skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I love using zsh (in combination with oh-my-zsh) on OSX but the only thing I've noticed after using it a year is that it's becoming very very slow. As in, it usually takes me 5-10 seconds to login to a new session (locally) and be able to see the prompt and type something.

Clean the history file.
He still can't write a compiler, or do anything new with regards to Operating Systems. Think about the things we read on HN and say "Impressive" to. None of them are on the list.
The frame of this OpEd is insane.

Anyone who understands what the word "Pandemic" means should also understand that pandemic disease is an inevitability.

The question is what can we do as a society (or societies) to reduce transmission, mitigate the severity and treat the afflicted if possible. It's why Public Health is so important.

(And to be fair to the author, the piece doesn't seem to pick the super weird frame that the title of the piece does. As Mitt Romney pointed out during the election regarding his GM bailout piece, the authors don't write the article titles)
The description sounds accurate compared to what I heard when I was in contact with Microsoft insiders. That was about 15 years ago. What's surprising to me is that it is still this way.

A lot of the justification for being exceedingly conservative about performance improvements was based on the difficulty of doing testing that is sufficient to leave no doubt that changes don't cause regressions nor any side effects bearing on compatibility.

I'm surprised that hasn't changed, or that the value equation about possibly breaking customer software hasn't changed. By now this approach must be a very entrenched culture.
Bug 698544 – Background configuration is missing in terminal profile editor
Now Apple wasn't the first to offer a 7" tablet, was it?
Because a wordpress[1] site with a $20 template is all most small businesses need for their brochureware site.

The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application.

The only reason the majority of small businesses think they need custom functionality is because they don't know enough to know what they're really trying to do.
Try to listen to what the client wants to accomplish, not how they want to accomplish it, and see if you can come up with an off the shelf solution to their problems (or refer them to someone else who can).

Think about all those times someone on stackoverflow asks how to do something in a really roundabout way that seems wrong. The first question you ask is "what are you trying to accomplish?" Most of the time there is a simpler way to do it.

Edit:

[1] When I say wordpress, I mean wordpress/drupal/cushycms not just wordpress. Basically anything where you're not charging the client to build a custom blog/CMS engine, or charging $2k for a custom design.
It was a great episode indeed. I think was the only good episode of the second season. I didn't even bother with 3rd season after that. First one is a classic though.
On a slight tangent: the iPad Mini is the best consumer electronics product I have used in a long time. I had a Surface RT before it, and while it was a neat device, the Mini has genuinely integrated itself into my workflow:

1) The size and weight are such that I can grab it along with my half-size notebook and the styling (I have a black one) is conservative and I don't feel weird pulling it out in a meeting. The Surface RT is too big to use say while waiting in line.

2) LTE is a game-changer. Microsoft is dead-wrong that you don't need to offer a tablet with LTE. It really maximizes the utility of the device. Yeah, I could carry around an LTE hotspot, but the battery life on those is ass, and I would feel stupid pulling that out at a meeting. Meanwhile, with LTE + Exchange e-mail, I don't feel so tethered to my blackberry. And tethering to my laptop over bluetooth is dead-easy.

3) The battery life is phenomenal. My current usage reading shows 12 hours usage and 7 days standby with 10% left. And I never turn off LTE/Wi-Fi/push e-mail.

4) Portrait 4:3 is the way to go for a work tablet. The RT's screen is a lot bigger, but the 16:9 ratio is useless for what is ostensibly a "work" device. Reading a document in portrait mode, the usable width of the Mini's screen is only 0.5" smaller than the RT's.

In many ways it's a shitty device. Old processor, little memory, overly glossy, low-resolution screen. But Apple just nailed the key features needed in the form factor: always-on connectivity, battery life, and size/weight/conservative styling.
Preventing commercial Cyber Espionage
> The caching misbehavior of referencing counting has been greatly exaggerated, especially in the context of UI where responsiveness is much more important than raw CPU speed. Also, the ref counting tradeoff seems to work better for device (e.g. all the cool kids [1] are doing it).

Apple's ARC is a compiler hack. It only works if you happen to use set of Cocoa libraries that are recognized by the compiler and allow for some magic incantation.

You cannot make any Objective-C library ARC aware.

ARC is a good solution for Objective-C, because Apple never managed to have their GC working safely in all situations, given the underlying C type system.

> .NET still does GC, it is only the WinRT APIs (something like COM) that manage resources through ref counting. There is some cool interop magic that makes this somewhat transparent to the programmer.

True, but C++ does not and you still have the performance penalty of reference counting.

The only way to have reference counting with good performance is do what Parasol or Objective-C do, by removing unnecessary increment/decrement operations thanks to dataflow analysis.

Which is something that you cannot do just by using the WinRT runtime and need to rely on the cleverness of the compilers.

Actually, are you aware that reference counting tends to be presented on the first chapter of many CS books about garbage collection as poor man's GC?
The Linux kernel developers take backwards compatibility very seriously. Here is a tame excerpt from Linux on the subject:
"Seriously. Binary compatibility is so important that I do not want
to have anything to do with kernel developers who don't understand
that importance. If you continue to pooh-pooh the issue, you only show
yourself to be unreliable. Don't do it." [1]

[1]https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495
Regardless of one's stance on the well-hashed out debate of whether ideas are worth nothing, the guy suing was one of the three co-founders with equity. To kick him out like that without proper recompense is unjust and malicious. To me, the two other founders' characters are suspect and they shouldn't be trusted.
Prototypical freelance gig: please use Ikea furniture, our budget is not large. Just change the height of that table from 3ft to 2.75ft. Also, please make it fit in this room that's too small for it. Stack this Ikea couch on top of it, but leave room for another chair that my uncle built in the 80s.
World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers in 2013
Your words exactly mirror my experience after having my first child, too.

I still waste time, but I've never been more productive. I work full-time, have my own company in my spare time, and my child at every moment he's awake.
Since only I can see it, at the moment, the comment has 7 points.
> Who knows what was going through his mind when he decided enough was enough.

Who knows what's going through anyone's mind when they are being productive, either?

We hackers go by output, which is why his article is about being more productive.

Compassion or no, it's fundamentally hypocritical to espouse productivity as a virtue and then do an about-face in your own personal choices.
The design is not just functional, it also indicates origin - like a trademark. They aren't copying Apple for the design, but because it is known and valuable in the market. It's like making fake Coke, in a fake Coke can. i.e. it's a marketing strategy, not a design strategy, to "look like an iPad mini".
Pivoting Yourself
Are you kidding? Web development is not just "pressing buttons". Get back to your Joomla or Wordpress site and think again before you post.
I cut my teeth building wordpress/drupal brochure sites for small businesses. I have inherited custom web sites for these customers who got duped by some punk developer who didn't feel like using an established solution.

I want to punch all developers in the mouth who think a custom application for this type of situation is a good idea. They give us all a bad name and exacerbate the cost problem.
"Almost compliant" would mean compliant except for guaranteeing the correct order of iteration, would it not?
Microsoft honcho pleads with media: 'Stop picking on us'
"preoccupied with existential thoughts"

This is important and really struck a chord with me. Totally agree.
What's the difference between Descartes' mediations and Aaron's writings? Ignoring the obvious, technology simply made them easier to read. They're avail. on his public website whereas Descartes' mediations are more commonly found in textbooks and reproductions of his originals.

Descartes probably isn't the best example because with one quick Google search, I found this: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/medit... Still, the principle remains true.
I deal with enough miscalibrated sperglords on a daily basis that the absolute last fucking thing on Earth I'd do in my small amount of free time is willingly watch a sitcom wherein they are depicted accurately.
> market the resulting product or service

and

> Understanding what the customer needs

Seem to be intended to go together but are really disjoint. Marketing the product isn't the same as understanding the needs of the customer. You can do both but they aren't implicitly the same thing.

Also, I don't quite understand how this is news worthy. It's an interesting thought, but there's no real discussion about any of this and as others have noted, there's no mention of Operating Systems or Systems Programming.
ISS: Watch the astronauts on their emergency repair mission
You missed the "/s" sarcasm tag.
Name.com hacked Change your passwords now
I think anyone that's ever seen a sheet of paper would probably come up with the same design as Apple there. It's a rectangle with a screen on it. The case is made of some sort of hard material so that the electronics don't fall out or get smashed, and the screen is glass because a thin sheet of glass protects the screen from damage while still allowing the touch sensor to work.

Apple's innovation in the space mostly consists of convincing people to want to buy a very large phone. I'm sure they would have sold just as many iPads if the bezel looked different. The software was also good and let people take what they liked about their iPhones and put it on a bigger screen.
No.

"Full-stack" has become trendy as slightly-with-it recruiters realize that the not-with-it rest of the corporate world encourages a certain combination of tight specialization and mediocrity in which people say, "I don't do 'back-end' " and that people who've been steeped in that world for a few years are undesirable employees. As it becomes an HRism, I'm starting to think that the new rule is: if you say "full stack", you're not.

I aspire to be competent over all sorts of technologies, but my definition of "the stack" is pretty expansive and I have a lot of gaps to fill.

Also, you're not a renaissance person if you don't understand science, mathematics, economics, history, art and literature (and much more) to, at least, a passable degree.
Yes. And even if we limit the scope to "hacker" (since the blog is called "Singularity Hacker"), the lack of any hardware skills on the list seems a rather glaring omission.
While I'm in agreement that one can't dismiss them out of hand, I wonder how likely a 1918 Style pandemic really is. I don't believe we have had a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu in modern times. 1918 was a long time ago. The outbreak of HIV comes closest. It's easy to forget how much modern practices cut down on disease: wash hands, don't drink water people (or animals) poop in, sterilize (or dispose of) medical devices, store your food properly, don't live in a house also occupied by rodents, etc... That is all a great start, and we haven't even talked about antibiotics and other modern medical tech. Granted, access to all of this is far from uniform around the world. However, the situation has been steadily improving. Epidemiology and monitoring are also vastly better than years ago. I was working in pharma during the SARS outbreak and saw firsthand how fast research can move when people perceive something as an existential threat. Government and corporate red tape that normally gums things up immediately falls by the wayside (as does the usual academic quarreling over turf and recognition). Not wanting to see mass death has a way of focusing the minds of even the most recalcitrant beaurocrats in any organization.
I can't think of another good or service with this much variety in price or opacity in what you get. For small projects, you're talking free or $10ish for an open CMS + theme to maybe $10K for custom stuff. That's a 1000x difference (and maybe little discernable difference to the client).

If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really want a nice one. 10-100x, and there is no "free" entry point here.

Similarly with a house, it's pretty clear why house one costs more than house two. Using apartments in Manhattan as an example, you're looking 250K for a studio up to maybe 12.5M for a penthouse. 50x with a very clear reason.
How, exactly, does identifying full-stack developers as "Renaissance Men" change things in real life?
That article is probably doing more harm than good. Using Vim with Dvorak came as naturally as switching to Dvorak from QWERTY (that is, it took some work, but now I wouldn't use anything else).
There is a great quote in the post: "Incremental improvements just annoy people and are, at best, neutral for your career."

Working for several different Fortune 500 companies this has been my experience many times. I have worked on products where I made a large number of incremental improvements that never got incorporated into the released product. Taken on their own the improvements don't change things much, but in the aggregate they make a significantly better product. Why didn't most of my incremental improvements get incorporated into the product? Every change, no matter how minor, is perceived by management to be a highly risky proposition. Product managers won't get promoted because the product is 4% better, but they could potentially get fired if that same incremental improvement had an unforeseen negative consequence.

Once the short term sales mindset gets power, hit products are viewed as cows to be milked and not as things that need continued maintenance and improvement. As an engineer in such an enterprise you watch helplessly as your competitors slowly but steadily pass you, and then someday upper management wonders why the magic money machine broke down. Some large enterprises avoid this fate but they seem to be the exception.
No, the Nexus 7 came out a few months before the Mini,and is much better (IMHO).
Not satire. The author simply assumes that his readership comprises design nuts that won't see all three proffered redesigns as exactly the same.
Will Jony Ive Let A Flat Design For iOS 7 Fall Flat?
Lynda.com Raises a Whopping $103M in First Outside Funding for Video Lessons
I think this is the startup of a powerful representation for a startup. I think the cash should be able to go negative to represent draw downs from savings or outside investment. This reminded me of Richard Caro's "Cashflow Fingerprint" for startups see http://blip.tv/science-to-profits/startup-cashflow-fingerpri... and work by Sal Virani and Mark Twum-Ampofo on a "Visual Language for Finance" http://www.saintsal.com/2012/01/a-visual-language-for-financ... If you could represent the decision tree in advance (or at least develop an initial model) a tornado diagram (for example http://smartorg.com/2011/10/tornado-diagram-resolving-confli... ) would complement this visualization.
I think it's partly because of blurry line between software products and programming services.

Many of the software products, proprietary or open source offer massive functionality for very low cost but this is of course because the development costs have been aggregated across many customers.

For example , I was asked to build an online customer management system for someone on a budget. So I googled around for open source solutions to the problem , found a few that fitted their requirements and showed them to the client.

Once they found one they liked, I FTPd the PHP upto their server, setup mysql and did the basic configuration for them. I then pointed them to the URL for the system, gave them some basic instruction and charged them $25 for the hour.

They were over the moon with that, since it was so quick and cheap.

Of course later they come back and say "hmm, this system is good but I wish there was an extra field here that did this and this part should work slightly differently".

So I said "hmm, ok. This is probably 5 hours work so except to pay around $125".
At which point they said "What?! This is just a few small changes, how come the price is so much higher?! The system is open source, so you can just make these changes easily". This then puts you on the defensive as you have to justify that in fact to do these changes will involve reading a ton of someone elses code , finding the correct places to change things and testing that everything won't break.

Now , if they had paid $1000 for the original system (probably a fair price for the amount of actual functionality it enabled for them) then the $125 would look more reasonable.

The amount of value that they gained for the $25 was so high that you have their expectations have been set unreasonably high.
Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Opens Taiji Club Just Before His Resignation
Funny, I just call them "engineers".

An Engineer (with big E, as in Designer, Doctor or Lawyer) must know the business side of things, must understand how to design technical solutions that solve real problems, and must know how to factor in the costs in his designs, and must have a fundamental grasp of science and technology so that he can be versatile when needed (if he is "too" versatile, he is a generalist).

Of course, as a designer, the Engineer's designs tend to be bold but generally not deeply aesthetically pleasing. IMHO, to be a "Renaissance Man" an Engineer must also master aesthetic beauty, have a classical education and a deep fundamental knowledge of the humanities.
If you present it as a commodity, they will treat it as such. "A website" is a thing. "A tailored solution to help your business do X" is not.
Fair enough - I have no direct personal experience with Mongo myself. Coming from a more traditional DB background, what I've read indicates it has a lot of technological flaws, but I didn't want to be too harsh in my judgement without personal experience.

For my own curiosity, what issues caused you the most trouble? The lack of transactions combined with the extremely coarse grained write locking were what put me off the most.
>"You're basically asking a friend to be an untrained therapist for free."

On the flip side, going to a therapist is just paying someone to pretend to be your friend for a while. My insurance (Kaiser; about $600 per month) covers something like 80% of 6 therapist visits, and after that it's all on me. This is probably the worst part of trying to seek help; the sickness basically prevents you from taking all the steps necessary to start getting better. I've thought long and hard about how to solve this (maybe have a service that just handles all the idiotic HMO stuff for you to make it as low-effort as possible), but I still don't have a good solution, and "hacking the medical industry" has traditionally been a non-starter.
"I can write a program and have it run without modification on my phone, on an embedded computer running sensors, on a tablet, on my laptop, my desktop computer, my hifi, my network hard drive, a huge server being rented to me on the other side of the world. I can even make it easily distributable so it can run safely on other peoples computers who don't fully trust me. It's unimaginable that any proprietary system from 20 years ago would have been able to produce that state of affairs."

That's what Java was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) it appeared 1995 - 18 years ago.
ipad mini - Release date November 2, 2012

nexus 7 - Release date July 13, 2012

> Why was it up to Apple to create a thin and light tablet with asymmetric bezels?

> Why couldn’t someone else have done that?

because they have done it before Apple? (see nexus 7)
i thought the coolest japan's innovations is Ruby
Why they're shocked isn't worth getting into really at first: The first question is, are they even able to get that sort of budget together. Then the second question is, what sorts of things are available for budgets they can muster up, and what are the constraints on said things.
I'd strongly suspect you're working with smaller to mid-sized businesses — or maybe just individuals.

I've done a ton of work for smaller outfits, and the fact is that whatever you're billing is coming directly out of their own wallet, or close to it. Imagine the shock when the mechanic says you need to spend $2,500 on a new transmission. That's what your clients feel.

That's also why I've turned away smaller projects for the past year. Everything becomes a never-ending, underpaying project from hell where you end up doing little tweaks for free because you're a nice guy/gal. You also end up competing with joker developers with lower rates who will probably do a hack job (the fight of "doing it cheap" vs "doing it right" is timeless on the small business front).

My point: If your clients are shocked and opting not to do work with you, find bigger clients. If bigger clients won't work with you, lower your rate and find smaller clients.
Right. From what I gather about a lot of these cheap Chinese clones of, well, any device, is that there apparently seem to be numerous reference hardware designs built around some cheap ARM SoC.

They take that board, toss it in a housing made to look like an iPad Mini/SGS 4/ whatever, and sell it for cheap.

It's not made to innovate, it's made to be a knockoff that's as cheap as possible. Although, it does seem that some of these clones do have features that are wanted by that market but aren't offered on the device being imitated. For instance a lot of these cheap knockoff phones have dual-SIM capability.
Best scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJXww8aizAM
so, no mobile use at all?
We need to continue providing non-forgiveable gov't loans to students so that they can continue funneling $8000/year into their schools while also taxing them and their parents to give grants to profs on tenure so that publishers can conceal these publicly-funded works of research from us.
Agreed. This is why the scientists playing with creating influenza variants freak me out. I suspect they have the 1918 variant on hand, combine that with something a bit slower to present and we'd have a winner.
Maybe I was too optimistic in people's ability to notice blatant sarcasm haha
Totally agree. This was one of the most insightful things I've read on this site in years.

EDIT:
Hey, what if it's a natural cycle, like tons of other stuff? Normally, it comes and goes, and the sickness is when it doesn't go. Not really a big leap from your point, but something to think about.
+1 and I would've bought one immediately if it didn't have the same internals as my iPad 2. Put the 4th gen parts inside with a retina display and I'd be all over that.
Thank you for shedding light.