skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What happens, however, when you decide to use multiple characters instead of a single character (to create a pattern for example)?

Then you can’t use left-pad, because it doesn’t support that and you don’t maintain it. So you make your own module to suit your needs, which is a very good thing and returns somewhat to the actual point, which is that anyone can make their own left-pad that matches the existing module, so the author’s wishes wouldn’t have a huge impact even if they were that the module stayed down, which they weren’t. Phew!
Very small programs don't solve complex tasks.

That's not quite right (some simple algorithms solve complex tasks). I think it is more true that very small programs can't model or facilitate complex interactions.

Your point about shifting complexity around is a good one.
I've been BLARPing since I graduated.
Yeah, when I saw the screenshots I immediately thought that it looked like the HQx filter.
I feel like the best way to avoid a disaster like this is for developers to avoid using registered brand names when they write their packages.

It's not difficult, since there are all sorts of rights brand owners can't get you on.

1. You don't really need a catchy name for an open source project, since you're not in competition for funds. Call it something descriptive. Descriptive words can't usually be protected, so you should be fine.

2. In most countries, using your personal name is fine irrespective of any IP rights.

3. If you want to use a catchy name anyway, check on the USPTO TESS database for registered rights. If any are live, choose another name.

Remember when Groupon tried to register Gnome for software applications[0], and the open source community (rightly) came out in force supporting the Gnome foundation? But when it's the other way round, it makes no difference.

The problem isn't IP law, it's just bias.

[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2846632/groupon-decides-to-le...
This shows the claims from kik messenger are not valid, at least in Germany.
You don't have to listen to random strangers' judgments though.
"Published on the day Julius Caesar was murdered 2060 years ago, after crossing the Rubicon. Julie Rubicon. Nice touch."
As a narcoleptic, I have no trouble falling asleep, the trouble is with staying asleep and getting deep rest during my sleeping periods. I've found that some nutritional strategies work tremendously well.

http://main.poliquingroup.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Ar...

Personally, I only supplement 4 nutrients and it has been a tremendous sleep quality improvement.

Vitamin D3 in the AM
Taurine & Magnesium Glycinate prior to sleep. L-Theanine is also added depending on whether I took caffeine during the day.

For my wife who also has sleep problems, she takes Ambien, but Ambien + Taurine will knock her out, while she can still wake up on Ambien alone.
for limited anonymity
Here is a comment from the authors about residual confounding:
https://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2428...
Marina doesn't come across in the best light.
> - Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation

The next time you're on a death march, or even just the "usual" period of "sucking it up" at the end of a schedule, consider that the only people who will actually benefit from hitting the schedule are the project lead and the manager. The schedule is most likely imposed from sales and marketing without consultation.

Death marches and schedule success don't show on your resume unless you're one of those two people; "Brought in X, Y and Z on schedule."

You are a stepping stone.
An issue a little bit like this that I've seen is overzealous admins who block ICMPv6, creating PMTU black holes. Short web pages load, and long pages hang. Too bad I discovered this during tax season a couple years ago, and the affected site was eftps.gov.
I've been using Tarsnap for personal, encrypted, deduplicated backups for a few years. It's not shiny, but it works fantastically.

https://www.tarsnap.com/
I may not be a fan of Apple any more, but I don't understand how this is sad.

The innards have been upgraded regularly since 2012, and the CPUs and GPUs in the latest 15" models are pretty competitive to everything else on the market not counting machines for gamers.
Given that the posts can be from folks that work in the company Facebook would be trading stocks for, that would count as insider trading.
Yes, negligible. Cruising on the highway uses about 20kW. 50W total is 0.25% of that. If you drive for three hours, the total energy consumption of the headlights during that time would be enough to move your car another half mile. Minor stuff like the precise air pressure in your tires, minor variations in wind, or different road surfaces will have a much bigger effect.

Put it another way: if you somehow convinced the car to leave the headlights on permanently, and you weren't plugged in, the headlights by themselves would take nearly two months to drain a 60kWh traction battery from 100%.
I've been getting the same feeling lately. There are definitely a handful of companies in this batch that are solving real problems, but I can't help but feel the majority of them are not true value-ads in a world where real problems exist.
I think the safe default for software and key operational processes has to be that if it hasn't been tested then it doesn't work.
> I am not sure if I was suddenly without money, the iPhone would be what I would want to give up.

Poor is when you have to dig through other peoples' trash to find food (I see this every week). I'm pretty sure you you really ended up poor you wouldn't give a damn about your iPhone except to sell it to buy food.
This bummed me out as well, but it's worth noting if you have an Apple Watch that has a barometer in it.
"Why does it look like the level of fear in Western Europe is so much higher today than in the 1970s and 1980s?"
I can only answer for Germany, but I doubt the level of fear was lower at the height of the RAF in the 70s/80s. There were fewer deaths than in, say, Paris, and the attacks were concentrated mostly at businessmen and politicians. Yet there was a very widespread fear in the late 70s and early 80s, and pretty desperate measures as well (google "Berufsverbot" - people in communist parties were forbidden to work in certain professions).
If you carefully read the fine article, you will notice that the author states:

"There are really only two reasons why people might have a computer that’s more than five years old:
1. They can’t afford an upgrade.
2. They don’t need an upgrade."

and then proceeds to examine and _dismiss_ #1 as a plausible motive for these comments.

What he is complaining about is disposable hardware. I am also bothered by this trend, and I'm concerned that it may become more difficult over time to avoid it. I'm typing this on a T430 with a removable hard drive, two SSD's, new RAM, new keyboard, new screen, new fan, and new OS. Try that with MacBook.

If _certain_ tech companies have their way it will be impossible to do anything useful with a machine that hasn't got a crypto-locked boot loader and soldered on hardware. It's debatable whether planned obsolescence is a motivating goal for this.

(It is arguable that semi manufactures are mostly competing with their own older hardware, and they aren't competing as well as they used to; phones still improve like PC's in the 90's, but that's not sustainable in the long run.)

In any case, planned obsolescence is at least a side effect of building non-upgradeable hardware, and that means you'll be compelled to throw away your hardware more often, whether you can afford to or not. For Apple, this means that 5 year old hardware _has_ to pathetic, and they obviously wouldn't admit that anyone else's is less pathetic than theirs.
> I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.

How true is this? I have noticed the proliferation of Macs in the developer community and I was wondering how much it would hurt me professionally by not owning one. Do devs really make snap judgements based on your platform of choice and could this impact me professionally in the long term?
It's not reasonable to be skeptical of every package. When you do that you get a mess of locally stored packages that end up out of date.

Should really just be a 'publish is forever' mentality
True, but I can also understand how for some time iPad 1 level hardware was just a bit too limiting. Now the bloated upgrades, as I said, did also help forcing users to "want" the new one more.

The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.
Blendle has no flat-rate, but if you buy several articles from a single issue of a publication, Blendle will simply give you access to the complete issue (e.g., today's New York Times) when the amount you paid for the separate articles exceeds the cost of the complete issue.
The reason the wind got taken out of my sails for creating my own apps is I worked for three small businesses in a row that had trouble getting enough marketing and visibility for their apps/software to sell enough to stay in business, and I'm hesitant to take on the risk myself, even though I think I have better ideas than some of the projects I worked on.

For the Apple store in particular I've seen it get so crowded without adequate app discovery mechanisms in place that it seems like without serious marketing money you're essentially rolling the dice on how successful your app is going to be. I don't really want to spend a bunch of my time on that, when I could spend it on other pursuits.

But maybe this is a mistaken perception? Why do you think it's so simple to do? Just because you've found success or is your approach different than the norm somehow?
Overly dramatic. The content is not suspicious at all, it's clearly a script to generate the package.json for an arbitrary package name passed in as an argument to the script.

I'm guessing @nj48 used a script to go over the official list of unpublished modules and attempt to generate a placeholder for each of them.

The same user also published some actual (unmanipulated) forks of the original modules, so I'm guessing this is mostly a quick move to preempt any malicious hijacking by others.

There is no reason to assume the "hijacking" is malicious. Certainly not in the scripts. The user is active on GitHub and shows no indication of malicious intent.

However it IS worth pointing out that the unpublished modules should now be treated with caution if you still rely on them because even if the replacements are identical and benevolent you probably need to take action.
Anyone have a screenshot?
This is anecdotal, but my mother has an iPad and she vastly prefers using it to the computer for everything from email to images to web browsing.

I bought her a brand new iMac and it's basically been unused.
It's not the comment that was absurd. It was the fact that Apple seemingly has no answer as to why there are over 600 million people still using old PC's.

Instead of exploring why that might be the case they instead decided to mock these people.

Just bizarre.
I know Kingdom Rush isn't exactly the latest high-end 3D thing, but I did a double-take at the notion that hardware that's fine for gaming is too slow for internet browsing.
Nah, you're not taking in account Moore's Meta Law:

"Whenever Moore's law is no longer applicable, its definition is changed to accommodate some new version of 'computers get faster'."

Moore's Law was dead a long long time ago.
Insane, yes, but I guess it's just never really been that much of a problem until now. Hopefully something good will come out of this..
This is how much im going to spend on this stupid article.
Very true. It could also be due to the long-term contracts that parents commit to as part of the family plans with iPhones attached. It's just another monthly expense that has become like a hard to give up utility.
> But why are you saying the copyright was transferred?

I don't think I did?

> I don't see anything that implies that. Someone got a copy of the code under an irrevocable license that grants them to right to re-publish it, and that's what they are doing.

Yeah mostly curious if the original author could, say, use the DCMA or something similar to force npm to take it down if he really wanted to.
I'm glad you posted that: everybody should read it and truly try to put themselves in those shoes.

I do not understand the fact that you seem to have posted it as a rebuttal to my post.

My post was meant as a criticism of another indignity that the poor often face: other peoples' (often baseless, and always condescending) criticisms of their financial decisions.

Their criticisms often carry the subtext that poor people are poor because they are wearing a $100 item of clothing or because they own a smartphone - in essence, those criticisms say that these people deserve to be poor and/or poor people don't deserve nice things.

I find such criticisms of poor people to be incredibly classist and devoid of empathy and my post was intended to address that. I don't know how my words could have been read otherwise.
I assumed the punchline was going to be that Facebook was generating fake graphs to scam their advertising partners, and the author was blowing the whistle.
I realized it was fiction when querying after today's date produced a spike that completely matched reality. If anyone can do this, they sure as hell won't do it by omitting an end date in a query.
That's a good way to look at it. Maybe Google can create a good $300 brand, but sells it only to people with certain qualities/experiences ? For example, if you volunteer - that could be one kind of status?
Setting up your own CA is rather easy, for internal hostnames I'd definitely not bother with going to an external CA (nor want an external CA to have control over internal certificates).
Create PDFs and print them from the Cloud – like magic
They are dependent on Apple for updates due to the code signing. Alternative operating systems also cannot be installed once Apple stops supporting them. That ensures obsolensce in the long term, even if it is longer term than their competitors' blob-ridden Android products.

Anyway, plenty of machines sold then and even today are junk, so maybe replacing them is not such a terrible idea. However, I think replacing the software matters more. Linux is an excellent option for these systems in the long term. If Apple made Mac OS X available for them, it would be too.
Valuation is meaningless, as we've seen with Webvan, Theranos, Clinkle, and literally tens of thousands of other companies. Tell me it's "not a fail" when the company is cash-flow positive.
Maybe you should spend more time making apps, whether they're a good idea or not. Often ideas in an area come from working in the area, solving problems in the area, talking to other people about the area, thinking about the area in the shower ...
> either Apple is misjudging the needs of their users, to the point where trendsetters like programmers will be switching away from the platform. Or, they succeed in their vision and breed several generations of technologically illiterate information workers fumbling their way through life with nothing but extremely limited mobile devices as their only productivity tool.

I would dispute the 'programmers are trendsetters' assertion.

Apple is probably completely correct in the way that most people use their computer. The majority of users do not use their desktop in a way that would not work on something like an iPad. They browse the web. They use webmail. They listen to music.

Now, do you really think that the only way anyone knows how to use a computer at work is because they use the same thing at home? Users learn click here, here and here and you do your job they don't have to know anything about the underlying system. Which is a good thing, because they are probably using some software at work that they can not get at home. Using a locked down device at home is not going to turn people into drooling morons any more or less than they already are.

The one thing that would be lost if tablets like the iPad or similar Android devices became the primary device at home is that children would not have a system they could learn the inner workings of, explore on and being to learn to create on. I'm talking about learning programming, not drawing or related artistic activities.
It's interesting and sad that this is the way it is. I'd get way more benefit from another core than another GHz. I'm sure it's not just developers in this boat, but I too am pessimistic about the size of that market.

Would software developers change their approach to coding if 32-core chips started to show up in consumer machines? I'd like to think so, but then again, I figured everything would be multithreaded by now.
Edit: I'm definitely wrong. The person who published these was merely parking the packages. Leaving the existing (inaccurate, see response) message as one example of how badly this could have turned out.

> and the content of the files is suspicious

The script seems as though it might publish your entire codebase to NPM. Sorting NPM packages by creation date[1] reveals[2] a[3] few[4] potential victims. Filtering by the ISC license also seems to work.

[1]: https://libraries.io/search?order=desc&platforms=NPM&sort=cr...

[2]: https://libraries.io/npm/alaska-dev - internally hosted repo, edit: license doesn't match other projects by the same developer

[3]: https://libraries.io/npm/b3app-prototype - private bitbucket repo, edit: deleted from npmjs

[4]: https://libraries.io/npm/nodework - private bitbucket repo
I'm "technical" and "hands-on", yet I was gullible enough to believe the story, IM-ed it to my wife, and was surprised when she hadn't panicked like I did.

I read way too much science fiction. Back to work now!

Kind of relieved though.
Well... I spent the last hour hiding under my desk, curled up in the fetal position, shaking and crying uncontrollably.

Left-pad is back in NPM, but that really doesn't the address the underlying issues. I don't know what we're going to do really. Hoping a new set of "best practices" for dependency management reveal themselves in the next few days.

Checking our node_modules folder into source control (and avoiding ever 'npm install'ing again), seems like a bad idea. NPM "shrinkwrap" seems like it could work, but not if the modules disappear from NPM. Creating our own NPM mirror and disabling "unpublish" seems plausible, but is it worth the effort? Idk... I'm considering assembling our node_modules folder from github commits rather than npm package names, but that's only a solution if all of our dependencies are doing the same thing (otherwise we're still tied to NPM in some way and vulnerable to packages being unpublished). And of course things can be taken down from Github just the same...but at least Github is namespaced to the username. I think the only "good" solution is to disable unpublishing from NPM...but that's completely out of my control.

Back to the fetal position...
We've been generating certificates in direct violation of their TOS for over six years. Every few years they pretend to find out, we do another blatantly non-compliant verification, fork over 120 dollars, and they let us keep printing certificates.
Because the USSR had no pollution or poor people... /s
Wow. Eventually we will need digital signatures to discourses and interviews.
Very enjoyable, and almost plausible...
Yeah, agreed. We had used it so far simply because it was convenient. I do still think it's important for StartSSL to be very clear about this to their existing customers though - it's a breaking change of sorts.

And they are definitely not, but thanks. :) They're in an AWS VPC which is only internet addressable via explicitly defined servers. The default is to not provide a public IP.
List of Common Application Security Attacks
It's a good deal, but I think it's subsided.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/phone/lumia635/offers?...

Amazon lists: $131.11 and Cricket has it for 20$. Still, as long as your not locked into a contract and can buy replacements at that cost it's not a problem.

PS: Windows does seem to beat Android on low end phones.
IIRC the theory is that loratidine and cetirizine don't pass the blood-brain barrier.
I use OVH, it cost 3.49 with 2GB RAM and 10GB SSD. I readed good and bad comments about OVH but my experience has been good. Maybe is not so good for production environments but It works really good for me.

https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml
That's interesting. If you don't mind, what rules are you violating?
Well yeah, the universal turing machine has a pretty small program and solves all kinds of problems. But that's not really what I imagine when I say "a simple program".
Vendors tend to standardize on crap. How many vending machines do you see with salad or tofu instead of Doritos or soda?

Big multinational IT vendors are even worse than the vending machine example. They cater to situations where a firm has some internal power struggle over IT and the struggle is won by one side who gets the certified approval of a statusy external vendor.

For instance, most big, showy technology re-orgs around Hadoop are unequivocally bullshit. Most firms do not face data problems that are appropriate for Hadoop, not even when their primary enterprise data store approaches the raw size at which Hadoop becomes plausible, because the types of analytical workflows still tend to involve much smaller data.

These firms hardly adopt Hadoop for pragmatic engineering reasons, and engineers may even resist the re-org and offer compelling evidence that it is a waste of money, yet are ignored.

Vendor offerings are much more about catering to the CTO or some other manager level employees, and focusing on b.s. on-paper "milestones" that the product can help them achieve. Many times, merely just the installation and integration of these tools can result in a multi-hundred-thousand dollar bonus, or more, for people high up the IT food chain -- even before anyone has seen whether it will bear any fruit or even come close to being cost effective.

Vendors will do this with anything they can, so it's not surprising they would do it with R technology and they also absolutely do it with Scala, Python, Spark, etc. Big vendors peddling all of that truly are the hotel lobby snack machines of the software world.

I'm not saying it's bad to have R as part of a professional computing environment. R is a great tool. I'm saying that for most business situations, people who tend to make the assumptions necessary to justify using R are often very wrong, and the clunky and inconvenient support for professional computer science and software design in R bites them, making Python a much more pragmatic choice.

Whatever vendors do is pretty irrelevant to this.
Other responses disagree with you, but I agree with you... and I'm rather anti-consumerist (it's difficult to pull off completely...).

In fact, I feel a bit silly having paid "only" $300 for my Samsung phone, having read your economic breakdown. I was imagining myself having an extra $200 for stuff... but I go through a lot of wasted time having "only" 16GB.. continuously moving stuff off of it... missed photos and videos I could have taken. Perhaps the pix didn't have economic value worth $200 over 3 years, but the time is probably worth it.

I've also heard the perspective on the poor that if they have to be poor, it helps to have at least one nice thing. the nice thing of choice is the phone.

The real question is, imho, how to leverage these choices to get what helps an individual. e.g. use the phone to get jobs, to shop around for the best price, to buy used things on craigslist to save money, to watch inspiring and encouraging videos, to learn new skills to get better jobs, etc.