skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line.

Really? Seems like most people describe it these days as a craft.

> Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume.

Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line.

> People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers.

But they know design an assembly line for a new task takes loads of time from designers and engineers...

> Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.

You can break of that work if you are working on a project of sufficient scale.
This is further complicated by the precarious position of copyleft in Germany in particular, and the EU in general. In German basic property law, there are certain "rights" of a creator which CANNOT be given away.

The German GPL has some interesting workarounds for a number of these rights; mostly they do it by declaring that the GPL is a contract and not a license. You can give away lots of "rights" in a contract I'd you're explicit.... But not quite all of them. Among the problematic clauses is the one that controls the license of derivative works. Another interesting clause is liability, but that's another conversation.
No disagreement here - but it is all in the past now.

With the possible exception of Watson/supercomputing, IBM is a shadow of its old self.
Am I understanding this right?

The original report said that if you assume the NSA has broken 2 primes, 66% of VPNs in the 1% of IPs surveyed by the researchers respond as if they'd be broken.

The linked article points out that many types of VPNs won't respond to the query method used by the original researchers, many VPNs will respond with false positives, and some will give false negatives.

So basically, we have no idea how many are broken, but some very large number still?
Ask HN: Do you read literature  and novels?
As software developer i always take time to push my career up and read technical books to be able to do the job better, but sometimes i like reading stories and novels, but i don't have time for it, do you read novels ?
I've started developing in FF because of the ability to not have all my chrome plugins installed everywhere, and the dev tools are pretty much there compared to chrome a few versions ago.

For performance inspection chrome is still the winner for sure, but when I just want a light fast experience, FF has been great the last few months.
Step 2 was explicitly stepping backwards i thought. The rest was just a continuation of what the ability gives you and what I often do after stepping backwards to observe the execution.
TFA doesn't mention whether or how far the project is over budget or behind its original schedule. Does that mean it is on schedule and on budget? If so that's amazing.

I'm used to constantly hearing stories like the "Big Dig" here in the US, sometimes it seems like every non-trivial civil works project fails massively fail on both criteria.
Not Enough Women in China? Let Men Share a Wife, an Economist Suggests
I don't think it came from anywhere. I think some people believe it is useful to project that it is true.
Exactly. When an entity (i.e. a company, tech conference, etc.) chooses someone for any reason outside of merit, it's discrimination, and marginalizes the hard work of others.
What really bother me with Firebug and Firefox-debugging is that I can't see when the debugger pauses my page.

So when I'm testing and the debugger fires, I'd still be clicking stuff on my page, wondering why it isn't responding.
Google Fiber Exploring Oklahoma City, Jacksonville and Tampa
Sorry to bring up this yet-another-generics-ranty-thing, but actually point 4 is a typical issue that can be nicely solved with generics, by defining a function that works on every type that implements Foo. In this way you can directly pass a slice of Foo to the function and achieve type safety at the same time. As stated by the author, there's a demand for manually constructing an interface-slice in Go, and this shows a good example why generics can be useful.
HAH! True, but it's just one tool in a vast array of problem solving tools.
Platform support has landed in Firefox 44 and we're working on a prototype extension: https://github.com/firebug/websocket-monitor

Soon!
Yes. I also abhor their walled garden business practices. Here's Richard Stallman from 2011 on Job's death, I completely agree with him:

"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."
I edited my comment a minute after posting to reflect that. Thanks.
Inside the Programming Evolution of GPU Computing
This is one hell of a post hoc ergo propter hoc, I'll give you that at least
Playing with WebSockets for Fun and Profit: Debugging Remote Machines
There are deeper mines than that. The long time the project is taking is also an indicator that it is mostly about repeating a certain set of tasks over and over and over again. Certainly there were big challenges, but I imagine they were more of a project planning and management nature than pure engineering problems.

It is quite impressive nontheless.
Weather on Demand: Making It Rain Is Now a Global Business
We changed the URL from http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/11/193326-inductive-progr... which was causing trouble.
Power-sipping San Francisco network could have IoT devices buzzing
Cool idea. The design looks off on mobile.
Hard decisions for a sustainable platform
I remember doing RoboCode in Java back in the day. Was fun to participate, though back then the best I could do was a bot that always ran middle of the pack in any tournament.
Sure, there's always an opportunity for building a better X. I'd like a better google in fact, and the App store has always had poor search.

The question, though, is what is your business model? If it's just a demo of your skills-- great. but if you want people to use it consistently or use it for years to come it needs a business model to sustain it.

Without that, its hard to know whether I should try and remember that this exists or not.

This isn't meant to be mean or anything like that, not even criticism, just my perspective.
For more info - this is from the same team that created KA Lite, the offline platform for delivering Khan Academy content.
She says she was encouraged to apply and speak at conferences, and that management would campaign for the whole team to attend any conferences where she is accepted to speak.

> This may seem like special treatment or in some ways unfair. "Reverse sexism" some might call it. I don't see it that way. This industry treats women differently, so my managers treat me differently in the exact opposite way the industry does.

I would not call it "reverse sexism", because it is is just plain sexism. Of course the author doesn't "see it that way", despite acknowledging it, because the author directly benefits from said sexism.

If the author is being encouraged to apply for and accepted to speak at conferences primarily based on their gender, then the industry's reaction will be to expect that women speakers are token speakers, and this will set back women in the industry.

Embrace differences, embrace diversity, but in the long run special treatment does not benefit anybody.
Here are two articles from last year articulating Mozilla's view on Firebug:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/12/firebug-3-multiprocess-fir...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-an...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-an...
I got some good natured ribbing from friends for being the last Rails developer on Windows Vista, which Bingo Card Creator was built on. Went to Windows 7 with a VM for doing work on Ubuntu. Eventually switched to Mac last year.

My reasons:

+ The iPad was my gateway drug to the iPhone. The iPhone was my gateway drug to the Apple ecosystem. All of the "relearn an OS" cruft I was expecting to hit was greatly, greatly shortened by the experience of being on iOS.

+ Apple is a monoculture in the development communities most of interest to me. Ruby gems would break randomly on Windows due to e.g. using `ls` to get the contents of a directory rather than using any of the stdlib functions. All tutorials start with the assumption you're using homebrew. The final straw for me was when I started needing infrastructure pieces that just wouldn't run on a Windows machine -- Redis was, IIRC, the motivating technology. (MS sponsors a Windows Redis these days. Good call, a few years late. Sorry guys.)

+ I'm no more immune to social pressure than anyone else is, and my peer group was actively mocking me for running Windows since, minimally, five years before I switched.

+ I do a lot of international travel and need a laptop with me. Previously I used "the best Dell makes", generally a Dell Studio, with a big screen and lots of RAM. I affectionately called my Dell "the aircraft carrier", because it was heavy and bulky. My most recent Dell was a replacement for one which, when on a shoulder-mounted laptop bag, swung out an inch too far and caused the power button (side-mounted) to collide with a door frame, breaking it. (I had to turn that machine on by shorting the two wires attached to the power button which now strick from the case!) Every time I got back from the airport I complained bitterly about how heavy the bag was, and was mocked again by friends who ran functionally equivalent computers which seem to weigh about half as much.

+ Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games. This was a major thing keeping me on Windows, and literally the day before I bought my first Mac, I said "I might get myself a Mac purely for programming, but my main machine has to play games." "Which games?" "Recently, League of Legends and Starcraft 2." "Both are available on Mac." "I'm buying a Mac tomorrow."

+ As Thomas said, every Macbook looks like it has been sculpted out of aluminum. Equivalently powerful PCs are... am I allowed to say ugly? I used a Dell machine made and marketed specifically to artistic professionals -- it's literally called "Studio" -- and even to my very limited standards it seems to lack artistic taste, particularly when it is sitting next to a row full of Macbooks.
That kind of drinking can have serious health implications. Two or three glasses of wine with lunch, the same with dinner and a night out at the weekend adds up to about three times the recommended limit.

Increasing numbers of "respectable middle-class drinkers" are ending up with alcohol-related diseases, particularly women. You don't have to be a binge drinker or a dysfunctional alcoholic to put your health at risk.
We replaced gp with a combination of things.

we ported dremel to our heavily customized hadoop (it is, even now, at least 10x more performant than the public hadoop code, drawing from experiences of running on 5k+ physical nodes, plus yahoo is where software engineering goes to die)

we also ended up using spark

while neither of the above is as convenient as greenplum could be, they also didn't have 2+day outages every other month while hundreds of tb of data had to be regenerated and reloaded for the reporting powered by greenplum. They also didn't cost millions of dollars a year that emc wanted. Overall, I think we were very happy ending gp.
Well where there is a big difference between the underlying capabilities of the platform, differences are unavoidable.

I mean, examples of things that are cross-platform in Ceylon: collections, localization, promises, regexes, HTML construction, logging, testing, dates/times.

Examples of things that are platform specific: I/O, database access, filesystem access, distributed transactions, the HTTP server.

That's pretty reasonable and natural, isn't it?
Those are several possible negative outcomes of positive discrimination. It's also possible that more women speakers at conferences encourages other women to speak, to work on side projects and generally to do things that get them promoted.

I think her point is that since there is so much negative discrimination, the positive discrimination is cancelled out.
Welcome to Artprize,a “Radically Open” Far-Right Art Competition in Grand Rapids
Again you are assuming the wrong things about what makes education work IMO.

It's NOT the budget and never have been. My sons school doesn't have anywhere near the budget of a private school. That doesn't mean that they are doing worse.

The entire idea of money being the key indication only make sense if we are talking about litterally not being able to pay for teachers.

You contradict yourself when you then claim that places like Kahn Academy provides similar education for no money at all.

It's way way cheaper budget they run by and they don't have any benefit of having in person teachers.

And yes your take would be different once you have kids for reasons not easily detectable in statistics or public research and you can't set it up in some table and start comparing it purely via non-human metrics.

None the less your characterization of charter schools in general is mostly wrong and that is what I take issue with. Not whether there are problems with some charter schools.
Inside Apple's Perfectionism Machine
A Runaway $2.7B Military Blimp Is Floating Aimlessly Over Pennsylvania
We also need a bill length vs. review time rule.

If a law is too long for a representative to have read it (Patriot act, ACA) then Congress should not vote on it until they've had enough time to read it.

I propose 10 days + (number of pages / 5) after it's been introduced to the public.
Prototypo – Design fonts by tweaking parameters
What Apple Should Do with Its Massive Piles of Money
Ask HN: Do you like poll feature in tweets by Twitter ?
Twitter recently launched twitter polls feature in tweets. Do you like that feature or not?

I recently started a project PollPK a website which let users create polls and publish on my website and any user ( with or without login ) can vote on those polls. Here is early beta

http://beta.pollpk.com/

I stopped work on it 1 month ago due to some other projects. Please give me insight of it should i start working on it again. I know i can't compete them but i want a general opinion is it use able or not.

Thanks
* knowing that the dealership is trained to _only_ work on your model of car is extra assurance that they'll do it correctly.*

Semi-tangential: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii8rC6CPCvM
My IANAL impression of the courts is also that they don't want to make a judgement based on technical distinctions, but rather looks at how the work was used and what the intentions was. Did VMware distribute vmklinux without the linux kernel, and was it written with the intention to distribute it was a collected work.

The word "arbitrary separation" also seems to cover intention rather than technical facts. Did VMware create the ESXi intention to bypass copyright, or was it create as a natural part in the development of VMware products.
You should just quit and build a unicorn.
She does say that the two engineering managers are also male, so the current title would be correct.
>I don't see how a method that does not require independent replications can be considered science.

There is an implicit benefit-of-doubt here - that the scientists themselves have independently replicated the experiment before publishing the result. Most papers will list how many times an experiment was repeated by providing the sample size, number of biological replicates, number of technical replicates, orthogonal evidence etc.
This application will be able to:
Read Tweets from your timeline.
See who you follow, and follow new people.
Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you.
Not sure what the difference in this case would be - VMWare is doing the equivalent of distributing the patched DLL.
First Beta release of KDevelop 5.0.0 available
One place where it makes quite a big difference is in the standard library. In scala the standard library is very often just a thin shim on top of the JVM equivalent... which means that scala.js needs to shim the JVM library. It's not a huge deal in that most everyday things pretty much work out of the box, but if you're using a lot of time/date manipulation (via Joda-Time or the JDK8 java.time package) you'll have to use something else on the JS side.
I'm yet to see any compelling evidence of discrimination against women in technology. I've been in the industry 12 years. I know plenty of women in tech. They have the same minor grievances that men do. But none due to sexism.

I also think that if there -is- sexism in the industry, -more sexism- is not the right solution. Call out the sexism. The industry will rally around you, as we've often seen. Don't generalise the industry, and generalise men. That's just bigotry.
Social Media isn't marketing. So, what is it then?
I agree, but I bet an article titled "How to Avoid Spam Filters" gets a massively larger number of hits from search results than one titled "How to Play Nice in the Email Space."
"Male-dominated" is used all the time to refer to workplaces and industries that skew heavily male.
I have never worked for IBM.
Signing an NDA takes away your liberty to disclose certain things. I'm not sure what you're trying to dispute.
The license-writer's published opinion on whether an activity is a copyright-protected activity that needs a license is of no special status (if the license-writer is also the copyright holder, it might have special status as itself being an implicit license in those circumstances where the opinion is that a license is not necessary.)

What is controlling on this question is copyright law, not the FSF's opinion. And, clearly, the FSF isn't a neutral authority here, they have a positive interest in portraying the need for a license as being as broadly as they can to encourage use of the license and adherence to its other conditions.
That is correct. The hard part of the logistics industry is getting the integration between warehouse, trucking and operations correct. I worked as a programmer in this space and most of the time and money in this space is not going towards apps and websites (most logistics companies have that or have easy ability to get those things up and running) but integration between interested parties.
Once I visited weather.com and every image, literately every image, was a reference to an imminent cataclysmic event. Volcanoes exploding in fire, meteorites exploding over cities, etc. It's hard to differentiate weather.com from a parody of weather.com.
There is Noaa http://w2.weather.gov/climate/ you can get past results there.
I agree with you that it is clear in this case.

But they are arguing that the API they added makes the proprietary vmkernel a separate work and the distribution with vmklinux a "mere aggregation", no?
I'm curious to see if many of those that did invest in non-exchange startups have seen much return to date. A lot of the ideas seem (at least to "regular" folks) to be a bit... strange...

In the post they mentioned Dunvegan Space Systems, which as far as I can tell is trying to sell computing power where the server is physically located in space. They can broadcast radio, and in theory the signal should be harder to shut down, but that's the sole useful purpose - broadcasting something that someone may want to shut down - a problem for which we already have terrestrial solutions (eg pirate bay).

The blockchain has a lot of promise, but it seems like much of that is theoretical and far-future.

It's not surprising that VCs are waiting for a bit of a return (or indication that their capital's going to result in return at some point) first.
Or they could download from one of the many, many torrent sites? Both are about equally illegal, I think, though torrenting should net you a higher-quality copy, maybe even FLAC.
> You see, someone who is not capable of programming, should not be allowed to manage programmers, because that simply amounts to an insult.

I hate this trope. There are thousands of professions out there, and most of them involve some kind of specialized knowledge/ability/skill. Do you really expect the head of your organization, the person least likely to have time to do independent work, to be the one with mastery of all the activities in the organization?

> He cannot do what you can do. Therefore, he is an idiot.

This one is even worse. It's not like programmers know how to do everyone else's jobs, and they aren't idiots.

> Nobody wants to take orders from an idiot.

Some cynical folks have argued that the advantage is that idiots are easily manipulated...

> Every single business on the planet is now, one way or another, turning into a technology platform.

Technology != software, and even if it did, very few businesses are viable as a software platform. Software is becoming an increasingly intrinsic part of most businesses, but so is accounting, legal, hr, management...

> This means that in the end, it is programmers who will own and control everything, and not that bunch of idiots.

I can imagine an accountant thinking much the same thing a century ago...
I'm pretty sure Activity Monitor had per-app power usage tracking before iOS.
Building Better API Docs with React and Swagger
However, SSL also proves authenticity, not just encryption. It would let you know that the hidden service you are accessing is indeed who you think it is.

So do .onion address; they are an hash of the key pair you get when you generate a new one, and the client verifies that the server it's connecting to does in fact control the associated private key.

By abdicating readable domains, the Tor hidden services system eliminates the need for external authentication mechanisms like CAs; the address is all you need.

https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
As a starting point the site is part of the iTunes affiliate scheme. Hosting costs are fairly small, so as long as it covers its costs it'll be live perpetually. We also have other ideas for sources of revenue, this is just the MVP.
Given that it was 100% male, calling it male dominated is also true by default.

Male dominated also means "predominantly male", though, in common usage.
> It exports many symbols for drivers (proprietary or otherwise) to use internally.

I fail to see how those symbols being exported makes the relevant functionality public vs. internal to the kernel [1]

> Some symbols are exported GPL_ONLY, which means that only GPL drivers may call those symbols.

I don't think that is accurate. Drivers are necessarily derivative works of the kernel and have to be licensed under the GPL anyway. In practice closed source driver modules seem to be tolerated, even if they are not strictly compliant with the kernel's license.[2]
The purpose behind the GPL_ONLY symbols is that a driver has to declare itself compliant with the license to use the symbols. If a proprietary driver would declare itself GPL compliant to gain access to GPL_only symbols, its author would be in even muddier waters than before.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense...
[2] http://archive.linuxgizmos.com/are-non-gpl-loadable-linux-dr...
So, that's a good example: ceylon.time is implemented in pure Ceylon, and is totally cross-platform.
Let's just let the large corporations keep their rotten rodents effectively forever, given they pay a small fee (smaller than their lawyer fees, at least), and give everything else sane copyright terms.
US Military Blimp Loose Over Pennsylvania, F-16s Scrambled