skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To my understanding, one package set is built from the head of ports; that's been the default till now. Every quarter they create a new branch from the head, give it a little time (weeks?) to shake out the bugs, and build the quarterly package set from that; this will be the new default.

I've been using the quarterly package set for some time now to avoid the occasional breakage I saw on the latest package set. Having three-month-old software is a totally worthwhile trade off for me.

There's no reason I know of that you couldn't switch back to the latest package set and keep building your ports from the head of the tree.
Its not a matter of difficulty, but of reproducibility.

Mechanical locks imply that each individual thief needs to learn how pick locks. With computerized locks, you only need one hacker to crack the security for each model of car, and then a bunch of two-dime thugs will only need to download the app and get going in with the car-thief franchise.
I think you're basically right, but the waters are murkier than you give them credit for. I don't really buy any definition of "successful mainstream languages" that doesn't include Ruby and PHP, and neither of those started with any sort of corporate backing, and still aren't tightly associated with any single "big company".
> They are only concerned with guilty vs not.

Yes, because innocence is presumed. When a court finds "not guilty", it is logically equivalent to "innocent". It's not a free pass to say "he was only found not guilty; he's not innocent".

> I'd much rather 100 guilty persons go free than to wrongly convict a single innocent as a critically important ideal. Any "reform" that has an obvious mechanism that would bias the system to erode that in favor of a lesser benefit is cause for concern for me.

That biased mechanism already exists, although not to the same extent. A judge/jury who can't logically infer guilt would still rather lock up a scumbag, especially if they're likely to repeat offend. A large part of this principle has to be embodied in the judge/jury itself.

Not that it should be made worse. I suppose juries could be given leeway over the decision to reimburse, but it would be a larger change to our current system (nothing I've advocated for here is an actual change to the law, just an enforcement of proper civil liability). And you could still end up with the same problem where juries acquit yet routinely don't reimburse because "taxpayers shouldn't pay for someone being at the wrong place". It's less bad than that same person being in prison, but it's still wrong. Cops see "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" as a feature, but everybody who believes in the rule of law should see it as a bug.

Of course nothing proposed here would change the fact that the sheer majority of cases plea out due to draconian punishments for nonviolent crimes, and so even long-held legal principles don't end up applying. But the present situation is tough precisely because there are multiple pathologies that all corrupt the justice system away from the fundamental ideals it purports.
Does this mean we can stop using the Zxing Barcode Scanner?
> There is a huge selection of public domain ebooks (although admittedly less than there ought to be, with the ridiculous copyright extensions). Project Gutenberg has a lot of fairly decent quality .mobi and .epub versions out these days.

Poor formatting, usually, though even commercial ebooks are often bad at that (another reason I don't like them) and at least the proofreading isn't as bad as the commercial ones. Tolerable in some cases—I've read a few.

But if it's a work originally written in a language you don't read, the best translations (easiest to read, most accurate, best balance of the two, take your pick) are usually still covered by copyright. The quality difference between those and what's available from PG is often large.
I am not intimate with US law, but what about altcoin exchanges? I don't think that converting your bitcoins to say Litecoins is illegal.
They should put having technical books on Rust as a goal.

I learn via technical books btw.

Does anybody know if there's a rust book coming out?

I mean Julia is having a book from Manning and they're not even version 1.
And in some countries if you have any kind of music system installed in your workplace you must pay a tax to another companies each month or you'll face a trial by copyright infringement. This can be an endless source of problems if you refuse to pay; and they will suck as many money as they can from your startup really fast.
> The position that the software industry wants to keep changing things so everyone else should be forced to keep up whether or not it's actually in their interests is not something I can support.

Oddly enough, Microsoft already tried that. They ended up with people running 14-year-old code (which cost them money both short term and long term) and a major malware problem.

Check out conficker devastating businesses and costing people a fortune ... almost wholly because they didn't install the patch for it. And these idiots are running supposedly-competent businesses or government departments.

The business branches offer more control over taking updates, but this is a consumer operating system.
Or, you know, just use C++ if you want to do this.

No worries, it doesn't hurt, you won't have to use iterators and new.
PG wrote that in 2006. Market forces and opportunities around startups have changed astronomically in the past 9 years.

It was probably harder for 2 people to start a "growth" business in 2006 than it is for 1 person today.
3rd party reviews are seen as more useful than reviews in seller-owned platforms because they're impartial.

The moment you monetize, that impartiality is gone. There's a perverse incentive to make the product look more attractive so that more people will buy.

Maybe you aren't the type that does that, but users can't be arsed to consider the integrity of every blog they read. The safer/easier bet is to assume that when money is involved, we are being lied to for money.
If the city was smart they'd cut a deal in which the whole site is replaced with 40 story high rise apartment buildings. And the city can purchase one and let these people live there with affordable rent.
> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty serving our country at some point in their careers. We need better technology in government.

STOP. WAIT. THINK. As an entrepreneur, you don't want to lose opportunities down the road, or have doors close on you. Look how Huawei gets blasted because the founder served in the Chinese army. Or they may be some open-source projects you want to help out on and people don't want to trust you.
Will this scale? For me it looks like a kind of organizational anti-pattern. Imagine you are working in your project, then comes the "Know it all" guys trying to redo everything you know about. After rebuilding everything they will leave, take all the credits and leave the bomb with you.
It should be obvious, on an hour by hour basis, what is bing down, what is on deck and what is a blocker due to where issues are in the workflow. This is much more detailed and it's already being updated.

You don't need to interrupt your developers and take out 2 hours of productivity with a daily meeting.

I've never seen that undivided attention used for anything worth a damn- even the manager ends up giving filler.

It's like 24/7 news channels. There simply isn't enough content to fill a 15 minute (half hour) meeting every day. But they feel like they need to.
I have the same problem, but i suspect this is because i told my Firefox to lie about Referrer: headers (by fiddling with about:config). I'll see if messing around with those settings helps.
Sounds like a revolving door...
I'm starting to realize there is a massive disconnect between disparate communities here, sort of like when I came to realize that there are people out there who genuinely believe that the clouds that form behind airliners come from the deliberate spraying of mind-altering chemicals.

Apparently there are people out there who genuinely believe that app review is not an anti-developer requirement that Apple uses to further its own goals, but rather a pro-developer feature that's worth paying for. I don't know that I can usefully continue the discussion without spending some time thinking about this state of affairs first.
One thing I have learned from my wonderful partner is stories like this can be incredibly alienating to women who don't fit into them.

For example, the "all women get catcalled" - my partner notes that since she never gets catcalled, she must be too ugly.

So what about the women who have an entirely different kind of experience? This article is a classic: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a...
I can't for the life of me figure out how to text that number with FB Messenger... am I missing something?
Yeah but in context the idea was that at any time, Microsoft could decided to "un-suck" at whatever it was and then the plan would get blown apart.
I've grown to like a few no's to getting a ton of yes. I'm sure someone here knows the quote better than I do, something like: If you don't get a few no's, you're not innovating enough.

I have a lot of tech friends who are busy doing their own things. I set up an informal board of directors and I consult them on ideas, tech problems etc. I feel no need to have them as partners. They pick me up when I'm down, give me advice, help with direction, keep me focused.
And where are those people going to live during the year or two it'll take to build that?
> People attempting to lose weight should not be swayed by the "popular theory about how low-carb diets offer a specific metabolic advantage for body fat loss," says Hall. "Our study has demonstrated that this theory is probably not true."

> "The study involved 19 participants who were kept as in-patients for two two-week blocks and their diet strictly controlled."

Only 19 participants on diets that were only two weeks long (at a time)? I'm skeptical.
Sometimes when i am lazying around and increasing my chances to miss what i have planned for i simply put on songs like "Eye of the Tiger" or "Start me up". This helps lift up my subconscious and i am back in the groove.
I usually work by putting on some heavy metal, and unlike others it helps me concentrate much better.
I believe it depends on person to person how one perceives the music. You need to find the right kind of music that uplifts you. Definitely melodic music or music w/o lyrics can work on certain situations (as per studies), however, if you ask me, i will tend to listen to my kind of music.
So, i have 2 perspectives here:
1. When i am totally unwilling to work and yet have to work - i listen to meaningful rock songs, that lifts me up.
2. When i am already in the groove, i put on some heavy metal to continue the streak.
Unfortunately namespacing won't work for us. We need the ability to point a domain name at a bucket. Can't do that with a folder inside a bucket. If I am incorrect on this, it would be great if you could set me straight too.
You're making the mistake of assuming car thiefs are unintelligent or unorganized. Successful thefts that return a profit require a network of skilled people to pull off and talent can be found within that pool or recruited.

By saying a thief would have to understand how a computer exploit works, it's saying a thief needed the equivalence of an engineering degree to drive away with a car before computers entered the equation.
Exploit discovery, maybe, but it doesn't take much to execute packaged tools you bought on the blackmarket.
"Machine Learning is a mathematical discipline, and students will benefit from a good background in probability, linear algebra and calculus. Programming experience is essential."

Check Prerequisites:
https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2014-2015/ml/index....
1) If everyone serves, it's not weird. See Israel.

2) Are we really so selfish as to say "I would like to, but working for my country would look bad on my resume, so sorry"?
They're selling Home OSes for roughly $10 to $40 (sometimes free with Bing) and even a trivial support incident costs 2x to 3x revenue.

That's their problem, just as it is the chair maker's problem if he sells defective products on tight margins and then has to repair them at an overall loss when someone sits on them and they break. They're perfectly entitled to sell their software for more, if people are willing to pay more for it, but whatever the price, the buyer is entitled to have the working software they reasonably expected to receive in return for their money.

Further, most people have never actually bought anything from Microsoft. They "buy" it from the PC manufacturer, who is actually responsible for supporting their product.

That is basically true, though as soon as Microsoft start arguing anything about EULAs being binding agreements they're probably going to be on the hook as well. Third party rights and liabilities are an interesting area of the law, particularly when it comes to software.

But yes, if you buy a PC then the shop that sold it is primarily responsible, if you get a phone with your plan then the shop/network that provided it is primarily responsible, etc.

"Windows 10 laptop reboot loop" doesn't apply as it came after the launch

OK, but you were arguing that "most people seem to be very happy" with Windows 10. I suspect those people were not.

"Windows 10 WiFi Sense security" just shows a lot of ignorance

That is unfortunately true. However, it also shows quite a few people dismissing a genuine security concern because as long as everyone who ever uses a network fully understands the implications of the feature and makes no mistakes in configuring it (i.e., they leave the entire feature turned off), no harm should be done.

Of course, the moment a single person in your company accidentally hits share instead of don't share, your sysadmins can look forward to a fun day changing all the credentials and notifying everyone of the new arrangements, and your executives can look forward to explaining the resulting regulatory investigation and fines for not security data properly to the shareholders.

"Windows 10 search" doesn't show anything very much.

That's funny. When I googled it before writing that post, it found a rather lengthy list of articles and blog posts commenting on how poorly the new search feature actually works, mentioning several different points about the order results are shown in, not searching parts of the local network that were searched in previous Windows versions, and generally more work being required to find useful things that search found before. Plus there's the less favourable perception of Bing search results, and the privacy concerns, of course.
It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA. "Helping the US government" in the case of the digital service means things like making it easier for immigrants to apply for a green card by building a web application that replaces paper forms. What the digital service is actually doing is helping US citizens receive government services more efficiently. Which is completely different from "helping the government" the way you phrase it.
Have you replaced any terrible ones? ;)

On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?
No, they already knew the answer to the question which he fully understood, and he lied about the program because it was top secret, and they were using a public hearing to try and out the program. They already knew about the program and even so if they wanted to truly find out without breaking national security they could have held a closed door session.
I think actively trying to suppress a response to negative or positive feedback will have the opposite effect, just to get that out.

Framing feedback as an opportunity to improve and better yourself/your company, be it toning down something bad or ramping up something good, as opposed to a method for self-validation could help.

You could also look at it from two perspectives. From one perspective, feedback promotes improvement for the good of the company. In this light, negative feedback could be demotivating. The other perspective, preventing your company from declining in quality or regressing, could improve your motivation in the face of negative feedback and perhaps even prevent you from getting complacent with ample amounts of positive feedback.

Since you mentioned meditation, one way to improve at handling negative and positive feedback is to be mindful about it by accepting the feedback for what it is and also accepting your feelings towards it. In fact, meditation can help towards this. This can allow you to take a step back and analyse where to go from here as opposed to extremes of emotion clouding your judgement.

I think it still stings, especially if you invest a lot of yourself into your product. Like anything, it is a skill and it does improve with practice, especially deliberate practice.
Try it on a small project and decide for yourself.

There are a lot of detractors repeating the same thing: "It does not have all the features of my favorite language X so its bad", while not explaining why they don't just use X.
I don't see Kotlin as a "wow" language, I see it as a "this is sort of boring but pretty nice" language like Java and Go. Maybe Ceylon is similar, I dunno. It just strikes me that Go could use a stronger competitor than Java that runs on the JVM, but doesn't seem overly fancy (Scala, Clojure) or too dynamic (Groovy, JRuby, Clojure). Kotlin is the closest I've seen to that.
Yeah, go ahead and join the global Stasi. Maybe you'll improve it from the inside. /s
4.0 is the new 1.0
Is that the conclusion? Or should you use Kaspersky because other anti-virus vendors aren't really doing anything but compiling and selling software with a TM stamp on the name?
PS, it's interesting that CS224d : Deep Learning for NLP is trending at the same time as Myra. A lot of stuff is common to both - for instance, the topic on Recurrent neural nets for word embedding.

There are a bunch of very nice NL related experiments I've tried that are waiting in ipython notebooks, that we would love to experiment with here in production. If anyone here is interested in working on problems that relate to NLP/Deep Learning, and doing so with millisecond response times, at scale - you know what to do :)
I believe that the right book at the right time can change your perspective, maybe your life. £15 is a pretty small price to dive into a well-written book on a subject, practically the moment your interest is sparked in the subject. Other conveniences - the fact that you don't have to trudge hundreds of pounds of books every time you move, the ability to read on any device - arguably make them more valuable than their physical counterparts to me, at least.
I've never seen it work. The people whose only purpose in the organization is to create meetings and waste other people's time always seem to be able to stand and drone on about irrelevancies for 45 minutes without breaking a sweat.

I've taken the policy that I a reserve the right to sit down at any time. If I'm sitting, you're bullshitting.
To oppose housing subsidies is to always be considered heartless, siding with the rich, etc. But you cannot create prosperity by destroying wealth. The broken windows fallacy applies here.

It's easy to see the cost of allowing the property value to rise to market rates: people will have to find new homes. I'm not blind to the fact that this would be a terrible upheaval in their lives. The places where they might afford to live might be much worse than their current situation.

But -- there are costs to subsidizing their rent (and it is a subsidy -- if the law prevents market pricing, someone is paying for it). These costs are hard to estimate, but they are the cost of rising property prices elsewhere due to artificially low supplies, the cost to property owners who cannot realize the full potential of their assets, and the costs to the construction industry which cannot improve the land.

There is also the cost, maybe most importantly, of all of the money that is artificially tied up in the rent being paid by others that cannot be spent elsewhere. That infusion of spending would mean a lot of new wealth for workers in the service industry, for example.

Destroying wealth so that a lucky group of (perfectly decent) people can live cheaply in one of the most expensive ZIP codes in the nation may sound compassionate, but there is a cost, and there are unlucky people who suffer. Those people aren't all rich. It's impossible to measure the marginal gain in wages and new jobs created if the real estate prices in the Bay Area were deregulated and allowed to float to the market rates. But the gains would be real, and real people would benefit, and there are real people throughout the rest of the Bay Area who do not get to live in Palo Alto and who are really suffering.
Heh, I initially read it as "improves", and was wondering why they'd bother. Removing it is surprising, but makes sense.
Understanding Repairs in Apache Cassandra
Is the implication here that we shouldn't let women tell any stories unless their experience is an utterly universal one experienced by every woman?

Just seems like a way to derail a worthwhile project like this. It is clearly collecting a wide variety of stories, and IMO that's worthwhile. After all, minorities - by definition - don't have universal experiences, but surely they're still worth telling?
Like most useful metrics, the chart can show trends that correlate with other documented time series metrics. These can be reviewed periodically at regular intervals. Retrospectives can be held whenever it helps the team, e.g. at the end of each sprint/iteration cycle rather than only at the end of a project or major milestone. YMMV, and agile is all about what works for a particular team.
I found the following book to be quite a good tool with practical advice for the proposed approach:

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-...
I also see Facebook's competition with YouTube and the issue of "Freebooting" somewhat tempering the adoption of YouTube. Also, for music minded folks, Apple Connect might still hold more sway than Facebook. Then over on the side there's Vine. I see all these as competing, but not necessarily for the same audiences. Will be interested in the next developments and to see how the market share plays out.
I wonder what the pros and cons weighed in the discussion were.

Clearly not supporting Unicode text in non-UTF-8 locales (except through, like, some kind of compatibility function, like recode or iconv) is the Right Thing. One problem that I have is that current UTF-8 implementations typically are not "8 bit clean", in the sense that GNU and modern Unix tools typically attempt to be; they crash, usually by throwing an exception, if you feed them certain data, or worse, they silently corrupt it.

Markus Kuhn suggested "UTF-8B" as a solution to this problem some years ago. Quoting Eric Tiedemann's libutf8b blurb, "utf-8b is a mapping from byte streams to unicode codepoint streams that provides an exceptionally clean handling of garbage (i.e., non-utf-8) bytes (i.e., bytes that are not part of a utf-8 encoding) in the input stream. They are mapped to 256 different, guaranteed undefined, unicode codepoints." Eric's dead, but you can still get libutf8b from http://hyperreal.org/~est/libutf8b/.