skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But it isn't vim vs Emacs, that's the whole point! If we were talking about two different apps with comparable feature sets, at least for common operations, sure. But CVS is really vastly inferior even to Subversion, to which e.g. FreeBSD migrated 7 years ago.

Just to make it clear, I'm not complaining about OpenBSD using CVS in general, or claiming that they are too slow or missing features because of it. I'm just wondering why, in this day and age, anyone would use CVS when so many clearly better alternatives exist. I know I would be frustrated if I had to code in a CVS repo, and would push to get it migrated to at least SVN just to make my own life more comfortable. So it naturally makes me wonder why other people in that situation, who presumably know at least as much as me, do not.
The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
That's a very long comment to fail to justify it's not xenophobia. It is.

Leave got better results in places with less immigration, i.e. in places where they don't have foreign neighbours but fear having them.

Moreso, restricting immigration will actually make economy worse and take unskilled jobs out of the country (to China, India, etc), thus screwing even more over the working class.

If it was the economy, people would favour immigration (young people paying taxes, keeping jobs around, not using the NHS, etc) and complain about other stuff (company tax loopholes anyone?), but they complained about immigration and that's what they fear.

It is xenophobia, but of course no one fears Swiss, Japanese or Swede immigrants because they're rich. I don't see many problems in UK for Saudi princes or Russian magnates that exploit and slave people, again because they're rich. Racism is basically now fear of the poor (hence all the negativity about asylum seekers and other refugees).

People, including me of course, are assholes.
Funny this should come up now.

I'm on holiday at the moment and have been having geek fun by SSHing into a raspberryPi back at my home [in a different country], taking photos with its camera and uploading them to Google Drive where i can view them from here.

It did idly cross my mind that this kind of setup had the potential for "remote control" crime. I expect we'll start seeing more of this sort of thing, in future.
Great question, love to hear the answer on this !
I have not, and practically speaking I can't; they're in Silicon Valley and I'm in the Midwest.

The mentor system was extremely valuable for me in my prior internships, but as I transition into industry I feel that the impetus is on me to learn how to work without a mentor, which I think is what I'm struggling with.

It's a large, attainable project but on an unrealistic timescale.
You mean this?
http://www.informationweek.com/government/cybersecurity/gove...

That link also doesn't say anything about long-term prospects. It does say it can't pay the lucrative amounts the private sector can, but that doesn't mean that the pay is 'unreasonable'. In fact, most of that article is about a mismatch of cultural fit, and has very little to do with remuneration.

And seriously, given how much of the hot talent in SV jumps around on a yearly basis depending on who provides the biggest bucks, does anyone really believe that "long-term career prospects" are going to appeal to those hackers? Do talented programmers really sign on to Apple because "I know I'll be a senior manager there in 20 years?

'Job security' is not the same as 'long term prospects'.
It would help. But when they are patented, the structure is in the open and anyone with good knowledge of synthesis can produce them, e.g. for treating livestock in China or for sale on the grey market in India.
TOML don't even have a clear and definitive standard/test suits. It seems unmaintained but some people are trying to push it to 1.0 no matter what.
You would probably have to self assess. Fortune and wealth taxes tend to cost more to collect than they bring in, because it's extremely hard and labour intensive to verify the submitted data. Aside from being an "equality tax" (which policy makers in a country might think is a good thing), it has very little use.
There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite.

Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
Not just with the article, but with his own work. A Scanner Darkly is all about the people, including him, who had taken drugs during the 60s. His after words, dedicating the book to the friends he lost to drug misuse, are particularly touching.
In his own words "Reality is made of cardboard and if you push too hard, you fall through."

Describes his stories perfectly.
Jackplay – A JVM tracing tool that helps diagnose application issues
On the other hand, it's quite convenient to not have to do null checks in debug messages. Compare:

log.trace("doStuff(" + obj1 + ", " + obj2 + ")");

to this:

log.trace("doStuff(" + (obj1 != null ? obj1 : "null") + ", " + (obj2 != null ? obj2 : "null") + ")");

The second one is IMHO quite hard to read, even in this short example (and code readability is important when you do code reviews)
Ray Cline's Formula for Measuring National Power
Just so you know, i am a young apprentice in an IT department. The official average age of developpers here is 41... I can count the employees under 30 in my two hands. Could probably even count the one under 35...

So the opposite exists too...
I think you mean Second Variety [1], which is really great in my opinion as well. It, like many of PKD's works, was also made into a movie (Screamers).

Second Variety is freely available [2] on the Internet Archive, via Project Gutenberg.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety

[2]: https://archive.org/details/secondvariety32032gut
It looks exactly like a population heatmap.
Older Scrolls: Daggerfall Is Twenty Years Old Today
It's quite customary in Getmany to even have a picture on your CV.
My prediction is that 3 will not happen, and what happens in its place is going to perpetuate the tech giant oligopoly. With the tech giants getting into the business of collecting any remaining missing data points using IoT, it is only a matter of time before most of us are inside houses which are periodically sending data to servers at Amazon, Google et. al.

Their marketing might of course is hard to match. But they are also more likely to know more about your present needs with the trove of data at their disposal. Which cloud provider is going to match that?

Respected experts like Andrew Ng talk about data being a 'defensible barrier'[1] . Under this euphemism lies practices such as 'creating products which do not produce revenue but are intended for data collection'. Yes, folks at HN have known about these things for a long time, but my point is the stamp of endorsement for these disturbing practices from people who are regarded as authority figures, and the general absence of debate around these practices.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJhcxfYR4I&t=21m30s

The cloud providers and their ilk will be quickly driven out of business with revenue-less products which 'complete the picture' for the tech giants.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3061546/Amazon-dash-buttons

Self-hosted is possible. But that is going to make an explosion in IoT's popularity unlikely.
I think for non-scandinavians, you just have to accept that this is how we do things up north. There is the principle of being public (offentlighetsprincipen). It states that, if there are no extraordinary reasons to keep government data private (such as threat to somebody's life), the data should be public. The internal revenue authority is a government body, hence it's data should be public.

Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland (don't know if Denmark applies this system) are all well-functioning societies. I would not be surprised if they are some of the world's most well-functioning places around (which is great for getting shit done, but not always fun and free). Ideas of what is right and wrong in other cultures (such as mainland europeans and americans wish for financial privacy) might not always apply in the culture up north. That's fine.
Don't expect others to produce user stories or mock-ups, especially if this isn't already part of the culture.

If you want to have user stories and mock-ups, start spending your time making those yourself and push them back to whoever is giving you the requirements for comment.

If they question the need for you to be spending time doing that, it's an opportunity to ask for more specific direction on what you should be spending your time doing. Chances are it's a classic case of not knowing what they want, but knowing what they don't want, so by having their requirements reflected back to them they'll come back with "Ah, but what I meant was..." and you'll get more clear requirements.

If it's still murky after that and you really can't get more concrete requirements than "We need this magic box made" then consider that some places genuinely just aren't good places to work, and consider this a learning opportunity and point for future comparison.
I doubt that 30 year window. If if were nearly impossible to build a resistance, the bacterium producing the antibiotic would poison itself.

And I am not sure how you'd convince people in underdeveloped countries to use the new and expensive drug only.
Agreed. No ad blockers here, but the web site claims there are.
The School of Life: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog
Are you sure about that?

Using a connection pool to the database is a form of optimization. Otherwise, you need a connection per user. This is not being done even in network where is was easy to do that for years (i.e. those using Kerberos auth for users, where the webserver just could forward Kerberos tickets to the database).
Most startups fail. Many startups are train wreaks. In many cases, talented individuals can only watch in horror as events unfold.

As a junior, remote employee you're not in a position to significantly effect the outcome of the business.

Many companies also don't know how to communicate with remote employees well. Not replying to emails.

So... try your best to engage with company and observe how the company works. Learn the warning signs, learn what issues they face. These should all be hugely useful lessons.

But don't expect the company not to be a train wreak or to be massively successful. Those things are quite rare.
That may be true in older shells, but in modern shells [ $x == "" ] is valid, and "" is a single token whose value is the empty string. But I've seen old code that does things like

if [ x$x == "x" ] ; then ...

apparently because it was necessary at one time.
Not really anymore, the latest version of the DIN norm on CVs has no photo or birthdate anymore, and in some states, it’s being discussed to ban it even.
First, I would suggest being more open. Take some of the concerns you've raised here — feeling useless, not knowing what's expected of you — and go to the CEO with them. Don't be critical or overemphatic. Just tell them the situation you're in and how you're feeling. If they're worth their salt they'll listen and be understanding and try to make things better. If not, at least you’ll know who you're dealing with.

Communicate more frequently. If you’re not sure what to do, ask someone. If they don’t know, ask someone else. You certainly don’t want to bother people every 5 minutes, but if you’re stuck for hours each day that’s not good for anyone.

If possible, get them to tell you the most basic subset of functionality you can build at first. Build that. Take it to them and see what they think. That will probably give them a far better idea of what they want.
I have seen other people's trails on rental cars and I've always wondered why would they connect their phones to basically what is an unknown system, exposed to just about anyone.

Maybe I'm just weird. Never had any reason to connect my phone to the car, not rental nor my own. I make phonecalls from my... well, phone, not the car. I use my phone's Google Maps if I need to refresh my memory to get driving instructions. I don't have music on my phone either. It seems that being a bit ignorant to new technology does pay off at times.
SPDZ MPC software system developed by the University of Bristol
> Of course, this is a back-and-forth. Sometimes users aren't sure of what they want.

Or your "product owner" doesn't really know the product and happens to be in a minimal-overlap timezone, and walking to the other side of the local office to ask Real-Users for feedback eventually generates a subtle reprimand about going through proper channels...

Yeah, not planning to stick around.
I'm afraid it's not going to work.

Turning vaguely defined task into something tangible is usually the most difficult, and most important part of the task, but it requires some experience.

In the beginning you need to learn the internal know-how, and this requires regular prompt answers. Otherwise, you will stay blocked and frustrated most of the time.

Remote work is fine when you already know the domain, but that's not really what intern programs are for.

That said, you can try to write design docs where you put your questions. Note that it's not really about writing a specification, but about writing down what you know and what you don't. You can speculate about answers to your questions, and this way make your manager understand what you're missing.
Potentially; we don't have many remote employees yet (but we'd love to in the future) so we're still finding our way with it.
This is my life. Replacing software that was written a decade+ ago so that the software has become the process. Users find is down right difficult to think in terms of what is going on a business process rather than the steps they have to do to force the computer to say yes. Many find it genuinely tricky to even describe in even real world terms what is going on without slipping into jargon that is actually just describing the existing system.
A survey of the general population is not really appropriate for a hyper-niche demographic like talented hackers (the ones they want to hire). There's plenty of mooks out there who want to do the minimum work possible and unsurprising that a general poll would account for a lot of them. That's not to say that you are a mook if you want that, but that idea of a 'safe job' is not something that's particularly big in the hacker world.
My impression about the universe:

It's finite. "Infinity" is an abstraction, it cannot exist in reality.

It's 100% deterministic, based on some fundamental rules.

Those rules are imposed and enforced by computation and they can only exist in a computer simulation.

Space is actually an N dimensional matrix where all cells are the same, minicomputers running the same program enforcing those rules.

Don't know how it all really exists...
I think he captured Heinlein's fascist streak quite well, albeit while poking fun at it.

Starship Troopers is a very well made movie, quite cleverly constructed. For people without a sense of humour, it appeals to their own militaristic tendencies; it hits two audiences at once.
Disclaimer: This comment might be disturbing for you, so feel free to skip it.

Yes, I heard a lot of excuses, especially in Africa.

But it never really mattered to me in a way that I would have said to even a single one ok I let you go and you disappear and spend the rest of your life doing good to make up for what you did.

Some things these people did are beyond what any normal person can imagine.

If a 20 yrs old is in tears and tells you that he was high and ordered to do what he did three years ago and that he was a child soldier for most of his life, then it's just human to feel bad for what happened to him. No kid on the planet should go through that kind of hell.

But if you make the decision to shoot a man in the stomach and let him bleed out, then behead his kid in front of his eyes and rape his wife in front of a dying man before cutting her throat because you claim you were ordered to do so, that is the end of a chain of bad decisions that you made in the past.

I did not walk a single mile in his shoes, so I can't judge if I would have acted differently in his situation with a past like that and being drugged out and forced to do horrible things even before that. But if you make this decision then you also need to be aware of the consequences.
Show HN: Anonymous chat based on web-events
You _almost_ got the joke, better than expected for a Norwegian. :-)

For people outside of this mutual admiration society:

This is funny since I'm Swedish -- Swedes/Norwegians used to tell bad "racist" jokes about each others. The level was really low, like "Why don't they use underwear when picking strawberries in Oslo? To keep the flies out of the face."

(I always thought those were extra funny, since a relative of mine got promoted to general major for killing lots of Swedes in war in Norway a few centuries ago. :-) )
Domain: decentralize.today. Published on: Medium.

Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man up!
Daggerfall Unity
Make sure you know what they want from you. Not clear requirements could mean there are problems inside the company or they don't want to deal with you too much. In either case not clear requirements could be beneficial or very non-beneficial for them since if you aren't sure what you are building you might build anything that works from your point of view. Make sure you sort this out before you build it.
I live in Vienna an this is not the case here. Problem is the other way round (currently, is under discussion) - Universities just get a fixed amount of money. So they try to restrict the number of students by themselves, using different methods to get rid of them.

But all in all, I think it worked out pretty well in the past - no tuition, free access and lectures are public anyway.
So everyone gets a chance to try it, most drop out in the first year, probably changing field of study once or twice. But as we don't have that minor/major stuff but the curricula are extremely specialized, this is probably not bad for widening the horizon.
Still better than arbitrary tests or the weird numerus clausus in Germany.

I don't think that an university degree should be mandatory for everyone (we have a lot of specialized schools as an alternative), but it's good if the option to try it is there.
Last I heard, there was basically one guy handling all reports of malicious exit nodes, and I couldn't even get him to do anything about the ones very obviously intercepting traffic to Bitcoin wallets and injecting code that stole people's money
> Go is extremely pedantic about a number of things like unused library imports, trailing commas, etc. which have absolutely no bearing on the actual compiled code

Trailing commas, agreed. But unused library imports have the (probably unintended) side effect that their `func init()` will execute. Which is also why there is an idiomatic way to import a module without giving it an identifier, just to have this side effect.
I completely agree with you. I'm just saying the two controversies, on a relative basis, aren't in the same order of magnitude.
No need to pay - check out tastytrade for a great primer/entertaining resource. (Free, unaffiliated - I watch their live show daily.)
Stop trolling. Crimes deserve investigations. This is in the best interest of the victim.

And no, I'm not believing anything just because somebody told so. Everything else is patological naivety, expeciall if the source has a bad track record.
What's DNN? Google says it's DotNetNuke, but I don't think you mean that.
That's interesting. I use VPS as my VPN, but I also run tor relay there, just because I think it's the right thing to do. I can certainly say, that I didn't notice any blocks from the web sites. I tried to run tor on my home server, but, unfortunately, my provider seems to block its traffic, so it was never able to bootstrap.
If by "to agree" you mean "clicking something away that nobody ever reads in order to be able to use something for which you've already paid" or "silently assuming that some hotel's house regulations that nobody ever reads does not contain a clause that allows them to tap into your private communications", then I guess you're technically right. Somewhat.
Display a 'Bought Product' Label in PrestaShop – NemoPS
If you stop at "Before the occupation, there was Maidan", then do a serious investigation of those behind the Maidan, you'll get the real answer.

Hints: John McCain went to egg them on (He was in Libya and Syria too). The US ambassador was handing out cookies to police officers. And then there's Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
Would a MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone work?
YMMV but after almost 20 years I try to keep a foot firmly in both camps and position myself as an early-stage generalist who can also lead and magnify the productivity of the whole team.

Managers who aren't technically illiterate suck, programmers who can't see beyond the scope of their own little fiefdom also suck. If you can marry disparate skills from a few different areas you can really work magic in the right position.
Tesla envy grips Germany’s giants
Ask HN: Working off of a bootable USB drive
I'm wondering, how usable would it be working off of a Linux OS installed to a USB flash drive, and carrying your work with you.

I often want to work on my laptop in my own room, but it's only good for certain workloads. For other workloads that demand more memory or a better CPU I use the shared desktop with lots of RAM and a quadcore CPU in the living room.

It's not handy having to upload all your work to Dropbox, then logging in on a different computer, downloading the work, unzipping, moving the files to the htdocs directory, the Documents folder, etc, then continuing work, and again uploading it to the cloud after finishing, especially if I have to quickly move computers...

Did anybody try such a thing, and do you have recommendations for a good USB drive which is fast enough and won't wear down quickly from lots of writes to it.

Thanks!
I'd be interested if you could break these issues out a bit more :

- connection to the internet; seems to me that this is a trade off, without some sort of network access it's hard to see how many devices can be useful in many applications. But that connection can be constrained.
- firmware upgrades - is this about trust?
- hides data - ok, I get this, but many users are not able to spend time working out what is going on.

I agree that corporations tend to privilege themselves, but of course the world is not just made of users. There are government actors and rogue actors as well, most users can't defend themselves - how should the playing field be organised in your opinion?
Easy. Ask questions that only someone who has recently revised for exams would know. No-one enforcing this has any idea that coding a red-black tree from scratch on a whiteboard isn't something that any working programmer actually does...
I liked the simple CRM https://www.onepagecrm.com/ so much I started working for them after a few years of being a customer :)
Human footprint surprisingly outpaced by population and economic growth