skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes you can. There are solutions to move user profiles to a central server and boot from there. Mac can do the same thing with Mac OSX Server edition.

An entirely different question is, is it sensible?
Our university has two computer clusters accessible by Computer Science students only, one with Windows and other with Linux - 200 computers each. Guess which one is giving more problems? And the reason is that Windows server is a much more refined product. I would say that it's slower,but it makes sure everything is correct, double checks if there is no corruption, if the connection is authenticated, if you are not over your quota, and then it does fantastic job of restoring the machines to ideal state every day and keeping them updated.

Linux does the same thing,but only partially. Profiles get corrupted frequently,because it just seems to write what comes from the network, and if it looses connection it takes a while before it realises that it happened. And after that, it proceeds as if nothing had happened, while Windows has procedures to repair user's profile. As a result, our admin is constantly fixing all the weird problems with Linux machines, while our Windows machines keep running most of the time without a fault.

I am not saying that it's not possible to run Linux domain systems - but they require(in my experience) a lot more maintenance than Windows systems.
There's a lot of good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202381

(original LeChat announcement)

I'm pleased to see that Qwl has a different stance on XMPP than the 'lechat' user posted in the thread.
I wanted to submit this on DN (Designer News) but found out that it requires an invite code for registration.
Dear US government: are you serious?
On the nature of Jiggle.
Has the Internet destroyed the book market?
I read quite a bit, both traditional computer science and programming books and online material. I'm curious if anyone thinks the traditional book market (which is in decline) is near death?

For what you read, what do you look for in programming books? What drives you to buy a physical book?
I guess I could change WireframeApp to comply with most of your ideas. You could also do that, it's open source.

I read your blog post but I need more specifics. Could you send an email with more info?

Check it out: https://github.com/eduardordm/wireframeapp

Also available on the appstore (.99 cents) Sorry for not putting it there for free, but someone gave me 1-star rating and I got upset by it.
No one spends time on job solving "classical algorithmic problems", they are solved already ;) Unless you work in research and looking for more efficient solutions.

But understanding algorithms brings you to a new level and opens a wide scope of other problems you can solve by applying this knowledge.

If you are not using knowledge about algorithms in your programming job it doesn't mean such knowledge is useless. Maybe that means your problems are not hard enough for this knowledge to be applied.
Seemed like a harmless enough request with an easy yes or no answer. I find him asking a lot cooler than your response. If the situation is so sensitive to everyones well being, you shouldn't even be discussing it on a public forum. Get over it.
>I think the biggest problem here is the word 'bestseller'. 4000 is not a number I would associate with that word, prior to knowing what algorithms are used to determine those lists.

That. I'm for a pretty poor, and small sized, european country, with hardly a very reading population, and still a best-seller can sell even ten times that -- and make a popular writer something in the region of $30,000 a year or more.
There was a book on this a few years back: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140167129/jimloyshom...
Probably poker.
Well, here's something to think about: is it possible that sorting some data could have improved the performance of your code? Here is an example that my adviser used when he last taught algorithms at the undergrad level:

Given three arrays of integers, determine if it is possible to take a sum of three integers, one from each array, that equals a target value (say, 0).

It is not immediately obvious, but sorting the arrays will allow you to solve the problem much faster (whether or not this is the fastest solution possible is actually an open question). This problem has connections to several computational geometry problems, and I have heard that variations of it come up in certain real-world applications.

Also, there is more to algorithms than just sorting.
> This would conflict with greater/smaller than operators, which are also used on sets to express sub/superset relations.

Not any more than `[` being used for both literal lists and indexing.

> If it wouldn't cause trouble in the formal grammar, then at least in terms of readability.

It wouldn't cause the slightest trouble in the grammar, and I don't think it'd cause much if any trouble for readability either.
Just to leave a line here so I remembered that I need to rethink again on this...
My Google Reader UI that I made 3 days before the shutdown was announced.
I think most people are vastly over-estimating the number of books that get sold.

From http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/advice/bestlist.htm which is an old resource but the numbers are still within the same range:

"It does not take a tremendous amount of book sales to make a bestseller list. Depending upon the competition and category, sales of 50,000 books through bookstores over a period of weeks could do it. Some books have made #10 with sales of just 3,000 in one week. Most print runs are just 5,000 books, so 3,000 is a lot of books. On the other hand, with 119,000 titles being published each year, there is some competition for attention. In 1995, there were 93 hardcover fiction titles that sold more than 100,000 copies and 101 hardcover nonfiction title over that number. Softcover books did even better. Most first printings are 5,000 copies, and any book selling 5,000 copies a year is considered successful."
This is my favourite article on heists: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blancha...
Why don't they just put a cell radio in the DS? Then parents can call their kids home right in the middle of their video game.

I think the idea of "mobile phones" as a thing is going to pass. They're all just computers that happen to be able to make calls. Put cell radios in laptops and portable gaming systems and no one needs to choose between bringing their phone or their DS, or their phone or their tablet. Almost every computing device should also be a phone, in my opinion.
>I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold.

You'd be surprised on both counts. Actual rundowns I've read from technical authors can be even worse than the 4000/$12,000 mentioned here -- except if we talk about something like "The C programming language" or "Learning Perl".

Also: remember that 30% cut that Apple/Google etc takes of off your apps and e-books?

Well, traditional publishers take something like 90%.
Incrementor.js
> I don't understand why these changes make you switch from Chrome to Firefox.

Did you know that the Google Chrome New Tab page will occasionally display an advertisement for an entirely unrelated Google product? The latest one that I saw was for the Pixel! (NB: I've never seen this happen in Chromium.)
I can't believe you made it from Nixon to Hillary Clinton in a mere three or so steps. We could call it the reductio ad hilarium.
To some extent I agree... With the volume discounts from MS, and the fees payed for the shovel-ware, the Windows laptop/desktop probably does cost less than no-OS. Even then, they could probably get a knockoff/blank laptop/desktop direct from mfg from china... for desktops, they can order case/psu/mb/cpu/ram and self-assemble, in the mid-high range machines ($650+) you can even beat the likes of Dell in terms of machine/$$.

As much as it probably hurts their workflow, I'm willing to bet there are alternative avenues available.
The article doesn't even say what game he was playing. It wasn't necessarily blackjack, which as you observe doesn't confer a big advantage by knowing the enemy cards since your bet is already set and your strategy mostly is. Poker permits the most leverage for knowing hidden information, but in poker you scam the other players, not the casino (casinos very rarely offer poker games played against the house.)

Maybe it was Pai Gow Poker, which does have strategy that can be exploited by knowing the dealer hand you need to beat, and is often played for high stakes in VIP rooms.
That was an extremely interesting link, thank you.
Nintendo currently sells Mario at $40. A move to $30 would be profitable if Nintendo makes 33% more sales (ignoring costs). Do you really think Mario would sell 33% better on Android than it does on the 3DS?

Mind you, the majority of Nintendo Fans have a 3DS already.
Brevity is Awesome
If we manage to get a better supply of energy we can desalinate sea water. Fusion is always 30 years in the future, but I think solar+wind+storage(hydrogen?) could do it. This is being worked on. Also, a great part of the current production is wasted, which could give us some more time.

There is also the option of building farm skyscrapers [1]; I've seen an acticle about a test run recently. However, these also need a lot of energy.

I think it can be done. The greatest problem I see is the upcoming climate change which will force us to change a lot of the traditional agricultural patterns and which could be very unforgiving.

The problem is not the increase of temperature or the rise in sea level (except for Asia), but the change in precipitation patterns. What we need is more information and the ability to share and get the information from/to everyone involved, especially the small farmers in remote communities.

[1] like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
Leaving Twitter
Why? Because its not successful. See Neo Geo and Sony Xperia Play.

Every few years, someone tries this exact idea and fails. Plus, I don't want someone interrupting me when I'm in the middle of a Megaman boss. Thats just stupid.
If you're interested in learning more, "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein goes into some depth on these and other shenanigans.
I really dislike this diagram. I think it just perpetuates a damaging stereotype about research, one that makes it harder for people trying to do (entirely valid) types of research that fall outside of the stereotype.

The stereotype is that research is about making every-more specialised contributions that extend existing work in finer and finer-grained ways.

What research falls outside of this stereotype? Synthesis. Theorising deeper foundations that connect disparate bits of knowledge and gives a deeper understanding of them.

Why is the stereotype damaging? It equates research with simply making more specialised extensions to existing research, which means that it's seen as "a good thing" for research to be sharply-focused on a very specific topic. In a slogan: narrowness good, breadth bad. Breadth is seen as lack of focus, trying to take on too much.

But breadth is not always bad. It depends on what kind of research you are doing. Breadth can actual simplify the task and make it easier, if your task is developing a deeper, underlying theory.

And if someone can develop a deeper theory, that work can have -- to relate this back to the diagram -- an impact that projects across and reshapes whole segments of the circle.
I immediately was reminded of jwz's response to Michael Arrington about two years ago:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
I really wouldn't mind an RT based ARM system, if it were more price competitive (to even low-end x86 systems, and high end android), and wasn't using a locked boot loader. As it stands, no sale.
Death of an IT salesman
So far, the Wii U has been a $350 New Super Mario Bros. U box. It also gave me a way to play my Wii games without hearing the disc sounding like a jet engine (due to something wrong in my original unit's drive).

Where are the games for everyone else? I don't want to kill zombies or take hill #423, and I don't need any more versions of Angry Birds.
It's not that you're bringing up historical context. It's that your analogies overreach and don't make your points.

Of course we go to war for our interests. However, prior to Iraq, there was typically an existing conflict. Further, especially in more recent history, we at least attempted to manufacture some military pretext (Gulf of Tonkin, etc.) The difference with Iraq--and it's hard to believe that you really don't see this--is that there was no conflict and Iraq was not engaged in any hostile military action. We simply attacked them because of what the Executive declared they might do (WMDs or no).

The point is that it represents a new thinking and acceptance of the degree of power vested in the Executive. Even the architects of this power grab acknowledge this fundamental difference. See "Pax Americana" from the Project For The New American Century.

Edit: More specifically, see the report: "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century"

Your rebuttal regarding drones and Nazis falls down even more. Of course if a U.S. citizen is taking up arms with a nation that is openly at war with the U.S. (as eventually was the case), and is actively engaged on the battlefield, then the U.S. is justified in making no distinction between him and the enemy.

But, that the Executive has the right to declare that a U.S. citizen is an enemy combatant and may be killed with impunity is vastly different. You may take comfort in your degree of confidence that Al Awalki was a bad guy. However, the policy does not limit the Executive to targeting only those whom you believe to be deserving.

And, that is the very problem with your brand of thinking. Nearly everyone who ascribes to it does so under the belief that these policies and laws are necessary for "security" and will apply to only the bad guys.

But, that is the very point of our form of government and the Constitutional rights that we once held dear. The government (and worse, the Executive alone) doesn't get to decide unilaterally who is guilty or not. We are all entitled to due process, as "flexible" and inconvenient as that may be at times. It is our protection against the inevitable abuse that will arise in its absence, and it is one of our most powerful protections against tyranny.

None of this makes your case in any event. Your initial argument was that the Executive has no more power than they've had in the past. The minutiae of drones vs. Nazis into which you've waded just speaks to whether you think the Executive should have such increased power. In doing so, you are actually acknowledging that they do, in fact, have it, thereby making my point.

Something else that you may not have noticed is that your historical comparisons--invalid as they are--point to various incidents across centuries in your search for precedent. But, notice that these did not all take place at one time. It is, in part, the sum total of all of these powers and abuses invested in our Executive at once that represents such a vast increase in power.
5% - but it's the very important 5% where I'm optimizing existing code. The "classical algorithmic problems" you reference are almost all optimization problems; there's a naive search/sort/comparison, but how can you do it better?

The algorithmic problems I deal with are things like:

- Why the hell is this API call running O(n*m) SQL queries? Can I tweak my logic and use of the ORM get it down to O(1)? The ORM doesn't let you forget about the underlying algorithms, it just makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't understand them.

- Why is my single SQL query so slow? DB optimization is very much a "classic algorithmic problem", in that you need to understand the operations the DB performs and optimization is reducing its search space / # of operations.

- We're using too many jQuery pseudoselectors like ":hidden" and they're causing framerate drop on a particular page; can we use some dynamic programming / memoization techniques to dramatically reduce use of pseudoselectors?

- We need to figure out what font size will allow a piece of text to fit within a container on a PDF, but the bounds of the font (space consumed) don't scale perfectly linearly with the font's point-size. Finding the best fit is a search problem!

- And that's not even getting into infrastructure scaling issues! Do you know why Vertica might be a better fit for your data set and end user needs than Hadoop? If you understand the difference between an ETL approach and a MapReduce approach to data analysis, you're thinking about algorithms!

I spend a meaningful amount of time on "classical algorithmic problems" while doing frontend and backend web development, even if I've never had to re-implement mergesort.
It's been proven time and time again in studies (some are linked in these threads here).

I see that claim a lot, but when I look at the "studies" being cited, they rarely stand up to even cursory scrutiny about their methodology and the choice of test subjects.

These studies (or those making a case for TDD based on them) tend to do things like generalising results based on a few undergraduate students writing toy programs to draw conclusions about professional software developers working on industrial-scale applications, or using no unit testing at all as a control rather than say doing either test-first or test-last unit testing but not following the TDD process.

If you have better sources, please do share them. Developing a non-trivial application using two different techniques is rarely cost-effective, even without controlling for having different developers or experience in the two cases, so getting good quality data about the effectiveness of software engineering processes is hard.
I'm not so sure. I've always felt there's a quite specific form of elitism among many HN readers. Somewhat similar to what you find in business schools, but less based on privileged and more on a lack of "bildung".
Having spent a lot of time on HN, I think the demographics here roughly break down to two halves: those who react with empathy to people in weak positions, and those who react with disdain.

The bulk of this discussion (and many others) really just boil down to this.

Sometimes I wonder if the seeming distribution of sociopaths on HN is representative of the general population, or if we have more of them than other communities.
Tmuxinator Config Generator
9 Best Free Haskell Books - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
This. I've been marking undergrad assignments, and you would not believe how many sets and sorted sets I've seen implemented by linear scan over an unsorted array (or linear scan over a sorted array with linear time insert, and a few other, worse things). This lack of understanding of algorithms leads to slow, unscalable solutions, and even writing business middleware you at least need to know which standard library collections to use for good performance.
>Let's suppose Mallory has access to email for "hostmaster@fqdn." but can't get access to the actual "fqdn." webserver to do the attack that way; Mallory sets up "fqdn.localsite.com." to fool Alice's browser which is subject to a "localsite.com." search path.

Then you're probably still in trouble either way. But suppose the key for the actual cert for "fqdn." was generated with a bad random number generator like what happened with Debian a while back, or the attacker at one point broke into the webserver for "fqdn." and copied the private key and has since been locked but without revoking the compromised certificate, or it was revoked but the client isn't checking CRLs. Now the fact that you used "fqdn." and not "fqdn" in your cert saves you from Mallory's attack using "fqdn.localsite.com".

>They're not equivalent, but most or all major CAs issue certs without terminating dots, apparently.

The CAs will issue a cert for whatever you ask them to issue it for. The issue is that people ask them for certs without the trailing dot.

The real trouble is that we've basically trained the whole world to type "example.com" and not "example.com." and then when it comes to HTTPS, if you type " https://example.com " then the cert has to have "example.com" at least in addition to if not instead of "example.com." or it isn't going to work. But that's no excuse for not allowing the distinction in cases where it can be made, e.g. for subdomains that serve cookies but are never typed by the user, so that the cert for those can contain only the dot-terminated name and the attacker then has a harder time impersonating the subdomain to pilfer the cookie.
SMTP might be a better analogy, but I'll concede as it's irrelevant.

You're wrong about the compensation bit. It's entirely possible to send fake traffic and get compensation. Cutting that off is an entirely manual process; with someone noticing the fraud and reporting it. It's not some magic authentication that happens.

The reason things like sex lines (either premium rate numbers or just really high-rate areas) often do not work is because the costs are passed on through the various companies (so they'll clip anything over a few cents) or because they simply will not accept calls if they are not within the trusted system. If you have a VoIP line and try dialing a 1900 number, it won't work unless that VoIP provider has made a specific deal. It's not like they look at the calling number, then mail out bills to whoever they think the owner is.

Guess what: Folks don't accept limitations on dialing 911 (or the PSAP admin line, which is just a normal number). They're going to demand 911 be answered regardless of billing relationships.

At both 911 companies I've owned, the routing system depended on being able to "spoof" caller ID. We would have to accept whatever caller ID we were given, because there's it's essentially intractable to know who has the actual relationship with the end user. It's also not knowable if the connection handing me off this call is authorized to use that number. There's simply zero concept of that. Additionally, there's no such thing as a real master database correlating number-address. (That'd make things easy easier!)

Even if there was, it'd still be trivial to swat. Buy a number online, say your address is <target address>. Place a legitimate call that "authenticates". Change address, repeat. Worst case scenario (if you can't make an anonymous payment), hack someone else's VoIP account and change their address and place call.

You are right that this is a large problem. Some PSAPs have come under DoS attacks, getting a flood of fake calls. 9-1-1 is a critical piece of safety, and it's fairly unprotected. Funding is limited. Some of the vendors involved are laughably bad. And, at least a few years ago, there was a massive disconnect between technology/Internet and the emergency response side.
Well that's just messed up. I have no problem with Microsoft's market dominance; I just think they're a problem since they give the finger to our freedom of choice.
Irrelevant unless the company in question was selling ARM-based systems (which is impossible since they refer to Windows 8 as something that has changed in their business model, and previous versions of Windows did not support ARM. So they must have been selling x86 machines.
Opera moving to WebKit and Chromium