skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are right ways and wrong ways to do a rewrite. Joel Spolsky says you should never do it but he's flat wrong, mostly, he's right in that it's almost never done correctly.

Most rewrites are undertaken too lightly and with too much naivete. They are approached as projects with a lot of major unspoken assumptions. Often assumptions that are counter-factual. Assumptions such as: at code complete we will have a system that is as refined and defect free as a well-worn system that has been in real-world use for years. Or, there will be no problem with forcing every user to use the new system because it will be in every way objectively superior to the old system starting on day 1. Or, taking on the work of a rewrite won't cause a serious shortage of manpower needed to maintain the old system (or vice versa, the rewrite won't face a serious shortage due to the needs of maintaining the old system). And so on.

Yet such obvious fallacies remain as latent assumptions behind the majority of rewrites.

There are different ways to do rewrites effectively and none of them are easy.

One way is to build a parallel product using an entirely separate team, and having that product compete against your older product directly in the marketplace. This is obviously an expensive route, which is why a lot of companies shy away from it, but sometimes it's the best way to go about things. It gives a chance for a product to mature before it replaces the original. Microsoft did this with Windows, having two parallel teams work on different kernels (NT and 9x) and it took over half a decade for the "rewrite" to win out. This is even more astounding when you consider that originally Microsoft had intended for Windows 95 to be simply Windows 4.0 based on the NT kernel. A goal they didn't really achieve until Windows XP was released 6 years later.

An alternate way to do a rewrite is through refactoring style techniques. Start building the new system inside the old and slowly deprecate and migrate components piece by piece until the old system is entirely gone. This is a very effective way of doing things and has the advantage of being able to scale relative to the amount of development effort available but certainly has its fair share of limitations and downsides (which I won't enumerate).

As far as the Netscape example, they ended up coding themselves into annihilation, as their constant rewrites and architectural buffoonery led them to create a very unstable and clunky browser that was markedly inferior to IE 4 when it hit the market, and they just were not able to respond with any degree of innovation software wise. Also, my understanding is that the seed code for the mozilla project was a horrendous mess that didn't even represent a functional browser at the time and required extensive effort to get to that point.
Yes, it is. If you make my life hell, at least give me the freedom to die.
Right. Looking at just average life expectancy makes differences in medical technology seem more dramatic than they are. In the U.S., average life expectancy at birth has increased from 50 to 76 in the last century (26 years). But remaining life expectancy at age 60 has increased only 7 years, from 14 more years to 21 more years. Most of the increase is the result of lower mortality among children, and lower mortality among young adults as the result of a shift from dangerous factory/mining jobs to service jobs.
Very cool project. Congrats on the great work!
> Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.

Yeah, no.
Not all, I didn't say all.

The source is my current home in Georgia and my wife's experience as a HS teacher.
"I would love for all of those years of school to teach kids these lessons instead: Don’t follow orders, don’t blindly copy what others are doing, and always keep your wits about you."

This, to me, is the essence of Education, or at least what it should be - equip future generations with the ability to think critically, to become more adaptable by developing themselves and their peers in the process.

In most of the countries I know of, School systems are self-fulfilling jokes. You have teachers sandwiched between layers upon layers of administration and the kids' parents. You have a lot of parents who've dumped all their educational responsibilities onto the schools. You have the administrations whose main purpose seems to be meeting stats. And after all that, you have the kids, awkwardly categorized by age, pushed through hoops with no clear purpose except to pass tests. This costs a tremendous amount of resources (not just talking about money here), and for what results?

We seem to live in an age where we think everything has to be, and is worth measuring. I believe the "Level up" system is a result of that, it makes it much easier to assess people's worth, whatever the hell that worth may be. Ironically (and sadly), the only way to get out of this is real Education, one that promotes curiosity and self-growth for the sake of it (and eventually for the greater good).
"Final Term is written in 100% Vala, the language of Desktop Linux's future" https://wiki.gnome.org/Vala
Authentication with Warden (Rails)
An Entrepreneur Platform To Put You Above the Crowd
> When you start saving everything

I'm pretty sure that's media sensationalism - were they get quite ahead of the facts and details, and spin the headlines. Or worse, leave out the logic of it all and replace it with something else - the narative the reader wants to believe (ex: they are gathering data on me to be used against me).

Not only does it take time to process the data, but an operational window (of that data) needs to be maintained for the next couple of days - were that data can be cross-referenced with the new feed and possibly be mind and connected to new events as they are unfolding. As otherwise it's useless.

The data is filtered for specific targets, or on specific triggers, or graph data, which is then kept. The rest (like 99.9999995% or more) is just noise that has no use to intelligence gathering - and I don't see why anyone would store it - or would want to store it.
"For starters, some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the past, triggering a generator trip"

Wow, I don't know where to begin with this one. Either the engineers have completely lost all knowledge about how their controllers operate, or nobody has the right mind to think about putting opaque labels on the EPROM chips or over the controller board itself?

This kind of stuff borders on urban legend / cargo cult engineering territory.
Data.police.uk - open data about crime and policing in the UK
Julython 2013
Most (if not all) of the "Currency Clones" listed are scams. Be careful. Generally, the only coins you want to pay attention to are BTC and LTC.

Here you can watch the steady stream of altcoins and their scam practices.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0
Stripped down to essentials, this would be an online list of URLs, with appropriate auth (and maybe some representation of when something was read?). Such a service couldn't serve adds, but it wouldn't cost as much to run as a G-Reader or NewsBlur. Actually, if the clients were smart enough the described service could just be another RSS feed, which would take pushes from clients rather than polling sites. Either clients or other servers could then integrate this "read" feed with the other feeds.

This separation of concerns makes it clear that more than one trust issue is implicated. I think you're saying that users might distrust a service's permanence (frankly all services should be suspect on this point), but it seems other users might distrust a service's discretion with their reading habits. By separating this aspect of RSS consumption from all others, so that e.g. the really paranoid could just run their own service, everybody would be able to arrange a suitable situation.
The specifics are not made very clear in the article, so there are many possible scenarios.
Dismissing the difference between those 2 answers as political correctness, while not completely inaccurate, misses a larger point imo. It almost seems to me there is a different attitude toward other people and the world contained in them.
Don't ever come to LA if you don't want your reality to be shattered.
I'm assuming you use PuTTY, what are you missing?

I like the FuTTY fork of it at the moment.
This is true, but sometimes be introducing a new risk (point of failure) to the system, you get the ability to route around another. In this instance, separating POP and Gmail gives you the ability to route around Gmail when it's down.
Ditto. Here was my "super-quick installation" experience on OS X:

1. Read through the full page of installation instructions.

2. Update to latest version of MacVim.

3. Go research Vundle because up until now, I've been happily using Pathogen. Install Vundle.

4. Update vimrc file for Vundle, add YCM.

5. Launch vim, note error saying YCM needs installation.

6. Run :BundleInstall, which tells me I should compile and impolitely adding "Read the docs!" (Which docs? The GitHub docs, which tell me I should only need to recompile in rare cases? Or the bundle's vim docs, which didn't exist on my system prior to running this command?)

7. Back to terminal, launch ./install.sh --clang-completer in the YCM directory.

8. Go fix breakfast, return. Compilation eventually completes, no errors.

9. Launch vim, which immediately crashes with error: Vim: Caught deadly signal ABRT

10. Give up and delete any trace of YCM.

In a perfect world maybe I would have an extra hour or two to debug this, run through some regressions but right now I don't. Sounds like a nice plugin, maybe I'll try again in the future.
Email is an obsolete technology, since it's centralized and its meta data is never encrypted. Therefor it's perfect for interception and surveillance. We should abandon it.

I suggest we replace Email with a superior solution: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
Another idea is to bring them to the US and treat them like normal citizens either charge them or let them go free.
Enjoying the Web
To me is quite a deal breaker so far. The code on our website with Amail is really really more simple (no template engine for instance). And they give you out of the box a ton of analytics (geolocalization, bounce, click, open) even for singular mails.

Like Amazon SES on steroids.

P.S. Not affiliate with amail, just an enthusiastic user. We are using that at CoffeeStrap and we just saved a lot of time in development.
Google search changed to include more bias
Were I in the shoes of one of the kidnap victims at Guantanamo (for that is all they are - they are neither prisoners nor combatants, just abductees), I would not wish to continue that existence. The right to death is as important as the right to life.
Alan Moore is the guy behind classics like Watchmen and V for Vendetta in case you didn't know.

To say he is quite the character is a bit of an understatement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore
My first computer program was in VB.

I picked up a book (forgot the name) to learn programming as a hobby.
This book had a project based approach to teach. Step by step it helped me write a tic-tac-toe program using Visual Basics.
It was easy, it was fun, it was hands on. It helped me quickly relate to basic programming constructs like conditional statements, loops and branching.

It turned out not only a wise choice for someone who was experimenting with programming, but also a natural choice because, as soon as i looked at the books content and illustrations, i knew what i would be able to get out of this exercise and it seemed both interesting and achievable.
Please stop spamming RetroShare.
I say this all the time - I would gladly pay substantially higher taxes if that money went towards things like universal healthcare, public education, infrastructure and social programs for the 90%+ of the population that will never have to worry about paying substantial income taxes.

Today's conservatives and libertarians remind me of Captain Hadley in Shawshank Redemption, when he tells his men that his estranged brother left him $30,000 and immediately proceeds to curse the fact that the government will take a large chunk of it. Perspective, my friends! If you make enough money to qualify for the top income tax bracket, be happy about it! It should be an honor to pay more than "your share" of taxes to support your nation, community and less fortunate countrymen.

John Kenneth Galbraith said it better than I can:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
So...I kind of don't feel bad about this ever since those allegations of domestic violence surfaced.
Google after benchmarking C++, Java, Go, and Scala:

"We ﬁnd that in regards to performance, C++ wins out by
a large margin. [...] Scala concise notation and powerful language features allowed for the best optimization of code complexity."

https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...
I've seen several reactions like yours, but after reading the interview i've got to say it gave me the same feeling about Guido Van Rossum. Most of his answers are slightly-off one-liners, like he doesn't care about the interview at all.
Now I guess his main point is, like he says in its answer to the first question (which must have been swapped btw no?) : "Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable", which i would agree with.
So I wouldn't say that he is a jerk but compared with the good-will of the other interviewees, I see how he can come across as one.
And Ian Brady doesn't lack that capacity. The judgment to keep him in Broadmoor was yet another example of "the moral state", not abiding by the rule of law, and instead abiding by selective, moral justice.
Bayesian Bandits - optimizing click throughs with statistics
Great, I'm also working on improvements to HaskellDB! I don't know it very well, but I know how I want to improve it.

Can I email you on your email address I found via your HN profile so we can share ideas?
hi. is this the same problem that `set ttimeoutlen=10` addresses or something else?
Sidenote: RapGenius started out by copying the lyrics from OHHLA:

http://tumblinerb.com/post/34418855275/on-genius-and-geniuse...
great project & good implementation. very nice!
Why is Tor not on the list?
I mostly agree with you, I just found that trivial things — like drawing sprites — became cumbersome.

In my case it involved adding the transform component, the sprite render component, any movement components (usually custom subclasses for the specific game) and then adding that node into the graph.

When I wanted to hack away quickly on ideas I found I avoided my own engine because of all the typing it took just to get something up on the screen and moving. Or I found myself creating simple wrappers on top of the component system that killed the flexibility for the sake of brevity and readability.

In my personal experience coding with components did something to stop the creative, messy part of my brain that just wanted to see things on the screen and moving as soon as possible.
I can't see how anyone who read the article could possibly make the comment you just made.
Can someone explain this? "generators spin in a sealed atmosphere of hydrogen gas", hydrogen, really?
There's also KiTTY [http://kitty.9bis.net/], another great fork of PuTTY.
Why on earth would anyone cheer for 3000+ people dying? Insanity. I say that those you cheered during 9/11 has been force fed anti-US propaganda.

Holy shit, what an disgusting attitude. I may not like some US politics but cheering for 9/11... That is insane. I would love to see sources on Brazilians celebrating 9/11.
Authentication and Authorization using Action Composition in Play 2
So, torture in Guantanamo is OK?
You Have 25,000 Mornings As an Adult. Here's How to Not Waste Them
Oh, this is very nice -- maybe what I need to finally kick the tires of ruby/rails.

What is the minimum to get this up and running locally for test/dev? I know this isn't exactly meant for ruby/rails newbies -- but according to a few searches, (and the readme) it looks like I need:

* postgresql 9+
* redis
* memcached
* solr (is it needed for test/dev?)
* ruby 2.0 and rails 4.0

It looks like a sane way to get a rails 4 dev environment for the local user (on a recent Debian system) is:

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails

So, with the various servers installed, should the line above, paired with a checkout of the repo allow me to do:

rails serve

And have a look at a local install of this thing?
Archive.org's earliest snapshot of it [edit: at this URL - see below] is from January 6, 2010, but have a snapshot of the same content at a different URL from December 26, 2002. Their snapshots of the site itself go back to July 6, 2005, so I'm inclined to believe the article dates only back to 2010 or late 2009 at the earliest.

Edit: and archive.org has an even earlier snapshot from December 26, 2002, under a different URL.
My ram is fast. My disk is slow. I want things to be in ram to be ready for when I need to use them.

The amount of ram a software uses seems like an odd metric to use, especially when the ram hungry beasts mentioned in the article use less than 250 MB.
I cannot believe that people are actually paid and getting popular on base of this kind of experiments. I mean, unless I am missing some crucial point, the results are just some random numbers that can point out only the fact that not many people have manners to give up seat for whoever needs it. And even that statistic is useless as it would have to be performed on many more people in order to have some solid ground. I wish I would have gone study psychology really. Lot of money and exposure for something that could be performed by primary school pupils...
Additionally, it is worth noting that the weakest target is very often the human element. Although this was noted by Mitnick in his "hacking" (which generally was just clever social engineering), it is equally true when governments are targeting you. The stasi (or other pernicious organizations organized to carry out state censorship) could easily have someone smeared in the press, dismissed from their job, or many other means short of official imprisonment.

To the point of encryption, as noted by the NSA (inclusive of present revelations), it actually makes you a target for state surveillance. This is a bizarre catch 22. If you are using facebook and "rah rah-ing" about Obama or the latest political fever you probably are at very little current risk of long term data retention. The government doesn't care about you. If you slip into politically suspect views and/or start encrypting your messages simply because you don't want the government to read them, you attract government attention, including the likely possibility that your communications will be retained.

Moreover (and this is where it gets scary, even if it wasn't already), the likelihood is that the many people that are part of your social graph (even if you aren't involved in social networks, some friends likely are and have probably shared their email contacts at the very least), governments can very easily figure out your social circles, and how suspect they may be from any standpoint that the government cares about.

Today this may be "terrorism" (itself a vague term, but one that at least nominally includes the threat of violent acts), tomorrow it may simply be having politically incorrect opinions of some variety. As noted by many, even the nominal but legally actionable protections for American citizens have been eroded to the point that the executive branch can hold anyone in infinite detention without trial. A world without borders has become the panopticon, a jail where we are bound by ever-peering eyes of our peers.

"What you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law" -- even if you said it 10 years ago when you were drunk in a private message on Facebook.

Welcome to the Brave New World.
How many times have you spent 20 minutes joining a 15 minute meeting?
Tales from the Silicon MilkRoundabout London: job offering stats
Moreover, would the meditation participants behave compassionately in other situations? A waiting room forms an implicit assumption that the present humans will have further interaction. What of compassion shown to stranger where the subject can be reasonably expected to assume a lack of interaction after the place?

Still further: what of the gender bias? A forty person study seems hardly likely to account for the gender bias inherent in compassionate activities. I would suspect that a male would be more inclined to give up his seat to an attractive female than any other, even regardless of the circumstances (broken foot, lack of chairs, etc.)
This "study" warrants some careful reading.
Falling down the hole with the plant must be an homage to E.T. on the Atari 2600. :)
This is a case where the TechCrunch headline is a lot more reasonable than the HN one. I read "You need an acquisition culture to sustain a startup culture" and thought it was going to be an article about how a business's culture should be primarily about acquisition, which was a little more outlandish.
You just described a per project contract that's supposed to be delivered in under a year. There's nothing in your description that says you're supposed to work for the whole year. You can finish it in one day.
I don't consider this comment to be SPAM. It's a relevant comment, the solution is entirely non-commercial and open-source and there are still tons of people on HN who don't encrypt.
Een gezond en gemakkelijk vol te houden dieet? Dat is het Eat Clean Dieet |
You don't often hear the same discussion about train or bus drivers

Plenty of cities are getting rid of their subway drivers at least. And if many airport shuttle trains around the world are automated as well.
Ok, so that's not $20K per year. That's $20K per certain number of man-days.
Err, or maybe it's just a sensible precaution, because relying on a single defense against failure is a bad idea?
If you are a ruby or javascript developer, just use Supertab, because you will waste more time installing it than getting any substantial benefits over default vim completion.
Oh please. You can argue about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees are being treated fairly as prisoners of war, but they were caught fighting against Allied forces in a war zone. It's an absurd characterization to call them "kidnap victims."

And the U.S. does not recognize a "right to death" for anyone in the U.S. You can argue about that policy, but the Guantanamo detainees are not being treated inconsistently there. Our policies are strongly anti-suicide across the board. See: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/guantanamo-is-not-an-an....
Snowden said "Encryption works. Unfortunately, endpoint security is still weak."
Omnisharp - True intellisense, find usages, semantic refactor, etc for C# in Vim
Haha, yea it's pretty great.
> Oh I am positive that there are millions in this very country who believe that he should have stayed and gone to trial, that his fleeing is cowardly, and that his actions are traitorous.

Of course. In WW2, when the Japanese were attacking the Philippines, you didn't see General MacArthur cowardly fleeing for Australia, right? Heroes stay and fight no matter what the odds are. He would have never gotten his medal of honor for fleeing to fight on a more favorable battlefield!