skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found FreeBSD to be extremely fragile, with regard to updates. It can easily become unusable if you initially install from binary packages and then move some things to ports builds (library dependencies aren't handled appropriately, as far as I can tell). System upgrades (from 8 to 9, for instance) are also scarier and more prone to failure than any Linux distro I've used.

While I have a lot of respect for FreeBSD's developers, I'd be unwilling to deploy it for production on servers; this is at least partially my own inexperience with the system...but I'm simply afraid to trust a system that makes it so easy for me to shoot myself in the foot.

Even with my own very limited use, I've never had a FreeBSD system that didn't end up utterly trashed eventually (in such a state that I chose to reinstall rather than try to fix it, because I had no idea where to start on fixing it; I'm sure a more experienced FreeBSD user would have been more capable of getting the system working again). I can't imagine what would happen if I were using it heavily, without first spending months or years learning how to avoid the pitfalls I run into so readily.

I had a similar level of experience with Debian (which is to say, not much), but never had a problem keeping it running. My experience is much higher on Red Hat based distros (I've managed CentOS and RHEL servers, and before that Red Hat Linux servers, for almost two decades), so I can't really compare it to FreeBSD, but I know our customers rarely run into OS issues on RHEL or CentOS, and we have a lot of them. CentOS represents more than half of our user base.
You're probably referring to this Rolling Stone article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/16-major...
Was about to post this, I'll definitely have to rewatch it now.
Basic biology? Are you seriously asking or just being obtuse? Do you know what the world looked like the last time we had 1000+ ppm CO2? Teeming with plant life. C3 plants were facing extinction if CO2 levels dropped any further than they had, we've done the biosphere a huge favour by digging it up and putting it back in the air where it came from. Maybe we haven't done humans a favour, but that's a different conversation.
Yes, tiny resource overhead while still providing near-complete isolation is a big benefit. The current memory overhead from using file system drivers and TCP/IP networking is around 8MB, and I'm sure there's a bunch of fat in there that could be trimmed off.

It's going to be interesting to see where the exact set of supported application images converges as use cases arise. For example, I'm pretty sure fork() will never be supported -- would it fork the VM? -- but some of the other things are up for discussion.
First I ever heard of this stuff was from Olin Shivers' page:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/martinez.html

his general page:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/

I don't think it's changed much in about 15 years
INANCIENTLATINTHEREWERENOSPACES.THEREREALLYWERENOPUNCTUATION
EITHERBUTI'MBEINGNICE.THEREWASALSONOSPACESATALLBETWEENWORDS.
BUTPEOPLECANMAKEUPCRAZYPSEUDOHISTORIESTOMAKEUPWHATEVERTHEYFE
ELTHEYMUSTBELIEVE.

And frankly, be glad we don't use the traditional caps-only run-everything-together style of yore.
He's not using the existence of double-spacing as a historical standard to argue that double-spacing is correct. He's using the existence of double-spacing as a historical standard to argue that single-spacing isn't the historical standard.
But I'm an intellectually lazy techno-hipster who doesn't want to learn new programming languages!!
Lifecycle cannot be underestimated. The average life expectancy of a server is over 3 years. I'm pretty much running on a five year cycle, right now, for most of mine. It's a huge time cost to have to deploy a new OS more frequently than you deploy new servers.
Anyone notice "Writing I-Ds using HTML" was in the header of each page? I assume the author reused something from his other RFC by that name [1] and forgot to update the page header.

[1]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hallambaker-rfctool-01
I'm a longtime perl user, and I don't know where my blind spots are.

Are there any particular resources you would recommend for someone like me to get going quickly with python? In particular ones that specifically address the type of blind spot you mention?
Possibly, though it is just as likely that the tests would still not catch the problem in a local dev environment if that module is not used there, right?
> You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932.

And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita.
Are you sure about that? Everyone on my team does. I can't really imagine not being able to build the full stack.
This will only serve to perpetuate the stupid meme that "Javascript is basically Scheme with curly braces and semicolons"
It's not that non-LTS releases are "shit"...Just that you'd be a fool to sign up for replacing your OS every 18 months on a server that will be in service for more than 3 years (which is the average lifespan of a server, and that number seems to be growing).
It's too bad that you can't locate any evidence for your opinions. I posted scientific evidence, you replied with opinion.

> ... scientifically described but nevertheless: still superstition.

This isn't a creative writing class.
Hey wait, what're you on about? I'm Karl, and I AM in New York City. Am I being voted out?
They need a free-range or wild standard I guess
Why is Boston depressing?
Good demonstration of sensory overload looks like
That would catch the SyntaxError instances he mentioned but certainly not every case of AttributeError or ValueError exception. Even good testing would not catch all of them.
Poetry.js
Black on light grey causes less eyestrain than black on white.

http://ergonomics.about.com/od/eyestrain/a/reduce_contrast.h...
To avoid problems like that, you probably want your dev environment as close as possible to your production environment. You probably also want to be testing your production specific code/logic (especially if you're not doing that on your local).
Just a counter point: I love yum. It is, by far, my favorite package management option. Managing yum repos is a breeze vs every other option (the toolchain is one command, vs a half dozen commands and hours of manual labor to setup a new repo for Debian/Ubuntu). I also prefer it from the end user perspective.

apt-get is fine, and I wouldn't be at all unhappy with servers running Debian, but yum is my preference.
Drivers maybe not, but after reading coreutils/ls source code, I think most of the userland part of my OS would probably benefit from a rewrite in js/v8.
possibly one of the worst package managers around are shipped on centos and rh.
I do consider them the sysop's nightmare.
Shh! Stop telling people about Texas!
Did you start checking facebook as well whenever he got a new message?
Ah damn. My bad. Seeing this in Javascript has sort of disoriented me.
A thought experiment:

What if just the enclosure was replaceable?

For example, if an iPhone 5 user could purchase an iPhone 6 enclosure and transfer his iPhone 5's PCB to the new enclosure (perhaps as easily as moving a SIM card from one phone to another), then as far as the most of the non-technical, status-conscious, exterior design-focused world can tell (this probably excludes you, gentle HN reader), does the user have an iPhone 6?

What if were true that non-technical consumers buy phones in large part because of how they look? After all, the differences in functionality between, e.g., Samsung's and Apple's, phones are relatively minor. Many phones from different manufacturers are more or less the same size.
That was my initial thought. However, assuming that the photo is real, Westinghouse could have had the project to design and build the gas chamber itself.
I really hope no one is using just one OTP.
Now, that is awesome JS work.
A viable alternative may be in-vitro fermentation:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/20...

There was a marketing campaign earlier this year in Taiwan around the animal-cruelty-free process.
I would not want a Phoneblok phone. I don't want to think about my phone at all. I want to use it, and put it away when I'm done. That's it. I don't want to deal with CPU blok A has a bug in it, or doesn't quite work with wifi blok B, or app C was written with camera blok D in mind and is a bit wonky with my camera blok E.

It's a major reason I've always preferred the iPhone. It's also why I no longer use Linux, same general annoyances just mostly in software instead of hardware.
Hey Alex,

I'm a Presidential Innovation Fellow focusing on open data initiatives at the FDA. I'm working to get a number of our datasets made public and available via APIs. I'd love to talk to you about what would be useful to you (and others) and how we can help. Feel free to email me at sean.herron@fda.hhs.gov if you want to chat.
I think perhaps you can look at it another way. Maybe it is meant to show you, the parent, what happens if you don't teach your kids another perspective early on. They might fall into this trap of not getting out and interacting with people in real life and, instead, engage with everyone they know through a computer screen.

Honestly, if small kids see this, they won't understand. It is up to you to show them another way.
Why is it that rarely does anyone distinguish output format from source format in these discussions?

Two spaces are used to semantically separate sentences in source format. They can be collapsed or modified for typeset output (like HTML rendering), but nobody should be telling an author to use single space in source format if the author wants to add the additional semantic separation between sentences.

Particularly at fault are sanitizers like tidy (not just stand-alone, but sometimes used as a component in document editors) which will collapse multiple spaces by default. They're not doing any other html rendering, and they're not minifying the html either, so why do they insist on removing a common form of semantic content information in the source document? Collapse >2 spaces to 2 in some cases, perhaps, but not 2 to 1, particularly not after punctuation.

The two spaces vs one space argument for how text should be typeset is a completely different issue and unrelated to the question of how many spaces human typists should use between sentences. Using two spaces between sentences happens to make it easier for typesetting software to automatically apply whatever magical 1+epsilon or 1-epsilon inter-sentence spacing it deems best, assuming the typesetting software can deduce that the author is using the two-space sentence convention (otherwise it has to fall back on heuristics, which are not perfect).

Any author is free to choose how many spaces to use between sentences, but collapsing 2 spaces when editing others' documents is wrong, and so is preventing an author from using two spaces. Doing so removes information content from the document, which can only be restored perfectly by humans (or other things with human-level natural language processing ability).
Gentrification in Houston screwed my buddy out of a house...it's getting hard to find a 2,000 sq. ft. two story for less than two hundred thousand near the city center. ;)
In the short term I think this article is going to have the opposite effect of what's intended. It seems inevitable that everyone must know about Civet Coffee before resources can be gathered to protect the animals regardless of the demand. Better sooner rather than later.
> All other things being equal, I expect the total time spent in Python will be lower than C++.

I hear this a lot, and for the most part, I don't really understand it. I know Python and C++ at about the same level and for a lot of things I find myself taking less time in C++, particularly with Boost giving me a bunch of handy tools in my toolbox. I don't find static typing onerous, and it does save my bacon more often than it gets in my way.

Nits about C++ aside, since there does exist the general perception of C++ as having those problems, wouldn't a fairer comparison be Scala or C# as it pertains to statically typed languages? (I don't know Scala great yet, but I find myself able to build good, reliable code fairly quickly--although sometimes, due to unfamiliarity, I end up writing code that's too clever and it's hard to read afterwards--and I am ridiculously more productive in C# than Python. The miracle of a good IDE...)
The comments here remind me of the classic debate of monolithic kernel vs micro kernels; It ends up with the same result that the ecosystem required for the modular components causes too much operational bloat.
> It's possible to, you know, not actually like Silicon Valley.

Well sure, but the goals of the article were in terms of startup ecosystems. I don't think anyone says it's impossible to dislike the bay area (so much to love, so much to hate). The whole article had nothing to do with "liking" a city.
What on earth..
>Static typing doesn't ensure correctness for languages like C++ and Java.

Types provide a pretty high amount of proof towards correctness, in theory and in practice.

In my experiences working with Haskell (and its type-system), I've found the amount of runtime bugs I hit to be almost non-existent, because usually the type system catches all my stupidity beforehand. It's weird, because the type of runtime bugs I get in other languages (like Python) are rarely type-related issues, but for some reason it seems to help a lot.

The arguments for dynamic typing are very less convincing when you start getting into systems with very expressive type systems such as Haskell.

There are so few use-cases of un-type-able code out there that it really shouldn't be as demanding, but unfortunately people have conflated typing with verbosity and uselessness, instead of things that can work extremely well as proofs of some amount of correctness.
Thanks for mentioning that, I had a feeling of deja vu that I couldn't figure out. It was an awesome hack anyway.
Japan sends rocket into space with a launch crew of just 2 laptops and 8 people
The only thing that will make something like this plausible and sought-after is expensive e-waste disposal. We have to charge the actual costs of the waste to the waste producers.

Right now that waste cost is practically invisible to the consumer, much less the manufacturer. If the true waste costs (health impacts, polluted water supplies, diminishing limited resources) were factored into the decision to get a "new" phone, computer, etc. then there'd possibly be some desire for this type of device. But right now, I can't see this happening without that market force.
A Pickpocket's Tale: The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins
Yep. For an explanation of why double-spacing is objectively wrong, read this:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...
But also less inflation. So, just let the government print more money.
I'm curious why there was no consideration for OpenBSD?
Nil Punning (Or Null Pointers Considered Not So Bad)
"An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted" - http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo_quote

This generation is going to be rewrite in Javascript/v8, everything that can be written in Javascript.
But what are the potential threats a backdoor in a USB token could have? Assuming it's used with (audited) open source drivers and keys are generated externally (ie by the host computer and not by the token) I don't really see a possibility for NSA to weaken the crypto. Of course there might be backdoors for physical attacks (or malicious driver attacks), but I'm willing to accept that.
Do you find it hard to read? The contrast is more than comfortable to my eyes.
Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time (2010)
As CEO of another KV-backed company (CellScope), I'd like to chime in and echo rvivek's comments. Vinod demoed my otoscope device during his talk, which was great, but for CellScope the real value has been in helping us to expand the vision of the company. KV was the lead investor in our seed round when we finished Rock Health, just as digital health was coming on the scene. He and his team have constantly pushed us to think bigger and faster, and provided resources and connections to add meat to those bones. I am very glad to be working with KV on building a company to make a real difference in healthcare.
Looks like the Brits haven't changed much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Act
We live in a cognitively assorted economy and half of all people have an IQ below 100. 5% have an IQ below 70. If they have unusually pleasant personalities, they may find jobs in the service industry. But most won't.

We have a historically vestigial class of people that have nothing to offer a modern economy. And that class will grow as the economy gets more complex. An increase in complexity is indistinguishable from downward mobility.

Poor immigrants come from places where the cognitive sorting hasn't happened yet.
Haters are going to hate.
The German system requires a 5% threshold to be seated; IMO that represents a sizeable chunk of people's viewpoints. And either way, the winning coalition must represent a majority of Germans. That promotes centrism not extremism.
That same lesson does not need to involve porn. Maybe I'm crazy for thinking that. But I don't think so. I don't need to show them pictures of bloody bodies smeared on the street to teach them to look both ways before crossing the street.
It's really great whenever I get to see media folks actually using web tech to display a story in an awesome, creative way, instead of just serving more social media garbage.

We have hyper-media for all now, so we really should encourage using it.
I always thought this would be self-evident to people, but apparently not: The reason why I want to have Javascript on both the client and the server is so I can re-use code.

My software has a fairly large chunk of code which is a gardening expert system. I'm hesitant to call it AI because it's so dumb, but it's along those lines. It knows things like "If you live in Phoenix and it's April, you should wait to plant your lettuce until September".

It's useful to have it on the client, when you're in the garden and there's no connectivity, or when you tweak your settings and don't want to have to download a bunch of "conclusions" from the server. It's useful to have it on the server so that the server can send emails, pre-cache HTML for faster loading pages, etc.

If my server is written in Ruby (which is is right now) then I have to re-implement that entire system twice. That's double the code. It feels gross. And I can't help but feel like most web-apps have code like this that could be shared between the client and the server.
I don't think you're following my point. I'm not arguing that it's silly to consider whether NSA has backdoored your RNG. I'm stipulating that they have. I'm saying that's not how RNG backdoors work.
Interesting that you can only buy an OpenPGP smart card from a supplier with a broken SSL implementation. https://shop.kernelconcepts.de/login.php
Show HN: Another task/todo app for the command line
Am I the only one that doesn't really like it? I see all these websites talking about how amazing it is, but it's just, eh. Everything pre-chatroulette was alright and realistic but then a third of the movie is wasted time jumping around dick shots until he magically hits upon a girl who has a quick speech talking about how fake Facebook is.

The bond between those two parts doesn't really work for me. And it seems like he just ran out of ideas for concluding the Facebook paranoia/break up scene so he cheated with the speech.

It's like a bunch of people see this movie is completely on a screen and it's this hard hitting revelation that relationships are now on screen and so this movie perfectly encapsulates a young person's relationship.
When I was working there 5ish years ago the government claimed the whole country had fiber connections, but in reality they had just terminated the fiber connection at each village post office and left actually connecting the last mile up to private companies or cities. Which meant it wasn't available outside the densely populated center of the capital.
The south, northwest, and former east Germany are each quite distinct culturally and have very different voting patterns.
Parents are held responsible for their kids behaviors all the time. A kid breaks something in a store? the parents pay.
There was a paper just published that built on Osvik & Tromer that recovered a GPG RSA key from a single run of GPG. This problem has nothing to do with key reuse.
What I want to know is why style guides recommend no space around a slash. To my eye, "either / or" is much more readable than "either/or".
What's wrong with TANs?
I'm mixed. Animation aside, some of the decorative formatting that has always made for beautiful print pieces really seems to get in the way on the web. Not sure I can explain why exactly. I was impressed by the effects (in a novelty, how'd-they-pull-that-off sort of way), but I can tell you this: I didn't read a word of the article. I was too busy playing with the animations. I think it's fair to say the content was upstaged.
NSA Accountability Act as a Diff
Depends on the environment.

I manage a large AWS environment at my current gig, and all of our code is in git. With configs in puppet, code in git, I can deploy to new OS version instances in the background, do testing/QA, and then swap out the old OS environment for the new one all transparently to the user.

Now if you're talking bare metal, yes, it makes sense to go with LTS releases.

It all depends on what your equipment lifecycle is.
> To make that claim, you need to define "rate".

"rate" means per capita per year. By "a century ago" I meant around 1913; 1800 would be TWO centuries ago. The murder rate in the US has been in the general ballpark of 5-10 per 100,000 annually since 1910. Currently we're near the low point of the last century. Um, here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/listening_to_the_late...

Quote: "Today's murder rate is essentially at a low point of the past century. The murder rate in 2011 was lower than it was in 1911. And the trend is downward. Whatever we've been doing over the last 20-30 years seems to be working, more or less. The murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1980: from 10.7 to 4.7."

> But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.

You now appear to be stark raving bonkers. No, silly, if the rate is unchanged it does NOT support your point. Yes, as there are more people, there are likely to be more murders as an absolute number. There are also likely to be more hugs, more kisses, more birthday parties, and more people making silly arguments over the internet. NONE of those constitute a population-limiting crisis.

Well, except maybe that last one. :-)