skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side.

Excuse my language but I don't know a better or more direct way to say this but horseshit. You have no idea that's true. That's a pretty slanderous claim. I _hated_ the old Microsoft but I'd never let that hate distort my judgement the way it obviously has distorted yours.

> "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore ---

Equally horseshit.

> Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing ---

Again, horseshit. My feeling is that devs have seen the success of Linux and come to the correct conclusion which is that open-source is pragmatically a better engineering practise than not.

> From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS bac

Are you out of your mind? I can link to comments of people quipping about flying porcine objects and chilly days in hades when Microsoft started open-sourcing .Net. The new Microsoft was literally unimaginable even six years ago. I think it's incredible and Microsoft is to be encouraged. Guess what, they're not a monolithic malignant entity. They can be giving with one hand while taking with the other without there being a causal relationship.
what did you end up going with and why?
Status-quo bias is a phenomenon that is well documented in the psychology literature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
Bias for the established ways of thinking seems especially common (to me) in the physical sciences. I do not think that should be a surprise since the fundamental view of natural processes does not advance quickly. Perhaps this is why Einstein remarked that if you really believed in your ideas then you should quit being an academic and go get a job like a lighthouse keeper. That maybe works in mathematical physics, where all you need is a pen and paper, but in the other sciences it does not seem like a great plan. What I have observed many do when they find their ideas fall foul of the times is they go get a line-of-business job that does not require a lot of mental energy. That is a plan I have seen work for many. Finance is particularly good for that. It is a field where knowing how to think in contrarian fashion and also knowing how to run with the herd are both valuable. I see a lot of mathematical physics folks do that as a way to reconcile the glacial pace of scientific development with the urge to think and do something new and innovative. There are quite a few famous mathematicians who paid the bills with finance work. For instance, Gauss wrote insurance contracts and used his distribution to help price the risk. Of course, in modern times Jim Simons runs a hedge fund.
If a patent is secret, shouldn't it then be possible to get the patent in another country? I mean how should others know something is secret? Or am I missing something?
Linux has plenty of file descriptor types that do not correspond to a path, along with virtual file systems where files cannot be deleted...

Your example of device files is hardly universal, and the way it works is useful.
So, I subscribe to The Economist and I have a lifetime subscription to Nautilus. I happily pay for things that are good enough and relevant to my interests.

The NYT may want to consider what they could do to convince people like me that they're worth paying for.
Varnish will actually hold those 100 connections open while it dispatches 1 single request to the backend. When that request returns (assuming the cache control headers allow it), it will serve that one response to all 100 requestors. It's a very powerfull tool for anything that's even slightly cachable.
OP says they work remote. One could get two remote jobs, and choose employers based on their time zone such that their business hours don't overlap much. But the point stands: this would be a terrible way to live.
It sounds to me like this is a market where Netflix buys loyalty not with loyalty in return but with cash and "A" colleagues.

As long as they're upfront about it, that seems fair to me.
I think R's data frames is by far the most intuitive abstraction. There's a reason why it was duplicated in Python, Spark or Julia. And R has a lot of utilities for converting input strings, dates, JSON etc.
The Mathematics of Juggling [pdf]
Because sudo only works when you sudo, it's just one more thing to type/mistype. Do you really want to pay your sysadmin to sometimes run sudo and sometimes have logging? Or would you rather automate it and get 100% logging?
802.11 wireless would be a pretty big add to your point. It didn't show up until after 1995 and has made a rather large difference.
I knew that this was a big event when it happened last Sunday, because the AWS service status page had a yellow triangle rather than a green tick. Usually when they have an outage, they just put a tiny blue 'i' on the green tick...
For senior software engineers, they pay ~$400k. Source: friend works there.
How Azure AD and VS Team Services Relate to Azure Subscriptions
One thing that interests me is language power, vs experience. Let's say you had 1 year experience in language X. Language Y comes along that is better in some way. In another year, would you be happier and more productive with 2 years experience of X, or one year of Y?

I sometimes think with the churn of languages, no-one really gets deeply enough into one to really leverage it.
Microsoft is a very large organisation, and many parts behave differently.

Did you know the president of the Apache Software Foundation is also an employee at Microsoft?
Bit-squatting: exploiting cosmic ray attacks on all Internet-connected computers
I wonder when the entire browser is gonna get open-sourced.
Heh - I love the image in my head of the flywheel providing a few extra seconds of power to the coffee urn in the Blackwoods warehouse out the back and to all the fan heaters and big screen TVs in Toongabbie - just as Foxtel, Dominos, and Channel 9's Nagios dashboards all start turning red and their ops staff phones start beeping.
I think that open source programming languages will always win in the long run, since the target customer base knows how to program and extend the tools.
Linux Isn't No UniX either.
I love reading about problems like these, it's great that Amazon is forthcoming about them. There's always some new wrinkle.

E.g. in this case, in normal operation, power from the utility power grid spins a flywheel. When the grid fails, the flywheel provides a holdover until Amazon's diesel generators can start.

But in this failure the voltage from the grid sagged, rather than going away completely. The breaker isolating the flywheel from the grid didn't open quickly enough. So power from the flywheel was sent out to the grid. It didn't succeed in powering the grid for very long. Oops.
The success of R in Statistics (in respect to Python, etc) was that it was thought from the beginning with Statisticians and their specific needs and approaches in mind. As much as I appreciate Python, it is a general purpose programming language adapted to Statisticians needs, not the other way around.

R has many issues, but if you speak to Statisticians you will hear that its the closest thing they have to their own way of doing things.
Same here. Simple.

I use it more for connecting to resources behind NAT then as an anonymizing proxy.
If I use python I have to write half of the algorithms I use myself. Worse, I have to write a gazillion helper functions nyself. It just won't do
Lots of people keep backyard chickens even in developed countries. Most of the local schools have chicken coops.
They're not Jesus, but they are not Satan either. I've seen EEE called on every single good gesture Satya's Microsoft did, and it's getting old. Is Microsoft the savior of OSS? No. Is the company doing something nice by open sourcing components? Yes.
Sorry I'm a bit late to reply. Just wanted to say thanks very much for telling me about this. I now know what I'm doing this weekend :)
Evolution of C programming practices: study of Unix operating system 1973--2015
Run Multiple WhatsApp Accounts in Android Smartphone Without Rooting
Although the author phrases it as "70+ hours a week", my assumption is it's not the hours per week that he doesn't want to commit to it, but the total hours involved that it's going to require to solve the situation.

Whether that's 70 per week or 5 hours per month, the total amount of hours needed is going to be x,00 or x,000 - and that's time he simply thinks is not a priority or valuable to him.
Let's Encrypt?
You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal".

To be honest, it is much better now, but as a QE on the project, now I get to deal with so many half-abandonned/half-finished features.
===8<==
Update 2016-07-09 05:58 UTC

Just to be clear: Please note it’s filed under the “Rant” category. The post has some valid points but don’t take it too seriously. Use your best judgment to decide which parts of the above apply to your situation.
===8<===
I've always wondered if there is scope for a MMO version of Elite that is less ambitious (especially graphically) in some ways than the current Elite: Dangerous but still has the essence of Elite; I'm thinking 3D graphics with a retro vibe, maybe primarily text based menus for in-station activities (and certainly no desire for on-planet or first person shooter components). Even keep the generative universe of the original with its nutty planet descriptions.
I think it is, I'd be interested to hear user stories.
> I'd much prefer a generous but structured policy.

Same here. If I have X weeks of paid vacation, I know I can take X weeks of vacation.

If I have 'unlimited vacation', I know I can take... some amount, I guess... but I have to constantly vigilant to the whims of HR and management to keep from taking 'too much'.
Sudo su
The politically-correct sympathetic "single mom" is referring to widows and abandoned women, not a pregnant single woman.
They are advertising in a thread about GitHub pages. I'd expect private pages/unpaid open-source projects are the vast majority of users of GitHub pages.
but that's a false dichotomy

It's a false dichotomy for self-funded/bootstrapped businesses. But if you consider yourself a startup, you have to deliver growth. It's that pressure that leads to the 70+ hour weeks. It's entirely possible to own and run a business while still putting in reasonable hours. But it's unlikely that business is a startup, by Paul Graham's definition of the word.

For reference, Paul Graham defines a startup as:

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not
in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to
work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit."
The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with
startups follows from growth.
"The API is more important than the implementation." If you extend the definition of API to include things like standard command line tools, etc
Am also planning tooooo
32m Twitter passwords may have been hacked and put up for sale on the Dark Web
Selling products to SMBs is hard. Most small businesses will often take the free trials but won't be willing to pay for a product if it entails a financial commitment.

I have seen a small companies use student licenses instead of paying for the more expensive commercial license in order to save every possible penny.
GSB-34:+First+Q&A+Episode|+5+Survey+Questions+Answered+By+Many+Forum+Readers
data.table and dplyr take data frames up a notch!

https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/wiki/Getting-starte...

https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introd...

xts is quite useful as well, when you need to do modeling/analysis in an especially time-oriented manner:

http://joshuaulrich.github.io/xts/
One pillar of the traditional Republican support for Israel is the Christian effort to usher in the apocalyptic war that will bring forth the second coming of Jesus Christ.
He said, they said
'95 back to '75:
- no mobile phones
- no personal computers (and punchcards and 'computer time' were still a thing)
- internet didn't exist at all, apart from a handful of people
- civil rights for minorities and women still in it's infancy (much more difference 75-95 than 95-15)
- cold war at it's height, no 'pax americana redux'
- blue collar work was still very common, and poorly paid as a result - the 90s was when the trades started to make serious money
- fitness craze of the late 70s + 80s not in view yet; smoking wasn't seen as unhealthy
- portable music players didn't exist
- international travel eased considerably (though maybe as much again to 2015?)
- 24 hour trading came in in the '80s and early '90s. In the 70s, if you hadn't done your shopping by Sunday, you would go hungry...
- exotic food amongst anglos was 'stroganoff', 'stroganoff', and 'stroganoff' - the food revolution kicked off in the '90s :)

The thin glassy touchscreens we have now are seen in scifi at least as far back as the '60s; they're not all that suprising, I wouldn't think. China's industrialisation might not be so surprising either, given the amazing things Japan managed to do in the relatively short time after the Meiji Restoration - in only 50 years they were sitting at the big players' table in naval treaties limiting size of fleets, for example.
The key is to ignore the feature request, and focus on the problem.

Users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with shitty solutions.

You need to take their solution, reverse engineer their real problem from that, then work out a good solution for that problem that fits well with your product.
> NT still has backdoors

For someone speaking of ethics you really can't just leave this here without any support...
That must be a PR comment.
I have never heard such overwhelmingly positive words about MS.
I am talking about CO, but mostly more off the beaten path resorts such as T-Ride, Butte, and the Boat. I started with Voicestream (now T-Mobile) back in '96 and it was quite bad. Back-country has always been best with VZ, and that is the same today.
Children's story bot in FB messenger
The 'demand' of loyalty isn't higher than at any other company. And in fact, this point is specifically called out in the culture deck:
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/33-Loyalt...

As for the annual bonus, Netflix assumes that everyone is functioning at a high level and pays as if they were making the top-end of the bonus range at other companies. Which is part of the rationale behind the high base compensation.
> most web hosters would not provide database access without charging

> most web devs needed a higher level of technical competency

> websites were run by people who only knew front-end programming and markup languages

That was exactly my situation
I never read Creative Computing as it came out, but there are some issues (along with other magazines) archived at: http://www.atarimagazines.com/
There are more server deployments of Windows than there are of Linux.

This is because Linux's server workload is mainly the Web. But every departmental office needs an Exchange server...
Gates is very addictive with vaccine stuff, I think you are right. This could be the trigger. But could be cultural and educational stuff too, maybe people must learn how great breed a chicken could be.
>decaf coffee

There is the problem
Although it's funny watching you guys fight.

Isn't the basic problem how much money the US government has spent improving the supply of heroin from Afghanistan after the taliban completely destroyed it during their 2001 rise to power.
This was maybe the case at Linux 2.0, but is not the case now.

Also, Windows development is infinitely more painful than Unix/Linux.
Which is why I personally use the term GNU/Linux. Not because the only other component in the system is GNU, but because it preserves the history of the system. It doesn't help than Linus calls his kernel an operating system.
You raise an interesting point. The prices seem too high for some commenters. They are presumably capable of doing this themselves on a DO box so they do not think it is valuable enough to justify that price.

However, one of the features of their highest price ($39/month) plan is that you can use 100 custom domains. If you have 100 domains hosted on Route 53 you will be paying over $50/month for domains, at which point $39/month for the service which actually hosts your static site is entirely negligible. I am curious how many people fall in to that bucket though - it seems more likely that people will run multiple sites with few custom domains, rather than a single site with 100 custom domains.

I am planning to offer some of Netlify's services in a product I am currently building. I'm still working on the pricing model but it is likely to be based on builds per month and bandwidth/storage, rather than the actual number of sites. My cost driver is not 'how many domain names are configured in my HTTP-routing layer', but rather 'how much pressure is each site putting on my build and web servers'.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Muhammad Ali Became a Big Brother to Me
Encouraging people to interview elsewhere isn't just about salary - it's more comprehensive than that. We only want to have people on our team who really want to be there. So people often leave their roles at Netflix to pursue other things. Many move to startups as early employees or founders so it's not at all just a question of compensation.
I'm in the same-ish boat with regards to paid subscriptions. I pay for what is worth it to me. I think it's an older people trend yet. I tend to put things in the perspective of what a movie costs to watch in theaters. If the entertainment value surpasses or at least equals that to me, I go for it. Netflix and Hulu are a friggin bargain. Other services fall on that spectrum to me. It's all about the value.
I read "well off white guy" as implying privilege. I am not sure that is the same as accusing someone of being a racist. The benefits of that privilege can help make your life easier, whether you asked for the privilege or not. And also regardless off whether you actively or consciously try to benefit from said privilege. I guess it does at least affect the way you experience life and the world around you.

Note:
I am from Denmark and maybe I have a different perspective, even though racism is a problem here as well, but maybe in a different way.
I was having an internal debate with myself about whether to jump in on this conversation just because it is a topic that can cause a lot of controversy. But I decided that self censorship, is a bad thing for society as a whole in the long run.
I'm going to give a very boring answer with regards to monetization strategy: they should sell licenses to Dwarf Fortress, or Dwarf Fortress Supporter Edition, which is distinguished from DF Vanilla by saying that it's the supporter edition and maybe some cosmetic change somewhere.

I would price it at $19, where it would be towards the top-end of indie games on Steam; by the standards of people who enjoy Dwarf Fortress, Dwarf Fortress ROFLstomps the depth and quality of any other $19 entertainment option.

I would then immediately solicit inclusion in a Humble Bundle, in the expectation that Humble Bundle would leap at the chance. One could envision a rougelike or Df-alike bundle; I anticipate that Humble Bundle would give DF top billing in whatever deal was negotiated. I would model that Humble Bundle as doing > $800k in sales, of which DF's take would be > ~$80k. Throw in "and we'll use Humble as our exclusive e-commerce provider for 12 months" since I think it is fairly clear that the authors don't want to be in the e-commerce business; that gives Humble ~10% of their gross revenue for next year.

Stage 3 of the master plan: get the game onto Steam. This might require $X,000 worth of production-ready art and video assets to satisfy Steam's requirements; $X,000 will not be a material amount of money to Dwarf Fortress, LLC.

The above unsolicited opinions are coming from a place of love for small software businesses generally and Dwarf Fortress in particular. Strike the earth.
Ah so I have luckily not had to experience this as my interfaces have been relatively stable
Why, oh why do they report times in PDT rather than AEST (the zone of the affected area) or UTC (the standard everything else is based on)?

(Mutter, mutter, … something about Americans and their timezones … and northern hemispherians and their seasons …)
Another dichotomy may also be pursuing the growth at the behest of investor vs doing it on your own. Growth, or adding value too, can have different meanings to the investor vs innovator. Startups that make money become businesses.
How the University of Calgary hack went down
The article repeatedly stresses how "influential" DF was, and it bothers me a bit. Dwarf Fortress is one of the greatest achievements in video game history because of its unparalleled complexity, but it's pretty much a niche game. It wasn't, I think, very influential at all. There are many adjectives we can use to describe this work. Monumental springs to mind. But not influential.
Ugly Bits of Data Science
I don't know why you're getting downvoted since the parent is basically stating random opinions about "power" and "sophistication" without anything to actually back it up.

11 param functions don't say "power" to me. They say "poorly thought out API design". Much can be said for most Windows APIs in general.
Well no, it assumes what I said, what you said, and a bunch of other things.

Why are you being weirdly insistent that there only exist exactly one tool for making HTTP requests on the command line?
That's right, and you're even lucky to the (i) usually it's buried in the rss which is why https://twitter.com/aws_shd is useful.
Of course, you must mean you have a foolproof system for finding "A" players in your candidate pipeline then, and then it's just a matter of selecting only the best!

Just today I clicked on a linkbait title from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-stephen-curry-nba-draft-2...

It lists all the people who were drafted ahead of Stephen Curry, "arguably the greatest basketball player in the world right now". Curry was drafted seventh. The others were:

1) Blake Griffin, 5 all star games

2) Hasheem Thabeet, 0 all star games

3) James Harden, 3 all star games

4) Tyreke Evans, 0 all star games

5) Ricky Rubio, 0 all star games

6) Jonny Flynn, 0 all star games

Even in the very limited domain of professional basketball, it's impossible to predict who will be the superstars and who will quickly wash out of the league.

In the real world, it's much more difficult!
Quite obviously biased and overstated. Many subscription models have nothing to do with tricking people or making it hard to cancel and many customers of those continue to pay knowingly and willingly and appreciate the convenience of agreeing to this up-front instead of manually renewing multiple services each month. For example, my water provider. My Netflix subscription. You cannot just ignore this because it doesn't fit your model. The immorality is the trickery, not the subscription.
Please don’t use Slack for FOSS projects
Methinks you are selling older computers short. I ran my blog (up through 2005, maybe to 2006) on a 50MHz 486 with 32?MB RAM (maybe 64MB? It's been a decade) and a gig hard drive.

That same server was also my email server.

Then again, I wrote my own blogging engine in C [1] (and still use it).

[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
I think the espionage act might have something to say about it.