skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2015, promising surveillance cases ran into legal brick walls
What is a good metric?

My take: a good metric is one that is correlated with customer happiness and can't be gamed by engineers.
There's another angle as well at play... My command chain cares about delivery of services and products at our below the budget, period.

But there are others with other interests. Program/project methodology religious adherents. Batshit crazy bureaucrats.

All of these people want to insert stuff to serve whatever agenda. I want to deliver on my commitments. Letting people without a clue evaluate my team's effectiveness is not in my team's interest or mine.
I'm at a place where we have an extremely large app and there are probably a hundred features that are each used by 10% of our customers. It's a bit of a kitchen sink app for a vertical market.

I certainly would not say that we "strive" to make any feature go away. In some cases, though, a certain feature can actually prevent us from implementing new functionality. It's always a tough decision. We don't want to leave any customers behind, but at the same time we don't want a small minority of customers preventing us from moving forward either.

I don't think these kind of decisions should be left up to a lone developer to make on their own. The developers, sales, support, management and everybody should be working together to understand our customers and what our mission is. It's not easy.
Not necessarily - a lot of the time it's just laziness and incompetence.
Boo-yah for 2016!
Here you go then: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ :)
To you as well :-)
I find Flashcontrol good https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidm...

Kills almost all the annoying video stuff and one click when you do want to see something. Works on CNN etc.

(also if fixed horizontal junk on top of the page annoys you check out my own (5 LOC or so) thing to toggle them https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbko...)
The new piece of information is that you also know everyone in the tribe know about that information. That was not a given before the statement.
that train of thought just leads to group think imho.
also http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
It's not at all hard for me to believe billions of dollars were spent on the F-35 program. Certainly less hard to believe than us already having interstellar spaceships.
I find myself doing something similar while learning a new lang / framework. For example, I'll watch a pluralsight video, then challenge myself to see how far I can get from a blank directory to a working blogging app without getting stuck (too much). When I do get stuck, I'll refer back and catch the minor details I might have missed trying to copy the code, etc.
Chrome Black Box Bug
If you copy and paste this code into a different level of nesting the brackets can help give you automatic and proper indentation plus you know it's in that block now. With indentation only blocks you don't get that. At least I haven't used an editor that gives me that.

Just my 2 cents
What do you mean by this?

- Expectation is to work on your project full-time, without any other employment
or work-for-hire obligations

Anyway, I'd like to nominate https://twitter.com/joepie91 for this.

His previous attempt: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-year-long-open-source...
The highest value of the ISS is not as a scientific experiment but an engineering undertaking. It's given us a lot of operational experience on long duration space habitats and space flight, as well as constructing and operating large structures in space that are launched via many payloads and assembled in orbit. From the ISS we have learned how one might actually build and operate the life support and habitat systems of a sci-fi scale spaceship like Discovery 1 (2001). Now that we have reusable rockets, it will soon be possible to actually launch and assemble such things in orbit somewhat economically.

IMHO the money could have been better spent but also might have been much worse spent. I'll take it.
Thanks for the links to interesting papers. I really liked the Breiman paper. I did not try to qualify either machine learners and statisticians as bad or good, just pointing out a difference in their approaches to problems.

I do not know enough about statistics to make a (negative) quality statement about it. I know a bit more about machine learning though, and there I also see things like: Picking the most favorable cross-validation evaluation metric, comparing to "state-of-the-art" while ignoring the real SotA, generating your own data sets instead of using real-life data, improving performance by "reverse engineering" the data sets, reporting only on problems where your algo works, and other such tricks. I believe you when you say much the same is happening for statisticians.

Maybe it was my choice of words (careful, sober). I think its fair to say that (especially applied) machine learners care more about the result, and less about how they got to that result. Cowboys, in the most positive sense of the word. I retraced where I got the cliff analogy. It's from Caruana in his video "Intelligible Machine Learning Models for Health Care" https://vimeo.com/125940125 @37:30.

"We are going too far. I think that our models are a little more complicated and higher variance than they should be. And what we really want to do is to be somewhere in the middle. We want this guy to stop and we want that statistician to get there, together we will find an optimal point, but we are not there yet."
> I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I fundamentally disagree with".

Give me your twitter handle, and your employer's email address, and I'll send 800 death threat tweets and I'll spend weeks bombarding your employer with stuff.

One thing that is often said to the victims of trolls is "just ignore it" (we see that in this thread), so she wrote a tool that allows her to just ignore it and you're telling her that she's wrong.
Who's 2015 Jerk of the Year?
I think it takes a technical lead who has the vision & skill to balance house-keeping work with new feature development. It can be both technical as well as political skill.

One methodology that I employ is "visibility-based development" where we will save up some super easy tasks that may have a big visual impact. When we need a sprint or two to get some boring clean-up work done, we'll throw in a few of those easy tasks with it. We've had some releases that look like a big, major release but in reality we only spent 1/2 a day on the features that seem big. The rest of the time was under the hood cleanup.

In some cases it's not simply your customers that require the illusion, but the management team as well. If you have a management team that gets uneasy if they don't see new features happening with every release, I highly recommend using this technique.
In my experience it doesn't get prioritized. I worked on a product where everyone including product management complained about performance but it always took very long to get fixing that prioritized. In one case I spent my weekend adding pagination to some pages that everyone had been complaining about being slow but no one thought should be a priority to fix over new features.
"The people" are sort of a non entity. A person can resist propaganda, but a propagandist does not have to convince a person. A propagandist need only convince enough people to sway an election-- and any subset of people of any age or education will do. If the election is close it might only take a few percent. This indeed places a lot of power in the hands of the media and anyone who can buy it.

Democracy is sort of a plutocratic oligarchy system where ordinary people are recruited to be intermediaries and are therefore given the illusion of power.
As a happy linode user, your update is much appreciated.

I do feel a certain amount of loyalty to linode, as they've been an excellent service the past few years, and I see them battling to put out these fires.

I'm hoping as linode grows in size they can put in place more sophisticated measures to guard against this - DDoS is a problem everyone faces. Its tough, but when the dust settles, it could be an opportunity to innovate.
It's less about the JavaScript and more about complaining and asserting uniqueness. Anytime an article mentions page weight, you can count on a swarm of people trying to casually mention that they don't use JavaScript and people are always asking them about it.
I've used sails.js for many (many) projects including gameref.io, hackjob.io, and on several internal projects at my current job. I find it ideal for prototyping and small-to-medium-sized projects. I really hope it doesn't die as I love the pipelined approach it takes.

@SignMeTheHELLUp is complaining about Waterline ORM, but I'd argue that Hibernate is worse (and it's an "industry standard"). It's just a fact of life that ANY ORM will suck because it tries to build an isomorphic API over several database abstractions.

Also, come on, entire world-class companies are based on a Node.js architecture (Uber comes to mind)[1]. If you can't write solid code in Node, you're probably just a shitty programmer.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-stack-behind-Ub...
It also allows people to block certain hashtags, thus blocking an entire category of people, both good and bad.

I am certainly not saying that she should ignore harassment. Let me be clear: harassment is not okay.

But I couldn't help reflecting on the irony that she has also produced a tool that allows you to filter out an entire category of people on twitter.
1) Why in the world are you exposing your router control planes to the outside world? That should be ACL'd off (in stateless firewall rules and routing engine) to only allow access from a few IP's.

2) Your transit providers should be defending their infrastructure. I've never seen a transit provider allow an attacker to take out their /30 serials or IX addresses. This is their network after all. If attackers try to hit the serial between customer and provider, you just readdress the serial to RFC1918 space. You don't really need a routable address there other than to make traceroutes easy to read. If they attack farther upstream in the provider's network, you just add ACL's at the provider edge. Nothing external will ever need to reach a provider's core. This is basic, basic stuff.

Next time, don't only run your network on house bandwidth (HE, TelX, etc). Or in other words, caveat emptor.
I think that map should be part of every intro CS course. It's a great intro to a world where no you can't just use a bit to store gender. And names, yea lets not talk about names.
Multi Column Jasper Report Export Support and Upgrad to Fresh Aspose.Words Library
OK, so I shouldn't have included Disqus under sloppy ;) You do get secure managed comments. But isn't there a bloat cost, too? There are also security and privacy risks in using third parties.
Multi-master MySQL is generally regarded to be a very, very bad idea. Single master with multiple GTID replicas and promoting a replica to master upon failure is BCOP.
They seem to agree. From the article, "...after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information."
You can, and lots of people will, wave their hands and ignore/belittle FreeBSDGirl's account. Certainly the trolls will.

But, it is just another example that the larger tech community has a problem. GamerGate et al, they are not fantasies. Women who want to create, same as any developer, getting SWAT teams sent to their homes, this stuff is real, and indicates a real problem.

Ask yourself, are you helping fix this behavior? Because if not, then you are part of the problem.
Political Correctness Teaches Humans to Fail the Turing Test
.. it may play out that the best defence is a good offense - ie. to hunt down and attack the attacker.

I imagine there are a few thousand linode fans who'd be happy to help fight back.
It has been demonstrated that Go (when generalized to an arbitrarily large board, and an arbitrary initial configuration of stones) is PSPACE hard.

This means that an analytical solution would either need to be an optimization of brute force, or exploit some additional structure that results from starting with an empty go board.

As an added wrinkle, such a solution may involve assuming that White [0] plays optimally. Ironically, this means that it may still be possible to beat someone who has fully analyzed and "solved" go, by making incorrect moves that puts the board in a position where their analysis only says that a winning move exists.

[0] I am assuming that Black has the winning strategy.
How to Get More Leads Online: The Definitive Guide (updated 2016)
Post is very confusing.. If you are writing an enterprise app, you would be crazy not to build it to support windows active directory (which itself leverages Kerberos) for authentication. However, you start talking about letsencrypt/ SSL and it gets a bit sideways. Further, security is more than just authentication systems. It's typically thought of in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, each of which have a lot of nuances (for example, integrity might represent audit logging, request tampering, journaling).
I guess, but that actually depends on congress actually enacting new legislation.
That and the fact that we have plenty of gravity on Earth. We go to space to study things that we can't study on Earth.
Keep TTL's low (3-5 minutes). Things don't have to happen instantly. Clients understand. You had a bad day on the Internet. Guess what, stuff happens. Remember when "XYZ company down for 2 hours" made headlines? Yeah, that was a long time ago. Downtime is more or less accepted these days. Sure, some hothead customers will flip out and leave. You were probably not going to meet their expectations sometime and lose them eventually. Let them become someone else's nightmare.*

* This is for an answer for the average "Hey I run a website or two" question. If you're asking and you are dealing with financial transactions or ad networks, well, you're asking in the wrong place and you should probably hire someone that knows how BGP anycasting works.
Interesting isn't it?

What? That folks are irrationally attracted to stuff from the "good ol days" back when they "made stuff right"?

No, not in the slightest.

That guy running that shop is making a mint on nostalgia, placebo effect, and confirmation bias.

And good for him, business is business.

But let's not pretend it has anything to do with even subjective sound quality. I guarantee you, with a double blind test, your colleagues would prefer a high quality digital sound reproduction. But because the turntable was a gift, and because the technology is suddenly in vogue, with a generation now venerating the technology of their parents, its no great surprise they gravitate to the turntable, not because it actually sounds better, but because there's an irrational emotional connection to it.
Great point! KPIs are often milestones in the achievement of an overall goal, not the end game themselves.
the argument i hear about induction is that it's only valid IF n=1 is a true situation, n=2 is a true situation, etc, up to n=k (where k is 100 here). But we are only given n=100, and we cannot say that n=1,2,3... is true. The best counter example is the surprise execution paradox: suppose you are a prisoner, about to be executed next week. However, a strange rule applies - if you are not surprised by the date of your execution, you get to go free. You reason that you cannot be executed on sunday, the last day, since by friday, you'd know, and thus not be surprised. by induction, friday is also not a possible day, since you'd know by thurs, etc. You conclude that you cannot be surprised, and this will not get executed. But come wed, you get executed, and is completely surprised!
In the original, you know the other islanders can see a minimum of 98 BP (blue eyed people). And you know that they know that you know that they can see at least 97 BP.

Given that, the statement that there is at least 1 blue eyed person doesn't provide new info. The argument that this "synchronizes" them is a little strange. For all we knew, they were in the middle of counting to 100 days prior to this statement due to the aforementioned common knowledge that everyone already knew there were blue eyed people.
You seem to know things about ports, so let me ask you something I've always wondered about the port of Oakland. Why does it make sense to them to have a miles-long snake of idling trucks waiting to enter the port? Why don't these guys just stay home (or wherever) until just the moment when someone needs to put a box on their truck? I understand that some queue depth would be required to overcome the natural variance in loading times, but I figure the required depth would be something like 5 trucks, not 500 trucks.
I'm a little saddened that the first line wasn't, "For best results travel back in time to 2010." :-(
> Now, everyone knows that there are more than two blue eyed people.

That's incorrect, in a subtle way. The villagers (every single one) knew that before. It isn't discovered knowledge. Everyone (including the visitor) knows there are 99 or 100 because they can count them already, prior to the visitor.

So nobody is suiciding for 99 days. As an individual who sees 99 other blue eyes, why would you think or not think that you have blue eyes on the next day?
He's probably talking about their home page, which is just text and images selling their product.
Very well stated thoughts! I found this quick summary more readable than the whole article, even though I enjoyed it as well.
Finish up Kloudtrader.com

Build an ecommerce platform
The Republican Party Is a Trick
Agreed it is a front-end, but that makes all the difference.
They wouldn't be counting to 100 days, because there's no point where everyone would start counting together (no one is allowed to reveal anything about eye color).

So you know there's no reason for all the blue eyed people to commit suicide together, so you can't reason anything out about the total number of blue eyed people.
Why can't they synchronize at any other moment? They already knew N is either 99 or 100 even before the visitor came.
I'm disturbed by their choice to use dogs of all animals. And especially chimps, which are very very close to humans. I'm disturbed that the experiment needed to be done 100's of times. The first few times might be understandable, but what do you really learn from throwing the 125th dog into the vacuum chamber?

And I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I don't believe this specific experiment needed to be done at all. Really, what did we learn? That bad things happen when you are exposed to a vacuum? No shit. It's at best interesting. But you'd be really hard pressed to find any practical application of this knowledge.

I've never been against animal experimentation before. I was always uncomfortable with it, but I just accepted the standard argument that it's necessary, and never looked too closely into the actual details. But something about this just went over the line, especially the horrific detailed description of the dogs and chimps suffering.
1) They were caught with their pants down. Their DDoS playbook was probably either outdated or not full fleshed out. This is somewhat excusable if you're a content provider. It's not excusable if you're the cloud/colo/datacenter provider. This is literally your raison d'etre. Cue the "you had one job" memes.

2) Netops people don't get Christmas off (1). Our teams are working all year, all day, every day. Netops isn't HR or marketing. It's not super difficult to arrange a conference call with your transit providers, DDoS mitigators, etc. This is old hat to them.

3) Completely agree.

4) The downtime was a lot worse if you had multiple instances in more datacenters. Or put another way, the bigger the Linode customer you were, the worse it was.

(1) I've had a router die every Christmas or New Years for the past 6 years. Never had one die outside those windows. They must angry at me for what I've put them through.
As a white thirteenth-generation American, I'm perfectly happy with more people from India in this country, especially if it means they might change what it means to be "Texan."
The problem is the initial leap of logic - why should any tribe member think that the foreigner is talking about them at all? The foreigner says 'there are other blue-eyed people' and everyone can see that there are indeed other blue-eyed people. There's no reason for anyone to think that they might be in the blue group.

If there was some reason to start a count, sure, but there isn't. The foreigner just states that there are other blue-eyed people, which the tribe already knows.
The simple solution seems to be to add the absolute value of the code subtractions to the value of the code additions.

This would weight code refactors with the weight they deserve...
You are absolutely correct on all points. Yet people need to get angry in order to be motivated enough to cause change. Happy people don't push for change, not on these kinds of issues. There has to be a lot of pain felt and verbalized for anyone to take it seriously.

Example: US government and all necessarily parties start to shut down --as in kill off-- all packets coming in from China every time there's a large DDoS attack. If it stops, we know the source. And we treat them to a full day of packet blocking to see if the Chinese government might become inspired enough to do something about it. Next time, it's two days. Or maybe a week.

This is the kind of thing where pain has to be felt at a high enough level for those who can do something about it to intercede and put an end to it.

And, yes, in the end, it's a technological solution. I won't claim to be informed enough to fully understand what has to be changed in terms of protocols, hardware or topology in order to make DDoS a thing of the past. I simply haven't spent any time studying the problem. I'm sure there are lots of people very well versed in the subject who can pitch in.

At some level though, I think this has to be criminalized and prosecuted with great consequences for the perpetrators in order to put an end to it. I say this because it is likely that whatever new technology is instituted there will be holes bad actors can exploit.
As per a comment in the original article, they could choose to "sync" when one of their children is first told the rules about not knowing your own eye color. This changes the way that person would behave, and is a completely reasonable time for each islander to reevaluate the logical cascade.
So. When. Is this happening?
See my reply above. I think these experiments were unnecessary.
thanks for sharing your expertise and the great memories Scott. Your books were clearly influential on a generation of developers on writing good, concise C++ code. Cannot wait to see what you do next.