skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Say that you are an experienced programmer, and you only run into unexpectedly complexity about 5% of the time. If you are starting a new project and split it up into 10 tasks [...] there’s a 40% chance that you will run into a complex task, and blow your estimations for this project.

Solution: divide the project into fewer tasks :)
How does that apply to the suggested workaround of the user running the necessary content scraping on their own machine and pushing the results to Power?
OP means this in the sense of "good estimates for software are impossible", but I submit that the alternate reading also obtains: that estimates for GOOD software are impossible. This is because, pace Brooks, the process of creation is also the process of eliciting the requirements that demand that creation in the first place. "Good" software, software that solves a real problem in a feasible way, is rarely so well-defined at the outset that your only risk factors are difficulties in finding the right library or algorithm. Frequently it is only possible for requirements to be understood once an early version of a solution actually exists.
"We have to brick this computer so bad the FBI can't recover anything out of it."

This is literally what she did though! Why else would you not just erase but rewrite with random data? In fact, why were they deleted at all?

Sure, he paraphrased it for the layman. They don't understand what rewriting with random data means. A good analogy is "bleach" which is also the name of the program.

Yes, he dropped in "chemical" in there unnecessarily, but this doesn't make the overall point invalid.
There's a grand total of one source for an article about the FBI being "in revolt", and he's not even an FBI agent. They can't get a single one to confirm, even off the record?
I think the homepage does a good job in showing what the product does.

Also, I think you should ignore any advice that says "do exactly what your customers are asking if they prepay you" if you really are into SaaS.
5 alpha reductase inhibiters like Finasterade slow the conversion of Testosterone to DHT, which is a more potent androgen. This conversion occurs in the skin, liver, prostate and retina.

Using a 5aR inhibiter mostly affects those organs alone. There would be a slight decrease in effective Testosterone levels and these drugs can sometimes affect libido and erectile function. But the reduction will be minor compared to hormone ablation (HAT), which takes you close to zero.

HAT affects you in many ways: mood, bone loss, muscle loss are the main ones. To which we can now add dementia.
IBM POWER looks to be the most performant libre computing platform in existence, but $4100 for Raptor Engineering's Talos is still too pricey for me -- I'd suggest US$1000 to US$1500 for plain ATX motherboard + CPU, supporting affordable standard commercial consumer components is probably the point where crowd funding is viable as a desktop computer for regular software engineers and tinkerers (well the kind of people who seriously consider buying a Novena).

But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is probably infeasible.

I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop don't need.

In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995
A single byte change is also enough to crack a lot of software, bypass DRM, and various other empowering things.

The difficulty is, as usual, finding out which one to change. ;-)
Agreed. At risk of sounding like an idiot, the K&R C book and Mythical Man-Month are the only books on that list I've even heard of, and I haven't read either of them.

Also, he gives "more of a language reference" as a reason for not reading Stroutstrup's C++ book. Doesn't the same apply to K&R?
Why not both? Of course you can accept responsibility for this mistake but then suggest creating a testing suite to run commits through before making them live?
That people need things spelt out for them even if the meaning is obvious?
Basically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_coherence. You want to ensure all the devices on the bus have the same view of memory contents.
Honestly, I consider it kind of tragic. I have some friends who are massive Cohen fans, and even they have to admit that it's just not good music. It's too late now, but I think it would be amazing if he had redone those albums at a later date and made them...good.

If anyone reading this can sing, start drinking whiskey and smoking cigars. You'll die early, but before you do, perfect your Cohen voice and fix this.
Right, it is like asking a builder "how long to build my new house?" Way too many variables and things that are independent variables.

Prioritized (short) iterative development is the only path to success.
Because it's one of the two major political parties in a democracy, with an election just around the corner.

I feel like you already know the answer to this question.
I think those books have a specific time* in people's careers. My first real programming job, a couple years in i got a large project. I'd go home and flip through the design patterns book every day. Some days, rereading the introduction, some days rereading patterns. The project came out pretty well.

If i'd gotten a C++ job instead, i'd probably have torn up the C++ programming language book. My copy is fairly worn, but not like that gof book.

CLRS probably isn't as helpful as it once was, because the vast majority of time you just use an ADT from whatever library your language provides. Sure, maybe go review some subtleties from time to time, but if you're writing an algorithm for work, you probably do that all the time, CLRS isn't going to be that insightful.

The dragon book was opaque to me. Just about every thing in that book, i had to go find another discussion of. I'm just not smart enough to parse those words and math into code.

I dunno. I'm a pretty mediocre programmer. They've been helpful to me at various points in my career, but i don't think they are much help in modern programming.

* I've only been able to chew through a couple chapters of TAOCP. I think the only programmers these books help are people like Fabrice Bellard. Find someone who's worked through those books, hire them. Well, if you really need to solve problems and you're not just hooking a submit button to mysql.
lol, can someone write a generator that generates this kind of non sense ? This is the kind of bullshit statement that gets often upvoted on HN and I love it !
It is in fact documented; what I didn't explain is that ctype_digit treats integers < 127 as chr() equivalents. It's designed to juggle both strings and integers, which indeed works against php's usual method of type juggling. This is because ctype is a port or wrapper around the C lib which behaves as such.
>F--- spending money on ..., nap rooms, ...

Whoa there, buddy; them's fighting words. Nap rooms are one of the very few good things to come out of startup culture.
Steroid deprivation in general leads to depression- post partum depression, etc. Steroid administration leads to a type of 'euphoria' or well being - 'steroid high'. The link between steroid levels and mental status is an old story. The question becomes what was the patient's testosterone before ablation was initiated and how far did it fall. This value may be the more relevant predictor. So, patients who already have a low T(<150) might not be at risk for altered cognitive function though no one has really looked at this.
Ask HN: What car do you drive?
Adding another. http://blog.codetree.com/articles/what-its-like-buying-a-128... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12654277) has a screenshot of a pre-due-dilligence checklist (Excel spreadsheet) and link to https://feinternational.com/blog/buying-an-internet-business...
Yes, it's not apples to apples at all, but AWS runs about 5x the cost without considering bandwidth. If you use a lot of transfer, even between AZs (same price as between regions!), it will dwarf the hardware costs. Compare e.g. the Skylake EX51-SSD at $63 USD / month amortized for one year vs R3 High-Memory Double Extra Large at $300/month 1-year no-upfront. Both have 8 hyperthreads, AWS has ECC memory (good) and hypervisor overhead (bad), Hetzner has a newer processor and higher clock speeds.

Depending on your needs, dedicated hardware can run a lot cheaper. You can over-provision by 4x and you're still saving money. There are a lot of other benefits to AWS though, it's a huge ecosystem, and it's much more flexible.
There's even an OpenFirmware song!
Space isn't cold. It has very low temperature. These are not the same thing.

Because space has extremely low density thermal radiation doesn't really work very well... it's very hard for a vehicle in a vacuum to dump heat...there is no medium to receive the energy!
The DEA should be abolished entirely. The War on Drugs has failed and was a naive idea to begin with.
Dupe. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944 (148 points, 3 days ago, 108 comments)
The age old problem of policy is how to design a system that catches the opportunists without accidentally capturing the altruists (not the right word but you get what I mean).
The Best C++ Programming Books
As a male co-founder I once asked an advisor for connections with "cynical product people" in order to illicit negative feedback of my company's product. I felt like the positive feedback loop in SF was that bad (for everyone).

I think a lot of different things are in play here. Part of it I think was just a culture that wanted a female Steve Jobs character, that opportunity was there and she took it. She also got a lot of credit coming out of Stanford, hell she even hosted one of those seminar courses at Stanford.
Have to agree with this. Having gotten my education well before SICP became a thing, I fail to see anything special or even particularly interesting about it.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and they seem to be doing very well with it and have very few drug overdose related deaths. They have [3 deaths per million citizens](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/05/why-h...). I wouldn't be surprised if we had more drug enforcement related deaths in the US.
I'm not sure why this is on the front page of HN. But I'm starting to mess around with Aros so this might come in handy I guess. Thanks!
Stay curious. If you know only one framework, read its source and understand every bit of it (or which parts you can ignore and why).
This is hogwash.

As a team lead who lives in this world.=, good software estimates are not impossible. If you are doing the kind of work that you have done before, then it's very possible. If you are doing R&D, then sure it's damn near impossible. But if the work and requirements are clear, then there are plenty of ways to make "Good software estimates".

I fight estimates when I don't have a good business requirement, but tell me what your problem is and the solution you desire and I will give you a good enough estimate. Estimate is never just a date, it also includes the unit of work to be done, and the resources.
I hadn't realized how ahead of its time the Amiga was for a personal computer: TCP/IP, MIDI, SCSI, REXX, (screamtracker) MODs.
>Maybe tell a true story that helps your point, rather than a blatantly fictitious one.

The point wasn't to give a true example, it was to add a twist to the ending of the story told by the parent to make those reading it fathom an alternative way things could have gone that goes contrary to its message.

>I could tell a story about purple moon dragons, but it wouldn't "show" anything.

Why not? That's what allegories, parables, zen koans, fables and 200 other forms of fictional stories used in making a point do.
Diggernaut can run JavaScript now
> Wow. Such a bold indefensible statement. By any chance, are you running for President? [...] Literally BILLIONS of people live for decades longer and better because of drugs.

Too dumb to use Google?:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8007898
Au contraire, a substance should only be banned from consumption if it is shown to be highly addictive, and life-threatening if overconsumed. Or something like that. I don't believe something should be banned until presumed completely safe.
IBM is already building two new supercomputers for DoE based on Power. (Look up the CORAL Project.)

(disclaimer: I work for IBM, opinions my own)
Ask HN: Foreign founder, can't find a payment processor
Dear HN

I'm a solo foreign founder for a Delaware Corp, but I can't find a payment processor for my US customers because I'm in Pakistan.

The irony is that I'm building a marketplace:

- Stripe rejected me (they were nice about it)

- Paypal decided I had to be in the US despite having applied for my account while being in the US (Paypal isn't available in Pakistan)

- Braintree rejected me once, I changed my business model a bit, and now I'm waiting on a second rejection.

What does one do in this scenario? Is there another payment partner you can recommend?
I'm pretty sure PHP supports sessions. I am missing something?
https://youtu.be/aRrDsbUdY_k?t=5m23s

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/20/3363914/wrong-turn-apple-i...

http://www.dailytech.com/Lockheeds+F22+Raptor+Gets+Zapped+by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
Kratom withdrawal is unpleasant. Debilitating withdrawal is uncommon in people that aren't taking heroic doses to self medicate their addictions to other opiates, therefore punting the withdrawal symptoms down the road. Acute kratom withdrawal is shorter than for long acting pharmaceutical opiates, but post acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS) can be dragged out because kratom has some poorly documented and poorly understood non-opiate-related antidepressant actions. It has unusually complicated pharmacology with interesting combinations of conflicting, competing, and synergistic mechanisms.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwMPT92bOJKdZWM2bzlLeU5DdDg... is the letter from the American Kratom Association to the DEA, which compares the number of kratom related calls to poison control centers to calls related to supplements. Kratom seems to be at about the same level as ginkgo biloba and better tolerated than St. John's Wort.

This is surprising, and has resulted in weird errors in literature reviews on kratom, that I've spent dozens of hours trying to unpack during my efforts to improve the Wikipedia article.

Kratom seems to have a really surprisingly low incidence of severe side effects. The state of the information out there is weird. Something like someone said "Kratom is a mu opioid agonist and mu opioid agonists cause respiratory depression" in a peer reviewed paper, which then got cited in a medical textbook as "Kratom causes respiratory depression". However, primary research in mice shows that kratom causes dramatically less respiratory depression than poppy derived opioids. No case of kratom related respiratory depression has actually been documented in a human. In my comprehensive review of the literature, there was someone who had a seizure and was intubated but still had respiration in the normal range. Someone else suffered aspiration pneumonia in response to (inhaling?) kratom, but aspiration pneumonia is not respiratory depression.

Basically, kratom does have side effects, and real side effects, but when looked at as a population level public health problem, is profoundly safe for how powerful of an effect it actually has.
I guess the parent thinks or implies that since Rust was created to help Mozilla build a next-gen rendering engine, platforms with browsers is the only domain they care about supporting.
the reason good software estimates are impossible is because the career/political cost of your project being late is less than the career/political cost of making a longer (and more correct) estimate and sticking to it.
Google's Rules (2011)
FTA:

> We know Silicon Valley has a diversity problem.

That's just making an assumption. Based on undergraduate enrollment rates in computer science and other technical degrees, the probability distribution based on ethnicity and gender seem very plausible.

Also FTA,

> Are lawsuits like these a good thing, or are they going to stall efforts to move towards more diversity in Silicon Valley?

Why are we trying to move towards more diversity? Why is that inherently a good thing?
If all you need is a basic CRUD service, there are even easier options in the PHP/Rails/etc. world. If you have a schema for your data, it's pretty much one command away to generate such a CRUD service. Some of them even give you a nice looking out of the box web interface too. So you're not really selling me... And my day job is in Java, we're pretty modern with Java 8, Jetty 9, Spring, etc. but it still ends up being something like this: https://ptrthomas.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/jtrac-callstac...

Spring Boot may be a bit nicer than the most out of the way method I used years ago (now at https://github.com/stoicflame/enunciate/wiki) which did use Spring for some things, but it's really still far away from what dynamic languages and their ecosystems offer.
I did not know this when I originally moved, and now I managed to find a decent spot in the hellhole. When its harder to keep it nice than to move back, I will.
Ask HN: How did I get this Facebook friend suggestion?
Recently I was at a friend's house. We were talking and he asked whether I had ever listen to the music of Steve Martin, the actor. We discussed it briefly and he selected his music on desktop Spotify and played a couple of tracks.

About 20 minutes later, I picked up my Android phone, which does not have any Facebook apps installed (except Instagram) and was not on his wifi network, and navigated to Facebook basic mobile site in Chrome. Right away, I was presented with a 'People you may know' suggestion for a profile for the actor Steve Martin, with two mutual friends.

Any speculation on what apps and/or marketing agreements could have made that happen?
Portugal is also a _much_ smaller country, with less wealth inequality and systematic racial/socioeconomic divisions related to crime, poverty, drug use, etc. I'm not saying we shouldn't relax the drug laws in the US, but I don't think it's fair to assume that just because it works in Portugal it would work just as well here.
> In fact, I've even heard some Forth fans themselves say that the point of using Forth is to write yourself something as quickly as possible that lets you program in a higher level language.

That was the main point for someone I know: Forth was how they'd bootstrap a new system to be useful in a few days.

I don't think they do this anymore. This mattered more in say the 1980s when truly new personal computer hardware was coming on the market fairly frequently.
Honda Odyssey.

I absolutely hate driving. Especially when there are other cars around me.
I don't think there was a conspiracy here. I think the most likely thing is that DEA is sincerely trying to do something about the opiate epidemic in America, and made a misguided and poorly researched attempt to ban kratom because they thought that would help the opiate epidemic.
Fun fact: Dunning & Kruger measured perceived vs actual performance on very simple, and somewhat subjective tasks. Ability to recognize humor was one of them.

It's strangely difficult to find this important piece of the methodology. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention it, and this context is fairly critical to understanding the effect.

I think you're right that some amount of inexperience and youth makes the kids overconfident, but what has been demonstrated is that the task difficulty is a large determinant in how good people are at estimating their own abilities, and Dunning Kruger only applies to easy tasks [1]. For very difficult tasks, the Dunning-Kruger effect actually reverses and becomes Imposter Syndrome [1][2]. Software engineering may fall into the latter category -- something that is difficult enough that, statistically, on average, beginners are actually pretty good at knowing they can't do it.

[1] http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
It's the AWS of the sales world.
too sad, too true :-(
Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords.

Ultimately, the "ignorant fools" responsible for such mishaps are almost always at the management level.
Cable news
> I only recall two really serious vulnerabilities.

Having a discriminating memory doesn't help you build programs that have no bugs. It only helps you feel better about the bugs in the programs you create. Meanwhile, real users believe DoS are serious vulnerabilities.

> If you place mail+web server on the same machine without a hypervisor, things can certainly be less secure than if you place multiple services on the same machine separated by the hypervisor.

No. It isn't certain. The hypervisor is just more code. Why should anyone believe more code is going to produce less bugs?

> The "memory sinkhole" problem does not apply to virtualization.

Why do you think so?

Users believed they could "place multiple services on the same machine separated by the hypervisor" would be more secure, and then it turned out they couldn't. If only they had used a simpler system they would have had actual security. This is evident.

> It's about keeping web server bugs in the web server, and not have them infect the mail server.

Wrong. A bug in the Linux PCI code affects web servers. A bug in ext4 affects a mail server. Don't you get it? Big programs have bugs.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 makes the no-fly list
I take it. Does this mean I should stop?
I have a hard time believing Petzold's Code is in the first list, or even the second, because its content is so very different from most of the other books. It's not particularly directed at programmers either.

As for the design patterns book, I've glanced through it and didn't find it all that useful; that being said, I was never a fan of that school of thought (OOP, UML, patterns, etc.) either.
see DanielBMarkham's comment from yesterday regarding Facebook's trending news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700183
Right, this is really a tricky game. I help run a nonprofit wiki farm, so a lot of our business is out in the open. We lost one of our clients because they were hanging out in the IRC while we were discussing the cost of an upgrade and the technical issues facing it, as the exit question revealed that they thought we were running out of money.

Now of course donations in the past few months have been roughly double our expenses -- information which is also public. But it's very hard to project confidence during a problem solving session, because it gets in the way of actual problem solving.

I wish I knew where the balance point for secretiveness and openness was for public organizations. But given that all of the candidates for U.S. President seem to be at a bad place, I'm starting to wonder if a perfect balance point even exists.
My general point was that your sample size is too small to draw a meaningful conclusion. Unfortunately, this is the downside to advertising for low-volume B2B businesses.

Your entire article focused on the click and engagement aspects, and I would encourage you to keep at it and optimizing things against conversion metrics.
Many worlds isn't the only alternative. The "cleanest" (i.e. least magical) proposed solution I know of is einselection, which gives us emergent behavior of the schroedinger equation that looks kind of like many worlds and kind of like "ideal" non-unitary collapse, but doesn't posit any "unobservable" or "magical" processes unlike many worlds or Copenhagen.
I like these guys - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8CB0ZkvogP7tnCTDR-zV7g/vid...