skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For the Navy, it's not so much about the whiz-bang technology as it is about the economics of such armaments. Both costs pennies on the dollar compared with missiles and smart bombs, and the weapons can be fired continuously, unlike missiles and bombs, which eventually run out.

Why is no one mentioning what seems an obvious side effect of this class of weapon -- all the people who will be blinded by it once it goes into service? If this system goes into service and sees actual battlefield service, the opposing army will be quickly divided into two groups -- those wearing protective goggles, and those who can no longer make out their hands.

My conspiracy theory (isn't there always one of those?) is that laser weapons are a sneaky plot by the Braille publishing industry to spring back from their present near-irrelevance.
Benchmarking of AWS general-purpose m1 and m3 instances
Investment banker jumps to death from JP Morgan’s headquarters in Hong Kong
David vs. Goliath, and the need for constant reinvention
Irrational Games (Bioshock Infinite) is shutting down
>In Rails, a process is short-lived by design (the lifecycle of a request).

I'm not sure if this is by design, or a limitation of Ruby.

>short-lived processes aren't the best approach for a web service.

Not for me - I'm building all of my web services in Erlang these days, and there's little to no relationship between the life of most processes in the service and the life of requests. Although each request is usually serviced by its own process, that process may interact with other processes that may have been alive for as long as the application has been running. For example, my RAM caching strategies are usually written as part of the application, not put in front of them. Makes pseudo-ESI easy to hand-roll.

Also, short lived processes may have been spawned by long lived processes, so changing how they're created can be done without taking anything down.

I find this style so much more performant than the one thread per request thing from Ruby, Perl, PHP et al. It's very easy and natural to minimize the amount of time spent in the db (which is where I'm usually bound.)
Hackaday Projects: hosting site by hackers for hackers that actually works
The quote about refactoring ease in Scala is interesting, since I imagine the experience would be the same in plain old Java - refactoring in any statically typed language is much easier when you are comparing to PHP, Python and Javascript.
I hear Java people say "I love scala" a lot. I do not hear people coming from other environments saying this.
> I don't see that people are confused about what is going on.

I can see it in these discussions and in personal conversations. Yeah one can say "their fault didn't read docs".

> They do mention LXC on their site.

Where? Click on "Learn More". Switch through slides, get to "Technical Details", nothing there. Click on "The whole story". In a 10-20 page "super-detailed" technical explanation it is mentioned twice in passing.

> I thought it was clear that Docker intended to abstract some of the platform-specific details like using LXC

Clear to you and me, not clear to quite a few people.

> and focus on making a standard interface for encapsulating and managing services.

And that is my beef with it, selling complete black boxes and then have people wonder if there are unicorns inside, is it a VM, is it a container... If they just mentioned exactly that their technology is based on it would make it easier.

Are they afraid they'll get sued by LXC creators? I don't understand why go to great lengths beating around the bush about it.

> I find it misleading to talk like Docker is just LXC

I think it is even more misleading to not talk about the core underlying technology and then say what they add on top of it.
I watched last night as they went back to the PC just to retrieve the Helix Fossil. That was madness.
Stanfy Open Source Libraries and Tools for iOS and Android Developers
It is not secret and it is not even a plan
With all this discussion about SPA websites:

Is anyone aware of a solution to allow clients to validate a version of an SPA website (cryptographically), in the sense that once downloaded a signature is checked and then further visit, if they require an update, have to be validated and verified by the user?

I'm thinking of a way to allow user to trust their applications in the same way you would trust a dist-upgrade on Debian via the packager's PGP signature and chain of trust.

This would solve the current problem that sites can change user side code at will anytime without them knowing and thus making it quite impossible to develop proper security solutions where the user actually owns and is responsible for his own security.

With such a solution in place, we might start seeing proper p2p/webrtc security related apps, we could even imagine an in Browser (read js) Tor-like service...
> They put computers on my desk, paid for (nice) offices, paid the power, air conditioning

True, but more importantly, before all of that, they made something people want to pay for and acquired enough customers to pay for that shit, and for lots of salaries too.

That's a good accomplishment, unless they're part of some government-supported cartel etc. There are plenty of those too.
I partially agree to you.

I have been using Scala as primary programming language for more than a year. I have been using Java for almost 5 years before that.

Yes, the learning curve for Scala is a bit high, but once I "got it", I felt much more productive to cover for the time I lost learning new language.
Ha! South Park :)
That makes sense. This is the kind of "carryover" effect that I talk about in the parent comment, so maybe I'm wrong in that there isn't a lot of carryover where in actuality there is.

I just doubt that learning a new language automatically gets you up to anywhere near 50% competency as someone who has been using it for 5+ years (would you agree with that?), and the ability to hire people who can apply that full level of competency (i.e. how big the hiring pool is) is important in deciding what language to use.
I think it's because of the streaming lag. The stream is several seconds behind the chat and people are submitting commands based off of where the stream is, not where the game is.

A version that played the game on your local PC (with periodic save state syncs maybe) would probably be more robust (and quicker to play).
Connect to and control Intel Core vPro computers
Where is the data sourced from? Having had to secure rights to Olympic data at a past company, it's a minefield of legal and usage restrictions.
A Valentine from Hallmark's Lawyers
And that point is just wrong. Anyone with a short enough time horizon would prefer the depreciating currency, because they can get it at a discount from those with a longer time horizon.
Homebrew Blog: Know what you’ve learned, not what you’ve done
Some of the trolling isn't trolling, it's a tactic -- specifically the constant start spamming.

Since twitch.tv recently added up to 30 seconds of stream lag, you want to spam start during the trickiest movement sections to minimize latency between the stream and gamestate. This is most important in ledges and mazes!

More of the chat catches up to the current position and starts putting in the right input, which actually has a higher chance of being accepted, after the start spam delay.
It's funny, In Spanish we don't have an equivalent of "beef", we use the word for meat "carne", but we have the anglicism "bife" (from beef) mostly used in South America, or "bistec" (from beefsteak) mostly used in Central and North America.
How Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone infiltrated communist Romania
I'll take one if they're just going to waste ;)
My point was that it's not written in stone anywhere that the middle class is a debtors class. People didn't used to have credit cards and car loans. Some would have mortgages, but nowhere near what we have today, and it wasn't about investing in the "value" of the home, given that there is no such thing, besides it being a roof over your head.

This system in which the middle class is by default considered the debtor class is a result of decades of manipulation.
Theon Greyjoy would sue, but he's not doing much business under that name these days.
There are two profitable high-speed rail lines: Japan (Tokyo-Osaka) and France (Paris-Lyon).

Some will say Acela, but it is only profitable if you ignore capital expenditures.
Ask HN: New parent or CTO at startup? Can I do both?
I've been running engineering at a startup for the last year and a half or so. We're getting some traction and things are going in a positive direction. My wife and I are expecting our first child very soon and the pregnancy has been anything but smooth. I've been a wreck the past month or so and my productivity at work has suffered significantly. I've been able to keep the cracks from showing for the time being, but it's now apparent to me that when the baby comes, I will not be able to work at anywhere near the same capacity I was able to initially. I want to be there for my wife and for my new son. The startup will be far from the front of my mind.

In other words, since I don't think I'll be able to give what is necessary for the business to thrive, I see stepping down as a necessary step for the good of the company. On the other hand, there's a small voice in the back of my head telling me to suck it up and just go for it.

I also have a buddy who has promised me a job if I ever decided to go the more corporate route, which given my current situation is looking more and more attractive.

So, HNers who have been a co-founder at a startup during the birth of their first child--what would you do in my situation?
It's a game, not everyone is playing it for the same reason and the input is anything but random. There aren't really any conclusions you can draw from this other than it's entertaining.
How to Run a Remote Team Standup Meeting
The Dust Bowl was what hurt people. The deflation of the Great Depression was not what hurt people.
Route 17 should not be an issue. Santa Cruz should be filled to the brim with tech jobs incubated by the mere existence of UCSC and its top-notch CS department. It's a beautiful place with ugly problems.

It's washed out hippy and NIMBY central with a crony government that presides over an unconscionable crime and homeless rate as well as a runaway meth problem.

In just the past few weeks there have been drive by shootings and a mental case driving a car into the lobby of a downtown theatre and slicing his own throat with a shard of windshield glass. Last year, the most famous thing that happened there was two cops getting gunned down:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/us/violence-spurs-identity...

I harp on Santa Cruz because based on the shenanigans there, I don't think the great Oakland migration is going to happen. There are just too many other places to live in the bay area. What we need is a county-wide moment of clarity about mass transit. I'm not expecting that either. I'm expecting status quo. In an age when we could at least work partially remotely, the trend is running towards banning telecommuting and pushing more and more people into coding boiler rooms. Yuck.
How does (steady, predictable) inflation help you as a debtor? If the banks expect to lose, say, 3% to inflation, isn't the logical action to increase the nominal interest rate to maintain the same real rate?

I can understand why unexpected inflation would help debtors, but that's not what people argue for.
ok... then can you explain what's happening here: https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/blob/master/js/brow...

Where the line checks for `window.Promise`
Not sure how old you are, but did you consider property in Florida or Detroit during the global financial crisis? Planet Money had the story of a girl who bought a house for $12,000 and rents it at $700/month:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/09/148218539/this-14-...

I'm not saying it's easy (hey, I didn't do it myself). But there have been opportunities. You've got to put the effort into finding the opportunities & be brave enough to jump in & take the risk.
completely awesome! please support.
I've come from lots of environments, and you're correct, I won't say "I love Scala". What I will say, is right now, if you are targeting the JVM there aren't any better alternatives (I believe in strong typing).

Maybe someday Kotlin or Ceylon or Java 9 will be better but for now Scala is the best choice.
>Oddly enough, the aggregate vote is doing worse than the random vote

It's simply because aggregate makes the game so much easier that it makes the stream seem less interesting.

Progress is not inevitable with the original system, it's miraculous. With democracy it actually plays the game somewhat normally.
That's what I thought. Ignoring capital expenditures could make lots of unprofitable businesses look profitable.
Weapons that are designed to blind have been illegal for a long time. And these types of lasers are so powerful that if one hit you in the face, you'd probably lose more than just your eyesight.
I disagree with the premise that using Docker to run individual processes is "wrong". Phusion is doing a disservice by suggesting as such. There ARE use-cases where such a base-image is useful, but I believe these should be the uncommon case, not the common one. Even yet, if running multiple processes in a container is needed, it's preferable to use Docker-in-Docker.

I suppose part of the problem is the two benefits of Docker and containerization are frequently confused. Docker provides portability and build bundling, but ALSO provide loose process isolation. You should want to take advantage of that process isolation and by doing so, should want to run SSH or cron in their own containers, not in a single container with your application process. If your application has multiple processes, each should have their own containers. These containers can be linked and share volumes, devices, namespaces, etc. Granted, some of the functionality one might desire for this model is still missing or in development, but much of it is there already and that's the model I aspire Docker to follow.

It might also be to some degree a matter of legacy versus green-field applications. For instance, I've been deploying OpenStack's 'devstack' developer environment (which forks dozens of binaries) inside of a single Docker container. In this case, the Phusion base-image might make sense. However, the proper way of using Docker would be to run dozens of containers, each running a single service.

The reason I don't do this is because the OpenStack development/testing tools provide this forking and enforce this model, using 'screen' as a pseudo-init process. From the Docker perspective, this is a legacy application. I could and probably will change those development tools to create multiple containers, but until then, it's easiest to stick to a single container.
TLDR; PRNG seeds in the cloud are somewhat predictable. Because sshd generates the keys on boot it's possible to guess the private key on a fraction of the cloud hosts.

Ubuntu 14.04LTS solves the problem by adding a new source of entropy. They add a early-boot (before sshd) service that fetches data from an external server. In short: `curl http://some-server > /dev/urandom`

EDIT: Looking for the default server but launchpad seems to be down. Ideally it would be a trusted source like the cloud provider themselves.

EDIT2: https://entropy.ubuntu.com/ and the public cert is provided with the package.
Microsoft fails to learn what seems to be the key lesson from every generation of consoles: Make sure your console is the easiest to develop for.

This is why the PS3 slumped, why PlayStation 'won' its generation and what killed the Sega Saturn.

Sony has the best hardware package by far. Console exclusives don't really pay off.

Microsoft has simply forgotten how to do product design and may be too top-down of an organization to accomplish the big wins anymore.
I might have used a poor example but I think most countries on good terms with their neighbors would help each other out in an emergency without them being part of any formal union.
And hardly a nutjob---if you read his blog (www.vilks.net) he is clearly quite smart.

My impression is that he mainly trolls the art establishment. It's usually quite difficult to tell how serious he is. His book "Hur man blir samtidskonstnär på tre dagar: handbok med teori" ["How to become a contemporary artist in three days"] seems to seriously and carefully argue for George Dickie's institutional theory of art, while at the same time it is clearly taking the piss out of contemporary art projects...
>There was a program "UO Extreme"

Yeah, I know the guy who wrote it.

>which let you fast walk

No, it let you work around having a high latency dialup connection. All it did was watch for outgoing movement request packets and respond to them with OKs. The server was still checking though. So if you tried to move somewhere you couldn't, your client would see the OK from UOE, then later see the "nope" from the server and you would rebound back to where you were, and you would often get your client's idea of your position desynced from the servers, which was the one that actually mattered.

>You could dye items glitched out colors, because the server didn't check that you chose a valid color from the dialog

Yes, there were many bugs. Large and complex software has bugs. That bug was fixed. Which demonstrates exactly my point, that you can in fact do everything server side.

>You could reveal hidden people, because the server just tagged them with a "hidden" flag, instead of not sending their location at all.

Which packet sets the "hidden" flag again? http://necrotoolz.sourceforge.net/kairpacketguide/
Some very small micro-controller didn't even had a readable stack pointer. The usual trick in this case is to fill the bottom of the stack space with a predefined, well chosen value(s) and to check that those values are still here.
How to Structure Your Agile Enterprise | LeadingAgile
Sounds like a rich-get-richer thing to me.
Have you ever been to a hacker news meetup? Did the conversation end in conspiracy against the public?

Shameless related plug: By the way, I'll be organizing a Hacker News DC meetup in the near future. Check the meetup group for updates. I'll likely send something out later this week.
It certainly does sound like a step up from Java, while retaining most (all?) of the good things.

Being a "better" alternative to Java (edit: as kasey says, targeting the JVM) doesn't sound like a bad place to be :) .

It's on my "to-try" list but the little development I do nowadays is on the .NET platform.

Which other environments do you think would benefit from trying Scala, or are bashing Scala? C / C++ ? Node? Edit2: it seems Ruby or Python people wouldn't like Scala. Me, I like static typing.
"Refactoring a statically typed language is easier than refactoring an interpreted one; modifying existing PHP, and even Python, is a difficult chore that engineers shy away from because modifications are likely to create more bugs than they fix."

Over the years I've worked pretty deeply with both static (C++/Java/Scala) and dynamic languages (Python/Ruby). I simply don't agree.

The biggest thing that contributes to refactorability has nothing to do with type safety. Instead unit test coverage, by a mile, is the thing that makes code easy to refactor. In my experience issues of type safety are rare. The same types of bugs are going to crop up in Scala, Python, Java, or even Fortran unless you have tests to help you discover those issues.

I've long felt that type safety is largely a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Not in a hugely meaningful way at least. Logic errors are generally independent of type issues, and as such it is code quality and unit test coverage, more than any specific language feature, that lead to highly flexible (and therefore refactorable) code.
Wow that talk is an eye-opener. Thanks for the link.
They looked at it once, couldn't understand it, and smashed their screen.
At a guess, base rate fallacy and typing. The java community is huge, so even a small percentage of happy scala converts translates into a large absolute number. People from dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) are probably averse to Static Typing which puts them off.
Yes exactly -- we weight common feedback from multiple Discourse instances much more heavily than individual opinions from folks on meta.discourse, for example.

(There is also the issue of observing what people do versus what they say they do. At least early on I find the problems are severe and obvious enough that this subtlety isn't a big deal yet.)
But the banks know there will be inflation, and therefore they can price that in at the moment the contract is signed, raising the nominal rate to counterbalance inflation, no?
App Opportunities on Wearable Market
It's amazing what some understanding of history can do for you. In particular, it can confer the ability to make surprisingly accurate surmises regarding the behavior of public figures.
I wanted to build a simple calendar for the London 2012 Olympics (and actually built another one for the Sochi Olympics). Both times I ended up using a JSON file found on NBC's website.

Like the linked article suggests, it would be nice to have access to an official (and even simple) API, to dig up some interesting statistics or just have some fun playing with the data.
What it Takes to Design the Next Big Thing in Bitcoin Mining Hardware
Despite the expense and interest, there is no API

There is most definitely is. It's just not free.
Using their Olympics logo is one quick way for you to get a cease and desist letter. http://registration.olympic.org/en/faq/detail/id/25 IANAL

Interesting data though !
“That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.”

-- The many and varied advantages of philosophy

(Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
The unsafeness isn't just perception. I see friends becoming victims of violent crime and property crime in Oakland/SF on Facebook fairly regularly, and I don't have that many city friends. The cities are too progressive to seriously address their crime problem. Someone needs to call Giuliani.
Alternatively, you perform the task faithfully and are unfairly blamed when said feature is exploited by a family cabal :

http://www.dorkly.com/article/59234/an-open-letter-from-a-de...
Does King Need Another Candy Crush? Probably.
GNU grep-2.17 released: 7x to 10x times faster with multibyte locale
It also depends what stage you are at.

This article is about early stage products that are very new. If you're looking at a mature product that has been on the market for 10+ years, it's likely (I hope!) that most of the major obvious pain / complaint points have already been addressed. I don't think CDD would be as useful in that scenario -- you want a different model.
I've gone Ruby->Java->Scala->Java->Scala over the last five years.

Scala was terrible two years ago. All the tools were broken, and every point release broke binary compatibility, so that jar dependency hell was amplified immensely.

Now, there's things I don't like, but it all mostly just works. It seems like this started around 2.10. So I just appreciate a language that is more expressive than Java, with all the things I like about the jvm.
That would free up a LOT of space in SF, so I think even that scenario isn't bad
Picostan would like to formally declare war against Nanotopia.
I've learned a lot of journalists don't look at the footnotes or supplemental tables when they write articles. It does provide a good indicator of competence though.