skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"SELECT" isn't broken. (h/t The Pragmatic Programmer, by Hunt and Thomas) Junior programmers will sometimes think the problems they encounter are the fault of bugs in well-tested system software, rather than their own code. (1)

The implementers of the legacy code aren't stupid. It's very common for junior programmers, tossed into the swamp of some codebase that's been around for years through many different hands, think the code is junk and the original implementers were fools. Usually, it's just that the problem is much more complicated than the juniors understand, and that's how the code got that way.

New tools probably won't solve the problem. There's a tendency with junior programmers to whine about the antique tools in use, convinced that the new Foobaz framework or Language X will magically clear up the issues they encounter. But the problems with code usually aren't from the tools used to build the code - they're from failure to understand the requirements, and time/scope/resource constraints on development.

Perfect isn't as important as finished. It's easy to get caught up in perfectionism. It's a good excuse to avoid releasing something you find embarrassing into the world. But the more time you squander polishing that turd, the less time you have for the next tur... er, cool new project.

If you can't write a test for it, you don't understand it well enough. Writing good tests is hard. It's easy to fall into a trap of "That's too hard to test. I'll just sort of check manually to make sure it works". This will bite you in the ass later!

(1) My first really good bug as a junior programmer actually was a "SELECT is broken" kind of problem (technically, mmap() was broken). I went to a great deal of effort to prove to the senior programmers (and then IBM) that my code was actually correct and I had an OS bug. And if some junior programmer came to me today and said a deep system call like mmap() was broken, I'd laugh at her and tell her to check her code. So sometimes, SELECT actually is broken - just not as often as junior programmers think.
-- it would take less effort for out of shape folks to get above the threshold

True, but it would also take less effort for them to see improvements at that level of fitness as well. You had to work harder, because your body already handled the easy stuff and wouldn't be challenged.
Why Shares of TripAdvisor Inc Are Soaring Today
Probably a silly question here (and I've asked it before), but why exactly do we only have dodgy download sites for Windows programs anyway?

I mean, other platforms have decent stores and download repositories. And games on Windows... well, you've got a lot of good sites and services there. Everything from Steam to Good Old Games to the average game mod or ROM hack download site is moderated and mostly kept free of adware and other crap.

Is there really no one interested in providing a site or service that explicitly disallows bundling and ad supported crap (or that outright removes it from anything submitted to them)? Does no one with any ethics exist in this space?
Maybe it would help to re-frame the relevant part of the (apparent) argument:

Oscillations show up everywhere in nature, and even a pattern as specific as a frequency sweep with ringdown could be the result of many different phenomena. Even if in this case many possible sources have been ruled out, there must be others that we do not know about. Since the only observation we have to go on is the signal (so far), we should remember that the cause implied by the model is contingent on the signal not being one of these unknown sources.

Some commentary: Imagining alternative explanations is only half of the work that comes next. Once more of these alternatives are found, we also need new experiments that will be designed to rule them out. It sounds like the space-based interferometers will go a long way toward ruling out potential "terrestrial" factors. And if the same signal is detected in both ground-based and space-based systems that is an even greater step forward.
You seem to be guessing, when you could look this up very easily.

"Every metric ton (1,000 kg) of waste glass recycled into new items saves 315 kilograms (694 lb) of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere during the creation of new glass."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling
I agree that 10,000 walking steps isn't enough, however, it's a great metric for monitoring throughout the day and realizing (on occasion) you haven't done much for the day and you need to get out and hustle.

Also, on the Fitbit, their analysis of a particular run with regard to your heart rate is very helpful.
EBayquality Classifieds – Find Buy  Sell Free Marketplace
Anecdotally, I experience somewhat higher perceived effort at a given (moderate) heart rate when better trained. For example, my resting and max heart rates have been nearly constant at 36-40 and 170-175 since about 18 (I'm 32 now). During that time, I've been a top-10 NCAA nordic skier, alpinist, and a casual runner (2y in Chicago; 'nuff said).

I try to avoid "junk" time in the 128-142 zone because the intensity is too high for recovery/endurance benefits, but not high enough to target aerobic threshold or VO2max. When in mediocre shape and trying to do a lower intensity workout, I accidentally end up in that range more easily than when in racing shape. Meanwhile, threshold and VO2max intensities are easier to sustain when better trained, though I can hit similar max heart rates either way. I interpret this as the lactic acid versus heart rate curves have different profiles even with similar endpoints.

I've also seen acute short-term effects. For example, I did a 160-mile backcountry race after a competitive nordic ski season. For about a week after the race, I couldn't get my heart rate above 145 (30 beats below my normal max). During that week, I did VO2max-intensity intervals with a well-matched regular training partner and could match a pace that would normally require me to be at 160 while I was at just 140. The pace felt more comfortable than expected (probably "felt like 150"), but there was no headroom to go faster.
Been using fitbit for over 2 years now (~ 7.5Million steps logged). Have the data being pushed to other web apps (MyFitnessPal, FitStudio, Higi, Acheivemint, Walgreens balance rewards). Also, trained up and ran 2 half-marathons in this time. Lost 60lbs so far, first 20lbs was from increased walking and diligent choices via calorie logging in MyFitnessPal. Fitbit is not the be all end all, but it definitely keeps me aware.
Flickr?
To play devil's advocate here: isn't there a difference between harmless flirtation and actually attempting to initiate a sexual relationship? Maybe these older, married men miss the days of their youth when they could be around pretty, young women and flirt with them (and more...), and in their current lives they don't have that any more because they're in a boring, monogamous marriage to someone who's not so young and pretty any more and maybe their marriage is rather unhappy too, and their flirtation is just a way to make themselves feel happy, even if they really know that these young women have zero interest in actually having any kind of physical relationship with them. Maybe they just like the interaction, and it serves as a happy distraction to their otherwise unhappy existence.
> Meanwhile, the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years.

No, everything they do will not be encrypted in 15 years. Most relevantly, except when the crime at issue itself is an act of communication, the crime won't be encrypted, or even subject to encryption, so all the usual police work that enables solving crime based on the actual criminal act and the evidence naturally attaching thereto will remain available.
"Heard any good jokes, lately?"

Yes, it seemed more like production companies got scared off than the public had any problem with him.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11089932 and marked it off-topic.
www.tellyourexwhatyoureallythink.com
Thought this was funny for Valentines Day

Lost my password and karma as user fitgreen
It really, really depends on the company. A certain company has interviewed and rejected me three times, for the last two times the interviewers showed up with lists of questions from previous times.
You have a point that should be up for debate. The issue though is that the real cause for income disparity between men and women is not misogyny by men. And that we should not accept the current framing of that debate.
If we don't want to subsidize overpopulation, then maybe we should accept that women will sacrifice income over the wellbeing of their offspring. Something's gotta give at some point.
Thanks, that sounds really cool and would definitely be something we will look into pretty soon :)
Request for Advice: How to interact with memes in the work place
TLDR: Looking for tips to finding the appropriate level of memeing at work.

Memes seem to be a biological drive, so as technology becomes more and more efficient (IMing, Social Media, etc.) Memes become more and more prevelant among the general populace and especially the work place.

We can see this "normification" through the filtering of memes by The internet funnel of memeing: 4chan => Facebook
(or whatever intermediate websites/steps in between)

Let's say you are a fan of more risque memes: (Abstract Pepe, Smug Pepe, High Test, Arch Linux etc.), how can one take the temperature of their work environment as to not stand out too much?

How does one find a work culture that will help you express yourself in the most lazy and beautiful way possible (i.e. through preferred memes).

People have their tastes, and no one wants to offend their work collegues, yet no one wants to feel stifled in their expression.

I feel as though in most proper work places, memeing is limited to /giphy in slack channels and pushing boundaries is frowned upon (for good reason?). Perhaps common sense says only DM your memes to people you trust. But don't clandestine memes go against a culture of inclusivity?

Are there any ways to find out the memeing culture at a company before joining? Is the only solution to try and create a startup with the appropriate level of dank memes from day one? How do you select engineers who have the proper taste in memes? Is that discrimination?

I feel as though memes matter because they define the level of abstraction that a company is willing to take as to the importance of their product. I apologize for wasting anyone's time if I'm the only person who cares about these sorts of things.
> We have essentially a decade of evidence

For extremely large values of "decade".
Thanks lomnakkus
Having gone through a heart failure, I can attest that walking is godsend. Even of moderate effort, as long as it's more than 30 minutes. Small hills are bonuses.

-- sent from my dead-oriented design desktop wheelchair.
Torrents Time bundles certificates and private keys
Love the delivery in this talk...
Your parents sound like Hillary, Cruz, Bush, or Rubio voters.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my argument, which is that electronic evidence definitely plays a nonzero role in law enforcement today.
This seems the most ridiculous - internet of shit - thing; when in the video he turns the "Vessyl" and it reads beer ... just look at your can, it's written here.
Tracking liquid calories is easy, you drink your soda can and the number of kcal is indicated clearly. You drink water from the tap and ... you consume 0 kcal.
Quantum Informant Injection
Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.
I and my wife both have 50-53 bpm at rest, mine certain periods were 48 and doctor demanded to do an echocardiogram even after I explained I do a lot of sport. Everything was fine. Btw TLDR, we got those bpms doing crossfit 3/4 times-week (4/5 my wife), we rarely walk at all. I switched to crossfit recently (a few months), before I did powerlifting + cardio for years which provides very similar results from the POV of heart rate, AFAIK. Btw I think my level of cardio fitness is improving with CrossFit compared to PL.
You can see which life science/health companies Google Ventures has invested in here:

http://www.gv.com/portfolio/#life

Several diagnostics and products companies in there. Also several aimed more at basic health care services.
My view is somewhat different. Ultimately, all the progress in technology is to make us live better lives, and to accomplish more of what we aim to accomplish. Transportation, energy, computation, etc., are all trying to accomplish the same. Most of these are external to us till now, and we are at the cusp of integrating them into ourselves. I can see why companies are investing significant amount in that regards. 100 years down the line, that's where most of our technology will be used.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11088674 and marked it off-topic.
What to Say to Your Employees After Your Stock Loses 40% of Its Value
This.

I really would like to see at least Debian get to a point where init is actually a swappable component in the real world.
in the context of agrarian society

We're not in an agrarian society, and in case you haven't noticed almost everyone gets the hell out of that situation as soon as they can when other opportunities present themselves.

a world of individuals pursuing their own interests can only fail

You say this, implying the inevitable failure of capitalism; then you oppose communism; do you really want to go straight back to feudalism?
Face it: There's no money in open source
Agrarian society was only practical because a wealth of unused resources was available to each individual. Since then, we have barely managed to postpone an impending Malthusian catastrophe by optimizing the crap out of high-tech agriculture. The world isn't growing, and a population of seven billion is worse off in most ways a than a population of one billion would be.
Blinding light: The US crackdown on not-so-harmless laser strikes
#RIPTwitter? 19 Points That Show Exactly How We Got Here
For sure. I didn't mean to imply that they do.
I'd love to improve my French, but would probably like to do it while working at a new job, not before a job
Some services probably have continuous deploy too
>>nobody was willing to give up any data, fearing they would lose their own value in the system

I suspect this is correct, particularly between the insurance companies and the providers. The coding of what exactly was done directly drives the reimbursement that the providers get. Thus, there's a clear incentive to be opaque and show the insurers only what you need to. Sometimes for good reason (insurers denying coverage solely for cost reasons), sometimes not (billing fraud).
Your "see-also's" provide good perspective. It's not just legal.

Some of the situations you identify (dating, friendship, sales, as well as interviews) have the attribute of "found nothing compelling". There was no single problem, but nothing emerged in the package or the interview that stood out.

In this case, the lack-of-match is not obviously the candidate's fault, and trying to provide feedback is forcing a conclusion ("that's your problem right there") that isn't justified by the information gathered.

And the best thing in such a case may be to say nothing, because you know nothing. ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")
Their pricing model is different, which I think keeps the base feature-set neutered. They try to up-sell you to JIRA and Confluence, which disincentives them from improving the base tools, IMO.
I made a Ruby version [0] in case anyone is interested.

[0] https://github.com/matp/himawari
LOL. Who are they selling to mostly? Let me guess....straight men.
Yeah, if you're someone who's already spending three days a week at the gym, you probably don't need a Fitbit. Especially in the GP's case where it seems like he may have substituted his gym time with a Fitbit.
With Fitbit, you can define your step length. This makes for more accurate data analysis.
Ask HN: How to issue API usage warnings via compiler?
What is the state of the art in giving library programmers the ability to generate heuristic compiler warnings for problematic code written using their APIs?

Such a compiler warning would suggest a better way of coding something using the API.

The compiler warnings would be about very specific issues that tend to come up a lot with people using their APIs.
Those studies are seriously flawed imo as their methodology is to filter on non-anglicized Chinese names and use that as a proxy for foreign money. That would describe a lot of people that aren't recent immigrants, like me.

If anything, those studies show that ethinic-Chinese people are more predisposed to buying a house than renting, even when renting is much cheaper.
You've posted several such dismissive comments to HN. Please don't do that any more.

Substantive criticism is fine, but it should be thoughtful, not snarky and shallow.
> Window scaling was definitely on my radar, but IIRC the Linux SYN cookie implementation is supposed to encode if this TCP option is set in the initial SYN as well, so I don't see how this would explain thing unless the implementation is broken.

Yeah, it's supposed to be encoded, but it's possible it's broken. Given that you can reproduce it with a low somaxconn, it seems like the router wasn't the problem, the router just was able to more easily trigger the problem.

> I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying about SYN+ACKs not being retransmitted, I think they should be if they get lost, it's only the final ACK from the client that doesn't get retransmitted if its lost, but that would cause different symptoms.

SYN+ACK will normally be retransmitted, but if you're in synflood conditions, it means the kernel is going to throw away state for SYN+ACKs, and then it no longer has the state to retransmit. It will reconstruct the state if it gets an ACK that is a decodable syncookie, or if it gets a retransmitted SYN, since it'll make a new SYN+ACK for that (although that may end up with a different sequence number).
Ouch, automatic locale detection, and badly in need of a (proper) translator (for at least Dutch). And no way to switch language that I can find (wouldn't be the first time that was translated with "").

I'm currently using https://blogtrottr.com to get e-mail updates for RSS/Atom feeds.
> You absolutely cannot ban a customer from your service

I guess that depends on the shop and the respect it grants its workers. In my case, at one company we would keep files about offenders and would report them to their managers, who would usually put someone else in charge of communicating with us. At another company we were simply told to cut them off, because tech support fees do not pay for abuse, end of story.

In most cases, any tech support contract worth at least four digits will involve too many people to be cut simply because of an individual hothead here or there, and in any case the wear this sort of bad customers put on your people is not worth whatever money is coming in. Managers who don't understand this are not doing tech support, they are running a sweatshop and they should feel bad, and I am sorry if you met anyone like that.
Google says will not participate in 2016 U.S. airwaves auction
They are tone deaf to the U.S. too.

After all the financial system dumped huge amounts of money into oil development, and then the oil producers outdid themselves and now predictably the cost of oil is down.

Other than Google offering Google Fiber in a few markets, which has inspired GPON offerings from many other providers, SV companies rarely take up the cause of improving internet access in the United States such as modernizing the telecom system to put fiber or equivalent (pretty much) everywhere.

It's a predictable investment although it would pay off over time and somehow I am sure S.V. people would get richer because of it, but they don't want to rock the boat with the telecoms...
The doc says it's equivalent to sinit: suckless init. That led to a git site I don't understand cuz I don't know git. I downloaded the zip to see if readme had anything. Here's what it says:

"sinit is a simple init. It was initially based on
Rich Felker's minimal init. Why? I wanted to get rid of Busybox init on my toy distro. How? There are 3 signals that sinit will act on.

SIGUSR1: powers off the machine.
SIGINT: reboots the machine (or alternatively via ctrl-alt-del).
SIGCHLD: reap children"

So, one or more of these could use some better documentation. Or at least more accessible for non-Git users.

EDIT to Add: I like the idea of rewriting key stuff like this in safer, easier-to-maintain languages like Ocaml. Really nice stuff there. Past that, I can't derive the value proposition without a page detailing what it does vs alternatives.
Sugar, corn, carbohydrates and bad science from folks like Ancel Keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys).

Look at something like a fruit juice from Odwalla, it says 'Super Food' on the label so it must be healthy right? Compare how much sugar is in a 16oz 'superfood' fruit juice (http://www.odwalla.com/products/smoothies/original-superfood - 49 grams) vs. a 16oz Coca-Cola (http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c... - 52 grams). We're drinking the same amount of crap but with a prettier feel good label.
There probably is a "hard reboot" feature, but an RTC circuit keeps date and time as long as it has power and the next boot attempt runs into the same bug.
That isn't really true. The more "resources" you have, the more stress you put on your communications mechanisms, like issue tracking.
Sorry, to be clear, I'm not renting. It was just an example.
Have you figured out a way to have a shared (family) photo library? My wife and I use different iCloud accounts, are part of iCloud Family. However, I cannot setup a single shared library for all the kid's pictures we take.
Most jurisdictions have a "homestead exemption" that reduces property taxes on owner-occupied property (though not to half, as this policy does).
While fixing everything about times and dates seems great in the abstract, these guys sound approximately like the French revolutionaries proposing their new calendar.

And at least the French came up with new names when they were doing things differently. The headaches that come from relabeling the calendar -- to one that looks confusingly the same, except that "January 1" has a different meaning than it used to -- would probably cause a century of bugs and confusion.
Huge opportunity here for a startup to be building a beautiful, well-maintained alternative to Google Voice, basically Grandcentral all over again :)
Nice name. If people don't get the reference, Teletraan was the name of a series of computers from the Transformers series: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Teletraan_I_%28G1%29
This is so excellent and looks fun. I'm really unconfident with my web animating abilities, and I feel I can learn a lot from this project! Thanks!