skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The general implication in this type of story is not that the tools were too limited for the use case, but that the processes which led to the use case are probably badly broken and the apparent tooling limitation is simply a symptom of that underlying disease.
I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement.

And without extensive training and experience in software development they'll automate those things very, very badly, and likely with a lot of bugs. And if those things grow out of control, the mountain of technical debt will be terrifying. If lives are in the balance in any way, it could be a disaster.

Just like someone without carpentry training or experience is likely to create very low quality kitchen cabinets which may even be unsafe.
True, although Facebook is still a massive company. At a certain point, it's extremely hard to keep the hard-nosed business types out of the game and they're going to have a more closed-minded approach to things.
Nope, just use return oriented programming.
Do you know why they don't make the ship more square? Seems like that would help fight tipping due to sloshing (or any other reason...)
I doubt you have written much Swift as you are like one of the most die hard Obj-C fanboys there is. Also I have read your blog before and you fundamentally misunderstand type theory, so I wouldn't really expect any other answer from you :-).
That makes very little sense. Why would the US be entitled to money earned in another country by a non US entity?
This comment by tptacek pretty much answers your question:

"Schneier's career has an interesting arc that is not too dissimilar from that of Eric Raymond, involving early modest-but-significant contributions to the field (cryptologic literature for Schneier, open source software for Raymond), then a marked phase of popularization and evangelism, followed by a full-throttle transition into punditry."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474372

I'm not from the crypto community, but putting Skein into FreeBSD seems a very strange choice, especially because it looks to be motivated by the "Schneier" brand. Apart from SHA-3 (which is already there), BLAKE2 would have been a better alternative.
It's not mandatory in the US; you just pay a penalty the next time you file your taxes if you went too long without insurance.

Spoiler: the penalty is far less than the cost of having insurance, which means it's still cheaper to just be uninsured (so long as you stay relatively healthy) and pay up on your tax return.
Maybe I should have done on record somewhere sooner, but this is exactly what I expected out of secretive companies like this. Raise a bunch of money, produce nothing of substance, then have some kind of lawsuit action bring in some dough. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but if we ever have a single product from this company I'll be surprised.
Designing for the operating system is actually a form of designing for the user. I believe you should start with standard conventional interfaces wherever you can. Then look for the pain points. What is more difficult in general or in yours specific use case. From there try to build upon the convention and improve it. Sometimes a small tweak can go a long way and other times a larger one is necessary.

Yes, longterm usage efficiency should be considered but perhaps even more important is the efficiency for beginners and casual users. This is why “pro” and “consumer” apps exist.

Snapchat is not a good example. It is the exception. In fact, it was born out of a desire to make it difficult to figure out so that parents and teachers couldn't spy on you. If every app you downloaded had as steep of a learning curve as Snapchat then the app stores would die as people would give up on apps. I truly fear a day where everybody is trying to copy Snapchat. It is unique and it should stay that way. Not every app should attempt to reinvent the wheel.
So true, something that works out of the box is worth it. I did the kickstarter for the Lifx on a whim as well. Dim lights are money for getting the kids to go the you-know to sleep too.
No, like Beijing, Sochi, and Rio.
Honestly, I'm not a particularly passionate advocate of open access publications, and am actively skeptical of open data requirements.

But if said open access occurs by mandate, and doesn't cost my lab money...why not?
Google, commanding the largest voice and spoken question dataset, probably the largest knowledgegraph in the world and for all intents and purposes infinite resources is to be beat by a small Cambridge Startup at the game they have basically tried to play since they've been founded?

http://i.imgur.com/dTmqF1i.jpg
If they repatriate the cash, the company can

a) pay dividends, which are taxed on the recipient

b) buy back shares, generating a capital gain for the seller, which is taxed

c) park it in a bank, which boosts reserves and indirectly stimulates the economy

d) make alternative investments such as corporate venture capital, real estate etc

I personally think there should be no corporate income tax. Instead, taxes should be paid by citizens when the money hits their personal bank account.

Yes, there would be opportunities for evasion by people incorporating themselves. No, I don't know what the ultimate solution to that is.

BUT... right now there is an army of accountants and lawyers who are able to charge companies like Apple exorbitant fees because the potential tax savings is so huge. If you have a $100 million tax liability, using accounting tricks to lower that liability by $20 million justifies paying a lot of lawyers.

If those gains were distributed instead of taxed at the corporate level, suddenly those lawyers will find they have to service a thousand, probably tens of thousands of customers to realize the same payoff they get from one big customer. That changes the economics of tax evasion considerably.
Do you do the bright in the morning and dim at night? I've found I need both plus a daylight lamp in my office.
And closed access journals have subsequently made accommodations to avoid death.
Roughly, that one situation involves stronger component of protected free association and one is more in the character of a public accommodation.
The IOC won't run out of countries who want to host it so long as countries with rampant corruption exist. The timeline of the Olympics is a corrupt developers wet dream.
It's funny how they did not use Perforce which works really well for large repositories.
Well said. The difference between facebook, the new friendster/AOL is night and day compared to Google in terms of so many different metrics including the way it started - based on true algorithmic approaches as opposed to a way to voyeuristically spy on classmates for doxxing purposes and such.
The building I work in was built using money from two foundations. The electricity and heating, as well as office material, theoretically comes from grant indirects - which at the moment for me come entirely from private industry.
This isn't entirely true, you could compress the source code which would generate a dictionary (vocabulary) which could be used with the description (compressed output) to recreate the source code.

You see comp sci is so advanced we don't even bother writing descriptions of our creations, we allow the software we've written previously create those descriptions for us, along with the dictionary used to understand the description, and then use another program to understand that description for us.
The same kind of work is being done on Git these days:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/29510...
"How is that different from just a regular application running on the host OS?"

The idea is to have each app in a "ready-to-run" state, so that it can be popped into existence anywhere on a pile of infrastructure and shutdown when it's not needed anymore. A container+app is a self-contained unit. If you're running several apps on an OS, and you update the OS, you now have to test all of the apps to be sure the update doesn't break things. If a security vulnerability happens for any of those services, you may no longer be able to trust the entire system. Apps that misbehave might impact all of the other services on the system. Containers are not a panacea, mind you...they introduce new headaches of their own, and the way a lot of folks are building and deploying containers is a joke (it's been a great excuse for people to start pushing out big binary blobs of crap again, which was a thing I'd hoped was behind us years ago).

But, the principle benefit is that a container provides a level of abstraction at the service level rather than the application level. This "thing" (which is a container that has an app in it) can be spun up anywhere and do its job. It can be upgraded or modified (including libraries and other packages) without impacting any other thing in your stack. Part of a self-healing infrastructure is being able to think of any service as a cog in a greater machine, rather than some individual piece of complexity you have to interact with to keep it running. And, ideally, we'll be able to outsource maintenance of those cogs to someone else, the way we outsource packaging binaries to OS vendors, today. Right now, that's a mess, and most of the people building containers have no clue what they're doing; so it's a minefield. But, it won't always be so.

It's just another abstraction for us to work with, is what I'm trying to say. A container can be a black box that we only need to open up occasionally (or never, if we trust our vendor to build it right).

"If it is something better, then why don't we write applications to be that way to begin with? Serious question."

We probably will, eventually. At least, it'll be closer to that than big full OS + a bunch of apps running on it.

The benefits are many; the costs and tooling are still high and fragile. But, it'll get better, and we'll get more fine-grained in how we're deploying these pieces. Most people, including myself, still think in terms of "I have a server, now I put things on it, and they combine to make a website/mail server/whatever". That's probably the wrong way to approach big web scale problems (though the number of people actually managing web scale systems vs. server-scale systems is probably small; most web sites and mail servers will never need to expand beyond a single server, and it's probably a stupid waste of time and resources to do otherwise).

The future of big web service looks like Kubernetes or something along those lines (one-app per container, very small and focused OS images, somewhat ephemeral in nature...they will come and go). It does not look like one big server with a bunch of apps running on it.
Are technical certifications just MLM scams?
Oh, well, the Olympics are more than just a single stadium, though. If you do a quick google search for "Abandoned Olympic Venues" you'll discover that although some infrastructure can be reused, a great deal is not.
My baser mind really wants to tear into you over this, but I don't think I will. Everyone can see what you're saying, and draw their own conclusions.
Graphene, the only hot new thing more versatile than USB-C.
"Max damage" doesn't imply unflyable. A later tweet clarified that it's capable of flying again. They'd rather keep it for extensive testing, though, as an example of the most extreme conditions. It won't fly again, but not because it's too busted.
"However, many of these dynamic features are definitely hacks, with various issues, some of which I talk about in The Siren Call of KVO and (Cocoa) Bindings."

"Note that Objective-C's metasystem...is a bad design."

You have a funny definition of "fanboy", but suit yourself. And if you've read my blog and think I write about type theory, then you are utterly confused.
It is entirely possible that we can completely cure cancer. Not just a treatment, but actually prevent anyone from ever getting cancer in the first place. It would be super duper difficult, but we know it is possible because of the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats are essentially immune to cancer (I say essentially because this February scientists dicovered two individuals that had cancer, the only two documented cases). It is thus possible that genetic therapy could create a population of humans with no (or almost no) incidence of cancer.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter all use monolithic repos (I'm taking monolithic to mean 50+% is in one repo, not necessarily everything in one repo), so no, not just Facebook. I'm going to assume there are very good reasons for doing so (and there are - you can look up past discussions on HN).
Does anyone know how to check if the patent was later invalidated?

I thought I've seen some of the patents mentioned in the lawsuit rendered invalid by the patent office later.
Just to set the record straight for Crissie's sake. Crissie is the friend he was going to visit and is not responsible for any of the discrimination.

Also, the racist does not use this property as a primary residence. It's one among many vacation rentals she owns so she has no protections under the law.
That's not what he said. He said SpaceX will start testing with the booster that took the most damage, because if it works well then there is high chance that the others will work too.
If you need monochromatic images (ie for logos or charts) a pretty cool trick is using braille. With a little bit of hacking, the xkcd example of this repo https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille/ works pretty well :)

I'll be using this for my email signature.
You need 10% of the code for 90% of the features.

But when you need to add those last 10% of features back do you realize how the crufty bloated code you tried to avoid became that way.
> discriminatory rejection patterns.

Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but how do you account for the renter and Airbnb having vastly different sets of information to work from? Also your sample size would have to be huge to rule out coincidental outcomes, which I dare say would rarely be found for the average property.

For example my property gets about 100 customers per year. I'm guessing in the last 4 years I've had 3 black customers, all accepted by the way, but if I rejected all 3 can an algorithm reasonably rule out coincidence having such a low sample size? It just seems like it would be the kind of algo doomed to fuck it up.
There's no such thing as "your own Android app", unless the apk is sideloaded. All apps downloaded by users from Google Play are essentially Google's, if you are not "too big to get banned."

[1] Developers offering products within another category of app downloaded on Google Play must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except for the following cases:

Payment is solely for physical products

Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players)

1. https://play.google.com/about/monetization.html
The July 2015 "Santa Cruz Waves" issue had an article by Peter Gregg, page 76, which talks about living out of a van and surfing, in Portugal:

https://issuu.com/santacruzwaves/docs/scw2.1/1

Seems to speak highly of the Portugal surf scene. : o )
"I think we will be successful - ironically - when it becomes boring." - Elon Musk

At the NASA press conference after the first successful drone ship landing.
> It's also an ideal language for expressing complex ideas, such as [...] finding the shortest route on a map

So, I googled "Dijkstra's Algorithm in Lisp" and got this: http://richardsherriff.com/?p=233

Now, I'm no lisp expert, so I can't judge whether the author of this code actually knows what they're doing, but I know for sure that in an imperative language the implementation of the algorithm is much more concise and understandable.

I have concluded from my observations that claims of Lisp being "easier", "ideal for learning fundamental programming concepts" and "more expressive" are exaggerated.
I have to strongly agree here. Valve is really very nice about this.

From the Steamworks FAQ

>8. Do you require exclusivity for titles you sell on Steam?

>We think you should get your game in front of as many people as you can, therefore we do not require exclusivity on titles.
The problem isn't that it landed hard, it's that it had to slow down very quickly. That's going to be the case for any GTO launch, including today's flight.

From what I understand there was heat damage around the engines.
Hope this project makes real inroads!
> Problem is, coming up with a definition of "patent troll" that's 100% objective and can reliably differentiate between a benevolent NPE like ARM

From what I can tell, ARM started 30+ years ago and sold physical chips. I am missing when they morphed into mainly selling chip designs - and how were they able to make such a transition without the publicity of lawsuits.
What about JIT compilation and other forms of code generation?
Death in the clouds: The problem with Everest’s 200+ bodies
Edit: disregard per Mike's comment below.

I would think if damage was within tolerances (even at the maximum of such), they'd be willing to relaunch. Implications from the tweet and subsequent conversations are that the damage exceeded thresholds to guarantee safe future flight, which is why they'd use it for testing on the ground.

I'd still read his tweet as meaning it's "too busted" to fly, but I suppose it's up to each person's own interpretation. Your point is well received.
Valve's Lighthouse tracking system isn't particularly elegant from a usability standpoint. I see Oculus' and Valve's current systems as a temporary solution. The future likely is in inside out tracking (i.e. one or more cameras on the headset, looking out). Oculus is working on that. I'd be surprised if Valve isn't.

I agree with your comments on the Oculus platform. It's sad to see them building higher and higher walls for their garden.
Thanks for the clarification. I'd read that elsewhere but couldn't ID a source in time. Where've you seen that?

The good news there is that it might mean the rocket can be rehabilitated if needed since structural damage would be less likely.
I call dibs on Winter Olympics in Antarctica!
Min – A smarter, faster web browser
E.g.: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=6572

"These rodents are protected from cancer because their tissues are very rich with high molecular weight hyaluronan (HMW-HA)."
The speech that convinced 50 employees to work without salaries for 2 years
You really think suing two ex-employees is their plan to make money? Most of the money those employees have is the money MagicLeap paid them.
What types of Hue light schemes do you find most helpful?
In some regards that's currently a myth perpetrated by the folks making money on container-based deployments.

Containers don't actually contain very well on Linux (yet, though some nice things are happening on that front, and you can already build very solid things with SELinux, but I haven't seen anybody actually doing so; except probably the Project Atomic folks).

But, yes, in theory, a container-based deployment is hella tight on the security front. One service being compromised is no big deal: Kill it and instantly spin up a new one on a new IP (hopefully with a fix for the security issue). If your visibility into the system is high enough, you may even be able to architect detection of compromises; e.g. if your container for database service starts sending email or opens an IRC port, you know it's fucked, and you kill it with prejudice. In a system built to think of containers as black boxes with APIs, you don't need to keep any particular one around if you have reason to tear it down.

Note that I haven't actually seen people doing any of this with containers. But, it's a thing that one could do that cannot be done when all of your services are applications running on a single big machine. The narrower the purpose of your container, the more secure it can become. You still have lots of moving parts in your total infrastructure (more, actually, since the container management has a cost, too), but each moving part has very well-defined boundaries, and misbehavior is easier to spot and easier to shut down quickly and via automated means.
Ok I'll state the obvious: people are not rats.
Wrong. Google has the exact same problem, only they chose to rewrite Perforce.

The scale of these codebases is way outside what most people have experienced and it might behoove people to realize that a lot of conventional wisdom might not apply. E.g. last time I checked, Google's codebase was >2Billion lines of code.

Google has 30,000 engineers working on a "monolithic" codebase and remain relatively productive despite (or perhaps because of it). There are whole sets of different problems at this scale.
No need look for implications, there was a clear statement that it's flyable:

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/73427436058892697...

It's being recruited as the testing leader because it represents the extreme, not because it's grounded.
If Airbnb forces people to comply with lots of regulation then vastly more airbnb listings will disappear. It is not a good business choice. Rich people like offering their small homes but they will rigorously discriminate for various reasons. And they will avoid the regulatory pitfalls anyway.
I've worked in places where we depended on external repos (Maven, Gradle, other Ivy-based things) and places where all code has to live in a mono-repo.

Thus far I've preferred the mono-repo mostly for dependency management reasons. Whether you have a lot of internal dependencies or external dependencies, you get similar benefits:
- All the changes to internal dependencies are in your revision history, across the company. Shared internal library upgrades are picked up quickly and propagate throughout applications with low delay.

- It's easier to have shared versions of external dependencies "automatically" instead of establishing policies that need a human to enforce. This makes it easier to roll out new versions and bug fixes.

- It's easier to do system-wide improvements in code quality. Replacing common bad code with better implementations is something I've seen across code bases at both Google and Twitter and they have been beneficial.

I think nobody should be trying to implement a system like this if you've got fewer than ~600 SW engineers, though. Small groups don't have as much drift or system-wide refactorings that give you benefit.
> And if you've read my blog and think I write about type theory, then you are utterly confused.

http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/the-safyness-of-static-ty...
"Apple is working on an AI system that wipes the floor with Google and everyone else"

Right. Google Now and Siri aren't even in the same realm right now and Google has access to massively more data than Apple. I'm not holding my breath.
Have you seen this demo of Jack McCauley's new laser based tracking? http://www.roadtovr.com/mts-virtual-reality-vr-tracking-syst...
They did mention Perforce in passing:

> For a repository as large as ours, a major bottleneck is simply finding out what files have changed. Git examines every file and naturally becomes slower and slower as the number of files increases, while Perforce "cheats" by forcing users to tell it which files they are going to edit. The Git approach doesn't scale, and the Perforce approach isn't friendly.

I don't know if Perforce's "unfriendliness" is enough reason not to choose it nor do I know if that was the only reason they rejected it. However, speaking for myself, I vastly prefer Subversion, Git, and Mercurial over Perforce precisely because Perforce requires you to ask for permission before you can edit a file.
Peter Thiel’s Revenge Against Gawker Is Neither Justice nor Philanthropy