skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really funny, but it's a bit of a time investment and the early sections don't really hint at the awesomeness to come.

The most emotionally gripping anecdote for me, in short form: they got really cocky and promised the moon (a new operating system that would be a programmer's dream); then scopes crept, and deadlines slipped; as they tried to understand better why they were totally sucking, they realized that nobody had solved the actually-hard problem that they needed to and everyone just assumed it would be OK; even after significant optimization work they were two orders of magnitude slower than their competition. Clients had waited for years for this thing, bought hardware for it, and now they were being told "look, we're cancelling this project, we just can't do this well enough."

Hoare expresses his then-disbelief that he wasn't fired for the massive failure, especially given his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing its variant of the same thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony). Then,

> At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what wen wrong?" he shouted -- he always shouted -- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modern software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system?

> I realized later that he was absolutely right, he had diagnosed the cause of the problem, and he had planted the seed of its later solution.

After a grueling meeting of "what the @#$% just went wrong and how the @#$% do we fix it?" he describes the reorganization, and it's remarkably anticipatory of something like Agile. He establishes small teams who visit clients directly and figure out what they need; he discards clients' huge-project requests in favor of incremental improvements; those teams then have to convince him personally that this feature is important/useful and not too hard to implement; finally they work on the feature.

It's very much describing a management style which provides some sort of quality-control and pushback, but does not micromanage or mistrust. And it's got a sort of fractal structure: Hoare is only able to succeed because his own supervisors did not destroy him for his failure but trusted him to learn; his system is to act as a filter for the requests hitting his programmers, but he still trusts them to write awesome software if they have a strong sense of direction.
i think he is discussing standard cookie session ids here, not access tokens. in many web applications, all the information you need is stored within that token and signed by a server-side secret.
It's not baseless to care about getting security fixes despite your graphics driver being a finalized buggy version.

Windows 8.1 on these devices is still supported until 2023 as far as I can tell.
> The thing about propaganda – why it works so well – is that it's presented as authentic civil discourse.

so many people don't realize this. if you can tell it's propaganda on the face, it's shitty propaganda.
Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities Found in Popular Motorized Hoverboards
They have a pretty strict rule about not talking to other experiments to avoid confirmation bias, because in the end they want to verify each other.
Looks like it's Jekyll

http://www.manton.org/2017/07/5463.html
Shuffle is too far the other way though, you don't get any duplicates until you've been through the whole playlist.

'Random' was better, especially when there were players that would play "random album" which was great.

You're right that shuffle has been the standard for a long time, the last actual "random" for singles I remember was napster back when it was popular.
Former Google teaming with Mayo Clinic to prevent a major cause of sudden death
>This intersection is 4 lanes plus a left turn lane in all directions with constant traffic. Hand signals were absolutely necessary because 12 people were all approaching the intersection simultaneously.

There is a set of rules that describes which cars go in what order.

The big problem I see is human drivers are going to start driving more aggressively because they know automated vehicles will always back off first.
Well, for future reference, the library itself is for Javascript. The post is more focused on how it works, rather than what language it uses.
Side note. From Andreas's post:

> looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago

I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins.

I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.
At a nesting depth of six or seven comments, is it really productive to reply with rhetorical questions that don't even respond to the comment? Of course I can see the difference. I just don't understand what it is about the level of privacy that comes from requiring a court order to access user information that moves a service from "mostly anonymous" to "not anonymous at all." It seems like a highly ideological rather than a practical position to take.
so.. two iPads!
Loose lips sink ... Nobel prizes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51
As someone who thinks both systems have their place, there are a few issues in your arguments:

1. ...There is no reason to write text-based SQL anymore.

There sure is! Unless your schema is dead simple your going to run into places where hand tuning is a requirement. Lots of ORM's are third rate at best, people swear by them but don't have complex data that would make one throw fits.

3. Normalization: NoSQL databases encourage you to denormalize your data. I've seen NoSQL databses frequently run into problems with stale data, with date that is duplicated and not kept updated, where you have multiple out-of-sync version of the same piece of information.

Nosql doesn't encourage you to de-normalize, and there are reasons to de-normalize in an RDBMS. Denormalization when done right should NOT result in duplication, if it does your doing it wrong. Both systems are afflicted by these poor choices. It is easier to screw it up in a document store like mongo.

4. Schemas: The worst thing about NoSQL is the absence of an enforced schema... If you are joining a new company, you have to sift through piles of code to figure what the structure of the data is...

Again were not talking about a problem that is exclusive to document stores. You can just as easily have queries all over the codebase that make changing your RDBMS hard. People also do very stupid things like throwing giant json blobs (and before that xml) into their RDBMS and expect it to work. However a schema makes dealing with data apart from your application a much simpler task, unless you throw all those rules out the window, and a shocking number of people do.
Which will not be available on your Non-Neutral Comcast/Verizon/Etc Internet Package.
It has also proven to be incredibly vulnerable to manipulation when people discover how to leverage money into vote manipulation and moderator takeover. All of the political subreddits very quickly became cesspools of propaganda during the course of the last presidential election, and this has only increased since. Many of my favorite political subreddits are just dead now.
i was asking the language it supports, i.e. English, Spanish, Chinese, etc
Just tried it, and my first four flips were heads - you may be on to something... I'll keep flipping and come back with my results.

Update: Heads stayed ahead by a few for quite a while, until they tied at 45 each. It's a race to 50, my money is on tails - it's due for a comeback!

Update: Tails takes the lead, 46-47!

Update: 47-49 Tails is in position to strike!

Update: Tails wins! 48-50! (two more clicks to make a sum of 100 results in a perfect 50/50 split)

It's surprisingly fun to anthropomorphize heads vs tails, and commentating on their battle
While I agree that a lot more funds for treatment are needed to fight the opioid epidemic, it is really a fundamentally different problem that road fatalities. The only thing they really have in common are the fatalities.

The opioid crisis seems like a symptom of our social problems (hopelessness in the rust belt, unscrupulous over-prescribing of pain meds) that has fatal consequences.

Short of a drug that provided a permanent cure for opioid addiction itself, I'm not sure what sort of solutions can be pursued by scientific/tech research, as opposed to addressing the root social causes.

I'm interested in what ideas others might have though.
Right. But the author's point was about battery life. Not that an iPad is unique in having cellular service.
There's a little randomness in the Catan deck of cards: the bottom 5 cards of every shuffle are not used. Not as much as dice, but also not a guarantee for certain numbers to come up a certain amount.
doesn't have to be 100% cpu calculations
> by supporting standardised DRM in the browser

Firefox is trying to avoid losing marketshare and you're complaining about a big usability win. In what way could causing every video service on the planet to start steering users towards Chrome/Edge/Safari help that?

(Yes, I realize we don't like DRM but normal people are far more concerned about not having to do anything other than click play on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc.)
Vendor-exclusive DDNS – is it a security risk? – John Headley – Medium
I submitted a bug report to GCC:

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81478

Even though it's not a real bug, it's a missed optimization. My pitch is to emit the code to do the multiplication, and only call a fixup function when the results are NaN. If you short-circuit the NaN check, you only need 3 pretty cheap instructions to decide to call the standard library for help, and you can avoid it in the vast vast majority of cases. This should make multiplication and division much faster in the default case. Naturally the checks would still be elided with -fcx-limited-range is on.
Maybe if the dice think they are settling on a too-common result, the internal servo gives them an impulse?
parent explicitly mentions people making racial jokes and mentioning racial stereotypes. This occurs even in every large subreddit, well-behaved or not. They likely aren't even malicious on the part of the people who say them, but nevertheless, they are damaging comments to make, and I wouldn't blame people for leaving reddit because of them.

that said there are plenty of small communities that are pleasant, sure. But some people would rather go elsewhere than take the time and effort to curate their subs, and that's perfectly reasonable.
The commenter you replied to may have a point. Just because vile speech has a place in public discourse, doesn't mean it is good to present that speech in a very public way.

Reddit is among the most widely-used websites in the world -- 7th, by Alexa's rankings. Reddit lives up to its motto of being the front page of the internet.

Imagine one of the top-10 newspapers in the United States were occasionally publishing stuff from /r/The_Donald on its front page, and had content from various hateful sub-reddits a few pages back. You could argue that this imaginary publication harms society.

Of course, Reddit is not the New York Times. So different standards apply. But the argument that Reddit -- and thus its administrators policies -- may be harming society, seems to hold some weight.
Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those issues were dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even bothered to config away was the search-engine change.

I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
It's worth thinking about the team in advance, especially to understand what things you do well and where you need complementary talents. Good teams also work through the problems that are inevitable in new products. There's a great speech by Ed Catmull that makes this point well. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc)

Of course this is useless advice if you are doing a one-person business. :)
Battling Dementia: A Mother and Son’s Incredible Journey
Steve Jobs only started Apple and NeXT. Pixar was already a division of Lucas Films and had leadership prior to Jobs that aided in it's success post Lucas Films.

That said, of the 2 companies he explicitly founded and ran, only Apple was successful. NeXT was a spectacular failure.
> empirically study social behavior or legal structures, but they definitely do study it.

Astrologists study stars, too. Empirically.
What's your flavour of cars?

American muscle-cars from the 60's / 70's mainly. I own a 1968 Camaro that was my first car (a gift from my dad) but it's been parked for a while with a blown engine. Lately I've been thinking a lot about trying to find a cheap 1970's era pickup, maybe a Chevy C-10 or something, to play with. I get tired of newer cars and how complicated it is to work on them. Take my RX-8 for example: you have to jack the car up and crawl underneath just to change spark-plugs. Uuugh. OTOH, take something like a 1975 C-10 and you can almost get inside the engine compartment and stand on the ground with the engine in place. You also don't need a lot of special tools, secret manufacturer codes, etc. to work on something like that.

Honestly, I spend enough time during my day job doing "computer stuff". I'd rather have a car to mess with that's old enough to be pre ECM era. No fuel-injection, just a plain old Holley 650 or something. :-)
Li-Ion batteries are much safer for the environment. Most modern battery systems use such types.
My bad, it supports English, but the only feature dependent on this is the part that removes stop words.

You can easily configure the stop words that Wade removes by editing `Wade.config.stopWords`.
Playerunknown's battlegrounds currently suffers from item spawns being "too random". You can go houses without finding a rifle then suddenly find 2-3 practically on top of each other.

They could do with learning a little from other games and making it a little less random.

Ultimately you can see it as a bug in human reasoning but we're the ones playing the game.
There's a probability model called the Pólya urn where you imagine an urns containing numbered balls (colored balls in a typical example, but to draw the comparison with dice we can say they're numbered 1-6), and every time you draw a ball of a certain color, you put back more balls according to some rule. A few probability distributions can be expressed in terms of a Pólya urn, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B3lya_urn_model.

A fair 6-sided die would be an equal number of balls numbered 1-6 and a rule that you simply return the ball you drew. You can get a gambler's fallacy distribution by, say, adding one of every ball that you didn't draw. I read the code as a Pólya urn starting with 1 ball 1-N and doing that on each draw plus reducing the number of balls of the drawn number to 1.

Also related, in 2d space, is the idea of randomly covering the plane in points but getting a spread-out distribution, since uniformity will result in clusters. (If you're moving a small window in any direction and you haven't seen a point in a while, you're "due" to see another one, and vice versa if you just saw a point.) Mike Bostock did a very nice visualization of that here: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/
[Podcast] to Be Continuous: When Toasters Broke the Internet
That's addressed in the article: "We purposely don’t employ dynamic IPs to retain multi-cloud deployment capabilities and prevent vendor lock-in with one platform."
Eh, I thought this was something more mathematical, like non-transitive dice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice). Apparently it's... a weighted random number generator? in node.js?
How image CDN helps optimize images: resize, responsive, prefetch and all
Free Speech != The First Amendment

The First Amendment is just a law which prevents the US government from restricting Free Speech. Free Speech itself is a principle which can be applied anywhere.
Apple has a patent[0] for a fall-protection system that will rotate the phone while it's in the air. If something like that could be made small enough to fit into a die, that would work.

The biggest challenge will probably be the power supply. I'm sure that a processor, accelerometer, and the Taptic Engine (the thing that provides vibration and haptic feedback in Apple devices) are all small enough to fit in a typical die. Of course, something like this could easily be built into a larger novelty die.

Bonus points should be awarded if the die is perfectly balanced when it's not actively adjusting itself in mid-air.

[0] http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/02/apple-patents-acti...
Is there an rfc-like specification document somewhere?
I still struggle with loneliness from time to time. A sporting activity can help. In my case, I started sailing. I couldn't afford a boat of my own at the time (1994, I couldn't afford much of anything then to be honest), but the local yacht club is volunteer oriented and easy to join. I was able to sail club boats and that made it easy to interact with other people with a similar interest. The volunteer aspect meant I was frequently paired up with someone else helping out with club functions. Obviously it doesn't have to be sailing, but getting outdoors with an activity that involves teamwork can really help.
Sumatra sea cave sediments reveal record of ancient tsunami
"What is Life", by E. Schroedinger is referenced in the article and covers these topics.

"Order out of Chaos" by Prigogine and Stengers, and "Into the Cool" by Sagan and Schneider would also be decent recommendations.
Spotify wrote a brilliant blog post on this. Highly recommend reading.

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
Yea, we're working on www.altheamesh.com. Happy to have you help. We're working with C, Solidity (Ethereum language), and trying to decide between Rust and Lua for some daemon code. Click on the link for "Chat" at the top and say hi.
This is exactly the point. Unless they can FedEx episodes to you, your Comcast/Verizon/Etc internet package could exclude (or slow to unusable levels) such cable-independent services, unless you pay for the Super-Premium internet package that includes them.
Darcs – a free and open source, cross-platform version control system
Cave provides 7,400 years of records of Indian Ocean tsunamis
Very interesting write-up - I use DefiantJS http://defiantjs.com regularly and it seems to work similarly but instead it pre-processes the data into XML and then uses (fast) in-browser xpath to do searched
I'm gonna take a wild guess, and say that the NSA has a monopoly on the talent for this field.
Thank you! Sometimes the hardest thing is knowing what to google!
Google definitely has been a (major) contributor to the decline of Firefox, both with all the google site notices suggesting users switch to Chrome and the works-on-chrome-first features of Gmail, Drive, etc. That last issue is years old, but I would bet it got a lot of people to first try Chrome.

Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought Mozilla's name down.
It's not just the_donald, sandersforpresident was literally shut down and scattered by shill mods after the election, despite having a community several hundred thousand strong of people ready to mobilize for progressive values. Arguably the central force that made Sanders such a phenomenon in the election was taken over and destroyed in the matter of a couple months. Incredibly chilling when you think about it. I think the worst mistake people can make is assuming this is just about alt-right meme factories. It is much more about the manipulation of self-described centrists to keep them pro-corporate, and divided on superficial issues (ie the same as it has always been, they are figuring out how to port their TV strategy to the internet, it is just taking some time).
This is a specific example of an Exact cover problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover

If you haven't seen Knuth's Dancing Links implementation of Algorithm X, I highly recommend it. It's based on the observation that updating a doubly-linked list in-place preserves enough information to make backtracking easy.
> I find that EV certs are valued by web marketers and nobody else

Fun fact: it was actually our marketing department that nixed our EV cert, on the grounds that having the company's legal name in the address bar would be "confusing" to customers who expected to only see the domain name.
This is more of practical importance than it looks on yhe first glance.
Take software development, for example. End users, marketing, sales, stakeholders and tech people are all playing a complicated game. Let's assume everyone knows what he wants.
Virtually no one is interested in withholding information, but communicating it somewhat efficiently is next to impossible.
If a mediator-based equilibrium was more archievable in short timeframe (and you could prove that), it will benefit everyone.
This brings back some memories from 2012. I was updating an internal tool at the company where I worked, and after a lot of thought I decided to replace a tried and true MySQL database with Mongo. It really seemed like a good idea at the time - we were storing loosely related documents where not having a fixed schema was an advantage.

Any advantage I got was lost by the time I built all the logic to handle the joins I did need to make (those join keys weren't so schemaless after all). And then I needed logic to make sure every record had the right keys, that they made sense, etc. This was all stuff that MySQL had been doing for me.

But the real kicker was that Mongo made my performance worse. When I migrated my database (roughly 10 million records), I compared before and after sizes of the actual files. Mongo's were 2-3x the size. I didn't realize it before starting, but Mongo's preallocation model gave me huge files with sparsely written records that had room for future updates. But I didn't need that extra room because my data rarely changed. So I ended up with larger files that took longer to scan for unindexed queries (mostly for reporting), which meant I had to index more stuff, which increased my memory usage, and forced me to upgrade to larger servers.

Had I stuck with MySQL, I would have been fine. Many expensive lessons were learned from this, which I guess was valuable.
Too many people jumping into the "I wanna design a CPU too!" pool. Not nearly enough designing the needed microcontroller peripherals to have a working open hardware ecosystem.

The JTAG debugging hooks are a nice touch for a FPGA product though. Do the existing RISC-V silicon implementations not provide this?
If it worked in the last release it's a regression and they can fix it. It sounds to me like a compat bug where the true severity wasn't understood or acted upon until too late.

(Disclosure: I worked for MS from 2008-2011.)