skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Values listed on a web page are one thing. Actions are another.

I haven't been impressed with their actions over the past few years.

Just look at Firefox. Instead of striving to provide a lean, practical, extensible browser, all they've managed to do is copy Chrome as of late. The UI changes have not been for the better. The release schedule changes were very painful, and the version number inflation is pointless. While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement. It's not surprising that users are moving away from it to other browsers.

Then there's Thunderbird. Aside from Firefox, this was one of their only other pieces of useful software. Yet they've dropped their support for it to a minimal level.

What's worse, while neglecting their software that people actually use on a daily basis, they've embarked on pointless efforts like FirefoxOS and Persona. We don't need another mobile OS, especially one that's essentially crippled to only supporting development using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (which, of course, are already available on Android and iOS, not to mention the other mobile OSes that are already widely available). Persona is clearly not gaining any traction.

The only encouraging thing out of them has been Rust. But even that seems to be rather loosely associated with them, and appears to be regarded as quite experimental.

I know, I know. I'm not paying for their software, so they don't have any obligation to me, etc., etc.. I'm merely not convinced that their actions really correspond to the principles in their manifesto very well.
Who Are You Calling a Patent Troll?
Decided to write an eBook. Looking for advice.
I've gotten incredibly valuable advice here before, so once again looking to you all for some suggestions.
I've had the idea of writing a guide/resource on developing and delivering presentations for a while, so I've bitten the bullet and decided to give it a try.

Couple of questions though:

I'm considering narrowing this to just to one or the other (building vs actually presenting) for a first attempt at writing an ebook. Thoughts?

Is this a topic you'd be interested in? If not, is there something close that intersects with a similar opportunity/skillset? I'd like to write something I can be passionate about, but also fits a market.

Thanks!
Interesting to see this latest incarnation of the whole Degree/No Degree thing. My time on HN has evolved my opinion of the situation somewhat. As a high school dropout (later, GED recipient) who has drawn decent six-figure salaries despite a strict telecommute-only policy ("If I can't do it from my subtropical island, it ain't worth doin"), I more or less considered the subject closed; I'd done fine without a degree.

The other side of this, however, is that yes, I've done fine without a degree, building countless line-of-business apps, a few games, and doing some amount of administration. I also fix my own large appliances and boats when they break, instead of calling someone. What I'm getting at, is that I am not a computer scientist, or a Rockstar Programmer, just a Handy Guy. And if your ambition only goes as far as line-of-business apps and living comfortably, being a Handy Guy is often enough. Everyone wants guys like us on their team, after all.

I've never dealt with discrete math or graph problems, but only now at the age of almost-36 (and being a computer professional since age 15), am I beginning to think about learning computer science. Or maybe not. It's looking like a decent fishing day. It seems likely, however, that a degree that taught me some of these things, would yield more interesting jobs, and perhaps more enthusiasm for work.
Why DOJ didn’t need a ‘super search warrant’ to snoop on Fox News’ e-mail 
If attorney general Eric Holder wanted to perform even a momentary Internet wiretap on Fox News’ e-mail accounts, he would have had to persuade a judge to approve what lawyers call a “super search warrant.”
I do not recall any real attention paid to such aspects of the transporter. I do recall, however, the inventor of the device showing up in an episode of Enterprise[1] and referring to all the dialog that came up when the device was new; his comment? "Metaphysical nonsense."

[1] - Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Daedalus" - Dr. Emory Erickson according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek)
I disagree that Javascript is not a real language. But I do agree that the entire way we build web apps surely can't be sustained. It's incredibly cumbersome to do the simplest things and you are right that parallelism that is intrinsic to responsiveness in desktop/mobile apps is inadequate.

But the real question is what the stack of the future should/will look like.
I think there's no reason to be afraid of lawsuits and very little evidence to support that you should. If a candidate decides to sue, it's probably because there's actual evidence of discrimination.
He paints whales on the sides of buildings.
That's how it's supposed to be. You need perl to parse perl. It's not an issue, it's a feature of the language being so flexible.

Simply solution is, k.i.s.s
> Nowadays, you have to patch and update to have a secure system. Freezing the software to guarantee stability makes it inherently unsecure, Windows or Linux. There is no difference other than the larger base of existing virusses for Windows.

The extent and effort needed in keeping a updated system running is directly related to the size of the installed system. If all you got is ~30 carefully picked packages to create a fully custom ISS installation, its not that hard to go through every single line of patches that is needed. This is a huge difference between windows vista/7/8 where such review is not even possible to do and the number of "packages" is astronomical larger.

> Also I wonder what this means for power usage, which is not unimportant in space. Windows still gets longer use out of most laptop batteries than Linux.

I would almost call FUD there, but I will assume good faith. Back at the time with vista, linux system tended to have several times more battery time than windows. After windows 7 was release, and that linux had a power management bug, Ubuntu got a reputation for worse power management than windows.

Now after Linux 3 kernel, linux machine tend to again have much better power management than windows 8. There are some direct variation depending on what distro you install and what additional fluff that is running in the background. Also, EFI BIOS is know for a slightly worse performance for linux vs windows.
This perfectly encapsulates my feelings about the Perl parsing question!

An ambiguous parse is still a parse, and yeah, the 'whatever' example is pathologically unmaintainable code. As you say, if a static parser finds it ambiguous, you should probably fix it.
The use of a phonebook analogy is clever, but I think the answerer should modify his answer to cover the O() running time of a trie data structure. A phonebook is essentially a trie. He talks about the "divide and conquor" approach to navigating a phonebook, but that's not how a computer would store the names. The way a computer navigates a phonebook would be interested in read about.
>"Don't be a moron. Get a degree."

lol.

>" The large corporation a a strict requirement for BS degrees as a minimum, even if the degree was bullshit or unrelated. He was told they wanted to hire him but could not due to the lack of a college degree."

Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work at.

College has been productized to a disgusting degree. If you can do it, you absolutely should not waste years of your life going to college for something dumb vs. doing what you love. You CAN be successful without a degree if you really want it.
You don't suppose US population density has something to do with this, do you? Rail does well enough in the Mid-Atlantic and NE states, between Boston and Washington.
Your example turns into "alter(ref, inc)" in any programming language with first class functions. I think there are some great concepts in Clojure (multimethods e.g.) which are not tied to lispy syntax and macros.
Thanks, I've been telling myself that for awhile -- the problem is I don't look for gigs.

Has been over ten years since I worked a 9 to 5 (where yes, I made more $$), all remote freelance work since I departed the cube.

In the end I enjoy coding and creating to the exclusion of all else -- need to work on the business front, marketing, putting myself out there, etc.
>" I don't regret doing it at all, I'm very glad to have finally finished the degree"
What was the benefit in the end?
> It appears that when Google was
small, they tried to be open to
benefit from other big players.
Now that they are the biggies,
they don't see any value in being open.

Sad but true. Corporations who have to worry about keeping their share price forever in the green will have to compromise on their ideals. They will still talk about their ideals but they won't put their money where their mouth is.
Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not creating the best browser. Creating a kickass browser was the way the reached their goal.

We do need another mobile OS because current ones do not respect our freedom. Even if they are technically sufficient, user friendly and usable.

So I dont care if Mozilla is copying Chrome or not. I just wish they stay in the same path AND be strong and influencial as they currently are.
Looks like we need a VC appreciation day...with all the criticism lately. ;-)
"Policy against headphones, is that a thing?"

This is normal.

We (mgmt) went to great effort to eliminate the possibility of concentration amongst the workers because all wisdom comes from above at our organization and we don't concentrate so you shouldn't either. Furthermore we intentionally designed this for easy collaboration / talking and your wearing headphones is a directly insubordinate act against our intentional management decision to encourage collaboration. As a class observation we are an engineering organization not a customer service organization so I do not want to see my people wearing "customer service" headphones, unless you want to transfer out of engineering and into 1st level support. Finally we occasionally escort outside visitors past this area on sales calls and what would they think if they saw you wearing headphones, that we are not observant, or we tolerate insubordination, or ?

This is a paraphrase of the conversation I had at a former employer. I'm shocked any open plan office allows headphones, it is blatantly insubordinate to go directly against your bosses orders and 1) think and 2) block out your coworkers. If they wanted you to think they certainly wouldn't sabotage you by putting you in an open plan office.
On the Step by Step UI Design page: Order now! Only 12.7 million copies remaining!
I would also point out that the US considered and rejected the notion of building a supersonic passenger plane, in part because of concerns about its effect on the upper atmosphere, in part because of the economics. The debate about building took place about the time that the Concorde was under development, i.e. well before much of the HN readership was born.
Metalearning in Action: How to Master Soccer
Interesting thought.

SSDs are in part a classic disruptive technology, a repackaging of something new and at least originally not quite ready for prime time that's eating away at various disk drive niches, some lower end.

On the other hand they're at least a bit of a sustaining technology, just another mass storage technology (well, at least until people start using them as other than drop in replacements for disk drives and use them with their advantages and limitations). Funding them as a class of technology is not a hard decision for VCs, they're not as much a new thing as FPGAs, and there's e.g. Intel validating the concept.
Hi! I added remove.
What's the difference between 'git pull' and 'git fetch'?
I had this same problem for years. 18 months ago, I started carrying around a notepad (Field Notes) and clicky pen everywhere to make sure I could get everything down, and it's made a huge difference.

At the end of every day, I process the last day's worth of notes. Appointments/meetings go onto my calendar, tasks go into TeuxDeux, and cash expenses go into YNAB.
If 500 million Europeans are suddenly given a basic income of, say 1,000 Euro per month, on top of whatever other income they already have, then things will get more expensive.
> While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement

It's basically tracked/caught up to Chrome on 3 major benchmark suites over the past year.

http://arewefastyet.com/
Extra cash for work - US Earned Income Tax Credit
This is why I don't have a blog, I have nothing worthwhile to say.
This is really a quite cool feature. For me, it was able to do a good job on searches for things like snow, road, dog, sunset, etc.
Pay Per Call For Lawyers
Maybe I didn't express this very clearly. I argue that it's paramount to understand what your code actually does. As simple as this sounds, in my experience a lot of developers just don't care. I'm not talking about applying some abstract CS concepts, I'm talking about getting a feeling for the amount of computational effort and memory consumption your code causes.

Once you understand your code's behaviors, you understand its Big O. It's not necessary to be explicit about it, but this is one of the rare cases where theoretical notation and engineering intuition do map very nicely. If you can say things like "my code's CPU cycles go up linearly with variable n", that's the equivalent of understanding Big O.

So I'm not advocating blindly "learning" about Big O, I'm trying to say that once you get a good sense of what your code is doing you get Big O understanding automatically.

> Surely Big-O is an abstract way of describing a property of your code to somebody who doesn't want to read it.

It can be, but that's not useful. I think of it as a micro vocabulary that comes naturally from understanding code. It's really not an abstract concept, it's a very concrete attribute a section of code has.
I actually did not test it against zepto.js. I will add some more tests in the future.
I believe that expanding the BI would reduce the amount of work performed, thereby destroying wealth.

Assumptions: most people prefer not to work, and most people gain diminishing marginal utility from income. A lot of people will be satisfied to relax and produce nothing while enjoying merely the BI.

Evidence in support of this hypothesis: poor Americans already have a BI [1] and choose not to work. See some numbers here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wor...

In contrast, poor folks in many other nations (e.g., India) have a much lower BI and choose to work.
Nobody discussed on call?

Would I get away with "Sorry boss I can't fix the emergency this afternoon, home is too quiet and comfortable and spacious, but thank god my kids are coming home from school and once they start screaming at each other, playing video games, and watching TV, I'm sure I'll be able to get right to work on the problem."
Thanks for the advice. I do work in Big Data (and have consulted) but perhaps I need to specialize further?

This post brings up 2 ideas:

1. Look into marketing or other areas where applied Machine Learning would make a direct impact to the bottom line. I'm guessing it's a lot easier to charge more if your value proposition is "increase sales/revenue by $X" vs. "increase the lift of this random model by Y%".

2.It might be worth looking into banks/hedge funds. They presumably are much more willing to throw large amounts of money at the right problems.
Contrast with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768570. This US $60 billion program with wide bipartisan support gives poorer folks extra cash after making at least some income ... many use the extra capital to support or establish their own business.
I agree completely, but I also teach non-CS students mostly in design. If version control is a foreign concept to some CS students, it's not even on the radar of most of my design group.
I don't think that is that different from a move to Linux. Certainly, if you do a Linux kernel upgrade, you will want to recertify. And Linux kernels may not have longer shelf live, either:

- https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html lists 2.6.32 as the oldest kernel with long term support. It was released in December 2009, not yet 4 years ago.

- Redhat supports their releases for 10+3 years. That is in the same league as XP.

- Ubuntu's long term support is 5 years.

Also, I think part of the problem is that astronauts will bring their own laptops. It may be hard to enforce them to run these long term support kernels (yes, that sounds stupid for an office building where access is that controlled, but space organizations have to take the psychological health of their personnel into account, too)
Yes. We have lab PCs here still running Windows NT because the upgrades for the hardware are either unavailable or would be prohibitively expensive (> $20K) and still not implement all the functionality. We tend to hide these from our well-protected corporate network behing a boat-anchor PC running XP with all the service packs and antivirus. We will run these systems until they can no longer be repaired because management does not want to spend the money to replace them.
So no more X11 apps over the internet (or network?)
A few thousand euro is not loads of money. It's enough to, say, live for two or three months without income.
Sky TV apps hacked, all now removed from the Play Store
Like I said earlier, it's pretty clear that the path they're following now is diminishing their influence.

This page lists a variety of measures of browser usage share: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Notice that over the past several years, in each data set, that Firefox's usage has dropped off, or at best not grown.

People are leaving Firefox because it's not improving, and because it is actually getting worse in many ways for many people. If we're going to get the Chrome experience even when using Firefox, but done in an inferior fashion, we may as well just use Chrome.

I expect we'd see a similar, if not more severe, drop off in Thunderbird's usage numbers. I've personally moved to a different client within the past year, and I know several other people who have, too.

There's nothing compelling about FirefoxOS compared to Android, iOS, or the incumbents. Average people will not switch to it. Without these people, it won't gain traction, and Mozilla will still have limited to no influence in the mobile space.

And the same goes for Persona. It has been around for a few years now, but average people aren't using it, nor does it look like there's any reason they'd want to.

"Openness" may be a noble goal, but I think they had much more influence when they were producing software that people liked to use because it worked well. The move away from this has corresponded to a decrease in their influence, and much greater influence for Google, Apple, Microsoft and even Opera.
Show HN: paleorecipes.io: For Geeks, By Geeks
Asm.js? Emscripten? WebRTC? Come on, Mozilla has really been pushing the limits of the web lately, in new and interesting ways that no one else will try.
am i missing something?
That's not really a question I have the knowledge to answer (though with some more guidance I'd be happy to look into it). I'm aware of fsevents, and I know for example that dropbox have their own dbfsevents so they can filter out what they need closer to the kernel. My understanding is that it gives you an api to be notified of changes to the fs. Maybe the BackBlaze case is complicated because they backup the whole filesystem by default?

The behaviour we saw was a constant scanning of all the metadata of all the files on the filesystem - not just things that were changing. It seemed that instead of being notified about changes it was relying on comparing to its cache by polling. There were huge folders with years of photos in that hadn't been touched in months being scanned again and again all day.

To be honest, my business partner contacted BB about it and they didn't seem as concerned as we were. It was at that point that for the first time in a couple of years I found myself with the desire to investigate backup services again. It's a shame because BB has been good when I've needed them. A drive died recently with a lot of important data on it (years of photos and music) and they had a replacement to me in a matter of days.

I'm still running their backups at the moment but I also started Arq running last night. It seems to fit my use-case perfectly.

Edit: I just ran it a again to check. The bzfilelist process does an lstat on every file in the system one by one.
What is it about ?
Where are you going to get that stuff you're going to give people? A giant government procurement contract?

Or perhaps many local ones. But yes, exploit the capitalist system and let the cheapest provider win.

Who will decide what goes into it?

The political system. Basically, there will be a public itemized list of what people gain from the welfare system. Periodically, progressive types will say "oh no, the poor lack XXX", and XXX will be added to the list of items. Conversely, conservative types can read the list and point out "WTF, why are we paying for YYY", and get such items removed.

It's far better than the current system, in which basically no one has any clue what goods and services the poor have access to. This enables progressive types to say "oh noes, the poor are barely surviving" and conservatives to say "they all drive cadillacs", and neither side can refute the other without reading obscure Census reports (and obviously no one does that).
unit test are always good and specially for startup's because they come handy to rescue when the original developer of the code had left you and a defect is raised. but as CoryG said there are always constraints with startups which stop them from doing that.
C#, the language, is nicer than Java. However, the Java ecosystem, especially in terms of open source, is way better than C#'s.
Anatomy Of An Undisclosed Investment Or Exit
We're just people too
The prefetch demo is obnoxiously misleading. If it is definitely the link you'll be loading, I doubt you will wait upwards of 7 seconds before clicking the link. In which case, it will not be 0 seconds loading. Then there is the equally likely, you were confident it was what I wanted, but you were wrong case. In which case I just downloaded a ton of garbage I didn't want. (Can't wait for ad servers to preload their assets for you...)

And this is also somewhat amusing, since if I recall firefox has boasted 0 second reloads when you hit "back" fora long time now. Does chrome support that, yet?