skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to have good reasons -- multiple OS-es.

I was just saying it is good to be aware of RPMs and APT packages. Even old and crusty setuptool has RPM support.

$ python setup.py bdist_rpm

(add deps setup.cfg and make sure to have a MANIFEST.in file to add extra data besides python packages to the RPM package).

You seem to need multiple OS-es. That is hard and I haven't found a clean universal solution.

It also depends on the software. We have lots of mixed, C/C++/Node.js/Java/Python/big data files. Using virtinst/pip, then unpacking tar.gz, make ; make install , then java's (whatever it has) then npm all to setup a repeatable dev and test environment would be a horrible mess. That is what RPMs packages provide for us.
That's true, but you also earn _a lot_ of money ignoring safety measures. They're paying with their lives part of this productivity
>closed down barbecue pits

Mind explaining what those are?
i think it's fair to refer to that technique as "The Microsoft"
>Why? Why can't I just have the pip'ed libraries in a subdir somewhere and tell Python to look there?

Because that ties you to a single system wide python. Why would you want that?
Aral Balkan's Codename Prometheus revealed as Indie phone
Get Ready For The Streaming-Music Die-Off
>Do not allow liberals to sanitise history.

It was the right that supported apartheid, almost until the end like Reagan and Thatcher. Dick Cheney voted against a 1986 resolution calling for the release of Mandela from prison. A month before Nelson Mandela was elected president Ron Paul's newsletter warned of a'South African Holocaust.' Get your facts straight.

It seems you're the one right-washing this.
I'm very curious where you are getting this info.

I own open source licensing policy at one very large company (which doesn't really work like you suggest), and am in contact with about 50-100 other open source counsel on a regular basis, and the only software most ban is AGPL (and a few other licenses which aren't talking about here, as they are wildly uncommon).

Most companies also do not treat GPLv2 and GPLv3 differently from a licensing perspective, only those that ship embedded devices do.

At least, this is my experience. I'm curious where yours is coming from.
Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story... The Last Question. Must read.

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
I guess it's horror in a very wide sense. But me and any memory of me will be long gone before any of this even begins to happen. I had my time here, enjoyed it, and it'll come to an end, as all things eventually do.
Awesome idea!

Something as simple as "if(password){logmein()}" would be quite hard to brute force I believe.
> You are still paying for all the servers in the server farm

Amazon is paying for all the servers in the EC2 server farm. Does that stop EC2 from being a cloud?

TestingBot is spinning up VMs dynamically to scale out test infrastructure on demand. Their use case is basically the ideal cloud use scenario. They've built a system of servers that enables them to do all of the things typically associated with clouds, which means they've built a cloud.

You're stuck thinking of TestingBot needing a bunch of servers, and seeing the tradeoff as dedicated servers vs cloud servers. In reality, it's TestingBot's customers who need a bunch of servers. So TestingBot built a cloud for their customers. They aren't setting aside N servers for each customer. They're building a cloud with the capacity for X servers and carving out of that on-demand.
"Stephen Wolfram’s recent blog post that “something very big is coming” must surely rank among the most buzzed about tech announcements of the year, right next to Elon Musk’s cryptic comments about the Hyperloop"

Shorter WaPo: just like the Hyperloop, this will give tech journos something to dry-hump but turn out to be nothing useful.
Doing It Wrong: High Availability and Security
I've always found the notion of a "target price" somewhat entertaining. Its market forces at work - baring Goldman schenanigens - nobody is targeting anything.
I don't think /r/programming was the correct choice for this campaign. I would think that the web development subs and even the sysadmin subs would be a better place for this stuff.
is it really brutally authoritarian if most citizens agree with it? social stability is highly prized in china even among the citizens.
The Win-Win Secret to Earning Recurring Revenue with Your Side Project
Google Adsense Mobile App v2.0 Released with New Features • vlogg.com
"Anal" "Goldilocks" "Sloppy"

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I don't share the vision of the author but you'll be surprised how quickly any building may collapse once not maintained: plants will grow under concrete and end up breaking it over years and years, and erosion will progressively do the job as well. And sidementation will end up covering all that's left over centuries: look in Egypt, most of the ruins we found were deep under several dozens of meters of sand.
Well as part of a rant, I'll point out two bizarro-world features of HTTP headers: Line folding and comments.

You can add arbitrary crlfs to any header, so long you start the next line with whitespace. Proper implementations need to properly treat every next line as part of the single header. Very annoying to implement (and other similar protocols implementations' do not all agree!), and no benefit. Unless you're composing HTTP headers to read on a 80-column layout. And that kind of thing has no place in a computer protocol.

Comments. Seriously read this from the spec:

Comments can be included in some HTTP header fields by surrounding
the comment text with parentheses. Comments are only allowed in
fields containing "comment" as part of their field value definition.
In all other fields, parentheses are considered part of the field
value.

That's even more bizarre. It further makes parsing need to know which header it is operating on. It just adds possibility for mis-implementation, security issues (confused deputy) and hurts performance. It's only useful if you're writing HTTP headers by hand and feel the need to comment them for ... I can't think of a legit case.

"Human readable" computer protocols are debatable (parsing rules always seem to become more difficult, which is very bad), but "human writable" is just silly.
Gzip format uses the deflate algorithm and adds header and footer. Only advantage is over raw deflate is that it includes CRC, uncompressed size, and optionally original file name. None of which are necessary for HTTP. I guess there is an advantage that already gzipped files can be served for Accept-Encoding.
One of the greatest speeches of all-time. Such a clear and forceful exegesis of his thinking. A giant among men.

And it answers why he chose to turn to limited violence, and as well the charges of being a communist.
Why the app store hate? My work computer needed an OS re-install recently (learned to be careful with sudo) and then they bought me a new computer shortly after. The app store made it easy to re-install a bunch of my apps like Evernote, Aperture, iWork, etc., and the app store keeps these constantly upgraded. Then I had to go through and download a bunch of other non-app-store apps (MS Office, ImageJ, Matlab, Adobe suite, Canopy, etc.), and these apps are always popping up with their own custom update software to remind me to update them when I open them.

I think it would be great if I could just use the app store to keep track of all my software, easily install and uninstall it on different machines, and keep it updated in the background.
In what form do you see that overt support?

The USA was very stringent in adhering to the progressively tighter UN arms embargoes and once the supplies from France ceased this caused SA to look towards Israel, Taiwan and Argentina for military equipment ( the latter two mainly as covert import channels, Israel as a partner ).

Occasional US arms did appear in SADF service but only as grey imports.

SA intel and SADF held a pretty dim view of CIA capabilities ( particularly in Angola ) and from what I know in public sources didn't deal much with them. Though they did supply captured Warpac equipment, once they had examined it in conjunction with the Israelis.
I plan on using this next time I have to do some quick and dirty python hacks at work.

Sometimes the effort involved in "properly" initializing someone's module far outweighs whatever potential benefit you get out of the module - this seems to subvert that quite nicely.
Most likely not and if they do then they're risking their business. A lack of response should not be treated as evidence of them engaging in state-requested white listing.

I previously worked in the AV industry (security consultant now) and have heard the drum beaten internally on numerous occasions that if the code is malicious then it must be treated as such regardless of who it is from or what is its intentions. The fallout from white listing malware that originates from a state-run entity would likely spell for a huge drop in profits.

So again I'd not take the lack of response as evidence of wrongdoing but rather an unwillingness to discuss business practices with third parties.
> for all I know Mandela pretty much deserved to go to jail.

TBH, while he did break the law, I think his course of action against the state was justified. That's obviously not an excuse that will fly in court, but saying "he deserved to go to jail" is a bit disingenuous given the context.

Mandela pleaded guilty to the charges against him (sabotage of various state and military instruments). The state was looking for evidence of him having a hand in killing/hurting civilians because they wanted to hang him. They couldn't find any, so they settled on life imprisonment.
Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.

In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!
If you liked this you may like Asimov's The Last Question: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
Great suggestion. In the next iteration, we'll add a different model for Latin artists.
I wouldn't say missing start menu button was "fixed" in 8.1. All they did was put a button there that had the same functionality as that corner without a button already had.
VPNs around the firewall are getting less reliable everymonth.

The visa changes made in July are much more strict than before, getting a one year non work visa is only possible if you have Chinese family. The visa companies from before no longer exist. But I have a working visa so I don't care.
> China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe

i know that people in general are racist against the chinese for all sorts of reasons, but this is the first time i've heard this one.

does anyone actually doubt china's economic growth? i mean all you have to do is go there and see it. (granted, very, very few 'experts' on china have ever actually been there)
nice, I like it!
I may have mis-spoke (could not re-read thanks to my antiprocrast) : I am thinking of a package format, probably more similar to .deb than .jar, that will drop the code I have written, plus the third party packages, plus the system level packages, ie all the dependancies that can get compiled)

The idea is to divide the Operating system from the application. There is never a good divide point but at some point we can say the chef/puppet/salt infrastructure will give us the operating system, and the big binary blob (.deb) will give us everything else.

Throw in configuration as a seperate function and I am going to have to lie down in a dark room.
U.S. Spy Rocket Has Octopus-Themed ’Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach' Logo
Nah, the last job I had there would have paid for schooling. It wouldn't pay for a hermetically sealed bubble of fresh air and water (and clean food), though.
Maria Popova on Nelson Mandela's Inauguration Speech and More
Your translation is wrong. This expression (jeitinho brazileiro) is Portuguese for "Brazilian arrangement" - like in "officer, I know I was above the speed limit, but can we make an arrangement?".

It is related to bribery, not to scams. If you are not Brazilian, it is a racist statement, if you are it is a shameful display of low self esteem.
Thanks a lot!

The font indeed is a bit hard to read. We were in doubt about using it for a while because of this, but in the end we liked the handwritten lettering.. so we went with it anyway. :)
Fail-fast is one of the philosophies I love in Erlang. By using gen_server and supervisor, it's easy to write fail-fast software that works.

In most software I see, exception handlers are a myriad of poor implementations of "log a message, clean up state, and try/fail again" rather than the actual handling of a specific exceptional state. Many of the most frustrating bugs I've seen are introduced when an exception handler fails to clean up state and tries again with some kind of insane context or a leaked handle.
I consider myself a creative individual, mostly because my boss brings it up in every review...

I think the thing a lot of "creative" people do is get too attached to ideas. When you have that idea its a diamond. Sometimes its hard to tell that its really just another rock. Of course sometimes ideas don't die. When that's true, you just gotta do it. Find a way.
Great read, reminds me a lot of Last and First Men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men
Its a scandal when SLC hits 70 2.5PM, its just a bad day when Beijing hits 700 2.5PM. There is just no comparison.
Legally and practically speaking, it's not a store because it is instead a marketplace. If we were talking about a flea market, Kickstarter would be the company that rents out spots, not the guy selling you a shady DVD.

It might be possible to set up something like a store using Kickstarter, and then to defraud people who participate. If I promise to try to build you a smartwatch and I was always planning to send you a brick wrapped in tinfoil, I've probably committed civil and criminal fraud. The court won't much care whether it's a "store," only whether I lied to get the money. But that's on me, not on Kickstarter -- federal law says that online marketplaces aren't (necessarily) liable for fraud. See the unsuccessful lawsuits against eBay, Google AdSense, and Orbitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

It's certainly possible for an online marketplace to become party to fraud if it's sufficiently involved, and I have no idea where that line is drawn. I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice. That citation above could be totally wrong and those cases were probably made up by rogue Wikipedia editors. Your intuitions will be closer, though, if you think of Kickstarter as the marketplace rather than the store.

(As a side note, let me repeat that the law doesn't care whether it's a "store"; the question is whether people are being misled about the relevant facts when they decide to put money down. When people say "Kickstarter is a store," the legal argument would probably be "projects hosted on Kickstarter tend to mislead people who contribute money about the nature of the transaction, and the website's design encourages that." I know legal definitions aren't everything, but good ones tend to be handy even in non-legal settings, because they strip away hard-to-define words like "store" and replace them with easy-to-define words like "transaction" and "website".)
This is pretty bleak and pessimistic. As an optimist, I'd like to think that our advancements in technology will save us eventually. We have made significant advancements in clean energy like wind and solar, and those advancements won't stop. We have also made significant advancements in crop yields, etc. Of course, by the time those power sources are so widespread, there will be much more pollutants in the atmosphere from fossil fuel power sources, so who knows.

Anyone have a future that is a little more rosy than this? Not looking for a utopia here, but just something other than the complete fall of civilization thousands of times over.
I think what you are doing is creating a mnemonic for a long pass phrase, which is a good thing. A longer password is, ceteris paribus, a better password. The only problem is remembering it. If you can memorise code better than phrases, this is a good strategy.
The monks in Anathem are technologists that shun distraction.
Artificial intelligence not being practical is a silly conclusion. We already have intelligence: in a few million years of fucking around with existing intelligence, I am pretty sure we can make some significant progress. The insistence on it being silicon is what causes people to get the wrong idea.
I think we're missing the data, but I feel fairly certain that bitcoin has, on average, become less and less volatile since it started being traded.

You've missed the part about $100->$1,000? = Not stabile. Unfortunately.
> You can nest under if(thing!=NULL) but then you end up with indentation creep.

I am not suggesting any nesting of anything. Repeatedly checking at the same indentation level.

> You can use the goto pattern if you like but some folks will tell you that goto's are never, ever to be used.

What matters more to you, getting stuff right or repeating adages that other people have said out of context? `goto` is probably the cleanest way to do it in plain C.

> When it comes down to it the logic is basically identical and it's just down to code formatting.

No actually, it is quite a bit more than style, doing it the way alexkus has it is much much much less maintainable when it's done all over a large code base. He's got `foo`, `bar`, `qux`. What if a year later some future maintainer totally unfamiliar with the code needs to add another one? Then it's up to that person to find all of the exit paths, make sure that `foo`, `bar`, `qux` and the new thing are freed in all cases. Doing that is a lot harder if the free statements are all over the place and repeated several times instead of in a single block.
Kudos for a simple-minded comment.
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a joke.
Technology, even AI, is only a tool - whether it is used for good or evil depends on the hand that wields it. There is no reason to believe that any new technology will help humankind as a whole as long as those that desire power are lavishly rewarded for their malevolent acts. Our society today is defined by war, authority that refuses accountability, and oppression of anyone with less power than ourselves.

We have plenty of technology to solve all of our problems already - more will not save us.
How often do you say "unfuck"?
Many people's commutes make a lot of difference.
Famous Mandela quotes
What Will the Energy Landscape Look Like in 2030?
As the article points out, it doesn't get us very far to use loaded, imprecise words like "god." Points 2 through 3 all depend on 1, which in turn depends on the word "god." So, for that definition of Christianity to be workable, we'd need to define "god" more precisely while avoiding equally vague terms, per the article's recommended procedure.
I wish I were creative.
This quote, or maybe ones similar too it, have been cited as the "basis" of our school system, and it's not inconceivable to me that people with those motives helped get our public schools off the ground.

But is there any evidence that such ideas are actually influential in today's schools? I'll bet that most teachers, if shown your quote, would retch.

Maybe I'm lucky (at least, lucky enough to be affluent), but I don't think that my kids are discouraged from being creative at school or in quasi-school activities such as their music lessons.
Millions of Android users 'deceived' by flashlight app that shares location
I'm the author of the book ("Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com).

I'm a big HN fan and would be happy to answer any questions!
There are lots of people with noisy neighbor problems on AWS. Linking to a paper to say that's not the case just strikes me as weird.
Shelling Out - The Origins of Money
I was surprised with the innate memory of spiders experiment so I look for some alternative explanations [1] as well as a link the original paper [2].
It seems that the study is not conclusive.

[1]: http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/10/03/do-infants-h...

[2]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130...
Learning to draw with Paris
And what does that do for the average person? Marginally cheaper prices? Does that offset the steep learning curve and the fact that you're effectively on your own if something goes wrong? Other players(or perhaps even Amazon themselves) can step in to fill that gap, but then you're back at where we are today. Noone has yet made a convincing argument for why bitcoin-as-a-currency will take off in any meaningful way beyond niche markets serving niche customers without the addendum that re-centralization will have to occur.

But more importantly, what matters is whether the manufacturers and distributors accept and use bitcoin amongst themselves all the way along the resource chain. If Amazon immediately turns around and converts the btc revenue to usd in order to pay for inventory, then what point is there in using btc in the first place? Right now it's a niche group of people using bitcoin to actually buy things(at their own expense at that), and without a doubt the retailer is immediately converting that revenue to usd.
Dystopia by the Bay
A wise man once said:

when you have a flabby culture of consensus that rejects those who offend the few, that’s exactly what you’re going to get: risk-minimizers, not excellence-maximizers. It’s generally agreed upon that some people are too creative, too interesting, to succeed in typical human organizations because of that specific effect.
It may not be new, but in regard to education in particular, it is worth repeating loudly and often. I work in the educational governance arena, and am exposed to many discussions that go on at the school district administration level.

It is very popular to talk about improving creativity in education. Many educational leaders recognize the issue. But at the same time there are even more discussions about Common Core standards and other ways to standardize education. Sometimes both conversations come from the same people.

I was at a conference this fall, with two session at the same time, in rooms right next to each other -- one promoting why the Common Core is the greatest thing ever, the other denouncing it. Both sessions were equally full, and both sessions got the worst reviews of the entire conference, mostly because the people are so conflicted about how to deal with innovation and creativity vs standardization.

It is a problem that is easy to identify, but much more difficult to fix. People are trying. For example, Khan academy is a great resource for independent learning, but even their elementary math lessons are categorized by traditional grade levels.

The best solution I have to improve creativity in the American educational system is to educate the parents. Make sure that all parents are aware of the issues, and make sure that all parents know that the education of their children is not in the hand of their local school district, but in their own hands. They need to understand the pros and cons of all schooling options, and make the right decisions for their children, and include their children in those discussions when they get old enough.

I know this is a huge tangent away from the original article, but this strikes a bit of a nerve with me, and I agree with you that education is an arena in which the issue of creativity is vitally important, probably moreso than in the workplace.