skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops.

I could envision certain types of companies being able to do this -- those where the great majority (if not all) of the computing that an employee does is in the browser. (Call centers come to mind.)

Just out of high school, for example, I got a "data entry" job at Columbia House. Remember those "Get 12 CDs for a penny!" things that were in damn near every magazine imaginable ~15 years ago? My job consisted solely of typing into a custom (DOS-based) application whatever the customer had written on the card (e.g. their name, address, the ID numbers of the CDs they wanted to receive). That job could be done entirely on a Linux PC without issue (web-based application) although, on second thought, that job probably doesn't even exist anymore.
I think you both overestimate the level of effort required to maintain an app that "just works" (kinda, for the kind of people who'd take a mostly-working free app over the paid one with lots of polish and working 99.999% of the time) and underestimate the "like me" effect. I've developed software for 15 years, including mobile apps. I know what's involved in creating and maintaining a high-quality, professional application. I also know that our society doesn't value that as much as a software developer might.

In particular, our culture, especially those in the "younger" (borderline Gen-X/millennial and younger) cohorts have effectively grown up in a world where "the self" has been commoditized in the form of "karma", "likes", and so forth in social media.

There are a lot of developers for whom the "skinner box" treat is another tenth of a star on the ratings bar or the next big "times downloaded" milestone. They're just as happy to "earn" 50,000 downloads in a few days and a 4-star rating as any amount of money for an app.
I don't always bookmark a site I visit...

But when I do, I use a command line to do it.
Ads don't have special access but because of their deployment across many different sites they get to track a much broader amount of your web activity than any individual site which in turn makes them a bigger privacy threat.

I don't block ads but I do use NoScript which means I rarely see them. It is increasingly common for pages to load scripts from dozens of different providers and those sites I generally turn away from.
> Mac OS is close to nonexistent in that area in the rest
> of the world.

I guess you dont't live in the rest of the world. I am from a small exUSSR country in the Europe and while I would not claim majority for OS X but to claim that it is nonexistent is very wrong. My last company (Java/PHP/Frontend) was Mac-only. In the current company the majority is on Macs (that includes Android and WP developers).
USDA is down
One important thing not to forget, Partisan issues aside, is that both Congress and the President still get paid without any hiccups.
Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.
This is exactly the case they are in. If you look at it from the typical tea-party perspective, they were in a win-win situation. Either get concessions on AFA, or shut down the government, which in their view is the root of the problem to begin with. I have to think this strategy will end up backfiring on them eventually, especially when you consider the long term trends in political leanings in the country, but for now, they got exactly what they wanted.

I'm reminded of the dog that finally caught a car and then didn't know what to do with it.
Practical Aspects of the Bitcoin System [PDF]
for the browser, map, skype and facebook.
List of all Seed Rounds on CrunchBase
On-the-fly ORM
Esch state draws its own districts, so there were 50 different "party in power" scenarios in 2010. Democrats in California gerrymandered themselves into a super majority. In Texas Republicans drew themselves some very safe districts. But there is no national gerrymandering or "party in power".
I imagine it'd be pretty similar to the adoption curve SPDY has seen. First Chrome implemented it to talk to Google's servers, then a few other websites, and now nginx will do it for you "for free."
Totally agreed. The problem with Flex is it was designed for developer ease first and user experience second. Virtually every code example reimplemented a regular HTML form feature in Flash. You always knew when you hit a Flex app on the web because the first thing you'd see was a "loading" bar.

I used to work for Macromedia but I knew the moment Flex was released they'd taken the wrong turn from complimenting web standards to trying to build their own proprietary platform on Flash. To the user it was only marginally better than Java applets.
i thought the same when looking at the US, but then I noticed Los Angeles. L.A. is the 2nd largest city in the US, and the smaller spike, compared to its population, is consistent with what I've heard about the tech scene there.
Fair enough to advocate for your project, which I btw find it very nice.

However, xml configuration is really a weak argument. It is very rare that anyone needs to touch the XML files. In fact, when someone touches those files is normally due to either a very extreme case or more commonly lack of interest in learning how the admin UI works. Jenkins lets you manage absolutely everything from the UI, from the very beginning, which is pretty convention-over-configurationish. Also Jenkins' changes control system lets you track and diff every change very quickly.
Now that you mention it, you can do it with CSS media queries, like so (but with shape and path elements rather than image elements):

https://github.com/estelle/clowncar
Be sure to stick with your courses. Understanding the underlying technologies are more important than familiarity with toolsets that come and go. This is just the next phase of a long lineage of web design tools including Hot Dog, Homesite, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.

Its day too shall come and pass...
good catch. Thanks.
From a previous article in the Wall Street Journal [1]:

"The Kauffman-RAND Institute for Entrepreneurship Public Policy in Santa Monica, Calif., says the law could increase the number of new U.S. businesses by as much as 33% over several years"

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732405970457847...
I played it on my MSX-2
just checked on youtube to remember how it was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBL8KjAyDs

the scrolling was choppy but the action was.. action!
I remember a couple years back reading somewhere (I tried and failed to find the article) that the Treasury Department's software wasn't actually prepared to stop the automatic generation of checks and payments if the debt ceiling was hit. This was for the first time that there was a "crisis" under Obama, so I would imagine that it's been solved.
Google Web Designer Beta Released Dowload Now it's FREE • vlogg.com
Oz gov needs to institute IBAN and free transfers.
A how-to for dot-coms: Alex Ohanian explains
Python itertools and builtin iteration functions for C++11
Basically he is saying he sucked at his job, because when I was at Microsoft I knew we were sharing data with out warrants and I didn't even work in that group.

I knew that Hotmail shared data without warrants. I knew that we had archives of users passwords so that we could comply with orders from the Fed to provide them. I also knew that we didn't require paperwork just a request.

If I knew this why didn't the guy who was tasked with knowing this know? There are only two possible answers. He was stupid, or he didn't want to know.

There is a third scenario. He knew and is now lying.
Fair. My real gripe with jenkins is the UI configuration - the XML is a bit of a sideshow. I'll restructure my post slightly, thanks.
CI sucks... in big companies it sucks more. The unruly XML configs are a small part of the problem.

Taking two days though? Fire the engineer(s) behind the initiative. (I assume this is a one-sided sales pitch though.)

You guys have clearly hired a baller good UX/UI person and have an amazing roster of clients. Wish you all the success in the world!
"but 100% of the access are using IE6. why should we add support for another browser?"
The issue is with the ability to issue currency, not with the social safety net. The sentence that you reference is a little misleading. What was implied, was that if the Eurozone had a federal government with the ability to issue currency, and that same government was also in charge of the social safety net (among other programs), then there wouldn't be as much of a crisis because they could print money to pay for the programs. Because the social safety nets are implemented by the individual countries, and those countries cannot print their own currency, they are currently forced to implement austerity measures. This is why recovery has been so difficult. The last thing you want to do is to cut spending during a recession.
1998 called and wants it's "scripting languages" back.
It's not so much a rule as it is that Boehner needs to keep a majority of his party behind him in order to remain speaker. If he goes against them, they just vote for someone else. Everyone assumes that there won't be any defectors from either party in that scenario, so whoever gets the majority of the Republicans is the Speaker.

A majority of the Republicans is hardly a small fraction in the grand scheme of ways things can get blocked in Congress. Committee chairs block things essentially on their own all the time.
I thought there was recently a speed test showing V8 to be the fastest. Your definition of best may vary, and my recollection may be wrong.
This is a fantastic read, brings back many memorys of my youth. One thing I was thinking about was the undisclosed multiface backup hack that was mentioned. I believe this could have been done using the Z80 shadow registers, which was a copy of all the Z80 registers in a seperate bank and had to be switched to in by code. If these were used instead via in game switching the multiface 1 would not be able to switch to the shadow registers, it would just copy the main registers, so storing a key in the shawdow register would defeat the multiface 1.

...and thanks again to the op for this ebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/27/us/who-goes-to...

Broad strokes seems to be that anything a normal citizen would enjoy or a program of social uplift etc gets shut down. National parks, NASA, various food inspectors (how is that not "essential"??) and some sporadic regulators.

Meanwhile, the DEA, military recruiters, and yes congress / the president keep getting paid. Is there a single elected official that will be affected by the shutdown? That would seem like mis-aligned incentives.

Who else is ready for some debt ceiling!?
I misunderstood you, I thought you were talking about the DOD being the largest employer, and our priorities about it existing.

As for funding it, it's just because it was an easy vote, not because of priorities.
Turns out it's not her - I asked.
Related: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...
Oh emm gee. what will we do without google cache?
I installed a JavaScript but it conflicts with my RealPlayer plugin!
Aren't well-seeded torrents essentially multipath TCP? The main thing they get around seems to be per-flow limits instituted on network provider routers and SPOFfy fileservers, the first being a flow deSPOF, and the second being an endpoint deSPOF. Multipath TCP (though I'm not very familiar with it) seems to be only a flow deSPOF, and therefore only solves half the resiliency domains solved by torrents. Of course, they are no doubt faster to set up and don't require half the world to be interested in something .. both significant benefits.
I've been using a Lumia 620 for the last three months, and I have really tried to like it.

Switched back to my 2 year old android ZTE blade with a cracked screen two days ago. I feel like I just got an upgrade.

Nokia used to make great phones... and I still love the hardware. but the windows phone package leaves much to be desired.
Trust Microsoft before you trust Google. Microsoft never sold your data to advertisers.

Google will sell me all of the search data for a user. That includes "directions" so I can tell what household.

Google is evil.
Jenkins has done a great job in getting continuous integration as a workflow into the hands of many developers.

But their usability is completely out of date and their current user base doesn't let them evolve to where they would need to be. Especially integration with PaaS services like Heroku should just be there from the start, but has never been a focus for the Jenkins community which still seems to be very on-premise based with all of their infrastructure.

More and more developers seem to be jumping on hosted solutions now (e.g. https://www.codeship.io where I am one of the founders)
Java - Write once, debug everywhere.

JavaScript - Write once, run everywhere
Wow, such melodrama.
Just got en email from a client who is with the Dept. of Agriculture and he said "it looks like the government is shutting down on Tuesday" and for the life of me I just couldn't understand what that was referring to.
PR stunt or massive budget decreases in government services? Either way it's not a good place to be in as a country.
What-If Numbers (whatifnumbers) from XKCD
Does anyone know how would this affect public schools?
"I own a relatively expensive piece of electronic equipment that keeps breaking."

Underconstrained problem set: no $ figure, class of product, mfg name, or indication of who repaired it. Without any specifics, it's difficult to analyze the manufacturer's response in its true context.
That is one painful page
Is this purely symbolic, or is there some real sense in which replacing the USDA website with a placeholder saves the government a measurable amount of money?
This is a little confusing. The USDA's website is presumably hosted on some server, so what exactly is preventing it from remaining online?

I mean, the domain is clearly still here, and there's a web page serving that error, so...
My guess is more the former than the latter.

Then again, federal spending can be pretty funky in how Congress requires it be spent. I'd love to see all the information on how the decision to shut down the site was made.
Actual information on the effects of the shutdown on the USDA, for those interested in that sort of thing: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agricul...
nsa.gov is still up, so they do have some priorities.
Symbolic really. The same servers are sitting there, just idle rather than pumping out pages.
You don't have to "maintain the distro" per se. You just have to backport security fixes for the subset of that distro's packages that you actually use. If you have a large organization and you only use a limited subset of the software provided by the distribution, it's not inconceivable that you might have the resources to do so.
When would a full shutdown occur?
Good job on having the typical non-biased flak-attack and also spamming your startup.
A pandering PR stunt by an overgrown bureaucracy. (The USDA is the home of the rabbit inspectors, bravely protecting our children from risky pet bunnies.)
Working without being paid during the furlough ("volunteering") is outlawed[1] to prevent employees from suing for back pay... which is also not guaranteed by any law. CNN simply made that assumption because it was granted during the last major shutdown.

http://www.bsnlawfirm.com/newsletter/OP0413_Natter.pdf
The funding to support server + bandwidth + sysadmins.
I realize that people are a little annoyed at this tact, and think it is melodramatic. But consider:

* The servers may be hosted on a cloud system, and there is now no way to pay for them. (Even if the bill is due in 4 days, the employees can't do the work 4 days from now, they have to do it now.)

* Some of the information may be time sensitive, and the submission of forums may rely on employee feedback. These services may not be easy enough to remove in the time they have available to shut-down.

* Even if hosted in house, if the systems break, or are hacked into, then nothing can be done fix them. Better to deploy a hardened static page now than be infected with malware running massive botnets when they get back.

* They may have to turn off the utilities to their server farm, so they can't support anything but a simple static page.

* They have 4 hours to do all that, fill out some paperwork, and still make a backup, and whatever other responsibilities they have (like internal servers).

The USDA in specific also handles dynamic data from across the country, so more than some, they have worries about being hacked and having their data screwed with.
My sentiments, exactly.

I feel like I just signed up for a bunch of spam.
Also coming from Vancouver. Let me know if you want to meet up. Email's in profile.
Canonical has an OS for tablets that will be released soon, and they can support any tablet they want, if they order large amounts.
I've always been under the impression that public schools and police services are all managed by state/local taxes and not tied to the federal budget.
Not if they can't pay for the power or system administrators to support them for an undefined amount of time. Better to switch to a simple single server now than let the web page get hacked, fail slowly, or disappear completely.
"which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth"

Ha! It certainly would be a good bit easier to put that hydroxyl group back on than to strip it off in the first place....
I havent had the chance to do pair programming at the workplace yet, but we'd do it all the time in Programming Competitions and it was very effective.

I think the reason managers don't tell you to do pair programming is that they thinking two devs on two different tasks is more productive than 2 devs on the same task. Though i'd argue that when two people are workign on the same screen, there's a less chance of them drifting over to HN every once in a while (like i am doing right now)
Having used CircleCI for a trial period, I can say Jenkins is definitely the way to go. CI on a PaaS is a bit of a black box, and when things go wrong you will suffer. The only real thing CircleCI does is put some pretty CSS around what Jenkins already does. Nice try though...
>EDIT: Could be people who just wrote "Germany".

I think that's it - there's a similar peak right in the middle of Australia with the nearest town being Alice Springs, but I highly doubt commits on the level of Brisbane come from there.
Somehow Heaven's Gate still manages to keep its site going fifteen years after its members committed suicide.
Quick response to whoever put this on pastebin:

If you don't like what you are working on, isn't it naive to assume that the entire field is like what you are doing?

Get some passion. If you show up to work, close tickets, do enough to get by, then not think about programming until the next morning when you show up to work you are not going to learn, you are not going to level up, and you are not going to impress anyone. Maybe you can gladhand your way into management, but you won't be any good at it and you've risen to the level of your own incompetence. I can't imagine that is very pleasant either.

Meanwhile people all over the place are working on hard problems of their own choosing and love every minute of it. I think they earned that. They earned it by taking the risk of success or failure on themselves, or by working hard and learning and working hard and learning until they had the freedom to choose what they would work on, because the decision makers trusted them to deliver if it was possible to deliver.

You can't shit shovel your way out of being a shit shoveler.
You can track changes in Jenkins configurations?
You can "shotgun" connections but hardwired and wifi usually isn't a win since the wifi will be more error prone and higher latency than the wired. So if you have both you should probably just do the wired.
Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?
Yeah who needs that pesky regulation of food quality anyway.

Now if gun permits were suspended, it would get an exemption almost immediately.
If they have legal requirements like a report of contamination or unsafe conditions is investigated within N days after being received their only option may be to not accept the report at all. Unless everybody involved in the whole process is an essential worker.
A Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Idea: Disrupt US Politics
I'm not aware of any official provisions for a "full shutdown", but if the debt ceiling isn't raised in roughly two weeks the government would technically default on it's obligations. This could certainly be viewed as a type of full shutdown.
This should be the other way around actually.
This looks really awesome. We use Jenkins heavily for deploying applications from build all the way through production.

I'll look into this and see what I can get out of it.
Pretty much this. Note that other government websites are also shut off or otherwise not updating, e.g.:

http://www.aoc.gov/

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-A06.html
Federal websites will shut down with the government
Personally I enjoyed all the whitespace in the XML source.

Props to mozilla.org for ensuring that dinosaur of a link keeps working!
I wouldn't really call that trivial compared to enabling a VPN connection in most operating systems (i.e. clicking on the vpn icon and saying enable).

Also it appears to require root access on the remote machine which would make it difficult to securely let a few people use it. Definitely a useful script for a quick linux to linux tunnel.
As long as we're doing shameless plugs: checkout my cross-platform product at http://tweenui.com/animator – it's for creating simple HTML5 animations (focus is mobile display ads) in the browser. You can download the result or publish to the cloud.
Well if they have a server farm or cloud server on which the website is hosted it likely needs power and bandwidth (or money for a cloud service). Either they disappear completely or put up a static page.
Now that is very interesting. According to this article, earlier this year meat and poultry inspectors were designated 'essential personnel', meaning that they can continue to work even during a government shutdown. This is important because it's against the law to sell meat in the US if it hasn't been inspected by a USDA inspector.

Imagine the outcry if this government shutdown meant that all meat and poultry sales in the US halted until an agreement was reached.
What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome".

It is a political tactic, wherein you deny the public access to the most visible aspects of a government operation during a period of budget cuts. You will notice all government agencies ceasing stuff like twitter accounts, which cost virtually nothing to operate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
NSA.gov is down.
They're down now, although it almost seems more like a DDoS ("Taking too long to respond").
Which facts in the article did you disagree with specifically?
NSA.gov is down.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov
Yeah, that line made my mind go blank for a moment.
That might be so. But not everyone uses GitHub, y'know?
Er, right. Reading back through the thread, I can see how that was confusing. My fault.

As you've now surmised, I was just complaining about the military's special status vis-a-vis the shutdown, for which "that's a lot of jobs!" is inapposite. But while we're on it, I guess I should say this: I'm for the government providing jobs, but I am against them being in the military, and strongly believe they should be employed more productively and less violently. I can think of a lot of things a make-work program could fix but I can't think of anyone I want to kill.