skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A comment from the article: "In point of fact, I don’t think you can get around the fact that we need to renegotiate how our economy works. It’s just going to become more and more obvious over time."

It's already obvious. We're very rapidly moving toward a world where a tiny, tiny elite capture massive percentages of all value through controlling a small number of convenience portals. The value of all other non-commodity goods tends toward zero, or the cost of whatever commodities they require.

This does resemble the post-Capitalist terminal state Marx described. Marx did not advocate a revolution, nor did he say "from each according to his ability" and so forth. That was Lenin and Trotsky. Marx was really talking about this-- about the fact that capitalism would eventually overproduce itself into obsolescence. He wasn't anti-capitalist so much as post-capitalist, sort of a sci-fi thinker talking about post-scarcity.

But I'm not a Marxist per se, and I don't think he had the right formula for "what do we do now?" I think that remains to be discovered.
Well, you're in luck, because bitcoin has the potential to do that.
No, see, this is something that applies only to other people.
You're invoking "science" in a cargo cult way, at least when it extends to the point you're trying to make.

Yes, Blix and company had a set of methods that in theory could detect active WMD programs.

But when put to the real world test before 1991, they utterly failed; per Wikipedia: "It was only after the first Gulf War that the full extent of Iraq's nuclear programs, which had switched from a plutonium based weapon design to a highly enriched uranium design after the destruction of [the] Osiraq [reactor], became known."

So there was no reason their subsequent pre-2003 invasion opinions that said exactly the same thing should have been given much weight, let alone be allowed to end the discussion with an invocation of "Science!".

(That was a particularly difficult situation, where Sadam himself believed he had some active programs but underlings where pocketing the money, and we still don't know exactly what he shipped to his neighboring Baath Party frenemies in Syria, just that there was a lot of it, and 1991 showed he was willing to send stuff that he'd otherwise lose to even his worse enemies (e.g. planes to Iran). For all we know, if Iraq was making binary munitions they could have been the source of the nerve gas apparently used by whomever in eastern suburbs of Damascus last month.)

Whereas isotope analysis after a nuclear warhead has been lit off is a conceptually much more straightforward thing. You're not e.g. trying to prove a negative, you know there was a device and that it came from somewhere, you're just trying to figure out the somewhere.
Your reply to Jared is talking about quoting out of context. There is no quoting in this case. The guy is simply introducing the research paper that he himself wrote and got published. Seriously I have no idea what on earth you're going on about.
"a farewell gift to guests as they exist the aircraft"

Allow me to snip this little gem, to keep company to previously collected items such as "rear window defrogger" and "string loaded door".

(Add cartoon image of passengers willing an airplane into existence by collective belief, if you will.)
We need more rubber ducks in Agile
You're right - it's not a refusal to help but a complete inability to help. It sounds like a cooperative fuckup by Air Berlin and whomever they outsourced handling lost baggage to, with the effect that procedures are opaque and make it impossible for people in charge of helping customers to do their job.
As an architect, my business is 100% based on estimating my design time. Within that design time I also estimate construction time.

What allows me to do both is not only my personal 20+ years of relevant experience, but also the collective experience of the industry and design methodologies that reflect that experience. I.e. architectural designs are delivered in moderately well understood stages of increasing concreteness and there is an established language for communicating designs to clients (plans, renderings, project manuals).

Furthermore, repeating the same operations in the design of a building is no less a waste than in the design of software. The same may be said for actually constructing a building. Programmers have no monopoly on the ideal qualities of laziness, impatience and hubris. It's just through experience that I have learned that at some point the nail gun has to come out if the plywood is to go up.

Or the pencil gets put to paper if there's going to be a design - and note that it is not uncommon for good designers in the software world to start on the drawing board not the computer.

And this, I think gets at some of why people have so much trouble estimating software. They start designing the building having already decided on its structural system and hvac layout and light switch locations.

Choosing Django over Rails over ASP.NET before diving into the problem means that the tool has to be made to fit the job rather than delaying that decision.

Now, I'm not suggesting that this is always the case. But to put the difference in collective and individual experience in perspective, one of my mentors [a formal mentor as part of the formal process of becoming licensed as an architect] was Ronn Ginn, an architect known locally but not somebody anyone has heard of. Anyway, Ronn is still practicing. He started practicing before there was FORTRAN.

Think about how many Ask HN's there have been based on the idea that 28 is too old.

Frank Gehry, who you probably have heard of, is about the same age. His first project to receive any sort of attention came when he was 42 in 1971. He was nearly 70 when Bilbao gave him international fame.
> The loss of GMail conversation view was initially really REALLY painful

Considering all the shit going down lately... we've seen a recent surge in use of things like DuckDuckGo and OwnCloud, but no good replacement for the Gmail UI. I'm surprised no one's seen that opportunity and created something similar, but installable on your own personal server so that you can have access to a good web UI from anywhere.

If I can make the time, I'd love to do something like this.
Sounds interesting, but .. anyone got a real translation?
> pop media is a wholesome product

That could not be further from the truth though, pop media is trash. Would you want your children exposed to the misogynistic, sexist, racist content being pushed by record companies these days?

We have been talking about environmental sustainability for a long time... pollution is bad, rare material scarcity is bad - it is time we started caring just as much about social sustainability. Pop media 40 years ago had stars that partook in peace activism, the founder of the most famous band wrote peace anthems like 'Imagine' and 'Give Peace a Chance', the most popular stars today are all involved in pointless stupid drama- Rihanna (beaten viciously by a guy, still wants to protect him), Thickle (http://vimeo.com/64611906), Cyrus - the girl my little sister was a big fan of when she was younger is making videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8.

A lot of pop media content is anti-intellectual, a lot of it objectifies women, a lot of it perpetuates racism. It is markedly worse than it once used to be. And there is less of an expectation of a news program or a record company to place the interests of its consumers before its own than there used to be. This is a problem, because it is very much polluting the minds of our young (and old).
Might I recommend highcharts? It's a lot easier to work with than flot IMO
If you look at the entire music industry, rather than just sales of shiny plastic disks, it is exploding: http://www.techdirt.com/skyisrising/
4 Reasons Why HTML5 Will Dominate the Future
Yeah, god forbid he have links that generate revenue for him. For shame!
How exactly was this a meltdown?
I think that people defending PHP are getting a point you (and OP) are missing: both PHP (the language) and its ecosystem matured a great deal in the last 2-3 years.

A lot of good ideas were either implemented into the language or ported over from other languages/frameworks. There are tools/frameworks that rival those in Python/Ruby land.
Good to know they're finally going for uniformity. I was mostly referring to the average developer whose code you might read at work or from some code one might find on Github.

Major frameworks and libraries going in that directly though is still a very good thing.
Why PostgreSQL is so Awesome
It's true and but I think both things can have a negative side, one it can be, coding seen as a homework, something the kid do every day, exercises, plus, the school I think they will not be motivated at all. The second is the kid loves coding, being at home in the computer and avoid sports. I think you can try to incentive both, but one will eventually take out the other.

Also, I think sports in general are more important in that age than anything else. A healthy body when is growing could be a life changing later, you can train yourself into coding at any age and eventually, master it, but a good body could give you access to other professions that require a fit body. I couldn't apply for air force because of my bad fit, as an example and I think the kid, at his age, still doesn't know what to do, better to teach him something cool as coding when he's about to exit is growing period and know more or less what he wants to do for a living (17-18).
Need? Of course not. It's always been possible to do the same thing "by hand". But you certainly do need to not have all your threads blocking while external calls happen (although from elsewhere in the thread it sounds like your peak is 500 requests/second/machine? That's not so many, maybe you can afford to make blocking DB calls in the request path), one way or another.

A better question is how many lines of code the async feature saves, compared to the code you would write without it.
Live: Crews begin to move wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia on Italy's coast
However I'm having trouble finding a way to back it up securely. The built-in backup methods don't seem to account for encrypting the backups (even if the volume is encrypted). Any suggestions?

Two suggestions:

A) Download the source [1], and see if it is complete and then you can port in cryptsetup and the LUKS stuff from Linux.

B) Run Linux. If you're at the point where you're worried about encrypted backups, then you should probably be running some form of Linux instead. You can get a small form factor PC that includes the motherboard and processor for not much more than the Synology box. That'll give you a lot more options for software and services too.

We're using this for all the offsite backup drives, and it wasn't too hard to get going. If you (or anyone reading this) can't figure out cryptsetup, just PM me and I'll help you out.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/?source=navbar
ASP.NET you're doing it wrong. Part Two: Nancy Views
It is pretty useful for ui stuff, you can start a wait cursor in a button event, do what you need to then put the cursor back when your done, all in one thread without having to use background threads or anything.

It is pretty simple for that scenario and avoids the cross thread marshalling you need to do in win forms.
You're all over the map: first, participatory music can't produce a Messiah, or a 9th Symphony. Now copyright is neccessary to get artists to create. Which is it? Or is there a third concept, that confuses the argument further?
Why would a farmer be coding his python on an old 800x600 VGA CRT?
Actually, there's a potential error in what I said. If corporate America benefits from economic espionage (e.g. spying on PetroBras), then it will never stop.
Cognitect: Relevance merges with Metadata Partners (Datomic)
Visualize Google's hot trends
Adam Curtis is absolutely brilliant.

Apparently, he also has a blog on the BBC website. One recent post really resonated with me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER
I have a question about go. Let's say I have a struct Foo and a function/method for Less. What is the quickest way to sort an array of Foo's?

Do I have to implement my own []Foo type with all three methods as described in the sort package?
Yes, but PyPy was not written in 6 months. For a rather comprehensive (but not so recent) benchmark, see:

http://etehtsea.me/the-great-ruby-shootout
http://igor-alexandrov.github.io/blog/2012/11/05/yet-another...

MacRuby looses against MRI in many benchmarks and MRI doesn't fare as bad as many people say.
I think this is a good one. I think also a spyglass could be totally awesome and portable.
Developing a new feature
Relevance merges with Rich Hickey and Metadata Partners (makers of Datomic)
There is Java implementation of Resque as well: https://github.com/gresrun/jesque

I've been using jesque to consume Resque tasks with no problems, and performance is great.
A good (free) explanation of Bayesian Stats using Python:
Downey's Think Bayes
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkbayes/
Encryption - RSA vs DSA for SSH authentication keys
David losing Internet battle with Goliath
Shopify Launches 4th Annual Build a Business Competition
You can follow the live streaming here: http://live.reuters.com/Event/Raising_the_Costa_Concordia
Not a shame: At least so far as has been envisioned proof-of-stake doesn't appear to actually work. The fundamental problem with proof of stake is that there is nothing at stake: Its in your rational best interest to mine all possible subchains that you can mine in, and not only in the single unique chain you believe to be most likely to survive, as is the case for PoW.

PPCoin's security is not provided by proof of stake but by cryptographically signed lockins broadcast to the network by its creator... so you have to trust this anonymous party to behave honestly. It sort of defeats the purpose of having a cryptocurrency.

Ripple is even worse in that regard— an opaque ledger implemented via a closed source system.
I agree with the thesis of Will's post. I'd just like to point out that 1) meetings are still Evil (capital E) and 2) "free-flowing, organic discourse," as Will puts it, is perfect for anti-meeting culture. It's not nearly as interruptive as a meeting.
Very cool - I just interviewed with a company that is using Sidekiq to process up to millions of jobs (at about 2/sec per worker) and I asked them to look into using Go for workers. I can send this to them.
After listening, I don't think they mention Task.Factory.StartNew, this is how I usually throw things into the background. Whats wrong with this approach?
That's a great thing to know-- and I wish I could give it 20 upvotes.
There millions if not billions of lines of c code in production today doing everything from web servers/cgi web pages to low level embedded oses. A shit ton of it is not using oo programming: do we really need it?

It's about doing more, better, and easier. async allows a pretty complicated process to be much easier to write.
Think Relevance and Metadata Partners Merge
I completely agree that the technologies used for self-hosting have been neglected during this era's obsession with what I call the "plain cloud." As you point out, convenience is paramount. The plain cloud has seen the lion's share of R&D and has been sold to consumers as the pinnacle of convenience.

However, I contend that had an equal amount of R&D been invested in a distributed cloud (what we used to refer to as "the Internet," not to be snarky)--especially one that provided federated encrypted data backup among trusted friends and family, a model that would embrace high-bandwidth symmetric connections to consumers' homes and the notion of self-serving--we'd be better off now.

In other threads at HN, I believe this has been covered sufficiently, so I'll cut that short.

I think your first paragraph may be correct insofar as there are many of us who were already doing self-hosting of our data. Those concerned with privacy were already assuming the situation was fairly bad, although I think even we were surprised at how bad it is.

My data is no more interesting than the OP's. Boring e-mail, boring family photos, boring unpopular music, boring documents. Yet out of principal, I self-host it. Self hosting is not that remarkable, but it is a rapidly disappearing practice. As recently as five to ten years ago nearly everyone in the world self-hosted their personal data.

Since my first DSL line in 1998, I've always splurged a bit for a symmetric connection. Since then I've found it disheartening that symmetric connections were and remain marginalized. Today, I can connect to my home VPN relatively easily from any of my devices to access my data. It could certainly be a lot better (I've ranted elsewhere that VPNs suck; they've not seen genuine R&D in ages).

Running a personal mail server is pretty simple too. With so much *-as-a-service out there, I admit that some people are losing the will to install a service of their own, but assuming you do a little bit of research, some modern options are more or less install-and-play, with decent anti-spam.

Again, had a distributed cloud continued to see bountiful R&D as the plain cloud has, the self-managed options would be 5-10 years more mature today. Had Thunderbird not been effectively neglected for the past ~4 years, it would probably be a (slightly) nicer e-mail client.
I always thought they take off backwards so I hit behind them and have quite a high hit rate
See that's where I want to dig deeper with those that really believe in this style of interviewing. Clearly it must have some value other than the weed-out factor.

Are there engineers who actually keep the algorithms/data structure stuff in their head and find small ways to apply it while they work on a standard web or mobile app? That's the only way I could see the knowledge having any value, but I've never worked this way nor have I observed anyone who works this way.
Cool! I'll check Jesque out and add it to the benchmarks.
As bad as it sounds, your best bet is probably to astroturf (or whatever the equivalent term is for social networking - sockpuppeting?) on Pinterest and Facebook, try and get a mention on popular blogs, etc.

Expending effort into improving your product is not likely to pay off in a "viral" fashion.
Awesome! Can you send me your contact info? Mine is in my HN profile.
The author is an ignorant puppy. [\ad hominem] What's the use of all those spendings if his email is not encrypted and hosted on his own hardened server behind a firewall he knows how to configure himself? And even then, if his counterparts are not doing the same, we're back to the original problem.
This is unfortunately common in sci-fi and related genres, where characterization and other aspects of literary craft take a back seat to nifty ideas and plot. Good characterization is a complex exercise that requires that the writer spend a lot of time dissecting the motives and mindset of each character, as well as an ability to exercise a kind of multiple personality disorder while writing and view each scene from each characters' perspective.

Lit-fic has the opposite problem: excellent characters, beautiful prose, but ho-hum ideas and/or plot.

VERY few works manage both craft and meaning.
Essential Tools for Starting a Rails App in 2013
Sounds like public tracking device to me. Put such a beacon in every street light and you've got something the guys at CSI would be jealous of - only that it's also public, so everyone who wants can track you if he just installs some sender. (On the other hand, the concerns with the fingerprint reader seem miniscule in comparison now.)
Shopify announces next Build A Business competition
For example method cache invalidation is a hot topic in dynamic languages that is often ignored in synthetic benchmarks. A Ruby example for this is:

output.extend(ContentTyped)

(thats from Sinatra: https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/154859f1553b8bacea97...)

I am not saying that these things cannot be implemented fast, but are usually the things that get ignored in a first implementation and take a lot of work to get right and quick.
From Mars
Time is hard:

http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pro...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-l...
Instrumenting ASP.NET Web API
No? Are you saying that legally he would have to?
You can use Google Visualization API, its really easy to use.
The short answer is that Ruby is "too dynamic" and "too malleable": An object can get a new class when you call a method on it, for example, or every method might be redefined, including seemingly safe ones like arithmetic on constant integers.

The longer explanation of this one issue (there are others):

Somewhere deep in the bowels of your code, some library calls eval(foo). "foo" is what exactly? If you can't track it back to a constant string, you're SOL from an optimisation standpoint: Any and all method pointers and class pointers you may have cached to speed up method calls are now unsafe, as for what you know, the next time you try to do "2 + 2" you might get "5". Or a string. Or your harddrive might get formatted - that latter is particularly important: Methods may change from not having side effects to having side effects or back, potentially in the middle of evaluating an expression.

99% of the time, the changes will not affect core classes, but even so a language implementation that wants to be complete will need to at least guard against it even for basic things like adding two numbers.

That means there's lots of stuff you can't cache, or where you need logic to invalidate caches that can be very complex, or you need to be able to validate any cached information. And you either need to do this for every method call, or you need to find ways of safely rolling back calculations (and you'd need to ensure you're not inadvertently triggering side effects that you can't roll back if you choose that option), or you need to be able to deduce what code can trigger these things, and tread with appropriate caution afterwards.
Sandsquid - An ocean of electronic parts
Exit Interviews
Can't you like, form a company in another EU member state with more flexible rules (UK comes to mind) and then operate/provide services in France, which you are allowed to do so due to EU freedom of movement of capital, goods, service and people?
This helped me the most to get started.
> you would have to be crazy to select a uniform distribution unless it was shaped like a sphere.

The distribution for a coin is uniform over the event space [heads,tails]; not over the angle of rotation it lands on. You can have continuous or discrete event spaces.
I guess I'm not exactly looking for some person that runs the place, more like the roommates though thus there wouldn't be administrative costs. And I said 3 people living per room, that's like 2100 per room.... thus if you had a two bedroom with a large living room/dining room for workspace, thats $4200 a month, which doesn't seem THAT outrageous...

And since it's 3 people per room there probably don't need to be bunks.
It's a flaw in the specification of the theorem, not in the verification.

The way it works is that they choose fixed sizes INLEN and OUTLEN, and prove that when data points to a buffer of INLEN bytes, they can allocate a result buffer and base64_encode(data, INLEN, result) will compute the correct encoding.

So, implied in this statement is the fact that the input buffer is valid (thus not null), and that the output buffer must be valid (and not null) and disjoint from the input buffer.

There are more fundamental classes of bugs that this won't detect:

- behavior for arbitrary sizes, such as integer overflows for large sizes

- bugs when using particular functions of the API, such as base64_encode_update()

The latter problem means that there is no proof that b64enc.c is correct at all, even for a fixed size: it's entirely possible that multiple calls to base64_encode_update() would corrupt the internal state.