skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In fact, some member states are opposed to it.

Which ones? Generally the EU wants more stable democracies to hold up the others.
"Write a business plan to prove the idea is feasible, then throw it away".
I've been eyeing Kafka for a long time now - tried to set it up on a smaller DO box and had memory issues. Is it worth using this for smaller operations (<100k requests per day)? The stream processing seems extremely useful for my use case. Is there something else that may be a better fit?
GuestToGuest Gets $35M
1 I think we all understand that there are are degrees of monopoly power:one company might be a pure monopoly, a few big players (known as an oligopoly) can behave cooperatively (like a monopoly) or engage in price wars (with the objective of driving out the weaker player).

2 There are lots of businesses with high fixed costs and low marginal costs - tech is not that different from others in that regard.

3 Tech, does have one key difference - the network effect.
In other words, a company's history in building up a large network of customers may matter more than how efficiently it operates today

4 The dynamic effects of concentrated industries (as I mentioned earlier) are complicated. There is no guarantee at all that the result will be optimal.

5 We have nice examples of this in collusive behaviour by the major tech companies in their hiring policies.

6 There are other alternatives to the status quo than, as in your example, of reducing companies to one hundredth of their former size.
Explorations in Adapting Redux to C#
I think cloud services and IoT devices when I think Amazon myself. Originally they were just where I went to buy college textbooks, but the times.. they are a'changin..
Ten Years with a Hasselblad
Yes, this is Corbyn. He was also simultaneously for and against Brexit.
The Best Implementation Practices for Deploying a PAM Solution
Well there is really no guarantee but Scotland will pass all tests easily and whole EU will probably help them ;)
And that's before you mention that he left UK with the most mass surveillance-friendly laws of the western world [1], that would've likely been declared invalid under EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. There May also played a big role in that. And let's not forget about the "porn filter" that includes much more than just porn, and it will soon become mandatory [2].

Cameron also helped Saudi Arabia [3] become the head of UN's human rights council, and who knows what other kind of corrupt deals he made with China. Cameron was really "looking up" to the leaders in China and how they're doing things there, so to me it didn't come as a surprise that he would try to turn UK into West's China (from a surveillance/censorship point of view).

[1] http://europe.newsweek.com/ip-bill-most-extreme-surveillance...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/01/26/porn-blocki...

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/uk-and-saudi-arabia-ma...
Not when you're using many network filesystems. From man 5 nfs:

"The intr / nointr mount option is deprecated after kernel 2.6.25. Only SIGKILL can interrupt a pending NFS operation on these kernels, and if specified, this mount option is ignored to provide backwards compatibility with older kernels."

I'm curious if you've used a network filesystem in production - this feels like such an everyday occurrence with either NFS or AFS that I'm surprised to hear people claim that it works differently.
Nick Denton on the future of the internet
Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and astro-turfing?
> I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431

I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.
I'm almost 40, and I don't let articles like this scare me. Everyone has this fear they are going to be rejected for some reason or another. It's just another idea that you can obsess over at night wondering if you are going to be able to continue living the life you want.

Is this article true? Yes, partially. There will be companies and people out there who won't hire older programmers, and this is true for almost every other profession as well. 15 years ago there was the scare about offshoring all our jobs too. We were constantly told that the people in India were smarter, worked harder, and had cheaper salaries. They said we were lucky to keep our jobs. Is this true, yeah partially, but anyone who as any good found another job at a better company. Are the people in India hard workers and smart? Yeah there are a lot of them that are. I've worked with a lot of people from India, and many of them are great people. They are smart, passionate about what they do, and nice. Heck there is a woman from India sitting 10 feet from me who is brilliant, and a hard worker. Am I afraid of this? No. Sure there are companies that will pick her over me strictly because she is younger, but I don't want to work there anyway. A lot of times companies making decisions like that are the ones that are in real trouble and do it, because they know that older and more experience people won't stay long. You can keep those companies. I've already lived through that. Getting rejected by a company doesn't bother me, especially for a silly reason like that. I'll see where they are in a year, and I'll most likely get the last laugh.
Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after.

Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that.
> However, is it common for production C code to have a single file with 5,300+ lines?

It's definitely not uncommon, but yes, that file is on the long side. However, it is rather clean and well-organized.

It may be due to the poor module system (header files) of C where you end up making files slightly longer than ideal because splitting into two files means also adding some header files and thus adding to the maintenance burden.

When writing C code, I usually strive to put a whole "module" in a single file, so that no "private" interfaces have to be put in header files. Everything that needs to be exposed in order to test a module goes in the public interface.

It's a tradeoff and C being C doesn't help (and C++ wouldn't really help here IMO), but I see nothing wrong with the file you picked. It's a bit long but it looks well done to my C programmer eyes.
International Crystal Manufacturing is going out of business
Facebook is a tool just like Chrome and the MacBook. It really is what you make of it. IMHO if it has low utility, you are using it poorly. It has a potential you are not tapping.
AutoHotkey Run script while holding down key
The general feeling is that this vote will now succeed. However, I think it's now almost certain that if Scotland does vote to become independent they will be forced to take the Euro as currency. Westminster said this would be the case with the first referendum but few believed it. Now voters in Scotland must believe it, given brexit. I think this will influence voters very strongly - and I think the issue of currency will be a central issue (if anybody other than the SNP can be bothered to campaign - the Westminster Government will have their hands full with brexit negotiations, so I doubt Scotland's independence will be top of their agenda)
SIGCHLD (via a signal handler, signalfd, sigtimedwait, whatever) only tells you that some child exited, and also only one part of the process can deal with SIGCHLD. (You can't correctly compose a signal handler + signalfd.) waitpid on the specific pid will check that specific process and no others, and not interfere with any other part of the program that might be waiting for some other child.
I think its fairly easy to criticise the actions of existing powerful unions, and postulate that the less relevant unions lost relevance exactly due to the same concerns and lack of monopoly protection.

Teachers unions for instance are still very strong on a state-by-state basis, but are disliked because they continuously only promote public schools and do whatever they can do show disdain for private school teachers, and students. This 'us versus them' mentality doesn't endear them to parents who simply want the best education for their children and not necessarily a "public school".

Additionally due to teacher's unions, demonstrably bad teachers are difficult to remove from their positions.

Police unions act similarly, by closing ranks anytime there's a whiff of a corruption investigation and proposing measures that essentially make police officers a protected class when it comes to criminal investigations against them. It's no surprise that the general public isn't in favour of them.

Unions historically can be favoured by the general population, when most people in the general pop are also members of unions themselves. Unions have an us versus them mentality that puts them at odds not only with management, but also with anyone who isn't a part of a union. They make allowances for and have political alliances with other unions, but don't really think about the public good.

An example is that if Software Developers were all in a union, we'd probably work it out so that a garbage man's union strike doesn't affect us too badly, so that in the future when we go on strike, the garbage men won't suddenly find that the apps and software they depend on suddenly has zero support. Given this situation, software devs (of the union) would be 'okay' with the other union, but everyone outside of the union would be unhappy because they're left high and dry.
A useful data point missing from the article would have been the moderator's response to an email inquiring as to the story's history.
I don't think this is inherent to the idea of a union. Unions should be democratic (I don't defend unions that don't give a shit about democracy), and tend to be quite concerned with process. If the union wants to support the accused and not defend the harasser that's their perogative, and if you don't like how your union handles (or doesn't handle) these situations you have the ability to lobby your union to change its process.
SoundCloud needs more money, or it may sell at a fire-sale price
Economies are not zero-sum. The gain of corporations doesn't mean workers are being "screwed".

Corporate profits are good; they mean more return to shareholders.
Well, judge for yourself.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=speak+at+lengt...
This book is used as the second course in the CS program at Luther College. At this point in the program python is the only language that students are assumed to be familiar with. The point of this book is to gain an understanding of how these data structures behave rather than implementing them in perfect python, so your critique is absolutely warranted.
I'll suggest a "Pythonic data structures" version of the book to Brad for those looking to learn good python conventions.
Pandora Just Released Its Spotify Killer and It’s Surprisingly Impressive
> Even before we get down to tax complexity, how do we decide if 10% of income as tax is good enough,

Why would we have to do that? The reality is that we already have an income tax, and we can definitely simply its filing process without changing its current rates.

So far this sounds like a standard libertarian tactic where you try to turn every debate on political policy specifics into a debate around whether government should be doing anything at all. It's not any different than internet marxists who, given a topic that revolves around business, will always reply "well X should just handled by government anyway FULL COMMUNISM NOW". It's completely unproductive and borderline trolling.
Define "manipulate".
You can add !g to your ddg query to redirect you to a google search.
Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?
I did an Ask HN one time something along the lines of "how would you game the HN ranking algorithm?". It seems like good security practice IMO to have a discussion on what is publicly known / discernible about the ranking algorithm.

This was during the time of the election so I was thinking along the lines of political astroturfing, but also to guard against companies unfairly promoting their products or suppressing posts related to a rival company. For instance, if someone really wanted to keep a discussion off HN, all it would take is to tangentially start a flame war over some sensitive issue and watch the ranking algorithm punish the ensuing vitriol.
I've been following your mailing list for a while and it's a great way to stay up to date after a very busy week. So i recommend it in a non-self-promotional way !

p.s.: I miss your podcast already
> I find the idea that the best way to support the poor is to make taxis cheaper, rather than increasing the/enforcing a minimum wage absolutely bizarre.

I explained this part in my comment. Enforcing a higher minimum wage just put people out of jobs, it doesn't give everyone a raise. So you're not raising people's wage, you're actually taking away from them their whole wage bringing it down to zero.
I am Scottish from birth- I spent nearly my entire life living in the middle of England.

The English are very angry about this and are touting Sturgeon as a crying "remoaner". They believe that they had a referrendum recently and therefore it's just "keep trying until you get the result you wanted".

If you're a person with that in mind I have a few things to say:

1) the UK being a member of the EU was something sorely needed, but people consider it a trade union deal and not anything else. Therefore they use the argument that the EU has changed enough to warrant leaving.

2) Scotland largely voted remain last time because it was immediately evident that the EU would not allow Scotland to join- since Spain and the remaining UK was in strong favour of vetoing entry. This has fundamentally changed.

3) Now Scotland will not remain in the EU despite voting overwhelmingly to remain. Leaving the EU now would be the antithesis of "the will of the people".. so you can't say that "they voted, get over it".

I'm rather sour on the whole experience regarding Brexit, there has been a _lot_ of smug mudslinging from the leave side, and they've already tried to scapegoat the remain campaign as being "not with the program" and subsequently sabotaging the leave campaign.
Sounds like you've already tried plenty of productivity apps, but in case you haven't tried it, I've found Todoist quite good.

The "Apple-ification" as you put it is done pretty well. In place of drag + drop to set a time of day, tasks can be created with inline date parsing. So tasks can be created with something like: "Meeting with Tim at Tues 3pm", and it'd pick that up. It's missing direct support for habits aside from having recurring todos.

If you'd like, I've got a 3-month premium code left over I can send your way. Not affiliated with them, just a happy user.
Possible and very likely
Idea: Hacker News as a P2P Concept Built on Ethereum
I would very much prefer an ansible playbook so I can deploy this in a blink, than all those countless manual procedures.
I didn't know Couchsurfing had raised any money. What had their monetization plan been?
What would you suggest? We're in need of an alerting platform and making use of Slack, not because it's flawless or anything, but because we're already paying for it and it's convenient for the mass junk. Ie, not strictly mission critical alerts.

What medium might be better than Slack?

(to be clear, i'm asking, not saying Slack is good for this)
AIUI It's about separating all untrusted web content from everything else on your computer. As long as you have _one_ content process (and one parent/browser process), you get the vast majority of security benefits (by limiting the capabilities of that child content process).

The same origin policy already works fine, when talking content-to-content.
> I agree. As someone who only recently entered the workforce, I have noticed that people from the US seem to have a particular tendancy to dislike unions whereas here in the UK they are often seen as a good thing. Anyone have any thoughts as to why?

If you've ever worked with our seen some of the actions of unions I'm the US I'm sure you understand.

They are often political and you can usually be barred from getting a job if you aren't Union. At one point in my life I considered doing lighting and stage work for theaters. After trying for some time, and impressing people with my spotlight work, they told me I'd have to join the union here in NJ and that could take years. I'd have to work for free till I got in! This was common here in NJ.

The political side is worse. Let's say you're a Catholic and you work in a company. Your company forces you to work in the union. Then your union donates to pro-abortion charities. Is that fair? I don't think so.

Then you have the biggest debate that should be raised about unions: how corrupted they are. Union dues are high and it's not because of the good service. The heads make a lot of money on the backs of some of the hardest working people in our country. You've got union bosses taking half a million pay check who is skimming from minimum wage factory workers.

So that's why I think the average Joe hates the American union: they are rich, political, and will bar you from getting a job all while taking your money, pocketing it, and expecting you to thank them for the pleasure.
PyDev of the Week: Luke Plant
Do you think it's now invalid? Do you think anything has changed? I'd be interested to hear of any news that you think would update this.
I grew up in the north of England, Cumbria to be exact. My extended family are all in the north of Scotland.

There is no doubt in my mind that the loser in all of this is the north of England. They are repeatedly denied a voice, publicly scorned, and they see all their talent move south or abroad. England is a lopsided country and I don't know how to fix it.
>Richard Gabriel was trolling readers with the word "worse" for comical effect. His essay is: "simpler with less features" wins in the marketplace of ideas more than "complex". His observation isn't about "quality".

Only it IS about quality.

The simpler and with less features" examples he gave were examples of broken implementations, that will succesful in getting "out of the door" and having viral acceptance, have resulted on lots of issues, lost man-months, and piles upon piles of hacks.

That's regardless of what Gabriels himself thought he was saying.

And while "getting out of the door" pronto might be good for a product, it's not good for infrastructure software.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay sane on autoplaying video ad-covered sites.
FWIW, the post does acknowledge that:

> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.
"the US could likely still dominate global firepower rankings at half the current spend"

True, but just winning a war or conflict is not an ideal outcome. Overwhelming advantage not only prevents conflict from occurring, it also assures that casualties are low in even low intensity / regional conflicts.
This is bullshit. There is unlimited miles and they can return the car whenever they want. There's nothing predatory about it. I've had Uber drivers who bemoan the fact that they bought their own car instead of getting the lease.
Does syncthing have a backup option?

Last I recall it didn't, which kind of soured me on it - in an ideal world every sync operation would be prefaced with "send a backup to one of my backup endpoints first".
I've had one post removed from the top spot on the front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041

I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed to:

Title: "Bing doesn't support SSL"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041

Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:

"
Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis.
"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342

I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time, I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an interesting one to have.
That's amazing, you're basically saying better services should be for the rich only while the poor should use lower public services while saying at the same time that you support the poor. Incredible. That's what socialism always does, pretends to help the poor but in the end only the elite benefits from it.

> No, it doesn't. It was never empirically proven that there is a connection between minimum wage and unemployment.

When it comes to low skill jobs, yes, increasing the minimum wage does create more unemployment as the middle class is not able to pay for them anymore, only the super rich. That's a well no fact, you can look it up.
The article is about posts that never receive the "flagged" designation.
Multics Vulnerability Analysis (1974) [pdf]
No, you're missing the point. The issue is individual freedoms. You're talking about the benefits of collective bargaining and calling that freedom. It is in no way the same thing.

I think the free rider problem you allude to is a result of union membership providing diminishing value.

But again, the only part I really have an issue with are public sector.

PS. You're not wrong about taxes, but let's not use debating fallacies please. We're talking about unions.
> Richard Gabriel was trolling readers with the word "worse" for comical effect. His essay is: "simpler with less features" wins in the marketplace of ideas more than "complex". His observation isn't about "quality".

I have to say that reading the thing again I don't really think that's accurate, since he also talks about sacrificing correctness for the sake of ease of implementation.
Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts)

I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from hn@ycombinator.com.
A Question to Fred Wilson from Union Square and AVC.com:

Since Fred is one of the early investors + somebody who frequently promoted Soundclound on his blog and on HN (despite all the industry warnings that he shouldn't deal with the music industry's oligopol), we are wondering...

How does it feel when one of your flagship investment is in such a situation?

(Serious question, and what are you telling your LPs now?)
+1 to this.

I think one party or other will always have to maintain an additional app to support that use case. I have a group chat with a few friends who have flitted between Android and iOS and the group has continued seamlessly for years.

I'm not sure if there's a reason to go Hangouts over Whatsapp, other than both parties having to maintain an additional app