skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a lot of the confusion about the article is that Curtis himself doesn't claim to understand what's really going on:

"""Computers, "financial engineering" and credit, social media, algorithms that predict what you want, NSA surveillance, giant new holding corporations called Master Limited Partnerships - all of these surround us and wrap us into a complicated modern web. Some of it is wonderful, other parts of it are threatening - while even more parts are just incomprehensible."""

For him, """It is as if the scandals are part of a giant jigsaw puzzle - and what we are waiting for is someone to come along and click those pieces together to give a clear, big picture of what is happening."""

(Like others, I also found the writing style very unclear, and I'm actually kind-of a fan of his).

What I think Curtis wants us to take from the piece is the suggestion of an overarching connection (possibly even a human-designed one) between these seemingly unconnected, aforementioned aspects of our lives.

The guiding theme for the article seems to be the effort to "... find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective" - the life of Tamara Mellon, her father, and great-uncle of her husband, affected by aspects of current finance practices, (the alleged precursor to) social media and/or surveillance, and corporations.

If I may add my personal opinion on this interpretation of Curtis' views: Nothing new here. Orwell and Huxley already warned us from the dangers of rising mass-surveillance and huge power structures, while people are kept docile with "Light Entertainment". I don't think there's anything more described in the article, but what a fascinating description it is.
Very interesting. If you don't mind me asking, how difficult was it to parse the grammar of Lua? I see you mention "Irony", but I've never heard of it. Is it a parser generator?
I didn't work with .NET around 2000 much; I had it installed on a Windows machine and played around with it, but not for anything serious as it usually just sucked quite a bit. Anyway; we ran everything open source besides some Windows machines for development at that time; our development server machines first were 15 very old IBM machines we picked up for a few 100 euros installed with Linux (no X) and after that 15 VMs running on VMware on one bigger machine. All ran smoothly and we actually hosted clients on those machines; everything written in 'enterprise Java'. One of those systems is still running actually, on the same old hardware without changes to the software. No problems with that 'Linux, Eclipse, Java, etc. was difficult, buggy, and slow' => it all worked fine and was fast enough to be productive, have happy clients and make tons of money. Quite different from any Windows experience I had around that same time and after that.

This experience has not much to do with .NET per se; I really like C# and F# and sometimes wish I could use it all the time (not a big fan of Mono yet...). Maybe I'm just weird or set in my ways, but I don't really find the MS toolchain to be very productive. I'll retry it again when I get my hands on a Windows laptop (we're running only Linux and Mac OS X besides for WP8 dev and i'm not doing that at the moment).
The Perception and Power of "Free"
There is a huge difference in the sophistication between what you describe and what a traditional SQL system like Postgres does.

The problem with just mmapping files is that, to sync, you have to do a bunch of random writes. To commit two transactions, you have to jump two places in the disk and do two writes. You can defer them, but then your transaction commit latency goes up dramatically. So the user is between a rock and a hard place: uncertain durability for extended periods of time, or long commit latency.

Compare that to a system based on a Write-Ahead Log (WAL). The log is 100% sequential (and often preallocated in large chunks), and a transaction is durable if the log is flushed up to some certain point. All transactions go into the same log, so under high concurrency, one flush to disk might commit several transactions. And even if you flush for each transaction, at least you don't have to jump around on disk (and, if using a controller with battery-backed cache to reduce latency, you can make do with a fairly small cache).

The writes to the main data area can be deferred for a long time (30 minutes might be normal), and syncing those is called a checkpoint. You can spread the checkpoint out over time (it's a continuous process, really) so that they don't cause transaction latency spikes. Deferring the writes for so long allows the writes to be scheduled more efficiently without sacrificing durability at all.

On top of that, if you are OK with small windows of time before the commits are durable, postgres allows you to choose on a per-transaction basis not to wait for the WAL flush before returning to the client. If you crash, you are guaranteed to be consistent still, and if a normal transaction comes along, it will of course force a WAL flush. You can control the window of time before postgres will force a WAL flush, where 200 milliseconds might be normal. It can be a small number and still gain you a lot because it's just writing a sequential log, so there's no need to defer it for multiple seconds.

In other words: Mmapping files gives you a choice between very short commit latency and long periods of uncertain durability; or long commit latency. WAL gives you a choice between very short commit latency and short periods of uncertain durability; or short commit latency.

I understand ArangoDB is new. The description sounds interesting, and I like some things about the goals. But I think it's way off the mark to tout the durability as offering a nice trade-off, when a much better method (at least for OLTP) has been known for two decades[1].

[1] Basic idea introduced by ARIES paper in 1992. Couldn't find a link to a PDF, but it is a well-known paper.
> "In typical applications with "complex" database operations there is often no clean API to the persistence layer when to or more database operations are executed one after each other which belong together from an architectural perspective."

Is that even a real sentence?
Although LTC is certainly playing into being "silver" to BTC's "gold"
So what is the intended effect of forcing you to do things that you do not want to do and emotionally abusing you if you fail to comply, every day? How can you teach someone agency by traumatizing them if they attempt to exercise it?
some people are very creative but can't get things done

other people are not very creative but move things over.

in order to achieve that result that everyone appreciates, there is usually some technical detail we have to work through that nobody else cares about or understands. anyone who is both creative and wants to do stuff has to work through that lonely period.
How can you take Pierre Omidyar seriously?
This attitude is silly. Lots of volunteer contributors start out making trivial changes because they're trivial. We take lots of trivial documentation and comment fixes at Mozilla as people's first patches. They help contributors learn how the contribution process works, such as the ins and outs of posting patches, navigating the bug tracker, etc. Rejecting trivial changes because the contributor hasn't "earned it" is a great way to raise the barrier to entry on your project. (Also, bundling unrelated changes seems like a terrible practice to promote. We like to have separate issues addressed separately.)
yeeeeeeee
John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) gave a lecture on this topic, which I think is pertinent if you want to consider some solutions to this problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

(I posted it to HN almost a year ago, but it got no upvotes then, though I think it is excellent and merits its own discussion so we don't derail this article's comments too much, so here's a repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862219)

He gives several pointers on how work environments could foster creativity if they wanted to, but also weighs the merits of both "open" and "closed" thinking. I thought it fascinating, and a good breakdown of "being creative" versus "getting things done", and the environment needed for each.

I definitely prefer written articles to videos, but I do think the video has a lot of merit for anyone interested in this topic. It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article.
The vast majority see compulsory and free schooling as an unmitigated good.

The "it's only there to make you conform and obey the elites" meme is certainly getting more popular, but its so far from the aims of educators (and the politicians that continue to fund it) that it's about as well grounded and believable as chemtrails, the illuminati or other conspiracy theory.
Waitress.js makes waiting on a collection of async calls less painful
I figured the 70k number came from crime counts or something similar, since it's easy to build up non-negligible numbers pretty easily when 50 people are murdered in your country per day, which is the case in South Africa.

But individual crimes, even crimes partially or wholly racially motivated, do not make for a race war or genocide.
I find perl to be a language that makes it easy to write bad, incomprehensible code.

Did you read a book or tutorial which explained the two types of context (value and type) in Perl, the topic variable, or operator monomorphism?
I just bought this and I'm excited to experiment!
A perfect example of a naive linear prediction. The thing is that progress is not linear.
Wow. How... Leninist of him. Damn commie.
>"This is true only because 99% of linux users are power users."

My point exactly.
That's a quote from here:

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/corporate-behavior/

Why not include a link to the source or even the author's actual name?
On the odd chance that we find life in the Alpha Centauri system, maybe we could lodge that complaint, just in case.
An Equation for Intelligence
Thank you!

I hope I'm not being too presumptuous but I also attached my resume in case I'm missing something there hurting my chances. Feel free to ignore it. :)
Biphasic sleep is built into our sleep rhythms. There is a longer, deeper sleep period at night, and a shorter, lighter sleep period at the opposite time of the day (2-3 pm). This is more or less prevalent for different people, and you don't NEED to nap, but it certainly is not unusual.
ah, the maximum length... I've seen more than one site which would say "password is too short" if the password is longer than 16 characters.
The only other problem is accurately blind-typing it, which I've found to be a drawback of the XKCD-style passphrase as well. Given a little practice, I can fit about a twelve-character password, complete with punctuation &c., into muscle memory -- anything longer than that, and the error rate rises to a point where logging in in the morning becomes a trial.
The ecosystem and brand awareness of Bitcoin is novel though. It will take a full transition from people becoming marginally aware of Bitcoin to comfortably trading in cryptos before a "replacement" even one with a better design - and IMO there hasn't been one yet - threatens or supplants BTC.
This vs That Blog | You've got decisions. We'll help you make them.
I've never done it, but considering how random it is to get or not get just a first upvote from someone else (let alone the 5+ needed for front-page), I can't blame people.

HN still needs a vastly better way of separating the wheat from the chaff for new submissions, that involves the whole community, not just the few who occasionally look at "new".
It's a learned skill like any other. Google "learn how to be creative" and you'll find a lot of techniques to train yourself; read a bunch of these things and try stuff that you see popping up in a lot of them and/or stuff that sounds fun.
I have no problem with the word cloud. I have a problem with it being used to mean "anything I call cloud". If we are going to use the term and assign it a meaning, then lets assign it a meaning instead of using it for everything from "webmail" to "virtual machines" to "paying someone else to do something for me".
/r/sysadmin is a pretty active community in general. You could always just try to post to their subreddit.
Completely unsurprising, but still kind of awkward given recent events.
Right, 10 min upfront, then by the minute. The last minute chunk is discarded from billing if it was actually used less than 15 sec.

Or so I remember from reading the ToS yesterday.

The command-line cloud utility is so much easier than Amazon's. Everything is in one place. ssh keys are managed automatically. In less than 1 hour I was able to do everything with Google, whereas it took me a couple days to feel comfortable with AWS.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)
Drink your Ovaltine?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU
Deadly mistake entrepreneurs don't like to admit
Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the risk, time and effort involved in making them work that has value.
Yes, but programming is where the hits are ... sysadmin and so on are fairly low in traffic in comparison (programming is almost 10x larger than sysadmin).

You have to dig fairly deep and piece together a lot of little subreddits to equal one /r/programming...
Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc.

AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.
And the population was always reaching millions.
Most of the strength estimators I've used allow for a list of common passwords, but I've never seen one that checks against rainbow tables, presumably both because that would take a long time (and enormous resources on the server side -- rainbow tables are big!) and because, absent careful salting, the nature of a rainbow table would guarantee a positive result.
These analysts are not to be trusted. The stock market is a 0 sum game, your loss is someone else's gain. Analysts and brokers are out to get you at worst, or part of the noise at best. the market is an information/disinformation battle. From a dev mindset it might be hard to grasp, in our world people don't gain anything from worsening someone else's prospect. In fact open source can be actually seen as the opposite.
US Supreme Court Will Hear Case Re: Standards for Software Patent Eligibility
Sure it does. With traditional finance you'd give your bank account details so that they could wire you the money (i.e. rob you ...).

With Bitcoin you give them a brand new address that is tied to nothing.
It reminds me of only-partially-related C.S. Lewis poetry.

http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis
The PCB they show (https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/935/465/b197830112a2...)

… has the model number (S2122B) of the SmartQ Z3 watch, too.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2501598
> "Apartheid" (literally: "the state of being apart") was a forced doctrine of legal racial separation, nominally "equal"

I don't think it was even nominally equal until very late in the apartheid period (and that as an effort to mollify external criticism and reduce internal tension while maintaining effective white domination) when the Constitution of 1983 adopted the Tricameral Parliament which provided for representation (via separate legislative bodies that were responsible for each groups own affairs, and had to concur on common affairs -- with a council representing all three groups but with an overwhelming White majority empowered to resolve disagreements between the three chambers) for Coloureds and Indians, with both of those groups also having representation -- Blacks, of course, still didn't get anything in the South African government, because they were nominally citizens of the bantustans and not South Africa proper.
Because it is not (yet) reflected on the SCOTUSblog page, here is the Order granting certiorari:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120613.zr_4g1...

The actual link above links to a number of amicus briefs urging the court to grant (or not grant) review, and would be good reading to understand the issues in the case.

Links to Coverage:

http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/12/court-to-rule-on-patent-ri...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/06/us-usa-court-softw...
> I share their passion about coding

> I spent too much time with .NET I don't want to learn ruby!

Um. That answers that.
This projection seems to hinge entirely on the idea that you can't build solar panels, wind farms and hydro dams without cheap oil.

As those have only become more economical as oil has become more expensive, I find it particularly difficult to buy into long-run projections based upon that unexplored/unexplained/unjustified assumption.

Setting up humanity as reliant on fusion, or massive increases in new energy generation in general, also strikes me as a red herring. Likely: we just won't need it.

Even if (this time) it really is ready in ~50 years, guess what? Population is going to peak and begin to fall in ~50 years as more countries become wealthy, healthy and secure enough to make large families a poor reproductive strategy.

And is there any reason to expect that energy demand is going to increase fast enough with a static-to-falling population (in the future) to match or outstrip the growth of energy demand with a growing population (today)?

Western per-capita energy use is flat. [1] So I don't see how.

Absent some trend of every nation transitioning to US-level per-capita energy use [2], the energy needed by the ~9B humans living in 2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand.

If you're going to predicate the collapse of civilization on a shortfall of energy generation, you need to show how that happens in the next 50 years, which is well within the capability of existing coal, oil and gas resources.

Further, an assumption of a war-wracked world hand-waves away the question of how on earth nuclear-armed powers are able to go to war with one another. This has been an unsolved problem in modern geopolitics for nearly 70 years now. These powers can certainly squabble via proxies. But, by definition, no major harm can be on the line lest it escalate directly into the conflict no-one can win. And existential threat is the major harm. So how could a nation decide that certain destruction is at all preferable to incremental destruction?

[1] Some countries are at a higher level than others, but all the western countries are essentially flat.
chart: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/en...
from: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...

[2] Any assumption that every nation will transition to US-levels of per-capita energy use seem unjustified by the data. European and Japanese levels have been flat to falling-modestly for some time. It's much more likely that US energy use will begin to fall, as suburban sprawl and huge houses become increasingly uneconomical and we move closer together, drive less, build more sensibly, telecommute more, etc.
I added placeholders to the textareas, for the cost of 42 characters: https://github.com/xem/miniCodeEditor/pull/4
Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed?

My numbers were very different.
Where To Promote Your Equity Crowdfunding Offering
http://docs.python.org/2/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONHOM...
How Square Is Structured For Rapid Decisions, Awesome Products
I would really suggest reading the paper mentioned first in the article[1]. Although it has a good deal of the usual statistical ranting, it's short and reasonably well-written. From the conclusion:

"Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Our findings imply a deep irony. Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most."

The key finding is two-fold: in a normal, non-uncertain, state, creativity has positive associations and is easier to recognize and assess. However, when people attempt to deal with an excess of uncertainty, creative ideas have negative associations.

That's something to think about the next time everything is on fire.

Oh, and the final bit is interesting:

"In addition, our results suggest that if people have difficulty gaining acceptance for creative ideas especially when more practical and unoriginal options are readily available, the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more
creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."

[1] http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... [PDF]
If InfiniSQL was an established incumbent where the choice was between living with GPL and buying a commercial license I would agree with you, but it's a newcomer where the main choice is whether to use it at all.
Catchy headline, but I feel it's an inaccurate generalization. From my experience, there is a spectrum of people between two different viewpoints: creative people who are energized by new ideas and non-creative people whose default posture is to be skeptical about them.

Neither bias is either completely right or completely wrong. Most new ideas fail, so it's healthy to know critics who can help counterbalance creative enthusiasm and perhaps see potential pitfalls.

But new ideas—the right ones—are hugely valuable. I've heard creativity described as a tolerance for the cognitive dissonance—that is, the natural mental pain and discomfort—of combining unrelated or incongruent ideas. This process likely bothers a skeptical person a lot more and they tire or frustrate out earlier.

Less creative people can be difficult to brainstorm with because they don't enjoy the process and want to "get to the answer." But creative people can be difficult to execute with because seemingly everything at every moment is up for reinvention.

The point here is that we need people on both ends of the spectrum and they need to understand each other and the value they bring.
thanks again for your comment the other day about memcpy(), I am after finding a deep and rich seam of optimisation out of it!
I think most "noisy neighbor" complaints actually come from the noisy neighbors. EC2 lets you use CPU resources of your neighbors if they aren't using them. So people hammer the machine and expect that level of performance, then when a neighbor does something and suddenly you are scaled back to only using the resources you actually pay for, you feel it is slow and complain.

But I think if EC2 didn't let you borrow CPU, nobody would use it because they would realize how absurdly underpowered EC2 offerings really are.
This was not my experience of school.

The US school system sounds like it has systemic problems, and may have bad results. But to say that the whole aim of the system and those in it is to kill creativity and individualism is ludicrous.
DataArt and Google Support Local IT community
I think it's a reference to the supernova that occurred before our sun existed, which created the seed material for the sun to form from. It had to have happened because there are heavy elements on earth that only form in a supernova.
Because they are the trouble makers. Now get back in line and do your work as you are told!