skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many large engineering organizations have internal document collections that detail past research and lessons learned. Google may be the most visible engineering organization, but many quiet financial and defense-oriented organizations have a wealth of information available, once you are inside. This info is commonly very specialized, so it would be unlikely to help you build the most scalable website or awesome mobile app, but might be useful in creating a toaster-oven that can survive a 100ft drop, being run over by a tank and lasting for 200 years.

Any engineering firm can develop a world-class knowledge base. But, that involves an engineering process, like starting projects with statements of work and conducting internal engineering reviews at certain milestones (all documented in whitepapers), not just by creating a Trello card or JIRA issue.
I really liked this; it's condescending, but in a good natured sort of way. It's as if the author was trying to explain really basic statistics to a marketer, then realized that the marketer had NO idea what he was talking about.

So you get statements like "This is a well-known phenomenon, called ‘regression to the mean’ by statisticians. Again, this is common knowledge among statisticians but does not seem to be more widely known."

I thought that was hilarious.
Regex Golf Part 2: Infinite Problems
Since they're comparing against a literal string, which is guaranteed to be NULL terminated, what's wrong with that?
> Why the army would do it for you instead of killing you and dividing your enormous wealth between themselves?

Because the army will almost certainly be robots or drones.
While Apple may not have intentionally added this (and I'm a bit skeptical--you have to shut off unreachable code and indentation systems to let this through), they almost certainly intentionally LEFT this in.

This is such an easy exploit that somebody found it and was using it. There is no way that this was not spotted by Apple in the field.
Are they really? I thought logos were squarely in the domain of trademarks.
At my first webdev internship, my only job was to report to the "Head of Analytics" (a young liberal arts guy). All I did all day was make the tweaks he told me to do. It was stuff like "make this button red, green or blue", or "try these three different phrasings".

We got no more than 100 hits a day, with no more than 2-3 conversions a day, and he would run these tests for, like, 2 days.

I hated it, and the website looked horrible because everything was competing with each other and just used whatever random color won.
Why not post a link to the article you sited and then dump on it in the first comment?

The owner of the domain said "I recommend developers to try to hack with only Linux in mind and experience the freedom and the opportunities this offers you" and "I don't think BSD is really too relevant anymore"[1]. The example they gave in the article is pretty mild compared to the original statements. I would imagine the author was "was really annoyed by that post" and threw in a small jab. I have said quite a lot worse when someone has looked at the whole of my work and dismissed it as irrelevant. In fact, some of the harshest insults in open source seem to be calling code irrelevant or foolish wastes of time when so many love and put effort into it.

1) http://linuxfr.org/nodes/86687/comments/1249943 read the whole article and compare it to the one jab in the opensmtpd article
Man, I loved Commandos 1 back in the day. I recently got a bit nostalgic and bought the whole series on Steam, and they are still great games! But MAN are the controls opaque. Thinking back, I think the game came with a little cardboard sheet with all the controls on it, which would have been easier to deal with.

Fantastic game though, thanks :)
If ever there was a top comment done in one line it's this. Also, let's remember that Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Roelof Botha are from South Africa.
this particular VC firm [Sequoia] missed the first wave of social networks, invested a large sum in the debacle known as Color, and then, in about three years’ time, turned their investment in WhatsApp into one of the great IRRs in the history of venture capital?

Ahh, Color.

Could the differences between Color & WhatsApp be any more pronounced?!
That's a really great way to look at it. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I do not subscribe to newsletters. Period. If an email sent to me has an unsubscribe link, it is most certainly spam.
Messaging apps are going to destroy SMS regardless of whether Facebook bought one or not. It doesn't give Facebook any more bargaining power.
Panama

Ah. Has there ever been a Yahoo project that had more hype?
it's the 19bn$ that's completely dumb.

whatsapp's entire business model is charging 1$ per month. for a little less than 19bn $ you could:

- build an app doing exactly the same

- run a media/marketing ad blitz

- charge 50c per year. or make it for free, until whatsapp is dead.

if it's about the awesome talent at whatsapp, 32 engineer can be hired for 19bn $. each one of the whatsapp members could have been acquired for less money besides the 2 founders.

it makes no economic sense. as in old school economics, not the valley funny money one.
Slack.com seems quite nice, built on top of irc.
And the award for goofiest looking motor protein goes to: Kinesin.
I believe the exact opposite: Biological systems are extremely optimized and add complexity only when needed.

Of course, in order to proceed in a meaningful way this conversation we should first establish what exactly complexity and optimization means, in this context.

So if you feel like it, please share a specific example.
My only criticism is that there's no easy way to step back a page.
Ripple, the IOU-oriented crypto currency,
also has a scripting language for encoding contracts:
https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts
Read the rest. You'll see that these proxies also serve as handlers for all TLS sessions.
Agreed. It's all front end web stuff.
If HTTP 2.0 requires TLS then to get speed and caching you'll need some kind of trusted proxy.
Your idea is an interesting one. It's a radical change, and I don't have a clear sense of the unintended consequences.

This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level.

Perhaps. But from a political standpoint, it's utopian and most unlikely in the near term.
Forget causality, can you even show a meaningful positive correlation between welfare as % GDP and alcoholism or obesity? Are Moldova, the Czech Republic and Hungary hotbeds of welfare? How about Nauru, Barbados, or Belize?

If you can show the correlation, can you point me at meaningful evidence of causality?

Yeah... I didn't think so. But hey, have fun asserting those opinions as facts!
don't you think that Facebook has tried this already? Facebook Messenger/Messages has a non trivial number of engineers working on it, but it still doesn't have the usage that WhatsApp does.
Still on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7286671

And more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=comcast#!/story/past_week/0/netfli...
I agree with you. I have a comfortable home, and home office so I spend less than two hours a month working in a local coffee shop.
> various corporate nets will require you to install root certs to accomplish the same MITM attack

They don't even bother making you install CA certificates. They just abuse subordinate CAs: see https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/02/15/announcing-vers...

I'm also a huge fan of Google's http://www.certificate-transparency.org/, which makes it very difficult to fool very many people for very long.
I really liked your article! Especially the first paragraph. In the "The Trader (Pricing) View" section, I was disappointed that you continued referring to value, especially with respect to a fickle measure such as number of users.

"The key variable in explaining differences in value across companies is the number of users."

Your conclusion was very rational, and I agree that fundamentals will matter (sooner or later), but I wish you had taken a stance instead of being so balanced. Very un-trader like of you :)
Those look nice, but presumably Intel NICs would be an order of magnitude cheaper, especially if built into the chipset.
Psh, a true JS hipster runs front end web stuff all through his stack.

Our DB runs on node.js, brah.
This article ignores the context behind the proposal. Many companies, schools, and prisons are MITMing all SSL traffic today for a variety of liability reasons. Today those users get no notice that their Web browsing is being observed and censored. Trusted proxies are intended to give those users some notice that they're being MITMed.

I agree that MITM proxies shouldn't be used on the public Internet and thus we shouldn't make it easier to do so, but what about the people who are already being MITMed? Is there another way to solve this problem or must we throw corporate Web users under the bus to save the public?﻿
Ahh glorious...
The title is quite accurate, as helium achieves escape velocity and escapes the Earth's gravity when it is released in the atmosphere, making it one of the rarest elements, in the long-term.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZkMQkHGj1s
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/6757fcdaa283
I wrote an API for HN [1]. Maybe you can use that somehow?

[1] https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI
Must be easy to always argue against the least charitable interpretation of your opponents positions.
If that example (eval.c) is supposed to be bad, I don't think there's a strong case here. It looks like lots of older Unix/BSD code, and most of the ifdefs are feature-related, rather than platform hacks; some of the functions are a bit long, but that's typical in older C code.

I've never read the vim code before and I was surprised how cleanly written and well-commented it is, given my expectations set by this thread.
How To make Chicken Stir Fry
If you are looking to how to make Chicken Stir Fry then you are in the right place.
you can also get a great ebook about recipes(Over 370 Recipes) and lot of things check the video.

Stir fry is a pair of Chinese cooking techniques for preparing food in a wok: chao and bao. The term stir-fry was introduced into the English language by Buwei Yang Chao, in her book How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, to describe the chao technique. The two techniques differ in their speed of execution, the amount of heat used, and the amount of tossing done to cook the food in the wok. Cantonese restaurant patrons judge a chef's ability to perform stir frying by the "wok hei" produced in the food. This in turn is believed to display their ability to bring out the aroma of the wok and essence of the food cooking.
The History Of Stir Fry
Stir fry originates from the Han Dynasty, but did not fully develop until the Song Dynasty. Although there are no surviving records of Han Dynasty stir frying, archaeological evidence of woks and the tendency to slice food thinly indicate that the technique was likely used for cooking. It was not until the Ming Dynasty that stir frying was popularized as primary cooking method of Chinese cuisine. Stir fry was brought to America by early Chinese immigrants, and has been used for non-Asian cuisines.
Haven't they shot themselves (and everyone else!) in the foot?
This proposal isn't intended for ISPs and should never be used on the public Internet.
That's actually a very good idea... Browsers could load the jquery file in your cache by its hash, rather than its URL. No more having 100 copies of jquery.min.js in your cache just because they're from different URLs.
Apparently it is safe

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/448563/am-i-correct-that-...

However, some people may have the temptation of, when changing the code, replacing it with a non-literal string, or, in a rare case, there's a memory corruption affecting the literal string making it lose the null-termination.
> To be fair to the authors of neovim...

Sounds to me like you need to go farther. "We should improve what we have" totally fails as a criticism when written by the same guy who won't let the product in question be improved.

If there's good reasons not to admit patches, fine, let's hear them, but don't give me this glib "we should improve what we have" crap. I can hardly believe that's basically his only answer.
I've known Gilles (opensmtpd author) personally for close to 10 years. This is just his kind of humour.

That you might not find it funny, I get. But dismissing all the work that has been put on this project because of what your perceive as attitude is like you not using OpenSSH because you don't like Theo de Raadt.
In practice, doing this will lead to what the author talks about under "Stopping tests as soon as you see winning results will create false positives." It doesn't make your data invalid, but it will generally lead to poor methodology if you are not careful.
That seems reasonable. Thank you for the explanation.
I'm somewhat confused by your comment, since the GitHub page explicitly says that NeoVim "is not a project to rewrite Vim from scratch". Where's the discrepancy here? Perhaps I'm just too tired right now.
All of them, of course. Believing any less is unpatriotic.
I have been preaching this for awhile. It is my sincerest hope others start to catch on and really focus on the environment and culture they are trying to build and the ramifications seemingly little decisions they make have on it.
Forgive me, but I didn't understand your first sentence. That might either be a problem caused by us speaking a common but foreign language, or - if you're a native speaker - me not understanding what you're trying to say.

I understand what he said. I also agree that he's difficult at times and very opiniated. But sharing his opinion is fine. The article you link to? The QUESTIONS mention BSD first (go ahead, check it) and he speaks his mind.

Do I agree with what he says there? No, I actually migrate a couple of things from Linux to BSD this very moment. But you cannot seriously compare "Guy's asked about BSD, says he doesn't think it matters" to "So, there's this cool SMTPD we built. Let me show you some examples. We could totally build filters and instead of example.com we're going to filter 0pointer.net, you know? That idiot?".

That is NOT the same thing. Plus, that article was supposed to show of what you can do with opensmtpd. Filtering? Cool. Filtering because you feel slighted? Awwww... Poor kitty.

The author of that article very well might filter gazillion domains _on his very own server_, but for some public "This is how you can create your own filter" text you should use a neutral example. Or .. people like me might shake their head, sigh, be disappointed and move along and share their frustration elsewhere (like.. here?) a bit later.
Well, yeah, you'd raise taxes, to the point where it nets out on average. You raise everyone's taxes by $10k on average, and give everyone $10k. At the average income it's a wash. At the low end people were already getting welfare and not paying much in taxes, so it's a wash for them too. At the lower-middle-class to middle-class level it reduces the disincentive to work and makes people better off. The only people who really lose out are at the very top, people who make so much money that any percentage-based increase would swamp the fixed gains (which is why, I would guess, they oppose it).
I believe there's already a standard HTTP header for this: Content-MD5.

Browsers definitely don't cache across origins by this though.

If they did, would it be possible to create a malicious JavaScript file with the same MD5 as jQuery?
Spolsky is wrong.

Rewriting is a significant risk, and rewrites often fail because people don't appreciate that fact. But there are ways to rewrite successfully, and often doing so is the correct course of action.

A big problem with rewrites is that it puts a strain on development resources, and it's not possible to maintain both old and new code at the same time. Another big problem is prematurely committing to the rewrite, before it has proven itself. When the inevitable happens and schedules slip, defects arise, and features need to be cut this can prove disastrous for a rewrite that you've foolishly committed to in advance. Also, people often ignore the value of years of productive use which provides testing and validation of immense value.

If you have the resources often the best choice is to spin off a new project for a rewrite and have them compete in the open. With luck the rewrite could become mature enough to overtake the original (as has happened with many projects). Alternately, work in phases doing refactoring in steps, perhaps with new features behind feature flags.

Many people think that rewriting code is easier than green field development, in reality it's often more difficult. It takes a great deal of skill, and often luck, to manage a good rewrite.
There is probably no Spolskyism that I disagree with more. And yet, I don't really disagree with what he said in context. The context is within a business where the opportunity cost could make it not worth it. If the only concern is making the software better, my experience is that rewriting does wonders for old code.
Outlook.com has been doing this for a while. Seems that GOOG took a cue from MSFT, no?
Yes, part of that payment is for access to those negotiated peers. However, just because a customer is paying indirectly for peer access doesn't establish an obligation on the ISP to support arbitrary uncompensated resource consumption on the behalf of their contracted peers. It's an entirely separate contract.

Cogent should pay Comcast market peering costs for the unreciprocated bandwidth they send to Comcast. That's what this whole dispute is about. Arguing that Comcast's refusal to build out and maintain significant infrastructure to support a peering imbalance imposed on them by a peering partner via abuse of a good-faith concession, at their own expense, is somehow "taking hostages" is just silly. Cogent oversold.

I think that Comcast sucks as much as the next guy, but I really don't think they're the bad guy here (as much as it pains me to say that). It looks that way to consumers because Comcast is the only contact affected users have with the whole industry (how many people who have been upset at crappy Netflix quality know who Cogent is, or what a transit agreement is?), but that doesn't mean that's actually an accurate perspective.
More specifically, it's DNA-Polymerase who proofreads. You should also check out the T-Cells (innate and acquired immunity) work. It blew my mind the level of complexity, diversification, etc: There are cells that perform profiling, cells the memorize information about viruses (that's how vaccines work) already encountered, etc.

Molecular biology is like entering the rabbit whole.
The "regression to the mean" and "novelty" effect is getting at two different things (both true, both important).

1. Underpowered tests are likely to exaggerate differences, since E(abs(truth - result)) increases as the sample size shrinks.

2. The much bigger problem I've seen a lot: when users see a new layout they aren't accustomed to they often respond better, but when they get used to it, they can begin responding worse than with the old design. Two ways to deal with this are long term testing (let people get used to it) and testing on new users. Or, embrace the novelty effect and just keep changing shit up to keep users guessing - this seems to be FB's solution.
Helium is a rare element in Earth, but Helium 4 is the most common isotope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium

> He^3 : 0.000137% *

> He^4 : 99.999863% *

> * Atmospheric value, abundance may differ elsewhere
What you're missing is that Netscape rewrote their own product from scratch. Neovim is a fork bringing very invasive changes (not rewriting from scratch) to a project by a different developer for the purpose of extending the original project in ways the current maintainer doesn't want to.

So it's more like taking the old netscape code and making gecko.
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html gives a good explanation about how this can ruin your tests.
Golang-like channels/goroutines in PHP
Here's my personal story, some may find interesting- I was finishing my masters in the UK and split up with my ex girlfriend, this meant I had to get a job quickly to sustain myself because I had nowhere to live and no money. I visited some different groups of friends who were kind enough to let me stay for a few days on their couch but I couldn't risk outstaying my welcome.

At the same time the Occupy protests were happening in St Pauls. I secured a short term contract in an investment bank, and stayed in a tent with the protestors while saving for a deposit to rent a room. I had to put on my suit and dash away from the camp in the morning before I was spotted, I'd then change before coming back in the evening. I washed in the local swimming pools.

Looking back on it, it was nuts that I was able to finish my thesis. So yeah, rents are high, you need to know someone to make it in London.
True.

It's worth adding that Facebook Messenger itself began (or was at least jumpstarted) with the acquisition of a company called Beluga in 2011.

Facebook has definitely made an effort to get into this space -- not necessarily a failed effort, at that -- and it's been trying for years. The idea that "Facebook can just build its own WhatsApp and market it" is silly, especially in light of Facebook's history here.

I'm not convinced $19B was a reasonable price for WhatsApp, unless, as I suspect, there was some heavy competitive bidding pressure. (Google tried to buy the company at $10B not very long ago; I'd imagine there were counteroffers between G and FB, which FB ultimately won at $19B.)
We've been exploring the idea of machine-readable content licensing in Tent (https://tent.io). The idea being that you could subscribe to content feeds based on your willingness to accept certain terms of service.

For example, as a distributed system, there's no guarantee that your subscribers will delete posts you sent them when asked, so one content license might be that you agree in advance to delete any content published under this license within a specified number of hours.

We've also looking at the idea of community arbiters: if two users want to enter into a contract, they could choose an arbiter to help resolve any disagreements from the intersection of their social graphs.
Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With That Location Data
This is really funny, I actually laughed out loud.