skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350
), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total).

Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time.

I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them).

I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!
I am having atomic.dining.today.
Every warning you receive is the accumulation of human stupidity, malice, or both. Someone, sometime, somewhere did something that made them think to warn you too. I guess its a form of fame.
Was there not a PoC recently (~months ago) of someone who did similar over a speaker/microphone but outside the audible range of ears? It was a PoC of the Flame malware capability to jump airgapped PCs
I found a paragraph in this article http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/ very apt at describing what Unix signals are like:

In *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Douglas Adams
mentions an extremely dull planet, inhabited by a bunch of
depressed humans and a certain breed of animals with sharp
teeth which communicate with the humans by biting them very
hard in the thighs. This is strikingly similar to UNIX, in
which the kernel communicates with processes by sending
paralyzing or deadly signals to them.
At the Previous Company I was in (Bindo Labs) I was coding the NFC Payment Integration with the Point of Sales System (POS). One of the requirements for the integration was that every transaction has to happen less than 0.5 seconds including the hardware card-reading part. So I ended up having to wave the card around the reader all day testing it. I thought of building a automated testing robot but tight deadline prevented me from diverging, and it didn't end up happening.

I'd be curious to know how big a business it is for you now that it's 5 years past. Sounds like a very interesting case-study.
Could you explain more about this?
I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my (very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)
The NMOS logic circuitry of the time had pull-up resistors bringing up the voltages to 5V. Chips would then ground the lines to make 0V. So in many logical views, '1' is the default state, and '0' is the active state. Unconnected bits would often leave the lines at 1.

So, if you ask a chip to read a value, and it asserts 4-bit number on the 8-bit data bus, it would tend to be

1111xxxx

in binary, or 240+x.

(Note: I don't know if it asserts 4 bits on the bus, and the bus pull-ups keep the upper 4 bits high, or if it's internal to the chip that the bits are naturally pulled up and it in fact asserts all 8 bits. Same net effect, modulo some sub-cycle rise/fall timing.)
Compare Gun Death Rates: The U.S. Is in a Different World
I've had them ship a flashlight that came with an alkaline battery labeled as if it had a lithium battery.

I've also found that they wouldn't ship the 8 oz version of a popular homebrewing sanitizer (Star San -- it's phosphoric acid and a strong detergent) to my address, but they shipped the 32 oz version just fine.

As a customer, the annoying thing is that they don't make it easy to request a review of this bogus database info.
On Windows it isn't. Microsoft has made it clear that you aren't supposed to link to the msvcrt.dlls shipped in Windows. See https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/wiki2/The%20case%20again...
This is textbook Gamblers Fallacy.
I can't overplay the importance of a octave like DSL.

Julia is gaining marketshare and mindshare among grad student not just due to its speed, but because it is a more fun and intuitive environment in which to code mathy stuff.

These people will in turn filter into industry and if not them, then atleast their code.

Also macros. As Julia gains more utility for run of the mill data science, Its Dplyr like DSL abilities will be very attractive.

Do you see this type system and generic function library as useful for general purpose programming as well? How would that play with mypy and type hints?
This was the original architecture of Multics BTW -- the world just consisted of a single address space of segments (pages) plus a capability-based address space; a higher level construct gave you a named structure for a group of segments.

A similar approach has been taken with HP's interesting memristor-based "Machine"

There's a lot of interesting stuff in Organick's book on Multics, not all of which was implemented, unfortunately. And a lot of really good stuff was tossed overboard when fitting Unix into a PDP-7 (a lot of overwrought bad stuff was jettisoned too -- don't get the wrong idea!).
> Aircraft carriers are cheaper but that assumes they are not sitting ducks and we can't find a friendly airfield somewhere.

This is probably incredibly naïve but wouldn't it help us get a "friendly" airfield if we could say something like "you can allow us to use your airfield or we will move in our ships in N hours anyway". Am I missing something here?
There are just as many benefits to a standardized infrastructure as there are downfalls caused by adopting the wrong standard, by forcing people onto it, or by using it for too long.
Let me doubt this quite a bit. What he did was an impressive display of lack of foresight, career savy, professionnalism, interest in his professional work. What I'm saying is, engineers are thinking workers that need some indidual drive and forward thinking to succeed. He showed less ability for intrinsic motivation than a seven year old.
So to play devil's advocate, a relationship between the data leak and acquisition?
As a shareholder I would find that kind of behaviour to have been the exact opposite of the kind of duty my mangers owe me. I'm surprised it's legal.
He didn't say "ban" much less "ban outright", did he? The list is "desirable properties".

I agree with his characterization of advertising, and that to be "people centric", there would be no ads by definition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
Watching the recorded feed from this summit is kind of nuts. You have Vint Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP) providing Q&A about a distributed digital archive of the internet and the first guy to ask a question is Carl Hewitt (developer of the Actor Model) and then the guy looking over his shoulder at Carl is Tim Berners-Lee (some web dude).
Often the fine just makes it very easy to establish guilt, and victims are left to fend for themselves in the court system. It might not even be possible for the FAA to pass money from fines along to the victims.
Where? The first hit on a Google search is a Quartz article from three years ago.
What sort of "bigger SATA disks" are you using, or how are you treating them?

If I see one bad sector develop on a disk for no obvious reason, it's getting replaced ASAP because it's a sign that more will follow very soon.
Both the Firefox and Chromium implementations of the payments api are free and open source.
In my experience the act of purchasing sudafed has simplified over the last few years and all I have to do anymore is show ID (as opposed to the pharmacist filling out a big log book and counter signing).

That aside, Flonase is my drug of choice for that stuff now and in a world without one or the other I know which I'll choose.
Given the mountain of legal shit Google has been subjected to over Java, the last thing Apple wanted was to have to answer to Larry's lawyers. ZFS, awesome as it is, has been poisoned.
No - by their reasoning, people who can't manage money should not be allowed to play in lotteries. Which they really shouldn't.
> We could live in a country where it's illegal to possess materials which may be unsafely transported

You seem to be suggesting that regulating the transport of dangerous materials is a slippery slope.

That's like arguing that speed limits are a slippery slope toward a ban on driving. Maybe that makes sense in some absolutist libertarian nightmare, but in the real world we have to weigh the real danger of regulation against the real danger of deregulation.

In this case, it's not much trouble to package sulfuric acid in a safe container. It is, however, a lot of trouble to be injured or killed by sulfuric acid.

I honestly can't believe that there's anyone arguing how the pros/cons shake out in that specific scenario.
> It's large, expensive, and incredibly complicated, so they don't have many.

From the article: "Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix estimated China could produce 1,227 DF-21D ballistic anti-ship missiles for the cost of a single U.S. carrier."

> It relies on a trio of satellites that can be compromised in various ways...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21 indicates China is actively improving and expanding this satellite capacity.

> ... and can be destroyed on the ground.

You can say that about every weapon system in the world. If China built thousands of these, there's no way you're taking out all of them in a preemptive strike.

> It can also be shot down by the SM-3, which is pretty widely deployed by now.

Again, China can build thousands. An entire carrier battlegroup is going to have at most a few hundred SM-3s.
Open-source is great, but if that source is covered by patents you're potentially liable for damages. Nobody would ever willingly expose themselves to that.
I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious performance issues.
Editors, can you fix the title of this post to match what it links to: "Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4".

The linked post is a rather confusingly written way of saying that Gtk 4.6 will have a stable ABI but that Gtk 4.0-4.5 won't (and thus shouldn't be used outside GNOME, if I understand it correctly).
Look into Dwolla.
This is interesting because just yesterday I saw a discussion here on HN about how sad people were that Apple was doing nothing to improve OSX and was putting all the focus on iOS instead. Heh.
No discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is, unfortunately.

I wonder how it compares to the memristor, which also has a sub 90 ns switching time and pretty low power. Optane blows that out of the water, if it's not vaporware.
Air refueling tankers are likely really easy targets to hit and don't scale for large bombing fleets, close air support, or other applications for naval aviation.

Yes, that friendly airfield assumption is one main point of the aircraft carrier.
I use it all day.

First thing in the morning: How's the weather?

In the car: Navigate to work. Play NOFX shuffled.

At work: Remind me to fix Monit on the Kafka cluster.

Before bed: Wake me up at 7am.
i just tried using sauce labs real device testing and I must say its pretty unusable for any real testing. Browserstack has this running pretty amazingly these days as I found out after saucelabs failed for me :(
New Ways to Save Data on Android Devices and iPhone
When we talk about 1ns latency for DRAM we aren't talking about access latency, we're talking about CAS latency[0]. This is how fast the DRAM actually works. It doesn't include the rest of the overhead between the time the data is sent over the bus and the time it's loaded into a register and ready for an instruction to operate on it.

CAS latency for DDR3-3300 is less than 1/3ns, according to the article below. If Intel's new Optane memory can achieve addressing on the order of 10ns, it will be very competitive with DRAM, since all of other overhead along the data path ought to be similar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency
i guess the homeless have got an app for that on their 500 bucks mobiles which was written by a 17 year old scumbag who had an idea of how to rip off the poorest and appear as a moral person to the public.
Sounds a lot like what Apple did with Swift.
This is actually the second major release of Safari in calendar 2016; there was 9.3 had a bunch of features back in March: https://webkit.org/blog/6008/new-web-features-in-safari/.

And of course Apple has also been shipping Safari Technology Preview every two weeks since March 30th: https://webkit.org/blog/6017/introducing-safari-technology-p... that updates via the Mac App store, in addition to the WebKit Nightlies.

Many of the JavaScript and web features have already shipped in the Tech Preview versions of Safari; the new ones will likely show up in the next Safari Tech Preview. Features that rely on macOS Sierra frameworks won't work on El Capitan obviously.
Those who fly a lot may get frequent upgrades through an airline's loyalty program. Some programs will upgrade you automatically if there are any seats available.
There is something similar in the US at Dartmouth (yes it has a slightly goofy name): http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/academics/graduate/innovati...

Basically they let you cross register with some Tuck Classes while doing research that is more self-directed than normal.

Source: I am in the program
Were carriers truly obsolete then why is china rapidly building it's own? It already has been building forward operating bases in the South China sea. Why invest in building a new class of ship which they have only recently operated if it was already obsolete.
I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything.

I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time).

I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tracking (queries, index size, query time) for the past 3 months and archives back further, and I have only had to remove noisy neighbors a few times (and did so quickly, by first isolating them on their own VM, then helping them move off to dedicated resources if needed).

Also, I explicitly state I offer no SLA in the support docs—some people are okay with that.

But yes, I'm always on call, technically. I've only had to fix 'emergency' scenarios about 3 times in the past 5 years though. Even security updates are automated via Ansible/Jenkins. I just need to log in and click a button and things are updated, or a new server is built.

I highly recommend Google's new book on SREs; whether a one man shop or a multi billion corp, the learnings are exactly the same!
And they can be sunk by todays military capabilities in no time, and what is more frightening, nobody can tell where the torpedo/missile came from.

China/Iran/Isreal/Russia (i could name a more few) all have the ability to do this, maybe even undetected.

Analysis of the detonation device used will be hard for a ship sunk to 3000 feet, not sayin this is impossible.

A carrier group can only do so much in the end.
Well, both HN and the business press are often negative - and on the surface Microsoft was buying a failing business, so it's a reasonable reaction.

A case in favor of the acquisition might go something like this:

1. Microsoft was far, far behind in mobile, with little hope to catch up through internal efforts alone. "Winning" mobile had the promise to unlock a lot of new revenue across Microsoft's other business units, "losing" mobile threatened to restrict Microsoft to the stagnating desktop market.

2. The industry was already consolidating (Google buying Motorola), there was a looming patent war, Nokia was sitting on a ton of patents, and was one of the few (if not the only) good target left for acquisition.

3. CEO of Nokia was ex-Microsoft, so Microsoft likely had a good idea what they were getting. (Conversely, this could mean Nokia CEO knew exactly how to apply lipstick to a pig to get it sold).

In short, limited time window to act, potential for dramatic growth for Microsoft if it works out, relatively small downside if it doesn't (IIRC the cost was something like 10% of Microsoft's cash reserves at the time). I'd take that bet to be honest.

All of this is speculation of course (I have no inside knowledge), and it was clearly not worth it in the end, but I can understand why a decision like this might have been made.
I'm one of those. I like to read about what they do because I like the idea of it even if I don't have a use for OpenBSD in my life besides a router. I could read their output all day like

-Results of audits or how they got bizarre bugs to surface with security features/randomization/running on exotic hardware platforms.
-Security mitigations and software hardening as they find potential attack surface
-Recreating the most common use cases of a common piece of software with <5% the codebase.
As a former Navy F/A-18 pilot, I have strong opinions on this and generally agree with the analysis. A few thoughts:

1. The services are building what the defense contractors want to build more than what the war fighters want. Knew a lot of pilots who didn’t like the F-35 and would have preferred more, cheaper planes specialized for specific roles. This defense contractor capture is a big problem.

2. The services waste these ‘big war’ resources on our insurgency campaigns. F/A-18s were about 10k per flight hour and perform worse than platforms such as the Super Tacono[1] when supporting war fighters on the ground. We spent hundreds of billions more than we needed to on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because when the game starts everyone wants to play to justify their budgets. Programs such as the Super Tacano were shut down to protect and justify the massive expenditure on fighter jets. Funding for different types of wars needs to go through different sources to prevent this enormous waste of money.

3. I’d be for a submersible carrier that could surface to launch and retrieve drones that act as missile trucks for both air-to-air and strike missions. I wouldn’t go all in on unmanned aircraft though, since I would also assume the possibility of totally denied electronic environment where signals are jammed and space assets are unavailable.

4. To force military leaders to focus on the services and not themselves, I’d support a ban on senior level leadership (O-7 and above) from accepting board seats or contractor / full-time positions with defense contractors. Too many leaders make decisions while in service influenced by their personal outcomes when they get out. This behavior reinforces a system that supports the status quo. Senior leaders have great retirement packages and can do things other than maintain an incestuous relationship with the military-industrial complex. Although sometimes other jobs seem to result in more bad behavior such as pressure to look the other way on Theranos and its questionable product.[2, 3] Does look like their board has gotten a bit better with the only remaining military / diplomat being General Mattis. Glad to see Admiral Roughead and Secretary of State Kissinger are no longer there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano
[2] http://www.techinsider.io/emails-theranos-elizabeth-holmes-u...
[3] https://www.theranos.com/leadership
Pretty good, honestly. Encourage you to email for more info.
I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ <- the current copy is pretty terrible!).

I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon".

Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs.

It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project:

- Hard to make
- Small market
- Complex

But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc).

(Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)
I don't think I will punish my employee for having contempt for the company. That is how dictators work. If a smart employee holds my company in contempt I should probably figure out why.
Snapchat Launches a Colossal Expansion of Its Advertising
The Space Review: The Bird Is the Word
Can you explain the liquid chalk concept more? I use chalk to absorb and dry sweat on my hands, how does liquid do that? Does the alcohol evaporate super fast and leave the chalk to soak up my sweat?
Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends. I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per month, net.
I'm assuming he made no documentation on his 'project'. If I was a dev who was assigned to the task of figuring out how it worked I'd have a jolly good time.

Would be amazing to see someone who is really good at software development doing something cool like that.
I already have gtk2, gtk3, qt4, qt5 installed on my linux machine, the situation which I really hope to get rid of.
And now GNOME devs hope user to install gtk2, gtk3, gkt4, gkt5, gtk6 at the same time to solve imcompatibility. Nice try.
Are you suggesting that it is acceptable to force neutral parties into a war? Or are you trying to negotiate with your enemies for the right to bomb them? I'm not sure I say any reasonable interpretation of that proposal.
Terrible analysis. This is especially funny: Mitchell sank a captured German battleship to prove a point. Except what point are your proving when you destroy a captured ship?
The article seems to be saying America's military isn't powerful enough. Is that really a problem for anyone, even America? I thought most of their military was just a byproduct of the military industrial complex and not actually needed for anything.
email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com, I deleted that from my comment here because I haven't really publicly released that project yet, but basically the gist is you put the liquid chalk on as a base layer, then use regular chalk. the marketing & sales is the true magic in a business like this. the liquid evaporates near instantly.
We're now at about $150k in
bookings halfway through the year. Last year was $30k revenue for the entire year. I hope the numbers keep going up or this will have to go back to side-project status!