skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can do a quick summary of what's being proposed and why. I work in the JS team at Mozilla and deal directly with the problems caused by insufficient data. Please note that I'm speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole.

Tracking down regressions, crashes, and perf issues without good telemetry about how often it's happening and in what context. Issues that might have otherwise taken a few days to resolve with good info, become multi-week efforts at reproduction-of-the-issue with little information.

It simply boils down to the fact that we can't build a better browser without good information on how it's behaving in the wild.

That's the pain point anyway. Mozilla's general mission, however, makes it very difficult to collect detailed data - user privacy is paramount. So we have two major issues that conflict: the need to get better information about how the product is serving users, and the need for users to be secure in their browsing habits.

We also know from history that benevolent intent is not that significant. Organizations change, and intents change, and data that's collected now with good intent can be used with bad intent in the future. So we need to be careful about whatever compromise we choose, to ensure that a change of intent in the future doesn't compromise our original guarantees to the user.

This is a proposed compromise that is being floated. Don't collect URLs, but only top-level+1 domains (e.g. images.google.com), and associate information with that. That lets us know broadly what sites we are seeing problems on, hopefully without compromising the user's privacy too much. Also, the information associated with the site is performance data: the time spent by the longest garbage-collection, paint janks.

This is a difficult compromise to make, which is why I assume it took so long for Mozilla to come around to proposing this. These public outreaches are almost always the last stage of a length internal discussion on whether proposals fit within our mission or not.

I'm not directly involved in this proposal, but I personally think it's necessary, and strikes a reasonable balance between the privacy-for-users and actionable-information-for-developers requirements.
Ask HN: Who have the best paying (tech related) affiliate programs?
Yes, I meant that the OP comment missed a large chunk of webpack use cases, such as compilation of components.
Does anyone know a similar project but for the client side? I've always thought using c++ instead of java would improve performance a lot.
Or correctly, in the sense of "a system that requires constant new investment to achieve payouts"
Why would optimising for the power users be wrong though? In most cases if it's good enough for the power users who tend to break things more often than regular people it is perfect for the regular users.

Quite the opposite if the focus too much on the regular users they might get too much noise and never notice issues in the more complex features that only power users tend to use.

You want the heavy users of your product sending in reports not the average Joe because he is less likely to even notice a issue.

Higher level features are less likely to be covered by tests and more likely to break just because of their complexity however you wont have many average people using them.
13 million dead:

All Punic Wars: 1.0M
Gladiators: 1.0M
Slave Wars (Servile Wars): 1.0M
Cimbri-Teutoni War: 0.3M
Social War: 0.3M
Mithridatic Wars: ca. 0.5M
Gallic War: 1.0M
Juleo-Claudian Paranoia: 0.028M
Jewish Wars: 0.4M
Boudica's Revolt: 0.15M
Decline and Fall: 7.0M
TOTAL: over 13.0M

Source: http://necrometrics.com/romestat.htm
Write My Paper for Me
Bookchin has spoken about this, but I can't find the lecture at the moment. When I use "libertarian" to describe myself, it's in the Socialist/anarchist sense, rather than what I view as antithetical to libertarian (i.e concerned with the freedom of people) philosophy; I think I would rather call "libertarians" as "propertytarians", as they are so much more concerned with the ownership of property rather than individual freedom, but the name won't catch on.

Edit: Found it, it's a short speech, but it's from a larger one about freedom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnj3dObd6do
I suspect they'd be designing for datacenters rather than consumers. That's essentially what they already do with bitcoin rigs too. It's a rented mining cloud.
Man, Mozilla has been planning to do this for a long time! One of my first open-source contributions was helping a team work on this exact issue, and that was in early 2010.
I don't think its a good idea because in reality most devs are one or the other.

My theory is that most backend developers claim to be "full-stack" in order to get the job even though they really are much more focused on backend stuff. This is because its very hard to learn ruby/python/php/java for web development without learning html/css. Project Managers like having full stack jobs only because they think that can just get somebody to "do everything".

This is also probably a bit of a legacy thing, ~15 years ago the difference between backend and frontend web developement was not as well defined as it is now. A web developer would "make the page look like this with a text field there and a button here" (frontend - html/css/javascript) and then make the form on the page "save the form input to a database" (backend - a php script possibly embedded in the page).

These days development is more like "make the site be a single page app with a responsive mobile-friendly design" (frontend - angular/react/ember...) and make it process data from the user and send it off to external apis and integrate third party libraries (backend - rails/django/.net...) and have a version controlled and automatic way of deploying the code to a multiple servers behind a load balancer (dev ops - chef/puppet for example).

As with any technology, the more advanced it gets, the more need there is for practitioners to specialise.
Mozilla's crash reporter already has the option of submitting the URL.
Tons of sites full of "amateur porn" think you shouldn't worry either. Who cares if all of your pictures are freely available to anyone on the planet, right?
"The world belongs to the easily amused" sounds like a great philosophy to live by. I'm going to remember that!
Instead of talking about collecting anonymized data, these companies should lead with talking about how they can effectively anonymize it. I have yet to be convinced.
Ask HN: Tips for a budget smartphone?
Hi HN,

I'm looking for a cheap allround smartphone. No specific requirements. I'd like to spend less than 60 dollars.

Any recommendations?
Those are all good points, and I don't have much to rebut.

I guess the only thing I still take issue with is the notion that so much can be inferred not just from which topics people comment on but which ones they don't. Especially if that inference comes with the tacit accusation of Nazism.

Again, going by my own experience, I tend to be pretty limited in the topics I comment on. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I don't have a ton of time to browse HN so the most likely topics for me are those that are on the front page long enough for me to see. Second, I'm no where near knowledgeable enough to comment substantively on the more technical topics, which leaves me with the more social/political ones. At the same time I don't want to get into the habit of commenting extensively and only on those topics since I don't think that's good for the community. Thirdly, if I'm being honest here, my lack of education and poor writing ability is a constant source of embarrassment, I try very hard to formulate my ideas into coherent comments and I suspect it takes me much longer to do this than it does for the average HN user. I try not to make quick low effort comments, but the alternative requires a pretty serious time commitment on my part.

The main point I'm attempting to illustrate here, possibly quite poorly, is that I already feel I have to be very careful in my commenting. This isn't a bad thing, it's arguably what makes HN's comment section so much better than anywhere else I've found, but after your comments I now also feel like in addition to making sure my comments aren't too political, or that I'm not only commenting on political topics, and that my arguments are actually coherent, again all good things to think about when engaging with a community, I now also have to think whether someone might mistake me for a Nazi because I commented on one topic and not on another.

This of course is by any measure a pretty meaningless hardship, there are much bigger worries in life, and while I don't think I add much to the HN community, I think we should be extra careful when accusing others of being Nazis. It carries a fairly heavy social penalty, in most places at least, and rightfully so, and can make people more hesitant to speak. I'm not saying this is something you've done, in fact I usually recognize your username and you definitely aren't guilty of this, but I've seen quite a few comments over the last few weeks implying that anyone standing up for certain free speech rights, and in this case I'm specifically referring to government action regarding speech not corporate action, is siding with Nazis.

Sorry if this comment is somewhat rambling.
> Also, concurrent (not stop-the-world) GC techniques could make this problem moot.

It would mostly introduce insane additional complexity. Erlang GC works per-process (each process has its own private heap and stack) and you'd normally create lots of small processes, so the GC is concurrent as an emergent effect of the system construction.

Not to mention processes can be distributed across nodes for which your scheme completely breaks down, what's supposed to happen if you ask for memory sharing across the network?
They should add more trees. Sometimes you just need a bit of shade while you lunch or nap.
I hope not. If that's true, then Firefox is in serious trouble. There aren't nearly enough power users and privacy enthusiasts around to make Firefox a significant player in the browser market all on their own.
> I don't think hardcore gamers like games with pay-to-play features

They do not. They really do not. I, along with several of my friends, would easily be considered part of the "hardcore gaming" audience and everything I know of the people on the forums I frequent and the games I play points to the fact that dumping cash into a game in order to progress is just about the most despised trend in video games among that section of the gaming community. A lot of people will happily pay for cosmetic purchases to support the developers and have some extra fun, but anything affecting the balance of the game is a strict no-no.
It's not wrong, look at the wording:

> effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network.

They are providing the processing power by selling mining chips. They are not operating those mining chips, so they don't control the processing power. They only provide it.
As a co-founder of a software company, I have an experience of 15 teammates for 4 years. Generally, our projects need a lot of expertise like backend and frontend but in all times, the weight of our requirements are not equal. In this situation that we have full-stack developers, we can do various projects often we do heavy-backend projects and having full-stack developers can help us to find proper tasks to everyone.

In principle, the world needs more between disciplines experts and you can see it as a universal trend.
My point is not the way you label gathering information from your users but rather that it is about implementing something Google proposed.

If the mechanism works, fine, but why should I use Firefox over Chromium then? Opt-out data collection is in violation to my core beliefs and what I believed to be Mozilla's principles.

Collecting data without asking the user about it is - to me - in violation to the very definition of privacy and calling some way to anonymise data (who guarantees that the cryptographic approach to this is not obsolete in a few years?) "differential privacy" is at the very least dishonest.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Arms and Equipment Guide, Rules Supplement - Weapons/security threat

They also seem to dislike Magic: The Gathering. And Tai Chi.

They've even got books in there banned because they "depict sexual acts". Not violent sexual acts, or acts with a minor. Just "sexual acts".

Can't exercise, can't play cards, can't even masturbate - just what are you allowed to do in prison?
Spyware backdoor prompts Google to pull 500 apps with 100m downloads
You think this is just in academia? Can I direct you to the Libreoffice codebase?
DevOps at General Electric
Well, your alternative may be more efficient, but it is not more effective. Scnr.
Are you at GDS? Please can you tell your friends at HMRC that the login system is the most janky UX I've ever experienced and is prone to social engineering due to how complex it is.
I don't think Java ever "won" in the cross-platform GUI application space. Sun tried hard and Swing was successful in terms of being able to produce a reliable, cross-platform experience that was reasonable. But in terms of developer mind-share and actual applications on the desktop, I'd say it's success was pretty meager. Aside from IntelliJ and NetBeans and Eclipse (yep, I know, SWT) I'm hard pressed to think of other popular Java GUI applications.
Minetest ?
I have always found that the most difficult aspect of any application is nearly always the integration points. Hiring only specialists would probably only make that more pronounced.

That isn't to say this isn't a necessary evil sometimes. Security and mobile development are two simple examples that come to mind of dedicated specialists that many organizations have.

When it comes to generic development, it is beneficial for one person/team to own the entire stack because often the domain specific problems are where the complexity arises, not in the frontend/backend split.
First time I've heard of "rat running", but am having a hard time seeing the justification for the negative connotation. I can only see it as a more efficient use of the road system.

Just because at some time in the past there was less traffic in your street doesn't mean it won't (or shouldn't) increase in the future.

It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
I've just recently switched over to it for my day to day work. Admittedly there are rough edges, but I think it's fair to call it viable for sufficiently small values of viable. I expect to do a major push later in the year to polish it to the point of being really viable.
Does anyone have the list of affected apps? It doesn't seem to be in the original blog post.
I replied to another post below. People are just people, agreed. Impact of corruption on a developing nation is felt much more by the people. This is why Africans will risk their lives on rickety boats to get to Europe but Europeans haven't got to that stage yet.
That's great it works for you. I have to stare at "Could not connect to server", wifi icon with a cross and a notification asking me to sign in to some telco's hotspot. Only thing that gets me back online is switching the wifi off
My guess is cookieclicker http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
My guess would be that it's because jails are exclusive to FreeBSD, and not that many people (compared to Linux, that is) run FreeBSD. Jails were also devised as a tool for the sysadmins toolbox, whereas docker is a tool for developers toolbox - and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Finally, jails do lack a bit of the functionality that lets docker do some things - but that isn't something that can't exist, an in fact there are certain signs that such instrumentation might be in the process of being written: https://twitter.com/FiLiS/status/894651614002393088.
Have any of these not been scams?
The target demographic is gullible, greedy software engineers who have a lot of disposable income but lack experience in conducting due diligence on speculative investments. Basically, Hacker News readers. Why do you think there are so many ICO related posts on this site? It's not accidental.
Scale of 1-10, how much does the spaghetti code from my PhD make you want to self-harm?

https://gtfiber.github.io

Follow-up: say I have a lot of free time to patch it up, write better documentation, unit tests, etc. What's the first, most value-added thing to do?
bah! yes that's much better.
General comment and not aimed at this specific instance:

Just because you are writing in assembler, does not mean it is going to run faster than the same code in a compiled language. There has been decades of research and who knows how many man-years of effort that has gone into producing efficient compiled code from C, C++, Fortran etc.

Your assembly skills have to be of quite a decent order to beat a modern compiler.

BTW: The answer to the question on Stack Overflow by Peter Cordes is a must-read. Brilliant.
Here in Europe, IT is better paid, and can range up to "much better paid". But it's less of a huge gap compared to, I suppose the US and the real startup scenes there?

You can make 500-800 more then the average other people behind a desk, which are perhaps "managers". But the double of them is only for real teamleader positions.

So I guess it also depends a bit on location... where are you roughly based?

Let's say the average worker is paid 1800-2000. And as decent IT you can add 500-800 on top of that, depending on if you get a car etc also.

But hey yes, it's fucked!
There is a list of clients here: http://wiki.vg/Client_List
Deliberate practice works for programming.
Most of those have already been through the initial sales period. It's mainly a way to gain additional revenue, not be the main avenue of money-making
Really? We use unit tests extensively in LibreOffice and its saved many bugs and man hours.
And why wouldn't they be polite?

The OP clearly does understand assembly enough to start doing project Euler type problems, which is a good way to learn basic programming in any language. They get a solution in assembler which is more than many people here would be able to do I suspect.

And they're looking to expand their knowledge by asking on stack-overflow about something they don't understand.

So why do you think they should they be met with rudeness and hostility?
Why Everyone Should Write
- "And they have never laid off anyone, other than for performance reasons, in their distribution centers,” Wood said."

of course they've put a lot of department stores out of business.
Is it that hard to believe? If you make the best X in your market, it's gonna be the most popular. 70% market share isn't so abnormal.

If you're digging for gold and there are 5 different shovels you can buy, but 1 is clearly the best, is it that hard to believe that 70% of all shovels in use will be that best one?
Well said, I recommend folks read a book called "Art and Fear" & "Talent is Overrated" to understand more about deliberate practice.
"Obsessively covering every trivial bit of code with a unit test of its own has always struct me as rather a weird fad."

The advantage unit tests have over regression tests is that the time between the moment developer implemented a change and finding out they broke something is as small as possible. When tens of people work on the same codebase this saves enormous amount of effort.

Fethisizing over some rule for it's sake is silly of course. My org would waste a lot of money and time without unit tests.

Another feature unit tests provide: Think of the unit tests as a living documentation. Breaking something leaves a breadcrumb trail to the invariant which was sullied.
Delivering RPM Packages Securely and Continuously with Jenkins and Hashicorp Vault
The advantage is that you get to name the receiver instead of having to use a keyword name like `this` or `self`. I've come to like this design decision.

self, at least if you're talking about Python, is not a keyword, it's just a convention. You can use whatever your want.
They should ensure statistics are submitted per domain, in a way nobody can know the users of <my_name>.com are also using <kinky_site>.com
Author's title should be "Cracking PSEUDO-random number generators" - We should all basically assume that any PRNG will be easily cracked like this and not use them for anything important to security!

Always use a cryptographic RNG for important code!
If I ever had to move a lot of Make America Great Again merchandise, I would license clips from "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."

I have two main difficulties with NPR. First, as a baby boomer, I wonder whether my generation will let go. WAMU still plays old Car Talk shows on Saturday morning, a couple of years after one of the brothers died. Garrison Keillor did, finally, let go, but it took him a while.

Second, so much of it seems to me the self-esteem of the college-bred classes. After a while, I wonder whether it isn't as restrictive to the listeners' viewpoint as the private school. (I suppose that this doesn't apply to truckers so much.)

"being able to laugh at jokes at the expense of either of the two major parties". Shouldn't one be able to laugh at jokes that are funny in general?

[edit: added missing comma]
>Yeah your theory is nice only if you don't have a deadline, a life outside of work, etc...

Not all academic disciplines are as hectic as yours. When I was in a top grad school, most of my colleagues were not under the stress you describe. And yet their code was still crap.

Incentives are a bigger reason than workload.
> That said, I do think it's neat that the fastest brute-force variant is a rough factor-2 from your naïve memoized version.

My naive memoized version in a GCd language that is consistently 4-5x slower than my own (pretty bad) C versions of the same project Euler problems without any of the tricks the fastest C++ version is doing.

Still pretty impressive considering most solutions in the project euler forums take more than 1s.
They don't have any games on their website currently but as far as I remember, they published their first game in January this year and generated a good amount of revenue
I'm pretty sure online games like that (e.g. Runescape) also check intervals between clicks, this one seems pretty constant. But Runescape can't detect clicking tools running themselves iirc, so they've got other means of detecting bots (random events)
The theory doesn't match the observations, so how do we tweak the theory to match the observations - oh wait - let's add dark matter to the theory. Partial fix - oh wait - we need something to add something else to he theory now - let's add ..... dark energy.

Oh yeah, this seems to fix the theory to now match observation.

The observations do not require dark energy or dark matter to fix things. It is the interpretation of those observations via the theory that requires these entities.

Observations are theory neutral. It should be fun to try an come up with a good model/theory and if new observations break the theory, then it should be more fun to see what is a better explanation.

For many, many years, I have watched very intelligent people get emotionally caught up in defending their theories and models, when it should be a case of just moving on. They just don't make it fun.
Exactly. I consider myself PHP developer and I would like to stick to PHP related technologies (I think it's enough there) and maybe things like Varnish etc. But currently looking for a job it's common to demand backend (PHP + some DB systems), frontend (damn Angular), server, and some other (Docker etc.). In my opinion it's not the way. At least not for me. And there was the same problem for every single company I worked with: lack of common knowledge and set of common solutions for common problems.
FYI - I'm having a lot of trouble getting any information at all from this comment, because so much of it is tied up in abbreviations that I don't understand.