skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The point about money attracting the wrong kind of people is (I think) accurate.

We live in a time where moral hazard was effectively removed for people at the top of the economic food chain. The 2008 financial crisis should have wiped out the bad players, leaving them bankrupt and starting from the bottom to crawl their way back up. The bad bets, bad ideas and fraudulent practices that should have served as a cautionary tale to others instead became best practices. I don't think it is so much that money attracts the wrong kind of people, its that the wrong kind of people still have power because of crony capitalism.
I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.
Lol. So true. I had a co-worker that I talked with several times a week about technical issues via HipChat for almost a year before I met him in person and the entire time I knew nothing about him other than he was a guy or identified as a guy and he was really good at his job (we have a few trans co-workers, so I don't assume cis-male). When I finally met him, it turns out that he was on the same floor about 50 meters away despite the fact that we're at a company with 1500 engineers spread across multiple offices.
I'm not sure what there is to recommend about this Applied Crypto Hardening guide, which seems to be in draft form. The section on SSH is just a couple of snippets from sshd config files with no explanation about the choice of parameters. And copy-pasting config file snippets from a random guide book hardly consistutes security best practice.
16 CSS Lessons via Post-It Notes
You're sunk when you have an influential SJW who's going to enforce unrealistic demographics and ultimately drive out the "undesirables" who made the company work.
Show HN: GoBelle. Like our mission?
People travel distances that would be unimaginable for some of us to get to work. 30-40 miles one way is not terribly rare. Or they spend the week living at the job site, and go home for the weekends.
> Just because someone has dark skin doesn't automatically mean they are "black" because black is more of a cultural thing than a race.

What are you trying to say? That sounds incredibly racist. Are you trying to say that someone who has dark skin but "acts white" is not black??
A really cool idea. Is this more or less how rootkits work and hide themselves? A system call is made to list the contents of a directory, and the rootkit excludes itself from that listing?
Radiation measurements on a commercial flight
Ok, that's cool. How long until we're able to use this and not have to worry about browser incompatibilities?
We accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Doge. It accounts for less than 1% of our donations/donors.
You and other commenters are focusing on lobbying in principle, and I generally agree with your explanations.

But what about lobbying in practice? The revolving door, gifts, paid trips, campaign contributions, etc. Wealthier individuals have a greater ability to influence politicians and not just because "they can afford education in rhetoric."

It is difficult in most cases to prove quid pro quo bribery. But I suspect most politicians, lobbyists and insiders generally agree that politics is increasingly a pay-to-play game.

An anecdote from Jack Abramoff, former lobbyist sentenced to 4 years for "trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips in exchange for political favors"[0]:

'...the number-one weapon used to influence a member of Congress was the promise of a future, high-paying job to a member's top staffers. 'Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to them, that was it. We owned them,' Abramoff said . 'And what does that mean? Every request ... of our clients, everything that we want, they're going to do. Not only that, they're going to think of things we can't think of to do' ... Such tactics resulted in Abramoff's lobbying firm holding sway in the offices of about 100 Congressional representatives, he says ... 'I would view that as a failure, because that leaves 335 offices that we didn't have strong influence in.' [1]

Note: Other than Abramoff, whom the media generally focused on during his corruption investigation, many other people were also convicted of crimes including officials from the White House, House of Representatives, congressional staff, Department of the Interior, Labor Department and Justice Department. [2]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff#Indian_tribes_gr...

[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/how-jack...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff#People_convicted...
It would be interesting to see if the TPP hooks up the lead industry to force more exposure it would seem the lead industry could st
In a large field of funds, some small sample will do better than others. That is just statistics.

Is there any objective evidence that there are people who consistently beat the market, over the long term? (And let's factor out those who use insider information)
I am wondering what people think about the future of it. Any idea?
Multitasking Is Bad, Multiprojecting Is Good
Um, mostly no. This can be trivially detected only when you are changing things already pushed.

Being a dvcs, you create atleast one commit on your local repo before pushing to a remote. That one (or more) commit can be changed to point at anyone and pushed.
> Bear in mind that Jerry Pournelle is a very right wing guy and was right wing at the time of the Vietnam war, so he looks for confirmation of his own pro war views.

That means you have to read his work with a critical eye. It doesn't mean he's wrong. Communists have done similar things elsewhere.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=3y4uAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=P...

"Castro assured the world that his revolution belonged to neither the Communists nor the capitalists, that it was neither red nor black, but Cuban olive-green."

We know how that turned out.
You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your company and you will see them.

Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.
This is my favorite quote from this article "building services that “actually do something” is a recommended practice". This is an argument I make all the time at work when a team wants to create microservices to serve very specific data types so you can get, put, delete data about a Person, and Organization, or whatever.

The service endpoints are easy to define, easy to test, clean and simple... and nearly useless to expose to the frontend. Congrats - you've exposed the database over HTTP. The layer doesn't accomplish anything, so it's pointless. To my mind, every layer should _do something_ or it should be removed.

The end result in some cases has been creating microservices that clients can theoretically build upon, but the orchestration of them is super complex because the services are too data-specific rather than workflow-specific. To do something, a frontend has to make 6 calls just to gather data before it is even ready to present a page of UI.

I'm not making an argument against microservices, just the architecture of exposing data in tiny self-contained (self-absorbed?) chunks. Microservices can expose data that people may want in those tiny pieces, but they should be wrapped up together by other services to aggregate related data to expose to consumers that need to care about workflow. So build a Person service, Organization service, Blog Post service, whatever. But present a Context service that returns large collected pieces.
> Still shocked and saddened that some people around HN have this attitude. If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?

I think most people would take the word of a " woman close to you " but the important part is the "close to you", if it's between two strangers, " innocent until proven guilty " should apply as with any accusation of wrongdoing. The alternative is how internet lynch mobs form
Thanks for the hint, next time I see poor performance I'll give that a try.
It depends on what browsers you need to support. Based on this data http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables I think it will be quite some time before you see this in sites that need broad browser compatibility. Surely there will be (is?) a shim that will come along.
Mondo smoke – vendita sigarette elettroniche
~5 years depending on who you're targetting.
As a member of this product's target market (blind myself) I wish they'd put a bit more effort into making their site accessible. There appear to be various images with no useful alt text, for instance. I also wish the front page actually tried to market to me. Would be nice to know what OS this is running, whether it's a full-featured Android device or just something I can send files to, whether I can run it as a peripheral with my desktop, etc. I'm a bit worn out on all the fluffy "making blind people more independent and employable" messaging I see from these types of projects which seems to ignore the fact that I'm already quite independent and employable, and maybe at the end of the day I think about things other than my "independence and employability metric."

Interesting tech, and if the price isn't prohibitive I'd be down to buy one. But I wish more folks in this space designed traditional landing pages and actually made them accessible. Too many access tech companies don't focus on their message or don't convey it in a way that lets me know what any reasonable buyer would want to know.

Ugh, WTF, so I click on their preorder link, which is apparently a JavaScript anchor, and my screen reader gets no indication that a preorder page/box/whatever has come up. Maybe I could poke the page a bit longer and find one, but I think I'll pass. I hope the final product is built better than this landing page. Don't like being so critical but it doesn't look like any usability testing for the target market was done with this page and it kind of befuddles me.
I actually can't tell if this is serious or should be on The Onion.
So they won't measure it because they can't afford to fix it? It still sounds like corruption to me.
If they didn't change the user-facing parts and just fixed the security issues, I think a lot more users would upgrade.

What's the actual risk though? I have a feeling these users are also the more experienced and cautious ones, the ones with JS off by default, the ones who aren't going to be as easily tricked by social engineering, and that already removes 99% of the attack area.
Business goodwill is a thing. Empty buildings don't earn rent.
South Korea did manage to maintain the human rights standards of other US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel until 1987; hopefully a little northern belligerence will get them back in line.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm really inspired by this on-the-nose third-hand bit of propaganda, and believe that if we hadn't lost our nerve at just 1.3 million deaths, we may have been able to save Vietnam from the evils of communism.
hello world is outdated

i think this alone probably turns away the majority of would be computationally literate individuals

as i was being taught programming i was so ridiculously underwhelmed by a program writing out hello world

here i am on this machine that can play my favourite movie, entertain me with a beautiful interactive gaming experience, and connect me to the world's information and i am supposed to be wowed by 'hello world'

i only understood the power of hello world when i became interested in embedded systems

so much time setting up the ide and connections and circuits and somehow i managed to make this previously idle pile of organised metals print hello world

that was a a profound experience but this was years after i had become a competent programmer and had the understanding of physics to appreciate what was happening

if you want to teach programming then you have to show people that the process can help them do something they want to do

there used to be classes to solely teach typing without looking

everyone i knew hated it, it was a pain for everyone in the class, then instant messenger came out and suddenly everyone was a professional typist banging out 60wpm

if social media was only available to people through bash scripts i assure you everyone would be able to program in a few weeks

because that is what people want to use a computer for right now

but that would be regressive at this point

so i'd suggest the future of programming education should be folded into mathematics education

learning times tables? write a script to express that table

even better would be to pull problems from a web api, solve, and post
Look at more traditional businesses like restaurants. If there is a restaurant in the area, you might think - oh dear, no place for me here. But no, on the contrary, businesses thrive because of the environment around them. This existing restaurant offers "local food", so you offer Italian or "for single mothers with little kids". The spot becomes full of restaurants and there always will be customers to come to your place because they just happen to be in the area.

You go to a flower market - there are tens of different vendors selling similar quality, similar product at the same price and at the same closed space. And they are doing fine.

Or look at a traditional marketplace - you have tens of farmers selling very similar product. And yet they are coming together to sell their fruits and vegetables. True, maybe there are different dynamics there, there are more buyers than vegetable stands and if the line is longer than 5 people you move to another stand.

But I believe the same works with software and Internet Businesses. It does not harm anyone if there are different tools doing similar things. Look at digital cameras - there are hundreds of them and there is a market for each.

A great example is Coca Cola and Pepsi. Pepsi was created because it was understood that with the market saturated with one product there would obviously be people who would buy Pepsi just because it's not Coca Cola.

Competition is a very sound and healthy environment to work at because you can perfect your product and narrow down your target audience. As @petercooper said: because you see that there already is a business that thrives, you save yourself a lot of trouble testing if anybody wants to buy such a product.

Now marketing is the key.
This is why I tend to trend in many comments to talking about "identity in-groups". I do occasionally use examples based on race or gender, but abstractly, I prefer "identity in-group" because it explicitly highlights that whatever it is we are talking about is an abstract concept that is not reality but something that exists as discrete quanta merely because we believe it does.
I've recently experienced what I believe was likely branch predictor failure. I rewrote essentially the same algorithm, with the same complexity, in a completely new way, to reduce constant factors. The new code was beautiful, and I was expecting perhaps 15-20% performance improvement. (40% of the runtime in the old version was in one function, the new version should, and did, call that function with less data to grind on average). Memory access patterns should be identical. Grand.

So what happened with my standard benchmark on Haswell (GCC 5.3, -march=native -O2)?

Old version, without PGO: ~8 minutes (baseline)

Old version, with PGO on: ~9 minutes (yes, PGO made it slower)

New version, without PGO: 11 minutes (60% slower)

New version, with PGO on: 7 minutes (~15% faster)

All of these benchmarks were replicated with a common set of functions tagged noinline, and I inspected the assembly to see if there was a difference with regard to loop unrolling. Nope, no unrolling. Afaict it appeared to be entirely to do with the way GCC had laid out code with respect to branches. The differences were minor in key areas and seemed like arbitrary compiler choices.

I eventually narrowed this down with callgrinds branch-predictor simulator to a few hot spots. I added a redundant if-statement to check for and short-circuit a common case, even though it shouldn't have mattered, and a few __builtin_expects, and suddenly I was getting the 15% speedup without PGO.
This was a really useful feature. By seeing all the comments, you could ctrl+F and find ones you were looking for. I.e. comments by a specific person or about a specific topic. And before the days of Plus, it was necessary to find people that had replied to your comments, or read comments in the proper order. It sort of still is, because of how mangled comments are with their weird threading and sorting system.

It's also very useful for search engines. Comments on the video determine what keywords the video should be indexed by. This follows their move a few years ago of removing the tags from video descriptions, which also seriously hurts search engines.

Now most comments will probably not be indexed. I found this necessary awhile ago when I was searching for something embarrassing I wrote years ago and wanted to delete.

I also just generally dislike the trend of infinite scrolling and very confusing sorting systems. I used to have a very hard time finding old posts on Facebook because of that. The all_comments page offered an alternative for that, but now you have no choice.

I'm sure there will be a bunch of comments complaining about youtube comments, or people not understanding why anyone would want to read them. There really is a big problem with the quality of youtube comments. That's because most of youtube is lowest-common-denominator stuff with no moderation.

But there are sections of youtube that aren't terrible. There are academic lectures on youtube. There are channels about math, programming, science, and every obscure subject you can think of. I've found some of the most insightful ideas from youtube videos. And the comments on videos like that will generally be better, reflecting the audience of people that watch those things. Video creators use comments to get feedback and talk to other people interested in that subject.
The relevant comparison, though, I'd whether you'd rather live in a contemporary Vietnam after it had been under control of an American-backed military junta since the 70s plagued by a constant brutal Communist insurgency. Latter may be preferable, but it's not a huge difference.
This is amazingly well-timed. Just yesterday I was complaining that the Python SQL libraries are annoying and verbose, and that I wished there was a library as good as requests is for HTTP.
I think the "race supremacists" were only supported in South Africa as the ANC and all the rebels were Communist. Letting the USSR get control of South Africa would have caused massive problems for the West.

I think it was an example of "real politik".
Like most here I always liked math and science. Nonetheless, growing up, I never felt like I was given a meaningful answer on "why do I need to learn math?" I think we can do better with programming.

The anecdote the OP gives, "learn coding so your really boring job [no offense to OP] will be less painful" is useful. Even better for high-school kids: "learn coding so you can Instagram all day at your job while your program works for you." I'm not condoning this, and obviously it's better to actually inspire true curiosity (extremely hard), but I think this kind of message would work for a lot of kids.
I'm not sure 30-40 miles one way is terribly unusual even in relatively urbanized coastal areas :-) But I agree with your basic point. I'm not personally familiar with how shifts typically work with oil drilling on land, but when I was working in the offshore drilling industry it was week-on/week-off in the Gulf and many of the workers came significant distances--often from rural towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama.
> we're comparing to Rust, whose namespace system seems very similar to a "using namespace std".

Not at all; only if you use globs ("use foo::*"). D's namespace system is like that, but not Rust's.
...and they showed photos of Powerpoint slides that were pretty damning as well. Sure, those slides could also be faked, but I think that's well past the believable threshold for giving the benefit of a doubt.
Yes the 'sexual-harassment stuff' is unfortunate, as both accusations made by Julie Horvath appear to be baseless. Here's the second accusation she made:

Horvath had what she referred to as an awkward, almost aggressive encounter with another GitHub employee, who asked himself over to ‘talk,’ and then professed his love, and ‘hesitated’ when he was asked to leave,” TechCrunch reported in March. Hurt from my rejection, [he] started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment,” Horvath told TechCrunch in an email. “His behaviour towards female employees … especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting" (http://www.businessinsider.com.au/github-harassment-story-20...)

In case anyone actually cares about facts and evidence, rather than pushing some social agenda, here are the results of the independent investigation in to the matter: https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-investigation-...
Possibly, but only if people actively choose usernames that remove hints of such things, avoid disclosing their ethnicity or gender, avoid using stereotypical male or female communication patterns... it's a rather unstable equilibrium.
In addition to the other comments on this subthread, a point I think is worth making:

If you're providing both an app and a server for the app to talk to you, you control both ends of the TLS connection and can pin however you'd like; you're not limited to HPKP and key-continuity. Secure apps have been doing custom pins of TLS keys long before HPKP got rolled out.
It'd be really interesting to see how long before that niche is re-filled.
This is the exact opposite of the "rich getting richer!" Whenever we start discussing income and wealth trends in the United States we always neglect how we as a society have gotten richer through technological progress. Even the poorest houses in the USA have computers and tv's that would blow the minds of people from the 1990's and be incomprehensible to people from the 1950's.

Cameras have gotten better and better while getting cheaper. Twenty years ago the only people taking photos of this quality were professional photographers. Now we have college students who can work really hard over a school break and be able to afford a great camera setup.
The syntax is verbose and ugly compared to SASS
> I think well designed C++ can maintain parity, especially with async() using http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread.

No, the entire point of Rust's "fearless concurrency" is guaranteed data race freedom by the compiler, something C++ doesn't even try to enforce. Modern C++ can still easily have data races.