skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Naive question from a UKian.

As the CinC, couldn't Mr Obama order the USAF to send a C-5 to Guantanamo and collect all the detainees, subsequently flying them back to Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Wouldn't that be a military operation without Congressional veto?
They say you try and suppress your worst memories, which explains why I can't remember anything much worse than this:

On Symbian OS, the window manager managed all the screen drawing. All visible apps would be asked to send draw ops to the WM and it would draw them clipped to the apps's windows.

And at UIQ we were adding theme wallpapers and memory hungry graphics faster than out licensees were adding RAM.

And a real problem was running out of RAM drawing the screen. Doing rectangle intersections actually requires allocation, so drawing isn't constant memory.

To speed up drawing we made the WM retain the draw ops. This was transparent to the apps, but a massive performance win. We made a 'transition engine' to smoothly slide between windows and smooth scroll windows and things, at a time when some Nokians confidently told me it wasn't possible :)

But what if our cleverness caused an out-of-memory in the WM? I had a cunning plan...

We intercepted the malloc and, if it failed, we called out a memory manager app to start zapping things. And if a second alloc attempt failed, we started discarding draw op buffers and unloading theme assets.

And this seemingly worked! By making our graphics adapt dynamically to RAM usage rather than ring fencing we got much better app switching because background apps weren't getting unloaded.

And then, just as the first phone with this tech was being tested (manually, by a small army), it would sometimes crash with meaningless stacks.

My team jumped into the challenge thinking we were elite clever sods and all bugs were shallow.

After a few days, I had to start making excuses; we were stumped. The thousand monkey tests should no pattern, only that it was often. Where was the crash coming from?

A lunchtime walk cleared our heads a bit and suddenly the horrid realisation was before us: if the allocation that failed was a bitmap data block, the bitmap itself may be reaped but the stack would resume initialising RAM that malloc didn't think it had any more and in the end some other random bit of data would be interpreted as a memory address and eventually the WM would blit to it...

The phone never shipped because the plug was pulled on UIQ, but I think this bug was fixed and forgotten before then.
No. But you can fake it with annoying popovers, e.g. always show the nag popup until they touch "rate it".
I mean that you can't just shove them into this kind of a working mode, then into some other kind, as would say a teenager play around with shifting from 2nd upto 5th the first time he gets to drive his dad's Mazda all by himself.

Which is about the same degree of attachment expressed in the idea that a project manger can "shift" programmers into and out of pair programming mode the way one would work a stickshift.

Working habits are intensely personal, idiosyncratic things.

People -- by which I mean creative, productive, self aware & self-managing people; i.e. the only kind you should ever hire -- almost by definition don't like being pushed into working one way or another. Or being simply told what works best (because X or Y said so).
YouTube needs chemo (Video)
OrientDB has issues with documentation and tooling. Generally the drivers for each language are difficult to use and confusing. There is very little in the way of high performance ORMs which is the main reason you'd want to use something like OrientDB - mapping your classes directly to the database.
Then triple your custodian's pay already. Nothing's stopping you from doing the right thing.
If low income taxes tipped the scales enough to make it more profitable for businesses, why haven't we seen that already with states that have zero income tax?
Robert C. Martin (known as "Uncle Bob" to many) wrote a blog post somewhat related to this recently. The gist is that Extreme Programming the name is dead because Extreme Programming the principles have been (mostly) widely adopted. It's a great read and I recommend checking it out.

http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/12/10/Thankyou-Kent....
Why count on the mapping from boolean to int being false = 0, true = 1? Pretty much everything other language that has such a mapping does false = 0, true != 0.

I can't wrap my mind around this complaint. "Why should you count on Perl treating booleans the way Perl treats booleans? Other languages don't treat booleans the way Perl treats booleans, so obviously you shouldn't rely on Perl treating booleans the way Perl treats booleans."

It's almost as if there were some democratic notion of boolean semantics where every language you know gets one vote.
I didn't even say anything about performance here. Even ignoring performance, sometimes switch() is best.

For example, I wrote a very small JIT compiler for Brainfuck. It uses switch() to do code generation. It's extremely clean and elegant code, if I do say so myself. Breaking apart the switch() with some kind of OO approach would make the program longer and less clear: http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-s...

Do you look at that and think "this doesn't look good" just because it uses switch()? If so, your heuristic could use a little tuning.

But now let's talk performance. In interpreter/VM main loops, bytecode dispatch is a huge factor in the overall performance of a VM. This issue isn't "theoretical," "minor," or "premature," it's the result of extensive measurement and experimentation by many people over a large amount of time. If you are not familiar with this well-studied issue, here is some recommended reading:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/298506

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html

http://www.cs.tcd.ie/publications/tech-reports/reports.07/TC... (see section 3.3)
You're assuming that they consider the false positives to be disastrous (and that they consider them to be false positives in the first place). That's not necessarily a safe assumption.
It's been my opinion that we need to put our policies where our mouth so often is here (we're still calling ourselves a beacon of personal liberty and freedom, right?) and stop acting like the rest of the world is made up of nothing but potential enemy combatants. The tone of our relationship with the rest of the world is significantly marred when we don't show basic respect even for our allies (not that I think our enemies should necessarily be fair game for these kinds of tactics either - not going to "win hearts and minds" that way).
Removing the first hurdle for new side projects: user authentication, via a centralized REST service. Less initial friction = more projects.
iTunes has a much larger userbase, though. Spotify actually generated half a billion last year alone.
> It is a commonly agreed standard to which all can be held and criticised when they fall short and gain respect when it is largely achieved.

But nobody can be "held" to the UDHR. They can be criticized for not following it, but countries can be criticized for their practices without the UDHR too! The word "right" has to have more meaning than "we'll criticize you if you don't do this."
Tracking the Secret Lives of Great White Sharks - no frickin’ pattern at all
Anecdote: I torrented Ponyo when it first came out, before the English version was available (it never had a theatrical release where my kids live), right during the Japanese theatre release. It was a terrible screener, complete with people getting up in the middle of it. And a rather funny attempt at subtitles. Even so, my kids watched it on repeat for weeks.
> How did it get to a point where this is actually up for debate?

Its not actually "up for debate", the President's statement is a way of making noises that sound reassuring when formed into a soundbite that passes through in a stream of media stories while being devoid of substantive content.

Its specifically designed to be revealed as empty of any commitment beyond what is already undisputably mandatory when analyzed rationally (so that in any case where it would be a source of "unfulfilled promise" political damage that would be the least concern), but to be soothing when heard in the typical media context which is pretty much designed to maximize emotional response and short-circuit rational consideration.
I'm not sure having an unofficial company motto of "Be evil" is evidence of being a bad manager.
I've got a CLI that lets you upload a file through FileTea. I'll clean up the source and post it soon.

See https://github.com/brechin/FileTeaSend
Tested with Python 2.6. Only external requirement is requests.
I see that now. And I just tried to price an alternative system at Colfax and came up with $15K (included dual cpu, dual 400GB SSDs, and a Xeon Phi 7120P, no GPU). The Mac Pro is a niche product, but not really 'out there' as workstations go.
It is insulting to Cocoa to compare it to .NET. .NET framework lacks concept of immutable container and abuses subclassing.
That's enough to degrade itself.
Is Nebraska really a flyover state?
It's not exactly 32 bit and comes with an onboard USB controller so it was probably a pretty economical option.
Our Metrics Revealed: Revenue, Churn, Conversions and More
>Locked-in OS

I'll agree on that point. Have to root your phone using closed-source hacks from questionable sources, just so you can use your phone the way you want to, makes me a little sad. I believe that Samsung and others do this to decrease support costs and perhaps for DRM/piracy reasons. It still is a shitty business decision.
One from my first job (not mine though).

Java app, deployed to four servers (by rsyncing a zip file and unzipping it). One of the four fails on startup, in some way that's hard to trace (I think it might have been a JNI crash)? But all four servers have the same OS, same version, same packages installed, same JVM, and it was the same zip file. Check the md5sum on the zip, it matches. In desperation one of my colleagues writes a script to recursively go through the unpacked version of the app and check the md5sums of all the files. Still matches perfectly, and the same files are present on all machines.

We get the dev team to try the app - there's a bit more variety in our devboxes than servers. Two of them can reproduce the failure, but there's no obvious correlation - one's java 1.5, one's java 1.6. One's Debian, one's Gentoo. For every combination there's another developer with a similar machine where it works fine.

Turns out that one server had been installed with a different filesystem from the other three (reiserfs?), which meant that the directory entries for the files were in a different order. The JVM just lists all the classes in the directory and then loads them in on-disc order, so classes were getting initialized in a different order, and it was that that was ultimately triggering the bug.
Sysadmins are what you bring in once you've grown enough that operational issues detract from development rather than add to it. A sysadmin should absolutely not be your first hire. At most a consult with an engineer in the early days to get you started. This would help if your coders are used to handing off deployment to someone else. Bluntly, if you completely lack ops knowledge, buy an hour block from an ops specialist that can get you over the rough patches.

My concern with a sysadmin first is that you'll want your early development very tight with your production systems. A sysadmin is the last thing you'll need while doing fast iterations on an MVP. In the early days your need for feedback is high and your operational issues are low. After some significant growth your ops needs will be high, and the feedback value of those issues will become lower (more repetitive less new information). This is where you bring in a sysadmin to manage/automate the repetitive and filter some of the ops issues into actionable information for the development team.

Edit: Ops guy for over a decade btw.
The projection graph does assume flat physical sales. But it's a stacked chart.

Paying to paying is not completely unreasonable, but imagine an airline using the average fares of its Airline Club members (who are often flying first class) vs the fares of average Americans. It's easy to inflate the number when the group of people you're talking about are rich and predisposed to being more engaged.

edit to your edit: It's not clear to me why you would be willing to listen to Spotify for free, but then buy music on the side. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who does that consistently. I'd be interested to hear contradicting anecdotes though.
Here's more information on the linguistic development of starting sentences with 'So':

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2011/12/02/so-it-tur...
> So the only way women are going to be able to re-shape the system in a way that works better for women is to put up with the obnoxious bullshit politics for a while.

It may be true in some circumstances that it will be possible for a specific individual to get further ahead by participating in a bad/sick/oppressive/etc system, but advising women that if they just participate in the patriarchy for awhile, and work really hard, they'll succeed, is not an acceptable message. It perpetuates the problem rather than moving to solve it.

It's like advising people who are concerned about our lack of choice in politics to shut up & vote, rather than to work to reform /how/ we vote.
No, it was the single letter, W.
They're dirt fucking cheap, is why. Last I looked, $0.80 a piece. Why screw around with an 8-bit AVR when it's more expensive and you're plugged into the wall and don't care about power?

(Oh, and I'll add a tradeoff: the chips are cheap, but they are not as easy to get up and running as an AVR. Programmers and a bunch of Windows software seems to be required; I've given up every time I've tried to use one :)
There are other costs outside of the US also:
Given that the NSA is so aggressive (all pipes being suspect now) the changes politically demanded will:

-lessen convenience of all software and increasing the costs for users to interact with it in terms of time and complexity.

-building and deploying security solutions can be expensive especially to those products that do not lend themselves to security--more engineering increases costs.

-increase in cpu cycles as we all increase key sizes and introduce encryption where once there was none, or limited for authentication only.

Id bet this will be a small drag on the world economy and certainly a drag on the world software industry. It could be thought of as a world wide tax.
How was he caught? A specially leaked watermarked version? It seems that if you're in the scene, you'd want to take a lot of network precautions.
Hardest bug #1:

With some custom embedded electronics, the ADC would work fine in a lab setting but always throw out garbage in the field. Now, about 500 of these had been running fine in the field themselves since February. Turned out there was a bug in the FPGA that controlled the ADC and at somewhere around 80 degrees fahrenheit, there was enough of a propagation delay that the ADC wouldn't start up correctly. Since the other units were started in February when it was 25 degrees and only a few had been restarted, it wasn't noticed.

That was frustrating.

Another fun one was the rapid degradation of a database when the write-back cache battery on the RAID controller failed on the write-ahead logging disk and nobody was notified.

Right now I've been battling a random corruption NFS bug for a few weeks. Recently thought it was the automounter but the bug has appeared in a few other nodes since:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20460238/random-corruptio...
Lots of people face the choice: harvest fields under harsh conditions, or don't eat. You're suggesting giving them food which won't be harvested because they won't have an incentive to harvest it. Yes that's a contradiction - that's the problem with your argument.
Why did this get down voted. It really is nice. It reminds me of my OS 9 days when it became popular to use icon sets to replace the stock icons.
Looking awesome!
The pc hardware is the least interesting part. What really matters is how well the controller works with PC gamers and is the OS good enough for a TV.
Computer generated wind patterns
Marketing can be very expensive, but it's useful as well. Jolla probably prioritized development and production vs investing millions in marketing. They have limited resources and had to make choices and the first priority was a functional product. It affected many areas besides marketing (for example lacking community infrastructure, no public bug tracker and so on). Hopefully they'll gradually catch up in these aspects, but so far they seem to have enough of demand for their level of production. Don't compare them to Apple - they aren't huge company which pours millions into marketing from the start and expects some crazy numbers in sales in return right away. They aren't Nokia either - they are a small startup.
I love the idea of the game, but I'm curious what Wizards of the Coast thinks of this game?

Roborally (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009HLSP0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...) is the exact same game just targeted for an older audience.

Can you patent or copywrite gameplay mechanics?
I imagine it depends on your focus. Want to pay someone else to do your sysadmin for you and take advantage of the economies of scale - use a PaaS provider and makes plans for when you outgrow it.

Want your developers spending time debugging CM scripts and install quirks? "Full stack" developers it is.

Want developers developing, and your application doesn't fit into a PaaS architecture? You absolutely need to hire a sysadmin.
> That is why we have democracy and political parties, to find compromise through negotiation

To be fair, in America, and on paper at least, that's why we don't have a straight democracy, but we actually have a federal republic, and a bill of rights that protects all.

In a democracy, you end up effecting the will of the majority, even where that majority is wrong. In America, there is no shortage of people who would be more than happy to restrict one's right to free religion, free speech, etc., etc. In a pure democracy, even with political parties, we'd be subject to whichever party happened to be the majority. In the case of Russia, that may be the Orthodox Church, in the case of Iran, it may be Islamists, in the case of America, it could be the Catholic Church.

We set aside a purer democracy for the notion that all beliefs that do not harm others are allowed, and we have (in theory at least) protections that exist specifically to shield the minority from the majority. While we don't allow for the stoning of adulterers in this country (as that would most specifically infringe on the rights of those being stoned), we do allow for freedom of religion, even where that religion is Satanism, Islam, or any other religion that does not share the majority view.
I'm not sure I understand. Is this the framework that "compiles" PHP?

Is the 15% performance increase relative to vanilla PHP or to a previous version of HHVM?
A Better Way to Patch Pottholes
That site puts stuff on the right scroll bar (at least in Firefox). Highly annoying.
I wonder if they will fix it, or go after the folk who found this out.
I had a similar epiphany when I read Beck's book around 2000 or so. I don't think the Agile community has added much if anything to the work Beck originally laid out, either. In fact the term "Scrummerfall" is now in common usage here in Minneapolis.
Wait, are you saying they voluntarily complied or not?

Anyway I found some info: http://www.engadget.com/topics/mobile/2009/02/15/eu-commissi... Looks like the European Commissioner scared them, then http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/29/european-standardization-... the phone manufacturers agreed to the standard, followed by the CEN-CENELEC and ETSI officially mandating the standard, followed by (most) phones actually coming out with micro-USB.
I remember building the first gaming dashboard at facebook. The assumption is that things are better with friends (true) and that your friends can be a good filter for content (largely false). People are different, even your friends. I think Prismatic is really on to something here, a lot like the promise of hunch. A service that understands me (whiskey, zombies, startups, catan, nukes, ...) will eventually do a lot better than a friend ranked filter.
Peanuts are neither peas nor nuts, but rather legumes, and despite the use of the word "right" in the UDHR, the document does not actually create any legal restrictions. Also, it has no signatories. It was passed by voice vote, with "yea" votes including the U.S. and other wonderful rights-loving countries like China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Liberia, etc.
Do Readers Really Prefer Parallax Web Design?
From:
"If we see that 1000 of the 10,000 random iterations had a difference of more than $1.50, we can say that there is a 10% chance that our $1.50 observed difference was due to randomness."

I'm wondering if maybe you're doing way too many simulations in the calibration, do you really need more than a few hundred to a thousand or so? The 0.1 quantile is reasonably well separated from 0, and I would have expected you'd get "good enough" convergence pretty quickly.

Also: "we can compare our computed p-value of 11% to our simulated 10% result to determine whether or not the model is accurate enough." you're getting a full pdf out of the simulations, are you also comparing to the full distribution of your test statistics?
I believe that's the one...wow, my memory is horrible. You can't get much further from "Usenet newsgroup" than "on a Tumblr". I guess that the story as told took place so long in the past, my brain associated it with the days of reading from a text-browser.
I've been using owncloud a bit lately, on my phone too. Not entirely satisfied with it I must admit, but seems to show some promise.

p.s: I'm amused how last time you replied to one of my comments you were being critical of how I was promoting my business on HN, heh. Your satirical powers are strong my friend! ;)
FTA, Koa is made by the same people who make Express.

And Express sits on top of Connect.
I could not disagree with this more.

Focus on building your business and your product, not devops infrastructure. Unless your business is devops infrastructure.

Your initial technology stack should allow you to deploy code seemlessly from day 1. This is why Heroku is a great start for early startups, despite the drawbacks.
Hmmm... that's an interesting question. I think you could probably put designs and schematics and what-not on Github as well. It might make the most sense to do that, so everything will be together, in one central location.
ExceptThatNobodyWantsToTypeDisambiguateRecordsByGroupID20Times. (No, IDE can only help you so much. You still lose valuable screen estate for browsing source code when we have excessively long names.)

Not to mention you only captured half of the parent's comment (the "why" of the function), so it should really be something like disambiguateRecordsByGroupIDBecauseRecordsAreAlwaysSortedByTime.
Yes it is harsh, in the same style of the parent comment.

Actually you're wrong on the experience card, for only one reason. What I mentioned is experience
gained that everyone will gain, just by staying long enough in the game. Not because, I am
super cool and worked in positions that few people can work.

It's the same thing, like when we were teenagers and we thought that we were right in every freaking
thing and our parents just responded "wait until you grow up". Well they were right in most of the
things, weren't they? Were they super smart? Was it relevant if they were? Nope, they just stayed
long enough in the "game".

Same thing here.