skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm all for this, and consider it to be inevitable in the long run. In the short term, however, it seems like the major hurdle will be getting one of these projects into the mainstream: for the most part, the web already does what most people want it to do, and those people aren't going to be bothered to install a new web browser so that they can do things they're already doing. Especially if it lacks the features, performance, or ease-of-use of their current browser.

So, how do we address this? Is there a "killer app" for the distributed web that will motivate people to move to it? Can we use existing web tech like Web-RTC to bootstrap the system? Maybe a workable avenue is mobile, where people are pretty comfortable installing new applications - what if we built the next social network into an app based on the distributed web?

I don't know the answer, but I'd love to hear any ideas/brainstorming you clever people have to offer.
Can I have some of the stuff he is smoking?
I doubt if this article will help your cause. Given his outlandish beliefs, I doubt whether this co-worker of yours is open to any scientific reasoning.
COBOL bridge for Node.js
> ...people are always going to end up using as much space as given...

I used to be certain of that, based on my personal space usage habits. Based on my ongoing survey of both technical and non-technical computer users, I no longer believe that to be true.

The rise of The Cloud(TM) means that there are shockingly few users who intentionally keep a local copy of their data. Media streaming and synced storage means that a wide swath of the computer-using population store that shit remotely and throw away data when The Cloud(TM) gets full.

> ...it's unhelpful and inappropriate to claim [silicon wafer] costs are insignificant.

When the analysis demonstrates that the costs are an insignificant fraction of the total cost, then it is entirely appropriate to make that claim. :)

Silicon wafers may well remain more expensive than harddrive platters. The price of silicon wafers may well mean that SSDs will never reach price parity with HDDs. These facts don't magically make $0.25 per chip a significant factor in the manufacturing cost of a product that also required substantial original research and development to come to market. :)
Is the Minerva Project the future of higher education?
I would like an ability to snapshot save the web page, with all the dynamically loaded stuff (content, JS, Flash..). Just like some emulator systems have.
Trump is a Clown Genius
No antifeatures / downgrades. I am aware that this is a fuzzy concept. However, a few specifics:

* Think very hard before adding things to make sure that they actually need to be in the core browser. Looking at you, FF Hello.

* Don't baby the user. Everything should be configurable. And existing options should not be changed on upgrades. And general solutions are (always) better than centralized services. Looking at you, Firefox "You cannot install unsigned extensions, period".

* Don't introduce "features" that hurt the end user. Looking at you, Pocket "you now are bound by the terms of Pocket's user agreement when you run FF".

* Don't try to do cat-and-mouse games. Looking at you, Firefox "we must try to prevent malware on the user's computer from taking over FF".

* Don't assume that everyone has the newest and best computer. Looking at you, Firefox "electrolysis tripling memory usage is fine, right?".

* Don't couple security updates with anything else. Looking at you, Firefox "you must downgrade to australis or else your browser will be unsecure aah!".
I think the new(-ish) MediaStream APIs are designed precisely for this.

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/streams/StreamProc...

The simple audio element itself might be sufficient.
Find a chrome users unattended computer

open a tab to chrome://settings/passwords

Click on a saved password and click "show"

Write down their site / password info. They'll never know you have their login data, no access logs or warnings.

Note that the people freaking out the most about this are incredibly uncreative, because they think this is the only way an unattended computer can be powned, usually combined with weird beliefs about "Security" being a boolean value. Obviously, if you have physical access, you stick a keylogger on there, steal the whole DB of passwords at the binary file level, take over the whole operating system, etc. Also for extra comedy the people most likely to be outraged stereotypically have the same password for all saved sites (LOL) so you really only need to write down one password for that user, and also stereotypically its a variation of "1Password" or their kids name, etc.
striving for being best shouldn't be limited to profession, but also on personal levels - friend, family member, partner, parent.
sociery will benefit greatly from people who manage to get this all well, but there seems to be actually very few people who achieve this.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I propose calling them a "seg". Given that they are half of a Segway.
Unless the security update is a change to the UI.

Such as, make it easier for people to visit self-signed certificate websites, instead of the disaster that it is now.

Ive had friends not able to get by the "error warning" pages to see the photos on my self-hosted and self-signed encryption on my own site.

Id rather have everybody being able to MITM my self-hosted site, than only government agencies (because why would I pay for a ceritiface when any NSA compliant CA can then MITM that same "secure" connection, its false advertising on behalf of browsers, that somehow a CA signed certificate is worth more than self signed).
Bash Keyboard Shortcuts
> The "final language"

Ugh, I've been holding out hope for this since I first learned there was more than BASIC when I was a kid. Instead, things got more fragmented.

How many millions of hours have been wasted learning languages, frameworks or protocols which weren't used nearly as much as they were expected to be and ended up dying out? Think of how much better software could be if those hours had been spent learning things that continued to be useful.

It honestly sometimes almost makes me wish I lived in a long-ago world where we could earn a living making things out of wood with the same simple hand tools our fathers did-- tools that stayed useful, and rarely changed.

Does anyone think this "final language" thing is realistic at all? I've given up on seeing anything like it before I hit retirement age.
I've worked 100% remote for 7+ years, and it is awesome.

- I've had the opportunity to see my kids grow up (they're 6 and 9 now).

- I get to see my wife for lunch and a coffee break every single day (she also works from home)

- As a developer, the amount of focus I'm able to achieve in my home office is incredible.

It isn't for everyone, though. Here's some things I've learned:

- If you're any sort of extrovert, you're going to need to find outlets to recharge your social batteries (I'm an introvert, so not much of a problem for me).

- It is MUCH easier working for a 100% distributed company. I've had friend work in both fully distributed organizations, and semi-distributed, and it is much tougher in the semi-distributed environment.

- You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room. You need something more than your kitchen table if you really want to do it long-term.

- You need to find a system to keep your focus up. I use the pomodoro technique and GTD.

- If you work with a team, it is critical you jump on the phone a few times a week to touch base, and a few times per year face-to-face. It is as much for human interaction as it is for the work itself.

Like I said, it isn't for everyone, but I think more companies should give it a go.
Jeff Bezos defends Amazon after exposé of working practices
Woohoo! About time we got to automating the tedium away!
Just tried it and it asked for my admin password (Mac OSX).
A colleague of mine did get one for the tube strike the other week. Took him about 1.5 hours to commute about 4 miles on it that day, partly because he was unfamiliar with it, and partly because there only rough potholed cycle lanes for some of the way where it was safer to get off and carry it.

Had a go on it myself. Found it a little tricky getting on, given that you have to put one foot first and it has a tendency to start moving when you take the other foot off the ground. I was wondering if there was a way to tether it to an app with a big stop button you'd keep pressed until both feet were on (although not sure how feasible that would be if the balancing thing requires forward or backward motion).
This shows the real problems with remote workers - they spread your company information to all kind of online platforms. The author here, of course, goes to the extreme with storing company passwords in a closed source password app and uploading them to dropbox!

Remote workers must have some sense for privacy and security, this is more important than anything else.
Uber Says Its Chinese Arm Could Eventually Go Public in China
Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS Benchmarks for Linux SSD Raid
Nice to see some stuff from UNIHACK [0] on Hacker News!

[0]: http://unihack.net/
Autocorrect? My phone corrects postgres to "postures".
Explore startups history on timelines
Self-hosting is a huge PITA, especially if you don't want to give away your music for free: setting up and maintaining a streaming server and payment system is not trivial at all. Also, if you're not already a big name, self-hosting will make it unlikely for people to discover your music. This was the big thing about SoundCloud: you followed people you like and saw what they liked.
The solution is what Bandcamp does: only host stuff where the copyright situation is clear. Which means: people selling the music they themselves created. This of course excludes mixes/remixes of copyrighted music.
Samsung Galaxy S7 release date and specifications
What else would you like it measured by? Paid subscriptions? Because we all know how that goes.

The breadth of online journalism we see today is precisely because of those ads everyone claims to hate. It allows anyone to quickly join the pot and lets the market decide their value. Without ads we'd be stuck with the 4 fuhrer model we had for the last 100 years.
Not surprising. Likely he knows exactly what is going on in his company (known as a micromanager) but can't stand criticism. But like the titans of old (Rockefeller, Carnagie etc) employee happiness doesn't register as important to him.
Ioarena – an embedded database benchmarking tool
Science? Pfft. They just want to keep you locked-up inside your little box. The elite know all about the hollow-earth, there are aliens that live under our earths core, they have a small ball of magnetar they have transported there which powers their civilisation and enables the so called 'gravity' effect on the surface. The aliens experiment on us all the time, even leaving messages to taunt us (crop circles etc). If you believe you will know the truth.

/s
I love crowdsourcing (when it works): the result of the troyan analysis is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Malware/comments/3h9lkw/trojan_sent... and a previous one: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-insight/post/You-Dirty-...
Nice article. As someone who has never worked at a normal office, I'm glad that you're finding remote work better.

I'm in my mid 20s, I do contract work and has several personal projects that I have high hopes for. But there are moments when I'm bored/stuck when I think having a coworker nearby whom you could instantly talk to would be better.
I didn't see anything definitive in the article. Didn't go through the videos though. The takeaway seems to be if you can play music to the point of causing pain ('musician's high', may be), then your brain probably is different.

Isn't that true for any field, musical or non-musical?
Really hard to collaborate with it. How do we share code between our images? I think this was largely solved later, but...

Similarly, how do you ship code to a customer? Later there were tools developed to pare down images, but my first introduction to Smalltalk was via a breakout game on an Alto my division at NBS had been loaned. You could start the game and then drop into the Smalltalk-76 environment with ^C or something like that and start mucking around with code. Pretty much all of Smalltalk had to come along with what you shipped.

Performance sucked for a long, long time. One of my favorite books is "Smalltalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice" which describes the porting efforts of several teams at Tektronix, Apple and so forth, and their efforts to get anything running, followed by what it took to get acceptable performance.

Smalltalk is my favorite language that I will never be able to do real work in. It's a shame.
Sure, but the JS you need is incredibly minimal and you can easily transport Phantom's output to whatever other application you can dream of.

I've seen a lot of headless apps outside of Phantom, but none of them work well enough for me to ditch the system above (Phantom :: Message Queue :: Other App).
I'm fairly sure these devices (along with Segways) are illegal to use on the road in the UK[1] (I believe you could use it if you registered it as a vehicle, but then you need tax, insurance and an MOT if they're over 3 years old).[2] I guess now they're so cheap people are willing to take that risk (or just aren't aware of the legal situation).

The government apparently pledged to make Segways (and then presumably all these self-balancing 2 wheel electric scooters) legal but never actually did.

[1]: http://www.legalisesegways.co.uk/
[2]: https://www.gov.uk/electric-bike-rules
Where people complain about paywalls, leading some to paste the entire article into a comment?
An Introduction to Ghost for Developers
Field Data: The Most Common Cause of Elasticsearch Cluster Instability at Scale
To the best of my knowledge and reading of the provided link there's currently no way to disable "weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message. (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)" type errors.

Its impacting me on an intranet-ish site that doesn't need https level security but the admins set it up incompetently. If they had set up https correctly, that would be a waste of time but it would be OK. If they had run the whole thing on http that would have been OK because there is no (... known ...) sensitive data on that site. But no they had to do a halfway job.

There may be market space for a bifurcation. Merely being able to render html doesn't mean all html rendering has to be done by one app, much like .ps or .pdf does not work best with the "one true app to rule them all". I could see a market with a iron clad virtualized one virtual (OS?) image per corrupt and insecure domain, and a hippie flower child browser for intranets and local files that blindly trusts everyone but by design won't talk to non RFC1918 ip addresses or maybe it blindly trusts the user not to do anything too stupid.
`easy_install` is not a library per se, it's a binary offered by setuptools.

> distutils was a fork of setuptools

This is incorrect. Setuptools is an extension of distutils (it patches and extends distutils to have additional functionality). Distribute was a fork of Setuptools that has been merged back into Setuptools.

Also, `pth` is not a installation method - it's merely a way to customize the import system. It's a very scary feature as it allows one to execute arbitrary code (that can reside in the `.pth` file) when import paths are being set up (when the `site` module is being initialized).
Doesn't the fact that they're based in Germany protect them from DMCA takedowns? I always figured that locating there was a calculated move, giving them a strategic advantage on this front.
Incidentally, people who are interested in Smalltalk may like to check this out:

http://amber-lang.net/

It's a Smalltalk that runs in a browser; bolt it on to a web page and you get a tradition Smalltalk IDE that pops up at the bottom of the page at the press of a button. It seamlessly interacts with Javascript. There's a backend which allows state to be saved, so it's theoretically possible to write your entire web client using the browser as your IDE, while the client is running.

It's a bit overengineered for my taste --- the backend's quite complex and requires node, where I'd prefer for the client to just talk WebDAV. But it's a very interesting reinvention of Smalltalk for the modern world.
You get 1 alternate session w/ Incognito or Private Browsing modes. Internet Explorer has File | New Session. Otherwise, it's down to extensions:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/multifox/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/multilogin/nccllfn...
I didn't know that the chrome://settings/passwords page existed until I read your comment. I actually just checked it out, and when I clicked the "Show" button on the password box, Chrome made me re-authenticate with my Windows password before it would show the password.

I don't know if this is a new feature, only available on Windows, etc., but it seems like this may be less of a concern now.

I did find it weird that I had to re-authenticate with my Windows password and not the password that Chrome is syncing passwords with, but it's better than nothing.
No idea about the legal situation. And to be frank I don't care. I have no economic incentive for my hobby. I consider it an art and a means of expression along the lines of singing and dancing. For all I care I am doing commercial musicians a favor for promoting their work, but really that's just an unintended side effect. SoundCloud was profiting of me giving away free content. Its people like me that enabled its business in the first place. So in the end its their loss, and they will fail because of the laws. I personally don't mourn the loss of SoundCloud as a viable publishing platform. I have many choices and it was never my primary platform to begin with (which is an independent pirate radio).

My point is that the laws don't stop the people doing the "infringing". We don't care. Its the businesses that could profit from the human need for creativity that are hurt by the absurd situation.
There's no reason that these tools cannot be hosted on the company's own servers and made accessible remotely via VPN. However, that's a decision every company has to make for itself.
white heavy photos need some contrast for the pins IMHO.
> You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room.

This is the most important piece of advice. You need to have a space that is for work and for work only. When you enter that space, it puts you in a work mindset.

If you work wherever, you will never be able to focus.

> it is critical you jump on the phone a few times a week to touch base

In my experience, it is critical for you to jump on the phone every day, once a day. Like clockwork. The meeting shouldn't last more than 5 minutes.

Go over what you did the previous day and discuss what you're planning to do today. Discuss anything that's blocking your progress. Then start your day.
Creating this Language in Racket would be the best option IMHO. Racket was made for specifically this reason.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/languages.html
Yes and no. It's 5% at the end of 1 year, another 15% at the end of 2, and then 20% every 6 months.

I would argue that the 15% is the first meaningful vest, making the parent comment correct.
No, because narcissism does not mean: self-reflection, introspection, consideration for one's own thoughts, pondering ideas, inwardness, etc.

Rather, it would be more like this: I think I'm the greatest. I'm so much smarter than everyone else. Whatever I do will be extraordinary.

Narcissism tends to be empty of substance, because by definition it means an exaggeration.

It doesn't take long to realize that's of no benefit to a process of thinking when it comes to problem solving, invention, or innovation. The more time spent on congratulating yourself on artificially inflated views about your own abilities or accomplishments, the less time spent actually doing. Narcissism is a detriment to achieving great output, to the extent of the narcissism, as it's wholly a waste of thought and time.
I've always dreamed of working remote.

I'm the kind of person who lives his work, I treat it casually (or try to) but when I'm in an office I feel the pressure to "look busy" and when I go home I (now) lose motivation to continue working (even when I get a surge of inspiration)

I've looked for remote work for a long time, but being a systems administrator this is hard.. employers want you to be in a bullpen full of other people, random noises, distractions, people looking at your screen nonchalantly. I just can't get used to it.. although over the last 8 years I've become a little harder to it.

Working from home 4 out of 5 days makes the most sense, you meet people when needed but "get things done" the rest of the week, communication is crucial but face to face communication, while important, is not the most important thing at the sacrifice of comfort and quality work.
For ML and Data Science I'd say very immature. HLearn does interesting things but is far from providing a workable ML or Data Science workflow. We need solid, unquestionable Matrix and Vector libs upon which the ~50 bread and butter algorithms cans be solidly implemented. Then Diagrams needs super tight integration and connections to "big data" systems can be built. Frames is moving in the right direction type-wise but it'd be really nice to get HLists (or even vinyl?) in as representations which can be transparently backed by the aforementioned common matrix libs. Lenses could probably help a lot here and I think Anthony is going in that direction exactly.

Neatly, the GPU story is actually quite strong and could be integrated with this hypothetical ML and Data Science platform I'm describing quite nicely. That'd be a not small boost to its power.
While that's largely true when dealing with pure business logic, there's a maddeningly large amount of UI logic, and hybrid business/UI logic that becomes really annoying (or outright impossible) to handle in pure MVVM with WPF. Reasons for this include that many user interface properties aren't exposed nicely to allow data-binding.

Probably the most infamous one is that the WPF listview with multiple select enabled doesn't allow you to bind to the collection of selected items. Instead you have to do all sorts of work arounds, that while individually aren't too bad, when put all together, makes all the other hard work you put into doing MVVM on the components that you fully control super frustrating.
> There's a reason Google is pushing IPv6 so hard.

Any sources for this? Otherwise, one could simply assume that they do it because the IPv4 address space is about to be exhausted.
The one that has been considered illegal by the government? O.o
"In Mr Bezos' memo, he encouraged Amazon employees to read the article, and email him directly if they recognised any of the "shockingly callous management practices" it described."

Oh well, this seems to be a bit hypocritical. ("Hey Mr. Bezos, my boss, John Doe (cc'd!) wants me to do this task until tomorrow, but it's 8 pm. What do you think about this?")
The fact that he has to defend their culture says a lot to me.
It may vary depending on version.

Sites that are heavily automated / packaged / locked down will not be up to date.

I can verify it works fine on linux 44.0.2403.107.

I have access to a 41.0.2272.101 on windows that is extremely heavily locked down and centrally distributed but I don't use that out on the internet, it would be non-trivial to test.
Not a chicken and egg problem, the evolution occurred during the egg lifecycle - thus the egg came first...

But we all get your point ;)
What's GTD?