skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite Heisenbug was a few years ago, at my current job with Silent Circle. There was a bug where, when a user tried to buy a new phone number, they would be shown around 12 messages saying "you can't change your number". I saw screenshots, but there was no way that the server would show more than one message, and there was no way to reproduce this reliably (or anywhere other than production).

I looked at the code, and it was straightforward: The "add number" view had a check for "ability to add number", and so did the homepage. The homepage would redirect you to the "add number" view if you could have a number but didn't, and the "add number" view would redirect you to the homepage if you couldn't have a number, with the message "you can't change your number", but there was no way for this to happen more than once (the checks are complementary).

Because this is a privacy-focused service, logs were minimal, basically only the path of the request, the time and the backend that served it. We managed to at least see the path the bug took, and, indeed, it was bounced multiple times between the two pages.

There was no clue as to this anywhere, the pages used complementary checks from data on the session, the session was stored on a central redis cache, all workers were running the same code, everything.

The bug remained elusive, until I noticed that the requests would be served first by worker 1, then by worker 2, then by 1 again, etc, until the cycle broke when a request for page 1 was served by worker 2. This could only mean that the workers couldn't agree on the check, and, sure enough, the configuration on one of the hosts had, mistakenly, pointed the cache to local memory rather than redis.

That was a pretty interesting bug.
only allowing know characters is a simple fix: branch=${BRANCH//[^a-z0-9\/]/-}
AWESOME effort Justin Angel !!! :D

It is great to see someone achieve their weight loss goals.

Yes it is that “SIMPLE” and I know it can be done, as I too did it myself.

I too had a massive weight loss goal (90 lbs / 40kg) and achieved it with the same basic principals, but in a slightly longer time frame (9 months / 40 weeks).

I wrote a book about it (My Weight Loss Story: 40kg in 40 Weeks Without Exercise (90lbs in 9 months), instead of a medium post. ;)

I personally (Richard Boegli) lost 40 kg in 40 weeks (90lb in 9 months) WITHOUT exercise. [90lb in 9 months (no exercise)].

I’m not trying to hijack your story! I would just like to provide another data point, that the basic principals do work. As I have found their can be a lot of scepticism, even though the math works!

Justin Angel: How I lost 100lbs in 6 months [100lb / 6 months (with exercise)]

I could do a line for line comparison, but these are the points that immediately came to mind as I read the article:
Richard Boegli: [90lb in 9 months (no exercise)]: “Just Eat Less”, its in the preface of the book :)

Justin Angel [100lb / 6 months (with exercise)]: "Calories In — Calories Out = Weight Change"

Richard Boegli [90lb in 9 months (no exercise)]:: “I reduced my food intake”

Justin Angel [100lb / 6 months (with exercise)]: “I reduced my daily caloric intake”

Richard Boegli [90lb in 9 months (no exercise)]: “I lost on average 1kg (2.2lbs) a week, every week for 40 weeks WITHOUT exercise

Justin Angel [100lb / 6 months (with exercise)]: “I would experience a 3lbs a week weight lose.”

I chose to do it WITHOUT exercise, as my theory was that I would keep it off longer, if it wasn’t dependent on exercise. Every other time I lost weight in my life, it was a combination of diet and exercise. When the exercised stop, the weight would creep back up, as I was still eating too much.

http://40in40book.com

EDIT: Cleaned it up a bit.
makes me wonder how much was driven by cheap fuel driving down air fares.
Ok, now I see. I am a mediocre programmer at best, and I live in a rural area. I often take 5 weeks off because I know how to save money (no gf or kids), and I've operated in the capacity of a contractor for 6 yrs. I do have Denver-based, fellow contractors that I can hand stuff off to, but I was always fearful of starting a family I could not support. I see this as a matter of choices.
> How do people implement live dashboards on the web these days?

> This is a solved problem. Use Flash. It's insanely customizable, has a huge ecosystem and now runs x% of the sites on the web.

This is argumentum ad populum. Lots of people used Java applets or Flash just a few short years ago, and I think we can all agree that the current HTML5/CSS3/JS ecosystem is much better.
Perhaps you should read the footnote [4]; while the heading on the column with income figures on the table says median, the figures in the per capita section are means, not medians. Here's the footnote text: "The data shown in this section are per capita incomes and their respective confidence intervals. Per capita income is the mean income computed for every man,
woman, and child in a particular group. It is derived by dividing the total income of a particular group by the total population in that group (excluding patients or inmates in institutional quarters)."
I also wonder, as usually slightly more women live in a country than man, and woman have a slightly longer expected lifespan, which are effects which would distort the distribution.
There's a feature budget only in that there's a cost/benefit restriction for every living thing. Usually the big cost is how many calories does this gene cost vs how much does this gene benefits the organism (or it's close relatives).

What's interesting about having high radiation resistance, is that I could see a cure or vaccine for cancer could be introducing (or possibly expressing) genes that cause our cells to spend a lot more calories to repair its DNA than they already do. And the skeptic in me thinks it'll probably be marketed as a diet pill :)
The stock market aspects of the Railroad Tycoon franchise were what set it apart from all the other "Tycoon" games to follow. It allowed you to play the game on a variety of different levels. You could just focus on building a railroad network. You could focus on building a successful business. Or my person favorite, you could focus on building a personal fortune without any regard for the other two objectives. I spent many an hour as a kid trying to build a fortune be strategically destroying my virtual businesses.
People getting charged with murders they didn't commit is largely a non-issue, but that doesn't mean we should just bypass the whole trial thing.

I don't understand your last part. If the state can't prove something exists that doesn't, then the state can't prove its case, so the accused should go free, no? We don't change the rules of legal proof just because it's inconvenient to the state.
I suspect the problem is less boredom and more ambiguity. Goal pursuit is easy to figure out with a health bar, mana bar, and purse with two few gold pieces.
> (also, this appears to be a particularly difficult culture to immerse oneself in, as by the definition presented in this article, having deep social interactions with a Hikikomori makes him/her less of a Hikikomori)

Anonymous communication doesn't count as "social interactions". Imageboards are where the hikikomori culture thrives. I doubt many would remain hikkis if they were deprived of internet access.
Does New Zealand have a hotel tax? That might potentially be a way of specifically helping to fund tourism related problems.
That gripe is different from what I responded to. You originally said it's unfathomable how someone could get 100 pounds out of shape, and I listed a few ways that it can easily happen.
Kaiser was, however, one the first systems to start (2000) and finish (2010) their electronic transition. Their decision had nothing to do with the government mandate in 2009, precisely because their business depended on it.

Also, don't forget that EHRs don't come with a data governance model, so the entire onus of maintaining clean, available, interoperable data falls on the institution. Again, since Kaiser depends on clean, available, interoperable data, they made that a priority both internally and in their contracts with Epic.
There won't be jobs for america's drop outs. There aren't jobs for america's graduates, right now.

I'm guessing this will be very slightly motivating for the few that can get their shit together and get haircuts and real jobs. But for most, it's going to be even more disastrous than a lifetime in one's parent's basement.
Videos - disable autoplay.

GIFs - adblock them? as far as detection goes - you could detect vast color shifts at high frequencies.
Congrats. Anyone ever tell you you look like Drake?
Shut up please. What matters in 2017 is that we are all humans.
> He was a 'junior operator' in a computer room .. you know, in the good ol' days, where the computers lived. (Before they escaped and attached themselves to your wrists.)

i hope one day i can tell a story like you. that intro is a work of art. :)
The first part of Table 1, on page six, reports medians. The per capita section, which is at the top of page 7, reports means (though it retains the median heading, which is admittedly poor data presentation.)

You have to read the footnotes.
These are theoretical concepts. If there's a bound on the slowdown, it's lock-free. If there's no bound, it's obstruction free.

These theoretical concepts might or might not be that relevant for real-world applications. For example, in real-time audio (the main domain of interest to me for lock-free techniques), what you really care about is that the audio rendering thread will produce one buffer worth of sound before the hardware finishes outputting the previous buffer. This sounds like a match for "wait-free", but it depends on the details. If the non-audio thread can cause a 100x slowdown (but no more) that would technically be wait-free, but you'd miss your buffer, and so it's not acceptable. Another system might use mutexes, but be carefully engineered so that the locks are never held for more than 100µs (say, using locks designed to handle priority inversion), and thus reliably meet the needs even if it's not technically anything like lock-free.

But, as with anything, these concepts are useful tools, and I _love_ lock-free algorithms for audio.
Maybe tourist visa fees could cover some of this
Of course there will be some people pushing for that, but it isn't pushed for nearly as much as in tech.
And yet, someone hits a publicly visible (no authentication) AT&T URL repeatedly, and he gets convicted of "hacking".

If so, then why should AT&T get a pass for repeatedly snooping and recording my activity?
I think it may be a worthwhile question and I'm curious why you think this. Why shouldn't they? Is there a objective measurable reason remote employees shouldn't be paid the same?
The origin may be questionable, but is yelling "fire" in a crowded theater protected speech?
Awesome and well-reasoned question!
> Point to point wireless is a lot cheaper than burying fiber, and also a lot cheaper than maintaining aerial fiber that can be torn down by storms/tree branches.

Wireless is not always cheaper than fiber. The cost depends on geography and spectrum availability. Wireless is also more expensive per bit. Wireless also has a shorter lifespan than fiber. All these are things that have to be taken into consideration when determining which has the lower total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the asset.
The parent comment did not blame the project, but the article.
It's gonna sell like hot cakes.

"High metabolism and cures cancer? I'll take five!"
This is a fascinating and well elaborated article!

I noticed that UX/UI is important and a guarantee that SAS should increase in length, what are some of the recommendations that you advise to have a good ZRTP implementation ?

Or should we start discussing the fadeoff of ZRTP and a change to something like Matrix protocol or even Signal's one ?
Obstruction-free is the weakest requirement, so your use of "even stronger" confuses me.

In any case, in practice wait-free has this property a bit: getting the guarantee of all threads making progress in finite time generally requires in them executing slower individually, on average, e.g. one common strategy is for thread A help thread B finish its work, because thread A needs that result.
You receive your full UBI for the year all at once at tax time? That seems like a recipe for disaster.
Hey, just updated my book[0] at Leanpub with a book sample up. I have sampled the introduction and a chapter on tools.

Any feedback would be great!

[0] - https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest
(SFW) Penetrating Pornhub – Hacking PornHub for $$$ and Tshirts
If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status. Status follows money, not the other way around.
Ok, my imagination clearly failed me on this one!

Though I usually do tip at fast food or fast casual (if there's a tip jar or a spot on the CC receipt), and always tip at a coffee shop.

But the others, yeah... spot on.

The beverage pouring thing is especially insane; I'd never thought about that before. At a bar I'll usually tip 20% for a cocktail, but only 10% or so if I'm poured a beer or soft drink. But even that 10% is crazy when you wouldn't tip a fast-food cashier for pouring you a soda.
Why Can't Any Manufacturer Get Android Right?
> When you get to scale that large, you are talking about society and culture, not individual choices.

A society and culture that pampers their children instead of making them learn their place in the world? I wasn't speaking about him in particular, but rather the parenting culture that created this reclusive and apathetic behavior.
Testing? With respect to what requirements?
cperciva, sorry, but you're these type of people who should be kept away from security critical code.

It's not that I would doubt in any way your deep knowledge of the C language, quite the opposite, it's just your arrogance, your mentality of elitism and your belief, that you don't belong to the people, who are making mistakes (like "because of XYZ years of experience" bullshit).

IMHO if you want to write good code (especially safety-critical code) it is a FUCKING MUST to believe that you or others who are working on your code will make mistakes, caused by badly readable code. The mental model caused by reading your code have to be minimized as heavy as possible.

But I guess the problem of people like you with writing clean and readable code is, that you can't show your knowledge and experience built over several years. This behavior reminds be of philosophers (also social scientists) criticized by Karl Popper as "obscurantists", which are preferring to describe simple issues in a complex language to show how intellectual they are, although they could be well described in a clean and a simple way, so that everybody understands them.

I'm highly surprised that your still behaving arrogant, advocating complex macros and act as you have never made a mistake when dealing with code. Open your eyes and deal with the fact that YOU are one of the people who devaluated the whole security promise of a security critical software [0]. YOU are one of the people as we all are, that are making mistakes. Be it by deliberately removing increment operators of an IV or by a fault caused by a misunderstand of unnecessary complex code.

[0] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...
This is a nice solution but if you have any readers that don't live near you, you may want to think about using Cloudflare for SSL termination. SSL can add unacceptably high latency to connection costs for people who are not in close proximity to your host. A typical HTTPS handshake using TLS requires 4 round trips assuming no packet loss. The Cloudflare CDN does a great job of making sure this penalty is reduced as much as possible by having edge nodes as close to as many users as possible. Just something to think about.

edit: You may even want to think about using something like netlify. The free tier is easily generous for all but the most popular personal blogs and if you outgrow it you probably will be able to make enough revenue to pay for better hosting anyways.
Version 0.2.0 is out now! https://ofek.github.io/bit/community/updates.html#release-hi...
Yes and communities and networks of merchants (e.g. Sogdians) ensured trust and fidelity in delivery of goods and money. A remnant of the Silk Road is the continuing practice of 'hawala': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Thats a fatalistic attitude to weight loss advice too. Weight loss advice can be complicated, but calorie counting and eating at subway everyday really does work.
Here's a few:

http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
Why does it have to say "PORSCHE DESIGN" right in your face? When I open my current MacBook Pro, I don't see any Apple logo or words, either on the topcase or on or around the screen. (I do recall that very old MacBook Pros did have a label under the screen, but Apple hasn't done that crap in years!)

I will not buy a product made by a company so insecure about its place in the world that it insists on shoving its ugly branding in my face as I use it.

Furthermore, it is especially galling that they use the word "design" to promote a thing that's so blatantly tacky.
Ah, sorry! Thought the comment had to do with article.
So this is to counter stuff like GAN's (generative adversarial networks) [1] to reverse engineer data out of a black box systems? Like Yahoo's NSFW [2] classifier for example.

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

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661

[2] https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw
If that model is inaccessible to the people that are trying to assure safety then it's not particularly material if it exists or not when it comes to safety
Thanks! One of these days, I'll hopefully get around to posting more.
Working snapshots/backups are system engineers number 1 concern, always. They mitigate issues with every other system, of any scope. Its the first thing a new hire sysadmin/eng should ask about coming through the door.
> Netflix doesn't weight those ratings any more highly than the 5-star ratings of someone who rates nearly everything as 5 stars.

Is that fact or speculation? It's a common recommendation technique to find the mean rating for a person, and use that to normalize. Normalized score = (actual_score - mean_score + 2.5) for a 5-point scale, for example.

I have no insight into whether or not Netflix does something similar, but I'd be surprised if they don't.
7 year cycles is a pretty long term horizon. That is almost a decade each time, and keeping the weight off in your 20s is easier than it is in your 30s hormonally speaking. Same thing with each subsequent decade.
Yup! Seems right. Although I'm sure I read it in the browser a few months ago and I can't find it now.
Good article and warning signs to look out for when deciding what to do. It sucks being left in the dark.. my last company acted like everything was going great, we would be successful "if we made X amount of sales by X quarters"

Telling your employees one thing and doing another, like the CEO of my last company did, telling us that we were all safe, and then laying me off first, and then everyone soon followed. One thing that most companies don't realize: keeping secrets from your employees is never a good idea.

I get it: A company wants to retain its employees until it can no longer do it, so they are always after their own best interests. I would have rather known up front: "Hey, we aren't doing so well and some of you may be let go" would have been a lot better warning than calling me into an office on a regular day, a Wednesday, and telling me that they need to see me, and refusing to let me go back to my desk afterwards.

I'm lucky I was laid off first.. they even gave me a severance package, while all of my former co-workers had to take the company to court to get their few last paychecks. If they had warning, they all could have been looking for other jobs in advance, but the company only thought about its own interests.

But the article definitely sums up the last company that laid me off.. and then they went under themselves. Another thing to add to that list, however is this:

"Checking in on the competition" and "Keeping up with the latest technology"

IF a startup / company chooses to ignore or even check in on what their competition is doing and really take heed to what they discover ... they are giving their competition the edge and will ultimately fail.

IF a startup / company knows there is better technology that exists or there is an update to the current technology, but refuse to update and/or change it, they are giving other companies the edge and will ultimately fail.

What seemed obvious to me was not so obvious to the company I worked for... I tried to warn my supervisor who assured me he would discuss it with his higher ups... but I'm sure it never happened, is the reason why what otherwise would have been a great company to continue working for (I enjoyed my time there), went out of business.
Netlify with a GitHub post-update hook to automatically build and deploy when I push. No muss no fuss with free SSL termination provided by letsencrypt and low latency handshakes across the globe. Now if only I had something to write...
I don't think they must necessarily "always happen"; capitalism is much more developed now, much more advanced, and the conditions for revolution are more pertinent. I think you should move out of thinking of the way hitherto "Communist" states have been thought of. If you think that the kind of society Communism wants to acheive is desirable, I would also suggest that you help research and develop ideas for how to reach it.

You may be interested in anarchist writers, or Murray Bookchin.
In no scenario is it better to allow arbitrary hidden process creation than to spend 10 minutes writing a function that validates parameters provided to launch a process.
Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF.

Edit: Updated with newest version.

[1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/
> If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status.

Farm workers would have status. (Of course, farmers would also have to make a lot more than they do now, or require far less hired labor, for farm work to typically pay $200k/yr.)
Is travel a Veblen good for the average tourist to New Zealand?
I started working on a Matlab command to export plotted data as Metapost paths, and to generate a script that draws the plot. The idea being that you would edit the script to get the style you wanted.

The proof of concept worked well for line and contour plots, but my thesis got in the way of completing this.