skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These things are true. Things do quickly get complicated when you're trying to replicate race conditions. What you described, though, is not trying to "fix a segfault" it's trying to "fix a race condition" where the fault is just a symptom. In the example in your OP there was none of that. Even assuming what he meant was that he accidentally mutated a pointer he passed by reference instead of value which caused problems after he returned and things fell out of scope or were freed, you could debug that in 5 minutes just by setting a watch breakpoint on the pointer to see where it was last changed before the errant access. An hour, tops, if that didn't occur to you to begin with.

Tracking down multi-threaded memory corruption is tough, but those bugs are going to be rare. Threading is a tough problem to begin with, but it's certainly not a fault of C/C++. And whatever this guy was describing should not have taken 'hundreds of test cases and over 24 hours'.
Do you know of protocols that use LFSRs for IV generations of cryptographic purposes? Can you link to them ? I'd like to see if they are breakable.
> Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons.

Absolutely not. Projects need to take a strong stance on what to include or not because every piece of code in there needs to be maintained.
One of my favorite facts is that you can be completely wrong about your current conscious experience, nevermind your memories. A few neat papers on this have been written by Eric Shwitzgebel ( http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ ) such as Why Did We Think That We Dreamed in Black and White? and How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation, or even scarier: Knowing Your Own Beliefs.
> "Morten Hansen of the University of California, Berkeley studied 182 teams who were trying to win a contract on behalf of a professional-services firm. He found that the more time they spent consulting others, the less likely they were to win a deal. This shows, he says, that collaboration has costs as well as benefits."

This quote is everything that's wrong with science journalism. I'm sure there are some narrowly defined conclusions to be drawn from the study, but "collaboration had costs as well as benefits" is a truism, not a finding.

And I'm highly skeptical that Hansen said any such thing (that the results somehow say something new about the scale of costs relative I benefits of collaboration). Though if he did he and his reviewers bear some responsibility.
Reminds me an argument about crossword puzzles I think comes from Shannon.

It goes like this: in a sufficiently "fault-tolerant" language (ie with low per-character information content, which sorta gives large Hamming distance), crosswords become impossible, because puzzles won't be satisfiable: words could never line up right. But in a sufficiently compact language (many bits per character in words, and Hamming distance thus tending towards zero), crosswords are impossible as well, but now because puzzles would be ambiguous: too many words that fit. Somehow, natural languages appear to fit somewhere in the middle.
In Massachusetts they do:

"All personal property situated in the commonwealth is subject to tax, unless specifically exempt by law"

http://www.mass.gov/dor/local-officials/municipal-finance-la...
Fair enough. Atlas Shrugged was such an awful book I couldn't make it past the first few pages. However, I have enough experience with Rand's followers and their "got mine, screw you" attitude to see how a shitty book can get turned into a political movement. See also Mein Kampf.
I am surprised by your this observation. I have been 100% honest in what I wrote above... Trust me I know what I am doing.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you weren't being honest or that you didn't know what you were doing.

I'm sure we've all had to deal with "Well, this guy on HN converted to X from Y and saw <insert generic gains claims here>, so why are we on Y again?", which the somewhat hand-wavy details in your original comment can end up contributing to (obviously we're limited for space and attention here, so leaving out some details can be desirable). What I failed at was communicating that my comments were not intended as an attack on your specific methodologies or choices, but was more meant to make the reader of our comments consider the wider implications of blindly following the herd and not making informed decisions. I have had people forward me lists of links to isolated, comment-less HN comments as "support" for their position.

But I very clearly remember seeing all the Apache child procs bloating to 25 Mb after the first hit to the PHP code was done. So I am actually saving by externalizing on the resources.

Yes, sorry, I didn't consider the exact traffic ratios between the (proxied) Java requests and the (internally handled) PHP requests. If you've got a wide spread there favoring proxied requests, then, as you've experienced, it would be advantageous to get rid of the internal handling, proxy all requests, and outsource the bloating to other processes/systems where it is more isolated, and the upper bound on the bloat be more influenced by the lower total requests for the resources that consume more. And once that's done (the getting rid of the monolithic parts) then it's a lot easier to experiment with replacing the different parts to see if there are other gains. You may have seen similar resource consumption benefits by nginx proxying to Apache+mod_php or even to bare PHP cgi.

But one shouldn't even follow that method blindly either, because it's all based on workload, and everyone's workload is different.

There are so system management and monitoring benefits and drawbacks that go with these kinds of changes. We both know that there is no software selection silver bullet, but it's not necessarily the readers of these comments that know that.
One thing that Apple does is clearly telegraph where they are planning to go. They drop support for old devices quickly and lavish support onto the product vectors they want to go all out on. As a consumer it makes the decision to buy a slightly cheaper but soon to be unsupported device vs. a more expensive but should have good support for the next 3 or 4 years easy.

But once you end up dropping off of the support curve, it gets frustrating rather quickly. I have a 6 year old Dell laptop and a slightly newer MBP.

The Dell is still finding lots of life even these days, doing time as a file server/NAS device and now a Chromecast laptop for my living room (for Chrome tab broadcast). I recently installed Windows 7 on it and it runs pretty much what I need like a champ -- full driver support and everything.

Now my MBP, I can't really find much use it for other than a little web surfing, and even that is hopelessly crippled due to OS requirements for flash upgrades -- even though the hardware is powerful enough to do what I need, the version of OS X I need to get the latest flash updates (so I can watch Hulu on it for example) doesn't support the device. Hell my virtually unsupported netbook from the same era is more useful at this point.
>Engineering work can be (somewhat) tracked by lines of code written, lines of code reviewed, bugs per line of code...

So don't do any work except code reviews and implement features really slowly without any bugs, but as verbosely as possible with as many lines of code as possible. Then you have tons of lines of code, few bugs per line of code (since it's so verbose there's a ton of lines of code)

Those metrics don't work, even if I completely agree with the premise of the article (it's a people problem)
How Legitimate and Game-Changing are 3D Printed Guns?
Maybe it's just me, but this reminds me a whole lot of all of the special pieces that the Times has released over the last year or so
Unfortunately, the note that has to be entered in the EMR has to be started and signed by a fellow (a person who has finished residency but still in training before becoming an attending doctor for those who don't know), and this is the note with the data, and so I (a first year resident) would have to be sitting next to the fellow, he would have to start the note, then I would have to switch seats with him, do some data entry, then he would have to write his impression ("normal", "COPD", "asthma", but in more doctor like terms) and sign the note. The way the system is set up makes this impractical.
> my suspicion is that Rand would be pretty much fine with this outcome if we could just get government actors out of the equation and have private parties taking homes from people.

Absolute nonsense....I can't think of a single Rand writing that would support this notion in the slightest. One of her primary principles was that the desire for the unearned was a "sin" (or whatever equivalent word she used).

Taking someone's home over a small tax bill is definitely unearned.
Ignoring the question. I asked why you didn't give those sources the same level of apprehension. I'm familiar with the situation you snarkily linked to.
This sounds like an awesome afternoon project!
I've got nothing I can cite to you; it's also true that a lot of bespoke crypto enjoys a lack of usable attacker chosen plaintext, which is admittedly not a good property to rely on for a standard.
Google Trends is based on searches, so it implies it actually started up three years ago, and a bunch of n00bs had to find out what it means. It grew into simple and powerful everyday expression that everybody knows a meaning of.
They researched this for 10 months, not 10 minutes. The quality of the research shows.
I think usury refers to 'excessive and immoral' rates in this context.
> I was referring to the generally sociopathic attitude they tend to adopt toward The Poor.

Do you really expect anyone to engage with you when you call a well-known author a sociopath without justification? Might as well call her a child rapist while you're at it.
What is this hmpgr thing? Are you developing your app with them as a platform or is this your actual startup?

Kinda confused because I actually did sign up to try your app, but now I'm signed up to this other app and I really didn't want to do that.
Collection of taxes being private, and the fairness of the rules are two entirely different things.

"Randian/Thatcherite dream"...as if they want people to lose their houses. You are very misinformed on Objectivist principles.
exactly what I'm trying to do
It took them 10 months to research this. No doubt there was a lot of effort involved.
I would tend to agree. Nanomix (nano.com) has been trying to accomplish this for the past ~6 years or so. Combining a complex biological assay + micofluidics + high precision sensing technology is not a trivial task. I want to see some hard data verified from a third party.
Interactive Timeline of Edward Snowden's NSA Revelations
I have that personal gripe about Go's documentation. Compared to C# and even PHP, Go's documentation is very short, often being a single line. For a beginner, it's difficult to learn Go this way.[1] Since taking it up, I've found it more helpful to buy books on Go, whereas I've been able to learn PHP and C# almost solely off the documentation. I still don't know much about Go and I feel Golang could do a much better job of documenting the language and making it accessible to beginners.

http://golang.org/pkg/io/#WriteString

vs

http://php.net/fwrite and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143376.aspx

[1] Edit: I'm aware that learning via documentation is probably not the right way to do it, but it's part of the learning process and thus, good documentation is important.
And the Redditization of HN is now complete.

Also, Godwin's law alert!
depends on where you work and how much staff is hired for this type of work, but with the way the EMR is set up, and who legally has to start and sign notes (a doctor), you cannot avoid some data entry unless it is somehow automated for you
This is the law in Utah and was applied to all businesses up until a few years ago. I don't think they ever tried to property tax the personal possessions of individuals, though that was the law.

You were required to declare your chairs and desks and tables, calculators, paper and pens, books, bicycles, cameras and computers, and everything and look up its market value and then pay the usual tax just as if it were real estate. You were required to do it every single year. And it's still the law for property above an exempt amount, but no longer applies to every paperclip like it used to.

That law is crazy, of course. Real estate is a big expensive immovable item that creates limits on the level of corruption and record keeping headaches so it's the best target for property taxation. Maybe really big vehicles like cars and airplanes and boats could be targets, too, if they have a home base, but even then you can see problems.

And finally, Henry George [0] points out that the ideal property tax to promote investment, limit corruption and cheating, allow fair administration, limit any kind of dead-weight loss [1], and generate reasonable revenue would be a tax on land value only. Buildings, improvements, vehicles, and personal property should be exempt and only the land's location, area, and fixed geology/hydrology/soil conditions should matter.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_burden_of_taxation
I too would love for most functions of the government to pack up and close their doors.

However, the problem with espousing this solution for every individual subject is that the amount of success is highly correlated to how much it means cutting public services (the purported reason for taxes) versus actually defunding the bureaucracy. Libraries and road maintenance are easily gutted while city administration and police push back hard to keep their pockets lined.

So you're still being extorted for a similar amount but receiving much less in return. Eventually, people cry uncle and vote for higher taxes to bring back services and the cycle repeats. And this is at the local level where there's some sliver of accountability, possibility of moving, and taxes are relatively low! So let's just save the discussion of whether libraries are a worthwhile public service until that military-surveillance cancer is well in remission.
I was puzzled when they switched from the marketplace model to an agency model. From the tutors' perspective, it was much better to have direct control over interaction with the students, scheduling, and the ability to adjust and test pricing dynamically. They switched to being an agency, which meant tutors started getting paid significantly less and now had to deal with a middleman to work out scheduling and decide whether it made sense to work with a particular student.
Thanks, I will definitely put this on the plate as I decide to apply for US citizenship.
What a clever disruption of the property tax industry!

But seriously, things like this are why we must not get too carried away focusing only on market opportunity. Some ideas are profitable, but socially disruptive. In this case, public policy is enabling predatory with very obviously antisocial results, but I think there are plenty of cases where the government isn't so directly involved and the results aren't so obviously destructive, yet antisocial, nonetheless. This is really addressed to the small but vocal minority that seems infatuated with profit-seeking, without concern for anything else.
I agree with the above, except I'd replace "Useful" with "Horrifying"
I'm red-green colorblind and the dots are extremely hard to see (at least for me). Any chance you might change them to be further apart in color, or use different colors? Blue and red, for instance, would not cause the same issue for me. Love the idea, though!
> To learn mathematics from scratch. The working programmer simply doesn’t have time for that.

I disagree. Most of high school math and calculus can be learned fairly quickly (like weeks). This is what I have been trying to do with my book "No bullshit guide to math and physics." It has been very successful with coders: http://minireference.com/

Also on the topic math \cap code, here is an excellent talk by Gerald Sussman:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Expression-of-Ideas
And it's about every idea being old! So fitting!
Confessions of a Biological Scientist – Part II: The Organic Engine of Science
Pivot into the lucrative "out of condoms" market using the same hardware and business model to grow the startup.

Presumably any drone that can fit thru a bathroom window can fly thru a bigger bedroom window.
"I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline."

Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?
Do you think income tax has proven a big disincentive for people to go out and work?

(To ancitipate an obvious rebuttal: yes, I will admit that inheritance tax has probably put people off the idea of dying.)
Not really informed here but I would venture a guess that 'perfect separation of concerns' causes a performance hit. In the backend web dev world you can usually suck that up by making the load parallelizable across servers, something you don't have the option of doing with code running locally. In other words, 'separation of concerns' is great until you hit a performance bottleneck, as you often do with any resource constrained system.
Anyone got a jpeg un-glitcher? I'm thinking of a tool to fix these sorts of minor corruptions in the jpeg bitstream. The tool would load up the corrupt image, let the user visually select where the glitch starts by clicking the first "weird" looking pixel and then iterate through different values until the user says the picture looks better. Rinse and repeat.
Hmm, I don't understand the problem. There is a philosophical question there, of course, but as long as you assume something like the law of excluded middle, you can easily set up a proof system allowing you to execute proofs by contradiction. This is a common strategy in Coq, for instance.

Maybe I'm not understanding your point, though. I also don't think this chain of conversation is the sense that darkxanthos meant, either :)
FLAC would probably be a bad example, since it is lossless. It makes fewer assumptions about the content of the audio file, since it anyway has to encode all of the noise and minor stuff. Making too many assumptions of the content would only necessitate a facility to introduce specified noise into the audio later. Which I can't imagine would be both fast and small.
Here is a British/US conspiracy version from the 1970's:
http://www.syti.net/GB/SilentWeaponsGB.html

Caveat: The website in general has pretty "out there" ideas, and that I concluded from just the English versions (it is mostly French).
Having worked in a variety layouts, I'd say the small team room setup is among the best. It's open layout within the team room, but the team gets their own room, sets their own culture etc. The lead for the team is the interface into the room. When the team is heads down on work it'll get quiet, and the room doubles as a conference room saving floor space. The only hard part is sizing the rooms and teams appropriately so you don't end up with stragglers sitting away from the team -- they'll never ever integrate into the team.

Open floor plans with offices are among the most caustic I've ever encountered as everybody jostles and resents those that get offices. Inevitably some criteria for office assignment will get set and then you'll run out of offices and some various persons who've worked long and hard to "earn" an office won't be able to get one and now you have a senior disgruntled bad apple in among your rank and file.

Open floor plans are terrible too, but a step down from open with offices. They often backfire in weird ways as well. In one place I worked the dev area was an open office with breakout conference rooms. The unwritten culture was that it had to be as quiet as a tomb. Which also meant there was no communication happening...so it was pointless as a communication mixer. People stopped checking their email and communication deadlocked.
I think bad_user is talking about Mir: it's licensed under GPLv3 [1].
How Space Hulk got lost in translation
TfL Travel Alerts
I decided to write this application because whenever there are delays on my line, I never check tfl website. Sure I could have checked every other day that week, but not on the day with a bad service!

Using this app I can get the current status, weekend status and set up my regular commutes so I get notified if I'm going to be affected by problems. Simple and fast.

We make use of push notifications so it won't drain your battery! ;)

Suggestions and feedback are more than welcome!

This app is open source. Check it here: https://github.com/antonyt/TflTravelAlerts
Why do you say "should not have taken?" Given the fact that he was a student at the time, learning C++, I think it's perfectly understandable that he ran into a "bang your head against the wall" type problem. Maybe it was his first real segfault debugging session. I doubt you solved your first real segfault in 5 minutes.

Sure, I'd expect someone with a couple years' experience to be able to debug a simple segfault relatively quickly. But the only reason they'd be able to debug it quickly is because they've _painstakingly done it before_, and can draw from that experience.
Maybe the people that he hangs around with..
Yea, this is why I didn't want to start a company in healthcare. It's ugly.

I think I can avoid the whole thing by having my software just be a tool, not a final read, and doctors will still have to double check the numbers against the PDF hardcopy. It will just take 1 minute or less to glance at 10 values or so and make sure they match up compared to typing it in themselves
The point is we really haven't evolved defenses against it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

Yes you are right, people can choose to avoid getting addicted in the first place. But countless people try drugs and video games anyways. They are very tempting. And there is strong market pressure to make them even more tempting, and even more addicting.
Property taxes add liquidity to the market, and lower prices on everyone, as the cost to own real estate is not zero. Negative side effects that areas with no property taxes include

* blind investments into endless real estate development projects that have no tenants or structural quality (China, Dubai)

* extremely high prices for anyone entering the real estate market (old European monarchies, where a family might have owned the same real estate for centuries)

* lack of funds for upkeeping and maintaining what's considered a shared property (facades, sidewalks) while maintaining fancy interiors (Eastern Europe)
Why I don't use a parser generator
“How It Feels” and “On the Nature of Startup People”
Nice concept and experiment! In a similar vein, reminds me of this curious JPEG glitch http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3937885/cross-browser-inc...
DC is notoriously slimy with taxes. It's not surprising that they would do something like this. For example, DC tries to trick VA and MD based businesses into paying corporate taxes in DC if they work with the federal government based on the unsound lie that because the federal government is based in DC any business that works with the Feds must pay DC taxes. Even if that business never sets foot in DC, or works with a single federal person in DC.

Thankfully VA and MD don't recognize this twisted logic.