skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem isn't with the wealthy. Wealthy and powerful people have been behaving badly behind closed doors since at least the Roman Empire, and probably before then as well. The problem is with us. Why don't we hold them accountable for their misdeeds? Why do we buy into their rhetoric that they are the job creators? Why do we give equal time to their views that they are being persecuted like Jews during Kristallnacht, when the events of the last few years have show that, if anything the opposite is true?

I think articles like this, honestly, are a disservice. They're comfortable. They're easy. They put the blame on the wealthy -- "Oh look, those billionaires and plutocrats are at it again!" -- without asking the real question: what systemic changes can we work towards today to ensure that people like Vikram Pandit, Dick Fuld and Jimmy Cayne can't wreak the same kind of havoc that they did in 2007? What can we do to ensure that people appreciate the impact that obscure financial regulations have on their everyday lives?
Don't be so sure. Some porn stars are brands unto themselves, and go on stripping tours not dissimilar from musician's concerts.

Perhaps it's only a matter of time till we see pornography crowdfunding.
If you're in a US timezone, Stripe is looking for experienced devops candidates. Most employees are in the SF office, but we have a sizable minority of remote employees.

Send me an email, I'd love to chat: jorge@stripe.com
CrnklR is hiring
I'd like one too! ;-) (My email's in my profile.)
Yep, greed is a human constant. The structures that we build around ourselves, though, don't necessarily have to reward it.
Human lung made in lab for first time
Yeah let's stop the progress of the web because SEOs aren't getting any better.
I wonder if it's practical to store energy in rotating asteroids? For the terrestrial power grid. No friction, no (mechanical) safety hazards, just an expensive transmission problem.

edit: Back-of-the-envelope says it's a very bad idea, which is just barely plausible if your asteroid is extremely large, and has an extremely high tensile strength (maybe iron-nickel?). Oh well.

edit2: Also apparently there's a failure mode where if you do overestimate the strength of the asteroid's interior, it tears apart and (from e.g geosynchronous orbit) has a >5% chance of destroying most of the planet. D: Yeah, where I said "no mechanical safety hazards", I retract that.
Getting started with component(1)
There was a HN thread that suggested that Eric Schmidt be fired after the anti poaching scandal.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo...
> When you are dealing with recursions?

They shouldn't be dealing with recursions. If stack corruption is what caused their failures, inappropriate testing played an important role IMHO.

> You pay a lot for those cars, can't they at least put better electronic hardware.

This isn't how it works for cost-sensitive designs. You don't hear people boasting about how they have a quad-core car computer and how the touchscreens from their motor control are perfect for Facebook interactions.

The way people think about this is, if half your RAM memory never gets used, then you used twice more than you need and your module is more expensive than it should be. CPU use never increases past 20%? It's about 80% more powerful than it needs to be. And so on.

"Better electronic hardware" (in the sense of "more powerful" or "faster") also introduces additional complexity. This means more difficult constraints in testing, longer and more expensive verification processes, additional non-deterministic behaviour and so on.

Not that their system wasn't at fault. It was, but throwing more hardware at it wouldn't have made it better.
EADS/Airbus are using CATIA by Dassault Systemes/IBM. Though they had some issues during development of A380 (different software versions, change management, etc):

Initial production of the A380 was troubled by delays
attributed to the 530 km (330 mi) of wiring in each
aircraft. Airbus cited as underlying causes the
complexity of the cabin wiring (98,000 wires and 40,000
connectors), its concurrent design and production, the
high degree of customisation for each airline, and
failures of configuration management and change control.
The German and Spanish Airbus facilities continued to use
CATIA version 4, while British and French sites migrated
to version 5. This caused overall configuration
management problems, at least in part because wiring
harnesses manufactured using aluminium rather than copper
conductors necessitated special design rules including
non-standard dimensions and bend radii; these were not
easily transferred between versions of the software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A380#Production_and_delivery_de...

Nevertheless, CATIA is top-notch is used by many car, ship, aircraft and spacecraft manufactures.
Your anecdote does not equate to "disrespect an exploitation are absolutely prevalent." You didn't actually build an argument for that statement, you provided one personal example. It sucks you had that experience, but just because you had it once doesn't mean it's a bad idea to ask. Bosses are people, and people come in all kinds - some honest and respectful, some not. Asking has the small potential downside of being a short-term time-waste, and the large potential upside of letting you continue to work at a job you're familiar with, with the people you like, at a more satisfying salary. Seems like it's worth simply inquiring about your options.
> 5. Slowness is swept under the rug, not addressed

This is a joke right, asyc loading is somehow bad? If it's that much of a problem hold off rendering untill you have all your data back, of heaven forbid implement item one of Nielsen's list of heuristics, "Visibility of system status" and chuck in a loading gif.
Absolutely, I wouldn't really use Java for any client-server architecture, mainly because there are other tools that are way better. And yes, latency does factor in that decision as well.

One thing to note is that even if you did have a large-scale Java deployment, you have to think about how much the GC is costing you. Depending on what percentage of time the JVM spends in GC, that can translate to millions of dollars worth of computing time. This is a very real problem that arises when businesses try to use Hadoop for creating solutions at scale.
Comments on these kind of articles on Hacker News are always more defensive than I'd imagine. I think we have a weird mix of people where 50% are "hackers of computers" who'd do this shit for free, and will be doing it until they die and 50% are "hackers of society" who are here because they see an opportunity to make it to "big time" without having to have the right parents/schools etc.

It's strange how most of the time the two groups get along so well!
I don't really see the problem with them telling insensitive jokes and acting like idiots in their time off. How they act at work is more important. Pretty stupid article.
Very sad story.

This page introduced me to Nancy Leveson's work a few years back (her paper on the Therac is linked at the bottom of the Wiki page). She's written two excellent books (and a number of papers) on engineering, safety and complex systems which are well worth reading.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/
It seems to me this doesn't actually contradict parent; it almost just rephrases quanticle succinctly.

(To the extent that I'm actually unsure of your intent.)
> The Emperor had no competitors so he had no incentive to find new lands first. Competition leads to innovation. Monopolies lead to stagnation.

From memory... The Ming around 1420-ish closed down the sea voyages to divert all military resources to defending the northern desert approaches to China. Because China had been ruled by the Mongols from 1250 to 1350, the dangers were fresh in the minds of the Chinese leadership when the tribes started raiding again, and building the Great Wall and Forbidden City for defense were more important than exploring and defending against the Great Southern Ocean.
This was one example given in a very early lecture about software testing and failures in our uni. This (and others) make me hope that I never have that much responsibility over human lives as a developer.
Because we could have 80% of one group, and 60% of another group as well - the two groups are not mutually exclusive.
Learn A new Alphabet
HP/Autonomy investigation: Tangled web of hardware and resellers
When downloading requires you to login, you absolutely need all the cookies even if you download it to your server first.

In this case, "Copy cURL" of a request from Chrome's Developer Tools is priceless.
It's funny, I think exactly the opposite of this. Something along the lines about how a sham democracy is worse than no democracy at all, because people keep blaming themselves although they are being oppressed by plutocrats in ways not really unlike violent threats in terms of control.

Instead of being starved, the threat is to get fired. Instead of lack of education, people are blasted with advertisement. I think to say that the fault is "within us" is a platitude about as banal as "the answer is somewhere in the middle".
"discovering that an American has been selected for surveillance must be mentioned in a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”"

This is so bad. Just when you think it can't get any worse.

The worst part is that more leaks with probably even more depressing revalations are on the way.
They're pretty good, if you don't mind the lack of security that is.
Yeah they put a full block in my jaw the first time they drilled, but subsequent sessions were just a small injection around the tooth. Could still feel a certain amount of discomfort, eventually a bit of pain when the anaesthetic wore off. At which point they reapplied the injection.

I prefer it that way, can't stand the huge nerve blocks as they ruin a good 4-5 hours of your day.
Woohoo! Me too, pretty please?
Show HN: Comedylib – A site that organizes comedy content from major video sites
:) Screw me
This has been, and typically is, implemented. There are various ways to ensure your stack doesn't thrash your data, and this is one of them. Why Toyota hasn't is not something I can answer, but the principle that the article describes is well-known.

As for the last part of the article, there are ways to get around this issue when using operating systems, too. Some of them depend on certain hardware features being present, of course, and what should be inferred from this is that, where such protection features are critical, hardware should be picked accordingly.

Edit: I've seen a lot of posts here blaming C and the unmanaged runtimes. While a managed runtime can provide some amount of protection, it's worth noting that:

* It requires a MMU. These aren't smartphones folks. An MCU with a MMU isn't cheap.

* In the absence of correct memory management from the kernel (and that also requires a MMU!), it's perfectly possible to smash data regions with overgrown stacks, even on managed runtimes.

* You can achieve a good amount of protection using special compiler features. That requires no special hardware support.
Not related to the content, but the construct and display of this article is less than conducive to reading it.
Not always. That's essentially what I did to get my current job.
You're giving the audience here too much credit that they're actually hackers. On most articles like this it just feels like a bunch of doe-eyed, aspirational men who really want to be rich one day, so don't want to spoil the fun for their future selves.

Tangentially, this is what struck me about visiting America. We went to Hearst castle and the reverence which the guides and the people on the tour paid to the ghost and myth of Hearst was unnerving. Explains a lot about how wall st gets away with stuff though.
This is a real company man, holy crap!, spending your own time redesigning the your employers badge is really quite sad.

Microsoft is known for hiring young gullible people and indoctrinating them with the idea that MS is a good company rather than the reason the software industry was held back for decades, using illegal tactics. If it could have killed open source it would have.
Wow! I didn't know about Wt! It looks really interesting!
Thanks for sharing. I can't wait to check it out.
I agree selling hours doesn't feel right. Rather than bore you with yadda yadda, please go through the following slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AnttiKirjavainen/a-minute-of-our-t... , http://www.slideshare.net/juhailola/agile-contracting-killin... .

That might give you alternative ways to think about contracts. In short, because we aren't contracting right, all parties end up disappointed. I would say this is one of the main reasons why software projects fail. We sell too big projects (more likely to fail), buyers don't know how to buy (or what they need), we specify too much beforehand (and then stick with that...). There are so many traps.

Speaking of outsourcing it all depends on what kind of a relationship you want to build. I think some of this depends on legislation (ie. hire vs. buy). Construct incentives so that they are win-win.
I have same problem, no solution so far :D
They needed to have an alternative to flash to make not implementing it viable...

If they hadn't added canvas/video etc to HTML and there was no way to do half the things flash did, it would have been trumped by Android and their mobile flash player.
"The Russians, for example, believe in putting large amounts of time and resources into testing so that the systems are robust." - I wonder if India's attitude will change when they will become capable of designing and funding manned missions.
If you find yourself often having to manually access the console on a production system, clearly something in your testing and deployment methodology is horribly wrong.
I'd also appreciate an invite. Thanks!
Sure, I wasn't saying not to use Erlang. Just saying that it is very possible to use threads and pointers in a sane (and Erlang-style) way.

I am a big fan of interpreted languages and use them as my default. The situation I was describing was basically the only time I've ever rewritten in C++ for speed! It just doesn't happen that often.

But I do wish the interpreted languages like Python, node.js, and Erlang all had better and more consistent C APIs (more like Lua's). C itself is not that hard, but the C APIs definitely put people off.

Actually I wonder for Erlang, with the web crawler example, would you have to copy entire web pages if you wanted to pass them off from a "network actor" to a "parsing actor"? The threads + pointers solution easily avoids that, while retaining modularity.
The "news" takeaway from this is for those of us who are fathers to young children, we can still involve our children in our work, be actively involved in their lives, and still be incredibly successful. I know I'm guilty of sometimes thinking my kids "get in the way" of my career. This is an excellent post for setting us straight, thank you for this. I need to be reminded of this once in a while!
If you want to develop web pages, don't do Erlang. If you want to do web services, do Erlang. I've used both Ruby (Rails) and Python (trying to do concurrency with tornado, greenlets, gevent) and they just fell flat. You can do it, but it is incredibly messy and unstable (because there's so much work involved).

In Erlang, you would typically answer a web request in a new actor every time. Just as in Rails, running for example N number of threads serving one request each. Of course, in Erlang that number of actors can vary, which means your system will be more responsive and you'll have lower average latency. However, what differs mostly, is that in Erlang all those actors live inside one VM and you can have central actors managing things, collecting statistics, keeping global state, talking to databases / other services. This, I think, is the core strength of Erlang compared conventional single threaded / GIL systems.

A more concrete example would be to dynamically show the current request rate on a web page. You can just create an actor that gets a message from any other actor once they handle a request, and keeps track of how many such messages per second arrive. Then when rendering that web page, you just ask that actor for it's current value. Simple, beautiful, dynamic. No need for a database or any other central storage.
Combine the Flappy Bird cloning trend with the Bitcoin cloning trend and start FlappyCoin.
... If you have arbitrary memory access on the browser's machine, your site's password is screwed no matter what you do, and that is very much not the most interesting thing to be done with that access.

Your session management / CSRF token will take care of replay attacks without you having to worry about integrating that into your login page. If your sessions aren't secure against replays they can be replayed after the login anyhow.
The fact that some people use the language in a vague or unspecific manner does not invalidate English's suitability as a language for writing specs.

I doubt I've ever used "tomorrow" in a spec. I'd use "next business day" or "T+1" (with the calendar defined).

In my experience, writing a spec is an iterative process, where the developers review a draft of the spec and make comments, ask questions, point out ambiguity, etc., which provides the feedback for the next version off the spec. That process loops until everyone is happy, at which point the spec (or, at least, a portion of it) is finalised and the developers start work.
Well not everyone has a smartphone, and even then not all smartphone support RFID. So you'd need some sort of backup RFID container, maybe add in a photo to add another layer of security, and hey, how about for convenience we make it a badge? :)
"are you trying to tell me that NASA doesn't have access to previous mission failure insights" - even before that: https://xkcd.com/984/
Added my email, thanks for letting me know.
Most people who accept a counteroffer leave within 6-12 months. It's generally accepted at least within sysadmins (maybe not so much progammers or engineers) that a counteroffer makes a 'train your replacement' work situation.
> "Client-side rending (such as Angular/Backbone/etc) really shine when you need a web application (not web site)."

This, 1000x over. I have static landing pages and about pages for search engines, but the app itself is a single page Angular app. The data does not have to be indexed.
Yes, Erlang has a "share nothing" concurrency model. You would need to send the data over to another process. There is one exception, which would come into play here, and that is binary data. Normal Erlang data ("Erlang terms") such as lists, tuples, strings, integers etc. are always copied, but binary data (raw binary data, but often representing string data) is just referenced. If you download a web page, you'd save the whole content as a binary, send it over to the other actor (and it would feel just as being "copied" because there is no difference compared to the other data types). Under the hood, Erlang would just pass the reference and handle everything for you (reference counting, garbage collection etc.).

Also, when you split, or reference sub binaries, these become just pointers into the original binary data.
Absolutely not. It is important to understand that, even though it might seem different from the outside, the German political elite believes they are doing "the right thing". The problem is that, even though evidence to the contrary is mounting, they are intellectually invested in what they advocate so much now that a change of course has to be forced on them.

Nobody here (except some far-right fringe people) is talking of a return to the D-Mark and I'd even say that no government would survive it. If things got so bad that the EU takes serious damage (for instance abolishing the Euro) and it was obvious that Merkel and her deputies were responsible, they would be kicked out of office.

Here is why: If I may generalize about "the Germans" again, you must understand that our history is burned into our memory, not only because we repeatedly visit it in school, but also because nobody's family was left untouched by the war, the other war and the guilt.

Most people here see the unification of Europe as the only possible way to "break the spell" of perpetual war. And yes, the primary concern is still war, not economics or free trade or all that other stuff growing on top.

Consider this: While it is perfectly possible that a handfull of equally-sized states can coexist peacefully with each other for quite some time, the moment that there is a war, there will always be a next war. I mean 1971 gives us 1914 gives us 1939 and then bam! Irrevocably wedded to France, peace for 70 years. This is how the EU is seen here.

Even if you might find it unlikely that the quasi-demilitarized Germany of today would participate or even start a war, look at what's going on in Hungary. That shit could eventually boil over and start igniting if the EU doesn't get its act together.

And even there we have the perpetual war machine! The current problems of Hungary are largely entangled with how Hungary was partitioned up after ... WWI.

EDIT: I might add that I personally am a somewhat extreme adherent of "the European Idea". However, my descirption of how the EU is percieved as the guarantee for peace does hold for the general population. Interesingly, most young people don't even realize how fragile (and young!) the EU still is.
It's sad that recursion is considered dangerous. Tail calls have been known about for a very long time, and the duality between stack and heap for just about as long.
Yet another request for invite... please?
Our founders said that the legitimacy of government comes from the consent of the governed. Vox populi est vox dei. So why do we continue to consent to a government that sets up an economic system that ensures that plutocrats can behave badly and get away with it? I'm talking about cases like Dick Fuld, where he drove his firm into bankruptcy, nearly upended the entire American investment banking system, and still walked away with millions upon millions of dollars. I'm talking about cases like Jon Corzine's, where there was outright fraud -- M. F. Global was mixing its own proprietary money with its customers', which is fraudulent -- and nobody went to jail.

I'm not even talking about solutions. I think talking about solutions is entirely premature at this point. We haven't even identified the problem yet. Why do a significant fraction of Americans vote against their own economic best interests, even when they know that their vote is harming them?
Wesela Kraków w Dworze Staropolskim
China's Zheng He fleets generally hugged the coast through Singapore, all the way around to Tanzania. That took them a long way, but Columbus went directly into the vast unknown. If China had tried what Columbus had...

* the Pacific ocean is twice as wide as the Atlantic (I don't know anything about wind patterns here)

* the Rockies are a lot more difficult than the Appalachians to get a military force with supply lines over

* the Europeans on the East Coast can sail around Florida and up the Mississippi to attack or defend it, whereas the Panana Canal needed to be built first for the Chinese to benefit in this way

* China didn't have "military inclination" because it was surround by SW dense forests, the Tianshan mountains in the west, desert in the north, and ocean elsewhere. They certainly ruled Korea when they had they chance, took over Xinjiang through the passage, South China, and the southwest when they could.
I just refactored some code yesterday, I feel pretty confident, I'd love to know what they think :P Though my app is just some silly ruby code, not a realtime human life critical C embedded software.