skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stallman has been viewed as "radical" his whole career. Certainly there was nothing more "pragmatic" about him in 2001.

The important distinction is that the things (you don't list specifics, so I'm just assuming) that Stallman finds "important" seem like senseless distractions to his audience. It's hard to remember now, but in 2001 the idea of patent-encumbered algorithms being a threat to free software was not nearly as well-understood as it is now. Most people in the community were happy to download and build LAME (or whatever), and just shrugged when the Linux distros turned out not to be able to ship it.

Stallman was right (and to be clear: he'd been screaming about patents for a decade already in 2001). We were wrong. This has been a pattern his whole career.

So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem a lot more clear in hindsight.
> Yeah, asteriod belt

One day in a distant future, a weakly godlike posthuman entity may want to call a feature of its own stellar system The Asteriod Belt. Other posthuman entities will, immediately recognize a fellow TI-99/4A enthusiast and start to play games together.

:-)
Right, that's why I said manufacturers would certainly be liable for design or manufacturing defects, just as they are now. But I can't imagine they'll be liable for routine fender-benders that aren't the result of some systematic defect.

I really don't see what's so hard about it. I think people are over-thinking the situation because they're anthropomorphizing the software. If a driverless car collides, the software isn't "at fault" instead of the "driver". Fault is a legal classification assigned to people. Rather, the car failed, just like cars can fail today, for all sorts of reasons. If that failure can be traced to some systematic problem the manufacturer could have foreseen, then the manufacturer might be liable. But if it failed for the various random reasons anything fails, because nothing is perfect and very complex things tend to be very much not perfect, then such failures will just be deemed an inherent risk of the vehicle, and whichever person owns and operates it will be liable, just as they are liable today for the inherent risks of the things they do.
How to Hack 10,000 Hours
Regardless of how you feel about the man, it's very difficult to predict when he's willing to compromise. LGPL is another common example of unexpected (at least for me) compromise.
Even if you are prudent and spread your savings across different banks, you might still find yourself one day seeking taxpayer help.

In December 2012, the FDIC and Bank of England published a paper saying:

"deposit guarantee schemes may be required to contribute to the recapitalization of the firm... insofar as a bail-in provides for continuity in operations and preserves value, losses to a deposit guarantee scheme in a bail in should be much lower than in liquidation."[1]

In a nutshell:

"...the new system raids the Deposit Protection scheme, gives it to the bank instead of you and when that fails to save the bank…then what? The bank fails again and there is no money left in the Deposit Guarantee scheme."[2]

[1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/news/2...

[2] http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/03/plunderball-the-new-euro-b...
One trick I didn't mention in the article: partially nullable unique indexes. The idea is you want multiple rows to be able to half-claim a value, but only one to really claim it. The value goes in the non-nullable column, and the second column is a nullable "claimed" column that is set to 1 to claim it. I haven't been able to think of any real use-cases for this though.
Where is good journalism about Cyprus
I'm fairly interested in what's going on in Cyprus at the minute. One thing that stands out to me is how much of the reporting is in slogans, metaphor & cliches. I realize (and accept) that for the general headline browsing public articles need to be made up of sentences that can be understood without context.

All the articles are told as stories but this story would be better told in numbers.

Why isn't there an article anywhere with tables & number for those people (like me) who are willing to take 30 minutes or an hour (or more) to understand it. When they say "Cypriot banks’ high exposure to bad Greek debt" or "Without ECB emergency funds, the Cypriot economy will collapse" what exactly are the mechanics of those things.

Presumably they borrowed (bonds) to invest in these Greek bonds. Who did they borrow from? How much? How much is in insured/uninsured accounts? What exactly does collapse mean?

A lot of Europeans & Cypriots would be interested in reading this kind of journalism. It seems like it should exist. Where is it?
Often, it reflects the age of the town.

Grid layouts were very common from the mid-19th century to about World War II. For example, Boston's colonial-era city center is a mess, but Back Bay and Cambridgeport are an orderly grid, and the postwar suburbs outside Route 128 are sprawl. A city like Chicago did not exist in 1776, and so it has a more orderly downtown.

There's also a certain path-dependence at work. Western states were also laid out in a rectangular grid by federal land surveys, and thus arterial roads often fell on the boundaries. Subdivisions, however, can be much messier, depending on when they were developed and what the developer felt like doing. Compare Seattle (prewar) to its outer suburbs across the lake (postwar). Or inner Phoenix (prewar) to outer Phoenix (postwar).
Stallman has two really, really annoying features:

1. He is a grating and uncompromising lunatic, and does not make any attempts to present himself as agreeable to other people.

2. He's been proven completely correct on everything he's warned us of in this industry to date.
Yeah... what are you talking about?

Enormous memory consumption = deduplication? Otherwise it doesn't seem enormous too me.

Sure ZFS made a lot of departures from the standard toolset with all its own stuff... but that stuff is better once you learn it.

I can easily get 600MB+/sec reads and writes on my pools with are pretty commodity stuff. One of my pools is 95% full, which is high, and I just tested it and got over ~100MB/sec write ~150MB read.... good enough for me.
(Oh, and I just checked, it was scrubbing)

Here are my little ZFS peeves:
1. you can't grow raidZ vdevs. Reduces flexibility.
2. I wish there was a version of scrub that rebalanced data across vdevs.

By comparison BTRFS is nice, but nowhere close to ZFS. Last I saw a BTRFS scrub consists of cat'ing every file to null... which doesn't even cover the FS and metadata.
My concern with the license isn't legal so much as pain of administration. Maybe I'm just old fashion or lazy, but I prefer not to have to check my kernel repo against my kernel module repo to make sure they play nice. It is so much easier when you can just get it as part of the kernel.

That is the reason why I avoid the Nvidia binary driver as well.
Bitcoin Hits $1 Billion
Actually. It. Does. Not.
Got any source for that controller input lag? That does sound like a bummer.
Microsoft employee forced to remove unofficial BBC apps for Windows
Documentation that showed that products labeled as 'honey' were (in a widespread fashion) cut with other sweeteners would be plenty enough to trigger a controversy.

(I am quite ready to believe there are cheaters, but if it is more or less industry practice, it should be easy enough to document it)
This may not be related to the cable damage. Other reports have a dragging boat anchor damaging the cable, and the cable damage point is said to be too deep for SCUBA diving:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/28/2213222/ship-anchor-...
This is a pretty firewall happy mindset. Some of us don't have any "internal networks" as a matter of principle.
What makes a music streaming service great? Here’s why I think Tubalr’s awesome.
Ask HN: Co-Development, XCode, Git and Storyboards. Is there a decent solution?
I have had endless merge issues when working with other developers on iOS applications that utilize storyboards. After taking a gander around the internet for ways to solve the constant annoyance, I see two ways people are handling it.

1) Tiptoe around the commits. Just coordinate your work to minimize stepping on each other's toes. Which means constant 'I'm pushing changes to x storyboard now' and 'Are you working in y storyboard?' This is fine/mildly irritating with a two person team, but it would be hell with anyone else involved.

2) Granularity. Break your storyboards down into the minimum reasonable piece. This method means that it is less likely that you are going to be working on the same file. Although, this doesn't prevent conversations about who is working on what, it just minimizes them.

I ask you, good people of HN, is there another, better way?
Oh, that's easy -- they submit a question with no link and no context.
April Fools Pranks for Developers
Disbar Jane Hanlin for Misconduct
To further this point, take a look at "Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library", which outlines Stallman's very pragmatic reasoning for his strategy regarding the GNU C libraries: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

> So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem a lot more clear in hindsight.

I remember reading what Stallman said about cell phones, location tracking, and privacy back in ~2004 and thinking he was being paranoid.

Boy was I wrong.
Why is Oracle investing in Btrfs (GPL), rather than dual-licensing zfs as cddl/GPL?
Convert New Users to Evangelists: Understanding the Post Sign Up Funnel
Just to add to your thought, Siri came from SRI Research which describes itself as:
R&D and Solutions for Government and Business
SRI International is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government, industry, foundations, and other organizations. SRI’s 2012 revenues were approximately $545 million.

http://www.sri.com/work/timeline/siri
SRI spun off Siri from SRI in 2007 and Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010.

There are a lot of governmental, or government-associated organizations which tend to work with a high level of long-term technical depth. Granted, those organizations generally show less/varying ability to quickly get technologies out for public use than VCs.

In an ideal world, it would be nice to imagine that these long term organizations could operate on the downstream income from products benefitting from their focus. However, I think the typically the closing of that loop is through the relatively disconnected path of gov't funding: if that gov't/society benefits, and that organization can claim a link with past successes, then more gov't funding follows...
> But what if, instead, the only point you want to make is that the 2 largest distributors control 65% of the market. Which graph demonstrates that more clearly?

Apparently, the OP has never heard of stacked bar charts?
Yes possibly, although I wouldn't expect so many to drop on the road by coincidence when the fields are far more vast. The particular case could be interpreted from many angles, all speculation without testing the bees. Perhaps it was the sheer heat of the pavement under the sun that chocked them. In any case, the startling number of bees in the grille of my car doesn't call for any thought about disease, mites, or pesticides.

Of course I'm not saying cars are the primary cause, but I believe getting struck by motor vehicles may have a major impact on the population. Considering the number of deer-vehicle collisions and similar, it is at least worth considering.
It wouldn't make any sense to restrict what people list only to what Amazon knows they bought. For one thing, a friend could have bought a hardcover from Amazon and gifted it to me in person. Amazon's objective is to sell you more books, not worry about where you bought your last one.
imho, that's only half the problem. if you're bound to use .net for web stuff, chances are they will also force iis on you.

suddenly you can't use httplistener anymore and you have build an httpmodule for iis. so now you either build your own handler or use one of the existing ones.

i guess if you build your own isapi extension it's probably not very bad, but if you go through the asp.net "stack" it suddenly becomes a whole different story.
So, what's wrong with his Node code? What's the tell?
Same logic with Real Estate agents. My friend's agent tried to get him to sell his house with every low-ball offer that came in...
In defense of the modern male, things just aren't as simple as getting on a whim of building "walls and sidewalks, installed woodstoves, laid tile, added electrical circuits and plumbing fixtures, fixed furnaces". There are so many codes these days you can easily do something not to code and it cost you twice as much. Changing light fixtures and faucets is one thing - major construction is another.

As an example, my friends furnace is going out. Not a huge deal, they can buy a new one and have it installed. But wait! Now the AC unit that sits outside isn't up to code - it's too close to the property line (although it was fine back in 1989). That has to move, along with a fair amount of electrical and plumbing to support it. How would he know that?

It's just not worth it if something is done incorrectly. Better to pay a bonded contractor to do something right and spend your time doing something fun. If something goes wrong it's on him.

Also, I think HGTV has screwed us as a nation. Now every wife on the plant thinks it's so easy to tear down a wall and get that open floorplan to the kitchen. What's worse every husband agrees! And it's all done in a half-hour! Months later, when your marriage is on the skids and you've gone to Home Depot 30 times and spent twice what a contractor would charge you finally learn your lesson.
> You're using a subset of JS as an IR, which is something the language was never designed for and not inherently good at

I agree it was not designed for it. However I a not sure what "inherently good at" means - after v8 showed up in 2008, for example, many types of code suddenly became very fast. Were they always inherently fast?

> To get full performance you need significant engine changes including a mode switch, validation step, and special purpose compiler.

I disagree. Firefox did pick that option because it seemed best, but I believe it is possible to achieve similar speeds with other approaches. As the slide here shows,

http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27

on many benchmarks, even without any new optimizations modern JS engines are already fast on asm.js code. And with new optimizations, even without things you just mentioned, they should be able to get fast on the rest. I saw some activity on the v8 bug tracker indicating possible work in that direction, which I am very curious and hopeful about.

> And of course, the JS as IR doesn't really qualify as human readable in any meaningful sense.

Yes, it is not intended to be - like the output of closure compiler, etc. Note though that emscripten can generate asm.js in debug mode, which is not minified, and actually quite readable - you can recognize function and variable names, for example. It looks a little quirky to be sure ;) but it is more readable than compiler IRs like LLVM for example, in my opinion (and certainly far more readable than x86 or ARM assembly).

> However, in doing so you're already relying heavily on unspecced implementation details of existing engines.

Performance is not specced at all for JavaScript. Again, when v8, nitro and tracemonkey came out in 2008-2009, many types of JS code suddenly got fast. There wasn't a spec for any of that. No one says modern JS engines should use int32 when a value never goes out of the int32 range, but all modern JS engines do that (in hot functions).

> So, my point is that it's a hack... a really brilliant hack that might actually be the best path forward for a universal IR on the Web. But it's still a hack, and it brings with it some serious pain points that still need to be resolved.

I fully agree it is a hack, and it has various pain points. It's a compromise, not a clean solution from scratch. I hope we can resolve many of those pain points in time, and that we can do that in collaboration with all browser vendors together.
Why did you go to all that trouble to make an analogy when you have no evidence to back it up?
Works in chrome for mac, but falters on iPad (even though http://caniuse.com/#search=worker says webworkers are supported)
"Everything isn't perfect; I noticed a slight bit of lag on the controller, and I can't point to a single game that would make one need to buy a system at launch."

From the linked article.
Thanks for the comments, though not necessarily true. As an agency recruiter that represents several companies, typically the recruiter is paid a percentage based on the hire's salary - so actually, their interests and yours are directly aligned in that way. You are correct though that in general, the recruiter wants to simply get a deal done. Getting an extra 10K for the candidate may result in an extra 2K in the recruiter's pocket, but if the deal doesn't happen it's 0K for the recruiter.

These examples are specific to contingency recruiting, which is not the focus of my business (more retained/engaged search).
Ask HN: Career Development Plans. Is there a point to this madness?
I have never really gotten anything out of "Career Development Plans". In the end they just seem to add overhead to the task I already don't have enough time to accomplish. Actually, each time the development planning period comes a long I start looking for new jobs. I see these as a useless exercise when in the end real work gets in the way of achieving these "goals".

Why do companies, especially older or larger corporations, seem so set on this method? Do you find value in the process? Is it really "career development" if it's not something I want to do? What is so wrong with not wanting to move up or being happy with the amount of responsibility (or maybe work/life balance) you currently have?
Well for one thing, it makes keeping gifts secret more difficult. Seriously though, you could also share a Gmail account but why do that when there's no incremental fee (households can share a Prime account)? It just leaves you with a more confused data set and poor product recommendations.
> When you spend most of your waking hours working, that severely curtails your ability to make penis jokes (or really, any sort of joke).

Meh, you could still do so within a group of friends even at a conference I would think, as long as it's in between sessions or otherwise at a break in the action. But when you're sitting in an audience surrounded by strangers and attending to whatever professional topic brought you there, it's probably not as good of an idea.

I come from a community that is rather famous for being "not very formal", but we have a very clear distinction between when it's appropriate to be jovial and when formality is called for, and when formality is called for we go way above and beyond. Not because of sexism, but the neutrality of tone is definitely a nice side effect.
Internet Rallies Against Kickstarter for Nine-Year-Old Girl
I might be missing something obvious here as I only just woke up but that thread looks entirely innocuous and uncontroversial to anyone who doesn't accept the constant refrains to the necessity of the state, is that really a position that will get you hellbanned here?
Round Two of the Copyright Wars
1. When there is a bug in the code that writes the ZFS stuff, why should the bug be addressed by the fsck code. This would assume, that you know of the bug beforehand, but then you could better fix the bug in the code that writes.

2. When there is a bug in the on-disk-state it should be addressed by the code that reads the data , not by a fsck tool.

2.1. The correction of the bug in the on-disk-state should be done on the basis of the exact knowledge about the bug and not by a generic check tool.

3. Repair is always based on assumptions. Those could be correct or incorrect. The more you know about the problem that led to the repair-worthy state, the more probable the assumptions are correct.

4. What is the reasoning behind the argument "when your metadata is corrupt , that the data is correct" and so you could repair metadata corruption without problems. It sounds more sensible to fall back to the last known correct and consistent state of metadata and data, based on the on-disk-state represented by the pointer structure of the ueberblock with the highest transaction group commit number with a correct checksum . The Transaction Group rollback at mount does exactly this.
I think the problem is not so much with his message but with the steps that he suggests to address it.
People are uncomfortable with doing things that severely change their lifestyle and it's easier to rationalise someone as crazy than it is to change.

In 2001 there were plenty of people who were critical of Microsoft and their market share abuse but this was at a time when saying "stop using Windows" was akin to saying "stop driving a car".
Seven Languages: Week 4 (Scala) - Day 1
You'd think with 30% to 50% dying each year, at some point we should start to see some fitness selected.
It seems kind of paranoid to suggest that Amazon would manipulate an API that's so central to their business for the purpose of forcing an minor acquisition. Not to mention it would probably be cheaper to just buy the target for a few million dollars.
I don't know where this is coming from. I can't perceive any lag in my unit when playing all sorts of games. I've hooked up an xbox 360 controller and there's no difference. There's no more input lag on an ouya than on an xbox 360 as far as I can tell.

There are a couple games built using an older version of the ouya Unity plugin that introduced some lag, so that might explain it.

Full disclosure: I am an employee of OUYA. But any developer that has had a dev unit for the past 3 months can chime in. We never got this feedback until a couple people in the press brought it up.
It's right there in the title. ZFS does not need a fsck tool. That is the point. All the rest of it is telling you why.
I took a long break from this series due to, well, cancer. But I'm cancer-free now and recovered enough to start blogging again, so here's the next part!
This is only for the Kickstarter backers, though. The public launch is in June. If the lag is due to software, it could be fixed by then, for everyone.
Introducing The Twilio Module For Node.js
Yes. I probably could have mentioned race/ethnicity, age, and even citizenship status as well.
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be.

The reason Emacs users have their own unique setups is because they tailor the environment to their specific uses and preferences. That's going to be different for everybody.

Posting the entire configuration would add a lot of code that most people just wouldn't be interested in. It's easier to call out the interesting parts.
I'm guessing Goodread's data set on book collections is maybe 1/1000th as large as Amazon's. They're more likely buying them for the community of heavy readers and the team.
How to SEO: 10 top tips in 2013