skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you would like to view the entire article in one pageview, please use this link: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/social-media-hi...
why is su in the chroot?
> However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China.

This is, for many industries, clearly not the case.

Electronics used to be hand soldered. Now hand soldering is rare and machines are common. Those machines have clearly replaced human workers. A teeny tiny old pick and place machine can place 4,000 components per hour. That machine is easily available to small business. You need three staff (3 shifts of 8 hours each) to run that machine.

IC stuffers (a machine that takes through hole integrated circuits and places those into a PCB) have existed since 8" drives were common.

Look at the newspaper print industry - thousands of workers have been replaced by technology.

It is trivially easy to find people who have lost their job to technology.
So true. I use it to track every detail of my personal projects and never had the feeling that anything was missing.
Another Dropbox horror story: My colleague lost most of his Dropbox folder last week, and wasn't able to recover everything.

What happened: he had Dropbox synced to 2 computers, but one of them hadn't been used in a while. He turned on the old computer, and apparently, for some reason, Dropbox decided that the fact that many files weren't there was because they were deleted. Of course, the files weren't there because they hadn't been synced yet!

So Dropbox decided, when the old computer was turned on, to delete 10s of thousands of files that were in my colleague's account.

He reached out to them to help restore. It took several days (this happened on a weekend), but they did eventually restore it. Unfortunately, since it was difficult for them to pinpoint exactly what was the start of the event, some files were not recovered (I'm not sure the exact reason this was difficult to do).

I love Dropbox [1], but this was a serious blow to how much I trust them with my files.

[1] Just look at my comment history to see - I've raved about them several times on HN.
The Bigger Issues in Learning to Code: Culture and Pedagogy
Sure, you can do that... and still get an IEEE published article
Great comment.

Some of these "real-world" business models are broken because the industry is commoditized. One one hand, the margins don't exist to offer customers a discount (remember, you're inserting yourself in the chain, so need to take some of the profit). On the other, there isn't enough value-added in the product to demand a premium; there's a mechanic on nearly every street corner in every town.

These products need to work for both buyers (people in need of car repair) and sellers (mechanics). In this case, the buyers see some obvious benefit, but what are the sellers gaining?
Writing a wall of text with insults and a low amount of real communiction is not effective. It's also nothing to do with political correct. Linus' second post in the mail thread is much more technical and much less insulting.. more effective.
We don't view it as an abuse at all! We dig fun uses of GitHub like this. Carry on, and good luck with the house.
Why I Personally Process Every "Close Account" Request
I'm genuinely curious how you'd prepare for a multicore and cloud computing future.

Using global state is like blowing Gabriel's horn -- everything dies!

Ok, so not everything, but the upshot is that global state plays very badly in the future of computing.
Actually, there are no extra features with GH's paid plans, from what I remember. Paying enables private repositories, and all of the good stuff is still available for open source projects.
Cleaning Up Science
Medical field works to reduce number of surgical mistakes
Sounds like a good setup. Thanks for the details.
> how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb

This is a command-line program for accessing movie information (via someone else's web API), not movie database system. Asking how he/she distinguishes his/herself from TheMovieDB, is... a little odd. It would be like asking XBMC how they distinguish themselves from IMDB.
Grit: The Top Predictor of Success
Assertions by test, assertions by design
I had the exact same issues as the OP (interned at a startup and used personal Dropbox account for Dropbox for teams), but I was aware of the potential issue upon leaving the Dropbox for Teams account and emailed Dropbox support and everything worked out fine.
It's nice, but it there are some drawing errors on Safari (6.0.2), the Christmas tree flickers and ends up behind the buildings.

I remember a few years back when animated Christmas cards using Flash became popular. It's nice to see that we're almost at the point you can do all of this without a plugin :-)
Music industry dropped DRM years ago. Why’s it still on e-books?
This project exemplifies better than all others the advantage of being able to run the same language on the front and the backend. And it is awesome as well! Kudos.
That Sarah has only about 1 email per day in her inbox.
That's ~100x less than I have.
Yes, you probably want su rather than su -. He uses sh only to run some command but that's obviously superflous, he should just use su -c. The fact that he sources the user's profile is hilarious. The fact that this remarkably poor and trivial article made it to the HN front page is sad.
On the contrary, reading Mauro's e-mails before and after Linus' post proves that it is very effective.
That still is a very very bad reason to don't "use" engineers outside the US
Carlos Slim has a govt-enforced monopoly. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57369357-93/telecom-monopol...
Sage Math has a browser-based notebook for its dialect of python http://sagemath.org
There's a lot of overhead (liability, benefits, dealing with people) that's removed when using machines.
> For one, there have been stories of people's phones being wiped off thanks to an Exchange admin feature.

Wow, this is such bullshit. Why isn't there a feature on the phones to block any such admin access?
Something similar and very interesting that's used by ham radio operators every day: Automatic Link Exchange[1]. The system dynamically monitors many different frequencies (which have different propagation characteristics) to determine the best way for two parties to communicate, and automatically makes the connection. This is different from what DARPA needs, but still somewhat similar and definitely interesting. It's also one of the newer things in ham radio that a lot of hams don't know about.

1. http://hflink.com/alehamradio/
Treating every dropped use case as a public relations crisis is just an exercise in getting yourself worked up for no reason.

Whether or not it's a PR crisis, it is at a gotcha that is worth knowing about.

Unless, of course, you're the type of person that just likes to get pissed off at companies.

Reading this didn't make me pissed off. DropBox made a mistake, which I assume they will fix. In the mean time, reading this made us better informed and safer.
Why has dropbox not considered a github style context changing feature till now. I am surprised.
UPDATE: After doing extensive checking with extended family, this has proven to be legitimate (though very unexpected). Please ignore the post and move along, Gmail is still secure for now! My sincere apologies for raising an alarm.

(Emailed PG to ask the post be removed, no need for it to stay up.)
Yes, you can do that, sending notes into the future is trivial.

Of course, you have to get the timing just right, which is the real trick. Being early, as they say, is virtually the same thing as being wrong.

Also, you have to hope the patent situation is improved prior to your product introduction, because it is already neigh impossible to create a new product that isn't unknowingly violating dozens to hundreds of patents, which (given the purpose patents are supposed to serve) is ridiculous.
So you're saying that the arrow of refactoring generally points in the direction of less abstraction?

That directly contradicts my experience where most refactoring introduces abstractions when they are needed.
"AIX-over-ssh to web for email, losing all that status and messaging functionality in the process."

what does that even mean? You mean using bash over ssh and checking email using elm et al? And what's all the status and messaging functionality that was lost?

web based email was available when Zuck was learning his ABCs...
In general I agree with you. But in this case the point of the term is to highlight the contrast against the "fragile".
Agreed, its mostly a problem with me. But accepting the mortality of myself and my friends, or indeed feeling a pang for lost youth, has little to do with liking over-sharing of wedding and baby photos on public timelines. If I dig into it it's the almost aggressive reinforcement of conventional group-think and life choices that rubs me up the wrong way.
You kidding or what, c'mon ? Python is too good for them.
They still be in 70's, python was made in 90's.....
I Disagree with Steve Jobs – I don’t want to own my music
Dropbox doesn't delete the files, so none of this matters. They're only deleting the account, which revokes nothing but causes lots of problems. There is nothing hard to fix. Just switch it back to personal quota.
You may want to cancel that ball...
What to do about callbacks in the models?
Basically, lets say that 1% of the are midgets, then when there're 1% midgets who are programmers, we can stop caring.
if printing money without earning it and collecting on those debts were a good thing for the economy then it wouldn't be a problem if everyone did it.

it'll help stimulate the economy if i print up some 100 dollar bills. yeah! why are people getting bent out of shape because of my contribution to productivity?
Don't fall for SMS linkbait scams
While I feel for your colleague, I have to wonder why he didn't have a backup if these files were important enough to spend several days trying to get them back.[1]

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
This was one of the reasons Erlang was invented - big state machine + telephony.
this is the most likely explanation. That, of course, doesn't make it the explanation, because unlikely things happen all the time (just ask the White Queen)
We are starting up a brand new day
> (Yeah, there are some availability issues, but I bet after Christmas things will get better on that front.)

The availability issues for the Nexus 4 have absolutely nothing to do with the Christmas rush.

> So don't buy locked down devices. There are unlocked device for sale,

You're missing the two points, which are:

1. Unlocking the device should be an option for all phones - it's a basic right of ownership.

2. It's getting harder and harder to find truly open devices (the Galaxy Nexus had issues on this front). If things keep heading in this direction, soon there won't be any unlocked devices for sale.
hacks into the GPS system of a Cadillac and turns it into a remote-control car it's not going to matter

There's actually been quite a lot of success demonstrated with hacking automotive control systems. http://www.pcworld.com/article/196293/car_hackers_can_kill_b...

The steering isn't drive-by-wire, but everything else in a modern car is (including accelerator and brakes).
WOAH! This might be happening to me in about two weeks!
I would hardly say that it proves it. It doesn't prove that being a little bit more polite and to-the-point wouldn't be as effective.
I have a DVD player, and a broadband connection. Without getting into something (cable, set top streaming, torrents) for which there are investments in time, energy, and money, there is no legal way for me to watch the second season of game of thrones.

Once I get into something, there's a lot of other content available. Cable is the least flexible. Streaming is buying into a walled garden which might disappear in a year, or change TOS, or some other distasteful eventuality. If some popular show drives me to piracy, and I make that investment of time and energy, then that's how I'm going to get all the rest of my content from then on out.
From TFA:

> This is great way to execute unknown executables and code in a safe environment!

LOL wut? No. No it is not a great nor a safe way to "execute unknown executables and code". Chroots are so very inadequate for this.
You'd be surprised how little most non-geeks use the keyboard for much of what they do. Heck, even geeks use tablets for a lot of daily work.

In any case, I think this was just for display purposes. The touchscreen is intended more to replace the mouse than to replace the keyboard - at least for now.
Pad your JSON
My guess is that iOS autocorrect strikes again. :)
Well, that is good to know! Hopefully you are updating the site.

Can you provide any more detail on how it happened? Did a cousin's friend come over or something? Perhaps there are lessons for others to learn from this regarding securing your computer for guest use (ie I wonder if Sarah had access to your mail temporarily).
Honest question: Isn't it bad that they put this under a subdomain? Google won't credit your root domain for incoming links to a subdomain, will it? Similar to why it's better for your blog to be at example.com/blog instead of blog.example.com.
This has been available in the Google Web Toolkit since 2006. I'm not sure why a Google employee would not have been aware of it. If you use GWT, only the bare minimum of resources (JS) are loaded to render the landing page. Further JS will be loaded for subsequent pages/actions as needed. Images and CSS are inlined too so that there are no requests for them. "Perfect caching" of resources is built in through MD5 names for resources so that with a simple apache filter you never download static content twice.

I'm glad to Feather worked so well. It always drives me nuts when some major site/portal needs 250+ requests to load. If you like the sound of it (only 3 requests to load a complex app), checkout GWT as you get all of these optimizations (i.e. Closure) and more by just compiling your web app.
a and b are placeholders (type variables). They can be any type, for example Integer, or a Float. It doesn't matter.

[a] is a list of a, [b] is a list of b. Map takes a function that takes an a and returns a b, and applies it to every element of [a] in order to produce the [b].
An example usage is

map lessThanThree [1,2,3,4]

In this case, map takes a function where a is an integer, and b is a boolean, then takes a list of integers and produces a list of booleans.

The result is [True,True,False,False]
Steve Jobs and NeXT
G/Never, i never use the official instagram app to view the photos. I use better experience apps like flipboard for viewing, off late i have even stopped taking pictures via instagram
Obligatory language War: 2012 edition
You do care about overhead though, right? Bootstrap adds so much unnecessary code you will never use... which is fine for prototyping and bootstrapping, but not for production apps.
People frequently confuse file syncing facilities with backup facilities, and I don't think Dropbox does much to clarify which one they are.

Although, I thought Dropbox kept a history on each file going back a month.....
So the silver lining is still that they came through and restored the data, aside from the fact that the old and presumably really old Dropbox client on it went haywire. Yes, Dropbox is free and no I don't expect them to have a file retention guarantee that safeguards my stuff against nuclear holocaust, but I feel for you friend. In this case, storing files is all that Dropbox does. If my harddrive decided to do that intermittently, I'd purchase a new drive and probably mirrored them.

Why not come up with some sort of open-sync protocol where you could have your data mirrored by many Dropbox like services at once
You can find endless hours of hacker/data security conference presentations on YouTube. Defcon and Shmoocon are perhaps representative, especially the older ones.

To see hackers in action, look for footage of "capture the flag" type events. In practice, it's usually just a bunch of guys typing on keyboards and scratching their heads without saying much.
You're not alone, there's actually a browser plugin to hide baby pictures on Facebook. http://unbaby.me/
SpaceX's reusable rocket lifts cowboy into the air and lands vertically
Meaningful Transitions - How to use animations in the user interface
This seems to be a new trendy design pattern: wrap a single method with a class and claim you just discovered a pinnacle of object-oriented design since you respect the "Single Responsibility Principle"...
Great! But please go and read how to use animations meaningfully in your ui: http://www.ui-transitions.com/
I had an identical experience. I submitted a flurry of customer service tickets without a response. I was damn near ready to walk down to their office since they don't provide any type 1-800 number.

Finally, I got a response from a customer support rep named Todd who explained to me that my account had been deleted when I was removed from the Team. Fortunately, he was able to restore my account and I weaseled an extra 5GB of month for the trouble.

Quite the scare.
Very nice article, luckytoilet!

I recently published my own minesweeper AI, and it does only a subset of what your program does. The explanations in your article would be applicable to my work too.

My program plays the pre-Vista/7 version of Windows Minesweeper, so the graphics detection is much simpler. I only implemented a strategy that considers a single cell and its neighbors, a strategy that considers pairs of cells and their neighbors, and random guessing.

http://nayuki.eigenstate.org/page/automatic-minesweeper-solv...
~10Kbps. Southern VT. 0.1 mile from a cable provider and 2 miles from 4G cell coverage. Live on the wrong road and you are out if luck.

Solutions tried by people I know (all since 2005)

* Satalite radio (helps with downlink but uplink is still via modem)
* Pay $700/mo for 1.5mb commercial T1 (1.5MBps). Took the ISP 3 days to do the line engineering from the CO.
* Long distance point to point wifi (@2.4GHz ~1mile and 800Mhz 10+ miles)
* HAM radio packet networking. Slow but fun
* Running 1/2 mile+ of Ethernet cable (with inline repeaters) through the woods and hoping no one messes with them
* Combinationa of the above.

Hisghspeed Internet access in rural/hilly areas is a major challange. We pay a few dollars every month on our phone bills as a special state tax to fund the ISPs to provide it. Have for years. still a problem.
It'll be interesting to see how our interaction with our phones will change once data transfer rates of 1GB/s are common. Sensors will play an increasingly important role, and who knows... probably many new innovations will be funded through the rising crowdfunding eco-system.
You're right. I went off on a tangent. Apologies to the author. Thanks for politely pointing that out to me.
It’s All About the Genes and the Brain Machines
Hey guys - Dropbox product manager here,

tl;dr: The scenario described by the OP is now less likely to occur. Since October, individual Dropbox users are encouraged to create separate accounts when invited to a Team and warned that Teams admins will have control over the account.

We want individual and Team Dropbox users to have the best possible experience. Some users want to migrate their personal accounts into a Team. Others are much happier with separate personal and Teams accounts. We’ve been working to make that choice much clearer for the account holder and the Teams admin.

If users do choose to merge their personal account with a Team, things become a bit tricky. Teams admins want better control of data within a Team, and users want easy access to their personal stuff, but it’s not possible for us to differentiate between Team data and personal stuff in the same account.

Here are some thoughts on the points raised by the OP:

* Better support for multiple accounts: Users can quickly switch between using personal and Teams accounts on the web today and we intend to make this better across our platforms.

* Improved messaging to Teams admins: We plan to provide better messaging to admins before disabling an account that was migrated in.

* Disabled accounts are not immediately deleted: We can work with Teams admins and users to sort out account issues and recover users’ files.

We’ve contacted the OP to help resolve his case and are sorry for any pain this caused!
As a Linux user, I'm happy that Linus is passionate about not breaking USERSPACE. Had I done something of the scale that Linus is pissed about, I would have expected a much worse reaction.
The interesting comments posted before mine prompted me to read the whole fine article kindly submitted here. The article beings with "There's an entire generation where every photo, message, post, idea between adolescence and adulthood is cataloged on Facebook." The posting of photos as conveniently as Facebook allows posting photos is somewhat new (as is home Internet connections with enough bandwidth to put up with an online service jam full of photos), but on the whole this doesn't feel new to me.

Maybe Facebook doesn't feel new to me because I am old (born during the Eisenhower administration, just as the Space Age was beginning). To me, Facebook in 2012 seems much like AOL in 1998: a huge, dominant force in Internet interaction among the general public that is already doomed by fundamental flaws in its business plan. I'm old, and I have seen predictions come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."

Facebook makes it MORE apparent, if anything, than the earlier forms of online communication did how selectively people report details about their lives in online communities. I've known some good friends through online acquaintance, interspersed with real-world interaction, for twenty years. I'm well aware that the online picture of any person is incomplete, just as the knowledge of one person by any one acquaintance is incomplete. I think Facebook provides some convenience in keeping up with a varied group of Facebook "friends" including several of my first cousins, one of my children who has grown up and moved away from home (he was an early adopter of Facebook, and is now largely tired of it), former co-workers, classmates, current members of the same professional associations, and so on. It's a lot of fun to see friends from different phases of my life interact and learn from one another. I've managed to make my Facebook wall be like a targeted Hacker News: a place where I can find thoughtful discussion of links I discover while Web-browsing. To me, that's something well worth growing old with.

The article includes the paragraph: "You can message someone you haven't spoken with in years, and yet it visually flows right under some unimaginably unrelated conversation from 2007. And when you realize that exact numerical gap between the years, it stings a little. Reading how you've changed, how they've changed, and thinking about everything that didn't happen in-between." That is the most startling default setting of the Facebook messaging system. My email inbox, which is sorted strictly by date order, obscures the gaps in communication I have with some correspondents. (Cleaning out my drafts folder from time to time discloses those gaps.) But real-world analogies of this are receiving Christmas cards after a gap of a few years in correspondence, and the like. The strength of communication in each relationship ebbs and flows, or so I have observed for more than five decades now.
The question was why should one have to learn some sophisticated, over-engineered type system along with unreadable notation, when the result will be plain, sequential machine code anyway? What is the point besides "I'm so clever"?
I was pretty good then got all ideologue at the end with unfounded assertions.