skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And herein lies the problem with Go. Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN. People always say "well the name isn't a problem, because you just search for it with "golang" instead!" but no one writes golang unless they're pointing out how to search for it. If I was trying to get back to this article a month from now and I searched for "go", would I find it? Probably not, unless I remembered the article title contained the word "assembly", but then I'm matching a search to assembly and not Go.

The name is a problem. And if the name is not a problem, then the community is a problem.
Considering the name is an asset - not a consumable - associated with one of the most popular products in the world, $1m/yr for a decade seems cheap.
Are you sure it's not just flash (from e.g. ads) acting up? On my win7 laptop the only time I saw pages freeze was due to a plugin conflict where somehow flash managed to install itself twice as a plugin; disabling one of these would usually fix it. Or, you know, just try disabling flash altogether and see if there's a difference.
> I think the current scrum fashion dampens many impulses from programmers.

Wow, that gets at the very reason why I asked this question! Ever since we moved to scrum, I have felt less creative and more stressed. I think I do better in a less hyper-task oriented and hierarchical structure.

Thanks for the reply.
He seems to have his facts wrong. Swartz did have legal access to the articles. He merely used an alternative mechanism for acquiring them quickly.
Firstly, civil rights protesters were charged with numerous crimes - not just related to the Jim Crow laws, but as part of an active campaign to silence them (Martin Luther King, for example, was charged with tax fraud by Alabama, which he was found innocent of).

Secondly, I don't see the relevance of the number of felonies being charged at any one time. Many in the civil rights movement were repeatedly arrested, charged, and tried over many, many years. And many faced length sentences off only one or two charges.

I'm not totally sure of the point you were trying to make, but if you're trying to equate Aaron Swartz's persecution with that of those in the civil rights movement then you're treading onto extremely shaky ground.
wrt to the whole 'always-on' thing for DRM - is it not more likely that it would use the Spotify model - i.e. you have to go online at least once every 30-days to verify that you still hold a licence/subscription? That would be more practical than requiring a permanent Internet connection.
If your emails are in plaintext the email host can always read/scan your stuff.

If that bothers you, use PGP.
Good question.

I don't know either, but it is a very good question.
Most of the time my bouts of "screw this, I hate programming" has more to do with myself and losing sight of what value I'm providing than anything else. Sure, I'd love to have a job where I am constantly in a state of intellectually-stimulating ecstasy tackling new and daunting challenges... so would every other person on the planet, but such jobs don't exist.

Programming is a service business. You're solving people's problems so they can spend more time doing work that is more productive/fun/challenging/etc (hey wait a minute, that's what _I_ wanted!) When you lose site of who's receiving the benefit of your work, you start focusing instead only on your own needs and down the rabbit-hole you go.

I freely admit that I make this mistake regularly due to distance from those who are using the results of my efforts, but I also tend to burn myself out because I don't segregate work and life well enough. In Dream Job(tm) where I am always being challenged with problems that involve deep thinking, I can guarantee that I would burn out much faster due to this. Hard problem? I'll just work it until I've solved it to the detriment of all other activities. But that's how I work, and I know it so it's up to me to try and short-circuit that when it ceases to be healthy.

I would say that finding a hobby where you're working with your hands or engaged in the physical realm tends to help balance things out. All software is temporary and contemplating the months and years spent building something that will most likely be tossed in a decade or less is demotivating. So build some furniture, restore a motorcycle, paint a picture, anything that has a chance for permanence. It helps me, a lot.
I didn't say that.

In my post, "problem" was referring to the parent post's "politics organized around moving up." My point is that most corporate cultures have elements of that focus on upward mobility. Obviously its prevalence varies from company to company. But I'd rather take a culture with an over-focus on upward mobility and potential for upward mobility than a culture with even a lesser focus on upward mobility, but less potential for it (due to all the dead weight).

I'm not holding "focus on upward mobility" equal in that assessment.
Astronaut Cuisine
If you're hosting some sort of blog post, the best way to ensure that all goes well with high traffic is to make it static. Something like jekyll works great for this (publishing especially), and you can host any static site with a node server in like 3 lines of code on nodejitsu for $3/month.

Nodejitsu can handle hacker news traffic without even the slightest blink, with one dyno - I had a post up on the homepage for hours with over 200 concurrent visitors and like 13,000 total for the day and never had a single issue. Again, $3/month for that.

No need to over-complicate things : )
PostgreSQL updates to close denial-of-service hole
In our defense, have you tried reading Java code?
Here's the part of the comment I was replying to:

compared with other rights protesters, swartz fought going to jail.

Those protesters certainly "fought" whatever it was they were put through!
I just looked at those domains. They're empty parking spots. You own them and want to sell it for a huge markup.

This makes you nothing more than a domain squatter.
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile

Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team. We've handled over £250 million of bets since launching in 2010.

Our office near Old Street in London is shared with other exciting startups and has a pool table, foosball table, and fully stocked fridge.

We're heavily driven by user-focused design and a focus on technology and engineering as a first class discipline.
We write our software in Python and Erlang, and rely heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We build on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef, and Git.

For more info: https://smarkets.com/about/jobs/engineering
So, rumors like these are pretty typical before a major platform announcement, right? Intentionally leak a negative rumor in the months leading up to a release and either let the public get used to the idea (if true) or overlook an actual marginally better new practice (if false) because "well, at least they didn't do that first thing..."
Hmm... guess the author is not familiar with @Autowired, @Resource, @Component... etc. You don't need XML fun. And, he complains about 2 of the same type... behold @Autowired(name="bar"), @Autowired(name="bah"). Miracle? No, just DI.
Refresh: is there something to a simpler lifestyle?
Good point. I think this would complement the Occulous rift perfectly. You could actually use your hands to interact with the enviroment with centimeter precision! Let's hope someone thinks of this.
Are you saying that IoC implies that you also must use XML and an ORM? That really isn't so.
Creativity and process
Recent versions of Ghostery (and NoScript) both provide 'surrogate scripts' to replace common JS resources that are expected to work by the active page.

You can see the noscript[1] ones at about:config (search for noscript.surrogate.*) but I'm not sure where the Ghostery ones live, or if it has specific ones for different trackers, or just a generic handler.

[1] GA replacement code appears to be (reformatted):

(
function(){
var _0 = function(){
return _0;
};

_0.__noSuchMethod__=_0;

with (window) urchinTracker=_0, _gaq={
__noSuchMethod__: _0,
push:function(f){
if(typeof f=='function') f()
},
_link:function(h){
if(h) location.href=h
},
_linkByPost:function(){ return true },
_getLinkerUrl:function(u){ return u },
_trackEvent:_0
}, _gat={
__noSuchMethod__:function(){ return _gaq }
}
}
)()
They do, but large companies are no longer investing in the Wintel PC + Windows. Windows 8 trepedation will put the nail in the coffin, as Enterprise IT is afraid of Windows 8, and the key new PC form factors (Ultrabook, Tablet) are going to require it.

So companies are looking at landing Windows 7 in Citrix and VMWare VDI environments. This is scary for Microsoft, as both companies are looking at breaking up the Windows platform into layers, and injecting their own platform tools.

Microsoft needs a landing place for Office that isn't completely controlled by VMWare/Citrix, which is the true cash cow now that the OS is becoming commoditized. So they are finally investing in VDI with Server 2012, and supporting Office via HTTP and alternate platforms.

If you think about 1983 vs. 2013, VDI is the green screen, and tablets are the PCs.
Yah, you learn very quickly how incredibly convenient something as simple as a labeled address can be. Thank god for modern assemblers!
I don't think it's so much tablets that are the problem. It's that programs are steadily being replaced with platform-agnostic managed things like web services. Maybe we're not there with Office yet, but once you're at the point that Office is the only primary anchor holding you to Windows, it's a pretty big target for someone else to move in.
X86 assembler in Bash
A Manual for the Plan 9 assembler
Noone's mentioned the fact that "significant digits" could mean digits after the decimal point.
[Portal|Half Life] - The Movie
Maybe document container formatting overhead? Filesystem/disk block sizes?
I'm personally starting from the beginning. :-) http://blog.fogus.me/2012/09/21/the-amazing-colossal-science...
Worse, it required that mode. It was memory-saving by using single character codes for the commands rather than 3 bytes for DIM or 4 bytes to store LIST as ASCII.
I think this misses the point of the article and these types of discussions in general. To me, the value of this perspective is that it takes the ego out of this self-directed narrative, and places it in the proper context as a local manifestation of a long running evolutionary process. To see people not as god-like conjurers but as products of whimsical evolutionary circumstance is, I think, the proper seed for developing a deep and universal compassion, the type of compassion that renders the answer to your question of "where to assist" quite obvious, and exposes the goal of creating people with this "willing to fail" attribute as hopelessly naive.

The ability to "fail happily" is less an intrinsic trait as it is having support structures in place that allow for an individual to take bold action without jeopardizing their ability to eat or provide for their family. In this way it is much easier for a kid from a rich family to take the kind of risks that in rare cases lead to great success than it is for a kid from a poor family to do the same. No one can deny that the successes lead to the creation of great social wealth, and so it is in our species' interest to remove the various pressures that keep people locked into safe but stagnant pathways, and allow everyone to take the kinds of chances that produce new mutations for evolution to select from.

Note that I don't think the state should be providing this safety net, this is more of an abstract observation. I have my own ideas on how I think it should be implemented, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the point here. I'm not particularly convinced by arguments about incentives, although I realize that may be the main objection people have and I think that does have a place in the debate.
The #1 defining trait of a profession is that there are ethical obligations that supersede managerial authority. You don't have the "I was following orders" excuse if you do something wrong or unethical. You answer to the profession, not a manager. At least, that's the theory. In practice, there's a lot of variation. Law is technically a profession, but "white-shoe" law (aka biglaw) is pretty horrid, culturally speaking.

This is a benefit, in the sense that the profession goes out of its way to prevent you from being beholden to a single boss, but a drawback in the sense that if you do screw up in a bad way (or get unlucky) you can find yourself in a really bad situation when you lose your license.

I don't know how well that can be applied to technology where there are so many moving parts that 100% bug-free software is impossible.
Building a static site generator is always a good learning exercise.
Solutions, Not Ideas, Are Everything
Always love all the Java hate on ycomb. I'm not sure how a dynamically code hotswapping Ruby app with 10k classes and 1k domain objects works, but I suspect many of the same patterns emerge as have been solved in Java.
Fantastic tip, thanks! Right click the process and "Set Affinity..."
More precisely, they are scanning in an attempt to improve the relevance of the ads.
I have found that in a lot of cases IoC ends up being completely misused and abused in really horrible ways. One of the more common antipatterns I encounter is creating an interface for every single thing in the application ("because hey, the implementation might change and it'll be easy to swap out"). No, if you're building a webshop or a task management application, abstracting and injecting your business logic or domain objects is as stupid as it gets.

I always keep hearing this argument "but something will change". No, it won't. Is it really worth introducing all this boilerplate nonsense into the application just for the off chance of something changing at some point? And even if that happens, don't you think you're better off just doing whatever modifications are necessary vs. putting all this crap into your application?

The only scenario where I've found IoC to make sense is when an application depends on a module and that module REALLY needs to be swapped out with another one. I once had that with a stock market analysis application that depended on X service for data feeds, but X service suddenly stopped working and I could just inject Y service instead without having to change anything else. But even in that case IoC container would've been redundant as plain old DI does the job just fine. That was the only thing in the application that I wrote that way because I didn't want to hard code an external dependency (that I have no control over) into my application.

But what I keep encountering is the cargo cult approach to programming where IoC is done for the sake of IoC and everything is injected for the sake of being injected, with no rational explanation as to why. It's quite terrible really.
If this is true no one will buy the console, no matter what bells and whistles they add on top to make it "feel right". It's not right.
I'd imagine Google recognizes you're a programmer and modifies your results for "go" accordingly
The Art of Graceful Disagreement
David Byrne also seems to ignore the fact that Aaron was looking at a felony conviction and the possibility of spending 35 years in Jail.

Rosa Parks spent one day in jail. MLK Jr. was never sentenced to more than a few months in jail.

According to Lessig, it wasn't the jail time that Aaron Swartz rejected in negotiations, it was the "felon" label. His civil disobedience carried much higher penalties, so it makes sense that he would fight the DoJ on this. It's not cowardice to want to fight a justice system that is threatening to ruin your life.
Neither one of those points is necessarily true. Especially point the first, where margins on software were ridiculously inflated by certain companies, with no discernable change in software quality. Just as one example, apparently paying $59 for something that should have already worked, that you already paid for, doesn't mean it will be fixed: http://toddsnotes.blogspot.com/2009/11/microsoft-genius-erro...

As for the "ass-wipes can't be choosers" argument, that's just flat out unprofessional. If you were building a house for Habitat for Humanity, would you slack off and not hammer all the nails in because "hey, it was free, ass-wipe"? Maybe my point of view is skewed, because in one of the charities I volunteer for, doing something half-assed is fairly certain to get someone killed.

I get that OSS isn't always someone's day job, they may not have enough time to handle bug reports or documentation, etc, etc. But as the solutions to supporting an OSS project go, ignoring bug reports or making them hard to file rank pretty low. If someone doesn't have the time to handle the load, they need to communicate that. Post it on the project page. Put out a call for help to other volunteers. Have the bug reporting system autorespond that the project is not moving very fast. At least let your users know where they stand.
You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.
question: is still has some java dependencies, right?
Mr. Xtreme is a Real Life Super Hero
How I Would Learn to Code Now
No one?

Sadly I'm not so sure about that.

I would definitely skip it though, but not that many people really care.
There are line breaks at a fixed interval so that it wraps at 80 chars. I imagine that makes up the other ~300KB.

Edit: Line-breaks do indeed make up the bulk of the overhead, but it's also an HTML page so there's some boilerplate markup at the beginning and end of the file.
A thing is worth exactly what another is willing to pay for it. What he paid to acquire it is irrelevant; the fact that another is willing to pay that price is the issue. Since he only gets to sell it once, and he doesn't want to get shorted by discovering the buyer would have paid orders of magnitude more (but would gladly pay pocket change!), he's estimated how much someone will, someday, be willing to pay and he's holding out for that.

Domain names have gone for as much or more. Milk is a huge industry. There's no reason "he's not going to get that much money for it. Ever."

Since he put next to no money into it, keeping it as an amusement (an exercise in F-U money as others have noted), is a suitable payoff for him. Insofar as it may be worth a lot to someone, he's warding off uninteresting offers.

Upshot: it's his, he can do what he wants with it, and he is. Funny how much consternation this is causing.
I used it yesterday.

My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday.

I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)
Some recommendations for people:

Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, known for his alternative time line stories.

Beyond Lies the Wub, by Philip K Dick, a collection of his early short stories.

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The beginning of his Mars series about its civilization's decline.
Wait, people actually read Java code? I thought that's what IDEs were for.

For a serious response, I've seen tons of Java code of varying quality. Most was worse than horrible, but I have seen well-written Java. The Java code for Clojure is excellent, for one example. Most corporate Java code is indistinguishable from profanity.
It has to do with the number of requests plus the number of allowed processes plus the requests each process was allowed to serve. At a limit of 300 requests per process, the processes fell over at about 3 seconds time. With only 20 processes, dying every three seconds, the server was overwhelmed. So it's really a combination of issues.

Looking at the records for MySQL data, there wasn't that much of an issue there with MySQL connections. This is probably due to the fact that the page cache was working correctly.
This is a bad idea. Those certifications are meant to be there to protect the consumers, not the practitioners. Some engineering disciplines need professional certifications because of liability reasons, and some don't. I'm an electrical engineer working in a hardware design position in a safety-critical field, and I don't have a professional certification. I'm just competent, and we do an insane amount of testing.

One of the best things about programming is its low barrier to entry. Requirements for being a successful programmer: be good at programming. Having certifications isn't necessarily bad, but I feel that requiring certifications on a legal level the same way law and medicine are required is a horrible idea.
Sorry, but for xx million dollars, you can call me scummy for doing something that is 1/10 on the scum scale. Now if were talking about stealing or installing malware, keyloggers or extreme forms of spam that may be another story, but come on. This isnt' a disney movie, and if it makes you a huge amount of money to do something completely legal albeit it 'annoying' for the other person who wasn't quick enough, I'd say do it.
Writer is Good Enough to open a Word document I've gotten from someone else, and for what I mainly do with such documents, I actually prefer Writer to Word.

For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel.

Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better.

The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
That is pretty neat. I'm glad he mentioned that the Go compiler will not inline functions written in assembly, but it will inline small Go functions.
Ostinato - Cross-Platform Packet/Traffic Generator and Analyzer
Spreadsheets will be heavily used forever. Excel alone will keep Microsoft relevant in the business world. JavaScript gives us 1 numeric datatype, and there's no good way to load a gigabyte of numeric data into a web application.
Executive resigns after website redesign debacle (Finish Line/Sports gear Co)
Santa Fe Institute's Introduction to Complexity course is now enrolling
It doesn't.

Well, considering how hard I try not to be tracked by Google, probably it does for someone else.
Great write-up. As I'm perusing the math/somefeature_arm.s and math/somefeature_amd64.s files in Go's math package, I can't help notice most of them look like this:

http://golang.org/src/pkg/math/remainder_arm.s

That is, very short code that just looks like a function call to me, the complete asm noob. What is it, are all these maths functions implemented in hardware by amd64 and arm architectures? Or is this "asm code" just reverting to calling the Go implementation of the particular function (aka the not really that "optimized")?
And there used to be Microsoft Unix distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix).
I think that most people leave it configured for default and never bother to do any kind of caching. My server was down less than five minutes because I knew what to look for.
Not all of Java culture is like this. There's a ton of really great code out there. Take a look at any Android library. There's no damned Spring anywhere.

Or switch to Scala like me.