skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "technically inexperienced and/or incompetent" managers by now have been well established, CMS on up to the White House, and CMS at least has officially been removed from it's role, replaced by QSSI.

What I wonder is how many political types are still telling the new fix-it czar, Jeff Zients, what he can and can't do. I.e. right now all features that can possibly be punting into the future should be.

Although he said his #1 priority was to stop sending garbage to insurers, which isn't particularly political at this point, one would hope.
What?? Visual Studio 2013 just shipped a week ago. They have released 5 versions of the MVC framework in the last 3 years or so. The new async/await stuff is fantastic. EF6 is new. SignalR is new. We get new Windows Azure SDKs every 3 months or so. They are constantly improving everything.
Google Cofounders Larry Page And Sergy Brin Are Pretty Lousy Coders
The irony's not very strong, since these can clean a lot more than they contribute via electricity consumption.
I see, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining!
If a government agency cannot justify it's existence, then why NOT dismantle it?
Whenever you have a good idea, you have to bash people over the head with it. I guess he tried that with the Indiana Jones thing and it failed. He says Butler Lampson was one of the few people who noticed its significance.

But the problem is that when you have a BAD idea you also may find yourself bashing people over the head with it :)

I wonder if he will win the Turing Award for Paxos. Awhile ago I thought it would be deserved, but I also feel like the full state machine is a bit awkward and heavy-handed for a lot of distributed systems problems (especially distributed systems over WAN, which I think is more interesting these days). I like the Bloom/CRDT work. And Raft is a simpler algorithm when you need strong consensus.
You're welcome. Try to upvote if you can so that hopefully others will get to see it as well. I stumbled upon the offer on LinkedIn.
I agree with this and many times we are emphasizing the wrong question with our processes. Are we shipping on time or are we making good products? If we are making good products then we need to put the quality of products above timeline on occasion. Agile does take away at times longer term feature quality for the needs of short term milestones. i.e. a programmer will hack in a feature to get it done that week, then deal with problems with that implementation for weeks as there is no time to change it. Yet taking another week on that part would have saved a ton of time.

A good product a day late is still a good product. A bad product on time is a world of hurt not just for the programmers, for sales, the users, getting next projects etc. In the end it is good project management and programmers/contractors that can build a solid product, not just deliver on weekly Agile tasks. In the end the quality and product result from where people place their demands. If it is time as the main demand, over shipping a good product, then we know what happens.
looks nothing like my signature if I use the same motion as with a pen....
Sprint backlog prioritization can be a hindrance
The place where this scheme falls down is that for many people the date (and day!) will change some time during the day. How strange that it be Wednesday before lunch and Thursday afterward.

Also for communication you still need to keep a table of when the sun rises and sets in each place; still need to keep in mind "they're x hours ahead/behind."

I travel extensively and work regularly with people in every time zone, and have thought long and hard about this problem. I don't think abandoning time zones is the solution, but abandoning DST globally would certainly help a lot.
Handling Money in Rails (Part III)
We have been looking at Bounty Source. We think jobs on Bribe.io will not be on that scale. Some of those projects are quite involved while Bribe.io may be smaller efforts, like updating a WordPress plugin to be responsive for mobile so it works with a mobile theme. It may just take an hour and earn the developer $100.

There may be some crossover with Bounty Source which could be good to provide multiple resources for users and developers.
I don't see how that affects the API.

[API] --> [Skype] --> [Other Skype Clients]

Rather than:

[API] --> [Skype] --> [Microsoft Servers]

Changing how the network is built shouldn't affect the API in this way since there's an abstraction layer (The Skype program). It would really only affect those who have reverse engineered the Skype protocol and built their own clients.

As for making Skype more centralized, yes, that will improve the experience for mobile users but it can be done without scrapping the API.

IMO, this is an excuse to scrap it and not a legitimate reason.
Our current plan is to have Android during launch.
F# is open source too. </minor pedant>
I like having `push.default=upstream` because it's like `simple`, just a little more powerful. With `upstream`, the branch you push to doesn't _need_ to have the same name as the branch you push from. With `simple`, it _does._
SUSE has done a great job maintaining its projects, and I especially like how they focus on building things that are useful to anyone rather than just themselves. With the recent troubles between Ubuntu and KDE, I wonder if Kubuntu will be able to maintain its status as the leading KDE distribution.
You'll also want Hellblazer, and how could I forget the entire Sandman series. Those will keep you busy for a while!
I see where you are coming from, but I find that for myself, I come to different conclusions.

I work on open source not just because I love my product, but due to an element of wanting to show off. It's kind of a badge of honor, a point of pride to have a project that people use and love.

Which is to say that, without the motivation of others using my project, wanting to contribute to it, and even wanting to donate money to the project, my personal level of interest declines ("nobody is using this anyway.")
I believe a lot of the framework is open source. http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx
I'm fairly this was the bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311871 Apparently someone finally checked in a workaround a couple of days ago.
tldr;

0 - I dont like Windows.

1 - I dont have Windows.

2 - I dont have Windows so I use Mono

3 - I dont have Windows so I use Mono and it is behind.

4 - I dont like the OSS community around .NET

5 - I dont like spending money on tools

You could have been far more terse.
I suspect F# can also be compiled to nearly anything OCaml can be -- that is specifically the point of the Code Quotations feature of the language.

F# is also open-source (https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp). Why do you keep implying it isn't?
Ignoring the agile point, the whole idea of requesting data from ye olde bespoke applications and data storage systems in a synchronous manner for (even just) a few thousand users seems like it is destined to fail.
I disagree about an inability to remember/store a password, creating a "large" barrier to entry.

There exists many ways to securely store passwords. For one, educate users that it is OK to write down the password offline as long as it is stored securely in a safe, or in your wallet, which you already trust for your cash and important documents.
Until you have to cope with the fact that you have: Powershell cmdlets with their own specific behavior - mostly standardized; COM components loaded from Win32 - major pain in the neck - you basically need a huge brain to really understand all those rules and quirks; AND old school external commands - where all hell breaks loose since on Windows they couldn't standardize even the freaking exit codes (!0 is bad, fools, as Mr. T would say :) ). Yes, Powershell is usable, but it's really hard to write secure, reliable, maintenable scripts with it...
If they don't know what to do, try buying someone.
All lives are not created equal. That's just bs. Of course not all lives are created equal. For example if I had to pick between the lives of Einstein and Hitler, I'd pick Einstein.
What? Agile's not magic?
To make the effect perfect, you could display the electronic signature to a human who then uses a pen to sign the card in the same way. (Otherwise you could easily tell pen from print.)

That would of course be highly questionable.

Or you build a plotter instead of a pixel printer.
You misunderstand the purpose of signatures. Their main purpose is not identity verification, but rather solemnization. It is a formal act in which you acknowledge the document that you are signing. This is why you can sign with an X and it's still perfectly legal, even though an X is trivially forgeable. Conversely, this is why serious transactions require notarized signatures: with the notary, you are then able to establish identity.

This project is not strictly necessary, because an electronic signature can simply be a button, or a text field (I've seen both before). This is just as binding as a physical signature, which is to say that it demonstrates your intent to be bound, but does not actually establish your identity by itself. But it's merely overkill, not "useless".
What about Blackberry?
This is my reservation too. As a .NET developer you can often feel alienated because of the platform you build on.

About a year ago, I picked up Python because I wanted to build a site using Django. I decided to fire up my Ubuntu VM, and work my way through the official tutorial. The language was easy enough to pick up and within a day I finished the tool I was building. However, I would have finished it in half the time if I was working on Windows. As much as I love the Terminal, my main time-sink was getting used to working in Linux again. After two hours I ended up downloading PyCharm because Eclipse was as awful as I remember it from my Java days (I downloaded Eclipse because using a text-editor was so slow!). I know some fantastic C# developers, but if they wanted to work in Ruby, Python, or any other language outside of the .NET framework I bet that most of them would struggle; not with the language, but with the tooling and Linux.

I absolutely love .NET and C#, and I'm very happy working with them, but I don't like the idea of being restricted. If I lost my job and a great opportunity came up in a Python shop I'd like to be confident in my ability to move to a different platform. That jump seems 10x worse if you're also jumping OS.
Respect, I'd say.

But e.g. how many times have you told a superior something like "This won't work because of math" and then been simply ignored? Until, of course, the system/project goes down in flames.

We need stature that can get around Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...):

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."

And this amplified restatement:

"...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

Lawyers frequently don't get that. Doctors? Not so sure anymore, the same masters of the universe have been revising the way they have to do medicine (e.g. the Obamacare foretaste in the stimulus bill requiring "meaningful use" of Electronic Medical Records). Scratch that, Obama's utter contempt for doctors was strongly on display while he was barnstorming the nation, e.g.:

"Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, 'You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.'"

Or what about the conceit that a generic MBA can manage anything?

MIT considered this the #1 problem for it to address in the '80s.
SSDs help tremendously with PS boot time, I've found.
From the article:

"We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors)."

So yes, they are talking only about software companies.
physical signatures are almost as useless as a digital signature... some people (at least 2) just escaped jail in Florida using faked judge signature ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/us/florida-officials-say-2... (everyone should switch from checks to bitcoins)
That's like saying 'oh its not capitalism it's crony capitalism' or similar excuses.
The core of Raft appears isomorphic to Paxos, with the addition of clearly explained and well-specified details for extending it into a working consensus system. It's cool and useful work, and is likely to be influential in the long run, but doesn't reduce the significance of Paxos at all. Similarly, CRDTs are a useful and interesting area of research, very applicable to many real-world problems, but they aren't the same problems Paxos solves.

You also can't ignore his other work in logical clocks, the bakery algorithm, the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, and TLA+.
Yeah, it's an interesting story. My take on it: everyone in academia has their own pet problem. I think a lot of people read papers in their fields with an eye to how the paper will help them achieve their own goals. When the problem is so abstracted from what you care about, it's difficult to stay motivated & absorb the material. I imagine a lot of people put up with that paper solely because of the reputation of the author.

I also think Lamport overstates his success with formulating the Byzantine generals problem in terms of Byzantine generals. I know the problem as the Byzantine generals problem, but think of it in terms of computers, not generals. It's just easier to understand the problem that way, the generals stuff just gets in the way. iirc my distributed systems textbook (Lynch) did not actually formulate the problem in terms of generals, but I could be misremembering.
Make it captchas!
Kindle First
Microsoft is contributing patches to support Hyper-V virtualization to the FreeBSD kernel to allow FreeBSD VMs to run on Azure:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019
Welp, I'm back from half an hour on Wikipedia reading about "Balkanization"... you use that word a lot. I like it.
Try my new Android app
async/await is nice, but futures/promises and core.async in Clojure are more powerful and useful.
Citation please?

Clojure has some awesome libraries, but unless you can show some use cases where futures/promises and core.async make it possible (or even just easier) to implement functionality compared to async/await (or F# async) I'm not inclined to take your word for it.
Skype's pretty much the worst thing ever anyway
Human motivation is complicated. Chances are that ones relationship to some kind of labour is mixed with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: implementing the back end might be fun for you, while the front end is tedious, or vice versa. Or maybe it was only fun to make 90% of the features, while polishing those features and delivering the last 10% is a lot of tedium. Things like this might help to make some open source products more well-rounded.
Why is killing bacteria always good?
Knuth is great, but if we are going to attribute this derivation, we have to go far longer back in time. De Moivre was the first to derive a closed formula for the Fibonacci numbers, and he did so by "inventing" generating functions. I only have wikipedia as a source right now, as I have most of my math books, including the few on the history of mathematics I have, in boxes :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_combinatorics
An open-source environment is really the only place this kind of motivation could work. As you say, if the project is intentionally buggy, it's unlikely to be used.

Love the idea!
There are a couple reasons to put it on the intake side:

1. Otherwise you are pulling dust particles directly into the fan bearings/etc (though it may be that you don't have a good enough seal for this to matter anyway). All this does is lower the life of the fan. This is one of the reasons you see filters on the intake side of an A/C or furnace - to protect the innards.

2. If a non-dust particle gets dropped into the fan, with the
filter on the outtake side, it is likely to get propelled through the filter at high speed. With the filter on the intake side, this will never happen (since it would not hit the filter), and even dropping it near the rear of the filter is unlikely to cause damage.

(There are other reasons that would matter more if this was an enclosed ventilation system, but it isn't)

Note that without pre-filtering, i can't imagine these filters are really lasting that long without being cleaned. Are you measuring static pressure increase at all to see how long they last before needing to replaced?

HEPA filters are not usually meant to be sole filters and last a long time. They are just too fine and load too quickly. Some form of coarse separation (IE >5 micron particles) is usually necessary to get any real life out of them.
Both of which have been in F# for years, and C# re-implemented them later, poorly. F#'s dynamic is extensible (and around since 2007? 2008? earlier?)). If you wanted to implement a "dynamo" object, go ahead. If you want loosely typed CSV-reader access, go ahead. (You get the ? and ?<- operators to define as you'd like.)

C#'s async comes from F#'s async (available since Oct 2007), which in F# is just a library. That's because F# supports workflows aka computation expressions aka warm fuzzy things. What F# does as a library feature, C# requires baking into the compiler.

So for 5 years now, MS has added these two features. They've still yet to deliver a REPL, or finish implementing type inference, or any such stuff. It looks like Anders Hejlsberg, the main C# designer, seems more interested in adding some basic features to JavaScript, lately. C# seems fairly abandoned, language-wise, to me. They seem to be content to have put Java in its place, and leave it at that.

P.S. C#'s a great language, and I'm not trying to insult the people that have done great work on it. As a popular language, it's one of the nicest ones out there IMO.
UK Authorities: Reporter Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Involved in “Terrorism”
This article really does nothing to contribute to the discourse on Meteor. At best it would be a reasonable comment, but the content isn't worthy of an article.

The author admits to not having used Meteor (in any real way), but then goes on to defend it for ideological reasons: don't just say something is doomed to failure, because we cannot predict whether it's the next Rails/Node/etc.

Target the framework you're writing about specifically. This article would be just as valid in its logic if you replaced the word Meteor with any underdog library/framework.
Skype moved away from peer to peer for supernodes. Here's the article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
Three thoughts on this:

1. Keep in mind for most projects and papers, not very many people are ever going to use the source code. For most projects, there's almost no chance that you're going to get a lively, multiple contributor project going. Odds are it's just going to be on your shoulders.

2. If you're going to stay in academia, there's no level of bragging rights to an awesome project, and it won't particularly help your job prospects - indeed from an opportunity cost perspective, most of the time it will hurt them. Once the code is good enough for a paper to be written, the incentive to do more work on the code vanishes.

3. Science blogging is actually a pretty active field. But talking about the software aspects of code don't get talked about as much because its just a tool. There are some blogs on software for science drifting around out there though.
Quantum information and the Brain [video]
A bad workman blames his/her tools. Bad project manager blames his/her process.
Balkanisation, is a geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with one another.
What benefit does solemnization provide beyond its ability to facilitate authentication?
I can be used as a weapon. :)
This is what the 0install command does (it's included in the Ubuntu repositories). It will:

- Download the package metadata

- Download the GPG key

- Check the metadata's GPG signature

- Confirm the key with the user and/or check against a key information server

- Download and unpack the archives

- Check the tree digests against those in the metadata

This page explains what it's doing behind the scenes:

http://0install.net/walkthrough.html
Django plugins you shouldn't start without
Show HN: YASGG - Yet Another Static Gallery Generator
Given that Google is a publicly traded company, I think it’s a question of ‘when’ instead of ‘if’ it will trade on user data more than they do now. It only takes a flip of a switch.

That’s why companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have the market value they do. Any of those can at any time flip the switch to cash in on the user data and mindshare they’ve collected.

Apple has a very different business model. It hasn’t shown any interest in user data (past credit card information) and doesn’t even have the infrastructure to exploit it. Because Apple is so inept in web services, I don’t mind them having my information on file, while I worry about what Google does with my information even when I’m not logged into its services.
Another way to derive a closed form for the Fibonacci sequence: put the recurrence relation in vector form and solve by finding the eigenvalues. (Which, beautifully, turn out to be the golden ratio and its rational conjugate.)

http://mathproofs.blogspot.com/2005/04/nth-term-of-fibonacci...
The .NET runtime isn't open source...

I like how this is down-voted as though it isn't true...
The runtime (.NET) isn't...
Seems like as good of a time as any to bring up Zed Shaw's "Programming, Motherfucker": http://programming-motherfucker.com/

We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.

We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.
None of that, except async, is a C# feature. And that was taken from a 6-year-old F# feature of the same name, except in F#, it was implemented as a library, not baked into the compiler.

MS is moving .NET ahead as a platform, but C# doesn't seem to be doing much. As another comment said, they're rewriting the compiler and then are supposed to make it take off again. Still, 5 years with minimal additions seems "stagnant" to me.