skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, we run one of the largest (if not largest) private financial network in the world. Something like 180+ countries, close to 1,000 core routers, etc. with proper DR (dual-homing, separate fiber, risers). It's not like we run a NOC in each customer's office. It is all standard stuff -- you concentrate in big cities and run lines to individual customers. Lines are exactly the same type of lines you'd provision for Internet access (anything from a T1 to OC-3 and beyond, metro ethernet, etc.)

You can certainly connect to us over the public Internet as well -- but you have to factor in down-time, latency, and other factors. There are big Internet outages that have happened in past years (e.g. anchors cutting cables) where we kept our customers online while the Internet was down in the entire country.
True... but the crazy thing is the other options aren't hugely better. GTK has poor OSX support, while QT is massive and the bindings situation is still unclear - it's workable for building an app, but would you want to have it included in the default install? Kivy is neat but comparatively immature and doesn't have native theming. WxWidgets can look good but doesn't seem to have Python3 support.

I was really surprised by this actually - I wanted to create some simple GUI apps and assumed there would be something clean, small, and modern to replace TK... but nope. And all the documentation (including for python tk) is pretty terrible. The most realistic suggestion I've seen is... write you GUI in HTML and Javascript and use python for the backend server. Not a great situation when the best way to write a good looking GUI for Python is basically not to use Python...
From your link:

>"So should intersecting confidence intervals be our definition of replication? This too has a flaw since it favors imprecise studies with very large confidence intervals. If effect size is ignored, we may waste our time trying to replicate studies reporting practically meaningless findings."

I don't see why the definition of a replication should have anything to do with practical use or precision of the estimate. These are other important, but different, issues.

Intersecting estimates of the plausible range is fine as a definition. The observations are consistent with each other. The best way to make these estimates is yet another tangential issue.
That's a fair point. Facebook is very very related to the emotional/interpersonal side of things. There were groups devoted to more intellectual subjects but somehow I never felt it was a place for thoughts. Twitter can be 'topics' oriented. G+ has that too. I'm starting to think that it even appeared as a defect when compared to Facebook even though it's a bit 'apple to oranges'.
> "I didn’t choose Russia. They chose Russia."

But he was on his way to Cuba, which would have been his choice. It would have been a bad choice, because the US would have grabbed him there. It's a pretty quick jaunt from anywhere in Cuba to the US base at Gitmo.

What this article makes clear is that he is heavily guarded by the Russians. It's not a coincidence that this meeting took place in a hotel filled with high ranking Russian military. Would Cuba have afforded him the same level of protection?
A DASH playback plugin to Clappr
The actual emitted power is magnified by the antenna gain (say 14db) its not consumer 100 mw any more. And those sort of antennas have very pronounced side lobes.

And to get range they normally run these blue tooth/wifi sniper rifles much hotter than your consumer wifi AP

PTP you can run 4W
Honestly, though, what sort of market share does Windows Phone have? Surely it's a single digit percentage. How could anybody justify developing for that platform without having a significant interest?
Great piece of reporting, but the style makes it really hard to follow.
Not anymore; those methods are implemented in an extension on `String` that don't always involve bridging back.
The Advantages of Integrating API’s with Other Services
It's as if they're paid by word count. If anything they should constrain word count, much like a certain micro-blog network.
Before you do anything go and read this.

http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems

I am hoping this will give you some ideas you might not have thought about before about how to find those problems. Let me know if you want to talk about it.

Your hunch about finding problems to solve i right on. Now the trick becomes finding interesting problems.

The essay also references an ASK HN thread I did a while back. There are plenty of problems out there, the trick is to get into proximity of those who experience them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007
When I think of Edward Snowden, a video comes to mind, where there are three cattle in a corral and a butcher kills one of them with a riffle from close range. The cow obviously doesn't quite make it out of that situation and basically just falls over on its side. The shot and the cow falling kind of startles the other two cows and they jump an take a few steps but then just kind of stand there and look around and slightly take a look at their fallen comrade, but otherwise go about just kind of standing there, continuing to do their cow things.

That's kind of how I see society. What Snowden revealed has been going on and it's really just the tip of the iceberg and it will only get worse. But what do we do? We say "that's not cool" and then get back to posting our whole life on facebook and trusting the assurances of the same government that does far more lying than not. Here we are, you are maintaining your own government surveillance dossier on facebook, with all the connections and associations listed and conveniently connected. It is any and all past authoritarian dictatorships' wildest dream they could have never even imagined. yet it continues, the business media proclaims that there is no stopping facebook's domination, which will include what Zuckerberg's slip-up from yesteryear of intending to fully replacing the internet even if just in perception of people's minds. (see his free access to facebook in emerging markets where he is trying to head off the internet becoming a thing in people's minds)

It will be quite interesting to see how this all plays out. I am not going to hide the fact that no matter how I look at it, even if things seem all rosy and nice and pretty now, there are far more wildly risky and probably catastrophic outcomes down the path society has and seems to insist on taking.
I happen to agree with your analysis, but I am not a lawyer either.

What does it matter that a state cannot compel a corporation to reveal its source code as a condition of distribution? The key is that the recipient of the distribution cannot make use of it without a license, pursuant to international copyright law and treaties. And you can indeed sue them for infringing on this, under copyright law, can you not? As a condition of use, they must also OFFER TO distribute the source code of any derivatives.

No one is forcing the actual distribution of the source code of derivatives. But if this distribution does not happen, the recipient CAN be sued for copyright infringement, lacking a license, no?
https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeoplecode

http://www.watchpeoplecode.com/

http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative
I would be wary of assuming the problem was that they didn't work hard enough.
Shuts it down and tracks it on a map via triangulation
"Edward Snowden reached 1.5 million followers in no time. He only follows one himself – the NSA’s official account."

That's funny.

On an unrelated note, what a hero this man is. The US should consider itself fortunate that it has people who at great personal cost would expose wrongdoing. It's a pity the irrationally scared public doesn't consider him a hero.
> I wonder why they can't see the obvious wrongdoing by our leadership and how it erodes our values.

It's because traditional Christian values have been hijacked by business leaders who believe it is in their best interests to cultivate a populace with unquestioning deference to authority. (They're probably right about that too.)
The problem with strings is that there is very little that is easy. The lesson is to avoid using strings as much as possible, although sadly fashions in programming seem to have been heading in the other direction for a long time.

I don't think hiding difficult operations behind an easy facade that sometimes breaks is a good idea. It makes people think that working with strings is easy. It results in lots of people writing broken or even insecure code[1].

The idea that you only have to deal with unicode strings if you are writing an i18n'd app is wrong. File names are unicode. The content of the pasteboard is unicode. The results of calling a web API are unicode. Text the user types into a text field is unicode. Unless your app doesn't handle outside text data at all then it's going to encounter non-ascii text. And if you aren't handling text from outside the app then you probably won't have much need for string operations anyway.

[1] do a github search for 'UTF8String' and 'length' to see how much code using NSString is passing the wrong length value into C apis.
Well explained, now that you mention it it was in their post as well and... it's actually true.

Fair enough!
Not to mention making public file sharing explicit instead of implicit, or at least giving the option to exclude specific files from a public URL.
Do you never deal with user input?

indexOf, length, substring, and all the rest are still in there. They just require you to pick which representation you want to work on first. This is often just a matter of typing .characters after the string variable.
Long Strapless Prom Dress
Wait, you're telling me a VC funded JavaScript framework didn't work out?
But think of all those millions of cars VW would sure love to sell in the USA via their soon to be founded Australian subsidiary...

Extrapolating this some more, might we even see a pattern emerging where some kind of clever legal offshoring could allow domestic companies to get a stronger position vs their own governments?
I don't claim to be an expert, but I've read time and time again the argument (from medicinal users) that pure THC in pill form doesn't really replicate the effects of using actual cannabis that well.

Mainly because there are a variety of different chemicals/cannabinoid at play when cannabis is ingested traditionally, not just one "purest" form of THC in high doses which is what you find in THC pills.

Not to say it can't be replicated/refined into pill form correctly, but my guess is it just won't be.

I don't think there will be a market for high quality pot-pills large enough to justify the massive investment needed to do it right when a better alternative (natural cannabis) already exists on the market and can be ingested in ways people generally enjoy (vapor, snacks, teas, etc).

That is, companies probably aren't going to increase revenues by increasing the quality of a product that already exists because the people who already use THC pills can't be "re-converted", and enough of the people who don't use THC pills, but are in the market for medicinal THC, probably won't make the switch.
Well put! Yeah, people are very American-centric in their global conclusions here.
Levaraging Azure Service Bus with C#
Systemd.conf live stream
DannyBee's example is interesting. But since the treaty applies to software "owned by a person of another Party," couldn't the U.S. pass a law that says, in effect, "if you want to sell android devices in the U.S., you have to produce the GPL source code if the rights holder is a U.S. domiciled person?"

UPDATE--saw you already addressed this at the end of your post. Agreed.
Because it is harder to do the wrong thing. Same as the arguments for static typing and defensive coding. An i18n library will not save you if you are fiddling around with indexOf and substring.

I think want we actually want is a separate string type for ASCII-only strings.
>It's not an improvement to exclude functions that you know everyone wants from the API.

Which functions have they excluded? You mentioned counting characters, but you haven't actually specified which definition of characters you want it to use.

>The correct way to solve this would be to design the API so that the distinction between what you're getting and what you want is clear, and the place to go to get what you actually want is also clear

This is what they have done.
Intel had a huge process advantage over Freescale when Apple ditched PowerPC. PA-semi proved it was possible to make power-efficient cores (i.e. the PA6T, which everyone assumed Apple was going to use in their next line before the Intel transition was announced).

also as a completely unrelated side-note, the number of processor lines started by Dobberpuhl is crazy: Dec Alpha StrongARM (Became X-Scale), what is now the Broadcom MIPS SoCs. Apple picked him up via an acqui-hire, but he retired the following year.
Thank you, Y Combinator
This is not about community involvement, but about the maintainer's responsibility to stay active:

"you should only release what you're willing to maintain"

The Markdown story was not about that. Nobody demanded John's involvement; all people wanted was for him to let the project go. That's a far cry from "willing to maintain."
This is rather interesting, and the second case of FB using its spam filter as an excuse to ban an unfavorable site or article this month, as mentioned here on HN.

I went to the competing site and found it quite interesting, actually and signed up. I think there is compelling opportunity for people to use it. After all, if you are actually compensated for the quality of what you share, that could be a significant disruption to how social networks operate. I'm optimistic so far.
Canon iX4000 Driver
Avoiding hard work because it is hard. Give up easily etc.
Take it. Learn to love BART. Get a one room share in Oakland. Enjoy the culture, it's waaaay different than Chicago.

Yes, working at a bank is valuable experience. No, it's not necessarily a good work env for tech in the bay area. But don't worry, you'll get there.

Well, actually that all depends on what you like and what's good for you.

Really the best thing for your career and resume is continuous and challenging work that highlights how well you learn and take on challenges. Then again maybe what you want is a day to day grind. Maybe that feels safer.
They're still only available if you import Foundation. They're just NSString methods with wrappers. The real problem is just that Swift itself doesn't have methods for locating a string in another string, or replacing strings in another string.

This is why I was careful to say that Swift's API is the best in terms of its fundamental design. It still has a lot of missing functionality compared to other languages right now.
I see the API is open source: http://static.bloomberglabs.com/api/java/doc/3.8/

Could you set up your own stock dashboard or application with just that API, or do you need to subscribe to get database access as well?
People think Facebook and other social networks help them run faster... except they run in the wrong direction.
Technology is truly augmenting ourselves and this medium "shapes the scale and form of human association and action", as Marshall McLuhan once said.

With that given said, compare a whistleblower, say 20 years ago, with one today. Snowden not only had the world's greatest communication platform at his disposal, to disseminate whatever information he cared about, but now he can still address millions of people, speaking at the world's greatest universities and giving interviews, while being in exile.

Regardless on where you stand on these privacy/spying issues, I think it's hard to deny the fact that he started a dialog, and now the entire world can be part of it.
“We have about five years of money in the bank, so now it doesn’t matter what happens in the market”

First time I heard of 5 years runway....
Two interpretations across N features: (expt 2 N) interface combinations. :)
I completely agree with this reasoning, and those are pretty much the reasons why Servo's developed in such a modular way (in contrast to most other browser engines).
> taking the job, while continuing to look around for a better one.

That's actually pretty standard. Always keep your ear to the ground.

"Best time to find a job is when you already have one."
I wrote this about Twitter way back in 2010 on ZDNet http://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-tragedy-of-the-commons/

"As an information propagation device Twitter is peerless, but the Tragedy of the Commons - and in this case the commons is your time - is happening all over again.

When multiple individuals acting independently behave only in their own self-interest they will ultimately deplete a shared but limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen, as happened in the original Tragedy of the Commons over land usage".

Twitter never solved this problem and if you want to use it I'd suggest you have to spend a lot of time pruning who you follow and searching for people who are adding value to your life. Very time consuming....
Atom is a good choice to get started on editor integration because it's easier to develop for using a language that can compile to JavaScript. But the underlying technology (Dart analysis server) works with multiple editors and IDE's.
I disagree; it just takes a good idea, and anything can be disrupted. That FB is actually censoring mentions of the site does show to some extent that FB is a bit worried.

Google's social networks didn't really take off for a lot of reasons, mainly because they weren't really offering anything new that people would find preferable over what they were already using, which was FB or Twitter.
That matches my experiences when I was looking at desktop GUI toolkits for another project. I understand it though given most things are web or mobile these days.

A recent poll I had on the TkDocs site showed documentation is definitely the big issue for what people are trying to accomplish with Tk.
As an American (or 'Murican, if you prefer), the ham-handed attempt by multiple hierarchical levels of government to rein in and control the hobbyists flying cheap, miniaturized, computer-stabilized, remote-piloted aircraft only makes me want to get one and fly it as an act of protest. If the gummint banned them outright, I'd want two.

Knowing that the federals are themselves creating partially self-piloted full-sized aircraft armed with lethal area-effect weaponry (Predator/Reaper/Avenger/Grey Eagle) or surveillance arrays capable of observing entire cities at once (Gorgon Stare/Constant Hawk/Angel Fire) makes me angry at the hypocrisy and nervous about the potential consequences.

If nothing else, it undermines my enjoyment of modern and sci-fi subgenres of the Western, and any War-genre movie with an underdog guerilla group. For instance, when Hunger Games 3a showed me a fighter-bomber going down to a bow and arrow, it was Sid Meier's Civilization modern jet fighter vs. archers-stack all over again. It just can't happen, people; you can't fight war machine X on the traditional battlefield without anti-X weaponry. And you can't fight a nation that deploys hunter-killer drones with just AR-15s and AK-47s. Your tactics have to change dramatically.

I think all this drone/anti-drone arms-racing is just going to push Americans into inventing 5th-generation warfare sooner, and it's going to be really, really ugly. Prison drug deliveries are just the tip of the iceberg.
Systemd.conf conference recordings
"Comparing the sum of economic transactions to government income is not relevant. Just as with anything in economy you have to think in the margins (marginal demand, marginal tax rate, etc.)"

My comparison is very relevant. It means if taxes did not have to be paid in dollars, then with all else being equal there would be 0.16% fewer dollar transactions. Not a big change.

You talk about marginal tax rate, but I think you meant tax rate. (Marginal tax rate has nothing to do with our discussion). If tax rates where doubled, then taxes would account for not 0.16% but 0.32% of dollar transactions in my 1988 example. Again, not a big change. And yes in practice marginal demand of the dollar would skew this percentage somewhat, but it would still be insignificant.

You did not answer if you were convinced by my thought experiment, are you?

About your thought experiment: what you describe has actually happened many times in history, and many of these currencies had a floating exchange rate and could not be used to pay taxes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency Turns out they had value, like Bitcoin.
Manipulate data and save bandwidth in the blink of an eye
No. Portable laser weapons are simply not possible with current electricity storage technology. Those railguns the navy are experimenting with are intended for mounting on ships and wiring into the powerplant, and a laser would be even worse in that regard. If you want a weapon for making holes in flying things, the answer for drones is the same as for birds or planes: a gun, or a missile for bigger, higher ones.
If you are interested in publish subscribe and data-centric design, have a look to my latest blog post. It shows how to rapidly transform data, save bandwidth and make two systems compatible with each other using DDS and the scripting language Lua.
The usage of "heavy refinement, solvents, and chemical processes" wasn't meant to scare, it was meant to inform -- those have costs associated to them, high costs.

The process of taking willow bark and turning it into a consumable product is not minimal, whereas taking cannabis and turning it into a consumable product is very minimal.

From a practicality standpoint, it is simply logical that medicine derived from cannabis is superior to willow bark.
Oh there will be some way of identifying them, surely?

If they are from people you have actively chosen to follow then the source isn't twitter anyway and you can just unfollow those users if you don't like what they post.

If they are extra items in your display then there will likely be some marker to pick up on. Even if not then someone somewhere will start a service where people can report advertising tweets so subsequent the plugin can remove those from the feeds of subsequent users who use the service... Or perhaps Bayesian filtering as used for email? Not perfect in either case but someone will try and have at least some success.

Of course if the paid posts are truly unidentifiable then presumably that look like they were posted/shared by someone they were not posted/shared by, in which case the service is completely untrustworthy and you should just stop using it because nothing it tells you na be relied upon.

Caveat: I don't use twitter and aren't particularly likely to in future, so I have no particular axe to grind here but might misunderstand how things work.
Very cool -- tremendously useful, thank you!
GitHub project for CodePush
I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen.

The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.
The API requires a subscription. The API SDK was open-source licensed so that either open-source or proprietary applications could include it in their distribution so that they can consume Bloomberg data "out of the box".

An example is OpenGamma -- http://www.opengamma.com/ -- it is an open-source app that ships with the BLPAPI and if you run it on the same PC as your Bloomberg Terminal install, it will just work and pull data from the Terminal API end-point.

The incentive is for apps to support Terminals / Bloomberg data natively from the get-go and it makes it easier for these startups/smaller players/open-source apps to have a chance of selling into firms without lengthy custom development efforts to adapt other data sources.