skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I was the Bolivian president I would have called a press conference and mocked these countries for essentially becoming US territories and not being independent for about an hour or so. A few "how do you sleep at night knowing that your citizens voted for you but that the US government actually controls you" would have been slipped in there. Embarrass the shit out of them WHILE making their citizens furious at their own leader.
Interesting case (http://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/1996/3.html), thanks for the link.

The case concerns a claim that it was injust to make inferences as to the guilt of the appellant based on their choice to remain silent before the police and court. This appeal under Art.6 ECHR failed (though a claim of preventing access to an attorney succeeded). The court finding that there was no undue inference made, that any inferences as to guilt that had arisen out of the defendants failure to break silence were allowable.

I'm not sure this really helps so much as it seems as it appears to allow the [partial] curtailment of presumption of innocence.
That's a great idea, thanks for the suggestion! I'll be making some changes to reflect that.
And I don't believe I disputed that.
Six percent of American adults online are Reddit Users
s/Puppet/Python

There's a very big difference given the nature of this article. I thought that Ansible was dependent on Puppet and was quite confused.
We've got quite a few users managing hundreds and thousands of hosts, so I'm not seeing these kinds of compliants. If I would, I'd feel it, but we don't :)

One of the things many people want to do is rolling updates too, and Ansible is remarkably good at them, having a language that is really good for talking to load balancers and monitoring and saying, "of this 500 servers, update 50 at a time, and keep my uptime". Folks like AppDynamics are using this to update all of their infrastructure every 15 minutes, continuously, and it's pretty cool stuff.

For those folks that do want to do the 'facebook scale' stuff, ansible-pull is a really good option. One of the features in our upcoming product is a nice callback that enables this while still preserving centralized reporting.

Happy to have the conversation, but definitely I've never heard the CPU time compliant. I think the one thing we see is a lot of users are happy that Ansible is not running when it is not managing anything, rather than having daemons sucking CPU/RAM/etc, and folks are actually getting a little better performance from avoiding the thundering herd agent problems.
Do You Have Founder’s Disease?
140 Characters Spell Charges and Jail
I've used and continue to use, both. I like both tools, it's hard to choose one.

Ansible advantages:

+1 no client required. Python libraries may be required on the client machine to take advantage of certain modules (e.g. Python's postgresql library to use some parts of the postgresql module)

+1 roles. A nice, best practice way to package up logical configurations (e.g. files, templates, tasks).

+1 separate host files for prod/uat/dev/whatever you like. Keep all generic configuration tasks/roles host-agnostic.

+1 very easy to write (and distribute) additional modules

+1 uses SSH for all transport. I love that it uses something tried and true, secure, and robust like SSH. Based on comments on Salt's Github, Salt may be receiving something similar soon. A ZeroMQ mode (aka Fireball mode) is available in Ansible for speed.

+1 sticks to Linux (Unix?) only. I like that Ansible is not targeting Windows (for now?); The Windows ecosystem is a very different community; with its own mindset and tools, and they'd prefer to use their own vs. something from Linux-land. This also allows Ansible to concentrate on getting really good on Linux/Unix.

Salt stack advantages:

+1 (+1 +1 +1) allows you to use Python (with Jinja2 templates) to express logic in configurations. Some people are against this (and tools like Puppet and Ansible try to hide programming from the user), but I feel this is a terrible idea. All that you end up doing is writing a configuration language that's Turing complete [joking!]). Some people will say: logic doesn't belong in configuration! But when you need to express conditions or loops, let me use a (standard, i.e. Python) programming language. I don't want to have to learn your DSL (which only your specific community knows about).

So in summary, I'd love a tool, that has:

- Ansible's "no client" setup

- Ansible's logical way to package up configurations (roles)

- Ansible's separate host file setup

- Ansible's simplicity of writing (and distributing) modules

- uses SSH (currently only Ansible, but might be available in Salt shortly)

- Salt's templating being available in Salt states (Ansible's "playbooks"). This point alone puts Salt on even ground with Ansible. I cannot stress this point enough. This is the reason one of the main reasons I don't use Puppet and Chef.
`knife solo bootstrap root@my-server` will run both prepare and cook commands.
Yeah the web page does not say that unless you have a really sneaky IRC proxy in the way :)

Python 2.4 is all you need on remote nodes, but on the control machine you do need Python 2.6.
Why does he actually need to get out of Russia?
At the end of the day, clever technical workarounds still usually get a cease-and-desist, because the people sending the letters have no incentive to understand why your workaround is so clever.
Just wondering, are those MSN icons, or are these available in a free-to-use license somewhere online?
dgunn, what a lot of people are upset over isn't necessarily that the government is recording a lot of conversations per se. It's the fact that this program is constitutionally and ethically questionable and that it was enacted without any public debate or supervision whatsoever. America behaves in some ways like a democracy, and big issues like this deserve to be discussed and weighed in the public forum.

In general, the government taking powers and responsibilities upon itself without a public discussion tends to be a bad deal for everyone. We've all lived under presidents that we didn't particularly like or trust. If we let the executive branch off the hook for behaving this way that reinforces executive independence and gives more legitimacy to the next guy, who we may like even less, to do something even worse.

There are exceptions, explicit and implied, to this process for states of emergency when decisive action needs to be taken immediately. But it's untenable to claim that America has been in a continuous state of emergency for the past twelve years and that there hasn't been a moment to step back and evaluate where we're at -- and where we're going.
Google Docs began as a hacked together experiment, says creator
Not sure if we're talking about different things, but the BBC World Service radio channel is available on UK DAB.

Just to confuse matters, the World Service Click programme is not the same as the 'regular' BBC News one either.
"By me." - I've been there many times!

I hate that SCM systems commonly describe who made changes as "blame" (couldn't it be "praise" for when you want to find out who wrote exceptional code?) and yet it's wonderful to be able to look back into history and see "who" was responsible for a block of code. It can be a real learning experience!
Awesome feedback as usual. Thanks Ryan! That gives us a lot to think about.
I can see a great idea in there (I agree, turning long D3 chains into Coffeescript is a pain), but that documentation page is really hard to read, and has a lot of typos.
Makes me want to go zap a long standing ocassional test fail I got.

It seems that sometimes a netty hashwheeltimer is executing a timeout you add immediately, instead of after 2 seconds. And its the simplest code, and the 2 seconds we are trying to set are literals, so it ready surprises me. Find it hard to imagine a bug in netty and it always affects the same test, despite all our requests setting an aggressive 2 second timeout...
Why Being An Entrepreneur Is The Best Job
How Dell Fights Cancer with Big Data
Notes on computer science, math, research, programming, and industry
Clapper: I gave 'erroneous' answer because I forgot about Patriot Act
I've been always better off by starting with an empty file. It lets me concentrate on the problem I am solving, with no fringes or bells that belong to the finished product. Also starting from scratch is great if you're stuck. If something prevents this behavior, you're better off by tossing it away.

I think he should rather state to think clearly. You should always think for yourself about using a library. Does it fit your needs? Use it. If it doesn't, do not use it. You will not save time or your mind by using something that doesn't fit.
The question is what's the cost/benefit on fixing such things? Not everyone is in a position to stop working on features for two days to track down something like this.

This particular bug is also a strong argument for using more advanced type systems, even if you have good test coverage.
Chrome is Chromium with Flash and a proprietary PDF reader. "A ton of proprietary code" isn't an accurate statement. You are also free to use Chromium (100% open source and free software), like I do.
Nope. It's more like Googlewater came into town, made a great deal with the mayor to run the water service. Then poisoned the well and left town. Now no one trusts tap water, but Googlewater is more than happy to sell you bottled water from their vending machines.

Even though it's possible for another watercompany to come in and clean up the well, too many people distrust well water, and hell, all the cool kids are now drinking bottled Googlewater.
ok, but this wall of text is not very nicely formatted.
That's one way, you could also allow SSH key access as root too.

Ansible also has a --ask-pass and --ask-sudo-pass if you want to provide a password.
I have hopes that LightTable will, when finished and released as open source, become the answer for those seeking a modern extensible editor. I love emacs, but there are times when I feel that it's my hair shirt.
Personal firearms are worthless against NBC weapons. And I wouldn't be surprised to know genetic weapons are being developed...
Linux: SSH Tunneling, Port Redirection and Security
Great anecdote. I've never really agreed with having massive system-level automated tests, because more often than not the random failures like this do just get ignored.

I guess it depends on the culture within your team, how much you all care about your test suites.
At least those agencies are not reading my private messages.

Oh wait.
Well, a few days ago, we've been told the names of the companies that have been collaborating directly with the NSA, in secret, and they had the audacity to lie to our faces about it, when confronted.

I guess you know the names by now: Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Skype, etc....
Article title is “Top 5 tools every Linux server should have”.

Why has it been posted here as “Top 5 tools every serious Linux user should have”?
I'd rather have my public opinions public and face the consequences.

If the next time I visit the US I have my laptop confiscated, my luggage searched or have my entry denied, so be it. I'll know that's because the US no longer welcomes free speech and plan my future travels and career moves accordingly.

I'll add that, if that ever happens, it'll be a sad day for me. I still have faith a country founded on principles rather than ethnicity or geography means something. I'd like to keep that faith, if possible.
Using a library is just one giant copy/paste, right?
I'm still not 100% convinced it's something Windows admins want to do in a large enough number to focus on it...

I think this is much more common now that windows in the cloud is quite easy. (My company seems to have as many windows instances in EC2 as linux.)

I do agree with your preference for powershell over cygwin.
While I appreciate the writer's intention to write about these things,but I wish he had read the article titled "5 mistakes never to make as a novice writer".To put it bluntly, Its way too long and preachy. I am no saint myself though. Anyway the points put forth are quite right.
Wow. I've seen some stupid things in my time but this really takes the cake. The constitution and bill of rights aren't that big of a deal. The US style of government isn't even that great so the "great minds" of the founding fathers didn't manage to produce a system of government even as nice as the land they rebelled against (e.g. at least 3rd party has some meaning in the UK system, even if the system is damaged by FPTP).

The bible, on the other hand, has inspired untold millions throughout the entire world, regardless of your stance on religion.
Regarding 3, a funnier option might be to pollute the jury pool by giving stock to everyone they can in the district (Eastern Texas).
Extraordinary claims require at least existant evidence.
Precisely my point: a tool is a tool, you don't marry a hammer and you don't marry your text editor. You can have several hammers in your toolbox, the old hammer will never be jealous from new hammers.

You may invest some time/money on custom accessories for some editor, but if the author disappears it is not like a divorce, you can still use the tool until it breaks: if you can't get spare parts to fix your broken hammer because the maker went out of business, you just go to the hardware store and get a new hammer from other supplier.
Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games
The post I was replying to was grouping krrb and padmapper. I don't know much about krrb or what it does. Seems like a glorified copy past so I'm not sure how that exactly translates to a business worth putting this much effort into defending. Maybe I'm missing something.

But padmapper is clearly leveraging Craiglist's infrastructure for padmapper’s own benefit. I find that difficult to defend.
Student here.

Why is Nginx more popular than G-WAN?

I saw the benchmarks for G-WAN earlier this week (http://gwan.com/benchmark) and am curious why most people would choose nginx over the performance that G-WAN provides?
I have to disagree with a lot of these "mistakes"...in certain (many) contexts, they might be actual mistakes...but sometimes they are necessary and efficient practices.

As someone has said already, copying-and-pasting code is little different than implementing a library...and I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand how many of the libraries I use work underneath...but what I do understand is the ability to read tests/specs and see if the library behaves as it should, regardless of how it works underneath the hood.

And I would say "searching for a fix on Google" is almost always the first thing a beginner should do. Some bugs are just undecipherable (segmentation faults in Ruby, for example) and could result for reasons that are far beyond a beginner's knowledge. At least with Google, you have a chance of finding a solution, and being good at Googling helps you also get better at recognizing the relevant parts of an error message (i.e. don't include your local variable names in your Google search).

The one mistake that the OP omitted...and I think this is a huge one...is that beginners try to do too much. They want to build a Rails app...OK, fine, but they don't realize there's a lot of middleman steps worth doing before launching an app...such as organizing/visualizing the data, or deploying a simpler stack, etc., that all builds toward the goal of making a Rails app.

And this is the way it is with method composition. Don't make a method that scrapes data, parses it, and stores it into a hard-coded named database....write a method that contacts the website, another method to read the appropriate section of the site, then another method to parse it, line by line, and then a host of methods that acts on each line: cleaning, validating, and storing it.

When working with beginners, I find that there is a great inability to see how that last unit method fits into the bigger picture...because it just seems like that line-focused method should be a part of all the other methods...and yet that is where madness lies...I would argue that all of the other 5 mistakes mentioned by the OP stems from this inability to understand orthogonality.
The parent to my post wasn't just talking about Reader, nor was I. I was referring to the more general point that there are two competing models out there of how the web should work, the walled garden and the open network. Sure, killing Reader doesn't stop people from blogging, but that's not really what this is about.

Google has made it obvious, not just by killing Reader but by many of its recent actions, that it has switched sides from the open network to the walled garden. And the mindset of the walled garden does stop people from blogging (because they're too busy clicking "Like" buttons) or consuming RSS feeds (or any other information channel that doesn't appear in their walled garden).

Personally, I'm with you--I own my own domain name, host my own blog, have my own email that's independent of Google or anyone else, etc. If I want to consume someone's RSS feed, I can just do it; I don't need a walled garden to do it for me. But you and I are outliers.
Client won’t pay, my final resort
How you could say "I see no evidence of this" is just so far beyond me I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You think that insisting the guy is barred from every ally or that we are grounding foreign president's planes because we are worried Snowden might be on them and somehow your brain takes all these inputs and spits out "no evidence". How does that happen? Does one train in some sort of ignorance academy?
I have also needed a JSON lib installed on the target for python < 2.6. Is there some way around that?
I'm sure there is some obscure aviation security policy that makes this a maintenance requirement...
Kirchner is a flake, and Argentina is in serious economic trouble, including faking their inflation figures.

TBH I'm surprised she didn't mention the Falklands as well.
Scalability Happiness - A Quiet Query Log
LAMP stack scales well, but database tier is tougher. Aggressively tune queries & keep your slow query log quiet. That's the recipe for scalability.
Are you sure about the code? I am getting some plane over Canada.
I really don't think Top Gear is produced with a view to the US market.
I'm legitimately interested in how I'm affected by this as a person who doesn't conduct activity online that the NSA would ever care about. Can someone help me out here?

Sure, here's a little hypothetical story:

2014 arrives, and your information is being stored indefinitely. Let's say you're interested in comics and you store some on your github account. One of those comics is V for Vendetta or some other innocuous story. You delete the comics pretty quickly, so after a few months there's nothing there, but the record stays because the file was once transmitted. Nobody cares at this point, but the information is stored.

2015, and your phone records are used to pinpoint your location at a known collection point for subversives (a comic shop). Known terrorist symphasers used this shop as a meeting point in 2013 and 2015 (animal rights terrorists), which puts you with them. You're now on a watch list along with 10 million other Americans - no-one is ever taken off the list once they go on.

2018 arrives, with a new president who's hard on security and terrorism and subversive literature is banned, including some strange titles like the bomb-makers handbook. You're not too worried about this, as who would read that sort of thing, right? Unknown to you, one of your students has been reading it, and shared the link to you on a page linked in an email, so that link goes in your file. The student also voices subversive thoughts to you, and you don't report them.

2020 arrives, and more materials judged subversive are banned, including certain comics judged too subversive and supportive of terrorism. Due to advances in storage tech and analysis, the NSA can now go back to 2014, and every year after, and see exactly what banned information you've been trafficking in, along with analysing documents linked in emails, and your location at every point in your life. 100 million Americans are now on the list, because so many subversives are being found with the new technology. It seems there are a lot of enemies within. The new president is worried and orders more surveillance.

2022, and you are pulled in for questioning due to your suspicious profile. No matter how you protest your innocence, it seems no-one will listen - the facts are just too damning, and your lawyer can't find you because your arrest was secret. You're just another traitor and terrorist sympathiser. You end up in a black site for 5 years, and are released a broken man.

The technical advances to make this possible are just developing, but it will soon be a reality, so I do believe we need restrictions on the collection and storage of this sort of information - it's just not good enough to leave that decision to the intelligence services, because they will naturally want to keep everything, and analyze everything, and grow their power. We need a check on that power which is not technical but enshrined in law - at present those laws are being ignored.
- Just be safe, stay grateful/happy and keep moving forward. Like I've come to understand that in life good & bad causes/intentions can both lead to bad consequences. As the saying goes, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', so please avoid danger or anything depressing, evil or sad by any means necessary, unless you are trapped.

Do you read Harry Potter books? If you do, there is something called 'DEMENTORS' ~> http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Dementor. My suggestion/advice is that if you can runaway/avoid them, please do. But if you are trapped, then fight back. Happy July & Happy Wednesday.
The point is, he has open source and free alternatives to Safari, that are equally good or arguably better. If he really cares about openness, I wonder why it hasn't influenced his decision.
His email hinted at uncovering a grand plot. Lots of people who have mental issues think they've uncovered grand plots.

In other words, claiming to have uncovered a plot is a sign for a mental health issue? Just like being angry is a sign of rabies, huh? Before you dive into probabilities, check out some logic, I hear it helps. And maybe history, since you seem to think a "plot" is something like an elf or pink elephants.

are seriously saying that the former is more probable

Nope, that's the beauty of it, I'm not even speculating either way. I am dealing with your comment only. When I read that email, I don't see any signs of madness. To the contrary, that bit about legal advice seems a bit too coolheaded for even drug use.
Correct! And there are many like me.
I don't think you are a poor empiricist in your field. If you can somehow equate fossil records with creationism, then yes you are a poor empiricist in that field. I specifically wrote that it's a kind confirmation bias, however.
If you listen to the pain or failings of your test suite, you will likely end up with better code. The problem is most developers when testing gets hard don't look at their code and go "why does my code make this so difficult?" they wil say "testing sucks" and delete their tests.

It's amazing what you will learn if you pay attention to the pain.
>>What you are saying is that if any company provides a widely used product, say like Instapaper, they are ethical mandated to continue providing it, etc. Why would I create something for fun then, if I'm morally obligated to dedicate to it in the off chance it becomes popular? When can products close down?

If you want to close down a product, you can at least open-source it. Which is another thing Google could have done with Reader. It would have given another party the opportunity to pick it up and develop/maintain it.
Nice name & comment combination.