imperial bureaucracy the image of a meritocracy and therefore legitimacy. They also helped enforce a common culture, script, and style of writing for the large empire. To be clear, the Keju changed a lot as China's history evolved and it changed with China and is not a unified 'thing'.

The expense and time for study excluded many people and I have heard that whole villages would pool resources for just one son to buy the exam materials and take the time to study for the exam. Richer families didn't have need to sacrifice as such, of course. Typical success ratios were ~1:50 exam sitters. The Taiping rebellion was a direct result (among many) by such a man that failed his exams a few times (later declaring himself the brother of Jesus, but that's whole other story).

Though exam subjects changed over time, it typically included recitations of Confucian poetry, calligraphy, instrumental music, and other such gentlemanly subjects. You know, things you really need your bureaucrats to know to run an empire well.

Similarly with FAANGs (and previously with GMC/Ford/Chrysler, or in academia), the interview/exam is geared not towards the actual specifics of the job, but rather in the 'pruning' of the people and the appearance of legitimacy. They are selecting for people that will go through the hoops and the nonsense without questioning it and will make good bureaucrats (loyal, command-able, lacking vigor). Boat-rockers are selected out before they even start the irrelevant studying process.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
I could agree if by "participate" you mean come in as the CEO and clean house, like what happened with Uber when Dara took over from Travis.

You might possibly be able to do something as a high ranking HR person, but as a L5 engineer, the amount of cultural impact you can realistically impart isn't that big.
Where were you when the web was invented?

Author of the article here (thanks for submitting it!). I'm happy to respond to any comments or questions.
Plenty! Here's one specific news article from mid-December for the UK, with a link to the NHS data source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/17/nhs-hospitals-...
No.

The only special interest the US has is to hold the House of Saud stable so their Oil can be sold freely on global markets.

Other than that, they just want stability, as does everyone.

The US wouldn't even need to have ships in the Gulf if it were not for Iran. The 5th fleet is there to protect cargo from Iranian aggression.

Particularly between Egypt and Israel both for the defence of Israel and of course, that the Suez Canal stays open (open to everyone, by the way).

The US did not have anything other than a basic presence over there (5th Fleet in the Gulf) before 9/11 and that was after a major war in Iraq.

The US wants to take a 'hard position' in the ME about as they want to in South Asia. Or South America. Or Western Europe i.e. they don't. They don't really even want to be there.

Iran is super chauvinist antagonizing state - they don't simply want to 'live in peace' with their neighbours, far from it, they want to be the 'regional superpower' and take their historic position as dominating the Arabs, who they hate.

Right now, the Arab/Persian hate war is much worse than the traditional Muslim/Jewish hate war and it's causing problems.

The bulk of instability in the Middle East right now can be traced to Iran.

If Iran would just shut up and stay home, then there'd be some mopping up in Syria, Yemen might very well stabilize and then there would be peace in the ME like there has not been in centuries.

To see Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel getting along like buddies is basically shocking to everyone who remembers how bad it was, and they are 'besties' specifically because the mutual threat they face in Iran.
I'm tempted to install Turbo Pascal for a deep nostalgia trip. I grew up in a small-ish town in Appalachia, and when I ran out of math classes to take in high school I started learning to program. They had put together a little "computer lab" circa 1990 when cash was a little easier to come by for a public school, and hadn't updated them since.

It was 2004, and their intro programming course was still taught in Pascal. We hacked on a version of Turbo Pascal that might have dated to when the Soviet Union still existed, and I remember that cheery blue terminal interface fondly. It left me with an irrational life-long love of text-based interfaces.
> SpaceX, Tesla, [...] what the heck are you talking about?

Capitalism works well both in the US and in China. Those are private companies, and I hope you don't try to list NASA projects. Elon wants to bring down the cost of space transportation to 10$ per Kg, a Space Shuttle launch used to cost 1.5B$.
My point was about the public sector. Last time I checked, the high-speed railway they were trying to build in California added another billion $ to its budget. Meanwhile, feel free to look how much high-speed rail China has built in the last few years.

> Not for Uyghurs or political dissidents.

Just because a system works very well for the majority of its citizens doesn't mean it works for everyone. You are not refuting the central argument.

> I'd take our system any day of the week over being disappeared for disagreeing with officials.

You seem to have the impression I'd prefer the Chinese system. I don't. That does not mean you can't take a hard look at what they do better.
This isn't that good of a metric for code utility. Sure, very-long-lived code probably solved the problem well (though it can also just be a first-mover kind of thing), but a lot of code is written to solve specific problems in a way that's not worth generalizing.

I write a lot of python for astrophysics. It has plenty of shortcomings, and much of what's written will not be useful 10 years from now due to changing APIs, architectures, etc., but that's partly by design: most of the problems I work on really are not suited to a hyper-optimized domain-specific languages like FORTRAN. We're actively figuring out what works best in the space, and shortcomings of python be damned, it's reasonably expressive while being adequately stable.

C/FORTRAN stability sounds fine and good until you want to solve a non-mathematical problem with your code or extend the old code in some non-trivial way. Humans haven't changed mathematical notations in centuries (since they've mostly proven efficient for their problem space), but even those don't always work well in adjacent math topics. The bra-ket notation of quantum mechanics, <a|b>, was a nice shorthand for representing quantum states and their linear products; Feynman diagrams are laughably simple pictograms of horrid integrals. I would say that those changes in notation reflected exciting developments that turned out to persist; so it is with programming languages, where notations/syntaxes that capture the problem space well become persistent features of future languages. Now, that doesn't mean you need to code in an "experimental" language, but if a new-ish problem hasn't been addressed well in more stable languages, you're probably better off going where the language/library devs are trying to address it. If you want your code to run in 40 years, use C/FORTRAN and write incremental improvements to fundamental algorithm implementations. If you want to solve problems right now that those langs are ill-suited to, though, then who cares how long the language specs (or your own code) last as long as they're stable enough to minimize breaking changes/maintenance? This applies to every non-ossified language: the hyper-long-term survival of the code is not the metric you should use (in most cases) when deciding how to write your code.

My point is just that short code lifetimes can be perfectly fine; they can even be markers of extreme innovation. This applies to fast-changing stuff like Julia and Rust (which I don't use for work because they're changing too quickly, and maintenance burdens are hence too high). But some of their innovative features will stand the test of time, and I'll either end up using them in future versions of older languages, or I'll end up using the exciting new languages when they've matured a bit.
You're kidding me. I want...
Funny enough, these sites (including Kayak) are pushing users away from flight booking and towards hotel booking because the margins are much larger.

kayak.com defaults to hotel search now, for example.
> Here, the process worked.

So a false negative is it "not working" but a false positive is it working? How about no.