skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I prefer OpenBSD to Qubes.

Over the past couple years, my approach has changed from blacklisting what’s broken, to whitelisting what’s safe. NoScript in the browser, and I’m working on installing OpenBSD on my Libreboot laptop (tricky because UEFI support is so new).

OpenBSD has my favorite approach. Continual auditing of the codebase, and they’re always implementing new 'seatbelts', such as ASLR, W^X, and now pledge(2). These seatbelts are used liberally – even in programs that you theoretically shouldn’t need protection from, such as the system-provided implementation of cat. They aggressively delete dead code, and probably have the smallest codebase of all modern nix systems. The best code is no code. :)

Theo has some great comments on magical “silver-bullet” thinking about security. In this case, specifically about the security of VMs (2007, so pretty dated now):

x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full
of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page
protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand
new pile of shit.

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide
collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or
applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write
virtualization layers without security holes.

Harsh, but not inaccurate. And it’s part of the reason I’d rather use OpenBSD than QubesOS.

Eight years after that comment, a critical vulnerability in Xen affected the security of QubesOS, and the developers were shocked, shocked!

It is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the
hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink
their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps
additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor
ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes
no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive
work.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-patches-7-year-o...
> The decision to announce her technology imperatives outside of Silicon Valley may seem strange, but it represents one of the platform objectives: to democratize tech industry growth across the country, rather than just leaving the industry isolated on its most well-known turf.

This alone is enough to win my support.
The success of Uber in a city is directly proportional to how much taxis suck in that city.

So Singapore is one of a few cities where that's the case (NYC also -- Uber doesn't really work there. I was there for 8 days and requesting an Uber as a 10-15 minute wait. You can get into one of a million cabs that go by in that time. I gave up).
How much more would it cost to build it in a very straight line from Burbank to Gilroy, roughly parallel to Highway 101, right through the coastal mountains?
Wow, Brief. I used it, years ago. Very fast [1] and good text editor [2]. A few years back, in Boston, I was introduced to the person who wrote it.

[1] It had all kinds of shortcuts for speed. I think I remember one where, if you pressed an arrow key for a short while, it would move the cursor (up/down/left/right) at some speed. If you held the key down for longer, it would guess that you wanted to move longer distances in the file, and move the cursor faster. May have used low-level assembly language techniques and code for speed.

[2] A free version of it was available recently. I have it on my PC and use it sometimes these days.
One word. Relentless. That is how you make and stay in this business. I am relentless so that I can look at yesterday's code and giggle at what a fool I was.

I've hit several plateaus in my history -- mostly around the time I feel comfortable with something. Thats my sign that I need to learn something new.

You're going to be called a lot of things when you start out, Its all about how you take it. To this day, After ~7 tech jobs, countless "needs improvement", 2 companies founded, and about 1.4M in VC funding --- I still feel like a damn rookie.
I probably should also add that I'm using FreePascal - not Delphi - and that the servers are a mix of Windows and Linux.
Someone in China is going to get killed over that malicious slander.
Sure, but now we're past all that and people still come up with bullshit reasons that CSS SHOULDN'T be replaced when there is every reason to believe that we can do a better job now that we've suffered through 20 years of learning.
Porn site donates to charity – Maxim
Some of the disadvantages may seem valid but in terms of value, wordpress stands tall among many depending on what you are doing.
Many internet marketers for example use Wordpress over squarespace because its still one of the best CMS's out there.
Where they are lacking is UX and UI. Medium for example beat them to the punch there but isn't as useful if you're trying to make money online.
If you believe a large fraction of techies are not complicit and in fact are very against these unfriendly designs, then do you agree with the solution proposed by the author—just like the solution to the problem of unsafe working conditions—namely, regulation? After all, if a large fraction of techies are against this, there's political will, right?

Sure, in your worldview the big tech companies have too much money and power, but why would it be so much more asymmetrical than the unsafe factory days as to require a qualitatively different solution?

> I tried to avoid the surveillance state, but it’s very difficult to function in society without it.

The author made this point, too, and connected it with the point about unsafe working conditions and how it is theoretically opt-in but in practice a highly-discouraged opt-out, which I thought was poignant, especially because it suggests an easy-to-understand (though difficult-to-implement) solution: regulation.

Note that he's not just handwaving in the magic word "regulation", he has a concrete proposal for six specific, privacy-protecting rules: http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....
> What I was asking is "how do you weigh a gas without it spreading around and mixing with the air?"

That's a rather different question than you actually asked, "how do you weigh something that is lighter than air?" You might notice that not a single response takes the perspective that what makes the problem difficult is that helium will spread out or mix with the atmosphere. Lots of gases (not to mention liquids!) are heavier than air while still being fluid; weighing them doesn't pose the same problems.

> Same thing with helium, eventually it gets high enough that the neutral air molecules are sparse enough that it can float on top. It doesn't continue to rise past that point because gravity is still pulling it down.

This isn't true at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
Yes, if you control the language, you control the debate.
yes part of the magic was that there were so many different types of systems to get into. It was much, much more than just the 10 digit phone numbers. There was the parallel Blue Box system. There were mysterious things called "0488s," entry points to satellite systems, strange networks, loops, lots and lots of company voicemail systems, various ways to "extend" or evade traces, access points to service console to give yourself phone numbers, etc. In fact, almost all of the stuff, like conferences was in normal use by corporations during the day and crawled over by teenagers at night :) Even just payphones had numerous ways to be hacked.
Do you run? I'd run every day if I were you. You may think this is tangential. Try it and you'll be back here to thank me.

Also, if you suspect you might be depressed you should talk to a therapist/professional/clinician. There's no shame in taking care of yourself.
Defense, repurposability, and capacity.

Eisenhower had two sources of inspiration when pushing the interstate highway system. The well-known one was seeing the autobahn in Germany, but the second one was an experiment he was put in charge of in 1919, to see, using the existing US highway system, how long it would take to get a military convoy from one side of the country to the other. The answer was 23 days, with many bridges broken and having to be repaired, with an average speed less than 6 mph. This was obviously inadequate for defense purposes, so even if the most common purpose today of the EIS is private car and commercial truck transport, it was worth building for its defensive role.

Repurposability: the EIS is useful in more ways than HSR would be. HSR is useful only for passenger trains. The EIS works with cars, cargo trucks, tanker trucks, buses, tanks, and in an emergency many parts can be used as runways. In addition, it's connected with the rest of the North American road network, something which would not be true of CA HSR. The best you could get would be intermodal stations, probably at the terminal stops. HSR can't carry freight of any type, and the tracks are meant to be grade separated from the existing freight rail network.

Capacity: At the peak hour, 12,000 people cross the bay bridge westbound vs 28,000 through the BART Transbay Tube westbound. Seems like a win for rail, right? That's with 2.5 minute headway on packed commuter trains feeding from 4 different lines. HSR trains won't have the capacity of BART trains, nor the frequency. Even if each individual's trip is faster, the total throughput is lower. CA HSR specifies 900 seats on a 12-car train (or rather, 450 seats on each of 2 6-car trains which can be joined together). Just to have the capacity of I-5, (which we'll take to be 2/5 of the Bay Bridge capacity for simplicity (2 lanes vs. 5)) there would need to be a train every 11 minutes 15 seconds. Worse, to meet the "expected" ridership of 33.1 million people/year, trains will have to run with an average of 708+ people, assuming the trains run 24/7 (which seems extraordinarily unlikely).

In terms of construction costs, a rough estimate puts the cost of the 375 miles of interstate freeway between SF and LA at $4B (assuming costs of the entire EIS were spread evenly over every mile, but they weren't; the actual cost was lower, excluding the bay bridge, which is tolled). HSR is currently trending towards $62B. Ongoing subsidies are, using the same metric, $321M/year vs. ??? The HSR group claims it will break even before phase 1 completion (they estimate millions of people/year want to go between San Jose and Bakersfield, which seems pretty ridiculous), and be operating-and-maintenance profitable throughout in 2029 when the SF-LA line is brought online. It's hard to find in the 2016 business plan, but the O&M estimates are there: ~$1.1B/year in 2029 (excluding trainset lifecycle cost averaging). The state is on the hook for all of that that doesn't get covered by fares.

So that's ultimately why we should hold transit to a higher standard - more uncertainty, less utility.
We process at least 30 million messages a day with sidekiq and had to start sharding message queues for different purposes. At some point it's not worth trying to optimize the messaging.
Speaking purely for myself: It depends on the conversation, but I'm better at non-verbal conversation. I can research, source, write, edit, etc before I post. When I talk, my mouth moves faster than my brain.

I agree it's affecting people's abilities to interact, and that it does have some downsides, but I'm not convinced it's a bad thing overall.
Can you name a major successful mobile application that you think _doesn't_ use analytics?
Look at all the baby boomers now who 'didn't save enough to retire', it's crazy to spend 50% of your income on rent.
TrueCrypt, or one of the various forks now that the original developers are gone.

Software with utter class. They released full-disk encryption and it was basically flawless from the first release, just works.
[edited]
Ha, I just had this experience recently. It's amazing how quickly I got fed up with Eclipse, and how much it made me appreciate IntelliJ after I switched.
I personally have a different perspective. Yes, avoiding politics for technology is retreating from a set of hard problems into a set of easier problems - but IMO most of those hard problems are distractions and utterly irrelevant to anything. That's why I'm siding with the techy approach on this one - avoiding politics seems to be much more cost-effective way of making things work.

And sure, a lot of the problems won't be easily solved by direct application of technology. But then again, not all should be. Isn't that one of Maciej's points? There are non-techies too, let them have some fun changing the world too. Let's each focus on helping in things we're good at.

Now don't get me wrong - I don't think the current computer industry is doing much to help anyone with anything. In this I agree with Maciej. But I think he extrapolates the industry problems too far. The issue isn't really with technology or smarts-driven approach, it's with the industry poisoned by short-term thinking, getting more ROI on bullshitting everyone and doing pointless make-believe work than on producing something useful.
> So even if before I received any letter I'd tried to be clever and just said: "No NSL letters in March, No NSL letters in April.... etc.", if I ended up receiving one during that time period at all, all of those WOULD HAVE to collapse to "We have received 0-249 letters in the first semester of 2016 (or 2016 altogether)"

Sort of. There's also a required 6 month delay. So if you received an NSL today, but had "No NSLs in Jan" , "No NSLs in Feb", "No NSLs in Mar", etc, you would need to remove all those and could not report the 0-249 number until 2017.
Airbnb sues San Francisco over new rules for short-term rentals
Yes, punish the hundreds who simply do their job by forcing the company to go out of business, instead of trying to steer it towards a more productive future. We've gotta justify that pitchfork investment, don't we?
Those numbers were made up to illustrate a point. I have no idea how buoyant helium is at STP and didn't intend to conform to any realistic scenario. "7 cubic meters at STP" is a perfectly fine empirical answer, and I guess you can get the mass of 7 cubic meters of helium from the ideal gas law.

The point is, it makes no sense to say "the weight of the helium must be equal to the weight of the helium+cylinder system minus the known weight of the cylinder, just as the weight of a chicken on a plate is equal to the weight of the chicken+plate system minus the weight of the plate". You've got to bring in some extra information.
Yes, I do run. I started it 4 weeks back.

I felt depressive a couple of weeks back for 2-3 weeks. Now, I feel better but I will still consult a doctor.

Thanks for your input.
Naked mole rat
I've got to the same conclusion the last time I had to build some graph not quite standard. I first tried to grok d3, got lost in the sea of the possibility before finally resorted to putting svg rect at computed (x,y).
What is the benefit of owning a star right now? Why is owning a star better than a planet?
Does anyone know what type of hardware they are using to accomplish this? Is it just your standard Intel X520/540 10GbE adapter, or is there some secret hardware they have access to?

FWIW, saturating line rate 10GbE has been problematic at times in the past due to challenges like single-threaded drivers, which could only run on 1 core at a time, even if there are 128 logical cores in a system (like the X1 instances). There are also challenges offloading VXLAN encapsulation to hardware at 10GbE line rate, but it seems like AWS has figured that out.
Ah yes Tyco, that was a fun one...
4kloc is rather unimpressive if you delegate everything to already existing libraries.
It is nice but I don't think I would call it reliable. There are crashes, it took quite some time for stuff like column editing to stop corrupting the files etc. I think they are even less stable than a recent Visual Studio (ah the good stable days of 2008 are long gone)
> One alternative is to avoid forking at all. Depending on how events play out, this would lead The DAO investors to lose somewhere between 30% to 100% of their investment

What determines how much investors actually recover?
If you think about it, YC Research is how academic research used to be funded centuries ago - patronage by wealthy elites.
Not to get too conspiratorial, but Urbit's founder is not a very popular figure around here. Mass autoflagging of * urbit * would not be surprising.
Brexit is rejection of globalisation
Use makefiles and git with LaTeX. Use \input{} to structure large documents as a main file that includes smaller ones. Keep all your BibTeX citations in one large .bib file (under git) and symlink it into the current directory for every new document; it makes bibliographies so much easier.

PDFLaTeX makes it incredibly easy to keep all your graphics in PDF files; it makes them so much nicer to deal with. Inkscape is great for making vector graphics for use in LaTex; keep the source code of the graphics in SVG but save as PDF for LaTeX to use (tell Inkscape to export only the drawing to PDF, not the whole page, and you'll never have to crop or resize your graphics ever again).

Finally, use a modern TeX like XeTeX that directly understands Unicode characters and TrueType fonts.
Oversimplified - it's also a multi-threaded driver with multiple queues. This should hopefully allow you to fully saturate the 20gbps available to you.
Curious about this as well
You can use PhantomJS to generate image for D3 charts. A server package solution is here: https://github.com/vidalab/banquo-server.

Another possibility is to use wkhtmlpdf to generate PDF: https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf
How... how in the name of Science are you supposed to keep track of an attometer-wide object?! The dang thing would be so easy to lose I imagine that misplacing the drive would be the biggest problem such a ship would have! We always imagine spaceships with these brilliant, impressive reactors and drives, and here's one that is so underwhelming it may as well not be there. (Save for the petawatt energy flowing off it...)
Agreed, when I was living in the Valley in 2003/4 public transportation was terrible and taxis nowhere to be found.
But then I was driving a shitty Ford ....
Brexit is great news for the rest of the EU
It's a "forced" update, but the downstream dependencies have veto power: if their tests fail, the change gets rolled back.

Of course in practice, it depends on how important the app is. If you break gmail it's definitely getting rolled back. If it's just a one-off abandoned tool somewhere doing something they're not supposed to do anyway, or some tests that flake all the time, maybe it will be ignored.

If you are upstream of a lot of important code, you might not be able to move as quickly as you like and that's because you have a lot of responsibility.

Migrations need to be planned carefully. Unlike in open source, you cannot make an incompatible change, bump the major version number, and call it a day. Migrating the downstream dependencies is your job. Version numbers are mostly meaningless and compatibility is judged by actually compiling code and running tests.

You soon learn that if you can fix a bug without changing a public API it's a whole lot easier. But if you need to change an API, there's a way to do it.
Fair point. I guess by smart I'm thinking "least work for best grades" but that's a very loose definition.

Also - it's a very small sample size. And if I look more broadly... 2 of the seemingly "dumbest jocks" I knew in college went on to become doctors, one at the Mayo clinic. So perhaps their intelligence was showing in other areas until they got out of school.
Interesting, which one? why is that?
I thought it was illegal to prevent someone from earning a living?
ZFS.

I created a raid-Z zpool in 2010 on FreeBSD and those same bits, with two different drives, are still floating around intact 6 years later, across multiple different operating systems.
20gpbs is fast enough for a raw 4K video stream at 60 frames per second in ABGR format (e.g. what you'd get out of a video card). That's slick.
Entertainment Panel with Emmy Winners and Bachelor Producers
I know there is relentlessness in me. I am always trying (or actually thinking about) to be a better developer but my action fails to show my intentions. And I end up wherever I am in a worse situation
It could be. Also could be a low sample size. :-)
Birchbox Cuts About 12% of Staff
How Do People Really Use Text Editors?
For those interested making d3.js reusable for data analysis, check out https://vida.io. We create templates out of d3.js visualizations with dynamic properties. You can create dashboards from custom d3.js components. For more examples, see https://vida.io/explore.
It could be "Improved Improved" if they had a central server constantly polling the nodes in exactly the same fashion as this script does. If you know the distance from your central server to the nodes, you can use the rolling response times you're polling for to establish a baseline for the client to help factor out server load.
PulseAudio 9.0 released
IME, the most important key to Latex is setting up your environment so you can have a fast turnaround time between writing some markup and seeing what it looks like (essentially, getting a "Latex REPL"). There are a bunch of different ways to do this, you'll have to pick what's best for you. On Macs I tend to use Sublime Text (substitute with your editor of choice) with a macro to invoke pdfTeX; on Windows I use TeXstudio which has live preview support. There are other ways; do whatever's best for you.

The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like

\tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
a & b & c \\
\end{tabular}

With a bunch of variants for different styles (full borders, etc.), column numbers, etc. Once your macros have become muscle memory, writing Latex speeds up considerably.
I've been fortunate enough to have an employer with no non-compete, but in the past with my first job out of college I just signed everything and was under one for a year after leaving. My thought process now is that a non-compete is just another thing to negotiate during the hiring process. I'm happy to sign one but I will absolutely require that I'm compensated at least for a year of salary, benefits, etc. while under the non-compete. It's only fair that if you're asking me not to work for a year that I can actually sustain myself and my family. Employers are just coasting off the fact that people will sign these things and ask for nothing in return--once people realize it's negotiable (even if you just plain walk from that job opportunity to something else) employers will have a much tougher time with them IMHO.
Swiss VPS for $2.94/month
I don't enjoy using software that's difficult to learn or use, which most of your examples seem to be. (I haven't used "Everything", so I might be wrong about that one.)

Notepad++ used to cheese me off in a previous job where I was basically forced to use it because it couldn't even draw drop-down menus correctly. Ugh. Terrible UI.
I've been thinking of a mutual defense society for startups in Washington who in good faith hire someone and the employee is then threatened by Amazon or Microsoft, as a former employer, on non compete grounds.

I suspect if you were willing to completely go to war over a hire, you could ultimately get noncompetes invalidated. The problem is the chilling effect on marginal hires -- it usually isn't worth going all the way on hiring someone when you have other options, and even when it is, it makes sense to settle and move on (for both sides).

(From what I've heard, Amazon is particularly egregious in enforcing noncompetes. I believe they are an unconscionable and unconstitutional restraint on individual liberty, and believe the federal courts would agree, as well as the court of public opinion.)
Projects at Kestrel Institute