skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's awesome! Now if I could find a humidifier that is silent and that I don't have to fill every day.
Off-topic, but I'm curious how you handled that situation. Personally, a safe-guard I might build in would be to audit our code by an independent third-party. Was this at all feasible in your situation, and/or how did you handle QA?
In my five years at Google, I am not sure I have met a single engineer who is "trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads."

I have met tons of engineers who work on interesting problems like building models of query patterns to detect spiking queries (Google Trends and Google Hot Trends, all publicly accessible: http://www.google.com/trends/), Gmail, Maps/Directions/Traffic, improving (machine) efficiency of Google Search, and tons of systems problems/architectures like MapReduce, Dremel, etc. And people I haven't met are working on everything from Flu Trends to Driverless Cars.

This oft-repeated claim that Google is squandering a bunch of engineer talent building things that don't improve humanity reflects a distorted view of what Google engineers do, one that is easily refuted even by the publicly-accessible information about Google's engineering accomplishments.
What does Google need from Android?
Galaxy Note 8.0 sub-tablet could be a month away from release
I would hope it's uncontroversial that saving people's lives, health and sanity is categorically more important than making money or trivial social interaction.
Wow, C and C++ have undefined behavior? I bet nobody knows that unless... they took an undergrad comp sci class.

Why is this on HN?

Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that C or C++, sometimes it's not.
I think there's a certain degree of arrogance to that claim, but a lot of truth. For the smartest minds of our generation, programming is not that hard to pick up. I've seen (classical) engineers and physics PhDs working in ad tech and social games many times.
> The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me

Interestingly, I have met many in the sciences that feel the same about computer science.
Alright. Give us an example of how to make them and I'll fork, patch, and pull request.
Ask HN: Quitting my job at a top tech company. Why did you quit?
I'm working at what most in the industry consider one of the best tech companies in the world. My salary is decent, the perks are pretty good, the technology is really interesting and there is a solid long term career path. I just can't do it anymore. I am an insignificant cog in a machine that has existed for over 10 years. Previously working at a startup I had full control in my area, which meant I was responsible for a majority of the systems and it allowed for great creative freedom. Now I've been pigeon holed in a team with very specific responsibilities over a minute set of tasks. I cannot motivate myself to do any work. Despite all of the perks and an inside look at the tech I just can't get excited about any of it. I'm tired, burnt out and have no desire to prove myself here.

I look around and people are quite happy, they even enjoy working there. It makes me feel very conflicted and I wonder whether I should stick around to address my issues or just walk away from it all. I'm looking for some HN wisdom.

Has anyone else left big tech companies? What were your reasons? What did you do next?
That is the argument by which design becomes regarded as frivolous.

Frivolity has it's place in life. But it is only a subset of design.

Therefore, I think it's ok to disparage articles on the silly aspects of design, when posted to HN, especially when they're met with religious battle type fervent loyalty.
US Small Business Administration’s Offerings for Startups
My new projects rely on C++ libs, so I can't use Rust.
similar to "Why should we be spending money exploring space when there are so many problems here on Earth that we need to solve first?".
So that whole section doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Running strace on an unkillable process tends to produce no output (if the process was actually making new system calls, it wouldn't be wedged). And worse, my experience is that attaching to a wedged process with ptrace() usually does nothing at all except also hang the attaching the process. This also applies to gdb.

And finally, even if attaching worked, getting a disassembly of the current PC (in this case the syscall trampoline) would tell nothing useful about what's going on.
> Leiningen sadly uses Maven under the hood.

It imports some classes from Maven in order to integrate with Maven repositories, but the vast majority of Leiningen has nothing to do with Maven.

> Wanna quickly add a private .jar file / private repo? Good luck.

It's currently a bit of a pain setting up an encrypted credentials file, but once that's set up it's very straightforward to use the s3-wagon-private repository to use an S3 bucket as a repository. It's just two extra lines to your project file.

edit: Apparently Lein 2 supports unencrypted credential files now, which makes things even easier if you have full-disk encryption (or aren't worried about your credentials being read).

> And what happens if you have an Internet connection but some high-target repo gets rooted and a major Java .jar gets replaced with a version containing an exploit?

This is an issue, but I believe there's an effort to solve this in Clojars by being stricter about verifying package signatures. Already all jars uploaded to Clojars with Leiningen 2 are signed by default AFAIK.

You can also easily change the default repositories Leiningen uses when searching for packages.

> I've always been amazed at how many devs cannot correctly configure a Java classpath themselves and need to be babby-sitted by a tool like Maven.

I suspect a sizeable majority of Clojure developers can configure a classpath, but why bother if a tool can do it for you? The prospect of manually managing a dependency tree of 20, 30 or even 100 packages is just insane when Lein can do it for you.
What's a mystery is why it is taking so long for mainstream econ and op-ed writers to catch on.

I think they're quite familiar with the idea and have caught onto it long ago; they just don't want to be misrepresented as advocating a government takeover of the finance industry or as communists or whatever. It's not so much that they favor large institutions, as they're trying be moderate and consider both sides of the argument.

By contrast, read the editorial pages or the comment sections of the Wall Street Journal, in which Obama is regularly characterized as a Marxist ideologue and worse, and any sort of regulation or disciplinary action against the financial services sector is characterized a shakedown, at best. If the government actually proposed carving up the banks there would be (even more) howls for his impeachment. Much as only Nixon could go to China, a reset of the financial sector could only come from some prominent Republican, and a fiscally hawkish one at that.
Thanks for making the distinction. I've had Type I diabetes for over 20 years and occasionally get the "but you're not fat" comment. EDUCATE :o)
It think one of the reasons the kernel can't kill a process is because one of the process's threads is blocked inside a kernel call (not completely sure about this). Hes using ps's 'wchan' option to get the address of the kernel function that the process is currently blocked or sleeping on. After he gets the wchan address, he uses gdb to map the address to function name.

Taken from: http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?ps

nwchan	WCHAN address of the kernel function where the process is
sleeping (use wchan if you want the kernel function name).
Running tasks will display a dash ('-') in this column.
Diabetes. Overweight. These are real problems, affecting real people, that need real solutions...

Doing healthcare projects requires dealing with hardware, dealing with regulatory overhead, etc. It's much, much more difficult than building out another web app for social/ads/etc.
Sounds from nature to program to, relax to, or fall asleep to - iOS friendly
Even if it doesn't, there's a lot more profit in advertising than insulin. The economy would probably function better if diabetes patients were left untreated and die, since the cost saving estimates are quite enormous.
"Beats" might be too strong a word :). I guess the picture from AWFY 64-bit is that both have strengths and weaknesses but overall they're comparable.
I am actually doing a little market research. Through my friends that work on music I realized there isn't a solid marketplace for this type of sale. I am entering pre-release stage with my 99 designs like platform.

Thanks for the off though, it is appreciated.
It used to annoy me, but now I'm just amused when someone tells me what I should think is important when he's not even putting importance on those same things himself. HN trolling at its finest.
> ... a simple CDN that uses it to provide the locality.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean to tell the end user where the host (being reached via anycast) is physically located?

This exists as part of the AS112 Project[0], assuming server operators have created/edited the appropriate resource record.

From a machine in my data center (Midwest):

$ host -t txt hostname.as112.net prisoner.iana.org | tail -n 2
hostname.as112.net descriptive text "ICANN DNS Operations"
hostname.as112.net descriptive text "Culpeper, VA, USA"

From a machine in One Wilshire (L.A.):

host -t txt hostname.as112.net prisoner.iana.org | tail -n 2
hostname.as112.net descriptive text "ICANN DNS Operations"
hostname.as112.net descriptive text "Los Angeles, CA, USA"

Those of you in other geographic areas will likely hit other servers.

On a side note, if you manage your own DNS servers, consider adding the relevant .in-addr.arpa zones to them and help alleviate some of the load. Or, if you have bandwidth to spare, bring up your own AS112 server. I work for an ISP and will bringing one on-line in the near future.

[0]: http://public.as112.net/

(Note: After lurking for a few years, I finally created an account here so I apologize if the formatting of this "first comment" is wonky.)
Perhaps we can chalk it up to the economic ignorance of CS grad students. There's no such explanation for econ students. :)
There is substantially more sophistication to his points than you give him credit for. If someone who is an expert in something - and he is - says something about their area of expertise that you think is obvious and simple, consider perhaps that it's your level of understanding that is lacking, not theirs.
> I would probably set up just such a "Black Swan Fund"

I think that's what venture capitalists already do.

They place lots of "small" bets. They lose money on most of them. But a small percentage do very well, and those investments "make the fund" -- that is, they cover all the other losses and create an overall profit.

I remember when Andreessen Horowitz launched, to great fanfare.

What was their revolutionary plan? To focus on investing in companies that would turn them a profit.

And people were slapping their foreheads as if this were some great revelation. "Of course! VC has been run as a charity!"

It's like saying "I am going to start a horse racing fund. I will only bet on the winning horses".

That's not a statement of investment strategy. It's a statement of wishful thinking.
I think the incorrect assumption raganwald makes is that the greatest minds aren't trying to solve these problems. You're not going to hear about massive successes in these fields nearly as often because the problems are hugely complex and very difficult to solve.
Besides, creating Facebook clones is sexier. At this moment, your content is rated lower than @benihana's scathing criticism of @raganwald's outrageous assumption that saving lives is somehow nobler than squeezing out yet another social app-turd.
For most programs, yes they have done their job. However, in certaint categories of applications (for example, server software) it's somewhat of a leaky abstraction. Garbage collector sweeps, circular references, etc are all pains which force you to be aware of how the vm is managing your memory.

For an impression, see this excellent blog series on how a certain garbage collector sweep issue was solved: http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2011/02/avoiding-full-gcs-in-h...
I've been working my way through the Rust tutorial. As much as I like the power and control it gives me, they really need to take a note from Go on the syntax. Some of the even fairly contrived examples are an eye-sore. I need to give it more time but yeesh there's a lot of syntax to look out for.
Being charged with a felony is a life sentence in the US. You're forever part of an underclass of 'convicted felons', and your opportunities in life are greatly diminished.
As an example, Glooko makes a mobile version of a glucose logbook that reads data straight from a sampling device - useful, but not earthshaking. But to go from that data to automatic reminders and advice about managing glucose levels - what raganwald wishes existed - would require a much more stringent level of approval from the FDA.
Upvoted because it makes for an interesting discussion, which is what HN is for. An upvote doesn't mean agreement, it means (AFAICR) 'worth having on the site'.
You certainly could define some basic things to make the language safer. For example, make variables always be initialized to zero if not explicitly initialized, and force accessing beyond the bounds of an array to be a fault rather than undefined behavior.
sshfs used to have this problem and it was enough to bring nautilus and a lot of other applications to their knees as they tried to stat() my homedir and failed on the hung sshfs mount point.
Helpful Resources for Learning to Program
I'd never bothered comparing them before, never used Helvetica that I can remember, and I got 17/20. 2 at the start till I noticed the obvious lower case differences. The only other one was MATELL which difficult, didn't notice the difference in the As.
> When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?

Good question. How I'd answer for the 1940s-60s depends heavily on what you consider the status of research labs that were outside academia, but rather academic in terms of personnel, style, and management: the national labs, the NSA, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, etc.

If that's included as honorary academia, I would feel comfortable saying that "academia" (or perhaps "academia-plus") had most of the geniuses of that era.
Diabetes is just another first-world problem.

What about the millions of children dying of preventable diseases in the third-world?
Is it possible that one activity doesn't necessarily preclude the other?

Perhaps society is already running at its "cure diabetes hull-speed". What is everyone else to do? Sit around and cheer them on... hey that gives me an idea for this social app...
Funnily enough, it is exactly what I was taught! I'll freely admit that I'm a 'Philistine', when to comes to these matters.

I've always taken the view that you throw the text at an engine and let it do the rendering. If it doesn't look right, the engine needs improving. Manual tweaks fall into the realm of premature optimisation, as chances are the content will change faster than the tweaks can be made.

I can see that beautiful typography is nice to have, but apart from automation, I can't see a way to apply it on a mass scale. Crafted typography is the typographic equivalent of assembly language?
There are many fallacies with the argument that the greatest minds are at the googleplex. Google does hire some smart people and probably engineer for engineer, they probably stack up better than the averages across the US.

But, great people do great things. They don't necessarily work at google. And they don't necessarily advertise.

Who are the people that wrote the software that put the Mars Rover on Mars? What about the people that work on reddit? I am using Ubuntu12. What about the work that went into that?
Hey, don't lump C++ in with this. If you write code in the STL weenie style or the Pretend It's Java style there aren't any idioms I know of that would ever violate the rules he mentions (out-of-range pointers, signed overflow, invalid aliasing). I don't do those things and the C++ programmers I work with don't do those things, at least not habitually. I don't see violations of undefined behavior rules, or the use of idioms that come close to it, very often in our code. Not nearly as often as the sort of mundane errors that no language can prevent.

These are not problems of a language per se, but the original sins of neo-vaxocentrism and confusing "I understand how this might work, at some random abstraction layer" and "I can depend on what happens when I do something stupid". Free your mind of these and the rest will follow.

These low-level bit banging errors are vastly less common than shared-memory concurrency issues, which as far as I can tell are endemic to all code that attempts shared-memory concurrency, in any language. If you want to have an axe to grind about languages that aren't future proof, look there.
I could be mistaken, but I think that line is a reference to an interview with Jeff Hammerbacher:

Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...

Which, I hope not coincidentally, echoes Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
I believe the author is using that as an example of a command that will 'wedge' if you tried to kill -9 it.

The rest of it is an example of how to dump the cause of a process that is wedged.

"/proc/{pid}/wchan" contains the name of the current syscall a process is executing.

Basically you should be able to use everything but the first line of that section as a shell script(with some modifications) to determine the cause of a wedged process.
As it relates to developing pharmaceuticals and medical devices they generally require FDA approval. Please watch "Burzynski Movie: Cancer is Serious Business" it is about a Dr. who patented non-toxic cancer treatments that have better "survivor" rates than surgery+chemo on many types of cancer and it has even treated certain brain cancers in children that have never been successfully treated by current treatments. The Movie documents the FDA's continued harassment of the Dr. on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies, including multiple criminal charges that the Dr. was always acquitted for. Included is footage of Congressional hearing about this matter and a direct question to the FDA Director as to why the Dr.'s applications for FDA trials were repeatedly denied when his treatments had cured certain childhood brain cancers, and the response was he never had and never will approve applications unless they are from big pharmaceutical companies.

The best minds are busy preventing the best minds from taking a piece their pie (ie. Google protecting its market share), for the best minds to be busy making a difference (this is simultaneously why none of us have privacy on the internet, we cannot enjoy an internet experience without a bombardment of adds and why cure of diabetes is not the focus but rather treatment.
I agree with Raganwald's sentiment, and I think most of the posters here at HN lack vision and standards and are just fat dumb and happy with the status quo. Well the status quo is not good enough, and YOU need to raise your standards and expectations about what is possible and you need to get a clue about the kinds of things that are holding us back, but first and foremost, it is YOUR ATTITUDE that is holding us back.
By 2030, Medicare alone is projected to cost about 5.5% of GDP (about $1.15B/year), and by 2040 the cost will rise to 6% of GDP (1.6B/year). The numbers just get worse after that.

Do the math. It doesn't add up.

https://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TRSUM/
Sounds more like "We like to invest in college dropouts with insane ideas going after [currently] tiny markets [that have the potential of growing many orders of magnitude] with [currently] no way to monetize."

Isn't this basically another way of saying "we only care about home runs, not singles"?
Good question. I use Google's Cloud Messaging to actually deliver the pushes but the data in a push is not plaintext, and the push sometimes doesn't even have the data at all (the GCM message is just a tickle). All interaction with PushBullet app servers is done by https. Overall, I don't think I've done anything stupid but I wouldn't trust PushBullet to anything you consider prudently private.
My fellow HNers:

It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life.

That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some football team what to do next. Just because he's drunk and in a saloon doesn't mean he's wrong, just boorish.

I lamented the fact that it's easier to upload and simultaneously tweet about a picture from my phone than it is for Scott to lead a normal life. There are lots of reasons why this is so:

1. The barrier for entry (education, &c) is higher in medicine and bioinformatics.

2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses.

3. The problems are harder to solve than it may seem to the man in the saloon.

4. Some people feel the monetary incentives are to avoid medicine.

p.s. "Hypocrisy" is one of those empty criticisms, like "Unprofessional." If someone says to you, "smoking is bad," it doesn't matter whether he smokes. Maybe, his advice is actually more relevant if he's an older fellow who smoked and now regrets not making a different choice when he was your age.
Paypal is awesome.

It's 2012 and I'm still not aware of any other company that allows me to sign up (for free) and start taking payments straight away (for arbitrary items no less). See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

(Note: Stripe have a schlep blindness in International Transactions. I still can't sign up for Stripe. Last Week I was recommending a friend use paypal)
My friend has a insulin pump similar to this

http://www.medtronic-diabetes.co.uk/product-information/para...

This seems to be a solved problem, if only someone could make a way for people to search out such things via the internet ;)
I just got a macbook air (13" 8GB). It's very nice and fast and well designed. I probably won't run Linux on it, but if I do I'd just do it in VirtualBox.
It's very easy - all I did was think "Which one looks better?" and I got it right every time.
statsd is fantastic. I have used both the node.js version and the python version. I actively prefer the python version. Now it seems you have written a perl version.

Fantastic.
If people treated C++ as a maintenance-only language and used it only for legacy code -- like COBOL -- the world would be a better place. The world would also save billions of dollars.

This is not a matter of RAII or "smart" pointers (which are not even smart enough to deal with cyclic references unless the programmer explicitly breaks the cycle). It is a matter of a language whose high-level features are constrained by low-level concerns, where the features compose poorly, and where things that are obvious (like requiring that functions with a non-void return type have a return value along every control path) are simply omitted from the standard. It is dizzying to think of how much money has been spent on bugs that were made possible by C or C++; why are we continuing to waste time and money on these languages?