skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The reason you need to run a 16 bit installer" is to display a nice "Tough luck, you need a 32-bit computer to install this" message to the user, instead of an ugly Windows error message.

This was important at the time. And the whole point of backward compatibility is to allowed old applications (written, compiled and packaged at that time) to work.

Even if the software is open-source and has been repackaged in the meantime, the old version you found on a long-forgotten CD rotting away in your basement doesn't have that. The Windows philosophy is to make sure that this one still works (which is a crazy goal IMO, but an interesting one).
except we have the knowledge and drive to put it back together again.
From what I understand rainbow tables are not really used anymore -- they were useful when it took longer to calculate hashes, but nowadays you just need a decent graphics card to calculate a few billion hashes (MD5 or SHA1) PER SECOND.

Per-hash salts don't really slow that down at all, unfortunately.

Short-version: don't use the hash algorithms that are designed to be fast for protecting sensitive data; use something solid with a work factor instead.
To get an idea of relative savings in reserved instance prices compared to ondemand ones , you can try http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pri... . It was HN couple of months back.
At first I was offended that you would imply that MBAs are purchased rather than earned. I read way too much of that text before I had the hey-wait-a-second moment.
He means to get 4g on Verizon w an unlocked boot loader you end up paying for the dev edition.
When a mass shooting occurs at an school, nobody suggests it's a good idea to have armed security at every school entrance. Why is this any different?
it is a simple question of self-discipline

You say that as though there's nothing to be learned about self-discipline or as though there's no way to increase your ability in self-discipline by using a technique you don't already know.

There are lots of little techniques and tricks that people can use to fake or encourage self-discipline until neural pathways build that make the whole concept come more naturally. The Pomodoro technique works for lots of people.

Personally, I've found that I can induce a lot of focus by putting on a pair of noise-canceling headphones and listening to music without words. I have a rule whereby I can have my headphones ONLY if I'm doing real work.

The other thing that works really well for me is the "just one little thing" strategy. If I'm avoiding some task because it's huge and daunting, I decide to close my HN browser window for a few minutes and just do one little thing to make progress on the overall task. Nothing big, just one little thing. Maybe if I'm going to start a new web site, I decide to just create the repository or import a template.

It's a good trick since typically what ends up happening is that one thing is easy so I decide to do another... and another. Before I know it, I'm engrossed in the task and feeling good about making progress.
> If you have a problem with procrastination, it is a simple question of self-discipline

This is a little bit like saying that if you aren't as good at basketball as you wish you were, that it's a simple question of getting a ball to go through a hoop.
Well it isn't a zero sum game. Who's "productive" 100% of their time? And can keep it that way without any relaxation?
I would think that music you like counts as excellent relaxation and can help you achieve more afterwards.

Additionally, they are comparing "man years" to "calendar years". I would think it took more than 4 man years to build the titanic. Stupid post.
they're entitled to their opinion thats its 'wasted'. but really. wise enough to decide for other people how their time is best spent? is time spent being entertained wasted? or is time being entertained by gangnam style wasted but say, time reading 'in search of lost time' not?
It's only "wasted" if you got no value out of it. If you thought it was entertaining (which, presumably people who watched it many times did) then it's no more of a waste than time spent listening to The Beatles or Beethoven, relative merits aside.
"media hype can usually be traced back to the researchers themselves"

Journalist investigates media hype and lays blame not on the media. Film at 11.
cute, but also assumes no multitasking.
Thanks for clarification, I was pretty puzzled.
funcy doesn't preserve function signature. The only way for now to do this is to use exec, e.g. compile code from source or AST, which I choose to avoid.
McGinn frustrates me. Issues like this are highly popular and resonate with everyone, but I haven't been a fan of several of his policies.

He raised public parking rates to pay for street maintenance upgrades, safety at schools, etc. But, a lot of city streets have yet to be repaired, and safety at our particular local school has slowly been getting worse. He has had to deal with a police force in transition after a DoJ investigation, which he's handled rather gracefully, so he's done some things well. I'd say it's largely been a very mixed bag.

But the biggest frustration for me is that it always seems like he will say whatever is popular based on who is in the room. It's not that he is acting like a politician, but rather someone who doesn't really stand for anything. This issue, while he's raising it now, hasn't been a hallmark of his current tenure, so it seems more opportunistic than anything else.

If it weren't an election cycle, I'm not sure we'd be hearing so much about this right now.
As a tramway lover that photo of stacked, decommissioned streetcars made me cry a little on the inside. Just a couple of hours ago, as I was preparing to enter a tramway in my (East-European) city, I saw a 4-year old pointing to the two tramways that were waiting in the station and telling his grandma how great that was. Streetcars (and trains) are just magical.
Anyone knows what operation are they doing in the video?
That's always request #1 after a school shooting.
It might help to show the same examples from that module's documentation, how they are similar or different.

I still don't understand this after a skim of your post, since one example has

@decorator
def some_decorator(func, args, kwargs):

while the next goes

@decorator
def some_decorator(call):

Does this introspect on the parameters of some_decorator?

FWIW I'm happy enough with https://github.com/darius/sketchbook/blob/master/misc/decora...
The comparison to completion time of the Empire State Building, the Great Pyramid of Giza, etc, are dishonest. Those weren't completed by a single individual, so it doesn't make sense to compare it to all time spent by each person watching the video.
For what it's worth some of my take aways for why it's different are:

1) I don't see it effecting the tech industry as a whole to the level it did then.

2) It's not leaking out of the tech industry into the media, other industries, the financial world or popular perception to the same extent.

3) The amount of money flowing into tech and especially startups is significantly less now (proportionally).

4) There are many established business models that use the internet now while in 1999 there was much more speculation and few proven models.
I didn't see it!

People are also amazed when I tell them I haven't seen Avatar, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I guess I'm just different than most people.
I make $300-$500/mo. with http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com

I started it three years ago with a single web page and an email-me-when-it's-ready form. I barely got enough emails (50-60) in the first couple months to justify moving forward. But I did, with three designs and a simple design-by-form interface. Fast forward to today and I have dozens of templates and a custom drag and drop interface done in canvas. I have a pretty good conversion rate given that I only get ~90 uniques per day.
I couldn't agree more only I would say there are now hundreds of small bubbles that will pop at random and continuously. I'm talking about the startups that have no real value besides the fact that someone has invested in them. These businesses are propped up and made to look successful while in reality, they are nothing more than a localized bubble. Now don't get me wrong, there are startups with real services and long term value but most are just a show. It seems like the goal of many major investors is to prop up a startup make it look successful, offer stocks publicly, cash out and repeat. These people are not creating lasting wealth. They are mining money from the general public.
Australia has profited enormously from the US Constitution.

Our own Constitution was drafted in the wake of the American Civil War and with observations gleaned from decades of US politics.

If you read the Federalist Papers, it's interesting to note how much of history (going back to the ancients, ie Sparta, Athens, etc) the writers of the US constitution studied. That's not to say that they were perfect (I try not to hero worship myself; it often leads either to disappointment or distortions), but it's also nice to see the whole "learn from history" aphorism put into practice.
It sounds like it is rolling along, though the details on the "14 neighborhoods" is a bit vague.
Great idea, but June 2014 is too early to force a transition to PHP 5.5. They'll need to coordinate this with major Linux distributions, otherwise lots of people will be left in the cold.

As some of the commenters noted in the original thread, Ubuntu's current LTS release runs PHP 5.3. The next LTS, which will include PHP 5.5, is not expected until April 2014. Since people are encouraged to wait until the .1 release before upgrading to the next LTS, it will probably take until the fall of 2014 for the majority of Ubuntu servers to get PHP 5.5.

Those who run Debian Stable will need to wait even longer, probably the middle of 2015, since Debian tends to take 2 years between major releases and the current Stable was released earlier this year.

Of course there are PPAs for Ubuntu and dotdeb for Debian, but people who run "stable" Linux distributions tend not to get third-party upgrades.

And let's not even get started about CentOS...

Meanwhile, PHP 5.4 and above are a pain in the ass for shared hosting services, because some "security features" like safe_mode are gone forever and now the hosts need to rethink the security model on their multi-tenant servers. It took much longer for my favorite shared host, NearlyFreeSpeech, to roll out PHP 5.4 than it took them to roll out PHP 5.3. Getting PHP 5.3 is a big deal for us developers, but from the point of view of a web host it's a relatively minor upgrade. PHP 5.4 and 5.5 are much more serious changes for web hosts.

A more realistic timeline would call for PHP 5.3 by the end of this year, followed by PHP 5.5 a year or two later, and after that all the major projects should vow to support only the 2-3 most recent minor releases. A gradual approach like this will get developers most of the features they really need, such as namespaces, late static binding, closures and Composer, as soon as possible (they're all available in PHP 5.3). The new features of PHP 5.4 and 5.5 would be nice to have, but they can wait another year or two.

A rolling support schedule would also eliminate the need to do another GoPHPX.X campaign ever again. PHP 5.5 looks nice now, but you don't want to be stuck with it 3 years later any more than you want to be stuck with IE 8. Once and for all, let's force web hosts to do regular upgrades even if you don't yell at them every single time.
Meraki sells devices, AFAIK.

I have to kindly disagree with your opinion that there's nothing to learn here for aspiring entrepreneurs: one possibly actionable take-away seems to be "You haven't missed the train if you're 25, not even close. You still have time to learn, start a first company that probably won't take over the world, then try a second company."
interesting but an issue with that is pdf dont adapt well to different screen sizes. On mobile / tablet I am yet to find anything that adjusts it to screen size without panning and zooming. Especially two column layout favoured by publications.
Yelp Reviewers File Class-Action Lawsuit Claiming They Are Unpaid Writers
Thanks for the screenshot, the sample just shows as browser-default fonts for me with Iceweasel.

Both of these have the horrible rainbow effects around the edges of the letters, presumably from sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

But I'm an outlier, basically the only way I can read text without serious eyestrain is aliased with good hinting. Somehow the "jaggies" which so distress most people are completely innocuous for me, while I can't tolerate any of the fuzzy/blurry look that most readers bizarrely call "sharp".
Why hasn't it occurred to anyone before now that surely all surgeons are not created equal? As an engineer, I can't legally share examples of my work with potential employers because it's owned by the company I work for. Does anyone know if this applies to surgeons too? Can potential employers of surgeons request to see these videos to assess their performance?
The Power of Patience
The first part of a post is mere reasoning showing how I got to the actual interface I use. @decorator works with `call` not with `func, args, *kwargs`.
I don't think the issue is actually the music player, dialer, home screen, messaging app etc, because Google have done a great job making everything like that replacable. The actual missing piece which is worrying if you want to go this way is Play Services - that provides loads of the APIs apps need (probably including some for those replacements) and is closed source.
and did you play any games?
Most people don't understand it. Never have. Never will.
Actually, some people do suggest that, while other people suggest that it would be better if all school employees were armed.

You may disagree with them -- I do -- but certainly the suggestion gets raised all the time.
Why couldn't you just get up earlier (or later) on your own?
When are we having a hacker news JC readers meet up?
Yea, but you're the same as all the other people who feel the need to point out they have no tv and didn't see Star Wars.
Manufacturers love locked bootloaders. Otherwise you may squeeze a year or two more life from a device.
Jan, was the conference where Yehuda avoided you Froscon a few years ago by any chance? I remember having a chat with him about the issues I was having with Mustache at the time and him hinting at solving all of them in his own project.

We're still using Mustache.js for server side rendering at https://starthq.com even though we experimented with Hogan for a bit, but it proved to be less stable.
Ah, OK. So there's no way to express an example that needs to get at func, etc.?

I think I'd separate out an @decorator that fixes the metadata on the returned function, and another one, using it, that makes a decorator that works on the call() interface.
What is the difference between a "market correction" and a "bubble"? Do you think there is a risk of the entire web industry imploding like it did in 2000?
I was thinking the same thing. First one I saw was for the Eiffel Tower, which took 300 people 2 years, so that should actually show as 600 years, not 2.
And now a little more discussing it ;)
The Federalist Papers were written after the Constitution -- they were political ads for the campaign for ratification.
The KitKat version of GoogleHome.apk is already beyond bitrot; it's "an empty shell that forwards all requests to the [proprietary Google] search app" (which manages the home screen in KitKat), per ArsTechnica:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/google-just-pulled-a-...

This leaves it unclear what you get for a launcher with an AOSP build of KitKat, but it certainly is drifting farther from the official Android experience.
That is true until a new GPS module, or WIFI module, (or another core hardware module) makes it on the PCB.

I can't help but feel that the folks adopting this path will always be a couple of generation behind.
I started using the Pomodoro technique about two months ago and my productivity has boosted. An overlooked advantage is that you typically end up doing other productive tasks in your 5-minute break. Personally I often find myself cleaning, making my bed, taking out trash etc.

One of the top comments implied that this technique is primarily for those who procrastinate. This is not necessarily true, at least not in my case. There are studies (apologize for the lack of sources, on the bus) that show that your brain - although it may not feel like it - stagnates in regards to concentration after 25-35 minutes.

This technique can therefore force you to split up your work into intervals causing your brain to rest. To me this has proven to be very effective, especially during programming. You will be surprised how quickly you return to the "the-zone".
OsmAnd looks positively terrible from a UI/UX perspective, and seems borderline unreadable

Yes, the renderer needs some work both in terms of prettiness and speed. It's not as polished as Google Maps, but it's definitely usable. That the map data is from OSM is a feature by itself, OSM maps are often more detailed than what you get from Google, and you can download all data, which is great for traveling. It even supports navigation.
Or someone who downloads their media and doesn't want to pay $20 a ticket for bad movies.
I created http://www.twimemachine.com. Costs only about $6 a month to run (S3 static costs). And I make between $70 - $100 a month from just the one ad box on it. Pocket money that usually goes into buying some more Bitcoin.
Inside the Cheater’s Mind
I am certain that this violates Google's ToS.
FAA: Electronic Devices Soon Allowed For Bay Area & U.S. Travelers
Clever little niche! Well done.
Red Hatter here. If you want to work full-time on engineering within an open source project, the easiest way to get noticed by a commercial backer is making many quality contributions to the project. If we need to hire additional engineers, we'll typically ask some of the community developers first, prior to recruiting publicly.

That being said, there are many opportunities to work on the projects, albeit a little less "directly". Companies like Red Hat have large teams dedicated to QA, support, etc. Most of them are actively involved in contributing bug fixes, test cases, and directly working with customers. These types of positions do not usually require as much direct experience with the project as the engineering teams do.

And as one commenter already pointed out, we're definitely hiring! http://jobs.redhat.com/
Can you share what kind of product this is?
@olegp you remember correctly, I believe you sat on the same table when this happened :)
Show HN: Octoplate - Octopress theme based on Twitter Bootstrap 3
Spent, not wasted.

If you think Pop culture is a waste, then why not calculate 90%+ of YouTube multiple by # of views, time people spent in front of the television since its existence, as well as movies, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Computer games, etc.

In fact, most of the time and bandwidth being spent on "The Internet" is a waste - according to this theory.
There are at least three relevant meanings of free, not two!

Free as in beer, free as in freedom, and free as in degrees of freedom. Too many degrees of freedom makes a system inconvenient to use.

An application like Transmission is great: libre software but constrained in the "degrees of freedom" department, so you don't have the "chooseaphone" effect.

Edit: Let me illustrate. If I gave you a bike for free, you'd have the freedom to get around on it, tinker with it, sell it to someone else, etc.

If it had more degrees of freedom, it would be a unicycle, and much, much harder to use. But more flexible!
Wow, I get the sense that you had a really terrible experience someplace. I hope you get over it.

I do agree that there is a strong psychological component to the interactions with an employer over salary, and that it is good to keep this in mind when negotiating. But "forget about ever asking for more money where you're at" is demonstrably bad advice.
For medicine and biology, Pubmed.com is a first stop. Then Nature.com

I made a Perl script that emails you daily pubmed papers based on a list of interests, might be of use: https://github.com/bsima/daily-scholar
We may have increased productivity thereafter. I know I did! ;)
Oops, my bad; corrected.

EDIT: While I will agree that the Federalist Papers were strong rhetoric, and I can think of examples that contradict many of the axioms of them, I also believe it is very enlightening to read them because they reveal how much the framers of the US constitution had studied of other governments.
I hate the arrogance and pretence of this site as a concept. I'm far more productive than pretty much anyone I know, but I also need downtime to recharge.
I haven't seen Star Wars (and neither did any of my friends) but I own 3 TVs. I watch a shitload of TV shows.
If MBA is such a negative hiring signal (for startups) - why do I see so many MBAs in startups? The data shows that there are as many MBAs as PhDs or Masters. (% working in startups vs total pool).

Just like a degree in computer science teaches you the inner workings of a computer, a degree in business administration teaches you how to run a business. How can that knowledge be invaluable in a startup?

I do believe that certain segment (including the author) of the population has a strong negative bias against MBAs but majority aren't... Most mature+experienced tech founders understands the value of an MBA degree and even if they don't, they treat it as any other degree...
It's a few products actually, mainly aimed at small businesses who need web software. My main product is http://paymentsplugin.com which gets most of the sales. I enjoy putting products together though, some hit, others miss. It's good practice on the sales and marketing side of things too as I'm mostly a developer.
Not to mention the time required to design it, the time spent by workers to collect the raw materials used to build it, the time spent in factories to produce a finished metal product that could be used in construction, etc.

Attempting to calculate the man-hours that went into almost any project of scale is absurd. There are far too many factors to consider.
How does node get this 'very right'? Why is the 'code encapsulation' ruined now that he's monkey patched String? What should he have done instead?

I personally love monkey patching system libraries, it makes your code look pretty. I guess it's one of the guilty pleasures of a Ruby developer.

On the subject of awesome languages like Ruby, did you know that C# actually has a way of safely monkey patching system libraries? It's called 'extension methods' and it's actually the bees knees. Too bad C# has a proprietary side that makes it less desirable for business critical software, leaving us with Ruby.
I did the search and they're just smiling.... I'm not sure what you're seeing. Some clarification or examples might help.
Have you reported the bug upstream? I'm a GNOME developer and I haven't heard of this crash.
I came here to say the same thing, so it seems we're both guilty of it as well.
I think OP is probably right.

But the quote at the end from the New Yorker article omits the next part where Draper himself does -not- believe there's a dip or crash coming -- although the author thinks Draper's evidence points there, Draper does not, he thinks we're at the part of his graph where the next thing is a boom, not a crash.

The very next sentence:

> I asked him what he thought the next dip would look like, and he frowned. The coast was socked in, and the Ritz golf course seemed kind of scraggly. “Well, first we need a boom,” he said.

My gut feeling is to agree with the OP, but the OP is a bit sloppy with it's evidence.
I like the late hours of sun you get with DST, but I don't like switching. I'd be happy with a permanent change to DST. I don't understand the desire to have it get dark before 5:00PM in the winter.