skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd guess the opposite.

Might depend on how trendy the new feature is. Because I still see newish Java programmers who apparently don't know that java.date.util exists, and who also don't know that rolling your own date math is only done by date manipulation library authors and connoisseurs of slow moving train wrecks.

A second, related but harder to pin down, issue exists here. I see relatively inexperienced developers who, for instance, get a little confidence with Javascript chaining and callbacks, and work themselves into corners where a given filter method (like the 'Where()' example) doesn't quite do what they need, and suddenly they have no idea what to do. So they hack in something awful in the middle, forget that it is a weird homegrown something instead of a library function, and see profoundly strange problems later.

Both of those are things programmers grow out of, hopefully. But they seem to be instances of having APIs with large surface areas causing what amounts to research failures.
You could always get yourself a Pip-Boy 3000:
http://store.bethsoft.com/pip-boy-deluxe-bluetooth-edition.h...
I might be jaded, but that doesn't sound like such an awful example at all. There is some excessive overhead, but that's par for the course. And they did do the job :)

Some of the other examples mentioned (with costly machinery just sitting there) probably cost millions per day.
A lot of people will still default to their smartphone because that's good enough and they already have one. But I agree that there's definitely a potential market for a pocketable "computational photography" camera if its capabilities can't (yet) be folded into a smartphone.

Personally, I don't carry my Canon S100 with me much any longer mostly because my iPhone is good enough for snapshots and, if I want to do "real" photography, I have a couple of interchangeable lens options. But I'd be in the market for something that was clearly better/more versatile than my phone that would fit in my pocket.
I think the business, regulatory and infrastructure requirements are entirely different. They co-opt existing networks and only have to provide a SIM card, like other MVNOs. They don't have to deal with multi-year back-room deals for community access to dig trenches or hang wire to get into neighborhoods. I'm a Google fi user and I hope that your prediction doesn't come true. It's a fantastic service. If Google fiber was available in my neighborhood I'd be a subscriber to that too, so perhaps I'm a bit biased. :)
What cases are misses? Did those cases get overturned later?
"That was the site for the highly controversial 8 Washington development, a proposal for a towering condominium that set off a voter referendum that handicapped the project and led to its demise this year."

This is actually the problem. There are plenty of places to build houses or apartments. However, the regulations and bureaucracy prevents many developers from even getting their projects off the ground.
I am not sure why this is newsworthy. 4.3 is EOL upstream.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-4.3
I won't argue with your main point, but a fair share of kernel devs are probably not working there voluntarily, since they write kernel code for their employer.
Did Google Fiber use a municipal cable franchise agreement?

Also, doesn't the FCC have the power in certain states to regulate pole attachment rates?

So, where I live, on one side of the street, the electric company owns the poles, on the other side of the street, the phone company owns the poles. The franchise agreement does not have anything about payments to support public access TV, nor anything PEG related.

In a neighboring municipality, the municipality owns the the electric company and thus the poles.

I believe some of the original AT&T telegraph poles were placed by the Union army after the Civil War?
There is no iterating in civil engineering, it is built right the first time. They made a plan to build a replacement railway bridge over a highway and install it with a short interruption in rail and highway use and executed that plan. I think that is an impressive feat of engineering as well as management.
The author of the Esquire piece isn't a journalist working for Esquire.
AFAIK and from my own experience, non-competes are not enforceable in most states, or have little to no legal teeth. Anyone concerned should consult with an attorney.

Somewhat related, where folks usually get into trouble is reuse of intellectual property or derivative works. IP laws actually have teeth and are enforced in numerous countries.
Lytro made single-lens light-field cameras which let you refocus an image using their software. Very, very different.

I say "made" because the company has since pivoted to VR cameras.
Where does the capital come from to do this and how do you serve remote areas outside of towns.
I was really confused for a second why your girlfriend was laying cable... :)
> Anonymity facilitates the exposing of bad actors

No, it doesn't actually. What are called "anonymous sources" in the press are actually not anonymous in the sense that ZCash makes them anonymous: their identity is known to the journalist who publishes the story. The identity of the source is kept confidential by the journalist. This mechanism is an important check on the credibility of the source. True anonymity leads as much to vendetta-driven libel as it does to legitimate whistle-blowing. There's a reason that serious people get their information from the Register and the Washington Post instead of 4chan.

Also, anonymity in general and an anonymous currency are not the same thing.
As mentioned in the other discussion, I totally agree this kind of model seems to work better.

As an example, here in Italy we have a separate company ran by a utility provider (which is used to handle infrastructure at a scale and can leverage existing assets) taking care of deploying fiber in the cities and then they make it available to multiple ISPs (bitstream).

In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable).

The end result for the consumers is that here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for around 30 EUR/month.

Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.
Emotionally, I agree with this point. I want to make reliable things:

> we don't need 500 crappy, slightly different ways of doing the same thing, we need maybe 5, battle tested and hardened bullet proof solutions that are well engineered.

As much as I'd like to do that, I think we're some ways off from the sorts of stability that allow for that. Sure, we're all neophiles, so there's a fair bit of people using new tools for the fun of it. But I think a much bigger problem is the extent to which our raw materials keep changing under us.

For example, the smartphone isn't even 10 years old. We're all still replacing them every couple of years because the new ones keep getting better. Processing power, memory, power characteristics, sensors, network, ports: they all keep changing. The number of processors in my house is easily 5x what it was 10 years ago. The range of capabilities is larger, too: my phone is way smarter, but my lightbulbs are quite dumb.

Even if that were stable, our conceptions of computing are still changing. Most of the code we write is in languages that are 20 years old, but we've learned a lot since those languages were created. We talk about "virtual servers", which as a mental model is much like "horseless carriage" or "radio with pictures": it's a sign that our understanding hasn't caught up with reality.

We also have an enormous amount of business churn. A ten-year-old tech company seems old. Venture capitalists invested $58 billion last year, mostly in service of disrupting some existing order. Few will see a point in investing for the long term when they aren't sure if there will be one.

Even given all that, I think we underinvest in the long term, for reasons I'm sure we'd agree on. But I am often forced to admit that the level of craftsmanship I personally want is at odds with the current practical reality of software.

And I'm not alone. Back in 1992, Steve Wozniak was hoping for the end of Moore's Law. Bob Cringely writes: "But while the rest of the computing world waits worriedly for that moment when the lines etched on silicon wafers get so thin that they are equal to the wavelength of the light that traces them—the technical dead end for photolithography—Steve Wozniak looks forward to it. 'I can’t wait,' he said, 'because that’s when software tools can finally start to mature.'" [1]

The rise of mobile and cloud computing ruined that plan, of course. But perhaps just about the time you and I retire, the technological base will be stable enough for people to do some serious, long-term building.

[1] http://www.cringely.com/2013/04/03/accidental-empires-chapte...
My suggestion would be to ask other people doing similar work how they solve the problem because this seems to be the sort of software that a researcher is likely to write theirself.
The question is whether the Nordic model is scalable. Here is the OECD data on broadband deployment: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.2-OECD-WiredWirelessBB-2.... It breaks down DLS, cable, and fiber subscribers per 100 residents.

Sweden: 11.4 DSL, 6.6 cable, 17.5 fiber.

U.S. 8.2 DSL, 18.5 cable, 3.4 fiber.

U.K. 30.6 DSL, 7.2 cable, 0.0 fiber.

Germany: 28.9 DSL, 8.1 cable, 0.6 fiber.

France: 33.3 DSL, 4.5 cable, 2.1 fiber.

Spain: 16.5 DSL, 5.5 cable, 6.8 fiber.

Italy: 21.1 DSL, 0.0 cable, 0.6 fiber.

The U.S. does better than every big European country, whose residents are by and large stuck on DSL.
The trouble is that in the US, this sort of thing is seen as government unfairly competing with private industry.

Of course, we just get private industry setting up monopolies or duopolies instead, often with the help of local laws prohibiting competition. This is worse, but somehow more acceptable to the American electorate.
Love this. Evolution has had a very long time to arrive at a huge corpus of various nanoengineering solutions, we should use as much of it as we can.
Fortunately, our current legal system does not recognize contracts for slavery or indentured servitude (other than schools loans).
That statement in a way makes my point. Good tooling should help the creator offload a lot of the "thinking about your program", rather it should help you focus on what you want to do.

Also the long time taken in high-level decision making is strongly tied to the difficulty of getting even a trivial piece of software working, even if it isn't always apparent. For instance if the output of the high-level decision making was to create a spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, I am sure it wouldn't take anywhere as long.

I have a few long rants on this topic that I'll be putting on the Crudzilla blog (blog.crudzilla.com), stay tuned :)
Are you seriously arguing that Linus would think cleanly performant code is not in good taste? You're welcome to ask him that directly and see what he says.

EDIT: Okay, I'm being excessively snarky there; my apologies.

I will say instead that is that "good taste" depends on the context. What's "good taste" for kernel development isn't necessarily the same as "good taste" for enterprise development or the same as "good taste" for app development.
I haven't had any issues with SyncThing so far, other than the initial setup faff! I haven't had to deal with any horrible merges, and as long as you take frequent snapshots you should be able to recover if the worst happens.
I'm tired of how the travel industry uses all their tricks to make consumers pay more.
It's about time consumers use all the hacks they can to take back their travel money.
I'd say the key to their success was FTL travel and a big galaxy to plunder.
If your production services are properly balanced it should be possible. Not sure if the functionality is available.
Nat. Intell. Director Says Data Suggests ‘Nonstate Actor’ Was Behind Cyberattack
> Setting the session flag for "this user is logged in" before checking (or even decoding!) the password seems rather backwards to me.

Yeah, that seems like a problem regardless of whether or not you're parsing JSON.
There is a great essay by Jack Reeves making a similar point.

What Is Software Design?
http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.h...

FTA:

There is one consequence of considering code as software design that completely overwhelms all others. It is so important and so obvious that it is a total blind spot for most software organizations. This is the fact that software is cheap to build. It does not qualify as inexpensive; it is so cheap it is almost free. If source code is a software design, then actually building software is done by compilers and linkers.
>Let's an employer wants some insurance that I won't go work elsewhere because there is going to be a long training period or what not. I expect significant compensation for that, ideally in the form of a large signing bonus, maybe 50k per year of non compete.

They already have a mechanism for that. It's called a contract - you promise to work for the company for 2 years.

Your argument could easily be twisted to support cartels.
Hey! That's every JavaDocs I've ever encountered. See the Apple CoreAudio docs for instance. Auto-generated and never revisited.

Such doc systems are a crime - the Manager asks "Is the documentation complete?" and then Engineer says "Well the auto-docs were created but..." and the Manager says "Good, lets move on"
> Yeah, but you won't. I think that's part of the reason why people care about "taste".

Ahh but you eventually will (at least in my experience). If you don't need to the code either doesn't matter (dead code) or works just fine.

I think I have looked at my own companies entire code base a couple of times. Do I see nasty crap... all the time. And I often fix it for good taste when it is really bad but I have to say the value prop isn't very good compared to adding tests or other automated validation (including automated profiling and dead code analysis).

Kernel code and in particular C are sort of special cases because they are hard to test and performance is generally a high concern. But for many other higher level languages and problem domains this is not the case.

I have been meaning to look how at how much code bases change overtime. In the case of Linux I wonder how much of the Kernel code has stayed the same (lets say over a 5 year period). Probably not a ton but I bet for other domains particularly business software the code either just dies or changes dramatically over time.

Then there are I suppose other domains where the code really can't physically change often (ie space probes and embedded devices).... for those systems I really really hope they have lots of tests.
And what do you do with odd grid sizes?

Honestly the whole second half seemed damned weird. Give the requirement to zero the edges of a two dimensional array, it's so astonishingly obvious to just hard code the 0 and width-1/height-1 that do do anything else suggests a special effort to make a sub-optimal solution simply for arguments sake.
Where I live I can get Comcast. Slow Comcast. At the price they set. I pay for TV channels and don't own a TV. I asked if I could stop paying for parts of the service I cannot use, and they told me "No." As they are the only ISP in my area, I'd really, really like public involvement in Internet infrastructure, even if just to provide a single competitor. Seeing as I live a few blocks from Tim Berners-Lee's office, it's a little ridiculous that I can only access the web through an abusive monopoly.
Detailed subway-style map of proposed railways in Southeast Asia
Taste is malleable and relative. One can even entertain different notions of taste. I personally have at least two – "understandable" and "performant" – and they aren't always (but sometimes are) exclusive of each other.

I suspect Linus's "taste", given Linux's problem domain, tuned to some combination of performant + testable + reviewable + portable. In the example given, Linus's rewrite meets these requirements; hence his assertion that it is in better taste.
I'm not sure the cost is in digging the actual hole. The costs for planning, permitting and litigation can be substantial.
Teaming Up with Small Business Advocates in Your Community
By its very nature, it is inherently more unreliable than a "wired" connection.

Additionally, as usage of a particular endpoint increases, capacity for each individual user decreases proportionally.

There was an article some days ago about how we used to get these amazing LTE speeds, but now they are horribly congested and feel like low-grade DSL.
And to add just a bit:
- "resolution," as measured in megapixels, ain't the thing
- the "I can bracket to get similar results" argument for full-frame over medium format could just as well be used for APS-C over full-frame, MFT over APS-C, 1" over MFT, etc. Meanwhile, everything from FF on down has a huge user base, which prefers their unique set of cost/size/performance tradeoffs.
Bad thing to read when I'm writing a sass to json module
See this title about what's happening to Google Fiber is much more direct, honest, and to the point than the corporate PR google Post and title that confused me into thinking I'm actually going to be able to sign up for Google Fiber.

Their title: "Advancing our amazing bet"

Point being that our ISPs right now need some disruption and I think a lot of people were hoping this Google Fiber would catch on. A lot of folks assumed Google would eat whatever losses to make this a hit. Apperatnly not, apperantly some short term profits trump anything else.
Not really a fair comparison. How much does labor cost in Shanghai vs NYC? How much existing 100+ year old underground infrastructure does Shanghai have?

New subway lines in NYC can't use the latest technology. They're being integrated into an existing 112-year-old subway system with the highest station count and track mileage in the world. I'd make a software development analogy, but it would be woefully inadequate at comparing the scope of the situation.
Lua was written for exactly this purpose, and I personally enjoy writing with it, so it would be my first choice in most cases.
Yes, what non-compete provides is an attempted legal claim on something inherent in you as a person. This is unconscionable.
Apple needs to take a bit of those tens of billions of dollars they have sitting around and spend it on starting from scratch with something that's not horrifically crufty. The quality of their software is lagging so far behind the quality of their hardware right now. Realistically, I think we may just be at the point where operating systems and all the stuff the companies put on top of them are too complicated to keep developing in the traditional way with traditional tools. Formal verification might be the cheapest way forward at this point.
When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." If you haven't done that drive, by the way, you should. It will add some perspective to these comparisons. A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden (population 9.5m) and the state I live in, New Jersey (population 8.9m), which is one of the geographically smaller states in the U.S. We've enjoyed wide access to high speed broadband here for fifteen years or so now. I currently have clean 120 mbps service that is operated at utility levels of reliability. I have no complaints.
Incidentally the huge set of problems with execve were very old news - I know a developer who tried to get them fixed (because they affected a piece of Apple software) and failed. Presumably this was because execve bugs were considered unimportant.

Oops!
One of the biggest flaws of JSON is that it doesn't support "undefined". This makes translating Javascript structures to and from JSON actually not preserve the original value. Sigh.
"Abusive Monopoly" is the definition of most cable providers. Its a long sad history of civic corruption and greed. The actual cable should be turned into a utility, and the content competed for channel by channel, service by service, in an open market.
Wait for a couple of years of heavy flooding/storm activity, buy distressed beachfront property at a discount, and flip it when you have a few years with no flooding.
It's quite clear to me[0]: The member access and subscript operators (. -> []) have the highest precedence, and the pointer dereference and address-of operators (* &) bind from right to left. And in any event if you left out the parentheses the compiler or IDE would likely catch your error.

[0] As someone who likes coding in C/C++ for fun but has never for my day job.
It has been a while but I thought that algae grown in raceway farms was the most efficient way to remove carbon? Love to read more on the bamboo side of it if you have links.
The encoding takeaway seems simple: escape everything with \uxxxx characters that is outside of the ASCII range /[ -~]/ (regex) and you'll be pretty much fine. Set the encoder to utf-8, don't leave [dangling,commas,], and a few other things that are obvious from json.org.
Hundreds of billions?
But control of your body is your responsibility. I don't like being restricted in my life, because others can't control yourself. If someone takes those things in "hard times," that's not proper use and they're bring irresponsible.

In fact, you probably can control yourself (how is your record so far?), it's only a fear that you can't. I don't like being restricted in my life, because you're afraid you won't be able to control yourself.

Furthermore, the law has not eliminated drugs: If you run into hard times and seek something to self-destruct with, you can still easily find LSD or cocaine. It would just take you more effort because of the law.

So the law has put up a small barrier around you so you can get away with exercising less responsibility, making you weaker, yet your threat from the substances persists.

Meanwhile it has endangered me and millions of others in our quest for spiritual enlightenment. (I don't care about cocaine, only LSD). There are other ways to learn enlightenment of course, but in the meantime if we want LSD we run the risks of arrest in the act of purchasing, holding and consuming. We also risk poisoning because it comes from the black market. And we have to endure greater surveillance in our daily lives and at the borders. And we have to pay greater taxes for all the law enforcement and surveillance equipment.

While the benefits of millions of people attaining spiritual enlightenment are tremendous. There would be less fighting, less greed, less anxiety, more sharing, more volunteering and less fear. Having a connection to our spirit, environment and world means less waste, stress and pollution.

Imagine if 50% of the people in your life were as giving and kind and generous as your first-grade teacher. Don't let a vague fear of distant self-destruction control you.
Just by posting and exchanging information on this forum, you're adding momentum to the process of cooperation on a grand scale. Don't restrict access to spiritual substances. Let the people who want to chill out, see the big picture and cooperate on a grand scale figure out how to do it.
A parser should never crash on bad input. If it does, that's a serious bug that needs immediate attention, since that's at least a DoS vulnerability and quite likely something that could result in remote code execution. You definitely need to assume that the parser could fail, but that's different. Unless you're using "crash" in some way I'm not familiar with?
This post is a masterclass in buck-passing and spin.
New gene-editing technology successfully cures a genetic blood disorder in mice