skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd look at Google compute because of the auto discounts. Reservations are a pain the ass if your service keeps growing and shrinking.
It depends on the severity of the bug and the level of foresight of the hardware designer. In the worst case (e.g. the FDIV bug on the Pentium) you have to recall the CPU. Obviously, this is very bad. That's why modern CPUs have what are called "chicken bits" or "kill bits", which the BIOS or OS can set to disable specific features. The most recent use of kill bits I can recall is Intel disabling the TSX instructions on the Haswell line of CPUs. Finally, the least invasive option is to issue a microcode update, alters the way that x86 instructions get decoded to avoid the problematic behavior. Microcode updates are issued as software patches, and they're actually in the Linux kernel source tree.

If you want to learn more about all three of these fix techniques, in addition to learning a bit about the steps that Intel and AMD take to prevent such bugs in the first place, I highly recommend this CCC talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor....
I wish more languages would have what are essentially compiler enforced style guidelines (e.g. indentation, variable/function naming, file naming). So much time is wasted debating style, dealing with code review comments about style and making/using related tools.
Do you happen to know the company names where they work?
> But it's also the same when coding, the hard parts are not always where I expect them to be.

As you may know, this also applies to optimizing code. The 'hot' parts of the code are very often things that you don't expect.
Is this one real?
Where else would it come from? Nature and nurture are the only options; culture can certainly encourage (or suppress) violence, but it's pretty obvious that it isn't the sole cause of violence.

Maybe I should clarify. I'm not saying that every human being secretly yearns to smash and kill. I'm saying that most of the human race has an instinctive drive to respond to certain setbacks with violence, and some people (whether through nature, nurture, or both) find it more difficult to suppress that than others.
Browsers identify themselves with a user-agent string, and the user agent strings are a giant disaster of technical debt resulting from a long history of browsers working around buggy websites and websites working around buggy browsers. Browser video is also a giant disaster of technical debt, and YouTube uses the user-agent string to determine which ways of serving video will work and which ones won't. Presence of bugs here is no surprise, and any such bugs will naturally impact some browsers but not others.

So, a bug in YouTube's compatibility-autodetection caused it to fall back to a slower, bitrate-limited fallback method that it didn't need to, for some versions of Firefox. They took two weeks to deploy the fix. Considering those two weeks included Christmas and the bug didn't affect security or render the site unavailable, this seems like a pretty good response time.
I wonder why it was that important (for Firefox to do something about it).
The fact that you know about this problem already puts you far ahead of all the people who are still unaware. The best option (if you're not a senior) is to do a summer internship, which leads to a full-time offer. The next best is to get interviews through personal referrals. If all else fails, whiteboard like crazy and do your homework on the companies you're applying to, which will be a lot (hundreds).
"Javascript should be used for form validation."

Just to be clear and ensure everyone else understands. Javascript should validate input syntax and make decisions that don't need to be forced onto users. As an example, validate a credit-card matches mod 10 and automatically recognize if it's Visa, Mastercard, etc. Nothing drives me nuts like messing up my card-number only to have to go through an entire HTTP request & response cycle to find out.

What we don't want developers to do is ONLY validate client-side lest they open their back-end to injection vulnerabilities like XSS, SQLi, and CMDi or even name your own price vulnerabilities like we saw early on in the ecommerce space.
Support the printing of Managua's crowd-sourced public transportation map
Nice. That they keep running and being developed in parallel makes it fit even better.
I believe this is the relevant comment:

"Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."
This is honestly how I felt about shaving with a straight razor. Everyone I spoke to about it was like "you're crazy! you'll cut yourself. At the very least use a safety razor to warm up to something like that." I had a gift card to Art of Shaving, and bought a shavette.

Two weeks in, I haven't cut myself once, and I shave faster and better than I ever have.
Everything you just mentioned, plus stuff like this[1] really make this seem like a bizarro replay of the 1920s. That does not bode well.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/12/16/yahoo-holiday-party/
Sure, but then again:

> Be extremely skeptical of any advice you receive over the internet.

:-D
If the world made sense we would have doctors working 6 hour shifts at 100k a year rather than having one doctor work 12 hour shifts for 200k a year. But then you need people to actually want to be doctors rather than MBAs or financial accountants or lawyers, and strangely enough when the money isn't better and the work is way harder pressure to remove the artifical doctorate of medicine graduation rate caps is lacking.
We do agree that the experienced developers are necessary along side the less experienced developers. At least when the project is getting off the ground and the less experienced developers are still learning the ropes.
A new smtp protocol with:
- mandatory encryption, mandatory validation of certificates
- certainty on the sender (effectively a mandatory hardfail spf)
- ideally decoupling the email address from the provider running the mail server (users shouldn't be prisonners of a gmail or a yahoo)

[edit] also a system of extended validation for signatures like for ssl certificates would be useful. I would end up expecting a nice green logo in my mail client for emails from citibank.com, something cit1bank.com could not achieve.

[edit2] also a modern design would require emails to be instantaneous. All these messenger apps would become redundant and we would revert to a common standard.
I wonder if ordering workers back to office had a long term effect on moral?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/technology/yahoo-orders-ho...
Often the lists are built much further down the chain. In cases where they aren't, it's usually purely financially-driven.
Browsers should start submitting a random 10 character string for the User-Agent header.
End-To-End Memory Networks for question-answering tasks with demo
money can't kill people, but lack of do kills
For some perspective. A 22 year old college graduate can make $175k per year in total comp with a CS degree working for Facebook or Google. To repeat that. A 22 year old with a BS degree can make $175k per year with absolutely no experience whatsoever.
At our agency we tend to have a lot of low budget projects, plus we like to keep expenses low if there's a relatively small overhead in return.

For saving on costs we use:

- Bitbucket over Github (Private repos are free, although Github has more features, so it depends on how much you use really)

- Email Hosting Zoho over Google (FREE): We tend to recommend Zoho to single entrepreneurs since it offers 10 accounts for free on your custom domain.

- CMS (FREE): We use our own barebones one that's similar to siteleaf.

- Redis/Web Server/DB Server ($40/mo) Digital Ocean over AWS/Heroku: DO Droplets for launch + initial marketing, and then depending on how things turn out, EC2 or more Droplets.

- SSL (FREE): Recently tried out Let's Encrypt. Works beautifully. Will probably use that for everything in the future.

- Exceptions (FREE): New Relic seems to do a decent job, although the paid plan over at Airbrake seems a lot better. Haven't tried Sentry, but will give it a shot after reading this post.

- Log Management (FREE): We use tail and grep :D It's messy but we survive

- Assets / CDN: Sometimes Cloudflare (free), sometimes S3/Cloudfront (same as article)

- Chat (FREE) Glip over Slack: Glip's free offering is better than Slack's, because you can confine people outside the organization to specific channels, which works fantastically for us.

- Fonts (FREE): We tend to advocate some decent looking Google Fonts that get the job done
Downsides:

Search - How do you grep or Ctrl-F your notebook to find out that one command you ran three weeks ago to fix your dev environment?

Copy/Paste - If I ask you for a copy of your notes, you have to retype it out. I can yank and paste into my e-mail client.

In addition, I have to quibble with expandability. Yes, I can buy additional notebooks, but I have finite desk and drawer space. Moreover, the cost of searching increases nonlinearly as the number of notebooks increases. Meanwile, grep runs approximately as quickly on 1kb of notes as it does on 100kb of notes.
Unfortunately the Benchmarks Game seems to have removed LuaJIT in favor of Lua 5.3, but https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2588071/is-luajit-really... mentions it as being an order of magnitude faster. I've seen it said multiple times that LuaJIT is the gold standard of JITing, but can't find very many concrete benchmarks anymore.
That's true I suppose, since I develop primarily for fun. But promoting this minimal/ideal state of web development can only improve the experience of users. The excitement of using bloated web frameworks might help your startup, but when it seeps into well-designed free software made by the consumer for the consumer, it hurts the product.
>Second, the granularity of the modules is essential.

I think this is a huge point that most open-source projects neglect. It's vastly easier on contributors to open-source projects if there are highly granular tasks to complete.

I think the open-source ecosystem is very short on people who are good at what is effectively project management: that is, breaking up tasks into smaller ones. Imagine if major projects had a big list of thousands of short several-hour tasks they needed completing (e.g. "create a menu option for this tool"). This isn't always feasible due to e.g. background knowledge requirements, but it would be super nice.

One area where this approach could actually work super well is in collective theorem proving. It doesn't matter how people do whatever they're doing so long as it has the right top-level type signature. The list of outstanding tasks would just be a big list of type signatures (as-of-yet unproven theorems) waiting to be completed.
Breaking the Bullingdon Club Omertà
The VC bubble is already popping and it's going to affect this year but I don't think it will have as much of an impact on the economy as the Chinese stock market collapsing to more realistic valuations.

Let's also keep in mind that the world is becoming more automated, not less, so this isn't going to be last time we see bubble valuations in our lifetime.
Imo I'd hold off on susy. Bootstrap is a great start for a beginner abs it's used in a ton of environments.
As a counterpoint, I'm a software tester on a project right now that has:

* Several of the component programs read from multiple config files

* Manual registry settings

* Config files have True/False, On/Off, and Yes/No settings.

* The version is reported to a db on program run, but the version is read from an xml file, not the program.

It is true that a new car program can take 5 years or more to roll out, but at least it actually happens. This system has been in use for at least 15 years, and it just keeps getting kludged.
Is it normal to rely on this many external services when running a site? I'm obviously novice here, but my NIH syndromes kicks in, and I'd feel nervous if I had to deal with this many companies by myself alone.
Could this be done with an extension?
The "Other side" is scared, not dumb. Molly Ivins used to point this out. For the white lower middle class, life has been a slow downhill slide since the mid-1970s. Those are the people who support Trump and the Tea Party.

Unfortunately, exploiting that fear is politically effective. This is a problem with a long history. There are records of it back as far as Cicero.

It's not their fault that they don't know what to do. Nobody knows what to do. We have all this productivity, and we don't need that many people to make all the stuff. Economic policymakers don't know how to deal with that. If you want to look for dumb, look at what comes out of economists. There's a sizable faction that says there can never be a shortage of demand. Tell that to Wal-Mart's CEO, who says their customers are spent out.

(Sometimes they really are dumb, as in that Oregon "militia" group camping out in the bird sanctuary.)
Bob McGwier is an interesting fellow. I met him at Dayton many years back when TAPR was just getting into DSP devices: http://www.arrl.org/news/tom-clark-k3io-to-speak-at-amsat-ta.... I think he was doing work for a defense research outfit at the time.

Getting way off the topic, some of the events at Dayton are quite interesting. At one dinner, I got to hear Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor,_Jr speak about his work on pulsars. He brought some audio clips of pulsars, the first gave a "click" about once a second. The second clip was at ten per second, and the final one produced a tone of 600 clicks per second. He credits his interest in physics (along with his brother) to amateur radio as a young boy.
We should just remove the reporting of User-Agent in browsers. All they do is encourage user tracking a building half-baked heuristics.
When your average CEO makes 200~300x more money than you, why should you be faithful? When you end up paying for executives screw ups and your salary is the first "cost" to cut of, why should one be faithful to Corporate America?
Right, actual form validation for security should of course be done on the server to clear up potential confusion.

Form check-pointing is another good example of Javascript use. It has never bothered anyone that a webpage is saving your form on the client or server in the background.
Do you have any screenshots? Your comment originally said NeXT created bundles, which is very different from an online store for software.
That was supposed to be PATH, not "part".
I'm the same "Galactoise" quoted in the original story. I'm really happy to see the conversation that cropped up here, about the lack of value around trying to certify a mutable black box, and hopefully the power of HN is enough to get some action from the Alexa team.

I also wanted to pass along a blog post I threw together on the topic. http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification

It's pretty long, but the tldr is as follows:
We're all worked up about this idea of having to build switches into our code to meet arbitrary certification guidelines, only to turn them off the moment we are live in prod. It's worth noting, though, that Amazon pulls these sort of antics (bait-n-switches) on us regularly and without remorse, and that there's really no way we can even know it happened. This is arguably even more destructive to the quality of our products than trying to build for a set of capricious guidelines.
Yeah, but the next comment was:

> "Unfortunately this is not an acceptable state for us. We have many millions of users whose Youtube experience suddenly got significantly degraded, and we're not willing to leave them in that state over the holidays. Any chance you guys could simply roll back the change you guys made? If not, we're forced to ship a Firefox update that lies to you guys about the Firefox version, which really is not a good option for either of us :("
have a look at https://forge.laravel.com
I just assumed most devs would be worried about the potential affects of the bubble. Currently typing this from my summer intership, so your comment has given me so hope, thank you!
We can negotiate treatment down without insurance just as effectively (likely more so) with single payer health care.
Congratulations in advance for when EPIC buys your company and then ruins your product.
> I have a huge collection of print books and that is my preferred way to learn
because I can step away from the computer and digest what I am trying to
learn.

Paper has different profile of use friction than computer or tablet.

You can't easily search it for words, and paper book forces you to use its
index and table of contents, so you have to actually think about what you're
looking for. This is stark contrast with how digital text works.

You can make notes in a book, you can put shims and bookmarks, you can bend
a page corner. How it works in a computer is not as seamless as with paper;
you have to spend some attention to make a mark, and the mark will be limited
in one way or another.

And you can flick through a paper book. This is an important way of working
with a textbook, and no software can render that.

> An epaper reader would be a semi-acceptable compromise, but the tactile
feedback of page flipping and bookmarks are also very gratifying.

Page flipping is an unimportant detail, and you can have markers in digital
text, too. What is important is how much and how cheaply (in terms of
attention) can you put in your notes, and -- much less tangible thing -- how
the medium inclines your mind for its content.

> For note taking, I can use either pen/paper, or a laptop with a simple vim
session. The paper is most useful if there are non-text things that need to be
quickly noted, and can be turned into charts/graphs or whatever later on if
needed.

I actually design my code on paper. And I'm not talking about UML diagrams,
which I hate. I'm talking about rough sketches on programming interfaces
(which covers pretty much everything, since I build my systems out of
libraries written specifically for the system I'm building). I'm taking
advantage of the friction that paper gives. It forces me to think in different
way than when I'm writing on a computer, and that different way works very
well for me.
How to replicate ourselves
I've said it before but I'll say it again:

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Good checklist of things a potential "reformed SMTP" needs to do.
The problem with this approach is that for every legitimate reason for wanting to fight someone, there will be illegitimate reasons too. Someone might challenge a person to a boxing match because they think that person is weak, effeminate or gay. Is setting up a formal boxing match really going to help the person who is challenged in this context?

Should we allow homophobic bullying because it's in human nature too?
They already lost a massive chunk of their users. Do you think things will get sweeter if people start to notice that Firefox videos are crappier than on Chrome?
Reading the comments, it's some 6%, not small for me, if the total number of users is many millions.
Just real quick here. Box Office Mojo has data on 702 movies released in 2014 (I only wanted to do one year because there's no API I know of for this and I was doing it quickly, I chose 2014 instead of 2015 because there's still many 2015 releases that are still earning money and so I wanted the most recent "complete" year). The correlation between total box office gross and theaters shown in is very robust, at .79. So if you look at the top Metacritic movie from 2014, Boyhood, you can see it has a low gross, ranked 100th on Box Office Mojo's data. But if you look at the theaters shown in, it was only in 775 theaters. Mr. Turner, the second movie on Metacritic's rankings for 2014, was only shown in 120 theaters. Birdman, the Best Picture winner and the 16th ranked movie on Metacritic's list, was in 1213 theaters. Meanwhile, you have to go to the 21st movie on the top grossing list to find a film that was in fewer than 3,000 theaters. It's a classic example of Simpson's paradox[1]. You have two populations, wide-release movies and small-release pictures, and within each population, there's a positive correlation between critical approval (as measured by Metacritic) and box office gross, which is picked up by the contour maps. But because the highest Metacritic scores go to the movies released in 2000 theaters or less, without controlling for the number of theaters a movie shows in, it looks like there's a negative relationship between critical acclaim and box office totals.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Also have had great experiences with Logentries. Easy to integrate on every platform/OS, very configurable alerts, team has been pleasant and responsive to pull requests.
There's also the 130+ IQ group of neoreactionaries who like Trump from a perspective informed by history.
Engineering is at its heart is both an applied science and a methodology for it's application. So yes, software engineering is a valid form of engineering. We're taking computer science principles and applying them to a practical application. We don't write papers, but we use the knowledge to drive industry.

So there's this topic of failure analysis, and we don't always do this well in the world of software engineering. We don't like to analyze our failures probably as much as we should, possibly because we find them embarassing, or perhaps they might be bad PR if they were known. So we just want to get the fix done and move on.

But the thing is for most software it doesn't matter how we deal with bugs, and that's because they cause minor problems. But when it comes to loss of life or money, bugs do matter. Doctors and lawyers have professional boards that oversee actions and disputes. Airplanes and Trains have the NTSB that oversee accidents and engineering failures. Civil engineers study the collapse of bridges as part of an effort to make bridges safer.

Failure in those cases are bad.

If my software solution is off by a few bugs, meh, so what? It doesn't cost the company money, usually. And it probably didn't kill anyone, and it probably just fixed some small css issue that looked great on firefox, but bad on chrome...
Looks like I won't even have to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause#Repeal

Congress can modify or repeal treaties by subsequent legislative action, even if this amounts to a violation of the treaty under international law

So no, treaties do not affect US national sovereignty. Appeal to sovereignty is a charge you can not level at any treaty from inside the USA.
The Father of Online Anonynimity Has a Plan to End the Crypto War
One quote in particular sticks out for me:

"Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company."

For those with experience hiring, do you find this to be generally true? Would it really count as a black mark to have worked at a "failing" or "struggling" company, independent of your own experience/skills/accomplishments or would it really depend on the situation/candidate? I realize this isn't a black/white question and is likely more of a gray area.
This skirts close to being a circular argument: computers are "fast enough" because people don't need a faster computer; but people don't "need" a faster a computer because faster computers aren't available. You could make that argument about every phase of personal computing from the late 1970s onwards, because what people "need" is determined by their expectations of technology. Once a product comes along that exceeds those expectations (the Apple I; the Macintosh; the Amiga; etc.) then people suddenly "need" a lot more.