skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice article, convincing analysis.
> The recent trend in paywalling

Is there a recent trend? The situation has seemed stable to me for a long time.

The last big shift was the New Yorker switching to a ponywall (i.e. letting incognito windows work) which, whatever it did for their economics, made the web and HN way better. Nautil.us recently introduced a paywall, but they love HN and are letting HN traffic through.
And don't forget that load average means something different between each OS
>> The problem is that tech must be embraced not just by individual lawyers and defenders who it would help the most, but also by the decision makers themselves, government agencies/law firms, who have the final say on whether to bring tech into their organizations.

Totally agree that systemic improvements will require adoption by decision makers and higher ups. A way to get there could be those individuals and lawyers closer to the problem demonstrating measurable improvements, and tech could be a great way to communicate that.

You mentioned strides being made to help augment lawyers capabilities. Can you elaborate on that? I'd love to read more about it.
12 years of professional programming here.

I almost killed myself about two years ago. Have had depression since I was a kid. I saw a doctor, got on meds, went to a therapist and started feeling slightly better for about a year on and off. ive been stuck in the same location for a long time... Was hoping to change that last year but all I could do was fail job interviews (in part because I was trying to wean off my meds).

There is no success part to my story yet but you are not alone. Do see a doctor and don't feel like a failure if you find out you are depressed.
remember PiCloud? they shut down after I spent a quarter building around their API calls. I never want to repeat that mistake and you also get the bonus of being able to sell your source code or deploy local cloud if an enterprise are willing to pay extra for it.
> You consider software complexity comparable at a broader level than I do.

If you're currently starting your career in software, you're sure to -one day- consider the topic in the same way that I do. It's the only rational way to think about it.

Regardless of how you think about the comparability of software complexity between software projects, your statement about the near-impossibility of creating correct complex software was a gross overstatement; one that you're still not owning up to. :)

That bug list is not a list of CVEs. What's more, it's a list of bugs for the entire Chromium project. I assume that you couldn't find any CVEs that only affected V8 the JS engine, as used in Chrome or Chromium. Their absence shoots a really big hole in the foundation of your primary claim, which was: "[There exists no] functional browser that doesn't have bunches and bunches of exploitable bugs in its JS engine.".
JavaScript for Algorithm Challenges, Fun and Troubles
Police arrests a “regular Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents uploader”
Another piece of bullshit that I am running into with alarming frequency when I click on search results that leads to a local newspaper like the Des Moines Register is that it pops up with a request for a subscription. If I cancel the request, the story appears but with the text replaced by white rectangles. That's just rude. I'm from out of town, for god's sake, I just want to read one story. The New York Times or the San Jose Mercury are more respectful. They give you 10 stories a month.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that-far...
Random Valid US Address
This article speaks to me of the most destructive force in our human world: the social collective. It seems that the majority of his ills are sourced directly from the dire circumstances of the mass collective operating on itself in a negative way - that there is something broken in the peer-acceptance process; perhaps it is indeed impossible to advance science without disassociation from the collective reality of all scientists, who - psycho-socially - desire to attain a social goal as an imperative before any kind of natural observation or 'progress' otherwise; i.e. the complaints of the author would be best addressed to nobody in particular; it is the fact of the anonymous-crowd-mass which produces the conditions degrading science, today. There are simply too many social machinations in play. The desire for acceptance at a banal level (grant money), the desire for acclaim at a banal level (peer review), the desire to be heard above the din of the masses, at a most banal level (publication requirements) - all of these banal instincts have accrued much caché in the zeitgeist as reasons for doing things.

tl;dr sometimes you have to shake the sheets if you want to get a good sail on. No great explorer, adventurer, discoverer, scientist, engineer .. ever .. got that way because they followed the processes of the status quo. The fact that many of us must discover, and learn to stomach: life is not special for a majority of people. That includes scientists. It includes people who think they deserve otherwise. If you want to exceed and excel, propel the species forward: beware the collective. It will eat you.
One of the easiest mitigations to this is to not even create credentials that have access to do anything that could run up a bill in any short amount of time. Between the Console (access protected with an MFA token) and IAM roles, neither you or your application ought to ever have to handle raw AWS secrets.
Amazon EC2 Container Service (Docker)
From what I can tell, peering in from the outside, a lot of what Twitter's engineers do is maintaining the illusion of constancy.

Which is actually pretty impressive, if you consider the number of axes they've grown on and by how much. It used to be that the failwhale was an industry punchline. Now when something is flakey we turn to Twitter to see what the status is.
Also of interest is "Understanding the (original) meaning of Unix load average"

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/LoadAverageMea...
I've asked you many times to stop making inflammatory statements on HN. This one is beyond the pale.

If you do this again I'm going to ban your account.
Yes, I've been saying this for years. It's astonishing how rare it is to hear someone express the same viewpoint. It disgusts me when people laugh about the idea of (specifically male) rape in prison, as if it is justice. But for whatever reason people have a very different reaction to rape when the victim is male instead of female.

I ask them two questions to get them to reconsider their position:

1. Do prisoners deserve to be raped as a form of punishment?

2. So you believe that women should be raped as punishment?

I believe that a just and fair society should never allow sexual assault to be used as a punishment. This is true whether someone in prison is guilty or innocent.
Double blind is a farce in practice in most CS specialties (maybe not bloated fields like AI/HCI/graphics?). Once you get to the top tier, everyone knows everyone, including the industrial labs, including what they're working on. Most good work is too differentiated to anonymize to well-versed readers: less Neural Networks for X, more Sub-Theory of a Sub-Theory or Version 2 of This Weird Thing.

This may not be obvious to the normal grad student, but after a decade in a community of 1K-10K people, most of them working in groups, it becomes clear. The end result is that the last several top-tier conferences I reviewed for, I basically guessed the authors of all the papers I reviewed, and knew at least one of them personally on each paper. All of that, despite being a "young" member of the community.
Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Don't do it is always achievable, even if it might take some time to extricate yourself from a situation that demands it, and still take care of your family.
As healthy as prevalence of air pollution, I guess.
"The old (other, group, user) * (read, write, execute) unix model is [...] sufficient for the vast majority of uses."

It's really not, in an even moderately-complex environment. What I've seen most often is that the "user" and "group" permissions get eaten up by other factors (e.g. the "user" is a service account), so the only permission that can meaningfully be altered is "other".

The result is that either all of the people who support whatever the app is doing have to be given sudo permissions as the service account (drastically reducing the value of any audit/logging), or access has to be controlled at the OS level in terms of who can log onto the system in the first place. In other words, band-aids to work around the limitations of the traditional Unix filesystem permission model.
To me, the most fascinating thing about this story is the starkly different picture it paints of wealth in America. We're currently debating how much of a middle class there even IS anymore, and they're talking about how upper-middle class families had servants.

There's a lot going into the difference, for sure, but its quite a different world.
I spent a couple summers working on my uncle's ranch and I was actually sort of surprised at how lackadaisical vets could be when treating cattle. We had one cow with a soccer-ball sized lump on it's side, so my uncle called a vet in to have a look. The vet looked at it for all of five seconds before pulling out a knife and slashing the growth open. "Yep. Just pus". Indeed. Pus everywhere! The cow, being a marvel of well-bred placidity, just moo'ed and carried on chewing its cud. The vet prescribed some antibiotics and that was the end of it. I asked what had caused the pus to collect like that and the vet just shrugged.

We often think of cows as being dumb, but really, they're just bred to be calm and stoic. Imagine trying to treat a buffalo or moose the same way!
Picasso, a Go image composer
I couldn't help but notice that the blog associated with the site (linked at the bottom of the manifesto) is hosted on Tumblr and runs all of its offsite links through Tumblr redirects so that the clicks are all tracked. Surely that qualifies as exactly the sort of bullshit that this person is inveighing against.
you mean like how myspace was AGPL.
On the slogan "Death to Bullshit!".

General de Gaulle's comment on a similar slogan: "a vast programme".
I don't even know if Google would really be my bag, I would prefer to work at a smaller company but I am interested in coding challenges.
Teen charged for carrying bomb-shaped alarm clock in carry-on
Agreed that its mostly empirical and that correlation does not imply causation.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "other positions" though? Do you know of specific cases where startups have failed as a result of the said personality of founders?
google emacs
>"Aren't we supposed to be, like, building stuff that users want? Rather than just trying to get promoted and game the system?"

That's the company's job, not yours.

In fact, you are actually already doing it if you twist definitions a bit. The "user" is the company you work for, and you are the product. And you "gaming" the corporate-ladder system is you simply marketing the product (yourself) to your user/client so that they pay you more for it.

The beauty of it is that the emergent behavior of those combined two agents yields a net positive for society. Do not be fooled into thinking that only "noble" academia is the way to advance humankind.
This echoes closely (for me) what I experienced as a grad student before ultimately abandoning it.

In 2005, I was pursuing my then-dream of joining the ranks of academia. I was a history & philosophy grad, and my field was 20th-century intellectual and cultural history (so, you know, a whole lot easier than and not at all like the real sciences). I'd grown somewhat tired of the expected vulture-like hovering about what had been the standard historiographical approaches of the past 30 years. Not because I did not find them valuable, insightful, meaningful, or worth continuing. I absolutely did. I continue to find them incredibly insightful. However, it just wasn't quite what I was looking for. I thought I had something better, something nobody was doing at all at that time in the field.

For an entire year, I found myself locked in an endless struggle of presenting my case, arguing my thesis and its philosophical framework and merit, with every member of the department. I couldn't succeed in convincing a single prof to head my committee. Not one. There were long and impassioned debates. They asked a ton of questions, really forced me to dig further into proving the merits and value of the idea, constantly put me on the spot to really flesh out how I was going to support this idea.

At first, I thought I was simply failing to make my case. I could accept that. It drove me to work harder to make my case. I slowly began realizing something else was up when, without fail, every prof hit a point of being no longer interested in hearing my arguments. This was signified--every single time--when they suggested they'd be willing to lead my committee if I would choose a topic that matched their research. They offered to take me on as their RA because I had so thoroughly proven my ability to quickly gain depth and breadth of understanding in a given topic. They even granted me a TA position by the end of the year to sweeten the pot (I'd been attending with no financial assistance at that point, paying the bill myself).

After this happened with the last remaining prof, I finished the semester out, then emailed them all a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I left the program.

A month later, I received an email from one of the professors. It was a personal heads-up and invitation to attend an upcoming conference the university would be hosting. The keynote speaker just happened to be an expert on a philosopher who featured prominently in inspiring and underpinning my proposed work. The keynote topic was a talk about that philosopher's work, and a musing on how it needed to be included in historiography alongside the analytic categories employed for so long in modern historical scholarship. There was even a light-hearted mention by this prof of how much it sounded exactly like everything I'd been arguing in the department for a year, and how she thought I wouldn't want to miss hearing what an expert had to say on the topic.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT: couple word choices; formatting.
Don't think you read that right. The first two strikes have to be felonies (not just possession). She also says that the third strike "until recently" could be possession of a joint, but not anymore, apparently.
well, no sound from scratch on linux, clojure-1.7 and icedtea jvm.
Wikipedia has a one-liner:

{ echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: $(wc -c <some.file)\r\n\r\n"; cat some.file; } | nc -l -p 8080

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat
There was a joke going around recently: Twitter finally allows more than 140 characters in direct messages! Meanwhile, Facebook releases AI powered personal assistant and 12 new open source projects powering their entire company.

Is Twitter doomed because they are public? Their stock is in the toilet, so they are afraid to change anything in case the changes make things worse. So, things are bad, nobody can change anything, and nothing will get better on its own? And since their stock is in the toilet, what motivates employees who want to be like all the other cool kids and cash out for millions? Does everybody abandon ship?

Considering Twitter's entire gimmick is being a short message broadcast service, how much can they innovate without changing the core of what they are?
I don't disagree, but as someone who has written a bunch of personal tools (including a Tinder assistant lol) with electron and nwjs, think about why people are using these runtimes before you rip on it. Since so many people are doing it, there must be some good reasons.
Old campaign websites were the bomb dot com
You mean like per process time spent active on a CPU?

You could poll that ever so often and log the results to a database if you actually cared; but the act of measuring changes the results...
Before World War II, the government did not know what anyone made. Only the wealthy and upper-middle class filed returns—less than 10 percent of the population. The system was based on what the irs called “self-assessment,” which meant that the taxpayer told the government what he or she earned the prior year and then sent a check on March 15. Some information returns were sent to the government, but the government had no capacity to match the return to the taxpayer and the returns piled up in warehouses. Not until 1962 did the government’s computer system begin to efficiently match the information returns to the taxpayer. During the 1920s and 1930s, the tax system relied almost entirely on the honesty of taxpayers.

It's amazing to think that there was once a time in US history when the government could sustain itself through the honesty and goodwill of the richest 10% of its citizens.

I wonder what would happen if we returned to the goodwill tax model. If we had a simple tax code with self-reported earnings where we spent far less on hunting down and punishing cheaters and freeloaders, and instead left it as a matter of conscience for those who had amassed their wealth and raised their families through the good grace and fortune of living in the US.

Do you think our collective social fabric would be strong enough to fund an effective government? Or are we too far down the path of the self-centered, get mine at all costs, cheat the system if possible mindset?
Moldova protesters take to streets criticising 'mafia' government
Looks like it has been fixed. The title originally had "grammer" instead of "grammar".
Periscope Replay
Elaborate?

I find it really annoying that C# enums cannot have constructors and variables.
I was surprised to see Yemen on this list. It's my understanding that plenty of people came in on tourist visas from 2011-2015, particularly to the island of Soqotra, and getting a visa wasn't a hassle.
Currently they have far less though, so guaranteeing at least equal (relative to case load) would be a massive improvement.
iPad Mini Is Dead
Software Architectures for Connected Devices. A Smart Light Bulb Case
This is excellent as it demonstrates a bunch of concepts in a single file and is quite readable.

thinking out loud:

This might be a great tool for certain end to end test scenarios as the script could easily be templatized in order to pipe through sed to select difference binary responses ... and be checked in to have a immutable point-in-time version of the test response.

(edit: ps: I love single file pieces of code like this -- I once wrote a boot loader and "mini-os" in a single file for an embedded board. When I started telling people about it they loved it because they could literally read through the code like a word document and learn how I got it all to work)
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're making there.

We defend the company from issues using our software, arising from a 3rd party's IP claims. We wouldn't defend them if they used our software as part of an effort to hack into the Facebook's user database and stage a massive identity theft scheme.
The GDP is something like $14 trillion. We're talking about 60% of the GDP being redistributed. That will work really well... especially when the GDP drops by about a third, which will surely happen.
So your solution to systemic abuse is to put you, literally you, on every jury trial? Well, at least you're practical.
Audio recording of woman conned out of £12,000
We can base the capabilities of a human-level AI on the capabilities of actual humans. In particular, we know what can be done by a reasonably skilled software developer in the black hat domain; and it's a reasonable assumption that a human-level AI can be as proficient in malware development as a human expert, and can do it faster once it acquires access to more hardware.

For example, it can:

* Gain access to a percentage of global home user computing power - botnets can and have done this, and their main disadvantage is that this computing power is hard to re-sell and not worth much; but if an AI can use for it's needs, it's there for the taking;

* Gain access to significant amounts of money - not billions, but certainly in millions; some campaigns of spam fraud, ransomware, etc can certainly achieve this.

* Gain access to identities, both physical stolen identities and "proper" offshore companies; and integrate them into the modern digital systems - bank accounts, legal credentials, etc.

* Gain access to low level workers - the same people who sign to 'earn money at home!' and become mules for money laundering of various fraudsters, they will also be eager to do whatever things the AI needs to be done physically - practice shows that an anonymous online employer can get such things done, as long as some money (or illusion of it) can be transferred.

Yes, all of this can be done in a bunker, anonymously, without people knowing about it; if the AI has gained access to the internet. It would be consistent with our experience in tracking malware sources - we usually can't do that, most of successful prosecutions come from following the money trail to someone who got too greedy, lazy and sloppy.

And furthermore, there is the very simple scenario of arbitrage. If an AI can provide some service (as if it was done by a human online) which earns $1 but takes only $0.50 of Amazon cloud rental fees... then it can scale it up extremely quickly. Once a superhuman AI is out of the box, acquiring resources in a clandestine way is very much possible.
I think it's the other way round: most employers are subject blind, only a few need you to have specific degrees: Medicine, Law, Accountancy, Actuary, etc.

Technical jobs like coding require you to demonstrate ability, and therefore many people who have a not-quite right degree (physics degree to be a coder) or even no degree can get the job.
> Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?

OP had a good answer: Negative externality.
But conversely it's incredibly hard to change jobs in the UK mid-career or at least beyond the entry-level days. Many friends of mine have had tremendous difficulty jumping into a different role without that new role already on their CV in some way or another.
You can use sudo for that, by allowing certain commands to be run by the PI, eg.:

pi_account ALL= (root) groupadd course_*
pi_account ALL= (root) usermod -a -G course_* *

This would allow the PI to create groups with a certain prefix, and to add users to it.
Well, I guess the main driver is "one click buy" (tm) - that you don't have to bother with spending time on entering the credit card details, security questions, etc.

You click "buy" and then you are done. Off course, later you will have to do all the boring stuff...
There's another example of biological rotary motion at the microscopic level that is used by pretty much every living organism: ATP synthase[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase