skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why they keep developing Java/C#
I believe the functional languages are taking the field by storm (ocaml, f#, haskell, clojure, scala). and I wonder, why do we need languages like C#, Java for ?
TCPCopy vs Tcpreplay
To be clear, I think that IE can be a good complement to advertising in some industries and use cases, but I think it's a poor wholesale replacement.

I just think customers are bad at describing what they like/want. They need to see it. That's why product demos, movie trailers, and coupons are an effective call to action.

But no reason to believe me -- anyone's free to test with an IE-driven offer. No reason why it can't coexist with advertising.

(oops, replied to my own post instead of hitting edit)
Good point, but if anything, this should serve as a reminder of why children, who are probably too young to even really understand what a "pledge of allegiance" even is, should not be being led through such a ritual everytime they turn around in school or whatever.

For that matter, it's probably a good warning against the whole idea of pledging allegiance to a nation-state at all.
Actually, you just get better at estimates. 10 years in I am finally starting to get the estimate formula... and it's about as simple as someone told me:

every time anyone gets an estimate, double it. so, you estimate yourself, double it before you give it to a manager. the manager should double it before they give it to a client. the client should double it before they give it to their finance department... and you'll come out on budget for the project.
Agreed for the most part, but might not work in all cases. For eg. Learning to use vim ....
Your Silence Can Be Used Against You
And then steal the music? Then I wouldn't get to enjoy artwork like this: http://www.popsike.com/Lemon-Jelly-Lost-Horizons-LP-NM/29060... :)
The fact that the US has a ridiculous amount of people in prison[1] seems like a fairly clear example of short sighted third world thinking to me. I know I personally find this fact rather concerning and I'm not even American. Some things should not be run for a profit.

Discussion on the conditions of low-security prisons in the US should be secondary to discussions about why so many Americans are in prison in the first place, IMO.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#Population_statistics
I attended a less prestigious school for undergrad, a more prestigious school for grad school, and now I work at a well-regarded software company.

I think undergrads in a more prestigious and better-funded department likely have more scheduling choices for upper-division courses. They can follow their passions more easily and delve more deeply into rigorous material as a result.

A prestigious institution will also tend to have more fellow students are able and motivated. I am not very entrepreneurial but I guess this would make startup launches more likely and more likely to be successful.

It is certainly true that students in elite CS programs are more likely to get great internships. I believe this is due to a combination of their merit and their connections via peers, alumni, and faculty.

My impression is that especially if you're interested in the startup world, credentials aren't very important.

But especially because you are not surrounded by people with connections to Silicon Valley and top tech companies, if you stay where you are, you will have to find in yourself tremendous motivation to hone your knowledge & skills, apply for internships at places where the best people work, and really shine in every interview.
> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done out of VC-istan dues-paying as young people take on pager duty for the job they think will get them investor connections in 6 months so they can do their own gigs (ha!)

The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough". The result is that you get things like Google Calendar. What's wrong with Google Calendar? John McCarthy put it best:

"Now of course Emacs is merely and editor but nevertheless is does permit significant user modifications and the modern operating systems do not. Let me give an example: one thing that I have done is to add a feature where you can put in a file, the name of another file and even also a location in that file. And then with a single key press it will search forward till it finds its file name and go to that filename in place. And I use it for putting references to email messages in my calendar file. That's just one of the uses of it and I asked about the new Google calendar file. Can you put a reference to email messages in there? And the answer is not only can't the user do it, but even the implementers can't do it, but to me anyway it's very useful. When I receive email about a meeting or a seminar, or something like that, to be able to put a link to the email itself into the calendar file and Emacs permitted me to do that myself, without my even having to become a real expert in the inners of it, and I think this will be important. "

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000

The quote is from clickbox 9. That page has a horrible layout.
What's interesting is that while Juniper's software is proprietary, they've still contributed patches and funded dedicated upstream development. This is something enabled by not being required to share more than what they're comfortable with sharing.
great comment. a lot of people don't take the time to step back and think what they really want.
>Just because it pisses the public off, that is no excuse for anyone to leak information at will, let alone be pardoned for it.

Just because the actions documented in the documents are unconstitutional and hence illegal is an excuse to leak documents that were trying to be hidden.

FTFY
Foxconn to hire 3000 to support Firefox OS and software development
C# 5.0 adds asynchronous methods [1] and caller info attributes [2] to the language. They also changed respectively fixed the way foreach loop variables are captured in closures [3] and changed the overload resolution algorithm [3] and argument evaluation order [3].

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/hh191443.aspx

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/hh534540.aspx

[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/hh678682.aspx
PDF or Postscript. Word is not a format that you should share finalized document. Why does anyone need to edit a spec?

If there is a good reason to edit, perhaps they should have made it an HTML document. Use LaTeX. Are they afraid the Office division will get them fired if they use anything other than Microsoft products?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the equivalent of a bicycle with no wheels or chain: completely useless and I think we need to get rid of it. For those who are familiar with the Court of Appeals in this instance, this decision will hardly surprise you. Comedic incompetence at its finest here, folks.
iOS Developer Tool Belt - Essential Services and Libraries
Fake Android Antivirus App Holds Phones Hostage for $100
Should have added caffeine as a option :)
Organize Markdown Documents in Google Drive and Google Apps
Trivial Cycles in Object Oriented Programming
Thoughts and Financial Transparency on Masters in CS with Georgia Tech
The only differences between the current pledge and the pledge as it was many decades ago are superficial. Changing the salute and adding the (problematic for other reasons) reference to a god serve to change the appearance of the pledge, but not its substance. It remains as nationalistic as ever.

(Also, the addition of the words "under god" and a reference to a particular government hardly make it more "liberal"?)
Music, cinema, and television, used to be considered performance arts. One performance, one payment.

If I build a piece of furniture, or any other physical item, what right to royalties do I have? None.

The greed of the music, movie, and television industries knows no bounds. I for one am sick unto death of their greed mongering.
Finishing the 24 Hours of Le Mans period is an amazing feat.
I wonder why noöne ever brings up article 16 when it comes to gay rights.
How does one deal with the ever present slowness of functional programming?
By constantly operating on copies or mutations of tensors through pipe-like assembly -- instead of directly attacking them, functional code pales in comparison to the speed of serial code. Memory usage too if the language is GCed.
Reporting Constitutional violations should never be allowed to be considered as a crime in the first place. On the contrary, you will find that in many cases the person who reports the violation is protected and not hunted down by the authorities. But when the government is the violator... it goes the other way around.
3. Never do "cheap mates-rates" for friends & family, or this will apply...
It's kinda hard to get a regular performance gig when a venue owner can simply throw on a CD or pay a few $ to a DJ. Jukeboxes massively undermined the market for jobbing musicians.
After stumbling around this problem for ~6 months, making half-solutions, this is such a great article. Thank you!!!
How to work from a coffee shop
> I don't know why people think that "I think Edward Snowden did the right thing" is incompatible with "Edward Snowden should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

It's because the vast majority of people disbelieve in liberal democracy. They require heroes and villains in their news stories, and have difficulty acknowledging the existence of people outside of those categories; this is one of the biggest reasons why democracy is difficult.
Snowden will be hunted down, and murdered by drone.

He will never have the chance to face his accusers. There will never be a trial. There will be a mostly silent poof in the night, and Mr. Snowden will become another drone strike statistic.
Not just Juniper, either. Most large users of FreeBSD contribute patches back -- the great success of BSD as a license is the recognition that if you use open source, it makes sense to contribute back any non-proprietary improvements, without needing any "encouragement" from the license.
I agree with your comment on it being easier to get intern ships, and have access to a bigger network.

Regardless of where I end up at school, I'll always focus on honing my skills, and on making the best of what my school has to offer.

I guess my main question is about peers. I went to competitive HS where everyone pushed themselves and each other to do better. I think with a lack of motivation and ability, people automatically draw barriers/limits on themselves, i.e. I can't do XYZ, it's too difficult, only a genius could do that, etc.
Firefox OS Peak phone unboxed
It sounds like something similar to the softmod exploits used to run unsigned code on the Wii.
We've got a little-known radio station in the Denver metro area that plays non-stop music with no commercials.

103.9 FM: http://rocktherockies.com/

I've been listening for years and the only "commercial" I ever hear is some infomercial type segment early sunday morning for a half-hour. Other than that it's non-stop mostly old or obscure Rock. I wonder if the Sunday-morning infomercial is just to set the "advertising" base?

I looked into the station once, and it seems to be run by a wealthy, reclusive guy as a hobby. Wherever he goes in the Denver area, his library reaches him. Expensive hobby...
The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough".

Yeah. It seems that most of the large technology employers want to hire the best people to do middling work, ignoring the unhappiness that ensues when people are over-leveled for what they're asked to do.

Closed-allocation needs to die in a fire, in other words.
Not pursuing him sets a bad precedent; we can't allow any "slippery slope" effects in security. The impact on active operations is unclear, but it seems significant. I respect the principle of free information, but I recognize that we're at war and security is a very serious matter.
> a good warning against the whole idea of pledging allegiance to a nation-state at all.

Pleading allegiance is an ancient tradition inherited from Kingdoms and Lordships, where the individual was a mere subject of the crown or superior power. Why plead allegiance in our era ?
Ah whoops. Totally missed the 1%. Sorry about that.
You really need an option for "Reading the documentation" which is pretty different from reading blogs and watching youtube videos.
I'm curious - what's the difference between yours and the parent's in terms of the conversion?
Doubtful, it was built well after that OS was released.
IMHO the biggest risk out there is getting caught not the trains. The tracks leading up to that area have clear sight lines for miles. I've been out there 4 or 5 days over the years and have only really had to deal with trains a few times, and you always knew they were coming with many minutes to spare (10+ for a slow moving freighter, to just under 5 probably for an ACE train). Not to say it isn't dangerous, but if you can jump to the left or to the right and are worried about some mud I'm not sure that this is the place for you to explore :)

On the other hand I've had several friends get nasty fines from LEO's while out there, or on there way out there. YMMV
A new collection of my best articles. More coming soon.
> These are both actionable; their utility, I believe, is unquestionable.

Who are they useful for? Future humans? If every generation just lives to make the far future better, instead of enjoying life, I think it's all rather pointless.

That's why I question the utility of what you've given. If you claim something is useful, it has to be useful for someone to do something worth doing.

Rand wouldn't disagree with going to space, but she would ask, "For whom?" and "to what end?"

> Maximizing your personal pleasure is a path that, I believe, leads to a profound emptiness.

It's maximizing happiness, not pleasure.

> Living for a higher purpose than yourself is, ironically, a central tenet of Objectivism: Rand placed the Truth above all else.

That is absolutely a false characterization of Rand.

> Or do you think that Objectivism requires that it's adherents exist purely as agents in self-interested economic market?

It's a philosophy, not a religion. It doesn't require anything, and it doesn't have adherents. To answer your question, no, it doesn't consider that everything worth doing be framed in terms of economics.

> Rand was an idealist to the extreme, and, I believe, would have recoiled at your narrow view of what she taught.

Rand was not an idealist. She explicitly rejected idealism. Rather, she defined exactly what it means to neither make the mistake of being either idealistic, nor rejecting all abstraction.

I can assure you that Rand would not recoil at my (at least) approximately accurate portrayal of her views. I should say that some of the finer details of my point about the pursuit of pleasure/pain and joy/suffering are, I think, my ideas, not hers, but I think they are completely commensurate with what she wrote.

> It is my turn to apologize. Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss you as a "Randroid" in my mind, since that was essentially the view you espoused.

Thank you for apologizing. However, you do not understand Rand's views well enough to legitimately dismiss someone just because they agree with Rand.
I recall years ago reading that the reason Microsoft releases their documentation in Office format (other than the whole eat-your-own-dog-food thing) is so that they have the ability to cryptographically sign the documents.
First, I read everything I can read. I don't even try, I just read.
Then I try and read at the same time.
Then I stop reading, and just trying.... and trying.. and mess up, and keep trying again.

You never really stop trying
Over on the other side:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maricopa_County_Sheriff's_Offic...
Let me put this briefly: the pledge was used to teach children the basics of what this country values. You can argue that this is brainwashing. So, then, argue that teaching rote math and English rudiments is brainwashing. Children can't internalize the important concepts of the constitution when they're 5-6 yrs old. They can recite them for a while, but the ideas are too abstract until they get older. You say "indoctrination", I say "rote memorization until they can understand it."

Do you think my 5 & 6 yr olds will understand my explanation of what Snowden did, and why?

And, yes, there was lots of condescension in your comment, just so you know for the future...

If you value the notion of a free society (and I am sure that you do) then you should be able to teach that appreciation (and I am sure that you could, if you tried).

Not to be a dick, but if you were one of my personal friends and said that to me at a bar, I'd slap you in the nuts to get your attention. Maybe midwestern Americans take that differently.
Snowden leaves reporters chasing shadows around an airport
Sun started the trend when Guy Steele and Gilad Bracha (among others) wrote the initial Java Language Specification. Microsoft has a strong team of PL researchers, including Mads Torgersen and many people at MSRC (who published a paper on formalizing Async in ECOOP 2012), to do this work, which I think is very useful.
And to link it back to the outer conversation... Since google is using PFS for gmail, for the NSA to read those conversations, google would either need to (a) give them the email unencrypted directly (cheating) or (b) give them the specific key negotiated for each conversation.

It strikes me that once PFS is in place, google would, in theory, be able to keep everything private except those conversations that a court forced them to give up the keys for.

As long as the rule of law were upheld (i.e., warrants/judicial involvement), it seems to me that this model could work and be generalizable for all web traffic. Maybe it's the way forward...

Happy to have my naiveté corrected :)
It's not "leaking confidential information" if the information is evidence of ongoing criminal activity. Imagine that the government was kidnapping children and grinding them into a paste for use as a new MRE flavor. Would you put the person who told the media about this up for trial on espionage charges? Of course not. You'd use the evidence to convict the people that were grinding up the children.

This is the same thing except on a more abstract level of illegality.
You should check out https://ssllabs.com. They accept a URL and do SSL checks to determine if your server is not configured in the most secure manner possible.

It is already interesting to run the check against online banking sites to see first hand how seriously they take security in practice. I was surprised to see that some banks score pretty poorly in this regard.
Why can't you do it? We're not asking for anything more, it's actually less than what you delivered before.

Don't let a client, or anyone for that matter, corner you w/statements like that.

Regardless of whether they were right or wrong, in terms of the amount of work they're asking for being less than the previous, have something to show in regard to why it's not as simple as they perceive.

For example, consider adopting a thorough estimating strategy, broken down into small iterations of work. An estimate showing the amount of hours or calendar days the next iteration would take, accompanied by more realistic dev-hours-per-week (burn rate), would have been the right way to counter the client's statement. It's much harder to argue with with supported numbers.

My grand plan to under promise and over deliver had led to a disaster!

Any plan where you take on more work than you can handle in a given time frame will lead to disaster. Under promising and over delivering had little, if anything, to do here. This was entirely a management problem (dev schedule, client expectations, etc.).
Bandwidth is probably the wrong term here. It keeps traffic from backing up as far, true, but this really only matters to people who are turning off before the merge.

Ignoring early exits, at steady state, the only thing that really matters is flow _after_ the merge - that's what determines the rate at which traffic passes the restriction.
I think that the chat room seems obvious but it is not to a lot of older managers and it is very important.

I have worked with some (generally older) developers who just didn't have online communications skills and even refused to use a shared chat room. They might be seemingly able to exchange a few emails or IMs, but then the next week they would be busy, stop using emails/IMs, but the day you go into the office or call them suddenly the communication increases 10-fold. Or they did it but didn't know how to use it. I.E. they would spread the chat out into many many rooms and fill them with irrelevant design speculation and idle chat.
37signals is B2B2C: their primary market is small businesses. I'd never heard of Fictive Kin before, and a quick Google doesn't turn up anything other than their website, where it looks like they're more of a consultancy than a product.
Doesn't mention gender so by the letter you could read it as meaning marriage is strictly heterosexual.
It could be; I'd very much like them to succeed, because I love working with a lot of smart people in tech but hate paying Silicon Valley rents. Maybe that's why Andreesen Horowitz invested. But it's very much an open market thesis; I don't really see any evidence this is repeatable across markets yet.
Honest question: how much commercial software engineering experience do you have?
I don't know--it really seems pretty rare in the sites I use day-to-day. Going over a list of popular websites (plus a few of interest to hackernews users), I don't think any of hackernews, google, reddit, github, wikipedia, facebook, yahoo, amazon, twitter, tumblr, bing, or ebay are using DNSSEC. My bank is not, nor are any of the other banks I thought of off the top of my head.

Of the sites you mention, paypal is the only one that I use on any sort of a recurring basis. But it's a little weird to a DNSSEC newbie like me, so maybe you can explain. The verisign tool shows that paypal.com is using DNSSEC, but it doesn't appear that www.paypal.com itself is secured. Is the chrome plugin giving me misleading information? Is this how things are supposed to be?

And a lot of US government sites have DNSSEC waivers. The first two examples I tried:

cia.gov appears to not use DNSSEC: http://dnssec-debugger.verisignlabs.com/www.cia.gov
nsa.gov appears to not use DNSSEC: http://dnssec-debugger.verisignlabs.com/www.nsa.gov

(Thank goodness the verisign tool itself IS using DNSSEC.)

A long list of US .gov sites with and without working DNSSEC:
http://fedv6-deployment.antd.nist.gov/cgi-bin/generate-gov

(Also: nist.gov is using DNSSEC)
> "Not pursuing him sets a bad precedent..."

A bad precedent to what, exactly? Other people revealing more potentially unconstitutional actions by the Government of the day?
Snapchat’s First Monetization Move Will Be In-App Purchases
The solution to the problem is right in the blog title:

... "Less Than What I Make From a Single T-Shirt Sale!"

If you are good enough (and lucky enough) to get your music heard a million times, then use it as a platform to sell real, tangible things to the people that enjoy your music.
You often refer to something called "VC-istan". That name implies that the VCs have some sort of scam going on where founders/employees are the victims. Am I correct?
Sounds like they're right where they want to be.
New occupants for vacant buildings on Chicago's South Side: data centers
So in terms of traffic, basically 0% of the internet.