skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're not wrong and my programming style is very much like that albeit I use the code itself to diagram as I find that's easier for my brain to parse than flow charts. But effectively it's the same process of "sketching a design and throwing it out" cycle that you described.

I suspect quite a few developers who "just code damnit" follow this same process too. After all, it's not exactly hard to rewrite code and with tools like Git in place you can easily stash the different implementation methods so you're not having to lose any work during the cycles.

Usually when bad code gets written by experienced developers it's not so much because of a lack of willingness to conceptualise the design but often just because either the deadline is sufficiently tight that you are forced into writing a "quick fix" rather than something robust. Or because the code base is already an mess (due to the evolution of the product and the aforementioned issue of quick fixes) which means the "ideal world" solution is a significantly larger undertaking than it should be and best not undertaken while you have deadlines depending on it. Or sometimes you see "bad" code simply because the aim of the project is a minimum viable product or proof of concept, thus it's more about proving the product works as a concept than the implementation of it. In that scenario it can make a lot of sense to throw quick code at a problem with the understanding that chunks of the application will be revisited when you start to scale the product.
If this is a Microsoft mouse, this software should fix your problem https://github.com/paulrichards321/resetmsmice
Apparently, it's all in the Marketing. You can make a keylogger and get the cops to sell it for you, so long as it's "for the children".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/computercop-dangerous-...
If it's not too personal, I'd love to know how your, er, personal philosophy has changed over the years.

Is it work that got more interesting, so you don't mind doing more of it, or you found new uses for money you didn't think were important before, or something else entirely?

(Feel free to ignore.)
I'll take the bait: why is someone considered a lunatic for claiming that he was abducted by aliens? Do we have proof (or even very strong confidence) that aliens don't exist or that they do but don't abduct humans? If we do have strong confidence, then what's the justification for this?

Do people likewise call all God-believers lunatics? If not, then what's the difference? In both cases people believe in an entity where there's no strong consensus on its existence.
Well the particulars of what taught is exactly the difference.

In computer science you will learning about generic concepts like parsers, compilers or whatever.

For vocational you would learn about something specific like asp.net mvc.
A walkable community is our dream. There's a huge lack of that in the U.S.
- FLAVOR: server / all

- HEADLINE: remove sha1 PPA signatures

- DESCRIPTION: remove the warning "signature by key uses weak digest algorithm (sha1)" and ban sha1 for PPA signatures

- ROLE: user
That energypost article is clearly pushing an agenda. Like many anti-renewable articles it basically devolves into numerology when it starts talking about capacity factor.

Their methodology is like me saying that if you only drive your car 3% of the time, then you must be spending 97% of your life in taxis. And therefore any problem with taxis is a catastrophe, and we should probably not build any more cars, until my firm delivers it's flying car that it's been promising since the 70s, which will be perfect and have no issues at all, ever.

Methane leaks are an issue that reduce the good news about the switch from coal to gas but the article they've built around that is so bad it has deeply damaged my faith in thorium based approaches, if supporters of that tech have to stoop to such lows. That's how shoddy the argumentation is.
Captivating mobile app users through the sense of ownership
I have to disagree.

An axe is a multipurpose tool, and I think we agree that its main purpose is chopping wood (and/or wild wood, also known as trees), not robbing liquor stores.

The question here would be: what was the tools' main purpose? Is it closer to a gun, which are mainly designed to make living things less alive[1], or closer to an axe, which people use all the time in law-abiding ways? Because the first one has tons of restrictions (and penalties) that the second one doesn't.

Of course he'll say "I manufactured and sold tools", the prosecution will say "he manufactured and sold guns", and the courts will decide. While I'm not saying he's definitely guilty, I think the case is nuanced enough to warrant a trial.

[1] Yes, I know most gun owners go to shooting ranges instead of robbing liquor stores. That doesn't change what guns were designed for.
It looks like this: http://www.yimby.se/Publishing/FileStore/0166961a-9c44-4512-...

I'm not saying the pictured is a horrible dystopia, but it could have been much nicer. Nobody is going to sit under those trees among the cars.
Do we hold manufacturers of guns responsible for the people who use them?
It looks like the values are un-normalized density values, i.e the numerator in Bayes' theorem.

So, what you said. But determining the correct denominator for such a collection of values, in general, isn't easy when the collection is infinite (like a function). It amounts to a very very gnarly integration problem.

This is why MCMC solvers are used in Bayesian statistics, and why abstracting away the "nasty integral" part from the "probability density" part is useful to statisticians and other researchers.
https://twitter.com/StelumHQ
#WhatIsStelum
https://www.facebook.com/StelumHQ/
Encrypted personal archives
> I think this is why a lot of hobbyist projects run out of steam.

Thank you! I asked that for myself and tried to create (really) good code. Result: Hobby project felt more like work, than actual work did. Now I realized why.
Please see if the Cairo-GL backend can be re-enabled. This backend was disabled a years ago because of an issue with Nvidia drivers.

If it can be re-enabled, it can help enable some interesting future apps.
Yeah, it hit me recently that every single measure ever proposed to 'help' housing affordability simply propped the market up even further. Making it easier to for more people to pay larger sums for houses is the last thing that'll bring prices down.

At least they restricted the first homebuyer grant to new properties, so there's that.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop:

1. HEADLINE: A way to have different scaling for external monitors hooked up to my HiDPI laptop.

Currently I need can only set a single scaling factor, so I need to ajust my laptop screen resolution to match scaling of the external monitor. If that's not possible, a way to automatically set resolution and scale for both screens once you hook one up would already save me a lot of manual switching and restarting lightDM!

2. HEADLINE: "Native" multitouch gestures like 3-finger swipe to change workspace.

There are some programs that can do this already like xSwipe and Fusuma, but I expect this integrated with a nice and easy menu.

3. HEADLINE: Better battery management.

Battery performance under Ubuntu is often much worse in Ubuntu than Windows. TLP helps, but it's not enough.
- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Increased stability++

I shy away from using my ubuntu laptop (dell xps developer edition, you know, the one you'd expect to be doing this really well) because

a) More often than not when starting up it gives me a "something went wrong, do you want to report it dialogue"? I've stopped bother to report it or look at what's happening because it happens so often, but I think it's X crashing at some point.

b) WiFi frequently fails to connect after hibernation, requiring a reboot.

c) There's also been some worrying threads on HN about lack of support for strong kernel power management on recent intel generations.
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Better security processes

DESCRIPTION:

I've been quite disappointed that there wasn't really any public reaction from Ubuntu to a variety of security issues affecting the Linux Desktop in general and Ubuntu in particular.

E.g.:

https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.dk/2016/11/0day-exploit-...

https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.dk/2016/11/0day-poc-risk...

https://donncha.is/2016/12/compromising-ubuntu-desktop/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-E...

Seriously, right now an Ubuntu Desktop isn't a secure choice for users, especially if they have to expect targeted attacks.

Some things I'd propose:

* Dangerous automation features need to be either disabled by default or heavily audited. That includes things like tracker and apport.

* In general I wonder how much auditing happens before something enters Ubuntu. Some basic auditing that could also be automated like testing packages with asan should be a default inclusion criterion for adding packages.

* Currently there are no bug bounties at all in the Linux distribution world. I get that this is a financial challenge, but at least in severe cases where the fault clearly lies within the distribution and not within an external project I'd consider bug bounties appropriate. (Just read Donncha's blog post linked above. He could've gotten $10.000 from a shady exploit dealer and he got nothing, because he did the right thing.)

ROLE: I'm running the Fuzzing Project and I write for IT tech media about security issues.
Related: at the moment when a folder mounted with s3fs (Amazon S3 file system) is opened it downloads all the contents which doesn't really make any sense.
This goes hand in hand with one of my favourite IT jokes, which says that the perfect system has no users.
Personal Shopper Apps Development
An option in the installation script to not install systemd.
Nautilus does support that: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/nautilus-conn...

I'm not sure what version of Nautilus Ubuntu is on though.
The best music genre for being productive
IMO we should taboo "right-wing" and "left-wing" when discussing the reliability of the mainstream media. I'm a radical leftist, and I wouldn't trust the NYT or the WaPo if they said the sky was blue without double-checking with a more credible source. I think most leftists who were around in the early 2000s feel the same way.
What happened to you?
- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Application Menu search like MacOS

- DESCRIPTION: I usually use macOS but occassionally use Ubuntu and I really miss the ability to lookup functionality in my application by typing the name of a menu entry under help. On macOS this will drop down the relevant drop down menu and show the menu entry I am searching for. I use this a lot. Especially in complex applications this is very useful to have.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

HEADLINE: Smaller Docker Images

DESCRIPTION: An official, skinnied down, Ubuntu image for docker and AWS AMIs would be nice. I have some clients that want to maintain some uniformity across host and guest, so they aren't interested in Alpine or Busybox images. But the Ubuntu image is ~200MB or so, where OpenSuse is about half that.

I understand Canonical doesn't build those images, but you would have the expertise to help them thin it out. Some wrapper around debootstrap or similar to make a thin server image?

ROLE: Help various clients with docker and AWS.
- FLAVOR: Any

- HEADLINE: OpenSSL v1.1.0

- DESCRIPTION: Do it! I really want ChaCha20 and Poly1305.

- ROLE: Server admin / desktop user
Ransomware appears on Gentoo Linux
Apple laptops are known to come with hardware with very shitty open source driver support, there's not alot Canonical can do if they don't get good drivers for the various hardware components.
The simplest reason is that Australia has a higher inflation target and is willing to average that target over the business cycle. Whereas the US has a lower inflation target and treats that target as an upper bound. So in the 2007 recession for example, the Fed was trying to figure out how to push against the zero lower bound, and then despite a period of very low inflation, has refused to allow any catch-up growth that might take the inflation rate temporarily over 2%.

"So what is it that has kept Australia's economy from shrinking? ...It's that Australia has been able to cut interest rates when it has needed to. Other countries haven't, you see, because their interest rates are already as low as they can go at zero or even slightly negative territory. ...[Australia] doesn't have a 2 percent inflation target. It has a 2 to 3 percent inflation target averaged over the business cycle. ...The result is that interest rates have been much higher in Australia than in almost any other rich country."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/15/how-a...
Appropriate that it's "DIN".
Experiment: Advanced HTTP web proxy
Congrats! I'm still waiting for our email. I'm prepping by watching all the Stanford startup videos on YouTube and making notes. The PG, Thiel and Schultz lectures have been thought provoking. I'm a natural contrarian, so I loved the Thiel talk, especially the monopoly vs perfect competition theme. If we're lucky enough to get on the program I've got high hopes for the mentorship by YC alumni element. Would be great to get some guidance from a B2B SaaS that's been there and done it. But I'm a solo founder and I'm a lot older than the usual YC profile, so I'm expecting to get rejected.
The World Is Completely Unprepared for a Global Pandemic
- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Improving developer experience

- DESCRIPTION: Currently installing the Qt relating tooling requires messing around with package sources to install the SDK tools. This shouldn't be required.

Additionally it would be nice if ubuntu-make got a better UX than just remove/install, eventually some nice GUI on top of it.

Finally better 3D hardware support.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

- HEADLINE: Python 3 as default

- DESCRIPTION: In lieu of a description, I'll just link to this: https://pythonclock.org

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer, sys admin
I hate GreenHill C compiler as much as the next guy [insert huge rant] but the Blessed Compiler of Choice in its frozen buggy state at least usually means it's a KNOWN ENTITY. We code around the bugs, we compile in -O0 mode etc etc, we analyze the assembler output to death and so on.

I see these "certified" stamps less as "secure" and more of a huge slowing down of progress and change - which strangely can translate to more secure since you know what you are dealing with.

If I can dream, I'd take a "certified" GNU Ada, or Rust, or something over C. But that is bound to take many years to happen if ever. I think we sooner will see Rust compiled to C which is fed to something like the abominable Greenhill so security consultants can pour over the intermediate C output and put it through the abominable Greenhill.
- FLAVOR : Desktop
- HEADLINE: Fix UI for file extraction
- DESCRIPTION: When I extract zip files, the UI when the extraction is done has all the buttons glued together. It is such a small thing that I feel a bit silly for posting it here, and wish I just had a bit of time to actually
dive into this myself. I will take a screenshot of the Archive Manager when I am home later today.

ROLE - Software Engineer
- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: New icons by default!

- DESCRIPTION: There are a lot of good icon sets out there that are easy to install. I think a better default icon set would make the desktop look a lot smoother and cleaner.
If you're suspicious of Sandy Hook then I suggest watching this lecture by Sofia Smallstorm here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYQihoNNuQ

The inescapable conclusion for any reasonable person when presented with all the facts is that the whole thing was staged. Is that outrageous? Does sharing this make me a lunatic conspiracy theorist? Not really. It just means the US mainstream media isn't doing its job.
Yes, the prominent center, center-left, and leftish new outlets (NYT, WSJ, Economist, WP, etc.) have some bias in their writing. However, most of the authors and staff at those organizations are extremely professional and take their mandate to report and analyze very seriously. To me, this is self-evident 95% of the time. To the extent that there is bias, it is slight and subtle. Opinion is labeled as such. Pointing to specific counter-examples is like identifying NASA with the failures of the Challenger -- it completely misses the forest for the trees.

What there is not is a serious right-leaning counter-weight to this, and that is the vacuum into which the manifestly untrue and unserious outlets stream. Why this is true is an interesting and controversial discussion in its own right.
thank you, I say the same thing every time I see this come up.

That's a young mans game, after you've been doing this stuff long enough the things you learn are in terms of systems design, maintenance, etc. I regularly go back to code I wrote 2 and 3 years ago and think to myself "knowing what I know now, that code is mostly alright".

I can't understand how someone can go back and look at some authentication code, for example, and think the way they did it was horrible. Just how many different ways can you write auth code?

It's one thing if you're a young developer, but at some point the improvements to your code are negligible and have nothing to do with the value you bring to a project.
Many don't seem to realise that the black circles in the middle of spirals and other smooth curves are due to the iteration count being too low. The spirals don't stop and the only filled shapes in the mandelbrot set look very much like the zoomed out view.
Exploit race condition in the n_hdlc Linux kernel driver bypassing SMEP
But they are not thermoelectric generators, they are just electric generators attached to the turbo charger.
Did I miss it or did the reporter in this article neglect to mention the parent company's Bloomberg Messaging Service?
>Besides space exploration being fucking awesome

I don't see how space exploration is feeding the starving. It would be fucking awesome if we solved that. It maybe a strawman - couldn't these millions be spent on Earth? Instead we have commercial TV asking us to donate to solve problems
on Earth.
Gathering smart people in one place is exactly the point and the major value add. It facilitates the construction of robust social networks of people in a field, even at the undergraduate level. That enormously valuable and impossible to replicate online.
Please finally upgrade to opencv 3
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Phone

- HEADLINE: I want a snap-based Ubuntu Phone now

- DESCRIPTION: Being a click-based Ubuntu Phone supporter from the beginning, do I need to say more? Ubuntu show me some love!

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: beta-tester
I strongly disagree. While Democratic Party loyalists and the establishment center-left may trust the mainstream media, in general progressives and leftists don't. They're not going to InfoWars, of course; they're going to The Intercept, CounterPunch, Jacobin, Truthout, etc.
Blessing a compiler consists of running it on a trivial test suite and writing down the results, however bad they may be.
If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).)

And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right.

My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery.

[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...
Having lived in American houses for about 30 years now, leaking isn't an issue if you have a good roof that is maintained. I live in the north, an even worse than rain we get lots of snow that leads to "ice dams" forming on roofs. Even with that we don't have problems with leaking.
Flavor: Desktop

Headline: Surround Sound

Description: If a user has a media file or application that wants to play surround sound audio, 5.1 or higher, it should work properly and automatically. AC3, Dolby Digital, dts, etc. should all function properly with all different hardware configurations.

I'm aware that it is possible to make it work properly with some effort, but it is not elegant or automatic. The user should not have to do anything special. It should "just work".

For example, a user has a surround sound system connected to their computer's optical output. They play a media file or DVD that has a surround sound audio track. That audio track is selected. The surround sound should play properly with no further special configuration. The user should not have to know that pulse audio or whatever even exists.
> WiFi frequently fails to connect after hibernation, requiring a reboot.

`sudo iwlist scan` fixes it without reboot in my case. But it is very irritating.
Surprised no one has noticed this: Australia' "boom" has less to do with mining and organic growth and more to do with its falling currency . When growth is converted back into US dollars, it shows contraction beginning in 2013 and again in 2009

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/gdp
Yes, despite it being the poster child, the mining sector only comprises 16-18% of the economy. I would say all of it was from exports, since Australia doesn't really do much smelting any more. Aluminium smelters have closed down, no more lead or iron smelters either. We just export red dirt to China.

Out of that percentage, I don't think it would include all of the other mining related industries in that figure, or the effects on rutal mining towns. But just as there are positive flow on effects, once that flow stops then towns and communities die and people have to move elsewhere for work. This was already the case for towns dealing with mine and plant closures from earlier booms, it usually takes decades.

There is also a lot of temporary fly-in-fly-out labour in mining. Where the workers don't settle down in towns near the mines, but back in Perth and other bigger towns and cities. As such Perth has experienced a property bubble of sorts relating to mining, even though its not as popular a place to live as the east coast.

I can't remember exactly but the Banking sector in Australia may be the bigger than mining.