skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively.

Are you using "normalize" in the audio production sense, as in adding or subtracting a constant gain to an entire track? I'm pretty sure that iTunes doesn't do this, at least not by default.
Those might be but microkernels, safe languages, interface correctness (pre/post-condition checks), and safe coordination schemes aren't: built from kernel up and proven since 70-80's to prevent/contain many issues that affect C-based monoliths like Linux. That they actively argue against using them despite decades of evidence they work says plenty about them. That they also advocate and use methods that haven't worked for decades in terms of predictability/reliability/security is final nail on the coffin.

People should keep barking given how much depends on the project now. Plus support alternatives that take better approaches to architecture like old EROS, MINIX 3 (reliability), or GenodeOS (security/reliability). Safe native approaches like security-enhanced Oberon System or JX Operating System would also kick butt. Each achieved certain robustness properties in mere years with small teams due to good design.

UNIX and Linux took decades to get usable, still give hackers MB of opportunities for kernel attacks, and still crash my systems on occasion. Meme: "Failure to learn the lessons of the past and apply them."
> Most of us can afford to pay it too. That's the real tragedy.

I think the hardest part for me is: I use soooooo much open-source software, that I can't contribute to all of them. Don't get me wrong, I should contribute more than I do, and I'm not excusing myself, but it's a legitimate problem. I'm sure people smarter than me have debated models for this, but I still don't think we have a good answer.
I can heartily recommend this book for beginners http://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Step-Step-Programmin...
I upvoted you, and I agree. However, as a professional developer, it is nice to be able to use OSS at work because you are sure it will always be available.

Therefore developers who release things under BSD license have a very good incentive - they want to use the thing they wrote (as a hobby) at work, yet they want to continue to use it even if they change jobs. I think this is actually a primary reason why BSD is favored by some developers.

I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea.
This is true and false. Software is great for creating value: a few smart people can change the world. But the distribution of that profit is greatly uneven (a "few smart people").

As automation kicks in, we will see more value created by fewer and fewer people, leaving everyone else behind. So even if the middle class doesn't go technically backwards, they still have to compete with Microsoft and Google millionaires for assets like housing. We are seeing that already in markets with lots of high tech employees.
Facebook messenger has group messaging. Just use that. You can message people who you aren't "friends" with.
Behavioral Biology is a science, pretty sure about that one.
Sociology is a study of the behavior of a particular animal, humans.
Economics is a study of a particular type of human behavior.

Economics is just a very specialized science.
"...the company wanted to invest as little time in the problem as possible so the person couldn't fix the tests, write new ones, or write a real fix. I don't blame the engineer, I blame their manager and their company."

This is spot on. Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community. There's also the added benefit of helping the business to develop a positive image in the OSS community.

This obviously is not always possible, and in some organizations it is never going to be possible. However, there are teams out there that do have the freedom and flexibility to give back to the community.

If enough teams begin contributing bug fixes to projects they find helpful, eventually this pervasive attitude the author writes about will change.

On a separate note, the author needs to stand up for himself more. A boilerplate e-mail with his hourly rate wouldn't take long to put together. If an issue is important enough to a company to bombard him with support requests, it's likely worth it to them to pay for a fix.
If you're talking about the Bay Area - then there's good reason why buildings are wood framed and light weight. Wood frame construction is generally more earthquake resistant.

http://timber.ce.wsu.edu/Resources/papers/4-3-2.pdf

However, if you're not in an earthquake-prone area... then I agree I'd prefer to have a more solid construction.
Yeah, but you get really far by eliminating memory and control flow attacks. There's also relatively cheap ways to do that with hardware and software. There's even schemes like SAFEcode/SVA, Code Pointer Integrity, and Softbound + CETS that do it automatically with a performance hit many apps can take.

Yet, what's uptake of such methods in mainstream, kernel development? There's the problem.
So then why was your response to

> so there isn't much owning your own infrastructure can do for that.

> Sure it is, ...

?
In 15 years, I've read my fair share of "open source developer's lament", and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don't understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:

1. Is it a money problem? Then ask for money every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).

2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

I mean, requests alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply cannot be bothered to ask for money. Stuff like adding a "donate" button on the page looks lazy.

There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I'm sure), you already have three years of full-time development. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make billions with your code, I cannot believe they can't cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got Microsoft to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. Microsoft, FFS!
Manhattan DA Has $808M to Give Away to Criminal Justice Programs
> I said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office.

Just because you said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office doesn't mean others agree. Outside of bubbleland, most people are going to struggle to understand why the CEO of a company that almost certainly doesn't have a cent of profit spent any time whatsoever thinking about how he could avoid "boring noise panels."

"Why not make this a piece of art as well on the ceiling?" Really?

When will folks learn[1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778832
re: shaking, it's not necessarily mass; it's rigidity, or lack thereof. It's more expensive, but you can build a more rigid floor by using deeper joists and spacing them more closely. You also need to make sure the floor is well anchored to the walls, but these days it should be done as a matter of the course to get good seismic performance.
Agreed, and wouldn't mind if my city (Los Angeles) bulldozed most, if not all of the buildings built around the 60's. This is also the time when suburbs became fashionable, for a double-whammy of craptastic design. These two factors, among others contribute immensely to the uninviting, ugly, even amateurish feel to much of the city.

> 10ft ceilings

These were no longer necessary once air conditioning was invented. However high ceilings and window awnings are more energy efficient and therefore should probably make a comeback.
The Cop at the End of the World
Most of these tools don't work. How does this one work differently?
Based on the primary photo of refuse in the article the problem is not plastic bags but garbage in general. My city (Portland, Oregon) outlawed plastic bags years ago and messy parts of the city are still messy while clean parts of the city are still clean. The bag-ban made no difference. Visiting neighboring Beaverton, where plastic bags are still allowed, one is not overwhelmed by a mass of plastic bags in the streets...

It has always been my understanding that if a store is going to provide disposable bags plastic bags are far superior - functionally and environmentally - to the alternative (generally paper):

http://www.appropedia.org/Paper_versus_plastic_bags
Maybe you know that Common Lisp makes it easy to compile and recompile functions at runtime.

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_cmp.htm

In fact, with the package system ASDF, you can recompile (incrementally) an entire package at runtime. This is a single blocking function call; something like:

(asdf:operate 'asdf:compile-op :my-package)

I have a web project where any request in dev mode triggers a system recompilation only if the git revision of the working tree is new.

(my-handler :did-recompile (when (revision-is-new) (recompile) t))

That recompiles the system including MY-HANDLER, and right after RECOMPILE returns, the new version of MY-HANDLER from the working tree will be active.

The way Common Lisp lets me do that as a ten minute hack feels like living in the future... except of course it's pretty old technology!

Edit: I realize this is not really what you are talking about as "self-modifying code." Having full access to the compiler at runtime is a good first step for doing some of what you want, though. And with S-expressions, constructing and manipulating "ASTs" is ridiculously straightforward.
As some one who uses an eCig I wouldn't put much faith into the claims of X% less harmful because we don't know yet.
There's just too much crap going on as the scene exploded in the past 2 years I know some people that spend more time engineering their "coils" than what JPL spends on designing mars rovers and vape at with devices that look like a battery pack of a T1000 at like 150W.
No one can estimate the current effects of the oily residue in the lungs, the interactions with the flavoring, and other components, as well as the effects of in taking heated vapor, possible metal deposition and what ever wicking media is uses (silicon, cotton, other fibers).
Although it appears to be safer because you don't intake tar and the 100000's compounds in a cigarette it could end up being just as much of a health risk for a plethora of other reasons.

So it will probably take several decades until we can begin to asses the actual health impact, and considering how many variations of possible variables (liquid base, nicotine level, nicotine source, flavor base, flavor components, wattage, coil type, wick material etc.) are there it might not be a clear cut case either.

And I also hate people that "vape" in confined spaces such as trains, luckily in the UK most places put on signs that do not allow you to vape anymore, I've been seeing people do that in the movies and that's probably the most annoying thing to see as the clouds of smoke constantly catch the light from the projector.
Vaping should be treated as smoking as far as other people go if you are with some one that would not want you to smoke near them do not vape near them, having separate vaping areas might come in the future but I don't expect to see that anytime soon, sadly the place that is affected the most is the airport, especially those with the "phone booth" style smoke areas which I couldn't stand to enter even when I was smoking.
There is no such history in India. Please show evidence. India is a super poor country which means far too many people fighting for any minor job which does not amount to slavery.

Indian laws are outright crazy and favor labor and not the employer in all cases. One of the so called "reform" that current government is doing is to provide an exit option for failed businesses.
Duck It – Useful Bangs for Developers and Other Goodies
> Democracy is all about people being jealous of royalty (kings, feuds, pharaohs) having all the power, land, free food and honors, for just being "born" special, and putting and end to that charade.

I'm curious, are you saying that with a straight face? Because there's no way you can look at capitalism / US politics and believe that it's any different.
Cruelcharm – Menswear, Travel and Lifestyle
Maybe not a primary component of economics, but its sad how little statistics is a part of CS. Dealing with things at scale makes statistics/probability integral and many of the most interesting ML algorithms don't come from CS backgrounds, but from statistics (Random Forests) and Convex Optimization (EE/Math).
I will miss you so much Garry!
A combination of three things, IMHO:

1. Labor specialization, meaning less of the home-buying market is savvy enough in the "handyman" sense to tell the difference.
2. A move away from building the thing you're going to own, and building things that other people will buy later.
3. Minimum standards for housing construction.

The third needs to be explained more - instead of aiming towards "building a good home", the construction industry aims to build the cheapest thing that they are legally allowed to sell (ie, meets building codes). While building codes do mean that there's a quality floor, competitive pressure means that nobody can consistently exceed the floor without getting out-competed by people who aim to barely meet it.
How Politics Shaped General Relativity
And you know it was he who personally spent his time buying those noise panels (and not, say, the office manager) because...?

My broader point is people are just trying to find any excuse to uncharitably interpret anything just so they can to crap on the company.
No I mean it's misleading in that it looks like every other news article that came out about people doing dangerous stupid things with the autopilot, when the actual story is that Tesla has responded to the glut of people doing dangerous things.
I have heard stories of a whole brick wall falling off the home ... but the home was intact... it was not "glued"/secured properly.
Indian law and Indian in general do not understand the idea of law and individual liberty. Hence a lot of sensible things that you might expect from law enforcement in developed world does not work well in India.

In India police mostly see themselves as keepers of peace and would use arbitrary force to keep things from escalating. Indian laws are complex and hence cops can do whatever they want without impunity.

Check what happened to this Australian [1]. Not only he was harassed by people but the police made him write an apology letter to those people who manhandled him. (All because the guy had a tattoo that offended other people.)

There are some other crazy things in India for example "Right to Education" law which basically forces to shut schools down if they do not comply with arbitrary clauses but only if the school is run by a Hindu. If the school is run by a Christian or Muslim the school need not comply with the law.

[1] http://bit.ly/1HiJdRo
Should the U.S. Army adopt a bug bounty program?
What happens when the company that won tries to get on schedule 70, and are negotiated to contract to government for some fraction of a dollar?

It sounds preposterous, but government has done more preposterous things in this sector.
Germany's Mobius Strip Tokamak Reactor Is Going Live
> Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community.

They NEED to? Or what? I need to drink water. If I don't, I die. What creates this need to allow engineers to help the community?
make commits, issue pull requests.
Dual license your code. You can still supply it to your current employer, and any future employer under a proprietary license.
I think, with the three javascript videos I had to click away while trying to read this article, I vow to never read techcrunch again.

I think they're exploiting their relationship with HN, and their need should be re-evaluated.
Any culture at any time period? Are you sure about that? That's a ridiculously strong claim.
Amen! No permission slip needed.
[0] http://peninsulapress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2_lands...
It is usually a sign that designers are somewhat unfamiliar with the people that use their work or designers who have not learnt anything since the 99s.
There were systems that did that all the way down to hardware in the 1960's with many more since:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...

Market rejected them because they cost a bit more or didn't have highest, raw performance. Such short-sightedness means most done exist any more in any turn-key form. Many of the modifications are straight-forward enough that even academics are prototyping them and porting Linux/FreeBSD to them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10522742

Mainstream just refuses to learn or adopt proven methods of the past. They use every justification in the world even when the labor is free (FOSS) with someone only asking to use the minimal of proven techniques. Market rarely buys the stuff outside very limited sales of some robust appliances: see Aesec's GEMSOS stuff, SAGE Guard on XTS-400, Nexor Mail Guard (on XTS-400), Green Hill's INTEGRITY-178B OS w/ virtualization, Mikro-SINA VPN on L4, Secure64's SourceT OS for DNS, Sentinel's HYDRA firewall (uses INTEGRITY), and so on. Social, political, and economic problems rather than technical. I see no end to it outside continued sales and development of niche solutions.

Note: The things I referenced in last paragraph are either still on the market w/ descriptions available via Google or at least have papers in reach. I left out tons of good stuff that's no longer around or just a prototype. Happy Googling and learning. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10522334 claims that brick is expensive enough for people to steal buildings!
I don't think there is anything wrong here. Generally if you resign or leave you do not get the immediately salary in India. You receive it with what they call final settlement. It might be 30 to 90 days later.

But in either case the point here is that India does not have a working judiciary that can enforce contracts and hence people take law into their hand which is wrong even if the co-founder was at err.

Imagine these employees had to go to court to get their due. My uncle is fighting a similar case for last 32 years.

Check what happened to this mailman who was fired by postal department accusing him of stealing Rs 50 (80 cents). The case took 30 years and eventually reached Supreme Court.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/After-29-years-man-...
According to DOT the problem was floor mats and driver error, not code

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/its-all-your-fault-the-...
NASA's New Horizons Completes Record-Setting Kuiper Belt Targeting Maneuvers
There are two positions, 1) punish Edward for revealing what our servants do in our name or 2) do not.

Everyone is camp #1 is indistinguishable from the people who abuse our trust themseves. Criminal.
Concept of compiling things is awesome. But I refuse to understand how making compiled language -> interpreted language is a thing... It should be other way around. I'd love to see something solid like js -> c compiler so my js code runs quick and efficient.
There were a lot of references that I couldn't understand.
I agree with a lot of this, but it's more than asking for money. You have to offer things of value in exchange for money and ONLY in exchange for money.
Get used to the Linux situation cause it's not going to change I think. The "many eyes" theory is downright stupid, because guess what, there are few if any eyes.

The eyes that are many are on the attacker side, extremely skilled individuals who have cut their teeth on the kernel for 15+ years.

On the defender side, apart from Google project zero (who are not just focusing on the linux kernel) and a few stray individuals, there is nobody looking for vulnerabilities in the kernel in order to make them public.

As far as complexity goes, Linus knows all of that which is why he's playing "catch the baby" or "throw the hot potato". I called him maliciously stupid in a previous comment and I think that's a fair characterization. He's not simply stupid, he knows the stakes and the sad state of affairs in the kernel (complexity, 0 security mindset, archaic architecture) and he sees the options available to him:

+ Make security top priority (as Microsoft did 10 years ago) which will expose him as a fool for his past mindset since that will amount to him admitting that he was dead wrong all these years. I don't think he has it in him to do this, he's too much of an egomaniac now.

It will also expose most of the kernel maintainers and developers as total incompetents when it comes to writing secure code and slow the pace of development.

+ Let others solve the problem. This is where Grsecurity/PaX comes in. That would necessitate him releasing a lot of control over the kernel into 3rd parties, since the best parts of Grsecurity are pretty intrusive and touch a lot of kernel components. I don't think he's willing to do that either.

+ Do nothing and deal with the problem by making idiotic statements of the sort "If you care about security, don't connect Linux to the Internet" or "insulate the kernel by adding layers of security such as sandboxes ...". In sort, he's saying it's not his problem STFU and deal with it yourself. These comments are idiotic because any sort of security person knows that you can't build a fortress on shifting and rotting foundations. You can pile as many sandboxes and intrusion detection systems you want, but they can all be bypassed if the kernel is weak.

So, to summarize, he knows he has a clusterfuck in his hands due to decades of
development with 0 security mindset and he's simply not willing to own up to it. He's throwing the hot potato to us and tries to shift awareness and focus away from the part he's directly responsible for.
The only reasonable way to monetize twitter is to find someone who is already making money out of it. Then get a slice of that pie. They still make a profit, so you aren't wiping out nodes.

I think there are two groups doing making some money. Advertisers and reporters/data analysts. The fist wants more visibility, the latter wants analyzing tools. How you separate businesses from power users? Beats me.

Going the "premium account with premium price" route may work good for a while. But you are practically scripting how your competitor could overtake you. All they have to do is give that premium content for free. This happened here in Finland. We had popular service called "irc-galleria" which was quite close to facebook. You needed premium account to befriend people. When facebook came, irc-galleria took about year to fall into obscurity.