skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Long ago when I was, I think, a sophomore in college and worked for the university IT group, I was trying to add an external drive to an early NeXT machine [1]. I wanted to try out their fancy GUI development stuff, you see. I was at best a modestly competent Unix admin, and this was circa NextStep 1.0, so the OS was... rough. It was in the dark days of SCSI terminators, so just telling if the drive was properly connected and, if so, how to address it was challenging.

After a couple hours of swearing, instead of working from a root shell in my own account, I just logged into the GUI as root. And there was a pretty interface showing the disks. I could just click on one and format it. Hooray!

Well either the GUI was buggy or I clicked on the wrong disk, because as the format was going, I realized the external drive wasn't doing anything. I was formatting the internal boot hard drive. And since nobody but me gave a crap about this weird free box somebody had given them, they had repurposed it. As a file server. For the home directories of a bunch of my colleagues. Who were now collecting around me wondering what was going on. Oops.

No problem, says I. I'll just restore from backups. But this thing used a weird magneto-optical drive [2]. The only boot media we had was on an MO disk. The backups were on another. And there was only one of these drives, probably only one in the whole state. The drives were, of course, incredibly slow, especially if you needed to swap disks. Which, I eventually discovered, I would have to do about a million times to have a hope of recovery.

Long story short, I spent 28 hours in a row in that chair. It was my immersion baptism [2] in the ways of being a sysadmin. The things I learned:

Fear the root shell. It should be treated with as much caution as a live snake.

Have backups. People will do dumb things; be ready.

A backup plan where you have never tried restoring anything may lead to more excitement than you want.

Be suspicious of GUI admin tools. Avoid new GUI admin tools if at all possible. Let somebody else be the one to discover the dangerous flaws.

If you were smart enough to break something, you're smart enough to fix it. Don't give up.

When some young idiot fucks up, check to make sure that they are sufficiently freaked out. If they are, no need to yell at them. Instead support them in solving the problem.

Seriously, my colleagues were awesome about this. I went on to become an actual paid sysadmin, and spent many years enjoying the work. The experience taught me fear, and a level of care that sticks with me today. I'm sure at the time I was wishing somebody would wave a magic wand and make it the problems go away, but working through it gave me a level of comfort in apparent disasters that has been helpful many times since.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_baptism
Prediction fulfilled so far.
Ubuntu Now Often Leads Windows 7 On Intel SNB Graphics Performance
My previous office had really nice chairs (don't know if they were Aeron)...but the chair I bought for my apartment was the $199.00 IKEA Markus

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00103102/

Pretty decent range of swivel, good wheels...I recommended them to my new employer, who is on a budget, and we all use them now. Can't complain.
If you're looker for cheaper and faster then http://ramnode.com/ is the VPS you want.
If I can't afford my lunch after being given so many opportunities to earn it myself, then it would be unfair for me to ask my countrymen to foot the bill. It's my problem, not theirs. I would have an extreme moral aversion to seeking a handout, even if that aversion is to my own personal detriment.

Perhaps I should be trying to maximize every possible opportunity offered to me. But I just can't stomach the idea of taking money away from other people to pay for my own personal problems.
You're defining rationality pretty narrowly. You're assuming that the only thing that is rational is living as long as possible. People invest for the happiness it brings them while they're alive. If I were a billionaire, I would derive much more joy, in the present, from seeing the real reduction in suffering and increase in human joy that can be achieved with my investment, than I would from spending that same money for a marginal chance of extending my own life.

Maybe because it's because I'm only 30, but I'm not afraid of death. Indeed, I find the idea of life extension horrific. It would destroy the vitality of society to have old generations, with their decades of entrenched perspectives and power, cling on in perpetuity. I don't want to hang around consuming resources and overshadowing my children. I want them to have their own time in the sun.
I have read the entire article. Seems like he knows most of the basics. No need to go to a school to learn the same things again, he will be bored out of his mind.

Having said that, this guy is an aberration(in a positive sense), and for most of the 18year olds, to be inspired by this guy would be fatal mistake. Some people are born to do somethings, like this guy. Most are not .

And don't think that SF is some holy place where magic happens. It is only mecca in the sense Hollywood is mecca for aspiring artists. For every one you see on screen, there are 100s languishing doing smaller roles, and even more trying hard to make ends meet. SF is terribly expensive place to live.
That 20 minute policy is the source of the story. For years, that same franchise location did not have this policy in place. The coroporate parent does not have a uniform policy, it is up to the individual owners/franchisees. McD's parent company is familiar with the issue, however, as seen by the evolution of its architectural themes.
Predator drone evidence helps convict N. Dakota farmer in cow theft case
Google to sell Motorola to Lenovo, say reports
What happened was that post acquisition there were 3 or so rounds of lay offs each removing about 50% of staff until there was maybe a dozen of us left from the original acquired team. In an attempt to save the team we pitched a new product, which actually had customer interest, to the CEO of the acquirer and he promised he would think about it and come back with an answer.

On the day when we got the call from the CEO to tell us whether our proposal was good or not rather than it being myself and our Director of Engineering on our side of the call we had all twelve in the room (although the guys on the other side of the call had no idea).

We were told it wasn't going to happen, so everyone knew at that point what was going to happen next. I seem to remember something like laying most of the remaining people off, going to see the HR manager - finding out that my severance package wasn't going to be what I thought it was and I could take a cheque there and then or fight it in court.

By that point I was so tired of the whole thing I took the cheque without a fight and moved on....

[NB I was involved in actually doing a substantial portion of the lay offs in each phase - after a while people really did not want to have 1 on 1 meetings with me].
Funny github hack to graph frequent contributions
It is, it's the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.
Here is just one sample of such a line. "fallon fox" he is an mma fighter who now fights in womans division. We could get into great detail of the biology, height and so on that a man keeps even after surgery. Hopefully you see some of the real unalterable issues that arise from such things, can't wait till shaq has gender reassignment and fights women.

I shall be called emperor of all, sadly simply saying it doesn't make it true. Facts are stubborn like that.
How are comments ordered?

I thought it was the points you see, but this one has 4 points and [other] has 6 points (at time of writing), but [other] is below this one.

Is it based on absolute number of upvotes (without subtracting downvotes)?

[other]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156
Maybe because it doesn't specify if it is continuus power, peak power etc?
Synchronization Speedupification
Nintendo executives take huge pay cut in wake of abysmal Wii U sales
Facebook Beats In Q4 With Revenue Of $2.59B, EPS Of $0.31
I seem to be one of the few persons commenting so far who actually lives in the region and regularly reads local reporting on issues in North Dakota (a state neighboring my state). Western North Dakota, where the Bakken Shale oil boom is occurring, is very sparsely populated and historically had minimal infrastructure. It takes TIME to build pipelines to move the natural gas brought up by oil drilling operations to natural gas customers. Pipeline proposals are currently in regulatory review. There isn't even pipeline infrastructure in place yet for all of the petroleum production in North Dakota--much of the oil produced there is brought to broader markets in tanker trucks, and the truck traffic volumes are putting a lot of stress on highway roadbeds until the highways can be upgraded.
Right now there is a boom economy in western North Dakota, with extremely high wages, low unemployment, a shortage of single women,

http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_22382285/north-dakota-...

and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.

Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.
Remote syslogging, generally.

There are any number of log tailers. One I've recently discovered and love is multitail by Folkert vanHeusden:

http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/

Incidentally, a related utility (and one which works really well with multitail) is rsstail:

http://www.vanheusden.com/rsstail/

One option is to get an RSS/Atom feed of critical system events.
A motorbike is faster and cheaper than a car, but you can't use it to carry as many people. Or cargo. Or protect you from the elements.
What's the origin of the use the word "logical" in computer systems
Looking at the definition of the word "logical" it's hard to infer how it came to mean "virtualized" in certain contexts (logical volume, logical disk, logical adapter etc.). Where did the first use of it occur?
I just heard great nana Parry telling me off when I read that (Nana spoke Welsh and a few words of English). If she was alive now, she would be about 140. Thanks.

Reporters. Local. Might not be so easy for them to find jobs. But hopefully new media skills will help.
Changed the default RDP port on a remote Windows box, but didn't open the port on the firewall and couldn't get back in. Whoopsie.
Do you get paid hourly then as a virtual CTO? Also, what are the upsides of having a virtual cto versus an on-location guy?
My wife, who used to work at Walter E. Smythe, has a very good eye for this sort of thing. I pointed her to the site and she said "yawn".

Admittedly, she has number of serious sites that she looks at regularly. Two of our most prized furniture possessions she scared up on Ebay.
Connected leads on an expensive piece of equipment, power live, being very careful with a pair of needle nose pliers. Because the power switch was way in the other room, tag out procedure took time and I was late.

Poof. Equipment electronics fried and useless.

I was chewed out. Could have been way worse.

Follow your safety procedures.
I don't think cloud hosting will reach it's panacea until I can just upload a site or application, and be billed for what I use. No calculators, or intervention needed. Are weekends slow? It automatically drops a node. Get front page of Hacker News? Scales up automatically. Hosting that "just works".
Ugh, I did. mea culpa, sorry.
When the enterprise innovates...
Combine JavaScript files with the speed of C++
Fighting Against Evidence
I accidentally brought down yelp.fr by typoing the timezone field in the database.
Weird... I always thought that if you are running a split test in parallel (all at the same time), then you can figure out the number of samples needed to compare the branches with statistical confidence. I mean it makes sense to me. As the number of samples increases for each split test the distribution shifts from a binomial distribution to a gaussian distribution by the central limit theorem, and that happens around 1000 samples with a reasonable conversion rate. Then you're just comparing Gaussians, centered around the mean conversion value, with a width proportional to the number of samples. Taking the difference between two gaussians will give you the "chance to be different". Standard practice is to wait until one branch has a 95% chance to be better and then declare it the winner. This will test for false positives, which is usually what you are concerned about. False negatives don't matter that much when it comes to things like picking a name.
Lenovo nears $3 billion deal to buy Google's handset unit – sources
Tap Yellowstone's geothermal. See if we can't get greedy enough for energy extraction that we end up preventing a supervolcano.
Facebook Reports Q4 and Full Year 2013 Results
You approve of an action that happens to be illegal, and think people who take that action deserve prison time? I don't follow. If a person's actions are noble in my estimation, I wouldn't wish punishment upon them for their actions.
Poor are not staying poor by their "struggle to prosper".

Poor are staying poor by keeping doing things that keeping them poor, like getting further down in debt, not acquiring new skills, not being productive and not expressing their creativity.

And of course rich have their habits as well.

Give money to poor guy, take all the money from rich guy and see where they are in in 5 years. Chances are they'll be back to their original platoes.
Lenovo to buy Google's Motorola handset division
Easy to use Wizard library for AngularJS from the creator of Restangular
The thing is, what you think is your "own personal problem" doesn't really affect only you. If your neighbors can help keep you healthy and productive, there's a benefit in that for them as well.
If I were to have free access to the flaring output, I'd implement this myself out of my own pocket.
I've clicked on the one they used to have at theeconomist.com
It's not clear the magnetic ramscoop arrangement is particularly viable from the calculations, nor particularly efficient.

Given the absurd amounts of power available from stars when you start thinking about building such a ship, a lot of other options start to make more sense.

Antimatter synthesis isn't so unreasonable then you can magnetically divert the solar window to setup the brightest luminosity particle accelerator ever to make anti-hydrogen.
'RV Menu' is a RV recipe/food keyword, not a rental-related keyword.
> historically the response to beginner questions has been something along the lines of, "go read this paper" a la Haskell.

There's a lot of tutorials in Haskell that are papers, but if you go to #haskell or ask on stack overflow, the answer to questions are rarely "go read this paper", at least in my experience (even for some pretty deep type-level programming stuff).
Show HN: Digital Streaking – The Safer Alternative to Streaking at the Superbowl
"...one of the most challenging technical problems we faced was free-form input."

The attempt is greatly appreciated. I can fully see that this is a hard problem.
This is an interesting angle of thought. Thanks!
It's not a corporate policy. I've personally had hours-long study sessions at McDonalds restaurants with just a drink purchase.

The article also mentions a group of women taking up an 8-person sitting area for hours at a time, nursing a single $1 coffee. For a four hour visit, this averages ~$0.03/seat/hr in revenue. These customers aren't truly dining, they're just congregating under the pretext of dining (by buying the minimal amount possible). _This_ is the type of behavior that would drive an individual store into implementing a 20-minute dining limit. Chances are it's loosely enforced for actual dining customers, but provides the necessary pretext for booting these people when the lunch rush begins and actual dining customers need somewhere to dine. If customers come to eat and can't find anywhere to sit, they'll start going elsewhere for food and the store will see a noticeable decline in revenue.

While it sounds harsh, a restaurant is a business that makes money by selling food. The dining area is meant for dining. Systematically abusing it for congregating, while providing marginally little revenue, is going to result in limitations being erected to discourage such behavior. Coffee shops do the same thing with time limits on wifi, which is a limitation that works well to discourage their typical customer base. This crowd is just in it for the space, so the limitation invoked in this case is a time limit on the space itself.
Negatives are easy to point out. Similar to how "People don't know what they want", if something is working right, people may not notice it because it just works. However, if something isn't working right, it's often easy to spot it.

For what it's worth, I see a lot of positive feedback, though they're more about the service itself rather than something that the service (or UI) does well.
I actually ran into this the other day. The account I had used from 8th grade to about 11th is now probably gone forever.
A decade ago, a database consultant told us a story of helping a bank who was seeing their 3 MS SQL Server databases (on Windows servers) go down every single day. He replaced their setup with Oracle and their problems went away. In telling us stories of why he preferred Linux he described how he had set up and managed databases on a hundred Linux servers for a major oil company and they were humming along without a problem, easy to manage, and in contrast he dreaded Windows servers due to memory leaks and whatnot. Anecdotal, I know, but I heard a lot of stories like that a decade ago. I've also heard a lot of stories since then about Windows servers getting better. And I've had to administer each a little bit here and there, and I have to agree with the other commenters that you can't generalize about which is better because it really depends on what you're doing with the servers. But some of those stories from many years ago scared away quite a few people from Windows servers and they'd probably appreciate hearing how Stack Overflow is succeeding with the current generation.
We just stepped into the realm of sci-fi, so why not?

I believe it would be. It would give a grieving widow someone to grow old with. It would give adult children someone to brag to. It would give abused family members someone to finally confront without fear of physical retribution. It would open up that person's personality to experience the combined knowledge of all humanity on-line. I want that. I think others do, too.

Anyway. What I really meant is that this is marketed as you 2.0 essentially, and it's just not. For all intents and purposes, it's an electronic scrapbook.
If you go to the emergency room with an untreated, preventable illness that has become critical, and you can't pay the bill, other people wind up footing the bill anyway.

Maintenance is cheaper than repair.
Ha! Fair enough, though I was thinking something different in two ways. Namely, something that worked on the common collections used by people and more readable than this. Still, bad example.
I missed that set HOME doesn't set HOME (I was pre-coffee).

What I said about un-magic-ing is true for sure. "HOME=foo; echo $HOME" will print "foo".

Interestingly, it's propagated. "HOME=foo sh -c 'echo $HOME'" will also print "foo".
How you handle the different keyboard layouts? For me its always a pain to switch between coding on OSX/Windows because of the differences in copy/paste/selecting of text etc.
A few interesting points on this...

First, breach involved BMC management software that probably costs a bazillion dollars, using what was apparently a default password. It would be good practice for management software vendors to analyze customer configurations for untouched defaults (especially security-related ones) and make it an obvious notification.

Second, it involved compromise of the POS terminals themselves (which would explain why Target had obviously new POS software shortly after the breach). It may have been scraping memory in the terminals.

In general, yikes.
"Do you work for Hackers Without Borders?"
What's crazy is that the US is an "at will" employment law. Which means you can get fired (or quit) for any trivial reason at all what so ever (the meaning of 'at will'). The only people with legal recourse are protected classes (ie, minorities). But it would be both improbable and abusive if mass-lafoffs were only legal fodder in this context. Who the heck else is suing and for what? Or is it just the threat of lawsuits (bad pr) and no-fee lawyers (1/3 ransom) that facilitates this as some sort of "greenmail"? What an odd system!
Wrote an article on the company blog and linked it on HN. Traffic brought down the server -_-
My office mate said the same thing. :)

The numbers were crystal clear though: bounce rate was the same for all the domains indicating that users were getting what they expected after clicking through.
They're keeping the patents, right?
It must be a NY thing, the hard nosed business owner/manager.
Mark Crispin was wrong. The underlying model of IMAP is strong, but a lot of the complexity of mail access comes from clients working around things which are either broken or missing in the protocol.

Their reasons aren't excellent, they are some theoretical notion of purity which leads to things like the "MOVE" capability taking years to finally happen, and everyone implementing copy+store+expunge independently and poorly in the meanwhile.

He's dead now, so he can't tell me I'm a feckless Gen X with no clue how to do real protocols - but there's a reason why proprietary protocols like ActiveSync get traction, and it's not because you need to pay a licence fee - it's because they actually solve problems that need solving.
it depends on the size and popularity of the specific store. In my city, they don't care if you are there all day, but when you get to the busier and smaller locations, they start to lose money because of people sitting around.
Claiming poverty while not accepting public assistance in the same breath is absurd, unless this is a poverty vow. In any case you represent the corner of the corner, people who would rather take a tax penalty for ethical reasons than accept vouchers. Most people in your position are falling over themselves at the prospect of decent health coverage.
I'm surprised. I thought everything was written in JavaScript nowadays.
Sorry for hijacking, but does Ribbon have an opinion on Bitcoin?
Yes, this seems to me to be a rather absurd overstretch of the "consumer protection" purpose.