skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One of them is signed firmware blobs

I'm not sure I understand what you're describing here. Suppose I have a router and I want to run OpenWRT on it. Are you saying that the router will have basically two "firmwares" in it? One that controls the radio chip only, and is signed, and has some kind of defined driver interface; and another that controls the rest of the device, and has a driver that talks to the signed blob, so as long as OpenWRT has that driver, I'm good?

Or suppose I have a laptop and I want to load Linux on it. Are you saying the wifi chip inside the laptop will have a signed firmware blob that controls the radio, and has a Linux driver interface, so I can load Linux on the laptop and talk to the chip?

Assuming the above is correct, how different is it from the way these devices are designed now?
>Utility is a well-known concept in economics.

It's well known but it still has a circular definition. Why do people spend $X on goods? Because it provides $X worth of utility. Why does it provide $X worth of utility? Because they spent $X on it.

Ultimately it therefore ends up being rather meaningless. It's also non-disprovable which makes it non-scientific.
I always thought these things were obvious (although I had never found so beautiful words to say them), but it appears they are not.
Another issue: lag. I have yet to see a wi-fi connection without occasional periods of enormous latency, packet loss, or both. Cellular data is even worse.

RTSs and MOBAs both seriously suffer under those conditions.

Who's going to plug an Ethernet cable into their tablet just for one game?
How to Blog Skeptically on Politics – ZipMinis: Science of Blogging
For me the issues is the bezel. It's so big that it makes the phone big while simultaneously making the screen tiny.
I think of utility as the first principle of economics. Is your criticism that it can be used to explain a person chooses to overdose on heroin as much as why someone donates their time to charity? But couldn't the same be said of biology, and how natural selection explains both intraspecies predation and altruism? I mean, it can sound like a circular argument, but on the other hand if it happens there was something that made it possible to happen, too.

I don't at all agree that classical economics as a specific school is particularly focused on utility compared to others. Wouldn't that be a little like saying high school algebra is closer to set theory than say abstract algebra?

To establish a correspondence between utility and the real world, I think it is worthwhile to acknowledge that an understanding of what predated currency has shifted away from barter economies and toward economies that traded influence and status. Or, similarly, take a look at this story from a few weeks ago[1], where the consistent theme to me seems that people's behavior occurs within a context, and that anthropology might be as good a way to explain things as a highly simplified reward and punishment framework. That is, utility is maximized by acting consistent with your perceived identity as much as through projections of rewards from various choices.

So, while I don't think the concept of utility by itself says that status and identity play the primary role, I also don't think it is implausible.

And yet, you're right that open source isn't just hobbyists, and I doubt contributions from corporations contribute to prestige in any way that is valuable, so as you said:

>My guess is that open source software reduces the transaction costs of acquiring and fixing software for corporations [...] It should be a tragedy of the commons, but it isn't.

— leaving us with a poorly understood phenomenon. Is this just a moment in time specific to the age of a current generation of programmers, that won't last, or is there a dynamic that is more sustainable?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10057285
Thank Congress for the recent "first to file" change to patent law.
My guess is its that smart phones are more valuable than the raw materials, or more valuable than a tv, a land line phone, and a hand radio are individually. So not that there are more, that they are more valuable objects.
I didn't mean to imply that the problem was an expensive paywall.

Using graphics as an example again, imagine a research paper explaining a new rendering algorithm that can render in half the time of the next best algorithm. As great as it may be, it's not very useful without the rest of the software infrastructure that comes along with a production rendering system, like Renderman, 3Delight, or Maya. So even if the academic researchers release an implementation as open source, it's unlikely to be used in production until it's incorporated into one of the big closed source systems.

I suppose pay walls could be a contributing factor, but in a lot of areas the open source solutions are so far behind the closed source systems that inaccessible bleeding edge research isn't biggest problem.
My Rant on C++'s operator new
It's a subset of javascript, with a subset of flaws. The wiki entry specifically mentions that eval and closures aren't supported.
Except that this has been observed to not happen. Wealth differences between families have been observed to not compound across generations. Wealth differences between nations also don't compound across generations.

So, there's clearly something that stops reality from matching that nice pretty math.
Or a natural reaction to an overshoot of capitalist excess (trying to create scarcity out of a thing that fundamentally isn't scarce in order to profit).
correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
It doesn't disable anything, it just uses a different engine management map that runs the engine hotter or leaner (probably both) to get more power and better fuel economy while producing more NOx.
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Yeah, I kind of figured. This goes to show you how unfriendly Mountain View is currently with respect to biking, "if you want to commute legally you can only commute when the sun is up". Imagine if roads closed after dark. There would be 0 tech companies in Mountain View.
There was an article on the projected growth of the middle class in china. If that was to hold, it would support the point.

If everyone gets some linear growth to their income, those at the bottom get the most %. So the pie shifts down. If its about leveraging existing capital, then more capital means more for you and the pie shifts up.
The best - and worst - thing I've done had cured my procrastination issues. It's essentially a personal moon shot system wherein I describe my perfect 5 years, 1 year, month, week and day. Like a pace car doppelganger. No human could do what I set out to do, but I work at it tirelessly. My productivity is gobs better than it was, I get more done on time than any other time in my life.

The 'bad' part is it still feels like perpetual failure. Even if I do 10x more in a day than I did 5 years ago, I only did 40% of my perfect day. I never feel satisfied. It's depressing.

So if you're willing to sacrifice mental health for productivity, try my system. Maybe it will work better for you. Maybe it's worthwhile in the short term.
The values that the art community and the tech community are somewhat antithetical to each other. The art world does not hold programmers highly amd vice versa
Open source software is cheaper to produce. In fact it is so cheap to produce that you can use it as a loss leader for advertising job positions.

Why is this? Your average software company runs their R&D department on about 10% of their earnings. Yes, I pulled that number out of my nether regions, but in my experience that's about right. If you do a google search for R&D as a percentage of earnings, you will see lists for large companies that range anywhere from 2%-30%, but they tend to be on the lower side in my experience.

This means that for a software company to produce, package, market and sell a software product, they have to charge about 9x what it cost to produce it. If we factor in profit, then we're pretty close to an order of magnitude difference.

With open source software virtually all of that overhead disappears. If you are writing software that you already needed anyway, then the cost is very low -- even if nobody contributes to the project from the outside.

With a traditional software sales model, you divide the cost over many customers. So it might cost you $10 million to create and sell, but if you have 100,000 customers, you can charge $100 each and break even. With an open source model, each actor builds pieces that they want and care about and uses other pieces for free.

The advantage to working with the open source model is that the overall cost is an order of magnitude lower because you cut out all the sales, marketing, support and associated management. Not only that, but the pieces you pay for, you get to dictate exactly what they look like (within reason ;-) ). So essentially, you are getting your software at a tenth the price and the bits you care about, you are getting custom made.

Of course, you usually have to spend time packaging and documenting, but this cost is quite low. The reputation you get for doing it is often more than worth it (especially if you look at the cost of hiring recruiters). It would be interesting to see a study to see if sponsoring popular open source projects leads to lower attrition for companies. I suspect this is true, but have no data.

Of course, this sucks if you are in the business of selling software. If you are in the business of selling services enabled by software, then open source is absolutely king.

Individuals still contribute quite a bit to open source projects and have their own internal drivers for doing so. More and more I've seen advice that in order to show your worth to an employer it is best to work on open source projects and to have a portfolio (I admit to giving this advice myself, from time to time). Lately, though, I have found that the majority of important open source projects are funded through commercial entities. The last time I looked, the Linux kernel was about 75% funded through commercial entities. On the web side of things, it's actually getting difficult to find popular projects that aren't mostly funded by one or more organizations. I think the era of running large software projects as a hobby is coming to an end.
Biking really is dangerous though. Per-mile you are more likely to get injured in an accident on a bike than in a car. Though there are problems with that statistic since cars are also used for long-distance highway driving which inflates the total number of miles. That said, it's absolutely true that biking can be a fairly dangerous activity, though driving itself is also fairly dangerous (one of the most dangerous things people do regularly).

I'm still a huge proponent of biking regularly, but safety is an unfortunate problem, and a lot of people are stuck in situations where there isn't a safe bike route to and from work for them.

And you are absolutely right, there are plenty of cases where there are safe bike routes.
Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.

Money is much easier to spend than to keep. And if you didn't have the discipline to earn it in the first place it's even easier.
>But why do people contribute their time in building it?

Because they get paid a salary to do so. Because commercial companies poured millions of dollars into the OSS projects. Specifically, the projects that people actually think about when they talk about successful Open Source Software - Linux, Firefox, Chrome, etc.

>as well as the ability to leverage involvement into actual cash like well paid consultant gigs, books or successful blogs.

That only applies if your project is already successful. And if its already successful, chances are high that you're already drawing a decent salary. And, books... Err.. Do you have any idea how little money authors make on those?

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-develo...

The vast vast majority of Open Source projects are just that - Source Code. No chance of money. No chance of glory. An itch was scratched. Someone just pasted a bunch of source code onto the Internet. And there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. However, painting the entire OSS landscape with the success of the extreme minority distorts the picture.
Hayek, the second most cited economist?
Abito Cerimonia Bambina – Noradress
What worries me is that if this explodes across the industry, the common refrain will become that EPA guidelines are unrealistic and that's why everyone is cheating. Just what we need as the world is coming around to direly needed environmental regulation.
I'd like to see where that number is coming from.

I don't know how they arrive at it, or how accurate it is, but here's what they claim:

http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/internet/topics/ip...

Time Warner Cable was an inaugural participant in World IPv6 Launch.
TWC has rolled out IPv6 to over 90% of its residential network.

Both modems are DOCSIS 3 and IPv6 capable, neither receive IPv6 addresses.

FWIW, I have a relatively new Netgear router (as in, about a year old, maybe less) but even after TWC upgraded my cable modem to one of the newest ones, I still did not get an IPv6 address until I updated to the latest firmware on the Netgear router. Depending on what you have hanging off of your cable modem, I suppose there's a chance that you're not getting an IPv6 address because of some issue on that device, as opposed to TWC's network itself.
Adding my personal opinion about them:

Their current "10 days" delivery time is quite unfortunate, but I believe that's explained from the fact that they just started upgrading all their machines to DDR4 (and unfortunately, as I've been hit with it, a price increase for dedicated servers still on DDR3).

In the past I have used their 120 seconds delivery time extensively, but it has a few problems: 1. You have to verify your account first. 2. That's only guaranteed for one single server, try ordering 20+ of their top of line servers and it'll take a few days to get all of them.

Their control panel is also very confusing and feels very sluggish, and I'm talking about the one they released quite recently.

They also have tons of country specific domains (perhaps for tax reasons?).

They're pretty great on hardware, but I've experienced a bit of downtime with them, but as long as you have enough redundancy, you should be fine. I'm hosting game servers in there, with an automatic fallback to some cloud providers if those go down, so I'm not too worried about that. Still, seeing some servers randomly lose connectivity like this: http://i.imgur.com/9uMOHnH.png doesn't inspire confidence.
Docker is not a sandbox and was never intended to be. A comprehensive SELinux profile for untrusted Docker containers could be developed, but I've yet to see one. If you want to run untrusted Docker containers, then this is what you want.
It doesn't seem like you need to sacrifice mental health at all: your productivity is up 10x on 5 years ago, can't you be happy about that, while still acknowledging there is room for improvement?
Completely seconded. Universities are where the bulk of CS and software research comes from. Pretty much every paper I've read, especially for systems software, has been from academia, with the notable exceptions of a few publicly funded research labs.
Interesting, I also have ADHD. My tinnitus gets much worse when I am under stress like coming in bursts of 30% to 100% loudness for a minute or two.
A new Meteor and Django in the same week. Feels like Christmas come early
Thanks for the details. I'm fortunate to work in a place where this is largely not an issue. I work hard and often put in time at night and on the weekend because I'm Type A, so I don't worry when I need to take time off because I know I've put the time in and deliver results.

That said, I've definitely worked at companies that want to have their cake (in by 8:30 or 9) and eat it to (leave no earlier than 5:30-6 with expectations of frequent late nights and weekends with 2 weeks vacation). I've simply lost all tolerance for that, and always wonder how others manage it in stricter environments.
I agree, Rust isn't the first language to exist in the "safe systems language space". But it's a recurring meme that Rust is somehow related to Ada, when in reality they are divergent lineages. :)

> Also, existential types would prevent all
> sorts of issues that happen when two things
> are same size but should be treated differently.

I don't know what existential types are, but we use phantom types for that: https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/06/23/static-checking...
Apparently was an [Obama's initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...). Let's hope this decision helps to remove software patents.
I don't understand the point of Docker. It seems like a great product. For any serious production grade containerization , I'd use a real virtualization solution like KVM, or VMWare.
You do not own them.
Gnome 3.18 Full and Detailed Review on Fedora 23 Beta
I don't really get this, the implication is the container becomes more secure without access to the socket, yet it has access to the hundreds of local kernel APIs with which on the average month it can easily gain higher privileges than root, especially on contemporary machines where half the admins around these days don't even know what a security update looks like
Yet, I think it is important for people to understand Go is not a replacement for C. No one is going to be writing kernel modules or drivers in Go. For that one needs to look at new languages like D and Rust. But Go can replace Java. And if Google ever puts Go on equal footing with Java for Android development. Then, yes indeed, this article predicts true.

However, there are a couple of other languages out there that I expect will have a bright future too (Julia and Elixir) and others that might prove a surprise success (Crystal) So don't go thinking Go is the only choice you for your company going forward.

Now, if Go would just support generics I would be much more inclined to use Go too.
I would love to see one of these platforms that's capable enough to feel right when playing Descent.

[0] https://youtu.be/rrUF8Dz84rE?t=329
The C ABI is de facto standardized, the compiler in use doesn't matter. Rust code can expose a C ABI and be compiled into a linkable artifact, and that means that C code can use it as though it were an artifact compiled by any C compiler.
There is one thing about open source that needs to be known. It is not self sustainable. It requires external factors for support. Allow me to elucidate.

The software engineer occupation is a highly specialized role. A software engineer alone does not have the ability to survive, hunt food, or build shelter. Instead the software engineer must trade his skill for the services of other experts.

In short, a software engineer who only gives away his work to the open source community basically can't pay the bills. He needs to sell his work. Although open source is built off of the leisure time of programmers that leisure time must be bought and paid for by an external factor. More often than not, that external factor is Closed source.

Ironically, open source only exists because of closed sourced apps or web services.
Location: Washington, D.C. Metro Area

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Interestingly ol' Marx tried to differentiate between use and exchange. He called it value, but i suspect it could easily translate into the utility of modern economics.

Sadly he seemed to have managed to talk himself into circles trying to argue that labor was the source of value, and therefore capitalists were labor exploiters.

Because of this he ended up mixing use and exchange value when talking about production machines, to try to show that said machines didn't provide any more value output than was initially put into making it.

I suspect that once one correct for that, by for example making machines into labor amplifiers, Marx's writings have, given the circumstances and time it was written, some serious insights into the workings, and pitfalls, of capitalism (most people barely touch volume 1, but volume 3, published by Engels after Marx death, holds a stern warning about the effects of finance capital).

Using that as a springboard to bootstrap some other kind of society may well be futile however.
There is in fact something magical about printed books :-) Well, not magic, but books are not just the medium of data transfer, they are also integral part of the reading experience. This is unlike music, where it doesn't matter if you're playing the content from a CD or transferring it over the network. The feeling of reading a book will always be different from using a reading device, it doesn't matter how to great the device is. Once the novelty of e-readers wears off, you will start to see a steady-state of sales on paper and other media for books. It seems that it is already happening. I, for example, read books in printed as well as electronic forms. I use e-readers for the convenience, but there are some types of books that don't work in electronic format in my personal opinion - and I think there are lots of people like me.
Anyone have reading suggestions for an operationally minded infrastructure engineer who is paranoid about security and hates breaking production but still wants to take the IPv6 plunge?
They didn't catch it. It was caught by independent researchers. They should be ashamed.
How many shareholders are pursuing 5 to 10-year horizons? It seems like most shareholders today are just shareflippers, and if all the shareholders care about is next quarter's earnings report, they will inevitably hire staff that mirrors their interests.

Perhaps moving long-term capital gains tax benefit from 12 months to something like 60, and taxing the rest at regular income rates would change the game.
Ship defense systems are quite advanced, but to a first order approximation, the US's carriers would be neutralized if China can sink a carrier for less than the cost of a carrier (where the lives of the 4300 sailors and pilots on the latest US carriers are to be considered part of the cost), and the cost of a single carrier buys a lot of radars, satellites, subs, missiles and R&D.
A first look at the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows
I don't see how that could possibly be true.

Even with privacy extensions, you can't "clear your cookies" start fresh with another IP address. There is no incognito mode with IPv6. There is not anonymous NAT.

It's no surprise to me that the companies pushing IPV6 the hardest are also the ones most interested in your personal data.
Poole's situation did not give rise to the 'cuck' meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cuck
Agreed... I don't want the effort and complexity it would take to offer a lot of what's pretty easy with nginx inside a node app. As much as I really like node, I think it's generally nginx in front of node to offset what it does better... I think people make applications complicated enough as it is...
You might be interested in this then https://github.com/commoncode/django-ddp
Demonstrating Tidal (2013)
> New styling for contrib.admin

I've hoped for years they'd use bootstrap, how does this compare?