skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inciminated comment: https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/748#issuecomment-374...

> if you'd like Mercury language detection on GitHub then with the current implementation of Linguist you need to pick a different (unique as Objective-C already defines this) primary_extension and add .m to the extensions array which will force Linguist into using the other detection methods mentioned above.
We can assume the plane was half-loaded (after hours of flight, the fuel should be mostly used up, so the passengers+cargo remain as freight).

The point is (as I wrote one post further down): you'll need a ~1.5km-2km long runway to get the plane down in one piece or with everyone alive (depends on what you actually want with that plane). And that is what smells here. Something like this (or even setting up a 2km landing strip broad enough to allow a Boeing to land!) would definitely not go unnoticed.
What about shadow profiles?

On a bigger note - does it bother anyone that almost every privacy discussion has come to "who is lesser evil"? Kinda like politics ("we can't find a good candidate, so we are voting for the least bad candidate")
You cannot put a number on crazy.
All these "we think it went that way!" and then a short while later "no it didn't, it might've went that way!" articles in the news are almost facepalm-worthy. I'm not one to believe in most conspiracy theories, but it really makes me wonder if they already know what happened to the plane but just want to stretch this process out for some reason...
There are a series of topics that TV shows love to go over, unsolved mysteries. What happened to Amelia Earhart? How about that Navy flight that took off and disappeared?

I think we're now seeing, in realtime, another one of these stories begin. Very interesting.

I have a simple question that I haven't seen addressed anywhere: assuming that somebody on the plane left their cell phone on and forgot to turn it off, or that somebody tried to use their phone in-flight, wouldn't there be a record on the ground cell towers of that particular phone's SID "pinging" the tower as the plane flew overhead? Might be something to look into.
> My esoteric programming language isn't properly supported by the popular kids' web tool that I'm likely not even paying to use in the first place. I'm OUTRAGED!

Yep, seems about right.
In our company we use plain TXT files with an agreed formatting between the team mates.

We have the plain TXT files stored in dropbox shared location.

Easy, slick, cost 0, and accessible by search through OSX Spotlight. Also, we don't depend on third parties (we can move disconnect from dropbox at any time)
An airbag weighs 10 lbs max, usually 5-8 lbs. Anybody who removes this for "performance" or "fuel savings" is a blithering idiot who should not be allowed near a motor vehicle.
I'm sure it's a great learning exercise, but I've built enough CRUD applications as 'toy' projects without adding another! I'm not stuck for portfolio content, so I need to focus my time on generating business.

Not reinventing the wheel this time, but thanks anyway! :-)
Nobody's arguing that GitHub shouldn't prioritize popular languages. I don't think that the responses to this pull request show 'prioritization' however, they show incompetence and close-mindedness instead.
Stealing a plane with 237 people on board is a great story but no version that I have read address the question of how you prevent every one of those 237 people from texting about it?

Even if you're willing to kill them all it takes some time that they could use to try and make some sort of signal.

This plane fell into the sea and we'll find it eventually. The sea is vast.
The fact that technically, the information may be available at exactly the same time to everybody doesn't make it right (and is it really, or does the guy who initiated it get the info just a bit earlier?). What's happening is that you have a whole industry spinning its wheels to be just a little bit ahead of everybody else. This is a zero sum game. Either the other traders have to build the same kind of extremely fast systems which is just money wasting, or the high frequency traders get to skim off their profit. This is of no benefit to anybody except the high frequency traders, hence why this law was invented.
To me, the major difference is that the Java solution gives you one solution. The Go solutions gives you the building blocks.

The latter has the advantage you get to recompose the system in new ways, yielding greater flexibility.

In Java, a better compositional framework is probably Erik Meijer's et.al's RxJava. Haskell also provides better compositionality due to it's functional structure and lazy evaluation semantics.
Okay, but the automatically updating comments view is pretty cool. I didn't know Github did that. That is pretty awesome.
I thought it was supposed to have flown over the sea?
I don't get it - why is a bunch of people trolling the github project with fairly irrelevant arguments interesting? Could someone who upvoted this explain the logic?
Then, no "oh yeah, we blew up" confessions from terrorists or ransom demands either.

Maybe terrorists are just getting smarter. The uncertainty surrounding this incident has captured the world's attention in a way that yet another extremist hijacking would not. If someone truly wanted to cause terror among the flying public in a jaded post-9/11 world, this was the way to do it.

In fact, it is somewhat curious that none of these organizations have taken advantage of the uncertainty and stepped forward to claim responsibility, even if they had nothing to do with it. Surely there are many groups that would love to take credit for it. Perhaps they are playing the long game.
Rocket just launched an EU competitor to Homejoy (YC S10)
If you hijack a plane odds are high that you screw up everything and crash.
I think I read a different interpretation of your original post than you suggested, but I think you have the wrong emphasis, to the point of distraction. You talked about the "'reputation' of a particular college or university" when you probably meant "'reputation' of a specific degree program for producing graduates with the training needed for a specialized field."

This is a much more constrained and much less actionable qualifier.

To express it in more words, I thought in your original statement you were saying something like "Harvard has a good overall reputation so a 3.25 from there is better than a 3.75 from a school with a (sufficiently) lower reputation, all else being equal."

Now you're saying something like "Missouri University of Science and Technology's EE program has a good reputation in vacuum power engineering, so someone with a 3.25 from that program is better than a 3.75 from the EE program at Harvard, all else being equal, if you need someone with vacuum power engineering skills."

I assumed you implied an "all else being equal", because it's meaningless to say that someone with a music degree from Stanford is a great hire when you're looking for someone to work with x-ray crystallography, just because Stanford has a great biophysics program with lots of world-famous x-ray crystallography work being done there.

No, I think you should be saying "if you have two candidates, both with EE degrees and similar coursework, then the reputation of their corresponding EE programs should also be factor, and not just GPA."

But your scenario just now has the student from XYZ (the better school) also taking more courses in the specific field of interest, while the person from ABC only took a single pro-forma course.

So I'll invert it. Let's say that student X from college ABC, which has a second quartile ranking as an EE program, graduates with triple major in EE (with a focus in analog chip design), physics, and English, with a 3.75 GPA.

While student A from college XYZ (which has the best analog chip design training reputation in the world), graduates with an English degree with a 3.25 GPA, and a EE minor, with a single analog circuits class. (Student A came in thinking to be a EE grad, then in sophomore year switched to English.)

Who would you rather hire - the student with a higher GPA and with more training and interest, but from a lesser reputation program, or the student with a lower GPA and not much interest or training, but from the school with the higher reputation program?

BTW, the hiring manager is not in a 'prisoner's dilemma situation'. That requires two people who can make a choice, where the payoff matrix depends on both choices, but there's only one here. The scenario you describe is much closer to the FUD of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment."
From my reading of the issue it seems that he's complaining about a limitation of the tool Linguist. There's a suggested fix that doesn't, as far as I can tell, involve changing how Inferno code is written. My understanding is that primary_extension is simply used to short circuit analysis when it's unique to a language. In this case if the primary extension was .inferno and .m was in other extensions it seems that the sample code would be used by the classifier to distinguish between inferno, MATLAB, and obj-c.

To me this comes off as assuming the worst intentions on behalf of the github developers.
Said often and probably false. Neither frp nor dataflow are very expressive. Probably something still imperative but more reactive is the future.
Assuming you have lots of storage space, instead of drop you could just copy the table across to the archive. Similarly with dropped fields' previous versions, and created fields' current versions in the case of a rollback. But then you will also need to have the logic to create those fields for new rows.

It's just easier to have forwards-only changes.
Small part of Russia wants to live in a free liberal society but major part says we want to live in a gang-totalitarian terrarium headed by the KGB agent.

Those who have courage to protest on the Bolotnaya square say we want to have free media and have a right to protest but zombied people say we want to be slaves.

Zombied slaves don't want to have alternative media and don't want to think because Putin's propaganda does this for them.

These guys consider all countries around to be their enemies who want to destroy Russia. Why? Because all criticism which is really worth attention (poverty, HIV, abuse of basic human rights, the president who does his 3rd term, invasion to Georgia, Ukraine etc) they say to be an attempt to damage their declining country.

So guys, it is your choice.

Even if people read Hacker News, Silicon Valley will never come to Russia because innovations can't exist in a prison-styled country where semi-military illegal cossaks scourge young girls without mercy. This means your people will never be rich. Of course except your small elite made its weals selling resources and slavery workforce.

And FYI Wiki definition of Liberalism:

Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Liberals [...] generally they support ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property
If A is the event that x is causing y, and B is the event that x and y are correlated, what you are essentially saying is that P(both A and B) > P(A)P(B). There is nothing about the world that makes this statement correct without further assumptions.
Also, this is untrue. Omgrofl is supported on GitHub, even if nobody uses it.
I get this. I can't make out what it's supposed to be.

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what, then, is the point of the primary_extension field?

EDIT: or as I like to yell at Github for Windows when it can't revert out of a merge conflict "WHAT IS EVEN THE POINT OF YOU?!"
flywaydb is not even as good as pure SQL scripts. It is mainly designed to be a forward-only tool. I honestly doubt anyone with some database background would recommend it.
Anti-Pi Rant, 3/14/14
I don't really care about Limbo, but GitHub seems to think my .m files are all M(UMPS) files, and not Matlab files, the most obvious choice. Highly annoying.
I don't do rollback statements for non reversible operations either, but for some things like adding/renaming columns or adding/dropping indices it usually works fine.
The rant linked to appears to misunderstand the problem and the workaround. @arfon admits there's what amounts to a design bug in Linguist, and so to identify ".m" files, you have to identify a different extension as the "primary" and put the real extension into the "alternate" list. That's a hacky workaround, but it would make the pull request work.

The alternative is to fix the design issue. But that's going to be a lot harder and require more than a few days.
Logitech K120. It replaced a Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600 which looked nice but had small function keys that were awkward to use.
Probably if the classifier can't determine the language, it will fall back to the primary_extension field - as it should, if the classifier can't determine if a .m file is objc or mercury, it should and will default to objc.

Classification is never 100% accurate.

EDIT: Exact method that it is used is reported here: https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/748#issuecomment-374...
That's a good point, but there was nothing in Javascript that was exceptionally better at event driven programming compared to other languages: probably the reverse actually, because of the lack of constructs to carry state.
> My understanding is that primary_extension is simply used to short circuit analysis when it's unique to a language.

No, the primary_extension is only used in a gists_helper.rb file outside the Linguist repos. Note that the feature is deprecated anyway.

https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...
Phusion Passenger(https://www.phusionpassenger.com/) supports Node.
More likely a lack of time. If you'd like to see it fixed, start contributing to the fix.
DigitalOcean need to get their technical side up to scratch. Still not having IPv6 at this point makes them a total joke, and the security issues around host keys and VM deletion seem amateurish. My main issue with them, and a reason I wouldn't use them even with the IPv6 issue fixed, however, is the censorship on-demand for the owners' friends.
this strategy is ineffective with the transaction tax. it should be obvious why.

the whale is normally a pension fund or some other institutional investor that doesn't have the resources of an hft. that means they get burned.

I find it somewhat amusing that you're assuming that the rest of the market needs to be protected from the pensioners by Goldman Sachs.
CoreOS Monitoring
> In fact, it is somewhat curious that none of these organizations have taken advantage of the uncertainty and stepped forward to claim responsibility, even if they had nothing to do with it.

Yeah, that struck me too. Especially since the murder of Osama bin Laden, I'd thought Al-Qaeda could use another big-profile terror case attributed to them, and this is the perfect solution for their PR problems...
As someone pointed out in the mailing list thread about this, OSM's ODbL is closer to LGPL than GPL in terms of the strictness of it's share-alike requirements and its virality.
HN discussion from some months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012254
I Shall Tear Out the Spleen of Steve Jobs' Reanimated Undead Corpse
Couldn't whoever was piloting the plane act like they were still going to the right destination and then land them in a place where none of their phones have connection? Then it wouldn't be a problem to slowly move all the hostages to a holding area or something. Of course I don't think this was the case but it would be an explanation of why there has been no text messages etc if this were to happen.
It's just a design error in the original implementation where linguist assumes that the "primary_extension" for any particular language will be unique among all primary_extensions. Obviously that was a mistake, but that's where we are. The comment that set people off was perhaps poorly worded, but it was an honest suggestion to work around the design bug.
Well if those were annual payments it might be profitable spread over the whole year (my visual integration skills can't quite tell) and there should be another massive spike just about to start as all those people renew their subscriptions.
I’ve been in the programming trenches since early 90’s fluent in 5 languages at the production level and have to say I have never heard of the language 'Limbo’. I don’t fault GitHub one bit.

I suppose I could Google it and act like I know… naw
Everyone who pays for DMA is on the same multicast feed.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by linkbaits.

People will read whatever "new" about the plane is there. They will read the new, the correction, and the new correct version the correction, and the ... If your newspaper don't publish today's version, the people will go to another paper to read it.

To solve the problem, you must find a business model where the newspapers are rewarded for publishing correct information, and not the most recent gossip.
Cigarette-box-sized GSM/radio jammers, dead cheap and you can disguise them e.g. as a gaming console, replacement battery pack or such.

Additionally, a radio jammer could explain why there were no other radio comms from that plane, except the satellite uplink of the plane GSM picocell and the sat uplink of the engine MCU.
The NSA is no longer a credible source.
Sorry to hear L-1 was unsuccessful for you. Care to share what the eventual denial reason was?
I had the same exact thought. It might be that this graph represents month-by-month net income, rather than something like Net MRR. Perhaps the spike represents a large number of sign-ups for annual plans (it seems like his standard plan is $24/year) in a short period, which means he should see the same spike next year upon renewal (minus his churned customers, of course).

It might be that if he "pro-rated" the monthly payments for his annual accounts as $2/month payments for the future 12 months, he is net positive right now. It's hard for me to tell by eye from the graph, but it's probably close.
Exactly. If people renew there should be another peak about now. I have been happy with Newsblur so I have just renewed my subscription.
I corrected my remark above. They did not ban all Russian language channels, only some of them.
And to solve that problem, you must find an alternate societal mindset.
Academic social network aids debunking of stem cell research
Live stream now – Using Google Tools for your Startup on CampusEDU
Watch the LIVE stream of @campuslondon EDU on Google tools for your startup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQdSKwEVH-g
Also annoying is the news reporting dozens of "officials are not ruling out ______". Really? Officials are not ruling out a model that they have no data against but has higher than 0% chance of occurring?
Try
https://www.vtiger.com/open-source/

open source so you can install it on your own box or sign up to one of their plans.
Portable GSM/CDMA/3G jammers are dirt cheap.
The Era of Facebook is an Anomaly
I don't quite get what is he trying to communicate here. The graph shows that there was some profit during the last summer but since then the income has failed to pay for the expenses. The text reads partially like a post-mortem of a failed project, partially like that of a success. Is he happy or not?

For the record, I'm a happy NewsBlur subscriber and will definitely renew my subscription.
I've corrected my comment. Not all Russian language news were banned.

Still, it seems Ukrainian government is also trying to censor some news sources.
Why I Wrote the Sucker Punch Gem
Do you mean, a fix like https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/985?
To be honest I don't stand as often as I thought I would. I have no set schedule, just moods. I will stand usually for no more than 1-2 hours at a time (once or twice a day) and find I can only stand for work that does not require deep thought. If I am just coding some normal stuff, researching, responding to emails - all those type things are easy. If I need to really focus on big picture architectural plans (decision with big long term repercussions) then I find myself wanting to sit down for that. Not sure why, just me.
A lack of time doesn't cause problems with multiple languages that only use the trivial ".m" extension. Bad design does.

Luckily I use languages popular enough to be classified correctly.
A VPS host should have no business censoring "trolls".
Exactly! Phillip Lopate has a short chapter on "research" in "To Show and to Tell," and describes his way of researching like this:

"Here the creative nonfiction writer can follow the journalists' lead. Being trained generalists—that is to say, quick studies who can leap opportunistically on intriguing vignettes and facts, give them a vivid twist, and forget the rest—veteran journalists know that they don't have to become specialists, they just have to absorb enough of the material under scrutiny this week or month to file an interesting story. When you are researching, what you are looking for, subconsciously or not, is the oddity that will spark your imagination—not necessarily the most important detail, but the one that will excite your love of paradox or sense of humor."

This kind of "opportunistic" reading is discredited throughout this HN thread as "not real reading." I get the point—it's not the same as reading carefully, reverently, leisurely. It's a workaday tactic, it's somewhat impious. But for me it's a wonderful and even liberating way to work with texts.
The era of Facebook is an anomaly. The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being.
How long has this been available? And what are the prices, would love to learn more.
>I hope that founders of startups will consider forming their companies in SA

Which makes me wonder: can businesses use Google Fiber? I was under the impression it's a consumer-only service.

Would they allow servers not for personal usage for startups?

(I really hope more startups appear in cities where many households have Gigabit connections. I can't wait to see what could be done with fast Internet access.)
The fact that none of the countries in the region want to disclose the capabilities of their defence systems isn't helping: http://my.news.yahoo.com/distrust-adding-malaysian-jet-confu...
Pair Programming – Expectation vs Reality
This story desperately needs some sort of map or chart.
Few passengers would notice if the plane changed course during flight and if they did, they would have no cell phone connection anyways. While up in air, all devices could be collected from the passengers. When the plane landed (on land) and the passengers had signals again, all of these devices would have had to be destroyed so that they didn't connect to the local cell towers.

But I think you are right that the plane fell into the sea.
You should not build a product before being sure there's a market for it. Even if "it's just 200 lines codes". Scope creep is a real thing.
Make them fall asleep by reducing cabin pressure while you fly with an oxygen mask.

edit - yes, I did nick this from "The Langoliers"
I don't think you know what you're talking about

A GPS jammer will do absolutely nothing to a plane. Edit: A GSM jammer, even less

A "radio jammer"? For what frequency? For what range? VHF, HF?