skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can't rely on OSS as a pillar of my business.

'professional' people don't need $10k to be your personal bitch on a 3 day deadline. if you asked me, i would hang up the phone. not even worth the oxygen to respond, because you don't even exist in my world.

try cold calling a corporate lawyer, or surgeon, to do that. the realistic price is more like $50k, and anyone with half a brain or a shred of personal dignity is going to ask for it up front and with no contract.
The Hunt for Voiceless Victims: A Fake NGO Accused of Spying on Qatar Activists
companies release software when they hope that the cost of the freeloaders is outweighed by the number of benefit additional contributors will provide

Lols, is this how you view open source?
LaunchDarkly gets $8.7M to put the right features in front of right users
As far as I can tell he answers every question, and corrects every inaccuracy across at least these platforms: twitter, hackernews, reddit, [users|internals].rust-lang.org, irc; its mind blowing. Honestly, a talk on how he stays so connected without being awake 24/7 would be interesting ;)

Thanks, for all the hard work, Steve. You're devotion helped turn me into someone who loves Rust.
To amazing effect too. The two singers style take you off your guard (this... isn't... Stevie?) and then he comes in, singing slightly louder, and stressing the start of each word - the song changes from something super cool and easy, to something a lot more funky.

By the end of the verse, you realize how great Stevie's singing is, even though he's holding so much back.
Provided nothing breaks, then yes, do-release-upgrade can do the job. (dist-update does not upgrade to a new release in Ubuntu).

I have a bad experience with this, especially upgrading one LTS to another LTS. Clean install was much more reliable.
Not having time is not unprofessional. There are many different reasons why even throwing money at it might not be enough to get someone to work for you on short notice.

If your business depends on that piece of software to the degree that you might need a very quick fix on short notice at an almost arbitrary price, then you need to pay for a support contract with some company that offers it for that particular OSS software. That is possible for many big OSS projects, just like with closed source software.
Has he tried a increase in the cat's food intake? Seems low cost, low risk, and if it does not work you can resume armor plating the robot.
Stradivarius was ahead of his time, but all of his violins have been updated and modified since they were built, such as adding Bass Bars [1].

Since then, his results have been duplicated and/or improved. The name Stradivarius still carries an amazing amount of weight. Researchers have shown musicians can't actually differentiate between newly built violins and Stradivarius:

"The duo asked professional violinists to play new violins, and old ones by Stradivari and Guarneri. They couldn’t tell the difference between the two groups. One of the new violins even emerged as the most commonly preferred instrument." [ 2 ]

Therefore when TFA from NYT makes this vague, unsubstantiated claim "For hundreds of years, the best violin players have almost unanimously said they prefer a Stradivari or a Guarneri instrument," take it with a grain of salt or preferably evidence that mainstream media benefits by perpetuating mysterious illusions for the emotional allure.

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

[ 2 ] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/0...
DVCS is fundamentally a simple concept. And, every use case should be possible with a series of elemental operations. Any 'advanced' use cases can and should just be 'macros'.
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11156288
My point is that there's a price. It doesn't matter that it's high. Just that there is one.
You had me at record players :)

I think there's an entire world of record albums that never saw the light. Sites like discog makes me want to start a collection.

But I very much agree with what you wrote. I'm not sold on voice interfaces, that one time where it asks you "Sorry, can you repeat it again?" is the last time I'm using Google Now.

But more importantly I just feel like I look stupid talking to the air alone. Also feel like I have to strain my voice and focus when I'm talking to a machine which adds some friction.

I do miss the days when we didn't have such bloat. Games would load instantly and ready to play without signing into facebook or being awarded without doing anything.
Absolutely. We have to constantly evaluate our efforts for their effectiveness. When we coach our children, we should coach them to be mindful of how they spend their time on their effort and not just the effort itself.
Git is not "simple" from the point of view of new users. But it is "simple" from the point of view of the programmers of Git. There's the graph structure and some tools to manipulate it. It doesn't do much to hide that.

The underlying code of the application I'm writing would be much "simpler" if I didn't have to add all kinds of features to make it easier for the user.

Also, Git is not so much a VCS application as a framework for version control.
If this site gets attention of a Googler who cares, it will almost certainly be sent a C&D. I'd recommend the author rename/rebrand. Generally names "Google ____" or "Android ____" are forbidden, but "____ for Google" or "____ for Android" are generally okay with Google's trademark policies.

EDIT: I hit my HN rate limit for the morning, so my response to your comment below follows:

AppleInsider is extremely unlikely to be confused with an Apple website, however. Particularly since it's style is very different, and a "news and rumors" site about Apple isn't likely to be confused for an Apple site. (And as a sidebar, even if Apple did want to C&D them, they'd have a much harder time C&Ding a journalistic presence.)

In the case of yours, I had to check the copyright fine print to determine it was not a Google website.

Even changing the logo and site design from the standard Google corporate style would help.
GC is certainly easier. However, it is important to understand the life-cycle of objects regardless. To be able to control them (if desired) is good because in many cases one would prefer to have that control instead of being forced to use garbage collector.

In an ideal world, garbage collector makes sense because we don't want to have to worry about life-cycle management when we are solving other problems. Memory management can indeed be an annoying implementation detail, but as it stands there are certainly limiting factors in hardware which are impacted by generic object-management for specific application domains.
Doubt it.

Before the "Not me! I use w3m on a p3!" replies pile in, accept this as a generalisation warning..

I think most of us in this thread though generally use reasonably recent gear (our machines are the tools of our trade, personally I upgrade each year) and that we use our browsers extensively enough that even small issues around perf become quite noticeable...

I can't remember the last time I couldn't scroll smoothly or a tab didn't open instantly...

Maybe the difference here is those in the church of noscript and those without? After the initial pain white listing the various things you need, I've found the performance of Firefox on Linux to be brilliant. (currently around 100 tabs, some of which are sat on prime video etc, arch Linux, 16G, 50.1.0).

A lot of the extensions listed in this thread are doing quite a lot of work also, and sometimes on every request which probably doesn't help..

Disk caching could also be a problem for those of us without shiny new NVMe's in their laptops (pull the trigger on that one, it's worth it!).

The only downside of all the blocking stuff for me though is when you book a flight or something and the noscript/ublock combo prevents me from getting past the callback from your payment provider... I need some kind of giant banner that says turn off noscript and ublock when using britishairways installed somewhere :}

Or I'll just send them yet another snarky feedback message the next time I fuck it up (seriously, it calls t.co and doubleclick in serial!)
I would hope that this type of hardware can be offset by the fact that these devices don't suffer obsolescence the same way other digital devices do, which need to be replaced because there's no longer 802.11b networks around etc.
Supplemental reading:

* http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-...

* http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/embedded-se/...
Aren't there articles already that clearly explain practice doesnt make perfect? I never properly understood what Carol Dweck is actually proposing. Can somebody clarify if there is a 3 step methodology here?
The problem, as in most difficult hacking operations, is that the attacker has physical access.

I would have put the machine in a base cabinet, run a chute out a small hole cut in the toe mould, and if necessary, put a child lock on the cabinet.
I understand that risk, and will comply with Google's wishes. As the project is completely focused on Google's CSE, and serves only to draw attention to them, I do hope they give me a pass. Technically, it's not unheard of... for example, AppleInsider.com is not an Apple property.
How much were you paid to post that?

And if you were in a coma for three days, how much would I have to pay you to leave the coma and work on fixing a bug for that time instead?
> I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.

Sooo hard to do. I worked remote over the summer and tried convincing my wife that yes, I am working, even though I am home and sitting down staring into a screen. Not sure she ever got it but I'm working in office now so not an issue anymore. If I were to do it again I would definitely get a small office to go to or go to a co-working space. Good luck!
No, it takes 200K jobs to provide healthcare for the millions of previously uninsured people in CA.
I recently got a SureFeed RFID feeder. It can read your cat's microchip or an RFID collar tag. When an authorized kitty approaches, a flap raises and lets the cat eat. I got it to prevent other family pets from stealing my cat's food. It works well for that purpose and seems well designed. The feeder has clear side "walls" and the flap itself acts as a wall on the rear of the feeder, helping prevent food theft during authorized feeding.

I'd like to hack it and add timer functionality. See, my cat is always trying to get breakfast early and is always underfoot from 4 A.M. until I feed him. I tripped over him and broke my ankle last month because of this. I figure, if I can load up breakfast's meal before I go to bed, and only "unlock" the feeder after 7 A.M., my cat may eventually learn to stop bugging me at night. The joke will probably be on me though, darn cats.

I'd like to use an ESP8266 for this so I can also have an IoT feeder that reports usage statistics. =P
In order to help others more effectively share the maintenance burden, I need to stop fixing bugs and focus on helping them with patch submissions.

This is a good takeaway; I hope more maintainers are willing to prioritize patches.
I feel like this is supposed to be a funny reference to something.
Thanks both, and achanda358!

It's taken lots of work. I think I'm a nicer and better person in Rust than I was in Ruby, but that's all I'll say about that. I am very much not a perfect human being.

> Honestly, a talk on how he stays so connected without being awake 24/7 would be interesting ;)

I wrote a blog post on that a while back: http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-do-you-find-the-time it's still mostly accurate kinda.
I'm not sure you can change the NIMBYs minds, but you don't have to. You just have to get the planning commission to stop listening to the NIMBYs. You might be able to do that with enough evidence.
> Demanding for a feature without making a case for it. Not using any polite or nice phrasing in a thread.

In virtually every case where I have seen impolite issues filed or even abusive issues filed, the biggest success has always been when the project maintainers simply ignore the abuse and respond respectfully, as if the request had been worded more politely. The abusive issue opener will often apologize for their tone or simply adopt a different, much more friendly tone.

This is an effective strategy. In the same way that people filing issues need to remember that maintainers are people and should be treated as people, maintainers can also remember that people filing issues are people.

There's no need to act adversarially in open source software development.
Linux Container Internals
> I don't get you. What does a developer has to do with deciding what the business needs? If your job is that, ie, figuring out what a business needs, then by all means work closely with people..But I am not sure that is the type of work being discussed in this context.

Well, if you're a rank and file engineer, your "job" isn't explicitly to figure out what the business needs. However, if you care about becoming more valuable over time, you owe it to yourself to understand why the business values you. The business doesn't care about the code itself, it only cares about the solutions the code creates. If it's slow, that's a problem. If it's buggy, that's a problem. My instincts tell me to accept nothing less than purity, but a business needs pragmatism and "good enough".
This causes weight gain. My dog gains weight if I walk her any less than I usually do, but still clammors endlessly for food.
there isn't always one. some people are rich, remember?
The "functionalist" truth is not that these individuals add no value, it's that they generally add negative value. When you're unemployed with no job prospects and unable to support yourself or your family, chances are you are now "functionally counterproductive" to society (crime, homelessness, etc). Any ethical society (a society which does not kill or imprison people for this reason) should, from a "functional" standpoint, do its best to make these people productive again.
How Johnny Cultivated an Impostor Syndrome
That's sort of a useless point. For, say, a billion dollars, most people would do just about anything. That's not very useful.
I actually think this illustrates the main problem with all these opinion pieces: They depend heavily on the authors experience.

I only work in startups where I feel people expect me to know the business needs, I wouldn't want to work at a place where somebody 'breaks down' the business needs in small packages which need no knowledge about the business needs to implement. I think 'the good' startups realize that this old pattern doesn't work if you try to be innovative and agile.
> Not having time is not unprofessional.

Not being able to help someone out at all is.

> That is possible for many big OSS projects, just like with closed source software.

It should be possible for all of them. It's not, which is why OSS cannot be relied upon for business.
You're not alone, also proud Fedora user and I just can't understand all the criticism I see towards desktop linux in this thread.

Some people focus on advanced use, 3D editing tools and such. Sure linux is behind commercial distros due to lack of hardware support and of course community development.

But it's still a fantastic movement to produce so many usable distros for nothing at all.

I personally use NFS to stream video at home, and across VPN. The problem is always the connection, for example poor wifi reception and full HD movies don't go together but low res simpsons episodes from the 90s work fine on poor wifi reception.
The access to solids is definitely a problem. One approach might be digging them from the surface and lifting up using balloons. High temperatures don't help, but without the need to stay on the surface for very long periods, the digging robots may probably accumulate enough cold while high in the atmosphere, and then dive down for a short while, managing the temperature e.g. by melting and boiling the coolant, then go up again.

The lifting gas can be initially transported in a highly pressurized form (e.g. liquid helium). It would be enough to support a small initial platform. That platform can generate lighter gases right from the atmosphere, using solar energy. CO2 is pretty heavy, so even oxygen and nitrogen would be lifting gases. Hydrogen is also somehow available for extraction from the atmosphere. These gases could be used to support more and more incoming structures as they arrive from orbit. (Yes, easier said than done.)

The bigger problem would probably be compounds like sulfuric acid, hydrogen chloride and fluoride, etc, that would readily react with many construction materials, especially metals.

Given the atmosphere composition, it's probably even possible to synthesize both fuel and oxidizer for a rocket, e.g. hydrocarbons and O2 or HNO3. Launching a large rocket from a zeppelin is tricky. Launching a rocket from a plane has been shown to work on Earth, so it's possibly also doable from Venusian cloud tops. Again, easier said than done.

But still possible!
Building a Content Marketing Machine
I don't completely disagree, but the argument you put forward is about as ad hominem as they get. Is what he says flawed or are you simply utterly interested?
wow can't believe I just read that -_-
Good point. I used to work at a mobile startup that subsequently got acquired and burned - the run rate for a company of ~140 people was astronomical.

Radio engineers are expensive and rare, scopes and even faraday cages are expensive, specialist software is expensive, handsets were a fortune when you had to buy hundreds of them.

We got sold for (I think) about $330 million, then you look at social media startups that go for a couple of billion. Nobody wants to do stuff that changes the world for a reason.
I immediately through of other cellular structures that are essentially one dimensional: microtubules, 20nm thick; actin filaments 7nm; DNA bare filament 2nm; chromatin 30nm; cell membrane 10nm; aquaporin 5nm (diameter); water molecule 0.275nm, etc. How thick are these silicone nanotubes?
The cells must have adapted like how animals adapt when in an urban environment, or like how all humans and animals do.
> branches give you a way to track the branches a commit is a part of which is good for long-running branches (I think of things like master, maybe a long running refactor or major feature branch)

If you always merge "from the right direction", you can follow the first parent line in git and reconstruct which parent is in the master branch (or in the "heavier" branch in general) and which isn't.

In more complicated situations, Mercurial named branches (commit forever carries the branch name) can be helpful. But you can get pretty far with git, too.
For me it was very stressful to learn how to cope with that, and fortunately I'm paid at least to do the bulk of the work I do (that is, all the work on Redis is paid). However once you learn the mental attitude to have towards this issues, they disappear magically. It's you VS many people, and as the user base increases, there is no way you can handle issues and PRs. The contributors need to adapt in order to make your work as simple as possible, otherwise their issues/PRs will get ignored. I personally cherry-pick among the ones that are easy to read, understand, general. There is always who will say, don't you feel ashamed?!!11 Redis has tons of open PRs / Issues! When people tell you this, always focus on what you did of good and not on what you can't do well enough. In case of unpaied OSS work, the attitude should be to do it only to have fun and learn. There are no other justifications: IMHO it's very wrong to donate time to OSS like if it was a charity, OSS is used by companies doing tons of money and startups that sold for billions. Nobody cared about redistributing back money to authors of the OSS that permitted them to create (alonside with their great product) this result, so you as an OSS maintainer should only care to have fun.

EDIT: I think it is very important to outline how in my experience 99% of the user base is wonderful, splendid human being, nice, willing to help. It's just that the wrong 1% is very verbal and if you focus on that one is terrible, but I believe it is hard to find an environment like the "Underground IT/OSS" scene from the POV of people quality. It's just that's impossible to get zero-assholes-environments.

EDIT 2: To other OSS maintainers, a trick is to be super gentle with harsh people. You'll feel much, much better compared to using their own tones.
It poisons the discourse every time you do this.
So you just get off on it?
> Shit, I can't even find a SINGLE qualified mid-level software engineer with a clearance for a job that's already started and fully funded.

Two questions (on a tangent):

1. Define "qualified"

My experience, before I gave up on the DOD sector, is that companies that post Landry list reqs actually mean it. They are even worse than the larger industry at only interviewing candidates who look stellar on paper.

2. How much are you paying?

The few times I did get past the resume filter the salary was slightly below market, and none of these companies have anything resembling non-salary compensation.
Continuous Deployment at Facebook and OANDA [pdf]
If you've never done Common Lisp before, it's better to start by looking at `loop`, which is a built-in macro that provides a bunch of different ways to loop/iterate: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/loop-for-black-belts.html

iterate is a Common Lisp library that aims to be a replacement for loop, being cleaner (subjectively) and portably extensible: https://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/

`repeat` is an iterate clause that tells iterate to perform N iterations of the loop:

(iterate (repeat 3) (print 'beep))
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP

As for this particular `for`, it's an iterate clause that handles numeric iteration (among other things). So:

(iterate (for x :from 0)
(for y :from 10 :downto 7)
(print (list x y)))

Would give you:

(0 10)
(1 9)
(2 8)
(3 7)

iterate will terminate the loop the first time any one of its clauses runs out of values/iterations. So in the post I had something like

(iterate (repeat N)
(for x :from start)
...)

You could write this as

(iterate (for x :from start :below (+ start N))
...)

But manually calculating the ending value seems ugly to me. I know I want the loop to happen N times so I just say `(repeat N)` and let the computer figure out when it's time to be done.
Crazy Pixels – Cellular Automata in the Browser
Exactly. There are a lot of people who simply won't trust a "robot" to drive for them, regardless of their safety record.
Some pets might eat themselves to obesity given the chance. I'm not sure the amount of effort the cat puts into trying to get more food is a perfect determinate of how much food the cat needs to be healthy.
Prototyping a New 3D API for the Web (Vulkan in Servo)
I believe the Maku Pahu will be headed to the scrap yard shortly. They had a recent availability for perspective bidders to shipcheck. The award has yet to be announced, and the rumour is they will cancel the project. No reason to repair a ship headed to a scrap yard.
I recommend also watching Mark Blyth's brief overview[1] of how this problem has already affected the political landscape over the last several decades. Significant changes need to be made immediately to handle the changes technology is forcing on the economy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI#t=792
Feature Flags FTW!
Yeah and QNX booted you into a graphical environment from a 1.44mb floppy..

I never really understand comments like these, what are you saying? You want smaller binaries? Less features?

Don't you have a spare 50MB on your 512GB SSD?