skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we could script a lot of human interactions. Every now and then I actually try :). It's surprising how good sending randomly picked strings works if the other side doesn't suspect it, though being in script author's shoes, I'd add some variation - i.e. I'd repeat every reason in the array several times with different punctuation, or even do something like: "$RANDOM_ILL_BE_LATE, $RANDOM_REASON $RANDOM_SMILE $RANDOM_ENDING_PHRASE $RANDOM_EMOTICON." You get a combinatorial explosion of possible message strings, making it less likely the recipient will figure out it's scripted.

A different thing I actually semi-scripted once was starting random small-talk with people over IM (back when I was younger). I just never could get myself to write "hey, what's up?" to someone and many people thus thought I'm cold to them, or something. So in order to keep my relations with people from college friendly, I basically listed everyone I had contact with, assigned them some calendar reminder periods of time depending on how much I cared about the relationship, and obliged myself to chat up a person if their "date" came up in my morning reminders. The periods of time were picked up to be not divisible by 7, 29, 30 and 31, so that over time they'd land on different days of the month and the week. The messages I wrote myself; only the reminders were the "scripted" part.

I used this system for some time. End results:

a) it helped me maintain some relationships

b) it did not help me develop a chit-chatting habit, but it did lower my inhibition to initiating conversations

c) eventually me and most of my friends graduated and now no-one is chatting up anyone just to ask how they are...
My point is that BigBureaucracy likely considers it reasonable. In fact, my bet is that an engineering manager in whatever software team deployed this fix is getting at least an 'attaboy' for what his management sees as a lightning fast fix.
Yes and no. With PHP the complexity is all still there -- you've just delegated to a shared host.

I worked on Cloud Foundry buildpacks for a while. The PHP buildpack is actually one of the more complicated ones, because at staging time it tries to recreate a shared hosting environment in a standalone container.

The Ruby buildpack is complicated for legacy reasons, but for 99% of modern apps all it really does is run bundler and rackup.

Meanwhile every PHP app wants to keep on living in the 90s.

Arguably the Java buildpack has the simplest job, if you use a sane build tool. "Here, launch this jar".
A total blackout has happened to a US Navy Ship in recent memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_shi...
Gen-Y'er, I say neat but mostly because I think it's funny to use the word neat.
I think that's sort of the point - to drive ad networks and those who support them into the ground. It's certainly taking the offensive side: "they track which ads we click to find out our interests? Let's click everything so they can't figure out a single thing."

Ad networks do have protections against click fraud already, and just block/ignore users who click much more than usual - which to someone who doesn't want ads could be seen as a good thing.
I'm sorry but you're comparing apples and bananas here, friend. I'm pretty sure you're not being prescribed psychedelics or tripping off of your adderall. The mechanisms behind psychedelics are very poorly understood, as are most behind therapeutic psychoactive drugs but I am fairly certain that they are not the same.
If 3 different whitehats found the same bug independently, it's fairly sure bet that a number of blackhats are already exploiting it.
Unlimited sales leads, mailing lists etc.
So how exactly does the timing of this work out. If the neutrinos were kicked off at the big bang and have been traveling at nearly the speed of light since then, how is it that we are further away from the epicenter of the big bang than the neutrinos?
I didn't say any of that. You and another commentator are stuffing words into my mout...er comment.

A more relevant point would be along the lines: Why bother? I'm 99% vegan myself. Not because I care about animal suffering (which I do) or because I care about the impact on the planet and global warming (which I also care about), but because I LOVE non-meat foods. They are cheap, easy to acquire, and delicious.

This obsession with making fake meat seems like a terrible idea to begin with. It's like saying we all really want meat. We all don't because it's a terrible addiction and obsession.
> an IT department whose bread and butter IS releasing software.

I don't think you've dealt with UA much...
Hey all, I wrote this little Blab after struggling to visualize the impact of budgeting and investments in the long term. People kept telling me to save and invest, but I wanted to see empirically why this is true.

Features I'd like to add:

- Better taxation rules
- Specific asset classes and investment accounts with
associated taxation, withdraw limits, and contribution limits
- Investment allocation strategy with a changing risk profile
and tax conscious account allocation
- Social security income
- Highlighting the "important" factors
(i.e., the ones that impact the plot the most)
- A probabilistic simulation to get a better result estimate
(i.e., confidence intervals)

If you want to contribute, that'd be awesome! You can also easily fork it. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them here!
In simpler terms, copyright was created as a legal hack to prevent a tragedy of the commons that would result in a total devaluation of intellectual labor.

There may be a more elegant and fair solution, but no solution and pretending the problem does not exist is not it.
As someone who has owned a Charge HR and an Apple Watch, I'd say the Charge / Charge HR / Surge qualify as decent smartwatches in a way that doesn't apply to Fitbit's lower-end or previous devices.
I suggest it doesn’t matter whether Apple Watch 1.0 is too expensive, too ugly, too big, too heavy, or all of the above. I suggest that what it does is send a signal to the market that watches are just like phones.

Which means, that they will take over all the functions that hitherto required more portability than offered by a phone. Maybe Apple Watch 3.0 will do it. Maybe Pebble. Maybe Swatch. Maybe a company we haven’t heard of yet.

But the Watch establishes that single-purpose wearables have to be extremely specialized to survive. I conjecture this drives consumers towards “safe” choices, companies they perceive to have good potential to survive the shakeout. And behind the scenes, it does the same thing to companies.

So I agree that there’s opportunity to compete with Apple Watch. But I am bearish on dedicated fitness trackers.
This kind of horseshit makes me insane:

> We believe that everyone should have the freedom, and ability, to make money. A step is worth the same value for everyone - no matter who you are, or where you are. What matters is how much you walk.

Earning money mostly comes through creating value for others. (When it doesn't, it comes from diverting value into your pockets.) Walking around is great, and I encourage everybody to do it. But pitching it as the "freedom to make money" is absurd. Talking as if random people walking around Africa can double their monthly income is obscene.

I can't believe the BBC would publish that article, either. I understand the tech press is mostly toothless, but even so I can't believe that such a hallucinatory scheme received only the mildest questioning.

I can't wait for this bubble to be over.
When these problems affect the bottom line in obvious ways, they get fixed quick. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they are large because that one wizard guy is required, and security problems need to go to the top of his pile, not somewhere in the middle or at the end.

I'm not saying these companies need to magically become less bloated, but they do need fix security problems with the urgency they require. If that means that we all need to make a stink so it starts actually seeming important to them, then so be it. Another way to look at this is that they've reaped the benefit of having a web presence for years, but haven't had to pay some of the associated costs (since they apparently don't have the internal structure in place to review and/or fix these problems). In that respect, they've been playing the odds for a long time and come out ahead (wittingly or not), but that doesn't mean they don't need to pay up when it bites them in the ass.
The most interesting thing about this is the name; but then again, URI manipulation is not particularly interesting. How did the amusing choice of name come about?
Consolas is best.
Make it clean and fast and you'll have a compelling secure host OS for VMs.

One problem that would be good to address (and maybe it is) is making it really hard to dump the memory of a VM. We don't have homomorphic encryption yet, so right now if you dump a VM you own any secrets it holds. So at the very least this should be made as hard as possible on production VM hosts.
Right now VM's are the better choice for Statefull use cases like running a a conventional databases that expects a real filesystem. In a few years I think container and container schedulers will get good at doing persistent volumes.

In the meantime I think a less known but great solution for reliabily creating
VM' is OpenSoure BOSH http://bosh.io/ is an excellent tool that will allow you to deploy VM's on most major IaaS including AWS, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere and others.

BOSH is a hard to learn and it has a different philosophy than typical configuration management tools such as chef/puppet/ansible ... etc but it is totally worth it once you have it you have an amazing power tool at your disposal.

There are a lot of bosh releases for popular tools on github.com for example here is one for mongoDB https://github.com/Altoros/mongo-bosh
Anecdotally, the jawbone wristbands have been very unreliable among my friends, multiple devices failed within a year. Customer service has been great, they just ship you out a new one, no hassle. But you can't make that up in volume.
Ubuntu, because it's the only one that really works out of the box.
What is this thing #.jgiw2z:ikKk in the URL?
Many regulations do. The real trick is giving even the terrorists reasons to behave.

It sounds impossible, of course, but that's just because we're not sure where these guys put their goals; some may be fighting for lack of another purpose in their life, while others may be motivated by personal loss or a thorough belief in the violent interpretation of Islam.

So what we really need to do is find a common thread among all the terrorists, and pull on it.
With professional help/equipment you can either:

* Get the blotters/microdots lab tested so you know dosage per blotter, then volumetric dosing. This is relatively easy/accesible although not very convenient.

* If access to crystal and equipment is possible, you can just weight it. Obviously this is rarely a possibility and LSD crystal needs to be handled with care.

People suggesting volumetric dosing at home are simply clueless, "100ug" blotters are almost never ~100ug.
The phone does not currently have the heart rate function, so it’s hard to turn it into a complete health product. You need a chest strap, or a hat with heart rate function, and now you’re back to a wearable accessory for the phone.

I’d guess the other way: What if Apple ends up putting a GPS and a phone in the watch? Then you buy an iPod Touch-like device as an accessory screen for the watch, instead of a watch as an accessory for the phone.
DoS isn't an attack? I agree it's less severe than leaking credit card numbers, but availability is a big deal in many applications.
I'm curious what their QA process is like. We don't mark a story as complete until it's been tested and bugs are fixed. So it's rare for a new bug to crop up and if it does, the story is not accepted and the feature doesn't get to release.
A flavor of Ubuntu (usually Lu or Xu) or Manjaro.

For a portable OS (and may switch to it as main linux OS) I really like Porteus.
It's funny, I see this anti- self-consciousness stance more and more. Objections to hipsters. Objections to political correctness.

We're at a funny time where we sort of remember the time when we weren't all splayed out on the internet in front of each other, and we can still pine for a return to that... We have given up some important things that are worth trying to get back.

But unfortunately for these people, I think we're only seeing the beginning. And we'll be horrified at what the next generation will share publicly and demand space for in the public discourse. The Internet wants to see everything and it is only getting stronger. It's "eye" will grow 1000x every thirty years for the next century.

The swaggering unselfconscious architype she misses is going to increasingly read as tone-deaf until we reach the next civil rights plateau. Minimally we'll need free basic medical care and housing for all humans.

At that point I think he swagger could come back in full blast--nothing wrong with a little self-aggrandizement if everyone is fed and people are enjoying watching.
"The dude was literally living inside the terminal."

When you embellish your stories and miss key concepts such as hyperbole, I'm less likely to believe it and/or even read it.
Coding-plus
Well...this is an awesome episode. I appreciate the sharing of it. The 'King among men' comment made me smile a big grin. Thanks!
It reifies the process of munging and pattern matching on text streams in a way few other dynamic languages do. Perl 6 particularly so with grammars (similar to lex) as a first-class construct.

It's more appropriate to compare it to SNOBOL and AWK.
What does making it hard for the host to dump vm memory buy you? It seems like if the host wants, there's virtually endless things they can do. iow, you have to trust the host.
There's a research project being done on the viability of hand picking radish plants out of wheat and lupin crops on broadacre farms here in Western Australia. Some farmers already do it, but once the results come out, I'm wondering home many more will start.
Composition versus Inheritance
> you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets.

Then you could use that video to train a network to find weeds and get rid of the operator. You could also test the network a part of the same dataset to see how well it finds the right spots.
I mean I think I do see that side of it, but the robustness principle is highly pragmatic. I think if HTML parsing was completely strict then the internet might not exist.

It's an adage born from the fact that if you aren't tolerant in what you accept, you end up accepting very little. Especially when the people trying to create valid documents are not highly skilled or knowledgeable about why it can't "just work."

Of course, all of security is about tradeoffs like these, because an ideally secure computer is one that isn't turned on. The robustness principle may be a nightmare from a security standpoint, but so is JavaScript, Java plugins, Flash other assorted NPAPI crap, and basically anything else having to do with the internet.
Agreed. If you own the host, you win. The point is to make it difficult to own the host from within the VM, not vice-versa.
"Epicenter"? No, no, it doesn't work that way: the Big Bang was everywhere all at once. It's just that "everywhere" had much less empty space in between it at the time.

The way it works is that neutrinos were made everywhere, including some places which, after adjusting for cosmic inflation, are ~13.7 giga-light-years away, therefore the speed-of-light neutrinos produced there will arrive at the Earth approximately Now.
This plus webrtc bittorrent = decentralized video broadcast?
I think assuming that level of _competence_, at least in fields other than diplomacy and public speaking, is a big claim. It's not reasonable to assume that every single ancient senator that's pushing for this is fully aware of the consequences, but it is reasonable to think they simply haven't thought any further than "I need to make it look like I'm doing something, or I'll look bad".

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man who only has words, everything looks like a soapbox.
I've worked where software was not the primary product and was treated as merely another line item on the BOM. They grudgingly had to "do some software" order to make money with their real product. If United is this type of place, here are a few things I'd be willing to bet are true:

1. They don't have a formal QA process or an independent QA team.

2. They don't have source control (or it's very rudimentary, like storing ZIP backups of source code on a network server).

3. Their issue tracking system is an excel sheet on a shared drive.

4. 75%+ of the code was written by someone not currently working for the company. 10%+ of the code is considered "untouchable" because it works and nobody remaining knows how it works.

5. Compiling the final executable takes more than 1 manual step, resulting in screens full of compiler warnings.

6. Management is resistant to any effort to fix any of the above because software is a COST and not an investment.

(EDITed because I can't seem to count to 6)
maybe using the language of social reformers when in fact there is a profit motive just sounds disingenuous
Thanks! Really an excellent tool! I'd originally written a shiny app, but this was much better!

Other than the plot (thanks, gballan), it would be nice to adjust the width of layout cells, especially for the code cells. It would also be cool to adjust the spacing between cells to reduce whitespace when another cell in the same row takes up a huge amount but others do not.

I was not clear how to place markdown text in between or after tables and sliders but might have just missed how to do that.

Thanks again!
Sea creature makes a thousand eyes from its shell [video]
I guess I could've come up with a worse nickname when I was 12.
NYC Firefighter allowed to work despite failing physical injured 10 days on job
Besides gardening, robots could clean up garbage. An army of small bots could clean up a forest in no time (or go underwater to clean up the shores).
At the end of the day you want to be robust to failures right? Be able to quickly restore from a database in a hardware failure?

If so, why not just boot that way every time? It'll keep your backup system well exercised and it means fewer code paths since you don't have a separate hot boot.
One of the first experiences that i had was accidentally micro-dosing, i only come to realize the now. Reflecting on it, it was more pleasant then full doses that occurred after. It was as if I was seeing familiar things for the first time. However i feel that some of the most meaningful photographs I've taken have been during trips.
Referrer code maybe?
"Nothing AWS offers—no matter how much it might look that way—is an end-user platform"

I don't agree here. I'm definitely in the sysadmin camp but I'd like to think I've advanced from where I was when that was my job title 5 years ago or so.

For us, Cloud Formation was the real eye-opener. We leveraged CF to build a rather sophisticated environment. We referred the CF to our customers who then set it up on their own. We did this over several customers, with various degrees of AWS experience from zero to expert, and various backgrounds from security, to network, to IT. All were successful. I'd describe all as end-users.

The reproducibility, atomicity, and ease of this solution gave us huge gains.
Nicely done! I love Twilio's documentation. I'm working on an app with Twilio's conferencing API as well, will share soon!
The complexity of this setup screams 1 major thing to me: security issues

Seeing as we are on this topic, I would like to pose 1 simple and theoretical question for all those who only need 1 decently-sized 4GB server to get their small projects running:

=====

What type of setup can be used to get a simple Rails/Sinatra/Flask/Django webapp + Postgres-DB on a single 4GB server that has to be maintained by a single individual where time and complexity are highly-valued commodities?

The least-complex setup will be preferred, as the hundreds of 1-man side-projects will not be able to maintain their 43 container-clusters using x-software on top of y-software that is managed by z-software.

=====

A good answer here will probably help hundreds of individuals here avoid the situation of "I should probably containerize my app because everyone else does it" scenarios.
I think your market segmentation is somewhat off. The fitness tracking part of Fitbit has just been utterly commoditized; every smartwatch now does all the steps and sleep tracking, too, so they've subsumed that functionality while Fitbits smartwatch offerings are inferior.

Meanwhile, Garmin produces actual fitness trackers for the sports market, with full on GPS integration and a wide range of sensor support for stuff like power meters. Fitbits only offering here was only released in 2015, the Fitbit surge, their only GPS capable watch. But frankly, the price point is way out there, it has no support for swimming (so really the only market segment left for them here are runners) and their software story around sports enthusiasts is just laughable. They have no fighting chance against someone like Garmin, who dominates this market.
I think the form of the blog post (pretty much just short bullet points) makes it rather difficult to get an idea of what's the intended takeaway.

I do share your conclusion that SSDs are very good value for workloads that need to do a lot of random I/O.

Regarding the best config for PostgreSQL, it really depends on the hardware. If you really want to use boxes with just 2GB of RAM, use smaller shared buffers and let the page cache do the rest.

If you need more help with tuning PostgreSQL for the benchmark later, either ping me at tomas(at)pgaddict.com or join pgsql-performance@postgresql.org (I do occasionally lurk there, but others will surely help too).
If you have a static website, maybe. If you have a web application with millions of users, several large and complex data stores, and lots of functionality, things get complicated fast. Most critically, it's not a direct relationship. If you double the number of pieces in your infrastructure, your problems become four times as hard if not more.

You might have a database and a web app. But the database gets slow, so you add a caching layer. Then you need to scale up to accomodate more users. You've got to be able to back up all your users' data. And when your app gets complicated, deployments can break things, so you also need to be able to roll back quickly. Once you have a dozen or more servers going, you realize that if one goes down everything breaks, so you have to add redundancy to each part of the system, which adds even more concerns about how backups and recovery is handled. Then you need to add some search features to your growing dataset, which necessitates another kind of database to index your primary database, and more app servers. Oh, and by this point when things break, it becomes really hard to tell why things are broken, so you need monitoring and centralized logging, and whoops, those are two more kinds of databases and the associated web applications to manage them. And when you're at this scale, you have to coordinate multiple pieces of the system for any change you make, so you have additional software to manage that. And by now, you'll realize your original code was terrible, and while you are wise enough to know not to try to rewrite everything, you instead take various pieces of your infrastructure and break them into microservices in new languages, and...

Are you getting the picture?