skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In such a case, I would create a new employment requirement that one's code must be commented well enough that another programmer can take over, productively, in a short time.

Not commenting code, not naming variables and functions in a way meant to reveal as much as possible, is the behavior of someone who isn't accustomed to working with other people. So it should be made a requirement for employment, end, full stop.
I think that was a planned feature for synergy. I don't think it was ever implemented.
Personal language preferences are fine if they are justified by actual reasons like tech details, community, librairies, ...
Try and add support for detecting piped input on the server side:

bcp < filename

because this would allow for things like

cat filename | gzip | bcp

with the receiving end doing

bcp | gunzip > filename

Keep it as simple as it is now, but make it play nicely with other tools.
Stop Sharing Quotes. You're Not Better Than Anyone.
Firefox shot itself in the foot when they started breaking everyone's add-ons and plugins about three times per week (an exaggeration, but not by much).
I'm pretty new to Python and Django, and maybe someone more experienced can explain it better, but installation seems really brittle to me. Every few weeks I run into some silly problem like, I need this package, but it depends on an older version of distutils or setup-whatever, so trying to install it fails until I get that, but then I have to uninstall that after getting the package or the rest of the packages I want won't install right... kind of a nightmare. Usually it doesn't take a super long time to resolve but there's never any rhyme or reason, just install and uninstall and easy_install and pip and so on until it's happy so I can get on with my work. It seems like this proposal would help matters. I hope.
This feels like a distraction. How about instead of pontificating on how someone else chooses to do business, we discuss the actual merits (or lack thereof) of Heroku's routing issues.
I still don't quite understand how you manage version control with entire system images. I guess you could just write a changelog, but that requires a large amount of self-discipline to ensure that the changelog exactly matches system state. Let's say you discover some minor instability, and discover that it was introduced 8 months ago, but the changelog for that image was completely innocuous. Can you do anything other than throw out all 8 months' worth of images and try to work your way back to present via the changelogs?

Puppet-like systems have the same issue in that they don't attempt to specify the entire system, but at least with puppet if there is an issue due to system drift you can start with a clean base installation and re-run it.
Whats the USP
You cannot possibly be that dense. Though copyright laws need reform, there is 0 chance of completely dismantling them. Not only because there is no political willpower to do something like this, but also because it's not the right approach, and nobody actually wants something like this - not content creators (from software shops, to musicians to music studios), and not regular consumers. Framing your discussion in that corner, makes it easy to just completely dismiss your point of view because there is little value in it.
As far as I understand it, this simple example won't perform any better than if it were written using MVar. (i.e. it was explicitly locking reads and writes)

The difference is that `atomically` calls can be nested and still work. If you do an readMVar whilst that MVar is already locked in a function above you in your call stack you would have a deadlock.

So STM seems to be a smart way of keeping track which locks the current execution thread has so you never double lock.

At least in this case :)
Read the damn manpage
It doesn't have to be commercial to be more than a demo. Sql.js was a great concept but hasn't been updated in 10 months (unless there is a fork that is maintaining it), even though it has major issues.

I know you Mozilla guys don't have time to maintain ports, but are you doing anything to encourage open source devs to actually use and maintain this stuff? I'm working on an emscripten port of a game myself that I do want to actually maintain and improve upon, but I get the impression that I am in the minority.
With Mega, files are cryptographically safe. With Bitcoin, money is cryptographically safe. Of course they had to marry.
Yea, but my point is different than a cracked version leaking into bittorrent. That doesn't have a drastically large footprint.

If they streamed videos with no-DRM, everyone with a subscription would easily grab a copy of whatever they want. And all it would take is copying a file and sharing it with friends/family to have it spread. This might not seem like a huge difference, but honestly I think it would be. It would lower the barriers of sharing to the point that everyone could do it. Only those who hold onto a moral belief in not committing copyright infringement wouldn't participate. I think the past has shown that these people are in the vast minority.
There's a section in the document which compares wheel with egg.
Perl 6 is now half as old as Perl
Ah, the issue of CPU intensive code in a single-threaded event loop of a system designed to handle I/O bound applications... let's not go there again!
Smaller, specialized, closed-source plugins that are practically guaranteed to become attack vectors.

Personally, I'm glad Flash is dying and am not in any real hurry to replace it.
I think you are misreading what he wrote. With a single owner LLC, the owner is protected from LLC liability, but the LLC is not protected from owner liability. Search for "LLC charging order protection" for more info.
Udpcast:

http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/

Can do this and other related useful things, including multicast of a file to N machines in parallel. Don't let the UDP bother you: it implements retry/checksum/etc on top of datagrams.

It's been around a few years, and is probably already in your distro.

It can pipe, as well as copy files, I wrote about it some time ago:

http://kylecordes.com/2008/multicast-your-db-backups-with-ud...
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

The parent was making reference to the common notion that using outlier languages provides access to high quality talent. In certain cases this holds true, in others not. You will attract, on average, higher quality talent by using Clojure rather than Cobol.

EDIT (response to parent edit) : well, no. I never said there are "no good Perl jobs", just that Perl is not in and of itself a draw in the way that Scala / Clojure / Haskell might be. You could probably convince someone that there are cool opportunities in Fortran development, but very few are actively seeking them out.
Only if you want to limit the people who can install your software to those with one of the package managers and configurations you target, and who have root.
Lead engineers work close to product managers, product designers and the engineers. Your comment is awfully agressive unnecessarily, by the way.

A nice description of a lead engineer role:

http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/tokyo/ops-support...
I didn't say it was the worst place on Earth. There are obviously a lot of candidates for that, and I can see how people from some surrounding regions would prefer it. But it's definitely not something to idolize unless you really love a micromanaging surveillance state with ridiculously unbalanced penalties for petty and victimless crimes.

As this story suggests, it's also an authoritarian oligarchy in which you have no real rights and can be "disappeared."

I honestly found it disturbing to see it idolized by smart people. Do they have no appreciation for cultural freedom? Or do they really believe that yuppie upscale boutique fascism is an ideal worth aspiring to?

Seriously, watch a film called THX-1138. "Buy, and be happy..." Sometimes I think politicians watch dystopian films and think "wow! that's a great idea! I never thought of that."

Learn to appreciate your local ghetto. Like the song says: you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.
jQuery, Bootstrap

Python, Django, Nginx, Gunicorn, Memcached, Celery, RabbitMQ, Postgresql

Recently moved from Heroku, now hosted on a couple instances from DigitalOcean.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907
I really don't think this follows. Even if we take everything presented in the article at face value, there are a lot of questions unasked (let alone answered) in the article:

1. How did he come to the conclusion/concern he might be violating US national security?

Speculations:

* He could have come to the conclusion on his own, he was apparently a smart guy.

* He could have been asked about his work by embassy officials.

* He could have heard/overheard a conversation that lead him down that path.

* other reasons I don't have any knowledge of.

2. Once he became concerned, what actions did he take?

Speculations:
* He kept it to himself and his family.

* Being described as an all-american boy, he could have gone to the US embassy with his concerns. The general perception of US citizens is if you report things like this, even if you're unintentionally involved, you are not targeted.

* He could have started asking uncomfortable questions at work.

3. Why did he copy a bunch of (presumably NDA) "trade secret" research onto his own hard drive?

Speculation:

* He just wanted a copy of his work. (I know I've done this with certain bits of code)

* He wanted to give a gift to his new employer

* He wanted something to bargain with in case the USG investigated him.

* He was just going to hand it to the embassy.

* He didn't do it with any intent, it was just part of a normal backup routine and he didn't even think of it.

4. Why would that hard drive not have been destroyed or taken, particularly if it was accessed after death? (especially since the place was unlocked)

Speculation:

* Deep spy game stuff -- the accessed files were altered to be "wrong"

* There isn't foul play

* There is more dangerous information that they were really worried about, not the stuff he had

* No one realized the information was not on the company network, and some IT guy was just spot-checking against official work to make sure stuff wasn't lost.

5. If there are national security implications, what things are we not being told because of classified?

No speculation on my part here. I have no way of pretending to have a reasonable understanding of this world.

6. What don't we know about Shane Todd? (Not in a blame the victim way, but there is lots of a person's life that can't be described in an article of this size. Is there something about him his family didn't know? Is there something they are embarrassed to talk about?)

Speculation dependent questions:

1. If he went to the USG as a good citizen, what did they do?

* They could have advised him to not abruptly up and leave for personal security reasons.

* They could have asked him to get them copies of the research.

* They could have blown him off, or told him, "thanks, but don't worry about it".

2. Who are all the people who would be interested in targeting him?

* His employers (as speculated/suggested in the article).

* The US government, as you speculate.

* Governments who pay/partner with his employers

* Singapore government, wanting to keep various ties quiet

3. If they are after the research, why kill him rather than just steal his computers?
A few of the title changes lately have been unhelpful. It would be nice to see the original title in small print somewhere.
RequireJs mode for Emacs
Same! Sometimes I would like to introduce my coworkers to the amazing world of git, but it's hard to convince them without showing them a concrete example, this one is a pretty nice overview, and also useful for advanced users! I just got a better, more intuitive understanding of what detached HEAD really means thanks to it!
Petition against 'DRM Daleks' at BBC 
The BBC is now pushing for DRM in HTML5.

Let them know this is fail, and that we now suspect Dalek infiltration of BBC HQ.

(See http://boingboing.net/2013/02/16/bbc-betrays-the-public-demand.html and related discussion here on HN.)
The Emscripten use-case seems to be all about components rather than applications.
> as well as those desiring privacy.

Can you explain this part a bit?
> anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days

Yap.

* Better libraries

* PyPy

* gevent for green thread based concurrency

* Cython
Right, I'm interested in XYZ, so that is what the top post should be ...
Videos of Chelyabinsk Meteor on Map. Photogrammetry Hackers Are Welcome
Your examples are all expected to sort out whether to accept an input stream or start an output stream, but without an explicit command, which poses a problem -- the app would have to determine that the input stream is empty before switching modes to streaming output. That's not so easy -- suppose the operator unintentionally pipes an empty input file? Will the app know what to do?

Most (I won't say all) command-line apps must be explicitly told which mode to use. There's a good reason.
"I wonder if someday we'll have credit cards that help you be aware of ..."

If a credit card was an API, then you could wrap any sort of service around it that you like.
A C-corp and an S-corp are equivalent in all but a few ways:

An S-corp is restricted in the total number of shareholders, and the classes of stock. It also can't have retained earnings. That's it.

S-corps aren't really popular any longer. Everyone who might have benefited from an S-corp is choosing to form LLCs instead. Less paperwork. Less formality. More flexibility. It's essentially a partnership with the limited liability of a corporation.

Heck, even AOL was an LLC for a while.
great , did not work on my machine though , but great project.
Routing Performance Update
Agreed. I'm like you and I was just committing, branching, and merging but learning nothing while clicking around. I'm glad I know now though because I can totally use a lesson on branching. I think branching in Git is one of the most misunderstood parts of Git. I can't tell you how many times I've almost screwed up a repo because I made some mistake merging branches and not pulling from the correct branch when working on a different machine. To make matters worse, if you use Git to deploy into production, testing, and staging environments like I do you run the risk of pushing development or untested code into production by accident. I know I've definitely pushed code meant only for one branch (or feature) into production without merging with master... it gets confusing but needless to say it didn't take long before things stopped working and I realized my mistake.

Branching is huge, awesome, powerful, but I know I as well as a lot of developers I know could use a good lesson on it.
How would they? Even ripping DRM-free YouTube videos is beyond most people. I don't see YouTube piracy as a big world problem.
You can change

appV fn x = atomically $ readTVar x >>= writeTVar x . fn

to

appV fn x = atomically $ modifyTVar x fn

The function getValue need not be in IO monad. You can simplify it using fromMaybe in Data.Maybe.

Sometimes you check "head l" and "tail l"; it's more idiomatic to use pattern matching. For example, you can change:

setCommand handle cmd db = do
appV (conv k v) db
hPutStrLn handle $ "OK"
where k = (head cmd)
v = (unwords (tail cmd))
....
case (head cmd) of
("get") -> getCommand handle (unwords (tail cmd)) db
("set") -> setCommand handle (tail cmd) db

to something like this:

setCommand handle key val db = do
appV (conv key val) db
hPutStrLn handle "OK"
...
case cmd of
"get":key -> getCommand handle (unwords key) db
"set":key:val -> setCommand handle key (unwords val) db

Also consider using hlint, it often gives good advice.
If you have a few servers to spare, I'd recommend installing Cloudera Impala on them. You can use Apache Sqoop to pull the data out of Postgres and into HDFS.. Directly after, you can run SQL queries which will query the data in parallel (similar to redshift).
Ask HN: Is it worth upvoting old submissions?
I've been very busy lately so I've added a lot of stories submitted here to my "read later" folders. Going over them today I find myself "resubmitting" them on HN so they get the upvote they deserve from me.

Is that of any use though? Does anyone look at old stories, if there is such a functionality even?
So, where's the wheel to .deb/.rpm/.msi/.pkg converter?

For real ease of distribution, you have to support a destination platform's native package format.

See also: http://xkcd.com/927/
The guys who control BBC are not employes of policy or any other BBC department. The old boy networks in UK currently see the open Internet as extremely dangerous and will do almost anything to monitor/limit/regulate/restrict it.
> The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how.

Fundamentally, the problem has nothing to do with open or closed software: it's all about access to the decryption key. Open source doesn't really change this dynamic much as hackers have routinely retrieved keys from anything which they can access. You could implement something like HDCP where the content is encrypted all the way to the display device, at which point it's easy to have a completely OSS stack since it's just copying bytes to a specific location.

I'd like to think that at some point people will realize that making digital data uncopyable is, as Bruce Schneier famously quipped, like trying to make water unwet. In the meantime, I'd prefer that the software millions of people depend on be standardized and developed by conscientious security-minded professionals – i.e. not Flash.
Does that means Android emulator is going to be usable now?
Unite with Namecheap in the fight against CISPA
Not a fair comparison -- English prose

doesn't

care

how

much

whitespace appears between words, only that there's more than none. Python definitely cares how much.

Don't get me wrong -- I like Python and I use it a lot, but its reliance on syntactically significant whitespace isn't in the plus column.
"One of those tools was a voice based email service that quickly grew beyond our friends at the local senior houses"

If the service is doing well, why is it being shut down?
I'm disappointed by this post. There has been some amazing discussion on HN about the limitations of random routing for multi-threaded/event-driven frameworks. This post does not address those concerns.

Any app at sufficient scale will still encounter queuing problems even on the Cedar stack.
The slides are very informative (The reason I submitted it)
Agreed, it's a good thing the article is not legal advice because it's got so many basic errors that it would constitute actionable legal malpractice.

To clarify: an LLC means a "limited liability company" so the owners have limited liability. Their loss is limited to their investment. If the corporation's debts/losses exceed their investment, they don't have to pay those debts/losses out of pocket. The exception is the "piercing the veil" doctrine, which applies where the LLC is not being run as a separate business entity, i.e., it is financially or legally not treated as an independent entity by its investors, i.e., because they never have organizational meetings or they do not maintain separate bank accounts for the LLC. This risk is greatest with single-person LLCs, but can happen with any LLC.
Does http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/#comparison-to-egg answer your question? If not, what would?
Replication and sharding (horizontal and vertical scaling) in acid-state are in development right now. The developer's page has the road-map as well as his contact details: http://acid-state.seize.it. There's another project for distributed storage and data processing in Haskell called Holumbus http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/trac which powers one of the search engines for Hackage API's.
Congrats!

You may want to place a hyperlink to Palantir in your blogpost. I'm assuming it's these guys (?): http://www.palantir.com/
type 'level' to start.
Large parts of the Firefox browser (as distinct from the Gecko+SpiderMonkey) are written in JS. Have a look at the code some time. Or, just open chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox to get a taste.
What are you trying to say exactly??

iPlayer itself displays a ton of warnings that you need a TV license to use it.
Your title: "Study predicts political believes [sic] with 83 percent accuracy"

The article's title: "Study Predicts Political Beliefs With 83 Percent Accuracy"

Moral: Do not write your own headline, because you will get it wrong. Instead, copy the title from the article you're linking.

1. Pass your mouse cursor across the article's title, highlighting it.

2. Press Ctrl+C

3. Move to the HN entry form

4. Press Ctrl+V

How hard is that?
Oh, so it's more of an improvement rather than "eggs are horribly broken". I think I'm confused with the "easy_install vs pip" thing, where I also don't see much of a difference.

Easy binary retrieval sounds fantastic, though.
Can TPB lose?

Either it's deemed not to be copyright infringement and support is gained for TPB's position, ie wilful and complete copying is now allowed by legal precedent.

Or it's deemed infringing and the judge is obliged to throw the book at the infringers as they campaign for stronger copyright laws.

TPB are presumably not acting illegally in Finland in hosting links without hosting content? Can't they just send their lawyers as representatives, particularly as it would be a civil case.
You have no relevant comment on what I wrote either, I take it? Here I asked for references about the GP's claims.

Also, welcome to HN (or are the prepared troll accounts with a few hundreds of Karma running out? :-) ).
Wow, I actually got a bit of a buzz seeing one of my older items getting mentioned, albeit via a very circuitous route.

Thank you - significantly improved my day.

Added in edit

It's always bugged me that the top comment on the original HN thread about the Teleporting Turtle claims that the pseudo-code has a bug, and then subsequent, under-the-fold discussions realise that the code is correct.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1068715
The most popular Twitter abbreviations
> If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood

Look, I dislike DRM at least as much as you do but whether or not we like it, DRM is not going away any time soon. When you protest HTML5 gaining a standard way to specify this, you're saying “I would prefer most of the internet run on close binary plugins controlled by a single vendor until the rest of the world adopts my political views”. Since most people are going to stop using Netflix, Hulu, etc. I would at least like the system to be standard, competitive and well-secured.

Finally, it's a canard to make this an open source issue: it's really about control of the underlying platform: if the decryption key is extractable, it's game-over – and so the studios desperately want to end general purpose computing. Neither Windows nor WinDVD were OSS and yet the first DVD key extraction happened there shortly after release.
Why the name "wheel"?
isatty() to the rescue, but that's not to say that there shouldn't be a -- option or defaulting to a different mode depending on argv[0], like gzip does.

[0] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904875/functions/isa...