skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A typical application might open() a file, then read() the data from it, then seek() to a new position, write() some data, then close() the file. File descriptors are central to this process; one cannot read or write a file without first open()ing it to get a file descriptor, and the position where the next read or write will place its data is generated by where the last read, write, or seek call ended.

pwrite() doesn't have this problem at alll, and my copy of the "POSIX.1-2008 with the 2013 Technical Corrigendum 1 applied" man pages (type "man 3p pwrite" on your local up-to-date Linux box) mentions a function called pwrite(). I'm pretty sure that this makes pwrite() an example of POSIX I/O.

> Because the operating system must keep track of the state of every file descriptor–that is, every process that wants to read or write–this stateful model of I/O provided by POSIX becomes a major scalability bottleneck as millions or billions of processes try to perform I/O on the same file system.

This makes no sense. If you have millions or billions of processes on one machine trying to perform I/O on the same file system, you probably have scalability problems, and those problems have nothing whatsoever to do with POSIX I/O.

If, on the other hand, you have millions or billions of processes performing I/O to the same networked filesystem, then you certainly need to think carefully about scaling, and POSIX semantics may well get in the way, but the problem you face here has nothing to do with the fact that POSIX has file descriptors. This is because file descriptors are local to each machine, and they very much don't synchronize their offsets with each other.

(Unless you use O_APPEND. Having millions of processes O_APPENDing to the same file is nuts, unless your filesystem is designed for this, in which case it's probably just fine.)
The article mentions that even "homeless people promoting charity magazines" use cards, but I really wonder how the homeless population, or others who typically make money through cash such as buskers and street performers, fare in a cashless world. Having a credit card requires a bank account at the minimum, and generally being "plugged in" to the system, where disadvantaged people rarely are. Of course, Sweden's welfare state is far more developed than the US, but the overall global trend in this direction is troubling.
Would the citizens of a country like Cyprus welcome this kind of control over their own money?

Edit: Corrected spelling of country adjacent to Greece, replacing name of city adjacent to Disneyland's hometown
from a developer perspective

I think you have it backwards. I think you're still hung up on the developer experience, not the user experience. My observation is that users clearly prefer native apps to hybrid apps. And yes, you can throw together a hybrid app a bit faster, but you're just going to lose out to someone who did a better job (probably with native). So you might have saved a few bucks, but it's all going to be wasted.

Just my observation, YMMV, etc, etc.
I don't get 'cashless economy'. In addition to what you've quoted i.e.

> is a utopia where money cannot leave – or even exist – outside the banking system, but can only be transferred from bank to bank.

How do people in a cashless economy pay for stuff that demands discretion, and that which they don't want documented or traced back to them?

Example: Buying weed or drugs or underage alcohol, maintaining mistresses or paying for sexual services or anything else that is either a social taboo or is downright illegal? Are you telling me that everyone in Sweden is a 100% law abiding, obedient 'good' citizen and hence they don't have a need to be able to transact from time to time using a relatively discreet currency = cash ?
i definitely believe that is possible in the united states. i mean that's also why most grocery stores have membership programs. in that scenario the payment method doesn't matter.
Credit card or IC cards? (IC cards are refillable cards for the subway which many retailers accept but aren't linked to any identity)
> By comparison, an engineer's work is "deterministic" in that is fully under his or her control to complete the goal.

It sounds like you only have a single perspective, which is fine, but having more perspectives would help you move beyond being so rigid in your thinking.
Notice it says BaCKUP. I think it's just a placeholder.
Intro to Audio Content Analysis Class
No, there are actually five superior court locations in Orange County (Westminster, Brea, Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, and Orange -- but Orange is Family and Juvenile so it's really four if you want small claims). No need to go to Sacramento.
> One thing that has always befuddled me with HP calcs is their model numbers that don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason.

Back in the day, HP had nice sales literature that described the differences between the models quite nicely.

> And how does -48 compare, besides the relatively useless graphing capability?

The -42 and -48 were both intended to be successors, of a sort, to the HP-41 family. The -42 It was less expensive than a -48, and placed more emphasis on a function-per-key style of operation, as well as -41 compatibility. (The -42 was program source-code compatible with a nicely loaded instance of a -41.) Where the -42 suffered in comparison to the -41 was that it did not offer any kind of expansion slots, and, unlike the -41, the -42 was never intended to be the 'top of the line'.

To understand the -48, you need to look back to the -28 (as well as a couple of similar business models). After developing the -41, HP realized that they needed a new higher level internal programming model to take the calculator line to where they wanted it to go. In reaction to their growing ambitions, they developed a language for their calculators called RPL... Reverse Polish Lisp. There are a few examples of RPL in this thread, but if you think of a dynamically typed type safe variant of FORTH you wouldn't be far off from RPL. It was RPL that brought features like symbolic algebra, graphics, and a >4 level stack HP's product line, and it was the -28 that was the first scientific instance of this platform. However, the -28 was a bulky clamshell design, behaved fairly differently from a -41, and was sold in parallel with the (still popular) -41 series.

The -48 was a more spiritual successor to both the -41 and the -28. The -48 unified the new programming model of the -28 with the non-folding portrait style casing of the -28. The -48 also added a serial port and a couple expansion ports, so it carried forward some of the -41's legacy of expandability.

> I see lots of people also preferring some other models (15, 16, 35, 41 etc), which I would have imagined to be strict subsets of these "juggernauts", but maybe that is not the case?

I have an -11, a couple -48 variants, and a -42 emulator on my phone. While the -48 is strictly the most powerful, it can also be a bit cumbersome to use. The smaller platforms have their place.
Nice. I didn't notice that.
The CEO of Social Finance will step down
Show HN: ShotBox – iOS 11's new “Instant Markup” screenshot feature on macOS
Talk to your member of parliament and get a more consumer-friendly set of laws.
"Ok Exxon we published your article, please make the check payable to...."
Definitely but I think goes into the marketing/advertising category. But either way almost every other car company has an end sales person used to jack up the price, while tesla can sell cars at a fixed price off a website. And this is solely because of the perceived quality of the product.
The Facebook app is an abomination. It takes up all your battery, caches all it wants, needs access to every permission my phone has to offer and those goddamn notifications.

And it's not just Facebook. Every platform these days has been spamming with notifications.
Quora's infamous un-turn-off-able x upvoted an answer after seeing your upvote or your Facebook friend y is now on quora, welcome him by sacrificing a goat to the mighty God Ra. Irritating.
And for that matter -- if a CA really is untrustworthy, why should domains under any TLD be exposed to them?
Easier said than done. I can't get superkernels to work at all. I've tried.
I got robbed going to work this morning. I fortunately had some cash saved at home, but in a cashless economy, what would I do? I can't use credit cards, since the robber stole those, and I had to cancel them all to stop fraudulent purchases. I can't use payment apps or digital wallets, since the robber stole my phone. Would I just not be able to buy anything, until I got new cards and a new phone, however many weeks later?
The problems with capitalism are widely documented.

Here for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
There's plenty of sound dampening low tech solutions and social norms that work just fine. Hopefully there's a whole population of the orchestra to create specialized architecture.
> single page app about why I should be paid more?

Isn't that a resume?
Not if it increases conversation rate by X%.
That only works if you have access to electronics, which homeless people might not.
>software businesses (and the technology sides of other companies) have acquired perhaps the greatest degree of impunity.

TIL: No warranty == impunity.

Nobody MADE Equifax use Struts. The source is open to inspection. The bug existed there for 8 years. Let's see how many audits Equifax did on the source code with no warranty.

>If the costs of failure in production due to bugs were higher, businesses would make different decisions in hiring and how much time was dedicated to security and bug fixing. Do you disagree?

If the costs were higher, the one poor guy working on Struts would do a better job? No, I think that guy would probably not write the software. He'd find a different line of work. If he did write it, he would never release it for the world to use for free. Who would do that? "Here's this thing I worked on for over a decade. You can use it for free. Please sue me if you have any issues. Thanks."
> I decided to ignore kbenson's lack of reading comprehension hiding behind an attempt to insert himself as an arbiter through nitpicking about a thing he obviously knows nothing about

While I see how it's possible you could interpret me as trying to insert myself as and arbiter instead of expressing my own lack of knowledge and asking for clarification, it was fully your own choice to not only decide that was the interpretation you believed as fact, but to then broadcast that negative interpretation as fact to others. A little assumption of good faith goes a long way, and I don't think it's too much to ask for.
> A good balance of 'Smart, Get things Done and Doesn't Jeopardize the entire business by building crap' must be handsomely rewarded and free beer doesn't cut it.

Those who do are called founders. It sucks, but the reality is that if you aren't an owner, you don't get rewarded.
I have to research deeper to be sure (there is some FAQ at https://fi.google.com/about/faq/#supported-devices-7). But skimming through that page, I suspect this is a new-ish feature not available on most smartphone radios.
Living with a graphic designer, I've heard all there is to hear about how important logos are and how many hours/days need to go into research for one. BUT, I'm yet to actually see any real evidence whatsoever that it's worth spending more than a couple hundred dollars on one. Can anyone find any actual evidence that it's worth investing a ton of your marketing budget into a logo vs just about any other marketing exercise?

Personally, I just can't wrap my head around it. Pick a colour palette that matches your business (blue = calming, red = aggressive etc etc), and make a mildly unique and attractive shape with those colours that is related to your businesses name. I've had it explained to me a million times but I still don't see how this could take more than a couple of hours, it just seems like a massive exercise in overthinking a very simple problem.
> By comparison...

is the operative phrase.

Your fallacy is conflating engineering work and an individual engineer's scope on said work.

Projects can fail, engineering teams can face delays - all common things. But an individual engineer is very unlikely to lose his/her job over it, in contrast to a sales person missing on his/her quarterly number repeatedly.
How 9/11 Changed My Life
I don't really understand this comment. There's nothing stopping the student from doing the same thing with Vemno (especially since Venmo is owned by PayPal), and that sort of thing has happened many times before[1][2]. Venmo also has a strict "no business/commercial activities using personal accounts" policy.[3]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/reminder-venmo-wont-protect-you-from-scam...

[3] http://jolt.richmond.edu/2016/10/21/ignoring-the-venmo-user-...
Streaming TV Bundle for People Who Don’t Like Sports
another great example of how it can be "better"..
Reminds me of the ascii ribbon campaign against non-human readable formats in email.

I switched to a text only email client a few months back. I really don't think I am missing anything. HTML content tends to be chaff/advertising.
You don't see CEO's being CEO's in their free time. Nor do you see sales people selling stuff just for the fun of it. With open source, developers will spend time and effort building very valuable stuff for free. This perpetuates the perception that programmers like programming so much they would do it as long as their living expenses are met.

I honestly think open source has depressed the wages of programmers. Linux probably has generated billions of dollars of value, but it has not really accrued to the programmers. In addition, open source allows companies to get very valuable intellectual property without having to write it themselves or buy it from someone. Basically it devalues the cost of software and there the value of programmers.
If your point is that there are partially closed source Android distros, I agree with you.
If you go to the pricing page on Stubhub's sales interface (as a seller) and open the developer console, you can see the request as it grabs the last X sales to show as a pricing guide. While the table rows representing each sale only include the date, the actual JSON data includes a full timestamp, and you can see it in that request.
An aside... I had a hard time using my (US issued) Mastercard in small town Sweden earlier this year. The cashiers would photocopy my passport before processing the payment.
The author brings up a lot of good points, but they're mostly good within the context of HPC. Out in the broader universe where most data lives, many people do require the full suite of POSIX namespace, metadata, and permission semantics. Yes, even locking, no matter how many times we tell them that relying on that in a distributed system is Doing It Wrong. I know because I support their crazy antics at one of the biggest internet companies.

The author's on much firmer ground when he talks about POSIX consistency semantics. While we can't control misguided applications' (ab)use of locks, we can certainly offer models that don't require serializing things that the user never wanted or expected to be serialized, or making them synchronous likewise. As I've also written before[1], we need more ways to describe the user's desired level of ordering and durability, separately, giving the implementation maximum flexibility to optimize I/O while preserving the guarantees that users really care about. The setstream primitive in CCFS[2] is a good example of the sorts of things we need here. I'm not at all convinced that object-store-centric approaches are the way to go here, but some evolution is clearly needed.

[1] http://pl.atyp.us/2016-05-updating-posix.html section under "fsync"

[2] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast17/fast17...
> If you have a problem with taxation

This is ridiculous. I pay cash (mostly) because I don't want my purchases cross referenced against my identity.

If I buy a beer, I don't want that cross referenced against my car insurance. If I buy condoms, I don't want that referenced for my health insurance.

If you give people the power of all this information, they'll figure out a way to use it and make money off of it. I want to preserve my anonymity as long as I can.

Heck, we've had a long history of this. If all my music is listened through Google or Amazon, it's easy to trawl through and figure out who is "subversive" based on their musical tastes. See the McCarthy trials.
What matters is who creates profit which is easy to measure by their paycheck. What I was saying was that if want a more holistic way to approach it you will need to find a better way to measure who is involved in the sales process.
North Korea Hackers Step Up Bitcoin Attacks
Thank you. That puts into words something I've been feeling for a long time now. Building a lean, fast, elegant website with complex business logic and interesting invariants: super fun code. Adding the Nth server side validation check for a zillion similar but subtly different fields: boring engineering.
I know it's hard to find really good sales people too that are interested in selling aggressively, meeting goals but also building sustainable and fruitful relationships with clients instead of building a house of cards.

I think it's down to the incentive structure. Commissions need to be split between sales and earned revenue from prior sales, and the split needs to be just right in order to incentivise building long-term profitable relationships with clients but without making it too easy to just coast on last year's results.
Anyone could shed a light on how difficult would be the implementation of the following:

- All data encrypted by default

- The "dump" of the phone memory or macbook hard-drive makes it looks like the whole drive is full. It means that the free space is populated with random data that is, itself, encrypted.

- User can switch from his user profile to a fake user-profile and import some data (like contacts/messages/photos)
Fair enough, and some of those are good points that I perhaps wasn't giving enough credence to, particularly the first. The others have weight, but I think that weight canby mostly or fully mitigated by common business or implementation reasons (as noted previously).
Beginners Guide to SSH Keys (Video Tutorial)
I agree with your observation, that was a badly broken analogy within the OP. Of course the OP can "guarantee your sales people never sell enterprise software for fun."

But I'll bet those salespeople take more than a passing interest in buying a car, tending an estate sale, dividing up household responsibilities, or negotiating a lease.
Well, in theory, to the extent that people need lawyers but can't afford them, at least part of Public Citizen's existence is justified. So, for some, to say they need a lawyer is to say they need an organization like Public Citizen.

That's not at all a value judgement about Public Citizen or their statement. Just pointing out the potential conflict.
As I mentioned, I AM already using Google Fi on my iPhone. What does not work is the hardware feature of handing off between providers mid-flight. With my [now deceased] Nexus X, a call would seamlessly [to me, anyways] switch between providers during medium/longer commutes. With my iPhone using just T Mobile, calls get dropped during my daily route as there are certain "T Mobile blind spots".
You could go browse Patreon. Questionable Content is essentially a one man show, though it started as him and his girlfriend/first wife (she apparently did tech support and marketing, he produced the content). He has apparently been making six figures for some years, even before Patreon was a thing. Girls with Slingshots is another webcomic supporting its author.

I believe they both do a certain amount of T-shirt sales and the like, but the comics themselves are the main draw. T-shirts are just a means to monetize the comics, along with Patreon, ads, etc.

There are many other Patreon supported sites out there. You could go looking for some examples of stuff similar to the kind of content you have in mind (I assume you have no plans to be a web comic artist).

I make some money from my low traffic websites where I publish all original content produced by me. I occasionally get a little ad money, but most of the income is from Patreon and tips. I have never figured out how to make money from affiliates. So people are basically straight up paying me voluntarily to produce content online. I hope to grow the traffic and improve the monetization.
https://yelp.com/robots.txt

There is some fun stuff in there, like this?!

Disallow: /biz/outlook-autumn-market-fundamental-catwalk-flimsy-roost-legibility-individualism-grocer-predestination-0
Disallow: /biz/outlook-autumn-market-fundamental-catwalk-flimsy-roost-legibility-individualism-grocer-predestination-1
I'm not sure that's really true, though. The really good sales people get compensated really well, but the bad ones do considerably worse than engineers. The flip side of a commission based compensation package is supposed to be that the "fixed" / "base" component is very low.
Ask HN: What is the performance and APK size overhead of React Native on Android?
Can React Native experts share their experience on Android:

1. What is the increase in APK size?

2. What is the impact on app start-up time, compared to Native?

3. What is the impact on performance during usage of the app? Does the app get more sluggish? If so, what are the factors? How do ListViews and MapViews perform?
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The point under contention is whether or not the completion of the project is completely under the engineer's control.
Allergan Gives Drug Patent to Mohawk Tribe, Claims Sovereign Immunity
To me, it is obvious why sales people are paid by commission. It's because the most efficient thing for a company to do is pay someone their precise marginal value, not more or less, as that leads to the incentive of people doing the best they can given special constraints that only they personally know such as their own personal productivity function and how much they value their own time and effort.

Companies would do similarly for managers and engineers if there were a discreet non-gameable measurement of their output (I'm sure you don't need much imagination to see why paying per JIRA task completed wouldn't work). Unfortunately there's no such measurement system, so the best solution companies have found so far is pay them a salary and try to incentivize effort through bonuses, raises or promotions.
There are three really big hardware assurance problems:

0. Trusting any bit of silicon isn't backdoored or buggy.

1. Trusting any opaque binary firmware isn't backdoored or buddy.

2. Having "firewall" level of control of bus device lifecycle not in control of the user action and/or system policies.

We need more peripheral firewalls, external firmware imaging IDS/IPS like this project and depotting open-source chips that can be functionally OCR'ed under xray/microscope.
Back in the nineties I thought it would be utopia, but after all the government overreach I've changed my tune and try to use cash as much as possible.
Worse, from the company's perspective, you might try to make sure your new prospects don't close until next quarter, just as a little bit of insurance in case it turns out to be leaner than this one.

This has a name in sales - "sandbagging".