skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OoVoo Releases SDK, Lets Developers Add Video Chat to Mobile Apps
Nice, I was looking for something like that!
> Ask 100 IT people or developers what an operating system does and you'll get 100 different ones

An operating system represents the abstraction layer between hardware and software applications, its purpose being to provide on userlevel the APIs needed for efficient interaction with hardware. Modern operating systems also provide higher-level components or services that apps can reuse, plus bundled junk because an OS is perfect for achieving vendor lock-in and for shoving apps and services down on people's throats, being a natural monopoly that can be easily abused.

I learned the above in high-school. Of course, just like in any other profession and industry, you'll get 100 different answers because many "IT people" are simply incompetent.
Does anyone have an idea about how this fits in with Cloudflare's new fourth generation servers[0] which up the network card buffers to 16MB from 512KB?

[0]:http://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-latest-...
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch11.htm...
If it can prevent the next wiseass from spouting his mouth, yes.
> Doesn't everyone interested in computers/computing start programming things that are actually useful at roughly that age?

Sure, lots of people do, but it's nice to listen to her talk about it all the same.

There was one part: "Although it sometimes may be hard, or your programs sometimes won't work, once you do get it to work you feel really happy."

I thought that part was nice.
Could be very useful.
RED has too many tunables and overfits for a single traffic profile. Fair queuing CoDel just needs a bit more testing to become the Linux default (the current default is a fifo, which is horrible but simple). In addition to that, a lot more work is required to eliminate dark buffers in wireless drivers and other places.
Obviously things have changed since I was last living there!
What about creating a new library? It's been a giant PITA for me, especially figuring out which of the 4 major distribution tools to use.
nice. what about github integration?
Yes. I'm uneasy about drone strikes, but they're a lot better than cluster bombs, which not only kill people during the bombing but which leave bomblets around for years.

The bomblets are visually appealing to children, causing considerable harm to them.

UNICEF works hard in this area.

(http://www.unicef.org/eapro/media_14458.html)

(http://www.unicefusa.org/campaigns/public-policy-advocacy/ke...)
Was hoping someone would say this. I would love for someone more clever than I am to come up with the OS equivalent.
Modularity in JavaScript
I've heard of several scenarios where some senior employees had screwed something up but (presumably) had too much dirt on other senior employees, that they just sent them home permanently. No job duties, still receive a paycheque, just don't come into the office please.
I think judge should force Samsung to release all the information they have on history of this code. After all Samsung is suspected of violating the license. Shouldn't they be able to prove copyright before they can claim it?
> 1. Withhold your taxes.

> 2. Protect yourself against the police and the military who will try to extract them by force (possibly by having crowdfunded guards).

> 3. Switch from using US Dollar as most of the money government generates comes from inflation (gov sells "bonds" that it will never repay in exchange for new money). Since all national currencies are inflationary and controlled by similar institutions all over the world, only Bitcoin is a good alternative. Or gold, if we can protect the vaults properly and build trust in a company that keeps it (but history shows it doesn't work).

> 4. Pay only what you think is fair and where you think it's fair. E.g. if you like social security, pay there directly as much as you want.

So the solution of breaking free from the NSA and problems of US gov't is to isolate yourself and recreate the exact same systems in miniature?
Btw. Just tried LESS, and seems like there is some problem. Here's my simple LESS code test:
@color : "green";

div
{
border: 1px solid @{color};
}
Oh yeah, I see. I think I'm going to try and implement a low contrast theme, with grey links and easier to read text. Thanks for the link, I'll have a look at it!
"...David Omand's "Securing the State"..."

I shall add that to the summer reading list. I'm still dubious about how much accountability there actually is. For instance, the quote below is from a (generally favourable) Amazon review of the book referenced

"The book is a bit weak in the realm of intelligence collection, but this is because this is a very sensitive area and Sir David was clearly trying to avoid stepping on toes."

We are good at 'sensitive areas' in the UK.

"...the mushrooming growth of myriad, largely redundant secret intelligence groups..."

I suspect we have some of those as well but as projects/units within the main agencies.
For an example you can look at http://www.xmlsoft.org/downloads.html
That's a website for a highly used libxml2 library. I believe you would still just send your patch to the mailing list, or possibly the main person in charge.

So big or non trivial projects had their own websites, and mailing lists. I don't really know what a small project would have. For example yesterday I made a page that converts any time in human readable format into local time. (useful for when you get email for a meeting in some awkward timezone) Since now we have what we have, I put it in bitbucket, few years ago, I would just have the source on my PC until it gets lost.
Your own explanation admits that the problem of defining an operating system is that a modern OS bundles a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with an operating system.

I don't think the attitude that people are "incompetent" because they don't have the same definition as you is helpful.
Really important Hacker News.
I started to learn node.
Yep, but its also a very crowded market, for ever startup that makes huge money with free to play games, there are hundreds (or even thousands) that fail.
jsFiddle already has support for forking, but I guess you could add something like "fork to Gist". I'll look into that, thanks for the feedback!
Any game designer here wants to collaborate in reskinning my puzzle games Smart Kick (IOS and Android)? We feel like our puzzles are much better. Links are on ndat.org.
I enjoyed every word of this, real or not. Great story!
It's nice, but thin fonts are very hard to read (screenshot: http://uk.omg.li/QPvZ)
Why Galaxy S4's Awesome S Health Is The Ultimate Fitness Pal
The latest one. There was only the brief period when setuptools/disttools were confusing as far as I remember. Now, you can just use d2to1 and the new distribute config format.
Amazing ! Already using it, thank you very much.
https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+parallax+librarie...
I was a child during the cold war, but I actually could not tell you one thing about any Russian person that I was told during that time,

I still remember Sting's song Russians with the rhetorical lyric, "Do the Russians Love their Children Too?"

Which is kind of the opposite of your point, since it wasn't Big Evil propaganda.
Good job on the extension. I did have a couple of suggestions:

1. Have an alternate "dark" theme version for those of us who like dark backgrounds as opposed to bright eye-popping colors.

2. Similar to the "Open links in new tabs" option, would it be possible to add a "Open comments in new tabs" option?
When Atari fell apart in 1984, we discovered an office in New York City with about 20 "employees" who did nothing but collect paychecks. We figured it was an organized crime thing; I don't know whether there were actual people, or just an empty office.
Let's try again:

"That does not mean I approve of his actions"

I am against software patents and do not think he's doing something that makes the world a better place.

My point is merely that he's a human being who did something I don't like and not some evil monster. Sorry if that offends your sense of outrage.
That's because the child processes can load and run third party code, which obviously can crash them. Just like apache modules can crash httpd worker processes. So why run an extra layer of monitoring on top of the existing one for apps like those?
It's only an issue with TCP if you forget to enable keep-alive (http://www.gnugk.org/keepalive.html). Keep-alive solves this problem, and it solves other problems too, like when your network equipment decides a connection is no longer needed and disables it. Or, you can implement application-level heartbeats--whenever you send you have the chance to recognize that your peer has gone away.
Very specific "Gimmie informal explanation of the otto cycle" vs incredibly wide OS request.

A better matched question for the mechanic would be wide like "explain what an engine computer does. All of them. Ever."

Or a better matched question for the IT people would be narrow like "How do mice connect to computers?" aka PS/2, USB, bluetooth, maybe inport and RS232 serial if you're of a certain age...
This is what I don't understand. Why can't the US scale down this huge military complex? It has already served its purpose; it won World War II and defeated the Soviets in the defense budget chicken race, so how about calling mission accomplished and going home, now?

Considering how many Americans die of heart attacks, and how many in terrorist attacks, wouldn't giving your citizens an actual first-world health care system a much better use of these gigantic black budgets?
Oh, damn that's a mess. What OS is that?
Fetish is quite a strange word to use. They put in practice anarchist principles and showed that such principles do actually work in practice as they managed to grab the focus of the world for maybe a month or two and communicated a very focused message, there is a difference between 99% of the people and a tiny 1%.
Regarding 'wise up'... No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the masses (P.T. Barnum)
Sympathies. We had a similar thing happen at a previous job in the days of the "deathstar" drives. Lost a drive, no biggie. Tell the DC guy to replace it. Lost a second drive, told him to start running towards our cage. Lost a third drive, uhh - how current are our backups?

Different job - had a developer accidentally run a where-clause-less delete in production. Same net result. RAID and SANs are definitely not backup solutions.
Nearly everything that the NSA does is Top Secret, so can we claim to know anything about its activities? Why do we believe that we have the power to defund it, when we don't actually know where it gets its money, or how much it receives? Are posters here aware that the CIA has long been accused of being involved in the global drug trade, as a means of self-financing and leveraging power?

Despite the recent revelations having vindicated the world's tin-foil-hats, we still seem to collectively lack the stomach for darker conspiratorial notions. To be in step with reality, it may be important to build up a bit of tolerance. I'm not making any claims (because I just don't know), but I see absolutely no reason to assume that democratic process applies to these agencies. They may have gone rogue; they may have always been rogue. Their global network may be the actual, de-facto world government. Would it really surprise anyone at this point if a convincing leak exposed such notions? What would we do then?

Let's stop imagining that Law will take care of this problem so we can at least assume a proper direction for our efforts. Which is to say, let's dispense with some of our convenience and fashions and start writing software the right way -- the paranoid way.

To quote the eternal R. Buckminster Fuller:

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."
Funny you mention that; I've been to the most recent meetup at Thoughtworks and I'm trying to be more interactive in said community.
> Mining (...) sucks worse than an Amazon warehouse

I'm not sure.

Yes, mining was physically one of the most demanding / intense work there has ever been -- see this fantastic description by Orwell for example: http://george-orwell.org/Down_The_Mine/0.html

But, in a way, it that was a good thing, because you did a job most other humans weren't capable of doing.
Introvert? Act like an Extrovert to feel happier.
The only reference I've seen to suspected license violations is the assertion in the git history that it was at one time under GPL or maybe public domain. There's no provenance here.

I doubt this will ever get before a judge, more likely a combination of DMCA takedowns and exclusion from the mainline kernel.
Super-cheap online master’s degree could change American higher education
This is lovely. Thank you!

Would it be possible to port this as a Safari extension? Thanks again.
NANOG presentation on using Anycast with TCP: http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/matt.lev... (tl;dr it works fine)

As far as CPU, there isn't a whole lot of cycles dedicated to decoding and replying to network packets, and serving static content is incredibly trivial. The interrupts from high loads of network traffic (usually small packets) are arguably the biggest impact on the CPU, which is why you get network cards that offload L3 processing much more efficiently than your CPU can. Network appliance vendors rely on them to help do things like transparently filter traffic on 40GB/s interfaces in real time, which would probably be impossible with a normal CPU.

They mentioned in a previous post that they mainly rely on L3 routing to load balance. And I don't remember if they specified this, but they hinted in the post that all customer traffic can be served by any frontend box; it just pulls the customer data from their main storage and caches it on frontends as needed, as any good proxy does.
Licenses grant freedoms to do things that you would not otherwise be allowed to do. Here, the GPL means that someone with copyright grants a freedom (the freedom to change and redistribute). But these freedoms can only be granted by people who are in a position to say who gets to exercise those rights.

That code might come with a GPL, but the license it grants is worthless, because the people who put it there have no connection to the copyright holders.
Suck the money out of your wallet

squish 10 gigs of shovelware and trialware and just junk onto the hard drive

bang it crashes and needs reinstallation on a regular basis

blow. windows blows.
They threw out the 4th amendment without notifying the public, do you really think any software license is going to make a difference?
Thanks!

I'll try implementing a low-contrast version with less harsh colors soon! About the "Open comments in new tabs" option, yes, that's a very good idea. I'll do that as well!
Nobel-winning economist-end software patents & cut patent protection to 10 years
Five Marketing Activities that even Successful Startups Botch Up
Probably, yeah. I'm not sure how development for Safari works, but I could give it a try soon.
I didn't communicate my point effectively. Let me try again.

I believe strongly in quantitative analysis of election data. I place zero value in punditry, especially from main stream media. What I don't believe is that some of these complicated models, Silver's in particular, are meaningfully superior to predicting the election by trivially applying recent polling data augmenting it perhaps with a simple weighted combination of polls based on recency or sample size.

I take as a given that Silver's model is better than punditry. I am skeptical that it is better than the trivial model which any undergraduate stats student would cook up.

> The problem is, which polling data do you use? They provide a scientific answer to that question. Instead of cherry picking, they use it all, and weight it based on past accuracy and other factors.

What I dispute is whether the "other factors", which is the secret-sauce that allows Silver to give the impression he has a uniquely predictive model, have any real value.

Thanks for the Linzer link. I have to take time to read it carefully but on first glance it again shows one of the things I take issue with: If you are going to claim that a model is accurate you should be asking, compared to what? How can you justify a complex model if you aren't even going to try to show that it is better than some trivial baseline?
Podcasts for keeping your (entrepreneurial)  passion  burning
Eek, yes, forgot about that. PAE comes back from the grave, to annoy people!
> As an example, the new geofencing APIs that they announced at the last Google I/O (intended to replace the buggy core "proximity alerts") are part of "Google Play Services", not the core OS --- and therefore not available on devices which aren't part of the Play borg.

The location services framework in Android is deliberately tied to Google APIs for using address and location resolution, while gathering location sensor data is not. Wouldn't it make sense further evolutions of that API also only work with Google APIs?
Accelerators should have been mentioned in the article.
Nah bro they target civilians and blow them up en masse. If you had to pick the lesser of two evils, the answer is pretty clear I think.
Crazy time: liberal friends are now defending the NSA's actions...

If Jimmy Carter can't convince them, then they really are lost.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/jimmy-carter-edward...
Yep. I would suggest to add a position: fixed to the header. And place the searchbox there of course.
That won't happen... Cisco consumer and Cisco enterprise are entirely different beasts.

Cisco's track record on M&A being successful is actually the subject of a number of case studies... they generally do it really well and keep the CEOs and teams of the companies they acquire for a while.
Cisco to buy Sourcefire (which commercialized Snort) for $2.7B
How to work with services and intents in Android Applications
> they managed to grab the focus of the world for maybe a month or two and communicated a very focused message, there is a difference between 99% of the people and a tiny 1%

This... wasn't the goal of the core group going into the "turn Occupy Wall Street into a movement" project, though, which was my point.

It's sort of like setting out, in 0 A.D., to turn Christianity into a movement--but everyone who joins you ends up evangelizing for Scientology (or whatever the equivalent at the time was), because that's what they think you're talking about, and that's easier to sell. So, you've spawned a successful movement... to evangelize Scientology. Not a success.

Also, the word choice was deliberate; every piece of literature you can find on movements throughout history would suggest that there is a strong correlation between success in spreading awareness/change, and having charismatic leadership: a "face" to put to the movement, and a person that could be looked to--either for guidance, or just as a role-model--when one is confused about what the movement should be focusing on. This is important not for any sort of top-down leadership/command role--it's not a 1% hegemon--but rather the "face" exists so that new members have someone to base their understanding on what the movement "is for" off of, instead of just looking at what the people around them are doing (usually nothing.) To know this, and persist in attempting to use a self-defeating "no one is special; we are all of us together" approach, goes past ideology and into role-playing. They weren't trying to accomplish anything; they just wanted to enjoy the feeling of doing something anarchic, even if it wouldn't accomplish anything.
Canary Home Security Device Funds Within Hours
I just installed it and really like it however when I scroll (quite slowly) down the main page though the text and background blur together so that I can't see anything. I'm not sure if it's because of the thin fonts of the font colours (the headlines seems to blur the most) but it's quite annoying. I'd normally scroll at that speed and be able to skim the headlines. It's impossible to do with the blurring.
I don't know why you're using past tense here. People are still working in mines all over the world and all of those risks you list are their every day reality.
You could say the same about any business owner if you said thousands of paid employees built their business. Almost nobody builds something that lasts by themselves.
Reminds me of the "I was a warehouse wage slave" first-person account article - submitted to HN about a year back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641184
Meh. Don't know how much this really sucks the usability out of things. On my Android, I confess I'm already so bought in to the Amazon ecosystem that I almost resent the room that Play and the likes are taking up. Is particularly obnoxious when the phone complains that I need to make room, and the only crap I can't move to an SD card is the Google stuff.
PGM :)
Node.js web crawler framework
I've just installed it and I'm liking it. The links are a bit hard to read on the home-page (they are a bit faded) but otherwise it looks good. Thanks!
(please don't compare things to cancer, it does both a disservice)
This is not such a gray area as you think. Search for the readline license and what that meant to clisp.

Hint: derivative work of a GPL code is GPL (although that was slightly different for clisp).

You are free not have GPL stamp on your code as long as you keep it to yourself. If you distribute it to a third party you are automatically bound by GPL.
This is a pretty weird article, and fairly obviously just an advertisement for appcelerator.

So, native wins over html5- for what actual purpose? Isn't this something you evaluate on a case by case basis depending on client, need, budget, maintainability, and on and on? What prize exactly has native "objectively" won?

Isn't this the thinking that has led to the plague of "DOWNLOAD OUR APP" banners preventing me from seeing anyone's content when I'm on a mobile phone? Have native apps won so hard that nobody can bear to look at a piece of text without a round trip to the app store?
I was confused for a minute, then I remembered that you don't actually have to accept the GPL as a user, only as an intentional distributor. So while the base version is GPL, the private version isn't - by default it's a hybrid of GPL and proprietary code.
Chrome 28 on Mountain Lion http://uk.omg.li/QP02
"Potential"
Probably Windows. Chrome uses GDI on Windows instead of DirectWrite for some unfathomable reason: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
everyone seems to be using this to push their favourite file system, which is fine and all, but if you're using software raid on linux this is the kind of thing you need:

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script checks all RAID devices on the system
# http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Software_RAID_Install#Data_Scrubbing
for raid in /sys/block/md*/md/sync_action; do
echo "check" >> ${raid}
done

(the link referred to seems to be down for me at the moment - i just took this from my main machine).

then add a crontab entry to run it once a week or so:

0 0 * * 0 /root/bin/scrub-raid.sh &

you can check the script by running it by hand and then doing

cat /proc/mdstat

where you'll see something like:

Personalities : [raid1] [raid0] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [linear]
md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1]
976760640 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
[=>...................] check = 6.0% (59419520/976760640) finish=191.3min speed=79902K/sec
bitmap: 0/8 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

finally, my notes on this - http://www.acooke.org/cute/ScrubbingR0.html
For anyone interested in a Node.js crawler, my company recently released roach: https://github.com/PetroFeed/roach
51% of people think stormy weather affects cloud computing, and a full 95% of people don't think they ever use cloud computing.

http://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-a...