skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Restart everything.

Society has accumulated enormous "societal debt" (think technical debt). Most things are inherently broken and inefficient. They haven't changed in centuries.

- Communication

- Education

- Emotions

- Jobs

- Housing

- Clothing

- Health

- Nutrition

- Politics

- Economy

We can't fix these things incrementally. The social codebase is worthless. We need to start over, from scratch.

Buy an issland or a big piece of land. Carefully select people based on a yet-to-determine algorithm (people with as little exposition to society, such as kids), and send them there. Closely observe what they do, and ensure they don't repeat and/or bring with them habits and ideas that we know to be wrong. This will take a while, but at some point we will be able measure how they perform as opposed to the rest of the world. These metrics could include happiness (although difficult to measure), ratio of time they spend doing things they agree with (willing to do, not coerced), energy consumed, etc.

Most jobs are utterly useless. Most people have no idea what the fuck is going on. People don't have a purpose or focus. We really have no clue. Logical fallacies make up MOST of our understanding of reality. We live in constant fear and anxiety, and dedicate a lot of resources to cope with it. We quickly become convinced that money is an end rather than a means. We miss the big picture, we lack empathy, we avoid introspection. We believe in lies, myths, bro-science. We don't have a clue about what habits or foods are healthy for us. Regulations and the monstrosity of the legal system make the simplest thing unachievable by mere mortals. We have technology that's thousands of time more efficient than what we had in the past, yet our lives have barely changed (i.e., the hours of work).

Like it or not, most of your active time is spent at work. We work 20-100 hours a week just to get by. Surely, getting rid of 80% of jobs (at least in countries like the US) while maintaining people's quality of life would a real breakthrough. Yet, I would argue that this is already possible, without the need of any additional technological breakthrough (i.e., AI). Look around, most jobs only fulfill habits and historically relevant needs that we can easily get rid today.
Update: forks can have their own issues.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/revisions/179470/2
This is not up to HN to decide, it is up to the court.

Unfortunately, we will never know since the new JADE language maintainers agreed to the terms of the old JADE software company.
True... No disrespect, but I wouldn't be surprised if the company hasn't actually existed for 20 years already ;))
How many ways can you arrange 128 tennis balls?
> I can't remember the last time I was aware of a security problem before Red Hat (and CentOS) had rolled out a fixed package. I usually know about security issues when I see a slew of update notifications from my servers (even though I'm on several security related mailing lists).

Well looking at the last batch of OpenSSL security advisories, CVE-2015-3197 was reported and fixed by OpenSSL two days ago. [1]

Yet it looks like RedHat has yet to issue a fix. [2]

> Realistically, I rely on my OS vendor to provide my security fixes in a timely manner. If my systems security relied on me being able to apply patches manually in a timely manner, it would be a disaster waiting to happen. And, it is a big pile of labor I don't want on my plate.

It's not difficult to subscribe to your OS vendors security mailing list as well as the security mailing list for ALL the software you run in production.

[1]: https://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html#y2016

[2]: https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2015-3197
The retroreflectors were placed by manned lunar landings.
> which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort

Lol.

Not that I disagree about the americans spending too much on defense, but how can you say this with a straight face while India continually engages in a military dick-swinging contest with Pakistan?

How are things in Kashmir these days?
Perhaps this might work better?

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/0128165...
Here's a nice classic logo:

http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp
It's about supply and demand.

More people who can program means that programming is a less valuable skill and that programmers are compensated less. And cheap labor is the holy grail.

Things like this are pushed by the business elite and then sold to the public by politicians as enabling a middle-class lifestyle. Which will be true, for a little while, in some parts of the country. Already that is barely true in other parts of the country. The next state over from me, junior developer wages start at 25k and rise to the mid-50s as you become more senior. Yes, the cost of living is lower, but not that much lower.

I doubt truly substantive change can be made in the developer market through increased government funding of the curriculum, but they will find other ways.
The one vulnerability to this model is integrations. Spam filters have become good enough that I seldom see true spam in my email. It's all the ham - automated garbage, purchase confirmations, and newsletters that I've been opted into that clog up my box.

If Slack admins go crazy on integrations, you can still get a lot of low-value notifications. In our instance, we only run integrations into topic-specific channels (such as a channel for system notifications) so it's manageable.

But I can see that changing as the scope of integrations grow.
What is your reasoning? Because they are out of touch with most people? I would argue that Trump is closely linked with the most 'value' (in money or financial instruments) in America.

Oh, I see what you're afraid of.
Anyone using Simula, APL, PL-1?
> - Library mismatches leading to broken packages, sometimes
> on a freshly installed system. I've always heard outright
> denial that this happens, but I've literally never installed
> a FreeBSD system that didn't end up with something broken by
> the time everything needed for a fully functioning web hosting
> system was installed. It's like there's Stockholm syndrome
> happening, or something.

I run into this less frequently than I did on rpm (CentOS, RHEL) distributions. "rpm hell" was a real thing, and still continues to a lesser degree. Try building an rpm for anything recent on an rpm distro and it is painful.

> - Poor dependency resolution, and weak validation tools, that requires
> manual intervention to prevent or repair those breakages which are
> bound to occur.

I haven't personally run into this in a long time.

> - No reasonable mechanism for offering third party package repositories.

pkgng does this. In fact, building entire custom package sets and repos is quite easy with poudriere and portshaker.

> - Default ports are usually anemic

I use fairly exotic options for some things, so I tend to build more packages than most people probably do. poudriere makes it easy to build sets with different options regularly. pkg makes creating your own repo quite easy too -- certainly moreso than setting up your own rpm repo with yum.

Ports used to have all those problems you outlined (prior to round about FreeBSD 9 probably) -- hell, you couldn't even reliably mix ports and packages! It was awful. Now ports simply build packages, and those get installed with pkgng. Much cleaner.
Isn't moon black and white. What's the point of color pictures?
The code for my startup is in Visual Basic .NET (VB). Before you laugh, it's essentially just a different flavor of syntactic sugar as C#. For my approaches to writing code, VB is fine.

My scripting language is Open Object Rexx, and a version of it, Kexx, is the macro language of my favorite editor, KEdit. I have about 150 scripts in Rexx. I do nearly all my typing into KEdit and have about 150 macros in Kexx. Some fine day I may move to Microsoft's PowerShell -- if they write better documentation, then I will move sooner.

If I have some optimization (mathematical programming) to do, then I will use the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library in object files ready for Fortran from the Waterloo Fortran compiler. So, I'll use Waterloo Fortran.

For more in programming languages, I still like a lot that is in PL/I, especially the ideas around tasks, memory management, exceptional condition handling, and scope of names -- all of those deeply interact in nice ways. And I'm totally in love with PL/I structures, much more efficient than objects, a little easier to think about, and nearly as powerful.

For more, I want more on a programming language that (1)admits some automatic transformations that improve some properties and preserve others, (2) can report on some of what is going on in the code, and (3) helps with documentation. For (3), IMHO the documentation is more important than the code but in programming language design is treated just as meaningless gibberish and an after thought. Yes, Knuth's literate programming was a step forward but that lesson seems to have been forgotten for other languages.
What does it mean to be literate in India?

http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-ind...
This stuff belongs in the domain of graphical design. Rule of thumb is to provide padding towards the edges around text, a little more to the sides than to the top, eg. [padding: 1em 2em;] depending on the font used because of inherent vertical padding in writing. If the text hugs the container, it seems cramped, and we get distracted by the lines of the bounding container.

I recommend giving "The Elements of Graphic Design" by Alex W. White a read, where he talks about issues of space and typography and why certain conventions exist. CSS is after all a way to express graphical design relations in code, which isn't very useful if one is unaware of the principles driving clear and useful design.
I write with lingo now and then, when I want to quickly try out some game mechanic idea
She is goddess on the moon, not of the moon. For both the lady who stole the drug from her husband or the vehicle.
That is extremely neat. I wouldn't have thought you could build an 8080 in less than 1K lines of Verilog.
> "Well if you were good at your job you could make everyone learn."

I never said this.
oh okay!
It's not like anyone can just go out with a laser pointer and verify the existence of the retroreflectors though, they're for use by observatories. Although even if there was a scientific way for the average man to independently verify the presence of items on the moon, the conspiracy theorists would probably still think of some BS reason to dispute it.
The Hackathon Handbook- a Complete Guide to Hackathons
For the curious, the need to change the malloc behavior is not hypothetical:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6527

Basically for many years now glibc has been knowingly doing the wrong thing just to keep malloc_set_state/malloc_get_state working. Which as far as anyone knows, is used only by emacs. Keeping this interface alive for the sole benefit of an emacs optimization when it is blocking the fixes for fairly serious bugs is a pretty big bar to meet for justification.

In the end this is largely a non-issue as an Emacs developer noted that their configure script probes for the special glibc malloc API and if it doesn't exist then emacs will use its own malloc implementation. The conclusion is that once the glibc devs get their changes up, everyone can meet up again to make sure existing emacs binaries still run and that the API detection in the emacs configure script works right.

So props to Paul Eggert for being the only sane man in the room and pointing out that the drama was all for nothing.
> They justify the obvious copyright violation by only letting you play games they have physical copies of, and not letting more people play concurrently than they have cartridges. This... doesn't really avoid the copyright issues, but they do it anyway.

We found this service before creating Start9, and considered using the same thing. We talked to a lawyer before, who advised us not to do it, and fallbacked on letting people upload games that they are able to according to their local regulation (usually, games they dumped themselves), and forbidding them to lend their accounts to their friends.

It's 100% legal, but unfortunately it's still hard for some users to understand why this limitation exists. What I would love to do would be to have kind of a deal with game publishers, but as a single man currently working on the project, I don't the time to contact these studios (especially since most of them have closed since the games have been released, or are under Nintendo's copybag, which won't be ever available to third-parties such as ourselves).
Man................. You raise a good point. I read the headline and was pretty stoked to see my country reinvesting in itself. But this is US, fuck.

I think iPads are wonderful devices, but to think a school would buy them for their students just seems stupid and short sighted. I think Chromebooks offer the most compelling class room solution. They are hyper secure, come with a keyboard, and extremely easy to manage and share.
Hate to say it, but you'll want to upgrade to a later version than 8. There are a lot of exploits out for 8.

Oh, that was the other crappy angle for ColdFusion I forgot to mention in my post - the $1500-and-up license fees.
Vatican? San Marino? Andorra?
> Actually a lot of the old photos were color.

Couldn't help thinking of this:

http://calvin-and-hobbes-comic-strips.blogspot.com/2011/11/c...
The comment in TFA about exporting the saved game data via URL is a great idea. Imagine being able to send someone to a specific point in a videogame by URL or share an old Wordperfect document, including the content, via a huge URL.
> Snowden's life was never threatened by US officials

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/11/ron-paul-us-gover...

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-spies-talk-about-killing-s...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/edward-snowden-...
Everything people say about China today, including your post, is familiar from my childhood... except my old man was talking about Japan.
> .... only matter in your first job, or to idiots.

Today, every job is your first job. We are all contractors, constantly re-interviewing and justifying ourself to our customers.

And the idiots are in charge. Every founder who needs my help seems to be a 20-something kid who thinks knowledge is something you can pick up at a trade show or week-long intensive at some resort.
I admin/dev on an old LDMud, which means the "game" is written in LPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPC_(programming_language)

Perhaps not a terribly interesting addition to your list, since the reason is obvious: I keep using it because it's the language the game is written in. That said, I'll play along and discuss what I like about the language:

One of the fun things about working on an LDMud or in LPC is that the game driver (written in C, compiled) gets loaded and serves as the virtual machine for your game, and the parser/compiler for your game's LPC code; this means that once the game is up and running, as long as you aren't editing some really foundational game objects, you can create/load/destroy/update/unload most of what you use inside the game environment without a recompile/restart of the game. There's very little friction when you can quickly play with the new objects/npcs/environments you're creating as you iterate.

You can see the age/heritage of the game as a glass half full, or half empty. You can be frustrated that some relatively modern concept/module/support doesn't exist, but you also have the opportunity to learn from writing it (and not just as an exercise; for production!) Because it's got such a long legacy, you get plenty of chances to rub up against old code and reason about what constraints may have shaped it, and whether it is worth refactoring. Chances to become conscious of the extent to which decisions you make in the present will someday look as curious and smell as musty as the legacy code you're griping about.

It's very OO, and code re-use is a big deal. There are some really complex inheritance trees, and while a lot of issues you'll run into are the sorts of problems you'd expect, I feel like it's pretty good training for breaking down and reasoning about complexity of any sort. This gets ratcheted up by the interesting concept of allowing a certain kind of object to "shadow" another object at any time. A shadow object will intercept calls to the object it is shadowing, giving it the opportunity to modify how the shadowed object will behave. So, for example, most classes, subclasses, boosts/buffs/curses/etc. are implemented as shadows you apply to a player object, or to some piece of their equipment.
Agree on your points about exaggerated stuff for kids, but...

> And they get fed foods with super exaggerated flavor profiles, e.g. ketchup

What? Since when is ketchup a kids food? That's a pretty widely popular condiment among all ages.
> We paid market prices plus the usual worthless questionable stock options, but everyone we liked had multiple offers.

And they didn't take yours. I don't mean to be critical, but in my experience, when a company says they pay "market prices", they mean the market in their imagination instead of the real market. Maybe the offer wasn't big enough. There was some reason those candidates turned you down.

And sure, maybe you couldn't afford to make bigger offers. Not all businesses are viable. If I could hire labor for $0.50/hour I'd own a business, but I can't.

> emc/vmware

VMWare was in the news recently as cutting 900 jobs. Maybe they are hiring. In which case I expect we would find that expensive senior developers are being laid off and cheap new grads are being hired.
You can't just assume costs away. Teachers are very expensive and the main cost of education. I don't know if technology is cheaper yet, but it's worth considering.
Sure thing. I hope you copy one or more of them to have fun yourself at attackers' expense. I like to imagine my work results in hackers doing stuff like this:

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.patch.c...
>Learning about computation is just as important these days.

Why?
Is this just some tooling around Quagga and LVS then? I mean if you had Quagga/BIRD and LVS on your load balancers(not an uncommon configuation) isn't that pretty much all the heavy lifting? What else does Seesaw provide, SSL termination, config management?
This makes me think, is it possible to set that as the default stylesheet for pages that don't have CSS?
Depends on the browser but there's usually a 1k character limit which isn't a great deal of state. Perhaps that's counted badly so you can get 1000 char * 4 bytes for unicode, but I wouldn't bet on it being handled the same in different browsers anyway.
what kind of data was it they couldn't get by crawling, I didn't pick it up from the article. I just noticed there was certain kinds of data?
I always remember this video, the 1st time I heard the US political establishment openly question its China trade policy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EVGOQVuU2Q
I primarily play with z80 asm and C89 atm, so I guess that's pretty unfashionable today
For local quick edits of things like commit messages, you can run emacs as a daemon and use emacsclient as your editor command.

For remote files there's tramp.

But, I do agree that any sysadmin should know enough basic vi[m] to get around, because vi is almost always available on any unix system. Emacs (or nano) might not be installed.
Almost nailed it. They'll say China made replicas and photographed them in studio, just as the original Apollo photos had been fabricated.
Here is the story of Chang'e and Houyi, for the curious.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_Stories/Houyi_and_Chan...
Thanks. Looking at wikipedia, Verilog stems from 1984. I'm wondering why Intel and ARM don't develop their own hardware compilers. I mean, if Mozilla can decide to start a new language, then certainly can those big companies.
CanIStay
Staymate
Well obviously. And the longer the reproductive age lasts, the more it can reproduce.
I hope that FTP-master agrees. They've been okay with the ATI and nVidia drivers being shipped this way for a rather long time so there is hope.
Well, technically you could setup internal only email servers and addresses. In fact, it might even make sense for some companies to go to a whitelist-only approach for most employees' addresses. Unsolicited content could filter through a single mailbox.
I don't need to know the details of how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive so why would I need to know about how code functions at a fundamental level in order to play Angry Birds?
Computer equipment for schools is all about limiting how they can be used. iPad are given trackers. Desktops are locked behind content filters. The last thing anyone wants is some kid running unauthorized code.
I already hate group chat. For my use case, it's demonstrably worse than email. I imagine for many (possibly the vast majority) this is the case.

The thing is, as I've seen in this, group chat has a "cuteness" to it. Just like IRC back in the day (or today depending on if you still use it), people are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons. This isn't a tool challenge; both email and group chat can be equally informal and cute. I contend that email /still/ is a better mechanism given the non-realtime nature of it.

But then again, the realtime nature of group chat is what some like. It's precisely what I don't like. I like 1-1 chat quite a bit, though I very quickly default to video in these cases as well (higher fidelity, quicker, less prone to written miscommunication).

Hipchat/Slack/IRC are great for some use cases that require the type of communication (specifically I think of operations, incidents or things along those lines). I feel other general team communication in these mechanisms is, well, overblown. My gut tells me PRs are better for much of what group chat serves, and if not PRs, email/ML are still great. And don't forget getting everyone into a room or video hangout.

I don't particularly like email, but I don't hate it either. I do, however, very much dislike group chat.
Encryption is optional. Online syncing (w/ Simplenote) is optional.
I hated group chat before it was cool. The last time I used slack, there was no equivalent of a sender blacklist (or even just a /mute like in IRC).
How Fast Is Your Site? Measure It with Load Focus
While I agree with most of this websites recommendations I thought this line ironically looked too long.

echo "200 fucking characters long. Keep it to a nice 60-80 and users might actually read more " | wc -c

I was right.

89
The Effect of Companies’ Late Stage Venture Financings on Their IPOs [pdf]
Once again I find myself looking at code you wrote and appreciating it. If we ever meet in real life I owe you some beers.
I'm not sure I agree... This [1] is from Apollo 17, and I don't think the quality is any worse than these new ones.

[1] http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-134-...
If the pictures aren't in colors how do you know the moon is black and white?
Maintain open minds about the conspiracy theorists?

What do I gain by entertaining crazy wrong ideas? Other than practise in refuting crazy ideas.