skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before you can fix any of the problems that would require you to be a US government contractor, you first have to fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded. There is an entire sub-industry of IT service firms who have perfected the art of bidding on government contracts, and win them regardless of their ability to build the best solution. They just have to present the lowest cost solution that meets all the requirements outlined. They are often monolithic corporate entities with multiple sub-entities, with so many layers of bureaucracy it's amazing anything get's built at all. I did some contract web work for on a government project, and just to get paid I had to set up accounts with 3 separate government agencies which had similar but separate account management and payment distribution software (most likely built by separate IT service contractors).

It's an industry that's ripe for disruption if you can figure out how to break down the walls, but those walls have been erected pretty damn high and solid.
We've already fixed it.
> "We as a society" didn't really do this.

Yes, we most certainly did. Start with the Bank Secrecy Act which was enacted, by duly elected representatives of the People of the United States, in 1970. This group of regulations "require[s] financial institutions, which under the current definition include a broad array of entities, including banks, credit card companies, life insurers, money service businesses and broker-dealers in securities, to report certain transactions to the United States Treasury."
We require contributors to sign a CLA before accepting pull requests to RethinkDB (http://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb) for several (excellent) reasons, explained here: http://www.rethinkdb.com/community/cla/

We've found that it's a low hurdle for contributors-- it's a common attribute of most open source projects and helps avoid headaches of ownership later on down the road.

Essentially, no project wants the question of who owns contributed code to come up. The SCO-Linux controversy would have been avoided if a CLA had been in place, and since then they've become standard practice.
Golang structs for Citibike NYC
Great, have fun going around saying "Xbox" and having almost everyone assume you mean the current model, the 360.
AirCrack-NG Updated after 3-Year Hiatus
A procurement reform program was Philadelphia's submission to the "Mayors Challenge" this year (http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=184A...). It lost out to Providence, RI's proposal (I have argued elsewhere that Providence's proposal, while noble, is probably a boondoggle: http://wellformedness.com/blog/on-the-providence-word-gap-in...)
Sure. Usually when you find a strict rule, it's a rule to be considered ceteris paribus -- when all other things are fixed in place. So while thinking about parameters, I think about minimising them and ignore other considerations. When thinking about side-effects, I think about minimising them and ignore other considerations.

It's when the rules conflict that mere rule-following ends and professional judgement begins.

Basically, as noted legal scholar Captain Barbossa observed, they're less like laws and more like guidelines.
I think there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the "casual" xbox strategy for the last couple years with Kinect focused games and the core game orientation it had for the first few years after it launched.
You're somewhat correct, I'm building Iron Conversions as a way to boost my trial-to-paid conversion rate for Rakasheets.

Without going into too much detail (I'm not 100% sure this is what I want it to do or how I want to word it) I'm building the tool to respond to Stripe webhooks[1] and other subscription events with dynamic[2] emails.

The goal is to prod my trial users into using the app more, or at the very least telling me why they won't use the app.

This is a problem for me because as it stands my trial users don't even use the app. They'll create an account and then just disappear, never to log in again.

"When seeking advice/services for converting users, I'm not sure I would look to the person who just blogged about failing to convert users. Maybe I'm wrong."

Perhaps because I've failed miserably at converting users, I know exactly what doesn't work (insert winky face here). That's up to you to decide. Of course, I'll be blogging about all of the progress I make with Rakasheets on the Iron Conversions website, follow along if you like.

I'll be honest, yes I plan to sell this service if it works. However, using it to get more conversions out of my trial users on Rakasheets is the main goal here. If IC is popular, then it's popular. If it's the stupidest tool in the world, it still serves my purpose.

(1) Can't I just make Rakasheets respond to my webhooks? Yes, it already does. The problem is I find it a hassle to have to open up my IDE, write a bunch of logic for this or that situation or webhook, and then add in the email html/copy on top of that.

Finally, when that's done I need to test all of the changes and push them to the server. It's a hassle I don't like to mess around with, and severely impacts my testing of these "dunning" emails to the point that I don't even test them anymore.

If you don't have these concerns, more power to you. It's just an itch I want to scratch for myself.

(2) Iron Conversions will query Rakasheets for that user's inventory data. For example, an email will be sent saying "Hey you're tracking 1500 foozles in Rakasheets, if your trial ends now you'll never see those foozles again". That's an exaggeration, but it gets the point across.
Looking forward to the full release...

Fedora 19: Now live, or is it? Open the box to find out!
As for maxima — yeah, definitely. Done.
Suggesting someone to apply critical thinking is anything but. Your confrontational attitude is though. Another thing becoming of HN.
Geek productivity at work graph
You guys have a typo on your main page: http://www.airfoil.io

"Track with Dasboard"
> Nope. It is because he stole tons of private info from AT&T and then boasted about it and then said he would totally do it again and with worse consequences to the victim.

Wrong. It wasn't private info, it was email addresses. They aren't treated as private and no harm comes from someone else knowing them. These were on unpassworded, public-facing URLs because nobody cared.

Another way to tell you're just manufacturing outrage here is that you pretend to care about sensitive data but don't give a shit that without the leak the hole would have remained indefinitely. If it really was sensitive, it could have been exploited.

Repeatedly your main complaint about weev has been his disrespect for authority, and your hastily-formed notions about his personality. Nothing about actual harm, because you know there was none - or if there was it was because of AT&T's dereliction of duty.

To the degree that there were victims, they were the customers who were implicitly lied to. Without this security audit they'd still be in the dark.

>>> Someone who didn't want to go to jail would say "...
>> Someone who didn't want to get unfairly arrested would say "...
> Very nice, now do you have anything to say that is not wildly offtopic?

Sorry, but it's not off-topic, it just shows your point is full of holes the size of a truck. You brought up "what someone who didn't want to go to jail" would say, but upon examination it fails to help your case and now you don't like that tangent.

You're more concerned with jailing those who disrespect your surrogate authority than in patching whatever hole there is.

> There's a bunch of douchebags on the internet that could think of nothing better to do that cause mayhem and suffering to those around them.

God, I know. Don't you just hate idiot politicians who try to control things they don't understand with the same blunt-object laws they fail to fix anything else with.

> Those despicable and miserable creatures

You're conflating what they thought would be funny with what they actually did.

> they are not honey-bees.

Really? They look like it from my point of view. They're useful if farmed with care but harmful if mistreated.

> My main reason to thing he's a douchebag because I've read about him and his actions.

Well, your interpretations of things are pretty weak - that doesn't mean much. Was this before you were told what to think? Because following links from an echo chamber is just going to reinforce your preconceived notions.

You seem easily led by anyone who says something catchy - you're using a juvenile phrase implying weev resembles a menstrual pad. It's like the rash of ideological clones saying "mansion arrest" in any discussion of Wikileaks, indicating not a single one of them had ever had an original thought.

> Law enforcement usually doesn't like people that say "I'll do it again and worse" too much.

It's pretty obvious you're upset because you're an authoritarian and you see someone flouting the rules. You're fixated on it.
Because they wanted to annoy Kim Dotcom.
The x-axis data is not numerically ordered, so there's no good reason to keep it oriented that way.
I want to see 2 factor authentication. Not sure about everyone, but I see my github @SEJeff account as more of a resume than LinkedIn ever was. I hate that there aren't more ways to secure it
Agree, it isn't without issues. But if you've built the app and there are lots of people wanting a free solution then that is two out of three (with the third, and only, missing piece the people willing to pay...which is kind of where he is now). Still, at scale this would give you a lot of interesting data I'm sure you could make money off of somehow - e.g. shorting P&G because you can see their orders are down 20% or something like that.
Why is persuasion such a bad thing?

Because it's extremely difficult to set out to persuade someone of something and not give them a skewed presentation of the issue about which you are trying to persuade them. (IMO it's actually impossible, but just "extremely difficult" is sufficient for this discussion.) And as soon as you skew your presentation of the issue, no matter how you rationalize it in terms of "it's for their own good" or "I've spent a lot of time and effort on this, I know more than they do", etc., etc., you're still, at the end of the day, substituting your judgment for theirs. IMO that's never a good thing.

"you know, this is a position of power, I have a responsibility to use it for good, as I see it"

Why is it a position of power? Who gave it to him? And why did he take it, instead of saying, "No, I'm not going to take this power and try to use it for good. That never works. Go look up the facts and make up your own mind."

Bottom line, I simply don't accept that it has to be that way--that somebody has to have power, and so the best we can do is hope they'll use it for good. I get that it's human nature to let things be that way, I get that the alternative--that everybody makes up their own mind, period, no exceptions--is scary to many people (not to mention that it would basically break our entire media culture). But that doesn't make it right.

anyone who designs a user interface – which guides you to do thing A rather than thing B – is in the persuasion game. They're trying to shape your behavior for - hopefully - your own good.

Again, I get that this point of view is rampant--it basically defines Apple, for example--but that doesn't make it right. (And yes, I know that Apple does this because its customers pay for it. That doesn't make it right either.)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that I expect things to change any time soon. I labeled my OP as "ranting" for a reason. :-)

Facts are the domain of pure math. Everything else is conditional.

Really? Gravity is conditional? The way a microchip works is conditional? Or more to the point: is "anyone who designs a user interface is in the persuasion game" conditional? You didn't make it sound that way.
That does nothing to prevent the app from retaining the information they obtained using the Facebook API during the time they were authorized (yes it's against the TOS to do so, but it's completely unenforceable).
Thank you for the comments everyone!

I will be following up on them, but just need to do a bit of research (based on some comments below) to make sure I don't ask silly questions :)
You can do that. Just see what branch the pull request is on, then git pull it, followed by a merge of FETCH_HEAD.
I personally love the syntax, and in my own experience is not that slow, I use it with Sinatra and my productivity is huge.

I'm also a C# and Delphi developer. I learned Ruby cause I had the need the learn an scripting language, and the reason to not learn python was that it looks like it is stock for ever in the 2.7 version, so I chose Ruby and I'm very pleased with my decision.
Backdoor Pharmacist Does Smart Drugs
I think there's a No True Scotsman effect at work here: "meeting" is the general abstract superclass used to refer to "people talking at a table." However, "meeting" has some very useful subclasses--for example, debate and negotiation. Real things get done in debates and negotiations. But people don't think of those at "meetings", per se, so "meeting" gets stuck with all the negative connotations and none of the positive ones. (In est, a useful meeting is not a True Meeting; it's something else.)
I think Pixar will do low-resolution runs all through the day (so people can get immediate feedback on what they are doing), and a high resolution run overnight (so they can see the current product). If you're at close to 100% utilisation, and have a large cluster, renting hardware is very cost inefficient.
On a more positive note:

I'm lovin the name, it made me laugh so much. Great idea too. I move around a lot so am always looking for ways to build a solid network of new friends.

If you have a vision, pursue it with relentless ambition. Don't let these criticisms put you off.
See the other comments downthread. If he had used the word "inform" instead of "influence", for example, I might buy your interpretation. But "influence", to me, means he's taking it upon himself to decide what to present based on "what the audience needs to hear", instead of deciding what to present based on the subject matter--what needs to be presented to enable the audience to understand. Yes, this is a judgment call: as I said in my OP, your mileage may vary. But that's how I read it.
I would pay money to have an email client with this design: http://purecss.io/layouts/email/

I would pay a bit more if I could have gmail.com look like that.
He's also in a room that is more likely to contain someone who will change the course of progress than most rooms are.

The audience matters. ;-)
Seeking Food Ingredients That Aren’t Gene-Altered
What sort of demo would make you likely to log in with Facebook? Screenshots of people you might meet?
Don't spend 5 dollars a month! There are free extensions for your web browser that will do dns spoofing which is all you need for netflix.
CSS3 navbar dark ui
Good questions!

> Doesn't writes that commute mean that there was no contention to begin with? Ideally, if I have a balance of $100 in my account and try to spend $60 in two different transactions, one should come back as failed before the purchases are complete.

Whether or not conflicting writes are a problem or not depends on the application semantics. For example, if I'm, just adding items to a set, then my updates commute. But if I have a constraint that says that elements in the set need to be unique, then my updates don't (logically) commute any more. Ultimately, this is application-specific. The "CALM Principle" (http://www.bloom-lang.net/calm/, http://vimeo.com/album/2258285/video/53904989) captures this notion of "logical monotonicity" resulting in safe operation despite concurrency. Most of the applications I mentioned, like 2i updates and the social graph example, commute.

For non-commutative operations (and there are plenty), you'll need a stronger model like serializability or sequential consistency that necessarily blocks to prevent concurrent update (or otherwise aborts concurrent updates).

> My ideal database should be read-available at all times, but guarantee that writes are atomic and durable (and give up availability for this guarantee).

This is definitely one point in the spectrum; the question is whether you want to give up availability and write performance. But if you look at workloads like those in the Spanner paper, this is reasonable for many applications.

> What are your thoughts on quorum-based voting in distributed systems? E.g.: your protocol but with the requirement that a write is considered stable if only most (vs all) of the servers involved have it marked as "good".

There's a difference between quorums over replicas over the same data item and quorums over different data items. Using quorums over replicas would help ensure that the replicas provided properties like linearizability or register semantics like Dynamo or other systems that provide an option for "strong consistency." But it's not clear to me that quorums over replicas for different data items would provide the same atomicity property--does that make sense?

I intentionally left many of the issues of replication to the footnotes in the post--mostly for readability and clarity--but I believe the technique is applicable to both linearizable/"CP" and "eventually consistent"/"HA"/"AP" systems.
I was looking at furniture the other day and it's really, really hard to visualize where/how furniture will fit in a given room with just pictures (which can vary based on lens used) and dimensions.
Iran Attacking US Power Firms
I haven't read "Clean Code", but I grokked through a bunch of Uncle Bob's stuff in creating Obvious Architecture and I have to say that I think that many programmers don't/won't get what Uncle Bob is going on about because many programmers want to take the parts they agree with and throw away the rest in the name of "pragmatism".

In reality, Uncle Bob's stuff is actually better when taken holistically and when applied together, but it's hard to do and when taken to their logical conclusion, it is so outside the norms of OOP, that people freak out about it not being "proper OOP" as they were taught in university and in mainstream things.
Anyone had any experience with these?
all of nintendo power WAS in games. for a long time now, it's on TV series and Mangas/movies adaptations.

If it wasn't for pokemon and such titles, they would be long gone.

They tried the same model in the west trying to license every movie game, but it never caught on. You still can see them trying with a few disney titles.

anyway, i'd say the ONLY thing killing nintendo is their closed grasp of their developer program. If they were more open, they would have lots and lots of great innovative titles for the wiiU launch, and people would actually know the wiiU is a console, and not another weird controller such as the balance board thingy.

When the original xbox (no gamer call it xbox 1, at least before the current xbox one) was launching, microsoft released the development framework to everyone and their mother! heck i even was invited by a group that was going to show microsoft some game ideas and get $100k scot free! Think they ended up launching a minor puzzle game (their FPS idea was rejected, obviously)
The entire backend of Rakasheets is built in C#/Asp.Net.

For the real-time technology I'm using SignalR, which I highly recommend. It's like websockets for .Net and it's very simple to use.

Sidenote: While I love SignalR, "real-time inventory" has added zero value to the product from my customer's point of view.
The best thing about functions with no side effects and no output arguments, is they often get optimized out by the compiler.
I'll also add that the metadata requirements aren't huge--typically 8 bytes for the timestamp and N*(bytes per key) for the keys. In our implementation and the benchmarks that we provided, we don't garbage collect the metadata as it's small and isn't a serious overhead.
We have clear ideas of what the exotic underclass looks like because everyone is clamoring to help them.... The exotic underclass are poor Black and Hispanic children (are there any other kind?) living in America’s urban ghettos.

Yeah, they're wiping their asses with the money that gets thrown at them. What a fucking joke.
On average, chances are pretty low that a particular startup will ever make even a hundred thousand dollars, so stop starting new companies!

It's not for either your investors or your customers to tell you what to build anyway.

And just never talk about morals, which I deem "fluff".
Flat Design and EMRs
Well we aren't introducing you to your Facebook friends so I'm not sure I see it.
Money is simply what everyone agrees is money. It can certainly exist without government. It would probably not be a fiat currency, but rather something like gold or silver.
I agree with this statement. I'm creating a product right now which connects you to people who are friends of your friends. Since we need to have your friend graph, we currently require Facebook connect. We'd like to do without this and will look for ways in the future to do so. For now, Facebook connect is crucial to our product.
I'm in a web developer course and I really really need to get my Ruby in good/great shape. It is my first programming language and I am not getting it as quickly as others in the class. I'm not hopeless, but I am not where I want to be.
No, it isn’t that black and white. Many of Martin’s suggestions are silly, especially when applied to languages that are more expressive (like Ruby, CoffeeScript) or otherwise have no relationship to Java.

I distinctly remember arguments with people who were reading Clean Code at the time who really believed that one-line methods really were the ideal.

The trick is knowing what does “doing more than they should” actually mean? If you follow Clean Code as I’ve seen some people follow it (including the Ruby dev shop I mentioned elsecomment), you will end up having substantially larger interfaces at the cost of understanding just what it is that your program is supposed to do in the first place.

I’ve dealt with programs written the Clean Code way (an explosion of methods, classes, and objects), as well as programs written with too much going on in one place (e.g., 2+kloc functions). Neither is fun to deal with, but it’s generally easier to assimilate the basic business purpose of the 2+kloc function than something that has a larger interface surface than it needs to have.
Awesome service. Is there any chance of having a song rejected? If so, on what basis? I'm all for services that make it easier to get onto these services, but as the price gets closer to zero I wonder what barrier is left. Will spotify/itunes end up like google results?
Mozilla Labs : Projects
I don't think it's wild to assume thinking a 1% transaction fee is enough to fund an exchange. It seemed about as inconvenient to get funds in and out of as Bitcoin is and with similar fees.

Dwolla has a $.25 fee for example and while I'm sure a bunch of criminals use Dwolla, it would not stand out as suspicious.
I'd hope we could do better than Walmart for veterans. Unless it's to pick up a little cash while they go to school.
Unlike VideoLAN, Mozilla has a big, obvious income stream for H.264 patent-holders to go after. Mozilla, quite reasonably, thinks they should spend that income advancing their mission rather than paying off patent holders (in a way that undermines it). They're also, again unlike VideoLAN, headquartered in a very, very software-patent-friendly jurisdiction.

Mozilla isn't refusing to ship H.264 because they lack "balls". They're refusing because there are serious practical constraints that get in the way.
I'm not sure what exactly it's likely to change.

Although I wonder at its resolution as a controller. I kinda want to have one sitting on my desk that I can spin to control some aspect of my drawing program's interface. Or whatever.