skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know that it's rare, but I've experienced it a number of times. I think the key to it is 'low-level'. To avoid the big step of firing someone, they 'promote' them to a position where they are considered mostly harmless. Of course, they forget that over time things change, people leave, etc., and this low-level person ends up getting to a position where they can wield their stupidity in a damaging way.
Agreed. I had to implement base64 encoding to pass data through JSON, yeah it works but seems terribly wasteful.
I think the tough part would be making the transition onto mobile, and integrating the SMS/calling aspect into it. Yes, you've got the brand with MSN Messenger, but expanding that takes a vision of communications that I don't know MS had c.2009 when they would've needed to launch.
> It's text-based, meaning it's incredibly slow to parse.

This is precisely the reason it is used so heavily. Easily readable format to reason about. And incredibly slow is a pretty relative term, when you're waiting on database calls or doing other complex logic that is orders of magnitude slower, who cares how "slow" json parsing is.

> It has to be valid UTF-8, meaning it's incredibly slow to validate.

I think being able to embed all sorts of different characters and languages is, again a plus. See argument above about performance.

> Its numbers representation is double-precision floating-point, meaning it's incredibly imprecise and limited.

This argument I don't get. I'm pretty sure I might be missing something, but in my experience you can just put a plain old integer and any parser in any language will extract as an exact integer. Nobody is converting a "1" in json into a double/float. Maybe somebody can elaborate and what the author might have actually meant?

So, really, the argument all boils down to, it's slow and wasteful. Well, while that's true I think it's pretty much been established time and time again that Moore's law has made it possible to value programmer time over CPU overhead, to a reasonable extent (i.e. if the overhead you're adding overtakes Moore's law and makes infrastructure particularly expensive). If you have a format that is human readable, easy to understand, and simple, that helps tremendously in software development and it would take order of magnitude performance hits to really make it bad tradeoff (and even the, if you weren't getting a lot of traffic, who would care?), not just 2x or 3x.

We live in a web based world, and that world is fundamentally based on a text based protocol (http) and text based messaging formats. There are plenty of valid and good reasons why it happened the way it did.

*Final Note: I would like to see some empirical evidence to compare the wasted CPU cycles and energy that JSON uses compared to if all messages were sent with msgpack or something like it instead. While my own inclination is that number would be dwarfed by the overall energy used in computation I would prefer to see evidence rather then conjecture if you're going to make a point like that.
Here the reasons why i use JSON:

* It's text-based, meaning it's readable and easy to parse.

* It has to be valid UTF-8, no hassle with other formats.

* Its numbers representation is double-precision floating-point, i can choose what i want.

Who cares? Use what you want and what solves your problem at the best way.
Rails is plenty fast - for application development. And a well-designed rails app, appropriately tuned, can be suitable for all but the highest volume loads.

This rails bashing is becoming a cliché, so here's another one - use the right tool for the job. I've worked on rails projects happily serving 100req/sec with the servers running at 20% load. I've got friends who work on J2EE sites which take 10 seconds to render a page after the app server's done talking to all its zillion little useless ESB friends. Is ruby faster than compiled java?

I currently work on a combined rails/node site - we use a rails API to feed a node-served front end. Works beautifully. Why is the API using rails? Because in my opinion, rails is far more mature, and one rails API dev can keep up with three node front end devs. Would the decision be the same if speed and efficiency on the server was of topmost priority? Probably not, but it wasn't. Hell, the DB is the performance bottleneck anyway.

I have nothing against node and will probably use it in an upcoming project where server effiency is the topmost priority but geeze, right tool for the job!

And another point, while I'm ranting - I am coming to see node as the obvious choice for consumer (free) and rails as the obvious choice for B2B/SAAS (paid). Why? Because hyper-effiency is much more important for the former to keep cost per user down. With B2B, if you've got so many paying customers you need another rails server, you throw a party!

Oh, and even the node devs I know deploy using capistrano. There's that right tool for the job thing again.
Can you elaborate why this "sucked hard"? Hiring your boss can be a lot better than just being handed one, after all. It sounds like the company was growing quickly and running into organizational issues because of it, makes sense they might be looking to hire some people with more experience than any 25 is likely to be able to offer.

Or did you mean you were hoping for a Valve style structure, and they weren't going there?
Are you an actual person with a brain?
Ask HN: What are your favorite quotes?
Here are some of mine:

I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that don't work

Failing does not mean you are a failure. It just means you have not succeeded yet

I see the glass half full than half empty

Aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among stars

Impossible = I-m-Possible

Money is not everything. But make sure you make enough of it before talking such nonsense

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. They don't expect to be paid back

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire

Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing

The best angle from which to approach any problem is the try-angle

2 things in life are certain: Death & taxes. Everything else is upto you.
The site is blocked in UAE.
I'm not sure why someone would attack GitHub. Extortion? But aren't there more valuable targets? Showing off their botnet, perhaps? These attacks seem frequent.
Why isn't there an AWS EC2 AMI of this?
Its a true statement. I have personally evaluated almost every DDoS solution (either by looking at reports on how well they fared often posted on HN, or by having sites I regularly use go down because the solution they bought failed them), and I ended up going with Centarra because they're the only ones that don't have a history of failure.
If its a Linux Desktop alot of the time its just the X session that is frozen. Ctrl ALT F2 and sudo killall X will simply restart X
"It's not a failure, I learned something" - Why the heck you didn't learn it before ?!
Awesome, we have a multiplayer version, a bot version, a terminal version,
what's next?
Who's gonna make the flappy bird version?
I'm not going to lie... reading that list (and I agree with a lot of it) just makes me sad. I honestly don't know whether we can tackle that many large, important countries. Sure, they're a democracy, but it seems that those who care about this specific type of freedom aren't a majority...

I guess educating those around us and exercising our right to vote and protest (the latter is also coming under fire, at least here in Australia; while the reasoning behind the new law in Melbourne is a sound one, it will have ripple effects and abuse potential. Hell, just look at Queensland where I live back when Joh Bjelke-Petersen violently breaking up peaceful protests in 1971!) and attempt to turn the tide.
the term 'post-socialist' is generally termed 'communist'.

Allendes Chile was actually relatively moderate in its socialism, in the sense that he was a radical reformist rather than a revolutionary.

I agree, however, that there was a great potential for something much more dramatic (ie, a true decentralised communist planning) within the cybersyn project.
You mean lose data after it's been committed. I can send something to the database just as it's dying and it's been lost.
And EFF "happened" to find out about that just in the midst of Ukraine crisis. How fitting.
A Visual Representation of Python's Grammar – Flowchart
I hope so too. I'll probably stick with NewsBlur because I'm happy enough with it, and because I can't be bothered to find something better.
Having seen this happen recently, usually the bad manager always has a good excuse to give your employees are leaving (from there was no bonus to people don't like the color of the office), which masks the problem for a while.
...I don't want to look at binary data responses

I've always found this pretty semantic. Obviously tool support for reading ascii or UTF-8 encoded text is very strong, but it's all binary, so it's a question of tools. I do find JSON the most palatable of the text-encoded formats, but I'd adore it if a solid binary replacement gained favor. Unfortunately I think a lot of the protocols that have had pretty good energy behind them (pbuffers, thrift, hessian, etc.) end up either going the compiled-stubs route ,or bundle RPC, or both.

I'd really like to see a binary protocol with solid type support (please God, let it define a built-in datetime) that can be written and read dynamically (without a header file/stub).
You have to translate your strings to binaries before you try to encode to JSON. A JSON encoder has no way of determining whether it should be encoding an array or a string without this. Instead of one string type, you have "strings" and <<"strings">>, and due to the lack of typing, it is actually pretty tough to keep track of which one you have. It also is an exercise in finger acrobatics to <<>> all your strings.

JSON doesn't solve every problem. It does solve the problem, quite elegantly, of creating a 'endianless' interchange format that is easily consumed, constructed, and debugged.
That reasons exists since a decade with emails. And did we change the system ? No, because it is simple and it work.
To add to your point, it's also important to match the manager's character and personality to the role. I have a friend who's a great manager for entry-level folks because he can rally everyone around his vision and he has enough domain knowledge to help with a huge number of tasks when the team doesn't know much. However, as soon as his employees get a few years of experience and want independence, they tend to get frustrated and leave.

He's really successful in his situation, but he's not the one you'd have leading a high-performance team of experts.
That doesn't contradict the parent's comment. In Facebook's hands that future cashflow may be significantly large than in Microsoft's.

Also in a case such as this the value of the investment is the difference between the expected future cashflow of Facebook alone and the combination of Facebook and Whatsapp (as ownership of Whatsapp may increase cashflow at the original Facebook part both through removal of competition and also driving usage).
Well, regardless of the specification, most JSON deserializers approximate numeric values as floats, at least in the default configuration. Enough so, that the Bitcoin exchange JSON-APIs I know of all put numbers in strings. So `{"balance": "12.65334221", "currency": "BTC"}` instead of `{"balance": 12.65334221, "currency": "BTC"}`. It would easily be pretty catastrophic if there are any rounding errors in your currency calculations, and if the bug arises already in your JSON deserializer it might be hard to detect even if your program internally employs BigNums (arbitrary precision) or such.
Point taken.

But it's got a $5b a year budget which is pretty small in the biotech world. It's even worse when you consider that 42% of it is grant money. So my statement isn't quite right, but in my opinion, still close to right. Maybe 70% true.

http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/budget_planning_leg/plan-2013...

http://obf.cancer.gov/financial/factbook.htm

Inflation adjusted NASA's budget during the Apollo program was $30 billion a year or so. And that was in a realm that's better understood.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should start spending $50 billion or $100 billion a year on cancer research. But I would argue that it might take that kind of investment to really move the needle in a meaningful way and provide enough good paying opportunities for nerds to get them interested.

Thanks for the link though, even if it makes me look a little dumb.
I checked the console and it has to do with HTTPS. When I try to use Squirt on a HTTPS site I get this error in the console: "[blocked] The page at 'https://medium.com/p/cad4a8df73cf' was loaded over HTTPS, but ran insecure content from 'http://www.squirt.io/bm/squirt.js': this content should also be loaded over HTTPS."
The number of exclusively layer 7 attacks we've seen since beginning this project is basically zero.

I'm happy that for you that you don't see these attacks, because I can tell you that we see Layer 7 DDoS attacks frequently, but perhaps just go read HN story #1 about the Github DDoS.
What about S-Expressions? My electronics CAD program recently switched to using it for footprint and layout files and I am very happy about it. It looks like this in text: https://github.com/KiCad/Footprint_Symbols.pretty/blob/maste...
What would this offer over the official version other than "doesn't take up a tab in MobileSafari" (which could be fixed if the developer just added the right meta tags)?
If you only have one hand, just press the power button.
and it was only a couple of months ago that BRAF and MEK combo therapies were FDA approved... after decades of melanoma being a diagnosis without a lot of hope, the last couple of years have seen some really amazing advances.
However, there are cases where the "detain" button appears even though the person is following the rules (the cases I can think of are where the person's name or appearance has changed, but they pass the fingerprint test)
"sync; sync; sync; shutdown -r now"

I remember some sort of magic invocation like that years ago for our medical "device" product we had to manage hundreds of remote node instances of. Something along those lines. I don't remember why the developer (Gabe) came up with sync three times being magic number. Maybe three times was just paranoia. =)
Some important differences:
* the first step is explicitly 1 + 2 = 3 (which you mentioned), 1+1 and 2+2 do NOT add
* You move all tiles a single space at once, rather than 'to the edge'. Note tiles only merge when they push together, so an edge or other cards restricting their movement. This is a side effect design decision of single space moving. I do not know if two pairs will merge, e.g. will 3 + 3 + 6 + 6 leave 6 + 12? I suspect it will, but I haven't seen it.
* Numbers 1 and 2 both spawn, and there is a 'next number' indicator, although placement still appears random. (A 3 spawned in the tutorial, but I think that was a special case)

Overall this leads to a very different feel to the game.

Anything else I missed?
Forget Mt. Gox. Here are the 5 Bitcoin exchanges you can bank on
As far as I know your only options now are the GSA or Google Site Search. The mini is on Google's incredibly long list of discontinued products and services.
Siberian scientists announce they now have high chance to clone woolly mammoth
Unfortunately there may not be a "good" reason. It's not hard for me to imagine that someone could do it for kicks, or perhaps to test some new attack vectors against a reasonably hardened target.
s-expressions (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?XmlIsaPoorCopyOfEssExpressions) are another option. Even people who prefer JSON recognize the advantages: http://irreal.org/blog/?p=713
The Guardian: Load testing web applications for free
JSON decoders decode string to binaries.

https://github.com/talentdeficit/jsx

Erlang has been receiving and sending data. It just like to deal well defined binary messages and it likes to encode/decode them into its own representations (records, terms) at the boundary where they come in and leave the system.
Which might be part of why Gates is getting more involved again.
Yes but once you do have an account, I would say its the best file sync platform available. It never downloads the files until you click on them however it always displays all your files. No initial sync time and no taking up space for files you will never use. Its also safer because the majority of your files are never stored locally.
Stay away from Rogue then -- I spent way too much time in grad school on that one!
> I don't want to look at binary data responses.

I keep seeing this but having looked at hundred megabyte large JSON objects or XML files, some might as well be binary to my eyes.
There's still some kind of enterprise messenger that Microsoft sells. I don't remember the name of it, but I've seen it very recently in several organizations.
The thing is that JSON doesn't actually require or otherwise specify UTF-8. A JSON encoding is defined as a sequence of unicode codepoints: it doesn't actually tell you how to send those over the wire. You have to do that yourself, and specify the encoding out of band somehow.

If JSON did actually specify UTF-8 and provided a sensible escape mechanism for the whole of unicode, this would be an improvement, because it would turn JSON into an actual standard data-exchange format, rather than a textual encoding of its infoset.
The thing is EFF article heading is misleading. These listed websites are not "major independent news sites". And they never been. When it comes to independent news sources, Russia uses a lot of newsru.com, lenta.ru, utro.ru, none of those blocked. Besides livejournal.com works from Russia as usual. Serve it from open public proxy in Novosibirsk and see for yourself.
It is sad EFF became a channel for demonization of Russian public image these days.
> The only three formats I've found so far that are readable and well supported

It probably doesn't fit your "well supported" criterion I suppose, but how about Clojure's EDN? I've been meaning to try it out more myself.
This is something EVERYONE struggles with at some point, and everyone has a different solution that works.

It's still alpha (I'm introducing breaking changes soon), but I have been working on Mite (https://github.com/jdc0589/mite-node) for a few weeks now; its a re-implementation of an internal tool we used in the past. The documentation is incomplete/out-of date though; it will be getting some love soon.

Mite's goal is kind of similar to sqitch, but it aims to be a little simpler; very little configurations and migrations are plain old sql
Gates: People Don't Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software
Which, in my view, expresses where my main concerns about facebook's future lie (if I were an investor, I guess).

When Facebook introduced its plan to be a platform for developers to work on, I loved the idea. It reminded me of Yegge's post on Amazon, and seemed to me like a great way for Facebook to evolve to be the 'social layer' of the web.

Of course, they torpedoed that whole effort and kept going with their walled-garden facebook-as-a-product approach.

And now that Facebook seems to lose some momentum/popularity (or is perceived to be, which is still bad), they end up implementing part of the 'platform model' anyways, except still within their walled-garden with facebook-made apps.

It's quite possible that I'm missing the real reason why they are taking this approach, but seeing Zuckerberg as a product-first guy might be a partial explanation.
Clojure on the Mac App Store
Yeah, being first on Hackers News is not good for your box :)
The guy that keeps screwing up is often the guy who then pulls an all-nighter to save the day.
Indic keyboard android app with 15 languages support
Top 8 Culture Hacks for Startups
No need to apologize -- it was a healthy question & it's a strong point about motivations for management career move.
I don't believe MySQL is ACID compliant. You may have just ran into one of the reasons how.
That "errors are more costly later" notion is true for waterfall, but not for, say, Extreme Programming.

It is basically true for waterfall because the feedback loops are broken. Think cooking, for example: if I cook all my meals for a year at once and put them in the freezer, I'll have to do a lot of research and planning. Otherwise, a single mistake could lead to me throwing out up to 1000 meals.

But if I just cook every meal as I go, I can tinker quite a bit, because the cost of failure is limited to one meal. Which is no problem; if I really screw up, I just pull the frozen pizza out of the fridge.

Extreme Programming in particular can be looked at as a set of methods to flatten the cost of change curve. Then if you add the Lean Startup approach on top of that, you end up testing your core hypotheses early on, so even major shifts in business direction end up being pretty inexpensive.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived most of my life there, and I generally found it unfortunate— one reason I left. I don't like driving, but in most of the U.S. it is a practical necessity, whether you like driving or not. It's not that I lived where I wanted to, but that there was simply no way to choose a place to live that wouldn't result in needing a car, because everything was too sprawling. If people who liked driving could choose to drive, and I could choose not to drive, that would be much less objectionable. (There are a few places where I could make such a choice, like Manhattan, but not many.)

So I had to commute daily by car, which sucked. I had to drive to get to work, drive to buy groceries, even drive to go to a coffee shop. Besides just being unpleasant, I also had to spend a bunch of money maintaining a car, which is a fairly expensive proposition, between purchase price, insurance, gas, maintenance & repairs, etc.

Now I walk and/or take the metro, and it's much less stressful. I never have to call a tow truck, either. (Contrary to the local norm, I don't really bike, but I could also do that if I chose.)
Are S-Expressions a standardized data format? It looks very similar to Json, but harder to read.
Everything in this post is accurate. L7 protection at the endpoints (use 10GbE ports if necessary), L3/L4 protection in the network. And although I've never heard of the company, nenolod knows what he's doing.

Suggestion for them: improve your site, fix the colocation 404, provide info about your locations (perhaps it's available if I register for your client portal, but I don't want to do that until I know it would otherwise meet my needs), provide info about your network (transit and peering).
Sysrq is kinda neat.

You can force a kernel panic by 'echo c > /proc/sysrq' if you really want.
The lack of hypertext is a valid complaint, in my opinion, for a language designed in the web age. Sure, you can build a format on top of JSON that treats certain values as URIs, but that kind of thing should be built-in.
Tracking users via wireless networking at BSides Vancouver
A lot of times, amateur "hacking" groups will require new members to prove their worth in some way and I'm sure github is a great target to test their "skills"
You know, I wonder if we're about to see another tetris phenomenon. One of the miracles of tetris is that the game mechanics scaled from a few dots on an 80s era LCD keychain game to HDTV and surround sound.

Some kind of generalized 2048 game, with different or harder goals every "level" and some tweaked mechanics and we could see another one.