skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A little more nuance: it's not only that Oracle is bad, but that Sun was good.

Oracle's business model is about extracting value; whereas Sun was about building platforms (which they did several times). Oracle has a history of squeezing open projects and alienating developers. You're right, they've taken care not to completely chew up the tremendous business value of Java, only test-nibbling at the edges: projects like Hudson (now Jenkins), changes to JCP, cutting evangelists.

Many key people left Sun before or soon after the acquisition. Oracle is a different place to work, being sales-focused. It's not entirely due to Oracle though; the game had changed and Sun was no longer leading.

It's not specific changes to java, but changes to the philosophy of the java custodian. These determine its future.

BTW: I can't speak for the other upvoters, but I think Google was clearly in the wrong. They knew it, Sun knew it - but let them get away with it because a new platform was good for java (NB cf. Sun litigated MS for fragmenting java). In contrast, Oracle is suing Google for revenue, not for any platform.

So... although Google is the bad guy, it illustrates the different philosophies of Sun vs
Oracle.

In this sense the old java - its philosophy and its future - "doesn't exist anymore". :(
I have suicidal depression–and board games saved my life
> It pivoted to Cue then shut down

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...
Perhaps, but why give up if you're not missing any benefit? I still pretty much can rely on something not being readable as plain text also not being worth my time.
Repeal of the Glass-Stegal Act was not the cause of the 2008 crisis! Also Glass-Stegal was never regulation to protect individuals. It had nothing to do with customers. Glass-Stegal did allow big banks to get much bigger but it was not about protecting individuals. Glass-Stegal forbid commercial bank from becoming investment banks. The crisis in 2008 was caused by subprime lending, complicit ratings agencies and a derivatives market that speculated against those loans. Glass-Stegal would not have prevented this! I wish people would stop propagating this misinformation. The only reason its relevant to the crisis is because it allowed banks to become "too big to fail", not because it would have prevented banks the players from engaging in reprehensible behavior.
The Predictors by Thomas A Bass

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Predictors-Thomas-Bass/dp/080505757...
Even better, you can use spacing within a line to create a 3-D effect to emphasize certain words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_stereogram#Text_emphasis
Probably depends on what constitutes innovation and the time scale. It could be argued that language, agriculture, money, etc. have changed people lives than more dramatically than recent technology.
The retirement of a game that functions by receiving content from other users through internet connectivity isn't a clear example of why consoles shouldn't be online. It's an example of an experience that couldn't be had if consoles weren't online.

If the game was self-contained and wasn't defined by features requiring connectivity, unplugging the console from the internet would leave it playable.

It would be a bad thing if consoles only operated while connected.
>I wonder what kind of job opportunity it is that's both

For most programmers (and even more so other professions), outside of the Valley, most job opportunities are not like "recruiter finding you", and going out of their way to offer you some job.

Rather you apply to them -- and usually with lots of people competing.
Show HN: A pythonic wrapper over atd to schedule deletion of files/directories
"C/C++ language designers used to take the position that concurrency was an OS issue, not a language issue"

That was the case until Bohem's 'Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library' position paper, which lead the C++ Standard Committee to formally define the C++ memory model (whose correctness was also independently proven [1]). This standardization work was greatly inspired by the corresponding Java MM, and in a break from the past, it explicitly disallowed a few compiler optimizations and even made the C++ standard unimplementable on a few quirky older architectures for the sake of sanity.

Today there are no arguments on whether a concurrent algorithm (and compiler optimizations) is conforming or not, as there are both dynamic and static checkers that can verify it against the C++ memory model.

I wish that the same rigorous formalization work were to be done for the strict aliasing rules of the language, which are still a mess of underspecified, ambiguous and mutually contradicting rules scattered all over the standard document.

[1] the original drafts had in fact issues which were found when attempting the correctness proof; these flaws have been corrected, except there is a still standing issue with out-of-thin-air values; it is not believed to have any impact on code with current compiler and cpus, but there is an ongoing effort to correct it.
For what it's worth, I'm not a native English speaker and I don't live in an English-speaking country. However, I think I am "allowed" to voice this opinion without being labeled a racist, regardless of my native language.

I still think that there should be a standard language.

I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language. There are many distinct cultures that share a language already. Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture? Also, some languages like Latin died out, while we still benefit from its speakers cultural achievements.
Yahoo Pipes. Meticulously remixed, filtered, etc RSS feeds rendered useless with no viable alternative to date. Curses to Yahoo, especially whoever made the decision to kill it.
Your question is hard to understand.

https://kafka.apache.org/08/design.html

"So effectively Kafka guarantees at-least-once delivery by default ...."

Edit: Downvote if you want. I was trying to help you.
Interesting. I'll check. Not sure I can get into BIOS though...corporate laptop.
Are you guys Canadian citizens? If not, be aware the PR process is really slow (probably slower if you have to do a spousal sponsorship). The tax treaty between US and Canada makes the prospect of working in the US not that bad ... you need a good/expensive accountant to help you sort through the various complexities. Air Canada will make you suffer if you have to fly back for business meetings. If there is any way to avoid remote work, I'd suggest you take it. We had to do this for various reasons and it led to a lot of personal sacrifices and suffering.

In addition, I think Bay area real-estate is a far better deal than TO or YYZ real-estate. The key reason is that you can get a 20-30 year fixed mortgage in the US while you will you only get a 5 year in Canada. The -average- detached house in Toronto is 1.2 million bucks. Absolutely out of whack with incomes. In the Bay area, prices are high but so are incomes.
I'm sorry,the nuances in the name seemed to have resulted in a wrong link.There you go:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-quick-scrol.... If you do reimplement the behaviour,i'd love to know how how!.
I still use it; version 7. It's not great but it gets the job done, and I can make perfect good "programmer art".
> Why do you think being afraid of malware is BS?

I never said that. I said it's a BS excuse. I think it's perfectly fine to be afraid of malware. But you can run a couple of plugins (like noscript, and uninstall java) and solve that problem without even installing an adblocker. Which means you can have ads without the malware if you actually wanted to make the effort to do so.

So yes, it's an excuse since there are plenty of solutions which exist, some only requiring the download of a single plugin.
This is still a problem even if the Störerhaftung (WIFI-owner being liable for misuse) is removed: When the police comes looking for someone distributing CP, they go by the IP address and take everything that remotely looks like a computer for forensic examination.

So, having an open WIFI is like painting a huge target on your back, albeit a somewhat smaller one when media companies are removed from the list of potential trouble makers.

(See also: http://www.lawblog.de/index.php/archives/2016/05/12/dein-wla... (in German), for a defense lawyer's perspective)
If the internet were used only to publish read-only content, like a magazine, then maybe this would make some sense.

But language shapes thought. It actually limits it. If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. People who speak different languages actually see the world in different ways, with different nuances and details.

And the internet is highly interactive, collaborative and social. You don't have to look beyond HN to see great examples of this.

This means that limiting the internet through a single language means we would be also limiting our ability to form, spread and implement new ideas.

Creativity often comes from finding a curious analogy that crosses domains. If one of those domains has only a poor English representation then it's unlikely that the brainsinvolved in an English-only conversation would discover the novel analogy.

So no, that would not be good for the internet as canvas of collaboration and communication of ideas and thoughts.
Yes. Amazon for example was a normal merchant for years and did not need a money-transfer license. However, as soon as they decided to open a marketplace for 3rd party stores, they required licenses. And they got them.

The rule is simple - if you take and hold on to customer funds, you need to be licensed for money transfer in all the states you operate in.

Today, a few services like Braintree and Stripe offer a middle ground solution. Essentially, they will open an escrow account for your merchant customers, and you move any money your holding into the escrow. They will then hold the funds until you release them. This approach is clever, but still a legal grey area.
You could say the same for not learning Swahili (which I presume you don't speak) or going into Biology rather than computer science.

In other words, the argument from ignorance is useless -- reminds me of a very weak version of Pascal's wager.

Not only because he's still doing OK, but also because statistically I can assure you that the people I know who still have the LI account haven't gotten anything worthwhile out of it career wise.

Besides, the whole argument is oblivious of the notion of Opportunity Cost.
Click --> NYT Article --> Back --> Open in new incognito window

A dark pattern if I ever saw one.
Wow, I had completely forgotten about list.com,but as soon as you mentioned it, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. It was an absolutely versatile and powerful utility without equal in its day.
I haven't encountered a single laptop keyboard that isn't bad to type on but the old Lenovo keyboards were better than the usual stuff. But these days we can get laptops with full Cherry MX keys and that's a proper keyboard experience. It's not something you'd carry in your backpack, but for going on trips where you sit at a table, it's fine to bring with you.
Free Indie Game Press Release Distribution Service
Show HN: Wheatbin – Open Source Kanban Based on the Law of the Harvest
As if that's some remote past, or what it says doesn't apply to today's LinkedIn?
Ok. Forget malware. How about malicious behavior? Stop Taboola and Outbrain from serving pornographic ads and I will gladly disable Adblock.

Sorry, until your industry sets professional standards I will continue to block ads and not feel bad.
Qb: Database toolkit for Go
It's strange that Lenovo's laptop IPS panels are not as good as desktop IPS or VA panels, but they're okay to code on. Are there real IPS or VA panels that look great from any angle like a display on your desk?
WW3 UPDATE SYRIA IS BLEEDING, EVIL TRYING TO BRING IN LUCIFER
Cool, let's standardise on Mandarin. What? You can't speak it? Well stop wasting your time maintaining the english version of the internet.

You see how discriminatory that sounds? That's the reason there's not a single global language for the internet or otherwise.
Microsoft Excel 200x on Windows. Everything else (Google Spsheet, Numbers, etc.) is slower with less features, more bugs, and no keyboard bindings.
> I see no WTF here.

Not WTF in itself, but has WTF potential. The way I read it is:

If you forget to put synchronization around accesses to global state, in addition to the usual problems, we will also overwrite your globals with random garbage.

Which sounds great when you think about debugging affected code.

> sizeof(void* )

You think that's equivalent to machine word? On 16-bit x86, for example, pointers can be either 16 or 32 bit ;)
A New Way to Create Open-Source Forms [Tellform]
Runkeeper Is Tracking Your Location, Sending to Advertisers
Meanwhile, just for reference, ZFS started in 2001. Introduced in Solaris in 2005 and FreeBSD in 2007.

I'm not necessarily trying to make a point here, just adding some related facts.
The authors didn't know that their words of wisdom are not readable on a mobile (galaxy note 4 at least). There is a trick with colors to know (that the font should have some kind of contrast with the background).
Yeah but if everything can be effortlessly translated by everyone in a lossless manner, why not just standardize on a language then? Do languages at that point not become an unnecessary hindrance in personal communication without perceivable benefit?
Raid5 is not dead yet (https://www.cafaro.net/2014/05/26/why-raid-5-is-not-dead-yet...). The problem with failures during rebuilds is overblown, IMO. Manufacturer quoted URE failure rate (probability of failure to read) is overstated - instead of 1×10^14, they are mostly like 1×10^15 or higher.
Full disclosure: we're actually doing erasure coding in HDFS over Raid5 on servers (double insurance - if the raid array goes down, we can recover from other servers in HDFS). But our expectation for 6x4TB arrays is not for a 70%+ chance of a URE during a rebuild, rather a couple of percent. With ZFS or btrfs, it won't actually matter for us, as we'll only lose a block on a URE- that we can recover from the rest of the cluster.
Since when has Hopper been able to generate pseudocode for 64-bit ARM?
Relevant project that's usable now: https://camlistore.org/
I'm gonna echo on Winamp. Now a Linux user, I really miss a real good mp3 player.

Winamp was light, aesthetic and very good on its design. One feature I still miss is the global hotkeys, you could map Ctrl+Shift+Z to go back one song, on any window you were (hence the 'global'). I used to map the Z-X-C-V-B (the default bindings for Previous/Play/Pause/Stop/Next) to the CTRL+Shift+$key binding, and I felt like a wizard. Then there was a search function, with J, that you could also remap to a global hotkey.

Winamp was so good we should have paid for it to prevent a sale to AOL.
The challenge is storing money, legally, on behalf of a customer. No normal startup can afford to get licensed.

So you need to legitimately work around the 'stored value' problem, i.e. you need to find a 3rd party with a legal solution. That's either a real bank account or a prepaid card. And the 3rd party has to have an API that allows you to open accounts, execute transactions, etc.

The card program requires a bank partner too. And card programs cost 10K+ a month to run, regardless of whether or not you have 1 card issued or 250,000. Lots of cash burn early.

So that's the target state. Johnie outlined some nice interim steps below, but this is not simple. Oscar took on a challenging business problem.
No, but a lot of people on the btrfs mailing list recommend this due to the lack of stability for raid5/6 on btrfs.
The relevant wikipedia page [0] puts it thusly:

> For example, English has about 340 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers.

This statistic is based on research[1] from 2008 which summarizes it's abstract with this sentence:;

> In short, we have moved in 25 years from a fifth to a quarter to a third of the world's population being speakers of English.

So, not quite the majority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
Are there any sites or site owners that complain about ad blockers, but not about noscript? Aren't they effectively the same for the purposes of this discussion?

(I run uBlock and have it block all third-party JS with a few white-listed exceptions, but I suspect most people would describe that as an Adblocker. And it isn't necessarily wrong, since it blocks ads. Just not specifically.)
Sadly no.
Wikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-... ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia.

More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.
Server credits expired, we are migrating it now to a new place to be able to demo it :/ If you give a contact I can send some screengrabs.
> Life can be much _better_ without ads.

It's more complex than that, I'm afraid. People don't create content or innovate for free. I'm sure there are a rare few who do, but most people hope for the promise of a financial incentive. Having a financial incentive to innovate or create content is a good thing and life without ads would have a butterfly like effect on that innovation. I highly doubt the internet would resemble anything like it does today if ads didn't exist (people take for granted it would look exactly the same as it does now). Nope, without ads, I doubt the internet would have evolved much beyond 1997. And I remember the internet back in 1997. There was some neat things going on, not many ads, but practically zero content compared to today.

Without ads to subsidize content, most of your favorite TV shows wouldn't exist, most of your favorite websites wouldn't exist (think google.com, youtube.com, etc)... After all, google.com doesn't make much if anything off their search engine, 97% of their revenue comes from their advertising department.
Vine Stars Leaving and Going to Facebook
No, I don't think so. I'm a small-time admin, and I think that btrfs is working pretty good these days.

We have recently switched all our servers to LXC containers so that we can take full advantage of btrfs features.

I doubt I need to explain the advantages of containers to anyone here... but in short we've broken out all the network services (file service, LDAP, DNS, etc.) to separate containers.

Each container is in a separate btrfs subvolume. This allows us to take snapshots of the running systems every 10 minutes, and using btrfs send/receive, cheaply back up those snapshots to alternate container hosts. The send/receive stuff works better with the btrfs v4.4 tools that ship with Ubuntu 16.04.

Since the network interfaces for all the containers are bridged with the container host, we can configure each container with its own static IP address. So if a container host fails, those containers can be booted up on the alternate host, and keep their IP and MAC addresses. So that's convenient, and causes minimal disruption.

The main improvement I'd like to see with btrfs is a configurable RAID redundancy level. Currently, RAID-1 means that there are two copies of each piece of data / metadata. So in a 3-drive RAID-1 system that gives you extra capacity, but two drives failing at the same time will cause data loss.
A better argument is that advertising that a product is available to "buy now", but changing the terms at checkout to "buy a license" is a type of fraud known as "bait and switch". An offer is being made that the seller has no intention of honoring, with a different product (the license) offered as a substitute.
I realised the other day that the only time I use a pen is Christmas and Birthdays, I literally don't use one apart from that.

It's actually a bit scary!
> Sorry, until your industry sets professional standards your crying has zero emotional pull for me.

Oh, sorry if I mislead you. I'm actually not in the industry at all. I used to be a publisher though, had my own website until I sold it. My comments were me empathizing and seeing things from the point of view of a content creator. That's for whom I argue.
> Caddy has since had more than 70 contributors and > 1K commits.

That is impressive, will definitely try it. Is there a list of companies using Caddy somewhere?
My NYT savior! Thanks
On Chrome, I see nice random images being created. In Firefox, I see only the image that is used as a guide.
My bank got new computers and were selling their old intellimice for $3 each. I have a huge stash.
You forgot about how sensitive it is to low disk space. Don't go above 80% in production is what I've been told - that's a lot of wasted disk space.
TurboC and tasm ftw :)
As usual, OpenSSL is screwing things up.

Been delving into hairy problems at work and yup, it's openssl's fault. More specifically it's the misguided way it handles multithreaded, and memory management. Yay.
Huh. You're quite right.

Well, it may have been undefined, but in practice the behaviour was standardised and couldn't be changed without breaking existing code... which is basically C in a nutshell.
HTTP2 is a relatively bleeding edge technology at this point. Seems fine for it to depend on a recent version of Open SSL. It's not like HTTP 1.1 is going anywhere any time soon.
>> some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream

This unfortunate reality extends to pretty much all products. Manufacturing is nothing like it was 20 years ago; quality is down across the board. Products used to be well made, but are now mass produced using the cheapest materials possible.

Go buy a Scrabble board. The unfolded board won't lay perfectly flat on the table because the two halves are not heavy enough to fully bend down the crease in the middle. The tiles are made of flimsy particle board instead of real wood. The letters wear off too because they are printed on rather than etched. Compare it to a board made in the 70s or 80s. The difference between them isn't just large, it's disgustingly atrocious. Same for a Cribbage board (cheap wood, plastic sliding door that falls out instead of metal that grinds into the board), a Battleship set (the one I bought for my nephew, the panels that hold the pegs don't snap in properly and fall off). Things used to be quality made; now they're done at the lowest possible quality because people will buy it regardless.
I don't think that's the whole story. Yes, websites are increasingly obese and JS-happy, but Chrome has also gone downhill.

Safari feels significantly snappier, and has better RAM usage than Chrome at this point, and it used to be the exact reverse. Chrome is hell on a laptop battery, too.
We were boiling water before drinking and using filters in India in the 80s. The decline started a long time ago.
I miss my Amiga.
CVE-2016-4117: Flash Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild