skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviating the OS was a natural consequence of one of the original goals of OOP as conceived by Kay et. al:

First, recall that the advantage of universal computers is that they can simulate anything, including better computers. Objects themselves were supposed to be fully universal computers that got work done through message passing.

Second, the people at PARC had a "no centers" philosophy. They recognized that the key to building scalable systems is to keep responsibility widely distributed among the components.

Thus it's easy to see why you wouldn't need or want an OS:

* An OS is just a simulation of a nicer computer running atop a not-so-nice computer (i.e. the hardware). But, real objects can give you the same thing, and it just so happens that modern hardware components are real objects (i.e. universal computers that get work done by passing messages).

* Having centers in your system makes it hard to scale. And by "scale", we're not necessarily talking about things like "number of simultaneous users/processes", but rather about things like making sure that the Nth modification to the system is just as painless as the first one. The OS is clearly an unnecessary center because the hardware components are now better at handling the responsibility for their respective functionality, but the OS is also an undesired center because its opaqueness and rigidity makes it hard to modify big systems. Fortunately, since an OS is a simulation of a universal computer that means that it can also simulate other universal computers, so we're able to abstract away the OS by using it to run simulations of better computers with names like "Erlang", "Java", "Python", etc.

Finally, while I enjoyed the article and found it interesting, I do disagree with the author's tacit assumption that getting rid of the OS implies more opaque and locked down systems, or that locking down the system implies better reliability and security. Firstly, message passing is already a secure medium; stupid or malicious parser implementations are the biggest cause of the Internet's insecurity [1]. Secondly, it's an empirical fact that the best way to achieve systemic reliability is with redundancy. This means having components that perform the same function, but that are produced independently by isolated teams that use different technologies and techniques. So reliability means having communication standards of some kind (i.e. protocols). Indeed, as long as companies continue to sell computers (i.e. a thing designed to let me simulate what I think is a better computer), we'll end up with more freedom to tinker. What we really have to worry about is companies selling things that they claim are computers, but that lacks that crucial facility (which is why the trend of calling an iPhone a computer, or OSX's SIP can be a little disquieting).

[1] http://langsec.org/
I keep pointing this out to a friend of mine. It's not like one day someone's going to say "oh, shit! we ran out! sorry, no more oil." It will just get more and more expensive.
Too big!
> The goal of good writing is, in part, to permanently change the reader.

This is a lofty goal. Very little on The Web comes within shooting distance of it. What's more, it has little to do with the fact that paying for access to soft copies of material is -unfortunately- [0] quite a bit different than paying for hard copies of the same thing.

> > Nobody does that with web articles.

> Have you never referred back to the same web resource?

Unless it's a reference manual or similar such thing, almost never. Even the issues of SciAm that I did save were saved for the sections that could be used as reference manuals. Frankly, I'm not one for sentiment. :)

> Have you ever emailed an article to yourself to read it later...

I've emailed the URL to an article to myself to read later because I was either

* too busy with another task at the time to read it, but it looked like it was related to another one of my projects

* on a smartphone, which is often terrible for reading idea-heavy material

[0] I say "unfortunately", because it seems that "most" people don't understand how to save complete copies of online resources to their local machine.
Adobe Comet [video]
>You can argue that our drug laws are wrong or the punishments are too extreme, but singling out Ulbrich for the specifics ways in which he clearly and repeatedly violated those laws is showing favoritism. If his crimes didn't involve the Internet, there would be nothing newsworthy about his arrest and sentencing.

Seriously?

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SPECIFICS. Accidentally beat someone to death in a fight you started and you might serve a decade or two. Beat them to death for fun, eat their heart, feed the rest to a dog and light their house on fire while you're at it and you'll likely serve life. Both are 1st degree murder but that's about where the similarity ends.
As usual, erlang does it better: http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#system_info_cpu_to... and http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#logical_processors
I think you are too cynical to be able to understand it.

What you propose they are doing is the equivalent of inviting the fox into the hen house to give the other roosters a run for their money--it is Russian roulette. I doubt anyone using undocumented labor wants more enforcement, although certainly a low-wage state would welcome enforcement for a "competitive"/"fair" advantage over higher-wage states (like California, with its massive undocumented labor pool).
This is just one of many scandals for DFS in the past weeks. DraftKings had to refund all MMA bets on Saturday because of a "data error" -- it was sketchy as hell.
Difference is: entering a DFS lineup makes you care about most of the games.
Hopefully not who, but what. Such as, for starters, the "doesn't affect anyone else" principle.
Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Space
Thinking about it some more, this sounds like a good idea. I'll add it to version 2.
> For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.

It's much, much easier to "catch up" than to actually innovate.

With the education system and culture in China and India there's no way they're going to pass us by. Those are countries where having an original thought and arguing with your teacher gets you kicked out of school.

Hell, in China you need a license to put up a website.
That is pretty chilling... Why did it take so long to refactor the main pages if they were so inefficient?
Ditto for prefetch instructions:

https://lwn.net/Articles/444336/

A MIPS is probably the exact opposite to modern (which actually means anything P6 and above) x86 CPUs in terms of performance characteristics. If I were to guess what member of the x86 family might actually benefit from such optimisation, it would be NetBurst (which itself has very different performance characteristics from every other x86 family that came before or after it.)
We could do that all day. For example, it's "non-English" not "non English." I don't think anyone expects perfectly refined grammar in one-off comment on the Internet.

I'm sure you can write English very well and there are probably many people like you (maybe even yourself) who can write far better than I can. It's just in my experience such people are few and far between where outsourcing is concerned.
ahem... abu ghraib... ahem...
>At the time of the conviction, it wasn't known that the agents were corrupt and thus, not surprisingly, the Judge gave their testimonies all the possible weight and came down that hard on the Ulbricht.

stand corrected. Judge did know that the agent was corrupted. The murder-for-hire allegations used at the sentencing didn't even have as much as a testimony of corrupt agent behind them.
Someone is already offering to do it for $4 lol

http://justcancelme.com/
One other thing I don't think you've covered is that keypresses have a clear intent.

CTRL-W means "close tab" in a browser, SHIFT-HOME means "select to beginning of line" in a text field.

With a mouse, it's frustrating to try and resize a window and click one pixel off the edge, and bring a background window to the foreground instead - because there's no encoding of your intent to perform a resize operation so it's as likely that you were trying to reorder windows.

It also means that to make up for this, GUIs are trying to guess your intent - just try selecting all the text except the first character, or including the first character, or to the end of line not including the newline, or to the end of the paragraph not including the beginning. Different programs, different environments, will jump both ends of your selection around and/or make it very hard to get down to the letter, as they override your movements while wrongly guessing your intent.

It also means keyboard commands can be fired off in series, without waiting to see the results - especially with the awful trend of personalized menus - with a mouse + GUI you have to wait for the screen redraw between movements so you can respond to what's drawn. With a keyboard you can hammer ALT+F, X, N for File -> Exit -> No don't save, and know it will just work, no matter where the dialog appears, or where the 'exit' has moved to on the file menu, or where the cursor is on screen. Which is great for remote desktop sessions, but also it feels less annoying.
It's possible to use Facebook in a way that couldn't endanger your life or career, depending on who you are. Obviously if someone is stalking you or something, that's a different story. But most people can just omit the information that they find to be sensitive and limit their friends list to people they trust.
More fields... less compliance...
I'd consider the sentence excessive were it not for the multiple attempted murder-for-hires. If someone is intellectually and morally capable of directing a criminal enterprise that funds murder as a calculated business decision, and they try to do that, they've earned themselves a life sentence in my view.
Analysing Billion of Data points using GPU 100X faster
It's more common than you might think. Google has a very, uh, open attitude toward open-source hobby-project code contributions by employees.

See https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects for more, and if you'd like to come work for a company that lets you use 20% time to create new projects or contribute to existing projects, visit http://www.google.com/about/careers/.
Undoubtedly the guy has a system and has diversified in either time or by parallelizing in several "leagues."
In theory I like the idea that developers can now push useful updates to all of their customers like never before.

In practice, though, we see too many versions that are garbage. Why is that?

Google is far from the first offender (plenty of unnecessary redesigns and feature-removing "upgrades" coming from Apple and Microsoft too, say) but it's becoming a fundamental software architecture issue.

It's getting to the point where I want a 3-tiered set of app-updating preferences that says "low-level security updates and fixes are automatically OK", "prompt me for any new-feature updates" and "hell no on any re-peanut-buttering-of-the-UI updates".
All the ones I've seen are different to f.lux. They seem to be additive - black becomes lighter, rather than just decreasing the blue percentage. I'd assumed it's a limitation of the filter API.
Engineer merely implements the decision of the upper management...
You've missed the entire original point. It doesn't matter that you're tunneling traffic through some non-local endpoint, the point is that the traffic shouldn't leave your device by default.
You might be interested in seeing the efforts on `clinical track`: https://clinical.meteor.com/ for HIPAA
You can't present a different name, but I think that's a pretty narrow use-case. For teachers, sure, but I don't see a reason for teachers to be Facebook friends with students.

You can certainly be searchable by names in different character sets. I have a Korean friend whose name on Facebook is in Korean, but you can find him by searching for "Henry" as well.

If this compartmentalization is so important, why not just make separate Facebook profiles?
But, no one is denying users access to the courts to test the enforceability of FB agreements. On the contrary, I am saying that it is precisely a remedy that is available to them if that is the question.

But, in most cases, those who demand regulation or otherwise take umbrage with FB's practices in the current context are not questioning the legality of their terms, etc. Instead, they are asking, for instance, that the government proactively force FB to change practices with which they do not agree, irrespective of any legal tests.

The article itself literally speaks to people being endangered by a FB policy. All of this begs the question: at what point is it simply not worth it? It's nearly satire that people believe FB to be so critical that not even personal endangerment will deter them from using it.

Using FB is neither a requirement for survival, nor a fundamental human right. If their policies are endangering your life or simply not agreeable, then there's no need to launch a crusade. Just sign out.
Microsoft researchers explore a practical way to build bug-free software
All this is true. The sneaky thing they are doing is to quietly define more and more of the things you pay for to no longer be your property.
OS/2 was still used in some finance sectors. The Parallels virtual machine software was supposedly originally created to provide virtual machines to continue to support OS/2. (Porting Parallels to Mac OS X was an opportunity that came along later.)
Alright, I am going to give it another try. Thank you! I knew I must be missing something.
Imogen Heap shows how smart music contracts work via Ethereum
I reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign

"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't missed a Wednesday before?"

Make it intentionally innocuous-but-creepy.
I reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign

"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't misses a Wednesday before?"

Make it intentionally innocuous-but-creepy.
When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.
I've occasionally wondered how long it takes highly optimized C/C++ to be surpassed by optimizing compilers due to CPU advancement and the optimizations either making compiler optimization harder, or the optimizations target assumptions about CPU architecture that are no longer valid.

That is, what is the shelf life of a very low level CPU optimization for Intel hardware.
If you could somehow make it more light-weight and useable. It might be good for "9gaggers" to browse some original content.
As a parent, you can be held liable for crimes that your children commit.
The OS/2 programs were command line only and didn't include the GUI ones.

Microsoft removed the OS/2 ability in future versions of NT. Originally it was Microsoft OS/2 NT 3.0 as Microsoft wrote their own version of OS/2 shared with IBM like they did for DOS. But they added the Windows GUI to it and re-branded it as Windows NT 3.1.

I think the POSIX was removed as well in a future version.

I remember Windows NT 4.0 for MIPS systems, it had some sort of DOS emulation level as well. Microsoft wanted NT to be cross platform and then bailed on it and went Intel only.

IBM tried OS/2 for PowerPC systems and it flopped as well.
I used to use Ship.IO even though we use Circle CI for our web builds. Unfortunately, Circle says that they are still don't have the capacity for additional customers to use iOS builds. Would love to change that :) (@GregRatner)
Introducing Rusoto, an AWS SDK for Rust
Well, the context is educating children. Particularly, Kay's premise was that kids are naturally creative, curious, and artistic. He was concerned with process of developing a child along their "stylistic" axis, which opposed the conventional process of education that "beats the style out of them".

Artistic skill is the product of thousands of hours of deliberate practice. But, there's an idea that the motivation for that kind of practice comes from a desire to develop a style that's all your own.
Suspicious of what? That I own this website? Sure, I do. But, this is a legitimate website/business
You can enter multiple times I believe with different lineups. So you enter some lineups with high variance low % picked players.
> The transgender situation is similarly tragic, but it's an issue that trans people run into when presenting ID to buy beer as well.

That is different than a name you are seeing in front of your face, every time you say something. Imagine trying to talk to a friend and cringing every time you see one of your own messages.
Every site with a comment mechanism also needs a auto-cache mechanism
There are far too many times where I have been caught in the situation where I have written out a sophisticated and lengthy comment on sites like facebook and gmail, and before I could submit some act of random chaos, whether it be an accidental touchpad click or random browser crash, has rendered my contribution to an important discussion moot.

I very rarely take the time to say something, but I ensure that when I do it is,

A. Important to a discussion.
B. Articulate and well written.
C. Contributes a worthy point to the debate.

While I realize, as a developer, that said caching behavior would add heavy load to a web service's servers; the benefit is WORTH it.

Hell even having a feature in all web browsers that are smart enough to realize that a user is likely typing out a comment and should ask the user if we are really sure they want to reload or "the page is about to crash do we want to cache the input text?" would go a long way toward ameliorating this fact.

Can we please make this happen?
Quack: Build system on top of build systems
I was actually kept in the same situation at my internship after I graduated myself. It sucks...I ended up leaving and getting a pretty significant bump in pay by just relentlessly interviewing any opportunity I got. I'll try to find the resume I used at the time and send it over to ya. I haven't had to make one in a couple of years, so...
I don't think the judge agrees with you since that wasn't mentioned in the sentencing. And he wasn't convicted of attempters murder.
Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition?

Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal?

Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not.

Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.
Try getting a building permit for a residential dwelling without outlets or a bathroom. That might work in unincorporated territory where there is no municipal law, but not in a suburban neighborhood in the US.

Many workplaces will require that you are reachable by telephone. Pretty hard to do that without the equipment in your house.
My advice, to take with appropriate salt: Leave.

It's a seller's market for people with your skills right now. There's no guarantee that you'll find a new environment that doesn't have one of these cancer-in-the-locker-room culture killers, but they're not quite as common as you're fearing.

It's not just this one employee that's the problem, it's that the bad apple, the manager, and the manager's manager are all knitted together into a situation that you can't break, which is making you "miserable". You may not like the idea of leaving. But, given the information you've provided, it is your best option. (Or, maybe your least-worst option.)
The article is actually fairly silent on the reasons so read into it what you will. If anything the author is endorsing his friend's book without giving away the thesis and if the link is accurate it covers a wide range of factors.

As for Deirdre McCloskey, as Noah Smith says,"do not believe things that Deirdre McCloskey says just because she says them."

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/deirdre-mccloskey...
But also note this is not a hobby project. It is a full-time project by Chromium engineers (just not an official Google product).
Reading this made me wonder...do SpaceX and other private space flight programs have similar standards of rigor?
No, it's like abstinence-only Russian roulette education.
Did you read the article? These two were "put in charge of R&D at Volkswagen." They were literally running the R&D department!
> You're describing things that were inconvenient

So... pretty much every web paywall I've ever encountered. Where's my amazon 1-click for news website paywalls? Several of which I encounter using this very site?

I don't want to create an account, subscribe, save my details, unsubscribe from services I no longer use, etc. for each individual website.
but you have control on the vpn side.

i still have one question in a forum about why Android browser's ignore etc/hosts, and every now and then (question is 6 years old) people comment how shocked they are to discover that is the case (still!)
I just wish I had something that goes through me every step of the way to landing a job as a Web developer
Building on HTTP 402 looks like a good path forward, but some tough love: the name fairtread.com looks like "fart read" or "fair read". The 't' gets lost in the middle because "read" makes more sense than "tread" in the context of paying to read web content.
still not the more honest "do no evil to our profits"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/terrorism-is-made-in-the-usa-th...
They run (ran) R&D at Volkswagen. Whatever happened, happened under their watch.
Yes, it's a Jethro Tull tune called Bouree.