skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, seriously I don't know why they don't just offer free email,cloud storage,and messaging... it would have to be orders of magnitude cheaper than what they are doing now.
I agree completely, but from the linked article:

> One day far in the future upstream software developers will understand that W^X violations are a tremendously risky practice and that style of programming will be banished outright.

Whoever wrote that they should be banned outright, I feel is being very short-sighted. It would be like banning cars because it's possible to seriously injure a person with one.

tj later replied to me on Twitter saying they meant for it to become per-process in the future. Once that happens, I'll be okay with this change. Right now, I think filesystem-level is far too broad. I often will want an emulator on the same filesystem as I want W^X protections for other applications on.
The article almost makes it sound like UTF-8 was a Plan9 invention.

I also don't understand why using UTF-8 was a bad idea. If I start a new OS from scratch, I would have to be brain-damaged to not use UTF-8 as the sole encoding (and other encodings being treated as second class citizens).

I can understand the issue with taking the file abstraction to perfection. If by doing that you are incompatible to most of the software there is, you're going to have a hard time getting developers to develop for your OS. This could be somewhat alleviated with a ioctl compatibility library for the time being.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
The fact Android is way more popular than iOS can be used to support any conjecture about user preferences.

The ASP of Android devices is far lower than that of iOS devices.

Android is popular because it appeals to price sensitive consumers who are by far the majority. IOS sells mostly to people who are not primarily price sensitive.

That's it.
Rwanda, Bosnia, Latin America death squads, the Confederacy, Andrew Jackson's March of Tears, the list sadly goes on and on.

Your question is a bit odd. History is chock full of examples of genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, etc.

This is the problem I have with Godwin's Law - sometimes a comparison to Nazis is entirely appropriate.
Musicians are familiar with this.
> Yes; take the premiums you would've paid for 6 months (effectively without coverage during that time regardless), save them,

Well, that gets you about 5% of the way there.

> save them, and reduce your living expenses to allow you to build up the cash cushion from there. If you're in that income bracket you really should be able to structure your expenses so you can save a decent amount, even in a high-cost city (there are minor exceptions to this, for instance child support obligations, but moving to a shittier apartment or not going out to eat for N months to build up savings is a valid alternative to incurring an extra recurring expense like this if you're living on the margin of insolvency anyway).

Not so easy for many people.

> Unlike these benefits, depleting savings isn't taxable income, and again, in that bracket you might even be able to wrangle in tax-advantaged savings (eg saving in a Roth account that gives you extra option value, converting to a Roth at your now-lower income bracket & withdrawing the principal, withdrawing home equity, etc).

There can be tax benefits for this insurance product as well (See PLR-112680-11 for example). There can be penalties for withdrawing savings from tax-advantaged accounts.

> Once you figure in the fact that it's paying out effectively 1/4 of your income, after taxes, for 6 months max, minus the state unemployment benefits, it really does look to be a minimal payoff.

Your math is iffy. You double counted the State benefit.
It's
State benefits + Insured benefits = 50% of your former salary for up to 24 weeks.
In states (like Florida) where State benefits don't last 24 weeks, the insured benefit would be an initial supplemental benefit, and then a full 50% replacement.

So for say someone in NY previously making about $2,000/w, the state will pay ~$420/w and this insurance would pay around $580/w, for up to 24 weeks. Again, not a bonanza, but still very helpful for people who don't have (or don't have enough) significant savings they can easily access. If the benefits were much higher, the premiums would be much higher as well (TANSTAAFL). It's a trade-off to make an affordable product that is sufficiently useful.
You seem to be blaming the customer for not understanding the politics of the Android software update fiasco.

That is very much Android's problem.
Surely the value of this is that it provides a counterexample to a long-standing conjecture. The proof that it is a counterexample may not be too enlightening, but that's hardly the point.
Why these common tax evasion hacks won't work
When you said old I was expecting Offenbach or Beau Dommage not Les Colocs. I can't believe it's been 17 years. RIP Dédé.
Cool, cheers. :)
I definitely agree with this. It's very cool to see something you've built actually work more-or-less correctly. In science all I get are maybes.
thank you, that is really helpful context for me!
EngineeringVsMarketing (2003)
You don't acknowledge (a.k.a. "have a sense") of the irony (a.k.a. "of humor").
Emotional Kid Environmentalist
OS X is not the worst UNIX. Darwin is kind of a shit kernel, but the user land is way more sensibly designed than your typical Linux distro (which is, as OP said, a random collection of junk).
Very generous, you first.
I've actually worked with that kind of "high performer". The guy was actually good, always on top of his game and aware of everything that was happening across product teams, but his haste to get things done quickly led to a lot of technical debt in our part of the product. He just checked things in continuously without waiting for a code review. Feature-wise he was adding a lot of value to the product, but always at the expense of code maintainability.

I was the one who couldn't sleep at night seeing all that debt and every now and then would clean things up. At least he would thank me for it :)
In no way could a phony e-mail address (or any other string, for that matter) tied to a disposable keypair be construed as identity fraud. That would be like claiming "identity fraud" for telling the barista at Starbucks your name is Abraham Lincoln.
- Elm for building large webapps' frontends

- TensorFlow applied to NLP problems
So the NSA is basically a bunch of scientologists. So I guess Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible is IRL???
Recommendations for books on compilers
Lots of good points here. Limit Interruptions and Prefer Private Workspaces are big ones imo. If only companies realized that those 2 things can increase production and output 10 fold. Sure open offices are cheaper but you are paying for it in other ways.
they are trading data
> Now, if the company were to move all of their R&D to Bermuda & Ireland like they moved their IP, we could argue that they deserve to pay the ~0% corporate income tax on their overseas profits.

This is actually the thing that politically prevents such taxes from being collected.

You have these companies that spend e.g. ten billion dollars on R&D that produces a hundred billion dollars in profits. Right now the ten billion dollars they spend on R&D gets taxed in various ways (payroll/sales/property taxes) in the place they do the R&D, which is very good for that place.

What happens if you then demand that on top of that, 35% of the hundred billion be paid to the same place? You just made it actually profitable for them to go to California, find some engineers, and pay them five times the previous market rate plus their relocation costs to move to Ireland and set up shop there.
That was the idea, yes.
Seattle Releases FOIA Documents, Court Orders Them Taken Down
> An OUI {Organizationally Unique Identifier} is a 24-bit number that uniquely identifes a vendor or manufacturer. They are purchased and assigned by the IEEE. The OUI is basically the first three octets of a MAC address.

Makes sense I guess.
It's really difficult to reason about rigorously without the expense side of the calculation as well to calculate the potential for self-insurance.
FWIW some other catholic countries have beautiful blasphemous profanities: Italy and Spain come to mind, but I'm pretty sure Poland has some too.

In Italy profanities that attack religion are so pretty much a taboo that is weird to foreigners: you can have a prime time tv show with full frontal nudity and some violence, but you will not hear swearing against god until after midnight.

Edited to reflect a comment by gattilorenz
There is Baobab[1] - it is a single state-tree approach, while supporting computed values in the tree and has a react adapter[2].

[1]: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/baobab#computed-data-or-mon...

[2]: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/baobab-react
Ask HN: How do you handle large Python projects?
In C++, I follow a playbook for keeping all hell from breaking loose:

1) Write a googletest
2) Write a googlebenchmark
3) Run all unit tests under AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, and g++ UB sanitizer
4) Tidy up with clang-format
5) Run cppcheck

So I feel pretty confident I'm not doing something braindead if I can get this stuff through CI.

But for Python, I don't really have good idea when I'm doing something that'll cause me agonizing pain in the future. The only tool I use is flake8, which is awesome, but I can't see memory leaks or performance profiles.

What strategies do you adopt (and what tools do you use) to keep all hell from breaking loose in large Python projects?
I am adding a “sexual misconduct clause” into all of my investment agreements
I understanding where you are coming from; I thought the same when I was a few years younger and was wearing t-shirts with texts like "not even Norton can protect you", "every time you download music, God kills a kitten" and "I read your e-mail". And while those are a lot of fun, it's not fun to explain to customers and have to say: "Don't mind them, they are just our developers..."
Perhaps, with the right kinds of expectations and code review processes, many of the "high performers" to which he refers end up becoming the "low performers" that you see as the cause of most technical debt. People who, in one environment, are able to ship buggy code quickly (and without much consideration) find themselves, in a different environment, spending abnormal amounts of time writing and reworking code in order to get it through a code review process.

He kind of mentions it, but in a very early-stage startup, the ability to deliver MVPs quickly (regardless of code quality) may be seen as a positive trait. Of course, even better is when you can ship quality code just as quickly, but such developers are probably the exception to the rule.
I think it's a combination of things:

1- the name. Monsanto sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

2- the whole concept of patenting a life form rubs many the wrong way

3- previous bad behavior, I.e. Agent orange.

4- self-reinforcing bad information

That's no excuse for making things up whole cloth,but it at least explains some of it.
> The article almost makes it sound like UTF-8 was a Plan9 invention.

It more or less was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#History
I read many good reviews of Fastspring on HN, they also has CocoaFob integration. Plus I prefer older services to new ones doing the same thing.
If anything, this thread taught me that some people actually take Godwin's law to be something other than tongue-in-cheek.
Get your money right
> Why Does Everyone Hate Monsanto?

Because they forgot to set their corporate motto to "Don't be evil".
Facebook is a disease on the net, the next aol.
My main issue with this is that this is some behavior that is typically present in malware. Why is it acceptable when a website you visit does this, but unacceptable when an application you download an use does this?

This seems very underhanded. I really don't think I'll support this. I think I may need to write a Chrome/Firefox extension that grabs all of those links and rewrites them to be affiliate links to a charity.
In other news, 80% of Americans want food containing gaining DNA to be labelled - comparable to the number that are concerned about dihydrogen monoxide.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Why do we even need to finish it? Finishing a project is in itself a choice. I mean, like the article says, you might end at a ton of research and you might not get far on your new OS per se, but if that's what you want to work on, the more power to you. Never underestimate your ability to learn when you're trying to actually build something.

If there is a deadline, or if there are other requirements, then let size be determined by those. Just sounds like the author is frustrated with his unfinished projects. Personally, I wouldn't be. I've got a ton.
Also, front-end frameworks and thousands of lines of unnecessary Javascript.
That's the NSA's OUID, so anyone who looks your mac address up will think it originated with them.
After working primarily remote (in the office one day a week) for six months, it's been extremely hard to get back in the grind of having to go to the office again. I have a mostly private corner office, so it's not some open-office Lord of the Flies situation, but still, I'm so much more productive in a space that I control fully, where there are no casual distractions, and I don't have my blood-pressure and pissiness levels cranked up by having to commute in and deal with traffic in the morning.

If anything, I communicate more when I'm at home than when I'm in the office... Excessively verbal people don't seem to be able to handle it well, however, from what I've seen.
That's an amazingly regressive point of view. Sure, in the past such things risked prosecution but why exactly does it mean we have to figuratively knock stones together on vulnerability ethics? When cars were invented, a man had to run in front of the car with a red flag to warn others of it.

In 2016, everyone deserves privacy and security on the internet. We know and understand the dangers of vulnerabilities better, and I think we should be capable of having some respect and suitably compensating those who do the right thing.

If you can make the internet a more secure place for us to live our lives and make enough to live out of it, more power to you.
There is a premium calculator on the site. For some people this policy is useful and necessary, for others, maybe not. You can lecture all you want about how people should have a significant emergency fund always available, but unfortunately, many people find that too difficult. So this is an alternative.
I'm not sure that I follow your argument. Are you saying that because a similar research project was successfully commercialized Plan-9 should be judged akin?

Even if you accept that, UNIX was not developed to what it became by AT&T. Let arguments about how they managed licensing UNIX vs how Plan-9 was licenced commense!
Of tactical approaches, the OpenBSD team has clearly done the best job. I still advocate fixing root causes or high-confidence mechanisms wherever possible. They merit praise for what they pull off on the other side of the fence with UNIX apps I'd have little confidence in protecting outside of costly, isolation architectures and obfuscation schemes.

This is my favorite, though, as it's a high-assurance principle in action:

"When you free() an object >= pagesize, it gets unmapped using munmap(). Therefore, access after free() becomes a detectable crash."

That's the fail-safe principle in action per Saltzer and Shroeder. Can't stop every, potential failure in some area? Just make it crash hard, noticeably, and hopefully with enough detail to spot & fix the problem. Another line of research in high-assurance CompSci is to, via hardware or software, taint the incoming data with optional profiles of system code that stops and details circumstances of any code injection. Always interesting stuff developing along these lines.

Far as Saltzer and Shroeder principles, I accidentally found this in Google that explains them with Star Wars scenarios. Pretty good.

http://emergentchaos.com/the-security-principles-of-saltzer-...
Question: Why are your customers seeing your developers?
IME: The "effective" developer is never the one who has to clean up the accumulated debt though. They are pushed off to new projects before the warts start to show. It's everyone else that has to clean up after them.
PR fluff pieces probably don't answer this question as cogently as wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_con...
Neural Networks. I actually read a lot of introductory stuff but never really went down to detail and also never had the opportunity to implement one. For me and I guess a lot of people reading tutorials is not enough to learn unless we work on a project.
No one seems to still have a grudge against Dow.
> This is one thing I find a little bit frustrating with the tutorials of various JS tools. They fail to accurately describe a problem that they solve.

Yes, this is valid for anything. It's harder to understand the solution if we haven't met the problem. For example, I realized the need of React after my template-based app was becoming a huge mess.
Would you support making medicine a free occupation that has no special state status? I think that going in that direction would do a lot of good.
What operating systems do you have in mind? The only remaining systems (outside of academia/research) which are not based on unix seem to be windows, openvms and os/z.

Edit: thanks pjmlp. With so many name changes I forgot that IBM still had an alternative OS for small computers. I imagined that maybe there were still other mainframe systems, but I was too lazy to check...
The fact that it came before doesn't preclude it from being compared…
You copied the quote wrong, "was also its prisoner"
Developers come in many different forms, and I think this kind of "high performer" can be most valuable in an early-stage startup environment, where code quality hardly matters if product-market fit cannot be discovered before the runway ends.

I also suspect that many of these "high performers" are very aware of the technical debt they are adding, and simply prioritize shipping over anything else. To them, the mess is just a fact of software development, to be cleaned up only as can be justified by the needs of the business.

In general I don't actually agree with this view, but I also try not to dismiss it outright. (My counterargument usually involves the fact that technical debt will slow you down in the mid-to-long term, so if there is any expectation of keeping code around, it actually saves the business money to invest up front in code quality.)
ACS Commute Map
Our startup is working to fix the mainstream textbook problem. Specifically, I think the biggest ripoffs are the textbooks for first-year students; they're totally full of bullshit, so our mission is to replace them with more concise, and more affordable books.

So far we have two titles: one on precalc+mech+calc (3 in 1 for the win), and a second on linear algebra (see my profile for links). We're currently looking for authors to write the No bullshit guide to biology, and No bullshit guide to chemistry. If you have teaching or tutoring experience with these subjects, please get in touch.

Between the excellent OER books that available, and independent publishers like us, I think we can fix the textbook cartels. I give them 2-3 more years, then they're history.
I'd add one thing to that list: be wary of genius developers.

I currently work on a project where one of the most senior guys was an incredibly smart person. He wrote extremely complex parts of the code that "just work". The trouble is he's now gone from the team, and no one understands why certain things are written the way they are, and people are afraid to touch them.

Despite being really smart, this person was not very good at communicating. Your typical shy and introverted little genius who does it all on his own. When asked to explain things, he would just say "trust me, it has to be this way", but wouldn't really explain why he made certain decisions or wrote the code in certain ways.

So now we're in a situation where there are parts of the code we can't touch because "he said it had to be this way". Great. I call it personality-oriented engineering. A total failure.

This person got to a higher position because management only looked at how smart he was and how he was able to deliver complex solutions that would impress everyone. They failed to realize how bad he was at leaving a legacy of maintainable code that can be moved forward.
I actually think companies can get away with "underpaying" engineers if they can offer alternative benefits like great culture, lower cost-of-living, growth opportunities (career and equity value), etc..

But Reddit is a company with a laundry list of PR crises, with an office in one of the most expensive cities in the world, constantly changing leadership, constantly changing leadership goals, extremely dissatisfied investors, an estranged and angry founder, AND a reputation for underpaying engineers.

Ten bucks says they file a complaint somewhere stating "their aren't enough developers in the work force".
Countries with territorial systems have to monitor transfer pricing scams. The US actually ends up with much less revenue because it doesn't care as much about internal pricing abuse.
That would be purple, I was referring to spectral violet, the color after blue and indigo when going down the spectrum.
Echosim.io lets you test online what Amazon's Alexa is all about
I have the slight impression that the fad is wearing out on fitness trackers

It most likely will be replaced by "in watch" features or just left in a drawer
> I didn't open link, based on non-nazi references to the page's elements.

I assume the "link" is to the article. If so, that's unfortunate, the article was very well written and thought provoking.

The essential message Godwin has tried to impart is the antithesis of "lizard brain" reactivity, to be aware of what we are in fact saying or writing, and appreciate the gravity of invoking the memory of Nazi behavior or holocaust tragedy.

Yes, reminders to refresh consciousness of our tendencies to regress are absolute necessity and constantly useful.

Edit: wording/grammar.
One of the messages of the article is to identify if there is a market. I must have read this a thousand times so far in my life. It's as if so many product failures and millions of developer-hours could have been saved if we followed this advice and thought really really hard about the market. It's so simple and we're morons for not embracing this wisdom.

The problem is you just don't know. You might create a new market where none existed or completely take over a very crowded market, or (much more likely) fail regardless of what your marketing research told you.

How does the author explain the huge success of the original UNIX? It violates everything he says. Certainly Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson weren't thinking about the size of the market for a new OS. UNIX was incompatible was everything that existed at the time and AT&T could have used an existing OS for everything they needed done.

Facebook is another good example of you just don't know. Probably there were a thousand other equally smart Zuckerbergs trying to create a social whatever in 2004. One succeeded and 999 failed. Was it because Zuckerberg was thinking hard about the market and the others weren't? Many of the factors you don't understand, don't control, can't predict, and can't even explain more than a decade later.
OT, but this article consistently crashes my phone's browser before it's done loading. Admittedly, it's an older phone, but to take it out completely is rare... I wonder what the page is doing that it takes exception to?
The general point would probably be: As discussions approach infinity, the probability of any arbitrary string appearing in conversation approaches 1.

There's no predictive power in the statement whatsoever so it doesn't really tell us anything.