skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Own one, can confirm that OSX is unusable on a 5400rpm drive. Replacing it with any SSD makes it decent.
End of tax year
The point is his view about kernel debuggers is complete nonsense, and I'm baffled that you and so many others could ever take it seriously.

Yes, people would be more careful without debuggers, the same way they'd be more careful with cooperative multitasking hanging the system when they forget to yield. That doesn't make it good.
Yes, but when have you ever encountered a large company where unit tests are judged by what needs testing as opposed to "coverage" ?

There is almost no use for unit tests, as they lock down function implementations without verifying functionality. They have some amount of use for a programmer to verify if what they wrote really is what they wrote, and maybe for data structure methods (not in Go of course), but that means maybe 1 in 50 methods justifies a unit test.

Everything else should be system tested, to see if the components fit together and if the interactions between various parts of the application really are what you think they are.

It's like javadoc back in the day. "Document all your function variables, you've only got them for x%", ... you write a parser that parses the app and simply adds javadoc everywhere, giving the obvious descriptions to obvious names. 2 hours of work for the generator, but actually interesting work, half an hour to read through it and change a few things, and boom, 30000 lines added in a day. And the worst part is, you've just made everything harder to read, but everybody's happy with you.
2015 Cell Phone Buyers Guide
I happily paid a premium to System76 for their Linux laptop. Then I took a calculated risk and replaced their Ubuntu distribution with CentOS 7. I've had small hardware troubles (the biggest being video initialization during boot - sometimes it just locks up at a black screen; power cycle eventually resolves the issue, which does not recur until the next power cycle) - but my biggest troubles come from my employer's enthusiastic embrace of proprietary Microsoft protocols. For which I use the company issued Windows 7 machine, and the Mac users get a virtual machine image.
That would lose Apple, Google and Facebook a lot of money and possibly market share, something they are not willing to do, it would be much easier for them to just add back doors, they pretty much already do anyway.
I look forward to Police departments hiring adults with learning disabilities so they can use qualified immunity to deliver grossly improper warrants.
> Why didn't you return it and get -say- a Thinkpad?

The Lenovo X140e is a ThinkPad.[1] I didn't blindly trust Ubuntu's certification. I made sure to get a brand that historically has had good Linux support. I also knew about Nvidia graphics and avoided them. Still, I got burned.

I don't doubt your checklist is good advice for buying a Linux laptop, but it's simply too time consuming to check all of those things. Even if it wasn't, the likelihood of everything working well is low. All it takes is one bad driver for one piece of hardware and the laptop becomes a constant annoyance. Considering the number of hardware devices (Bluetooth, wifi, mic, camera(s), trackpad, GPU, fan, power saving, etc.) it's all but certain something will go wrong. Maybe audio won't automatically switch between headphone and speaker output. Maybe the fan will run at a few discrete speeds instead of gradually ramping up/down. Maybe it will wake from sleep if you open the lid, but not if you hit a key on the keyboard.

I'd rather just pay money and get something that I know will work. That's why my main development machine is a MacBook. I wish there was a competing brand of unix laptops, but so far… no dice. :(

1. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x140e... Though after I purchased it, some people told me it wasn't a true ThinkPad, whatever that means.
How long have you owned the TV though? The concern is that 3 years from now, will they still work, vs the easily replaceable Chromecast?
He's acting as a teacher in this email (like in many situations) and trying to explain that, in a deterministic and transparent system, the usage (and necessity) of a debugger is a clear signal of the inadequacy of the design. If you have to use a debugger, you should go back to the drawing board! You've made a fundamental design flaw in your abstractions and following a poor instruction pointer will not help you find that flaw.

It's kind of ironic to see that, nowadays, with the increased necessity for concurrent and multi-agent systems, a debugger becomes even more obsolete and cumbersome, since you're often fighting a race-condition or some kind of resource starvation.

Personally, I see his rhetoric in this email as highly intelligent community leadership in which Linus is arguing for better systems design (inside, or outside of the Linux kernel).
Urban Scratchoff
Your comment would imply that Javascript may not be the most technologically advanced solution for execution on remote clients. This is obviously wrong, so by implication the Software Industry DOES adopt the most technologically superior solution by default.
Are there third-party search engines for apps?
That he has vetoed various frivolous proposals is undeniable. There's nothing "unfathomable" about it. I strongly approve of his visceral policy against people breaking userspace. His particular post linked here is nonsense, however.
Spend less and have more freedom
They're trying to change how drunk people are treated in emergency departments. "Brief psycho-social interventions" can reduce the number of ED attendances.

https://twitter.com/AlexBThomson/status/549303363721232384
thanks for taking the time to explain the context, I didn't foresee so many people will miss the context (for various subjective or objective reasons).
Your proposals aren't really solutions, but ways of kicking the can down the road. The disagreement still exists, it's just hidden in the remainder. They can serve to minimize that disagreement, but it can never be eliminated.

The simplest counter-sentence to how you've stated the problem: let's say someone thinks it is moral to impose their will on to others - how do you give them this world? The only way to actually achieve your utopia is VR.

Good fences make good neighbors - privacy is a fence.
Ask HN: Have drones made infantry obsolete?
Imagine 1,000 drones flying at an equivalent number of infantry, each drone with a mounted gun.

Or small numbers of armed drones flying into buildings containing known enemies.

Seems infantry is at a distinct disadvantage, to the point of no longer being even relevant for actual combat situations.

What do you think?
Thanks to him, Solaris now has a proper packaging system with dependency handling and repositories.
Why is memcached under-performing? Is it maybe their driver? Or their benchmark? Shouldn't it be similar to Redis, if not a bit faster?

It's a bit fishy that the leading one is by the guys who wrote the article, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814318
> You and I both hate it, and they don't care and are implementing it by shipping intentionally poorly engineered product to encourage totally random early product failure, optimistically without personal injury.

Case in point: yesterday I ordered 10 quality LED bulbs. 2 of them are completely broken; one failed immediately, another after few hours.

Well, there's evil and there is not evil. People follow incentives, I know, and this alone is enough to explain most of the shit the world is in. Moloch does what it wants, but it is sometimes open to suggestions. There are people in positions to chose relatively freely, whose choices end up setting the trends for the rest to follow, and those quite often are the shooters from your example.

I've never heard an argument that "lack of specialization is an indicator of societal collapse" before. Do you have any sources arguing that to read? I'm interested.
I've taken to looking at marketing statements in general as from "opposite-world". If a sales-blurb is about how great their customer-service is, I'm guessing they are trying to clean up a bad reputation, without fixing the problem. Same thing when they say their product is "reliable".

When I see "to better serve you", all I can think of is: "we found a way to make things better for us"
> There is almost no use for unit tests, as they lock down function implementations without verifying functionality.

This is...curious, given that every place I've ever been with any sort of testing culture tested contracts, not function implementations. They test the range and domain of the function, not the behavior of it.

Unit tests do not replace system-level/integration testing, but to dismiss them out of hand is manifestly unwise.
If that's so then why should the Tanakh and Quran not be as instrumental in my life (as an atheist -- an "atheist Christian", if you must) as in a Jew and a Muslim's life respectively?
RIP Ian...Like others I find this very disturbing and troubling. I hope the truth comes out.
US military shelves Google robot plan
And the officers can't even tell the difference.
The real question is, given how much work is involved in implementing a CAD system, how can a person/business make money from an open source CAD ?
Get these two

http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software-Sche...

and

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Devel...

If you want to get deeper into project management I suggest that you become a member of the PMI and possibly get certification from them. The training and testing are rigorous and it is a certification that means something both from the knowledge you get and the benefit of having it on your resume.
A better woodworking analogy (or parody) would be:

Gentlemen, I am well aware that many woodworking shops have a FooBar2000 scrap wood burner. This shop will not. I am not saying woodburners are always bad, or the FooBar2000 is individually bad. Or pretending that scrap never happens. Why I enjoy a warm toasty winter night in front of a fire like the next lad. However having a scrap wood burner implies we create scrap that needs burning. And I will not tolerate that in my shop, nor encourage other shop owners to recklessly generate scrap.

Gentlemen, here we make keels of ships. The entire ship relies on this keel never breaking, creaking, cracking, groaning. Upon those ships... Lives depend. Businesses depend. Governments depend. And I will not tolerate scrap as a boat keel and all the destruction failure can cause. Therefore given that we can't afford to create scrap, we will work slowly and methodically and intelligently so as to not create scrap, and thus have nothing to burn in the FooBar2000 scrap wood burner, thus we do not need one. In the unlikely event that I or someone else make a keel that needed some scrap to be disposed of, well, if it tests good, thats OK. But I'd never tell a dude setting up his own shop that if he's going to build boat keels he badly needs a FooBar 2000 scrap wood burner because he'll probably screw up a lot, because if he's screwing up a lot, I don't want the world depending on his boat keels and I won't accept that caliber of workmanship in my shops nor stamp my name on it.

Gentlemen, you may not like my opinion about your deeply held beliefs about woodworking. I sympathize. I don't agree with everyone else either. Thus I'll give you a psychological outlet by talking like a pirate for a bit now, and making light of your mother's parentage and something about elderberries. Thus if you're insulted by my technical evaluation of your woodworking skills, you can tell everyone else you're actually insulted by my talking like a pirate. Then everyone goes home happy, and the world gets safe strong indestructible boat keels.
For some reason pasting code into it in chrome on Mac, it gets completely mussed up.
It's a test they're running so not all users with ad blockers will see it. You can get around it by setting the forbes_ab cookie to false before clicking continue.
Interesting. I'm using uBlock Origin 1.5.2 and the site refuses to load.
WebSockets, caution required
And yet, hardened Linux developers like Al Viro will rant all about the awful systems design inside and outside of the Linux kernel constantly (cgroups and udev are frequent targets of his). We can thus extrapolate that a lack of a kernel debugger has not reduced leaky abstractions in any measurable way. At best we can only speculate in counterfactuals.

Solaris has a kernel debugger and a more concise architecture.
"QNX4 is high throughput, mister."

Ok then, show me the server farms...

I'm not even really talking about HPC, just the massive datacentres that run everyone's lives. All for the most part running monolithic kernels. I doubt the thousands of engineers who work on such systems consider the "huge monolithic kernel" "undebuggable". And I don't see examples of microkernel OSs that are able to cut it in these circumstances.

Even in a mobile device, you don't really want to waste battery doing context switches inside the kernel.

Microkernels have their place, but believing that the world that chooses not to use them are just clearly dumbasses is bullshit dogma.
Some aspects of human society and culture are not really subject to empiricism per se, literature for example. Dawkins could well say "I don't believe in the existence of literature beyond words printed on a page, until you present rational evidence". That wouldn't be an unscientific approach, but would nonetheless be closed minded, I think.
Oops, I meant ~80MSLOC for OS X.
It's great how we're living in a world where tax codes are so idiotic and complex that it takes long lawsuits to figure out what tax is actually due.

It's not about following the letter of the law; it's about following the letter of the law, avoiding the court of public opinion, and coughing up whatever is necessary to stop the complaints when some politician wants to distract people from their incompetence and whip up some good old nationalist fury.

What do you legally owe? It's undefined. Or more, defined by whether the country you are in likes you for PR reasons (Google is stealing our newspaper jobs!) * the skill of your lawyers. Great!

How about, we admit corporate income tax is a stupid idea, get rid of it, and raise capital gains taxes respectively (and dividends)? People have the great feature of being corporeal beings which live in a country, which makes them much easier to tax than ethereal corporations.

Of course there are rough edges to fix around overseas investors, but it could not possibly, in any world, be worse than the system we have today.
How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?
Based on the footer ("Say no to tests!"), it seems like it's possible that's the whole point? To show how pointless most tests are? (More likely, though, they just mean "say no to writing tests")
What is the simpler explanation?
The emulator? Not particularly difficult, once you have generic drivers for audio and a framebuffer support. Is the same emulator you have on Linux/Windows/OSX PC's .
Just recompile and you are welcome.
After literally decades of fan productions, in which the original cast themselves even sometimes appear, why this now?
(response to 2:) Er, so bypassing the microkernel for the vast majority of your work is a vindication of the "microkernels are just better" line is it?
This seems crazy.

The basic operation of a market maker is to quote both sides of the market, the bid and the ask, so that people can buy or sell "at the market" quickly, without rolling the dice on the appearance of a counterparty with a long or short interest at that exact moment and price. To do that, market makers have to constantly adjust their prices. Part of the premise of a market maker is that they don't hold inventory (and thus a long-term position on the instrument they're trading).

The way electronic market makers adjust prices is by canceling and replacing their orders (the "UPDATE" command in FIX is literally "Cancel And Replace").

How do you penalize cancels without forcing MMs to drive spreads wider to account for their costs?
I don’t see much network effect with Uber. I see a liquidity effect, to a degree, but the barriers of entry are low on both supply and demand side.

To the extent Uber has a network effect it’s O(n) at best. I don’t have a connection to other Uber users. I like that there are enough users to make it worth the drivers’ while – again, liquidity, not network.

On Facebook, network effect is probably O(n^2). The connections exist and themselves have value.
Since this seems to be trending: any questions about Linkurious or graph databases are welcome. Linkurious CTO here :)
This is what pwned sounds like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7V3GLWF6U&t=76
Can't say about the Met, but Thames Valley Police have been quite good as far as I can tell.
A debugger is a thinking crutch, yes, it's easier and more productive to just see what it's doing; but to fix something without a debugger, you have to understand it better. That's his point, and he's right. Quite simply, the easier you make something, the more people who are less intelligent can do it and the result is more but less quality software. Examples abound, but every attempt to make something easier results is people producing more shitty stuff with pointy clicky interfaces.
I would argue that with perfect unregulated competition, having more than one firm with a stable market share is a sign of INefficiency. Small differences will get magnified, and whoever has the small edge will completely dominate, assuming rational behavior.
It is impossible to plan in the way you're suggesting. You cannot ever have a perfect view of the road ahead of you. What you're suggesting is that having a policy of taking a look around you to see if your mental model actually matches reality is being "lazy".
Unconfirmed Google Algorithm Updates December 2015
Why stop at killfiles? HN would be much better without commentary on a significant portion of threads, including this one. I knew better than to click and did anyway, and now here I am, disappointed in this community. Again. Ian's passing is tremendously sad yet HN has an amazing gift for turning that to anger for me, particularly the speculation that dominates this mess of a commentary section as well as this subthread.

(I respect that many people find value here even if I do not, but this thread among many others is a big driver of why I try to avoid HN except for pet topics now.)
A decentralized ride solicitation tool with a reputation system, maybe blockchain-based, could kill off Uber and Lyft almost overnight. Especially if existing taxi companies embraced it. I want to know if a driver is licensed, insured, etc. Uber doesn't provide that, and I don't like the rent-seeking aspect of their service.

If it's winner-takes-all, it's only a matter of time until another winner takes all. I don't think we've seen the end of this market yet...

EDIT: Wow, two down votes in 10 minutes. Care to say why? There are a lot of incumbent players losing market share to Uber - how do they compete? It seems like the perfect opportunity for more of a SaaS business model built around selling integration with an open network. There are already reputation-based blockchain implementations. Why would a decentralized model not work?
This is a great guide: http://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/Good_Produc...
I guess I was shooting for more technical answers related to e.g security, performance or etc.
I started writing AJAX callbacks in 2004, and I'm sure I wasn't alone, so 11 years of higher-level JS is certainly a better range.

But we should abstract away from the language. We've had 35+ years of experience of designing and implementing user interfaces, including their design patterns (MVC, Action/Event based). History is filled with successful designs.

Just consider a sophisticated tool such as your standard IDE: do/undo functionality, separation of concerns, event based, MVC, good standard graphical toolkit, easy deployment and upgrades. These designs are not new, and date back to at least the late 90's (Delphi).

What changed? Well, we've been doing incremental design: throw something at the wall, see what sticks and debug the hell out of it while adding new features. Perhaps that design philosophy is not very tenable in the long run.
You're misunderstanding reality. The simple fact is that these tests are not designed to detect drugs. They're designed to give the police a pretext to search you, whenever they wish to do so, while pretending to obey the law. How do we know this? If they were designed to detect drugs, the fact that they're very poor at doing so would be seen as a problem. It isn't. Therefore, they're designed for a different purpose.

See also breathalyzer, "drug detecting" dogs, field sobriety tests, visual estimation (without radar) of traffic speed, etc.
It's not bypassing the microkernel. It's using it either as a hypervisor or as a separation kernel [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_kernel
Show HN: Goshify, store entire Markdown texts in URLs
The proposed law as written does not care how you implement it. The proposed crime is to pass the information on by any means. If you invented a way to make this really hard for yourself, that would be your own problem.
It's worse than that. Countries will make up taxes for foreign companies just because they can. Microsoft EU settlements being a prime example. Windows 7 N is one of the dumbest things ever. The whole situation makes a lot more sense if you view it as a tax.
> There is almost no use for unit tests, as they lock down function implementations without verifying functionality.

I would disagree. You can change the implementation all you want, but you cannot change the functionality (contract). If your unit test verifies implementation rather than functionality, then it is a poor test.
Except they continue to use it.
In a free market, there are winners and losers. The winners have a strong economic incentive to keep their communication private, as has been the case throughout human history. If you want to prevent this, you need some sort of system that has power over all citizens. But you argue against a central authority of any sort, so how does this work?

In addition, I'm assuming given your distrust for the government and love of markets that all means of communication will be private. Private capital tends to monopoly, so we can expect in your utopia that all means of communication are owned by a small group of people. This group of people has practical control over everyone's data.

This group of people might decide to release everyone's data in order to appease your desire for a post-privacy utopia, but almost certainly they'll keep it for their economic advantage.

The resulting system you are advocating is one in which a tiny percentage of people has near-universal control over the populace.

You can try to equalize things by creating an alternative system in which all data is public, say by having cameras that stream to some publicly accessible resource. But the streaming and the cameras will be the private property of organizations that have a strong incentive for you not to do this. And since the entire infrastructure is owned by such organizations, you would be in violation of your end user agreement to start such a project. It would make you a "liar" when you signed the Internet EULA, which, as you say in another comment, is the worst crime imaginable.
Your statement is confusing (and possibly wrong depending on how it's read).

There are no patent grants in GPLv2. However, OpenJDK carries an automatic patent grant (outside of GPLv2).