jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
My word choice is more colorful than the source, but I think it's a fair characterization of the message in the source material, and not a proposition I am making myself.

For EFF to issue a sweeping recommendation that users should "avoid Microsoft products where possible" is completely ridiculous and might cause many readers, if they believe EFF to be credible, to conclude that Microsoft is a piece of shit. After all, it would be pretty shitty for a major software company with tens of thousands of employees, many of whom are brilliant, and $2B per month in earnings, to be completely unable to deliver software that does not so imperil users that the general advice is for them to avoid using the products at all. So, given its implications, I think the advice given by EFF is just outrageous.

Saying that IE and Outlook are difficult to secure is not in itself inflammatory, except when coupled with the general recommendation to avoid Microsoft. ANY Internet-connected software is difficult to secure and audit, so why single out Microsoft? Are the other vendors that much better? I doubt it. Can you show me some kind of real data demonstrating that products similar in functionality to the latest versions of IE and Outlook are truly less difficult to secure?

The argument that "adversaries tend to attack popular platforms" is common sense but not useful, and no more compelling than saying "The vendor with the largest installed base, the most smart developers, and the most cash, will do the best job, over time, of securing their platform." In reality, the size of the user base, and the size of the company, provide nothing more than a rationale, as opposed to real information about the security of the platform.

So, in my opinion, EFF is not making a "fair assessment."

This is not you and me having a debate over beers at a bar. This is the EFF saying, flat out, MS products are to be avoided, and one reason for that is their popularity. For most people, this translates to, "Use a Mac instead. They are inherently more secure and less of a target because they aren't as popular." And while there are lots of great reasons to use a Mac, I think this line of thinking is flimsy.

Finally, the MS bashing fest is totally pervasive. It's firmly in the zeitgeist right now, and I totally object to the herd mentality it demonstrates. Last week there was a much-debated post on HN by a company indicating that an experienced .NET programmer is "ruined" and very unlikely to be a good programmer in general.

There are absolutely valid criticisms of Microsoft. But when every jackass, and "credible" sources, too, develop the reflex that Microsoft is shit, it offends my sensibilities.
Performance is heavily bound by the GPU on my system - Chrome goes from sucking up 60% of my CPU down to just 7% when I launch the demo(OK, I've got crappy Intel integrated graphics, but still). I consider that to be a good demonstration that JavaScript performance is now capable of driving detailed 3D scenes.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Cycles of motivation then crashing.
Thanks. I didn't realize the link would be an issue. I think I came across it by way of Google News, so it probably had magic referer stuff going on.

And that's a handy redirection tool, too.
Always space in any market for competitors. Check out yipit.com for an aggregation of such deals.
Is not that great or what!!!!!!!

Final payoff for all sleepless nights and other goodies that comes with the upbringing of a child!!!! :):)

If you learn to listen to a mom, then you can hear others as well. Then, you could decide what to do and make your own mistakes, but learn to really listen (and this is for all negative remarks that were "artistically" produced already before mine and will be after mine.

And more for you whose understanding of global creativity looks like exploiting others: You are lucky to grow up here, in USA, where exploiting others could be in a form of brainstorming. Very lucky, indeed!!!!!!

Please, add double count from me for this topic!
Facebook is a really interesting counter-example. They have done an excellent job of empowering their users - their users feel like they know how Facebook works and can show or tell other people how to use it.

Facebook is also not gun-shy when it comes to trying out new things and occasionally getting them wrong. Part of the reason there are so many "1,000,000+ against Facebook charging money!!1!!" groups and things like that is that Facebook users feel like they can actually cause change. Giving users a platform for their complaints is a tremendously useful customer happiness tool.
TrueCrypt has a plausible deniability feature[1] which would allow you to provide an alternate password to your encrypted drive which opens a safe container (e.g. no secret stuff).

[1] http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
What an interesting claim!

That's like saying 'plucking strings on a guitar is not fun'. Well, no, if you're just doing it to see what it's like, or hell, I imagine even playing a really crappy annoying song is rather miserable.

However, if you're composing and playing something beautiful, well, it's probably one of the most enjoyable things you can do.
Huh, interesting - looks like HN's dupe detection considers a trailing slashes in the URL enough for the two URLs to be different.

Should be easy enough to fix, and I doubt it would flag many, if any, incorrect dupes.
I didn't even know about the challenge until today, but trying it just now made me realize that Chromium's built in dev tools are lacking some must-have functionality.
Makes sense -- is there anyone who has experience in gov't IT that can weigh in here on what protocols/practices are in place to reveal changes/mitigate dangers?
From the tweet you quoted:

> And for those who want to nitpick what she said, let me just stop you right there—Hitler was right on literally nothing.

This is most likely fake news. Hitler was one of the first world leaders against smoking. So he was right on at least one thing.
>No it’s not.

huh? There were lots of reports about ambulance queues last week already

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-42570660

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-12-30/ambulances-with-c...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6mCJt__oxQ
Do you mean Charlottesville?
The dude is a good writer, but not a rockstar engineer.
The universities also have a major cost advantage. They dangle the possibility of a tenured job in exchange for getting PhDs to work for $45k as post doc researchers. Even if primary research does have a payoff in the future, it makes more sense for universities to do it at 1/3 the cost and guaranteed government backing.

Maybe the government and universities have squeezed the corporate sector out of research?
Frankly? I'd vote for nicer cars...
Yeah. One of the nicest things, for me, about making software is that it lasts. It may become irrelevant, sure, but it doesn't rot, and you can make copies.
This is very misleading. The article speculates, primarily for the authors amusement, that this may be the case:

"Surely everyone has heard the basics by now, and I don’t have any new information to add, but my hobby is putting 2 and 2 together and imagining worst-case scenarios."
tl;dr: I'm on board the SS PhD now, so let's pull up the boats before it gets too crowded up here.
William F. Buckley, a man who was, politically, very different from Stallman, showed us that you can be a deeply radical and influential person without being childish or unreasonable. In fact, he was instrumental in kicking the nuts--Randists, Birchers, and so on--out of the movement he helped to found, neoconservativism.

Though I suspect most people here (me included) would mostly disagree with him, you have to admit things went pretty well for the neocons.

Asking someone like Stallman to not moderate his message through the collimator of reason shows a profound misunderstanding of how to stand for something and how to influence people. I hate the idea that you have to be a troll in order to make a point.
(Sticks fingers in ears).

My six year old son does that.
Thanks for this - seems dormant now?
I recently read Gleick's _The Information_. It's a quick, interesting read, although I suspect people who don't share my combination of interest in the OED and Babbage's difference engine may find one of those sections to drag. Like a lot of good science writing, it strives to make scientific and technical concepts palatable through the conceit of a historical narrative, and it's largely successful. As a hacker and a geek, I naturally wish it were more technical and less biography.
I like the 'the. That, and deskbook.com is owned by some pirate and I wanted a .com TLD :)
Is what they are sharing worth anything or is it just crap?
I can relate. I'm in my mid-thirties. I've been working as a web designer, which then became a web developer, then front-end developer and now front-end engineer - in the last 13 years.

I've found the same issues as yourself. Things have become more complicated and yet I feel like my position is seen by a more "informed" upper-management as a kind of commodity.

I once had a manager tell me, during a pay-rise request that developers where a dime a dozen. Fair enough, that's probably true.

I've been thinking so much the last few years of how to transition into a field with less technological noise. I feel like most other people I work with, their only real skill is in communication - as in they don't have any strong hard skills like engineering.

I'm in the same boat as you. Unable to get married or buy a house, or have a family due to living expenses. I mean the average price for a 1 bedroom in London is uppwards of 350k, I've been saving for 13 years and barely have a fraction of that - I dont know who is buying these houses...who can afford them? or are people willing to gamble with their savings and their future?

Also, I feel like some technical managers dont do a great a job of protecting our field. As they are the ones primarily responsible for communicating with upper management. Often times, they are downplaying our abilities and our position - they dont realise that their accomplishment in terms of generating efficiency is often compromising our job security. Ultimately most managers dont care how hard it is to be a front end engineer or full stack dev or whatever, they just look at numbers, and in many cases they see us a financial burden or as a commodity. So, you as a technical manager need to bare that mind during your crusade to automate and optimise x,y and z.
Hmmmm. Street dealers make the most per gram, but do the most hustle and probably make the least overall in terms of profit. The middleman buying and selling between the growers and the dealers makes decent money with little risk, while the growers themselves tend to make the least by weight, but make decent profit. Especially factoring in the expenses of growing and the risks they take. The middlemen, like with most businesses tend to be the biggest winners as far as making money vs getting caught and going to jail goes. They just need to have some starting money and their job ends up being pretty easy as long as they don't get caught. By middlemen I mean the ones buying multiple pounds off growers to sell to street dealers or to have street dealers hustle for them with.

Though here at least, with dispenseries and legalization, that's all changed.
Highly variable, true, wide range - false

http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...

You should never take your health advice from someone trying to sell you a book supporting your poor choices.

i.e. Dr Bacon.
If "these cartel companies were also constantly hiring from non-cartel sources," then why did they enter an agreement to stop poaching employees from each other? Clearly it was concern enough to potentially violate the law to stop or slow.
I think this is the Fox News response. "Science says one thing, but I have another opinion, so clearly there's no consensus."
Republicans are going to blow this because they hate Obama and Holder. Police departments and their unions are a huge component of the pension liability blowing a hole in state budgets. With all the blowback recently, now is the perfect time to knock them down a peg or two in a way that's going to get bipartisan support if the message is crafted right.
The podcast is as entertaining as it is informative. It's really a goldmine of good resources/ideas and it's my favorite podcast to date.
Along with the occasional censorship on obscenity grounds, those examples of wartime censorship were precisely why I said "very little" rather than "none".

"The closure of the Office of Censorship in November 1945 corresponded with the ending of World War II."

If only other emergency measures were ended so promptly.
I have never done any significant amount of dance, so am in no position to offer informed advice, but I wonder if explicitly thinking about every muscle is really the best way to practice. Focusing on higher-level goals and letting the sensorimotor system deal with the details might be more effective (and then figuring out how to observe yourself and deliberately working on correcting specific defects).

You might find the book The Inner Game of Tennis useful.
Are there any clinical studies that support that claim? A quick Google search only turns up a bunch of specious "home remedy" sites, and an equally suspicious doctor denouncing the practice.
Works for me. Across multiple vim sessions. Unless, you mean a new file thesis.txt, in which case the old file is untouched.
Great point. It's made more complex by artifacts of state law and home rule for political subdivisions.

For example, in New York, state and US highways (ie. State Route 5, US Route 20) are maintained by the State DOT -- unless you're in a "city". Areas that are organized as towns (think Hempstead, NY on Long Island with 300k+ people) get state services, areas organized as cities (Albany, NY with 90k people) typically do a lousy job at it.

The Federal government has been able to update things like street signals, etc. But fundamental things like road conceptual design, breaking out bike lanes, etc are going to be very difficult issues to handle without local control.

There are more people in NYC than Sweden, so the size and scope of the problem in the US is several orders of magnitude more complex.
That's very interesting. I would suspect the incidence of driving while intoxicated is more common in Britain too (or is this not true)?
the lesson here is don't drink and comment on HN
For the last few years? Looking at the answers so far, I think a lot of us have short memories!

Depending what few means, my list is below. Some of these things may have been the new hotness when you ducked out, but I'm listing what has become mainstream:

- MVC, makes building websites more robust, every major language has a framework for this now

- ORMs, every framework has a pluggable object-relational mapper for getting rid of your basic CRUD code

- Ruby on Rails or Django (Python) are mainstream ways to develop web applications. Both based on MVC.

- People still hate PHP, but it's still incredibly popular

- Internally a lot of companies still use ASP.Net, it's still awful, but ASP.Net MVC is pretty good

- In data transfer JSON is king, XML is dying, SOAP is dead (thank god)

- if you're developing a sales site, include a/b testing

- The rise of the API, lots of online services now offer online APIs. You can also plug a lot of functionality onto your website by using other people's services (e.g. uservoice.com for feedback, visualwebsiteoptimizer.com for a/b testing)

- Javascript frameworks make writing javascript much better, jQuery has pretty much won the framework war

- Lots of plugins are available for the js frameworks. No more having to roll your own table sorting solution

- Cloud Computing can be a cheap, reliable and scalable way to launch an app now. At minimum know about Amazon s3 (storage), but you can now host whole applications on scalable systems

- OAuth, you don't need to roll your own login system anymore for certain types of web application

Oh yeah, and for web design:

- Use divs, not tables for layout. No-one even argues about this one anymore

- Wordpress + a theme is an acceptable way to create a good looking website

- Know the basics of SEO, your clients often will

- As a rule of thumb, if you're nesting lots of divs, you're probably doing it wrong

- use a reset.css. A lot of people also use a grid for layout, something like 960.gs

- Html5, we're getting some more tags (mainstream soonish, probably when IE9 is released as I'm guessing most IE8 users will upgrade; IE8 doesn't really support the good bits). Depressingly being lauded as amazing when it's actually very meh. Still mandatory learning though.

- The browser landscape has shifted dramatically, IE is dying properly now, Firefox is mainstream, Chrome is amazing, Safari is used a lot more because Macs sell more as do IPhones (you probably can't have missed this ;)
.. or a poorly disguised press release for Path.
I don't see how it proves that at all. Presumably everyone who is overweight (or underweight) is so for a reason. Given how many people wish they weighed less and can't seem to make it happen, often in spite of dieting, exercising, etc, I think something more complicated is going on than these studies assume.
For those interested about the possibility of life on other planets, there's a great essay by Michael Crichton:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~scranmer/SPD/crichton.html

He rails against Drake's equation, and the larger scientific damage it has done. One important point he makes is that writing

number of cats in this house = average number of cats per room X number of rooms

gives the illusion of science, but it gets you no closer to a final answer if you can't estimate the density of cats or the number of rooms.
I am far more of a Linux user, but one thing that irks me on a BSD is that I feel like the GNU tools have more features and feel more natural than the BSD alternatives. I'm probably just not used to them but things like colors and such seem more prevalent with the GNU tools.
I don't believe that all CS students plan to be something other than a computer scientist, but that most of them do. I believe people like you to be the exception. That's why I don't really believe in killing the theoretical side (as the title might suggest) but in splitting off a vocational track that would be better for most students. I think it would be better for people like you, as well, because courses could be more difficult and focused.

There is overlap between the two proposed split degrees, just as there's overlap between, for example, engineering and business. That's why my University has separate calculus and statistics classes for each. But everyone knows if you really want to learn calculus, you should take the course for engineers, not the course for business majors...
Thanks for posting that Prolog/NLP book, I didn't know there was a free pdf. Same with your work-in-progress one: http://nlpwp.org/book/

My copy of _Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing_ just arrived in the mail, too. :D

Purely Functional Data Structures is excellent.
Most reports have Facebook turning a profit in 2009, though since they aren't a public company it's hard to verify any of the financials.
It's not exactly an apples for apples comparison, but with your 8 instances rocking 2 * 515Gflops of GPU each, you get just over 8Tflops. Looking back at the TOP500 lists, this "peak" value would have got you into the top 15 supercomputers in 2003. (Looking back further, you'd be vying for a top 5 spot in mid 2002..)

The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 cores @ 2.93GHz on Intel's recent architecture. This means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core. (Highly unscientific but an interesting ballpark.)
Why can't they offer SSD instances at a higher price than non-SSD instances? Those that want or need the extra performance can pay for it just as they're paying for other niche instances already.
Maybe you could turn one on, capture the positions of the dots, and then turn the other on, and somehow guess which one was which when the 3d mesh changes (from motion)?
yeah, because it doesn't matter what the victim of an assault thinks, just whats going on in the mind of the assailant.
It's endemic in a lot of companies in the UK - I keep having arguments with non-technical managers about their insistence that people have to "hit the ground running" with a very narrowly defined set of skills (which usually turn out to be wrong).

The same people who take this approach to hiring then complain when developers get stroppy about only working on specific skills that will get them their next, better-paid, job.
Google "VC carry interest". Feld's blog post owns the search results page for it.
But he's not saying "we should all switch to Java to save on hosting costs." He's saying he wants it to be fast and still be Rails.

As much as the extra $2k of hosting is worth the productivity boost, wouldn't you love it if you could have the Rails productivity and save that $2k/year compared to current Rails performance?
Just posted this - was interested to hear from the hacker community if they see analyzing this data is valuable or if they prefer other means of ascertaining the top sites (Alexa, etc)
Agreed. It's not all that obvious... I think I just tried using 2 fingers to scroll and it worked. Unfortunately not the case (yet anyway) on Android :(
So you're basically saying that if the founder(s) have to do actual work in order to maintain profitability than it's not a company?

I should also point out that there are quite a few successful photography photography studios that not only have employees, but also pass their business down to successors, so they DO outlive their founders.

In the end, it's honest work for honest pay, which in my experience is not the case in IT, which is usually a waste of talent. I've worked in the IT industry for 17 years as a software developer, and most of what I've seen is that most of the developers in the industry make up for a complete lack of talent and skill with a lot of hackery and long hours.
Hate or annoy? I choose annoy.
Case closed - for him.

But if ever there was a blog post that explained why I don't use windows this was it!

You have some random out of date software application installed on your machine and don't even know it? And you are a highly technical person?

I can't even imagine what it's like for a non technical person.
Most often than not, it's adware explicitly included in the installer by the software's creator to make a profit on shareware or freeware.

They usually have opt-outs, but the shadier ones do not - and you can legitimately click "next-next-next" and don't read about them and uncheck the button that installs it - that's what they're counting on.

If someone like Russinovich didn't see it, it was probably not opt-out.

Edit: here's some relevant info

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090518120035AA...

Google purportedly pays U$ 2 per install, I guess Yahoo! does the same
I'm for science. I thought that "use Tarot cards or Ouija tables" was enough to mark the rest of the sentence as ironic.
I wonder if projects like this will trigger the development of drone countermeasures, leading to an interesting arms race and regular battles in the skies above us.
Yes, I've tried other online retailers in the past (including returns IIRC), and I'm sure I will in the future too.

It's not about just following the letter of the law, it's about the small details that add up to a better experience, that's what I was trying to get across.
Nice!!! This is great
Lovely exchange in those LWN comments about monolithic vs modular. In particularly how the proponents are (perhaps willfully) confusing public and private APIs...
Yes, it does feel like yet another comparison web site. Perhaps the man mistook his wife for a hat, too.