skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does this exist? (micro open-source)
I just wrote a pair of extension methods in C# to get or set a series of bits from a ulong.

This must have been done thousands of times by other devs. I have done it a few times myself. I know I have it somewhere in another project, but I don't feel like hunting to find it. It's not an amazing feature, just a small thing I need.

It really doesn't have a place in a library, it's a small stop-gap; like thousands of other small stop-gaps we all write into our projects.

I don't know whether or not the technique I used is the fastest possible; at the moment I don't really care. I needed something quick, and I wrote it. It will probably never get replaced, as it will never show up on a hot-path when profiling.

I'd like to know if there is a place I can put little things like this, with a way to find little things like this placed there by others.

I'd imagine you'd need to come up with a way of describing your method in a verbose way so it can be found.

If I use one of these small methods from that place, and that method is improved by someone else, I'd like to be automatically notified that there is a better solution so I can go back and replace mine.

Does something like this exist? If not, who wants to build it (I'm busy)?

Hey there stackoverflow. This might be right up your alley.
It would be fascinating to get an insider view on this.
You're underselling working memory. Working memory is essential for almost everything productive that you do.
Those computers become fodder in July 2015. I think this delays the inevitable.
What's there in this story to decorticate that makes it HN worthy?
Only the antivirus/antimalware definitions are being updated. Windows XP and Office 2003 are still on track for end of life on April 14, 2014 (88 days and counting down...)
ah he's 22 years old, at 22 I hardly cared or really needed to work either as I had my parents as a fall back, now involve a baby and wife and lets see how easily this exact decision can be rendered.
Read the first paragraph.
> Even assuming that Linux cannot compete with XP
It's about the balance of negotiation power between the buyers and sellers in the labour market. Once jobs became standardised, and employees easier to replace, individuals had/have little/no negotiating power, so their response to low pay and poor conditions is 'suck it up'.

Unions aim to redress that imbalance, and there are specific laws in many countries detailing what they can/cannot do.

IANAL but AFAIK there are fewer and less strong cases where companies can legally collude in most jurisdictions.

A couple of personal thoughts:

- The impact of unions is different in different situations. It's easy for us to pick and choose examples based on pre-existing biases, but the details are more nuanced.

- People often think of unions as being for low-skilled workers, or those where the choice of employers is limited (e.g. teachers in the UK). However, many professional guilds (like national doctors' associations) also provide many of the same functions (lobbying, collective bargaining, coordination of industrial actions, ...).
But XP was a paid OS. I know it was paid for moons ago, but I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a $100 upgrade after 12 years. Alternatively, I think many Linux distros work better than XP will come August 2015.
This concept of testing seems strange and very limiting when it comes to the assertions you wish to make. If you post "Hello World!" I would want to test that in my post feed there is a post from myself ( Assertion 1 ) and the contents is "Hello World!" ( Assertion 2 ). I don't see how this form of snapshot testing would accomplish this. Am I missing something?
Because not everyone loves excessive verbosity.
"Seemingly overnight, [San Francisco] has filled up with phone-scrolling, blank-faced wanderers (particularly in my neighborhood). I prefer a taco to a vintage glasses store any day."

I guess all those people I follow on Tumblr aren't real artists :-(
I like how you've thought through the end to end use case: not just generating an API, but actually making it usable. I've done my fair share of web scraping and it's not an easy task to make accessible and reliable -- good luck!

It makes me wonder if there isn't a whole "API to web/mobile app with custom metadata" product in there somewhere. I can imagine a lot of folks starting to get into data analysis and pipelines having an easier time of it if they could just create a visual frontend in a few clicks.
Classes, unions and objects are all everyday words. I knew them from mathematics and everyday life before I ever used them in programming.
The author of that post has done a lot more research than that.
Just curious, have you ever supported end users? My experience tells me that most people would freak out when presented with something as dissimilar as any linux variant after being a Windows user for a decade or more.
The problem is that English speaking people rarely learn other languages and therefore don't have much skill at communicating with people who are not fluent in English.

Communication is a two-way street. When I was working in the UK in multinational companies, the employer put a fair amount of emphasis in using International English in all communications. For those of us with an interest in literature this was a bit difficult because our heads were filled with flowery language.

If you have any second language skill at all, then you can probably deal reasonably well with 3/5 English speaking folks as long as you are careful to avoid slang and write your emails in clear International English.
"Hanging around" works in any kind of shared setting. Our non-engineering discussions are really accessible in Hipchat, which is cool.
Apple To Refund At Least $32.5 Million In Disputed Kids' App Purchases
(aside: This post was doubly a victim of autocorrect. s/noises/modes/ and s/tour/route/. My bad.)
PBS Frontline has footage of them doing it.
You lure advertisers by building great products people want to use (and spend time on). Has Yahoo released anything truly noteworthy since she became CEO?
the customers got something out of it too, no?
There are many, many problems here.

> Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal

Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer collusion to hold down wages used to be bad, but was now good?

> no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone"

I have to agree with the bare semantics here, but... who's alleging that the harm from a bunch of companies secretly agreeing to hold down wages comes, entirely and only, from the fact that the agreement is secret? They do it in secret because it's illegal, and your parent is wondering why employees are legally allowed to do openly what employers must do in secret. Why is there supposed to be a difference? Is there a justification for punishing the companies, other than the fact that their conduct is illegal?

Nothing can be bad because it's illegal; belief following that reasoning is religious, not valid.
That would be a mistake.

He's getting a lot of hate because he's insulted a lot of people while stretching some of his arguments and opinions too far, but his ideas are still better intellectual reading than most of what's available elsewhere.

If you care to read the comments again, you'll notice many of the disagreements with him are on the level of knee-jerk emotional reactions and not well reasoned criticism.

However, it's true that he's turned/turning into some gigantic obnoxious ego whose ideas are beginning to look like wild gambles (speaking more often than he substantiates.) He's definitely intelligent and I would say a genius, but in each book it's like: 10% great ideas, 30% very interesting intuitions, 30% vitriolic anger at people/institutions/ideas, 30% broken ideas/intuitions. But all is sold as the truth (tm).

If you wish to increase the quality of what you read you could use Taleb's own heuristic: when a book has existed for a thousand years it will exist for a thousand more. Time is a great arbiter for importance.

My point is that you either hazard a guess on which of his ideas are powerful, or you wait until the dust settles and somebody else has done this work for you.
"...but if your product/service actually sucks..."

"They are obsessed with the quality of the product/experience"

Maybe "competitive advantage" is not so directly addressed, but I feel some of the other points touch on it, like "do things that don't scale".
"You will indemnify [us] from any costs [..] caused by your use of the Services"
Yes. If I've got used to the idea that lists are appendable and then someone tells me I can "append" two numbers by adding them and that will fit the interface... yeah, that makes sense. It might be a bit confusing on the way, but better to use a term that covers the most common case than a term that's completely alien.
For those who like demotivational posters, see also http://www.despair.com/demotivators.html.

Here's one that could relate to startups:

http://www.despair.com/acquisition.html
The PBS Frontline episode from yesterday makes it seem as if thumb-drive video playing computers are common (perhaps only among the upper class, though) in NK.
John Dwyer is talking about gentrification by his old house around Valencia and 17th, aka mission gentrification central. Of which, he recently criticized "techies" for leading.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2014/01/here_is_what_the...
Key point of the article is that many artists can't afford SF anymore.
Interesting process.

We tried to incorporate Packer in to the Docker Release process but found it just took way too long.

Best of luck, I hope it works out for you.
Marissa was a programmer.
There's some amazing footage in this; at one point, someone with a hidden camera visits a Potemkin department store in Pyongyang and tries to buy a dress, and then some beer, only to be told that all the merchandise on display is for display only.
That's why I was so puzzled - NNT rather eagerly takes finance to task.
Take a Vacation to Read
https://weworkremotely.com
...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is almost zero benefit to upgrading beyond XP.

Seriously.

A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM.

Notepad still chokes on 500KB of plain text wrapped to the window, Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square, MS Office still takes eons to load, and one large document created by any particularly incompetant user will destroy 15 minutes of your day. One bad tab in a browser (any browser), and your entire system might grind to a halt for minutes on end. Starting and stopping windows services takes ages. Hard drives are still just as noisy as fuck, and god knows what the fuck is even being paged to disk anymore. Network traffic is relatively opaque, despite prettied up WYSIWYG spikes on logarithmic line graphs of monitors that provide meaningless information.

And then Windows 8 comes along and tries to disenfrachise the common layman end user even further by covering everything up with a touch-based interface even for machines that have no touchscreen, and follows Ubuntu's lead of serving up ads in a local file search.

If you want a version of Windows that doesn't embody this nightmare, call Microsoft directly and provision an Enterprise account with one of their helpful sales reps. What's the price tag? Why, the sales rep will inform you of that once you answer some simple questions.

Gee, I wonder why "enterprises" refuse to budge off of XP.
I actively practice using gender neutral nouns whenever I write stuff. Sometimes I'll slip up, but I'm pretty confident this isn't the case with the HN crowd.

Using they, spouse or partner is pretty safe and only the only people that are likely to get offended are more than likely already a part of an entitled group anyway.
Sigh. If you read his books or papers or see a lecture or the technical companions, you will see that the case against him is vastly overstated. It's like how social justice people probably view PG right now. He is pretty reasonable and I love seeing him accused of all sorts of things here when it's obviously vastly overstated. He lives for trolling the try-hard crew found here. Do you seriously think he is advocating the absolute abolition of std deviation inquisition style?
Where do you get those percentages? Having worked on tech support I can tell you that 99% of people aren't able to do more that click start menu and launch their favorite program. If the that is missing, they usually just give up and must be guided.
Using Docker in production is about stability of API, not technology.

Meaning, for those companies/projects with fast, iterative cycles, who want to take advantage of Docker but understand it's an investment in time over the long run, it's a great fit today.

For those companies/projects with slower cycles, who want a solution which will fit their needs out of the box backed by some sort of support.. 1.0 is the target.
It's now even included in PlayStation Plus subscriptions ($50/year) on the PS3: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/01/13/playstation-plus-b...
Thanks

Those are jobs which is cool, but looking more for just companies that work remotely - like a crunchbase for remote companies.
Your product/experience could be totally awesome but also totally irrelevant to market needs. Poof. No success.

And "obsessed with the quality of the product/experience" is BS wording. It means nothing. I could say the same thing about any subject without making any distinctive point. It's not about being "obsessed", it's about "making the right choices in terms of priority regarding the product/experience". That's more like it, and that says that decision/compromise is needed in everything you create.
Not for R5, because in a non-degraded array the parity blocks do not contain anything you have not read from other blocks in that stripe and unlike the data blocks can not be used as meaningful data without at least one other block in the stripe being read. You do get the speed benefit fromt he striping of course: RAID5 over three drives performs similarly to RAID0 over two for read operations (though be warey of write performance if your I/O pattern is write heavy, particularly for many small randomly positioned writes, as RAID5 has issues here).

For R1 you can in theory use an elevtor algorithm to chose which or the two mirrors serves a given read depending on how close the block may be to the most recently accessed blocks on each device, reducing average head movement distance. For bulk reads or an I/O pattern including much writing this will make little or no difference, but for significant random access read patterns you might see a measurable (perhaps even noticable to a human user) latency improvement.

Last time I tested this myself I found that the Linux software RAID arrangement did not perform any such optimisation for RAID1. Results like https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Performance agree with my findings, though they do suggest that with certain layout options the newer RAID10 single-level driver provides such optimisation for reads (at the expense of slower write performance). Linux's md-raid "raid10" module is not your traditional RAID10 (a nested arrangement of RAID 1 and RAID0, a stripset of mirrors needing at least four drives) - it is a single level driver that offers greater layout flexibility with regard to the copies of data on each device and even supports operation on three devices (this operates similarly to what IBM RAID controllers call RAID1E and some others call RAID0+1) or even just two devices (in which case it behaves as RAID1 but with the extra layout options). See http://neil.brown.name/blog/20040827225440 amongst other references. IIRC you should avoid the "far" layour for your boot devices as boot loaders don't tend to understand it.
If I had to wager a guess, I'd say remote access for support purposes. The "web site" very well could have been something like a Citrix or Juniper remote access web interface.
If he spent a little while educating himself before making such comments in public, he'd know that the real problem is draconian zoning laws and NIMBYs.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078X...
> In general, eliminating runtime bounds checking is solving the halting problem.

Your example does not convince me that this follows. In cases where the compiler cannot statically prove which branch will be taken, I would expect it to require that either path can be executed without error (so in your example compilation would fail). But you could use static range propagation to allow code like this (given in C++ syntax since I'm a Rust novice):

void f(int x[], unsigned int n) {
n = min(len(x), n);
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
x[i];
}
}

Maybe not the greatest example since I would hope that Rust+LLVM would hoist its internal bounds-check to emit something very much like the above anyway. I guess intuitively I just hope that there's more that can be done when it comes to static bounds-checking.
> Once they add a option to skip/autoplay the predictable-outcome fighting sequences I would buy any sequel. Seriously if you're over 30 you shouldn't have to prove to anyone anymore that you can beat scripted hoards and boss fights.

What? You bought an FPS (or at least a game with FPS elements). The mechanics of that, the co-ordination and the thinking, are part of the game, part of the challenge, part of the fun. If you're too old for games and would rather watch a movie, buy a movie.
"I've been observing companies (as have many other HN readers) since before Sam was even born."

OK, fine. If you have lots of relevant experience, then write a counter-argument that's more substantial than "selection bias!"

I'm sure we'd all like to read a comment that outlined some specific, well-thought-out points of disagreement with Sam's arguments.
What does a typical packer config file look like for building a docker container? I think of it as a useless abstraction on top of docker, but that's probably because I only generate containers and don't need the other packer targets. I only ever need one AMI, GCE image or vbox: the boot2docker base. And even that is exported from a container :)
The price of the OS you are upgrading to does not equal the total cost of upgrading your OS necessarily.
That little discontinuity at the origin is kind of a pain though.
> "Was Steve Jobs a nice guy"

Same goes for Jeff Bezos. Yet, incredibly successful. That's a few major counter-examples.
World’s most photographed places
Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight
It worked great for me (http://www.kimonolabs.com/kimonoapp/aws-status-check). It would be helpful if you shared what you tried to do when it failed. I don't work for or with Kimono, but am curious what does and does not work.
Except the difference here is that generally Taleb is right and has a point. You know the b difference between the probabilistic hacker news titles generator and the actual titles found here are that even though they sound the same and have like weight same style. .. one is actually real.
Black Girls Code wins Microsoft grant
Or skip past inconvenient questions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684477
Stuff like this happens all the time. Tim Cook fired John Browett, who was recruited with great fanfare from a huge retail chain.
I was once in an accident, and my car needed to be towed. The tow guy was supposed to take my car to where I specified; I gave him the address of a mechanic, and watched him write it down. Instead, he takes it to his company's lot, and doesn't tell anyone (including the police, who thought my car was delivered to the mechanic). Fought it, and didn't have to pay their ransom, but it was troubling having no idea where my car was for a few days until we figured it out.
Blackboard Acquires Austin Startup MyEdu
It's likely Windows XP embedded, which doesn't enforce code signing.

I've worked around some Retalix (NCR) POS software (mentioned in the article, though in Canadian stores) and I can safely say that the security posture of the software of theirs that I've seen is simply horrible.

Perhaps Target has newer stuff than what I've worked with, but I'm talking about VB 6 code running in XP embedded using a "database" back-end that amounts to some Btrieve database files on an SMB share marked "Everyone / Full Control". Getting remote code execution on the POS machines would be trivial.
I generally use taxis when I'm late for a plane, so the only thing I could do was call:

- Police department say they see issues frequently, but clients are often foreigners, and unable to testify;

- the head office, G7 (because they need to be named and shamed) reaction was that hiring and paying road criminals was not their concern. After making that phone call several times, I support long prison sentences for the executives of that company.
This is the problem with assuming humans are all rational, utility I maximizing machines. When a game like Skyrim comes out, I don't care that it'll be $45 instead of $60 in some months. My friends are playing it, the Internet is playing it, people are making memes.

I picked $45 as an example price on purpose, because games which are brand new (according to my anecdata as someone who couldn't stop refreshing Steam in Dec), newer games just aren't as deeply discounted as older ones.

So no I don't buy it. There's a lot to be said for playing the new and shiny if you can afford it and if it's great. The only time I hold off on for a Steam sale is for a game I wasn't going to buy anyway. In a sense he's committing the same fallacy as the RIAA did by presuming that, in the absence of piracy (or sales in this case) people would just pay full price. Maybe some would! But it's fallacious to ignore the difference an incentive such as a sale makes in purchasing at all vs no purchase at all.
you're probably right though it astounds me that this relationship would be bidirectional eg: web servers can make requests to individual stores.

Security implications aside if it was engineered that way it would make for highly variable response times and diminished reliability: not only would you have to make 50+ queries but those queries would have to be across a wan instead of being colocated.
https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/156338_6888...
The difference is individually, consumers have no power and neither do workers. Which is why unions form. That being said, unions suck as well.
Indeed, why does it not make sense?
I read that, I immediately know that about 68% will be between 165 and 170 cm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule
Yes, that works much better.

But that isn't what the article said.

I'm a c++ programmer who consumes the occasional Haskell articles on hn. By dint of complaining and hearing sensible explanations, I feel like I'm "getting it". But I don't think that takes from the notable phenomena of opaquely ridiculous explanations of Haskell ideas that seem to pop-up regularly.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/write_some_fucking_co...

Edit: I kind of feel like there's this phenomena where someone is "real math guy" and so they'd rather people to wholly ignore the structures the language is built on, call functors Poptarts etc, rather than giving a simplified explanation which would leave them open to other real math guys complaining the explanation wasn't exact/cool/powerful enough.
"A workers union in itself does not exploit employers." No, pretty much all unions exploit workers via forced due paying. Unions sucks in the same way corporations colluding suck.