skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's perfectly acceptable to not understand the low level details of seriously used systems.

Yes, that's what my colleagues thought a few months ago, too, when they churned up a web UI for an embedded device. My teamwork was, apparently, insufficient to make them realize that a configuration interface that takes half the available flash space is rather large (the other half was taken by a goddamn kernel, a web server, a proxy server, a bunch of other networking tools, a logging service and all the tools that communicated with the web ui!). Lack of understanding regarding how routing works in TCP/IP networks also meant that their first attempt had a pretty fatal flaw which resulted in the configuration interface becoming inaccessible, which became apparent in the first ten minutes of testing and required a significant amount of redesign because the entire workflow of the interface depended on that.

Their Bootstrap wizardry was remarkable, but ignoring how the underlying system worked resulted in them having to start from scratch.

It works the other way 'round, too. Not understanding how web tools work would also make my systems programming entirely useless when it has to provide the infrastructure on which such tools rely.

No one likes all this complexity. I hate it, too. I sometimes truly, really wish my job was as simple as taking this thing from here and putting it over there. Ignoring this complexity doesn't make it go away though; building tools that can isolate some of it behind a comprehensive and consistent interface is ok, but relying on those tools to do it for you without understanding what they do is technical suicide. It's this kind of thinking that makes people think it's ok for a rudimentary word processor to take six fucking seconds to load, after asking you for a password, in 2014, on a quad-core system.

Edit: it's also worth pointing out that this is really beyond the scope of the article's argument. What the article insists is that this:

var numbers = [7, 8, 1, 3, 2, 7, 6];
numbers.sort();

hardly helps anyone learn coding as a problem solving tool. This exercise taught the reader exactly nothing about how to solve the problem of sorting numbers. I could ask someone who works for me to sort me those numbers, and my understanding about algorithmic thinking would be as rudimentary as before.

Teaching children how to use calculators does not increase their problem-solving ability, not by an iota. Teaching them mathematics does that, and their ability is further advanced when they learn about theorems and structuring proofs, about induction and, yes, about using a calculator.

It's the same here. I'm not arguing that computer science should be purist to the extent that you shouldn't use anything but a Number 2 pencil to program. That's stupid. I am arguing, though, that teaching people "to code", as if programming consisted in nothing but translating from English to Codese, is pretty much as retarded as teaching mathematics as if it were a language, consisting of nothing other than translating the English "Two apples and three apples make how many apples?" into the far more cryptic "2 + 3 = ?".
New open source Disqus alternative: Debiki Embedded Comments
Hi,

I've built an embedded comments discussion system:

http://www.debiki.com/embedded-comments

It's open source so you can install it on your own servers. It's available as a service too, in case you don't want to host it yourself.

It's a bit different from Disqus and LiveFyre:
- It has Wiki-like features
- It uses a novel 2D layout that hopefully contributes to a more varied discussion
- It has some features intended to save people's time

Would you like to use it? What should I change and improve? (I could make the 2D layout optional for example.) What do you think about the overall concept? Feedback very welcome.

Best regards,
KajMagnus
All very good points... but one additional thing to add: what is his/her reputation with former co-workers / companies that s/he has worked with?

I had one co-founder who (we thought) had a very celebrated career at a very large (e.g. publicly traded) eCommerce-based company, making his way up to Sr. Director, etc. Considering we were starting similar type of company, it seemed like a perfect fit to bring him in as our chief executive.

However, we never asked for contacts / references with people he had worked with, VPs he worked under, etc.

When it came time to raising an institutional round, we were in due diligence with a VC that did look up those references, and it wasn't pretty. Turned out he had gotten fired by the company because he was using insider knowledge to basically try and start a competing company. Through his time there, he lost the trust of most of his co-workers and alienated everyone around him.

As our VC had then told us -- our CEO was a poison pill. Any VC we would talk to in the valley would have connections at this company, and would definitely follow up with their contacts at the company to find out more about our CEO, and every VC will come up with the same conclusion, that he is not to be trusted.

Had we known about all of this at the beginning (including how detrimental his relationships and his reputation has become), we would've never co-founded with him.

Definitely a tough lesson learned.
How does this startup make money? After reading the blog post a bit and some comments, I still can't figure out.
swarf
Here you go:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/nuclear-stand-down-go...

The most germane part to the author's premise is the graphic that illustrates how Samsung has apps to duplicate pretty much every app Google has. (With, admittedly, the very notable exception of Maps. Even Apple has had a rough time of getting away from Google Maps, I think that'd be a very difficult piece for Samsung without going to Nokia for help.)
"Ok enough metaphors."

Not so fast, I see no car metaphor yet. And there is no comparison of Dell's practices to those of Hitler or the Nazis, either. We are far from 'enough' metaphors, my friend.
Speakers are built to be able to withstand short peaks with high power to reflect the dynamic in the music or your movie. This is what is abused to be able to play loud sounds continuously. You could take the possibility to do that away, but then you would of course also remove some of the dynamics out of the music.

But of course, the people that burn their speakers this way don't care about dynamics or evidently about sound quality if they press their computer speakers like this. Can't sound not even a little good.
Certainly not. A wealthy slaveholder could feel sympathy with the slaves and not want them beaten unnecessarily, and care more about the good treatment of the slaves of neighbors than to those held on another land and continent.

The upper-class homes of 1800s Britain had many working class servants. I have no doubt that in general there was some sympathy more for one's own servants over those of a neighbor's, and even more than for British landowners in Ireland.

That is, classism exists even in the presence of "the innocent and natural bias toward sympathy", because there's nothing in sympathy which demands the object of sympathy be treated as an equal.
Storing and Sending Bitcoins Directly from Your Brain using BrainControl
In general, with LedgerSMB, we don't usually use stored procedures for security reasons. We use them for abstraction reasons. There are cases, however, where we do add security barriers to them so there are reasons why having this as a layer in the db can be a good thing.

Let's take an example: separation of duties in accounting. You want someone to enter transactions and you want someone else to approve them, and you want to enforce this through db permissions.

You might give insert permissions to user 1 but update permissions to user 2. Except that you don't want to allow updates. You only want to allow some updates, to a few columns.

So now you grant update permissions only on some columns. Except that you don't want to allow all updates on those columns. You only want to allow updating from, say, a null value to a definite value (say, indicating who and when).

You can't do this with standard permissions, so you now create another role with permission to update these columns, and require that mere mortals go through a stored procedure to update them, which will only allow those rows to be updated which had nulls in these values.

Now, I hear you say, you could do this with a join table called 'approval' with these columns so you don't have to worry about NULLs. Great, except that NOT EXISTS() queries tend to suck and you can't use partial indexes to ensure you can always quickly look up those transactions pending approval. So in the end NULLs, stored procedures, and an intermediate role end up winning out in terms of security.
The problem then is that the FBI laboratory, without consequence, utilizes the science "without good judgement [sic] and ethics." Are there any forensic laboratories in the USA that operate with good judgment and ethics?
The Beginner's Guide to Believing in Yourself
No. we are not.
I find sorting algorithms a bizarre and damaging introduction to computer science.

If, as suggested, you ask an interested teenager how they sort a list of numbers on paper, they can usually give a reasonable algorithmic explanation, e.g.
"Find the smallest number in the list, and write that first,..."

Then, they have to throw that thought process away, and rote learn some different and esoteric alternative - the A-level course mentioned in this article requires you to execute bubblesort step-by-step, from memory, on paper.

When in fact, the teenager's own creative method (that we threw away) is much closer to how a computer scientist/coder should be thinking.
If I am understanding this correctly, a specially crafted mp3 file, played in Windows Media Player or similar, could cause the same symptoms that Dell is indicating VLC could create. Surely that would be considered a totally normal operating condition that the speakers should be tolerant against. It may be heavy use, but does that mean it is abuse?
Haha all the proud mercenaries of HN quick to shoot down any hint of politics in their little world... A good number of us INside the US (not to mention Europe and elswhere) would certainly think twice about using a tool called drone. A lot of us want our government to stop killing people by remote, is that such a strange point to make? It is really quite an ignorant name to use, as bachback said.
> Stored procedures don't offer any protection against malicious input.

Not necessarily true. Parameterized queries generally do and most stored procedure queries should be parameterized. Add good check constraints....

Now, the protection isn't perfect but it is well beyond no protection at all and can be a good level.

> An SQL statement built up of concatenation including user input is just as bad in a stored procedure as it is directly in a program.

Yeah, and sometimes that's the only way to do things in PostgreSQL. So if you find yourself having to do this (I find it most common in CREATE statements), then heavily commend and make sure (via frequent audit) that all values from the input are properly quoted by quote_ident and quote_literal functions.
That's like saying that a "counter-argument" to wearing a seatbelt is that drivers shouldn't be getting into accidents in the first place. Yes, it would be nice if all code was well-commented and well-factored with well-named functions, classes and variables, and we should all strive to make code like that. And if that never failed, then perhaps we wouldn't need any other best practices or rules to help us along.[1] But we all know the real world is not like that. We need all the help we can get. Having good practices for writing good code is not, I repeat not an argument against having good practices for commit comments. You make it out to be an either/or proposition. It's not.
I used to be of the opinion that Debian stable was too old, that its packages were outdated. Then I realized that I only need Emacs 24 (compile it from source) and a recent browser (both Chrome and Firefox have up-to-date repositories). I've been using Debian stable for over a year now, and I don't regret it. As a student, it is more important that my machine remain break-free that it is that I have the latest version of my bittorrent client.
What is left when you logout of Facebook?
If the individual agents and prosecutors were bonded for the purpose of funding liability like this, we would know the cost of liability up front, and it would make it difficult for the same individuals to be involved in many such cases. Making the government as a whole pay is too diffuse.
IBM made this change last year. There was outcry from employees, but nothing changed.
Yes, I was talking about solutions with special properties, like eg being optimal or minimal in some sense.
Does Coinbase make money by showing a unique price to each user?
It's a false comparison. Algorithms, and data structures don't have a ready, real-life examples, that a new kid from middle school can already relate to. I suppose, you can point to facebook and google and try to explain the infrastructure behind them, but he still doesn't have a way for the kid to play with and see the consequences. I also think there's a false dichotomy implicit in your question.
It's not about speed for the sake of speed. That speed allows insider trading and frontrunning.

Insider trading means[0]:

buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other
relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material,
nonpublic information about the security.

How do HFT traders get "material nonpublic information"?

The Wall Street Journal reports that HFT funds buy early access to data
from third-party distributors—everything from corporate earnings to
the Philadelphia Fed's manufacturing survey.

If an analyst at the Philly Fed tells me the results of the manufacturing survey two days in advance of its release, and if I profit from that information and give a kickback to the analyst, that would be clearly illegal.

But if the Philly Fed gives the information to Reuters ten minutes early so they can write a story, and if Reuters sells electronic access to HFT traders two seconds before the public can trade on it, how is that different?

And don't get me started about using HFT for frontrunning client orders[1, 2].

[0] https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm

[1] http://blogs.barrons.com/stockstowatchtoday/2013/05/03/charl...

[2] http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4442.html
I hope it will one day include my YouTube (favourites) - as I still get an empty result for archiving my YouTube profile. It requires Google+ to access that now, from what I've tried to research on it.
I would wager money that there are just as many FBI agents who to this day are disgusted by what the idiots at the Portland Field Office of the FBI did to this guy.
* Robert Heinlein - All you Zombies - http://faculty.uca.edu/rnovy/Heinlein--All%20you%20zombies.h...
Yes, exactly. Use Audacity to increase the volume and play with WMP to get the same result.
While differing in nitty-gritty details, the googler basically confirms what I interpreted to be the main thrust of the Ars article.

AOSP is the carrot, the compliance necessary for google's value add software is the stick.

The last paragraph concludes saying that Android with google apps is the least bad offering out there. That's why I both use it personally, and why I'm not super pumped about the future of any mobile platform these days.
Not sure if you've ever owned a Dell laptop, but I'll never buy one again. On a couple of occasions I have tried to play DVD's on them and cannot hear people talking with the volume up. Put headphones on and its too loud. Dell speakers are junk.
Thanks for creating this, will be testing this soon.
> 2. Recognize all the people outside of your door as your neighbors, even if they look different from you and live under different circumstances. This includes the homeless who sleep on the street, the drug dealers who sell outside the liquor store, and the prostitutes walking your streets. Replace the words homeless, drug dealer, and prostitute with the word neighbor. Treating these folks with respect and dignity from the beginning will give you later leverage to talk to them about changing their behavior and getting out of the life.

Wait what? Yes they're your "neighbors," but for an article against gentrification it's suggesting you should be telling people to change their behavior. (Not to mention drug-dealing and prostitution are crimes! Don't we have the police to deal with that? The onus shouldn't be on people who just want to get a good night's sleep!)
Michael Jackson: His Death and the Ongoing Mystery
VLC cannot damage anything more than any other player using the Windows APIs.
I'm a Slackware man in everyday life, but I do use Debian to run our NAS at my workplace. Stable, easy to use, and dependable; I have no complaints about its performance.
Where tech buses roam, affluence follows
Any other manufacturer do that? (someone mentioned HP below)

I am a VLC fan (thanks! I wish I was skilled enough to contribute to the project) and right now using a ASUS laptop, I want to know what manufacturers I should NOT buy from next time (I bought this ASUS because I tried to buy from DELL and their site was buggy and did not closed the transaction... good to me their site was buggy!)
I assume folks who advocate for a transaction tax don't actually want less transactions, rather they want more "real" transactions and a less artificially volatile market place.

Unfortunately, a transaction tax would create the exact opposite of that situation. The hypothesis that if there were a transaction tax there would be less transactions is incorrect. What would happen is that transaction quantities would get bigger in order to overcome the new added cost. These larger transactions would magnify the risk at play in the market place. This in turn would raise the reward for being able to pull out of quotes faster and/or to misrepresent the riskiness of your trading strategy.

So a transaction tax would actually incentivize more "false" liquidity and work to the betterment of companies that are more risky.

What HFT systems actually do, is allow firms to "pay" for priority of an order at a price level, by investing in network infrastructure/algorithms. If you want remove that advantage the easiest way would be a system where you transparently pay for priority of an order. The system with the least likely negative side impacts of this would be making arbitrary price level sizes. That is, instead of quoting down only the penny level, let people quote arbitrary (or some fixed but very small) decimals of a penny. That way if you really want to pay up for priority, you can just increment your order slightly and actually pay for the privilege.
Well, it's also a wild compromise to say the warranty is void by installing popular software. If they would instead say, the warranty is void if you go above such and so threshold for such and so long (no matter with what software), that would make sense, but this, just seems a cheap way of making the warranty unexistent.

Anyway, a moderator from Dell replied that you can contact him if Dell refuses to give support just by seeing VLC installed, so maybe it's better than it seems.
Really? Did your teachers never say "Ok, everyone line up in height order"?
I resubmitted this because it seems like an viewpoint that's important in the larger gender in tech conversation, but the author seems to be outside the mainstream conversation (or at lest what I see of it on Hacker News).

Sadly it looks like this submission is dying an even more uneventful death than the first time it was posted.
Wellll, I don't wanna be a dick or nuthin' but it says on your chart that your shit's all fucked up.

uh, you talk like a fag and your shit's all retarded...

What I'd do is just like... you know... huhuhhhuuh huhuh... like know what I mean? Like, huhuhuh huhuh...
Anybody care to share their experience with this?
> Any other manufacturer do that?

We heard about HP and Dell doing that, and ONLY in the version they shipped to India or South-East Asia (Do they ship worse components there?)

> I wish I was skilled enough to contribute to the project

There is a very high chance that you are skilled enough, to be honest.
Quora and the Search for Truth
I suspect it might if you doped the graphite oxide with something to muck up the sheets a little and allow vertical bonds, perhaps a bit of boron.
Well-reasoned and supported statements about the corruptibility of human beings are done absolutely no favors by this kind of faux wisdom. You might as well stick to something people will recognize, like "absolute power corrupts absolutely," if you want to come off as edgy without actually contributing to the discussion.
Fail Go Kart Racing. Too fast entering pit lane
There a typo in the HN title.
Even if you don't know much, there's always grunt work to be done to get to know a project.
I don't think Firefox would be keen on (1) having a webkit-based browser with the name Firefox and (2) having it be an intentionally-hobbled browser compared to Safari so Apple can ensure its browser is the 'fastest' on iOS. Google made the decision with Chrome, since it is also webkit, but it will likely bite them in the ass later as blink continues to be improved and webkit begins to stagnate more. And as they begin to have differing rendering bugs.
I love their github page:

http://netflix.github.io/
Excellent point! Being able to trade on information revealed overnight would have much greater value than being able to trade at an even smaller sub-second interval.

Since the marginal value of additional liquidity decreases rapidly, I've often wondered if having a fixed resolution (say, one trade per minute) would actually be beneficial.

Nobody can realistically trade a stock based on sub-minute changes in information anyway, and having a fixed resolution would eliminate the advantage some players have by having more servers/etc. After all, if we are chasing liquidity, allowing some players in the market to have an advantage restricts the number of players able to participate which lowers liquidity.
We're discussing different things. You're talking about fame and internet comments which have no real impact, at least, not to me. I don't have a problem with people insulting the code I publish under my real name.

I'm talking about the potential for real life harassment (folks calling my employer, showing up at my house, swatting, etc) if I were to say something controversial. I am specifically concerned with being doxxed and criminal harassment.

There's a vast world of difference between people making comments in poor taste over a game and the level people sometimes go to if they engage in an argument and lose in an embarrassing way. I would not recommend that anyone freely engage in internet debates in a non-anonymous fashion.
Music for Coding or Not
Actually, you learn your first algorithm in elementary school, you just call it "doing an Euclidean division by hand". You're first data structure comes a bit later, in middle school, with vectors. That are just the first among those that I thought of, there are many more.
Alt. lyrics for Pink Floyd's Vera to bring Chromium's DevTools icons back
All products eventually approach "if you use this product for anything at all, it voids the warranty". How fast they get there is an indication of the integrety (and managerial health) of the company behind them.
Low quality speakers and a poor hardware design. It isn't even a challenge to match amplifier output to speakers in such a way that the amplifier can't break the speaker. There are easily a dozen cheap ways to make this work properly that don't rely upon a probably non-existent WMP based solution.

>VLC does not, and cannot modify the OUTPUT volume to destroy the speakers.

That would be remarkable.

>And as VLC is present on a lot of machines, it's simple to blame VLC. "Correlation does not mean causation" is something that seems too complex for cheap Dell support...

It sounds like a #BOFH excuse.