skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What makes you say it's a "very bad caricature"?
All the stories I've read and heard (from my relatives and friends in Romania) paint a very bleak picture of what life was like then. I was 4 years old in '89, but I heard a lot form my parents. Essentially they were prisoners in their own country, and the higher layers of the party practically owned all of it.
Weather helped somewhat to slow blitzkrieg down in 1941 (though it applies to both sides equally; Soviets were just better prepared), but it doesn't win wars. If you look at casualty figures, 2/3 of all Axis casualties in WW2 (this includes Japanese!) happened on the Eastern Front in Europe; and most of those weren't frostbite.

Soviets paid two for one in terms of casualties, though. But they could keep doing that for longer, and their industry could keep up as well (war production figures for Reich vs USSR are rather telling).
> Sucks that you buy something for feature X and few days later an update comes through getting rid of it.

You really shouldn't buy products because of an un-official feature hidden in a preview of a developer SDK.
> You'll also note that Germans and Japanese troops fought with particular determination even when it became clear that defeat was the only possible outcome.

I actually recall reading regarding Germans that there was a very peculiar distortion of perception there when even during late 1944 and early 1945, with Soviet armies literally at the door, a lot of people genuinely still believed that a victory (at that point defined as peace on non-debilitating terms) was highly likely - based on letters and other personal correspondence from that period, journals etc.
an "old" language? compared to what?

Ruby appeared in 1995, the same as PHP

JavaScript appeared in 1995, the same as PHP

Python appeared in 1991, four years earlier
Not satisfied? Have something after brunch
This is precisely my point. People like you are wrong. Sure, your friend may have done something brave, but he still put himself in a situation where he would likely be asked to do wrong. He supported a government that uses force to try to get its way. We don't need that. I don't need that. Even if I profit from it, I didn't ask for it, and I really do have the moral high ground here.

Don't act like the people joining the military do it for some high flying idea of honor and defense of the country. They join in droves because they get to have an adventure with the feeling of danger but extremely low chance of injury. If we were actually fighting a real enemy that really could do us harm, I /might/ call that bravery.

You have an antiquated view of what it is to be "more of a man". You seem to be stuck in the past where blindly killing the others is somehow a good thing without stopping to think about the reasons. How about, why was your friend walking around in a foreign country in the first place?

I like how you couldn't try making your point with a reasoned argument, you had to use ad hominem. Classy.
(sic) is "thus" in Latin. It's not an abbreviation.
No, for example when I'm on battery, or working on a remote server. Collaborative coding tools are also missing most of the IDE features. Why would I want to make myself dependent on an IDE?
> More likely, the Incan slave/poor populace was split and easily co-opted by the Spaniards.

Why is this either/or? The above statement is undoubtedly true, but that doesn't mean what I said is false.

The problem, is, as you say, that the Incans only had access to cloth armor, copper axes, and stone clubs, as I said in my comment. They eventually developed guerilla tactics, but such tactics are not effective when you are sieging your capital, trying to take it back from invaders. Also, I cordially invite you to try and organize the digging of ditches when 50 to 90 percent of your population has been killed, most of the rest are in rebellion because your rule was, frankly, never terribly popular, and the remaining percentage are currently facing down a thousand pound warhorse. I would also like to point out that decently training a pole-armsmen is no easy feat when you have never done it before, and your empire is in disarray.

Also, the Spanish had plenty of experience in the European style of warfare based on cavalry supported by foot, since the European cultures had access to horses for many centuries at this point, whereas the Incans and other cultures and empires that arose in the Andes had access to the llama. Llamas are not, shall we say, renowned for their martial prowess. It takes time to develop new ideas and technologies in the face of change in the best of time. Saying "oh come on, just dig ditches and train spearmen" is a tad unrealistic.
> Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

Yes, original author! You should be spending your time on forums bitching about things, not trying to bring a little fun into people's lives! Can you not see how anonymous abuse of strangers VASTLY IMPROVES THE WORLD?!?
That's a confusing way to stretch the definition of that phrase.
probably true on the development side. but on the business side, there are just so many apps popping out left and right for every niche market you can think of.
Who on earth puts the body text in 25px?!?!

I've been noticing a lot of blog fonts getting annoyingly bigger, where I keep having to zoom-out a couple of times in my browser for good legibility, but this is just flat-out INSANE.
I'm happy with the fact that it allows admins to choose
whatever they want at the filesystem and block level, the
same as dpkg/rpm do. For example in a cloud environment,
block level redundancy may be more easily provided at the
infrastructure level for guests.

While it may provide admins with choice, it doesn't provide them with "robust OS upgrades". Again, that's my only quibble here.

For those who do need redundancy, you're free to choos
BTRFS, XFS+LVM, or hardware raid, whatever suits you.

There's a large variance in those solutions that doesn't provide the same end-user experience (or even result), and without integration with the package system, doesn't really provide the sort of safety net most administrators are looking for.

As for the rest of your reply around the reboot-needed
flag; it basically sounds like it's fairly manual, but
maybe that's "good enough".

It's only "manual" in some sense for package creators; not administrators. For administrators, it's a transparent decision about what's safe to update and what's not.

As for actually being manual, not really. The package system provides package creators with a tool called pkgmogrify, which allows them to set rules that cause transformation of actions based on patterns at package publication time. As an example, Solaris has a set of rules that say that, by default, any files delivered to /kernel should be tagged with reboot-needed=true.

I won't claim it gets the OS 100% coverage, but as has been said before "perfect is the enemy of good."

I have a particular paranoia about race conditions though,
so were I to design a system that attempted to do live
update applications, it'd be a whilelist, not a blacklist
as reboot-needed effectively is.

While I understand the paranoia, a whitelist is not actually a practical option. The vast majority of content delivered onto a modern UNIX or UNIX-like system doesn't require a reboot when being updated. man pages, header files, and most userspace binaries and libraries can all be safely updated without a reboot.

For example, on my desktop workstation, ~289,806 items have been installed by the package system. Of those, only 857 have been determined to require a reboot if they are updated.

That means that roughly 0.37% (yes, < 1%) of the items on my system have been determined to require updates to be performed in a clone boot environment (require a reboot).

For enterprise-level customers, minimising the number of reboots needed to enact change is paramount. Any downtime at all can often cost them millions of dollars.
Politicians have bodyguards that can put a bullet through the head of anyone who acts on the information, sometimes even legally!

On the other hand, do you really want the neighbor's meth-head boyfriend to have NSA style access to your records? to your children's records?

Seriously guys, a world with zero privacy may sound kind of cool... in theory. But you have to realize that there are actors much more nefarious than most governments on Earth, and the impact to the lives of those who become "persons of interest" for that kind of actors happen to be more immediate and unpleasant.
It sounds like UIKit Dynamics will make things like flicking tiles around a lot easier to implement, without creating a physics engine from scratch... And UIKit is generally more friendly to flat designs... And the whole game engine thing is built in now.

But the real value of the best games comes from game-play dynamics, and not just how well the app simulates physics. Hopefully these changes in iOS will allow game-builders to focus more on the things that really matter, rather than redoing the work every game needs to do.
if i stood in front of your house with a cellphone jammer, did i just hack your cellphone service provider?
If I understand, he's saying that he didn't end up doing consulting for them, not denying that he talked to them.

On the whole, a mildly interesting non-issue.
I think this was a reference to the fact that Soviet Union had extremely high (compared to average) rates of collaboration with the enemy among both civilian population on occupied territories, as well as and POWs.

Some keywords to look up: Hiwi, Russian Liberation Army, Lokot Republic, Ostlegionen.
If you have your own plugins or native libraries that none of the Firefox OS stuff will cover functionality for now or in the future, then no, it's not enough. Also games are huge part of mobile sales, and sales is the biggest driver of developer adoption. I feel like webOS's slowness in adopting native access kneecapped them in game porting. As a new platform, the less barriers the better to getting games ported, the better.
I said accidents happen[1]. Sadly, no, it is not hard and it happens without a firearm too. Pools and cars tend to other ways youngsters end up with a lifetime of regret.

1) yes, I classify this as an accident - the responsible party is the fool who left it out and loaded
There are no winners in the #infosec blame game
Non-American here. Can someone point me to what exactly happens if you opt-out of these screenings? What happens on this 'opt-out floor-mat of shame'?

I'm asking out of pure curiosity and prefer not to search those keywords and get added to some list and have an eye-in-the-sky suddenly trained on me. It is completely understandable if you choose not to answer this question.

Thanks for reading, though. :)
I find it refreshing to have text styled for readability. Narrow columns with large fonts really help me sit back a little and enjoy the read.
Python 3.4 will default to non-inheritable file descriptors
Guns, Germs & Steel discusses the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in some detail. Well worth a read.

More surprising to me than the lack of money is the fact that they did not have the wheel.
Very interesting! You should consider having a fast path for long string literal prefixes.

You might find DynASM[1] useful, as long as you're not doing dynamic register allocation. Here's[2] a good tutorial.

[1]: http://luajit.org/dynasm.html
[2]: http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-simple-jits.html
Yet the article also indicates that even the supposed 'golden tickets' into the highest tier schools don't guarantee success. Sure, if your family built the library, they'll probably let you in with mediocre scores, but for the >99% of students to whom that does not apply, the admissions system works exactly as advertised. Who really cares that Theodore Legacy IV gets in when those people comprise <1% of the students? Someone's family needs to subsidize everyone else's tuition...
What size monitor do you have? I've written about big type on blogs here: http://mikeyanderson.com/optimal_characters_per_line
What in particular makes PHP ugly, compared to JS (or Java or C)?
6. Since the new iOS UI is so ugly, no one will really care if your app don't look good.
Since you're OK with manual labor on remote ships, you might try manual labor on remote farms? WWOOF: http://wwoof.net/
I hear the youths in college are pretty into this, they use it for low-budget gap years & language study. Have never done it myself
I loved the original version of this book (actually just passed it along to a friend to read), and I'm probably going to pick up the digital copy of this revision. Interested in seeing how he translates some of his original points into digital products (which has been a common stumbling block for a lot of designers).
> The official hospital bill is a worst case that roughly nobody actually pays.

If someone has no insurance but does have enough assets to cover the lofty bill, I'd expect the hospital to seek to seize assets for the full amount. It's a safe bet there's a fair number of people who've ended up losing their house to pay for a few hours of tests, after the hospital refused to negotiate. Lesson: If you have assets, have health insurance to lower the risk of losing it all when you get scratched by a cat.
Should a person who has huntington's, and will lead a highly productive life through the late 30s and chooses to die quickly (in lieu of dying slowly painfully), be forced to subsidize the life of a person who smokes through their youth and chooses to milk the system for expensive, extended life support through their 50s-100s?

Either of those people could get hit by a bus at age 20 and need life saving surgery and massive help learning to walk again. This isn't particularly about morals of ownership, this is about pragmatic ways of spreading risk.

I don't personally care what the political setup is and I think there are numerous ways to achieve spreading medical risk, but I have yet to see a country that is getting good results from just private industry plus charity.

If you think you know how it could work and that there would be an improvement in medical outcomes and general equitability from your plan over the other systems now in effect, then that is excellent news and you should detail it in an academic paper and tell the world.

However, given that you are stating that you are an ideologue on this, then you are starting with the answer you want to end up with and just trying to work out how to argue it.

If you want to say that is all I am doing as well, then fair enough, all I can say is that I am fairly certain that is not where I am coming from on this, while noting that you openly admit it.
> In practice, the Party owned everything, and its high ranking members were effectively nobility.

The concept of nobility implies hereditary transfer of privileges, which was not the case in Soviet system. It was certainly easier for children of Party bureaucrats to get their own spot, but it was not guaranteed to them, they could lose it at any time, and "commoners" could get into the ranks (and it was not something exceptional).

So Party was the ruling elite class, but it was not an estate/caste, as nobility was in feudalism.
...which means everyone agrees it's a good time to be making apps?
If I had read this reply 3 years ago, I would have called you "racist". But after spending time with engineers from different countries, I believe having an understandable English accent is not a nice thing to have, but rather a professional responsibility.

I have personally witnessed people losing their jobs/contracts because of this issue, and although I enjoyed their friendship, I wasn't really sorry for losing a teammate. Because trying to solve a technical issue while your mate uses a very broken accent is very very mind numbing and frustrating at its best.

Interestingly, my wife was also having trouble with pronunciation of certain English words as she was learning the language, and I did not want her to have the same fate when (or if) she got a job.

So I created a very simple app for her to practise her pronunciation. Later on I turned it into a webapp when her classmates also wanted to try it. If you are interested you can check it out at: http://www.sayafter.me
It can be a fine line between criticism and it being "constructive"
> The EU is absolutely obsessed with writing up laws to invade into absolutely every area of our lives.

That is a funny way to frame it! Being European I, for one, welcome a government trying to protect me from the massive, for-profit, privacy invasion and user data trafficking that the internet business currently is.

And, as said before, the "cookie law" applies to any form of user tracking and storing or exchanging user-specific data. You can't code around it. Sending visitor data to Google Analytics server-side could technically hide the cookie, but it would legally be exactly the same as using the cookie based client-side javascript.
Shorty Awards Round Up
iOS 7 SDK stuff is still under developer preview NDA, shouldn't be discussed in the light i think....
> the language violated expectations

its a language, you learn it. it doesn't adapt to you.

I am slowly learning Thai. I am fucking terrible at it. I mean absolutely woeful. It's hardly the fault of Thailand or its people that their language has different sentence structure and different words than what I'm accustomed to, is it?

Type juggling exists, there is an operator that does a strict comparison.

Build a bridge and get over it, and yourself.
Also the time of day
Highly recommend Discourse, even if you don't know Rails.
inDinero is hiring another Web Developer
Are you interested in being an integral part of areal product? Looking to transform an industry? Hi there! inDinero is looking to bring on an additional engineer who will be working on the company’s greatest engineering challenges. To be successful in this role, you’ll have to be super smart, be well versed in CS concepts and studies, and you’ll need to have a passion for helping small businesses succeed. inDinero has been hauling for about three years now, growing to over a thousand paying business customers!

Both founders (Andy and Jessica) studied computer science before starting the company and Andy continues to focus exclusively on the product development. We’re looking for a Senior Engineer who can oversee the product growth as we attract thousands of new clients. We’re unlike any other tech startup out there, because we’re working to transform an industry that typically moves super slow. Why work on yet another photo sharing app when you can change the way that businesses think about accounting and tax? This is a true problem that customers are willing to pay for, and we’re growing our run rate by 6 figures month over month.

THE BIG PICTURE

You got in on the ground floor, and inDinero is responsible for the accounting needs for tens of thousands of businesses across the country You’re helping lead an engineering team of several dozen hackers, and you’re working on developing technology that no normal accounting firm would be capable of building.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN DAY TO DAY?

You’ll work side by side with cofounder Andy Su to work on the most challenging engineering projects in the company. This isn’t just slicing and dicing html/css and simple ruby features… you’re working on efficient ways to manipulate data across a multimillion row data set; you’re helping facilitate money transfer between businesses; the list goes on and on, but you’ll be assigned the most challenging engineering tasks that the company has.

SKILLS WE’RE LOOKING FOR

•Solid computer science background. Fundamentals in algorithms and complexity theory
•Ruby on Rails, Java, HTML/CSS/JS, Sysadmin experience
Office jousting.

Edit damn! Someone already posted the xkcd.
You're probably not the only one, but here's a tip... HN uses a system of up and down votes to allow the users to decide what is on the front page. So if something is on the front page it probably means more people want to see it than don't.

Amazing hey?
> His girlfriend even lives here in Austin and we can't seem to convince him to move back.

This may be indicative of something else entirely.
Are you arguing that behavioral profiling is useless or that it's not perfect?

The classification technique goes beyond just watching how fast you answer: It's a skill that takes training and practice, but can be extremely effective, which is why the Israelis and U.S. ICE use it.
Tanzania, Africa - In 1.75 Million Particles
Sure, PXE imaging is great for enterprise desktops but people don't use it at home.
This happens all over the world?? In my university (USP at São Paulo, Brazil) there were several foreign - normally Russian - physics and calculus teachers with terrible accents - some were still learning portuguese.
It's important to note that YC skims from the top, taking the creme de la creme. Applying 1000x the money would not yield 1000x the return, as there's a finite number of the "good founders" PG notes.
I never really understood this mentality. I haven't met anywhere, whether it's a funded startup founder or the CEO of a Fortune 1k company, or a single parent with a full-time job, who doesn't have 20 minutes somewhere they can spend reading.

I can understand if the argument is that it's so far down the list of priorities that by the time you get to it you'd rather just go to sleep. I get that. But don't say you're too busy to do it, say it isn't enough of a priority.
Woosh. He was referring to Sony and their removal of Linux on the PS3.
The limiting factor on YC is not cash.
Thanks for mentioning this. Search is the only feature I can think of that I desperately want out of Feedly but it sounds like it isn't worth it
Ah, sorry, some actual context might be helpful.

In Perl, variable declaration was originally even worse than it is in PHP: any variable, anywhere, required no declaration and was assumed to be a global. (This was inherited from... some combination of awk and shell, I guess.) Obvious problems aside, a practical implication was that recursion was pretty awkward, since the callee and the caller were sharing the same namespace for the same code.

Perl 5.000 introduced the `my` function, which would declare a variable as lexically scoped. This solved the practical issues, but it left the problem of error-checking: a typo in a variable name would still create an implicit global with no warning. The solution was the opt-in `use strict;` declaration, which disabled the implicit-global behavior and made unrecognized variable names a compile-time error. Code could be fixed and then opt into the stricter semantics on a per-file (or even per-block!) basis, and nowadays most Perl devs will jump on you like a pack of hyenas if your code doesn't start with `use strict;` or some equivalent. Over time other features with too-sharp edges have been culled, still supported by the interpreter (Perl is more or less compatible going back decades) but made illegal in strict mode.

JavaScript's weird "use strict" opt-in is a spiritual port of Perl's approach, stuffed into a string literal to fit into the existing syntax. One of its effects is even the same: assigning to an unrecognized name is now illegal, rather than creating an implicit global.

I'm not aware of anything so fundamental being changed in such a heavy-handed way in PHP. From the outside looking in, I'm not even sure the PHP community has a strong consensus on what PHP-specific features to avoid. I'd be happy to learn that I'm wrong on either count.