skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I often find myself making a base model and then iterating down different paths using saved as on the fly with no prior knowledge of the number of iterations (duplicates) I will end up with.
Perhaps it refers to the crash of Knight's own stock price. I do vaguely remember a FT headline that day (Wednesday) about market prices falling due to the problem.
Frankly, back in the old days when Olympic fencing never turned up on TV, I used to wish I could watch it. But then it appeared, on streaming video. And I've tried to watch it every four years. And I always turn it off after a couple of minutes, because it is the most boring spectator sport I can think of.

Even bowling, which is far emptier of visible strategy than fencing, is perhaps more fun to watch, because it makes pleasant sounds and has a soothing rhythm and you can immediately see the difference between a good frame and a bad frame. And I actually spent more time watching archery last week, which is really boring as a spectator, but again it has a hypnotic rhythm, and at least you can see where the arrows land.

In fencing, most of the time the participants are hovering looking for openings and baiting each other, and then something happens that you barely see, and half the time that's a no-action anyway because they didn't hit the target, or they moved past each other, or the equipment broke.

I see, from our more-informed commenters, that this controversial match seems to have involved a tie, three tiebreakers, two dubious judgement calls and a denouement that happened too fast to see and that may have been a glitch. I wish this were atypical of my experience with fencing, but that pretty much sums up what it all looks like to me. ;)

So, not surprisingly, it turns out that a lot of sports are more fun to do, or read about, than to watch.

Maybe it would be different if I really understood fencing, rather than knowing some but not all of the rules.
They should add a third (or fourth?) option: "Move changes since last opening to a duplicated file and revert this file"

It's long and would look ugly, so they'll never implement it. But they should.

(I'm not a pro git user, and don't use `stash`, but I think what I described is like `stash`ing changes, checking out into a new branch, `stash pop` and then `commit`ing...)
For reference: the rules (http://www.fie.ch/download/rules/fr/RTECHN.pdf) do allow the referee to adjust the clock. Section 32 (page 10), about the duration of combat, states:

"En cas de défaillance du chronomètre ou de faute du chronométreur,
l'arbitre devra évaluer lui- même le temps restant à tirer."

In English:

"In case of failure of the chronometer or of error by the chronometer,
the arbiter can, all by himself, decide the time remaining."

So, I can see a reason why the arbiter was not overruled, especially since he, apparently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339668), informed both parties that he adjusted the clock. If they had changed the result, surely the other party would appeal to that.
A real life example:

In the last ten years Connecticut Light & Power made major cut backs on trimming the trees near its power lines. The state got slammed by a huge snowstorm last Holloween and a huge portion of the state lost power - for as long as 10 days. Not only did CL&P suffer a financial and public relations disaster in the aftermath of the storm, they decided to double their tree-trimming budget for the next year. But this just led to further problems - people who weren't used to the power company coming in with chainsaws created a fuss at town meetings about CL&P removing or damaging their trees, leading to more ongoing PR problems.
> It's impossible for that to be an educated guess.

It would be impossible if I had never worked in IT or support organization. Otherwise I don't see how you could conclude that. While my knowledge of the specific situation is limited, we have to assume there is some degree of sanity to it. (If there weren't, I would expect to be reading something more likely to appear on the daily WTF than on here.) Taking an educated guess is inherently something you do based on a blending of limited information about a situation and a combination of you're own experience.

Granted, the information here is limited, its meant to illustrate a point, not rail against any particular perpetrator. Discounting the point because you don't know all the details doesn't make sense. The details are in how you apply the point.
This story has nothing to do with Michael Phelps, Kobe Bryant, or the Brazilian beach volleyball team. Therefore it is not interesting.
It did show up in somebody's hardware. Azul made (and is still making) hardware for Java that does this. They also release an x86 JVM that is able to fake it a bit by using HW virtualization support and double mapping pages.
As a general rule of thumb? Sure. When you're gambling with other people's money (and lives to a point)? No.
On every other system I've used, such a message would imply the file has been edited since the last _save_.
Previously by the author: "Ivo – a reimagined Unix terminal system" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3300264
Pardon my rudeness here but who the hell are you to make a proclamation that "Save As" has always been "dangerous and ridiculous". Did you try that in every major workflow, like mine?

Let me give one example - I sometimes want to read the content of the file (inside its own app), maybe make some changes and then Save As a new version. I do this mostly in MS Word (for Mac and thankfully they haven't gotten rid of Save As yet). We keep different version in different files, especially for our team. Updating the original file by default is simply stupid in my case.
Yeah, and guns are vastly more reliable than rockets or missiles, too. Sometimes old and simple is the way to have high reliability, sacrificing performance.
FarmLogs (YC W12) Letting the Cloud Watch Over the Farm
From 1969 to 2009 male earnings have fallen by 28%
There are a few choice quotes to pick from. My favourite is:

"If people come to us and say 'I am really upset, I've been offended, my life has been made a misery and I want somebody to do something about it', then yes the police should, whenever possible, try to help."

So, I'm wondering: how much of this is an example of the new intolerance to freedom of speech in the UK and how much is due to newly created 'e-crime' positions trying to justify their existance?
Do companies have internships for non-students?
I was thinking about doing internships as a way to get experience and get into the software industry. I don't think I'm getting much from college, and I'm not sure if the financial cost is worth it.

Do companies have internships for people who aren't college students? I seem to see "current student required" most of the time, though I'm hoping smaller companies are more flexible.
PHP Creator Lerdorf Extolls Language's Modest Start
Do whatever the hell you want with your own money (set fire to it, if you feel like it), but if you're trusted with other people's money, you shouldn't be "reckless". It's not a video game that you can return to last "saved" point before your ridiculous adventures if they prove to be wrong.
We have a weird situation in the US right now in that lots of information is available via the alternative press, etc., but none of it seems to matter during election time, in which the major parties and major media vehicles seem to be the only important aspects in pushing past the 50% mark, which is the defining feature of our democracy.

Thankfully we have the ability to operate presses fairly freely, but these little presses don't seem to matter all that much when it comes to fending off the thieves. I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves a large number of people working together to build a system that is better than the current one.
I am brought to mind a quote by a god like galaxy: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

Problem solved.
NASA JPL C Coding Standard [pdf]
How about a CMSCMS ? :-) I suspect that the choice of a CMS has enough personal flavor to it that there will always be a wide variety of them. They are the 'text editors' of the web site management world. When is the last time you though "We've got enough text editors, nobody is going to do another one." ?
It's a possibility. But it's being done under their name - that's almost the same thing in practice. And I would hope it's not an unapproved use of their name, so they're implicitly approving of what is done with it.

edit: unless you meant something like them having a SE 'user' to categorize posts? I think all Q&As are under CC, so they're legally capable of doing that, but it certainly looks to me like it's SE doing the posting, since that's how they display authors too.

I think the spreading of good SE Q&As is great. There are problems with it that essentially can't be resolved (stale data), but it does spread good information to people who may not have seen it otherwise. But this is sheer laziness, and ends up with something significantly less valuable than if they had just embedded the question in an iframe.
There is no such thing as a Linux gamer. There is no such thing as a Windows gamer. Gamers will go to where the games are. Many (most?) pc gamers build their own systems. Without free OEM Windows preinstalled, and no Office lock-in, pc gamers are a perfect beachhead for Linux. Carmack, with a limited portfolio, can't make it happen, but Valve has the library to bring gamers with them.
The Associative Model of Data
How I survived Twilio’s massive product launch
you can label a message with multiple labels. you can only put something into 1 folder. that's the difference between labels and folders. gmail still has the former, and it works.
"Goebbels of Haskell"? What the hell is wrong with you? Assholes like you are why this site is going down the toilet.
pair.com has always been fantastic for me. They aren't cheap, but they're very good.
How do headhunters get paid for senior positions?
Also relevant: http://www.farmigo.com/
Ask HN: How do Riak, Canonical, and other "deep-down" companies make money?
When I look at developer profiles on eg twitter, I could partition their advertised day jobs into "surface" and "deep" companies. By "surface" I mean consumer-facing companies like LinkedIn, Codecademy, Path -- something where the money flow is pretty obvious: like either a consumer pays to upgrade to premium or ads are sold or somehow they're asking for money from regular Jane.

Then I see the developers who seem to work on "back end" stuff like Riak, Neo4j, RevolutionR, ... companies where if I click through to the company site I see a lot of technical stuff which is clearly aimed at IT intelligentsia, but not at the web-surfing public.

I've never worked in the IT field and usually just come to HN to read about business models in this space. So I don't understand the IT ecosystem. How is it that these "deep" or "back end" companies make money? Do they sell data? (if so, who buys it and what do they use it for?) Provide support services to large businesses? From an economic perspective, what's going on?
The version history is stored by the file system and not by the file itself. If you copy the document you don't store any of the version history and you can't revert (from my experience).

Also, if you send the file to someone they get the latest changes, they don't get any history... the history is snapshots made by the OS much like Time Machine does for backups, except it is done every so often automatically (auto save) and not to an external drive.

The only real cock-up is the Save As. Save As should save the new file, and revert the old file back to what it originally was (the last time I explicitly saved, not the spot that auto save last saved).

If you want to modify a copy of the file, before you start your modifications you simply choose File -> Duplicate and it opens the same document but with a different name. When you save that one it will have an entirely new history associated with it.

The fact that it is a file system feature that is baked into the OS means that all apps can take advantage of it if they want and the overhead is small. It also means that apps no longer need to keep notes about what modifications were done to what, instead being able to rely on the auto save feature. The other nice thing is that since it is not part of the document and is outside of it, data leakage is much less of an issue than with other file formats such as Microsoft Word where recovering previous text is rather simple and can lead to data leaking that you wouldn't want leaking.
_.m: A port of Underscore.js to Objective C
"Magic that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't is fun for small projects..."

SQL has a magical compiler. It's actually a lot more magical in some ways than GHC, because good implementations use statistics on the actual input data and a sophisticated cost-based optimizer. And SQL is certainly suitable for large projects.

I mostly program in C, so you don't have to convince me that predictability of code fragments has its benefits.

But it has a lot of costs, too. Sometimes, good performance fundamentally requires a lot of complexity, so if your compiler is not helping you (being "magical") then the complexity is forced on the programmer. Once the programmer takes on that complexity, they also take on the burden of additional maintenance cost and additional cost to add new capabilities forever.

So, you have to consider whether you really have a net increase in predictability by using more predictable (but less helpful) tools. People complain about garbage collection and virtual memory and NUMA for the same reasons, but those are ubiquitous now -- dealing with the annoyances simply takes less effort than managing the memory yourself.

You could argue that laziness, in particular, is not worth the trade-off (though it has worked out pretty well for SQL).
I'm the OP. After few years of bad IT hell, the rest of the company was almost completely dead in the water, in part because of the bad IT drag, and in part because of other management decisions that had bad outcomes. I then left when it was gutted with layoffs. A few years after that, it was sold for pennies on the dollar prices to a low-quality technology aggregration company.
Good insight.

Made me wonder what would happen to volume if markets were open 24/7...but I'll leave that thought for another day.
A few years later, the company itself was effectively dead.
In SQL, you don't even specify the algorithm, the cost-based optimizer chooses the algorithm for you (that is, if it's a good SQL implementation).
Is there something fundamental about the API that makes you say that, or just understandable cynicism?
In 1980s hundreds of banksters went to jail in loans&savings scandal. US went to the dogs:
1. Militarily: terrorism as tactics is just effective (especially cost-effective). US looks like it is trying to kill a fly using a machine gun. Good luck!
2. Politically: corrupt to the core. As weak as never before.
3. Economically: capitalism is really not about being in debt. It is about capital accumulation via savings. Currently, the US is the biggest debtor in the History of the World. 600% gdp - that's our total debt.
I'd be interested in seeing Harvard debt stats. The rich don't need to borrow for it. The poor get generous student aid. It's only the middle class that gets squeezed.

It's worse at 2nd tier schools, but I don't think Harvard is the enemy on this point.

The "student as a customer" model perhaps contributes to the dumbing down of students, but my perception is that Harvard students still work hard. Again this isn't true at 2nd tier schools.

It seems like he is taking a shot at Boston University, and calling it Harvard.
I'm the OP.

The employees were expensive software developers, electrical engineers, RF signal electrical engineers, and microelectronics design engineers. There probably was one person making minwage. She was a very sweet developmentally disabled girl who delivered the mail to our desks.
Phone companies are often quite stupid about letting phone numbers (with their texts) get redirected. Like you don't have to know any private information, just have a good story stupid.
This is exactly the marketing angle that (desktop-centric) linux companies can and should take.
It's dangerous. What if you had pressed Cmd + S before you did Save As (my hands have a reflex, I press Cmd + S so often it annoyed me that NetBeans will actually disable the shortcut and give me the warning bell instead because the file hasn't been changed). Now the original is gone. You really should duplicate the file and then make modifications.

Also, with the new Versions stuff in Lion/Mountain Lion you don't have any extra data leakage. The latest file on disk (depends on the app I guess, but most naive apps that use Versions) will be just that, the latest, unlike Word where retrieving old versions/text is relatively simple and can cause an hotbed of issues...
Ask HN: Comments on Technology for fixing Source Code level (security) problems
I'd like to hear your comments about our startup's product offering of some novel work that 'fixes' security holes in existing web applications. For example, think of security holes in web applications such as Cross-site Scripting or SQL injection.

The difference between existing security source code scanning tools (such as IBM App Scan) and ours is that ours can automatically fix the problem (by offering concrete changes needed to the source code at the 'click of a button'). Due to the advanced analysis engine, the changed source code is equivalent to the original source code (except for the fix) and therefore no further QA efforts on the (changed) source code is required. In this sense, our offering can deliver cost savings for the customers. Ours is a source code fix solution, not a firewall or web proxy filter.

The actual technology has been developed over two years of fairly sophisticated program analysis technology (PhD level research of one of the founders). The tool currently works for PHP based applications. Implementations for other web application platforms is currently under development.

What are your thoughts on this type of technology? Where do you see this useful? What are the potential business models for this type of technology? What kind of pushback would we face from potential users?

I'd value this community's insights.
The problem there is that the CIO or equivalent isn't making these things clear to the rest of the executives.
Businesses are right to be turning away from social media
I wonder, and I am just pulling this out of my ass, if this is anything like the Skyscraper Index.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index

Perhaps we see this many SQL Injections because money is getting thrown around too liberally (and bad coders are getting more work) and is a precursor to a bubble.

Does anyone know how this news correlates with past SQL injection numbers, and if it has increased relative to the amount of internet usage?
I get that, if that was not the case, both contendants would stay too much on defense. OTOH if one is declared winner 'by default' in case of a tie, the other is more inclined to attack.
A company of about 400 total on-site staff, about 8ish internal IT staff before, and 3 internal IT staff after.

FOAD, Hope that Helps, Have a Nice Day.
Managing Risks in Company IT
You don't even need to do git stash before switching to a new branch and nor do you need to do stash pop.
I think the market makers (who are often just skimmers) and Investment Banks have cooked their goose. How many 'muppets' have now left the market never to return because of all the outrageous revelations, scams and bad news?
Your wikipedia link is broken. Try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
Looked into Wuala. I like this part:

"Wuala is completely private and secure. When you store a file in Wuala, the file [..]gets encrypted before it leaves your computer. [..]Your own password is very important here: it never leaves your computer, so we do not know it. Hence, not even we can access your data."

- https://www.wuala.com/en/support/faq

But it seems pointless in light of:

"Do you plan to open the source code?

Currently not. Opening the source code of Wuala would consume quite some time and effort, and commitment to maintain it. If you are a software engineer and would like to see how Wuala works, feel free to apply for a job at Wuala."

- https://www.wuala.com/en/support/faq/c/21

It would be trivially easy for them to hide a backdoor and/or leak data in their closed-source code. So at the end of the day, the message is "Trust us." So what purpose does the client-side encryption serve? Empty marketing. At best, it makes it _slightly_ harder for them to read your files.

Tarsnap (www.tarsnap.com), which does have client source code available, doesn't suffer from this problem. Unfortunately it's a fair bit more expensive.
For a long time, that was my email sig.

Then I realized the problem with it.

Now I still try to do things right, and then try to make sure that a few key people knew what happened.
You also want reasonable and understandable default behavior so you can avoid problems before they even occur.
There is a difference in meaning between most certainly (what was actually written) and almost certainly (your misquotation, and apparently your reading).
What Not To Name Your App
Congrats to Jesse and Brad. Way to go!
Since it's a feature, not a bug http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4753 http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#autosave
I think we're all conflating "worst case" with "common case" of Save As and Duplicate.

In the worst case, the traditional filesystem behavior could lose your data if you accidentally hit "Save" instead of "Save As". In the common case, it let you save off new versions without affecting your existing version.

The (Mountain) Lion paradigm removes the worst case; you can always revert and recover. But the behavior of the common case gives the appearance of lost data, and violates both Principle Of Least Surprise and Do What I Mean.
What I Hate About Git
Wouldn't it still have been better to use a different command name rather than commandeer one that has established expected behavior?
Upon reflection: I think automatic audio might be the better approach. Say "hey, you busy?" and either jump right into audio/video discussion, or dismiss without awkwardness or feeling intruded upon.
Mountain Lion made me greatful for bootcamp. I've resolved to use my Mac Mini as a Win 7 machine from here on out.
It appears this article was written and slated for a September publication before the Knight incident. While the Knight incident is mentioned in the leading editor's note, the crash most prominently dicussed in the article is the May 2010 'flash crash'. The title as submitted is vague and misleading.
If you know it exists. And how long until it gets reaped? (I honestly have no idea. probably long enough for it to not matter, though, I'll admit)

I'll try another way too. You had unsaved changes. You chose 'save as', which you know makes a new file. Why would you want to save the current changes to both files, ending up with two identical ones? Filename aside, they're the same file, but one can be reverted and the other can't. That's what copy/paste/duplicate is for.

edit: there are plenty of valid cases for this, but they're mostly specialty (saving stages of changes in e.g. design work). why would the average person under average use want to save-as and end up with two identical files?
thank you.. that tells me far more about the situation
Much, much worse than the bug in the market making algorithms was the design failure of not having some out-of-band mechanism to kill order traffic (or of said mechanism's failure to be tested adequately).

This is a risk management failure much more than a programming error.
POLS = ?
DWIM = ?
I suppose what is new is the speed of execution.