skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Caring about the 'boring stuff': release management. configuration management. proper continuous integration. simplifying your build steps. cleaning up hairy code or removing redundant files and gunk from older projects.

Sigh careful there. I just got the evil eye from my boss for doing just that.

Only care about this kind of maintenance and future-proofing if you work in a tech-savvy company. In other environments where the suits have no understanding of things like technical debt and the value of maintaining a high quality, they will see this as procrastination.
Actually we're pretty sure there is less of that now than a couple years ago, because Daniel has written some amazingly effective software for detecting it.
I think debate over moderators' actions is crucial and should be encouraged.
I believe there were more bad ones in 2008-2011 than today; I haven't yet had a MagSafe2 adapter fail, and I saw child mortality on the T-shaped and L-shaped magsafe1 connectors after 3-6 months. The "yellowing and then die" seemed particular to one batch of insulation; regular fraying, sure.
I hope this develops sanely. There has been a lot of emphasis on the conflict over the personal beliefs of the CEO, but I think this article was correct to point out that some of the resignations were over desire to appoint a more product-specific CEO.

What's weird about this is that as an individual he's still entitled to his own personal beliefs. If this person can still function and keep his own bias out of matters (and expresses a willingness to do this!) -- then there's no reason to put too fine a point on it.

This might be akin to holding different religious beliefs - and while that idea can be scary when you think X may think Y for ulterior motives A, B, and C; the day to day expectation is that their role is limited to being reasonable and calculated when challenged or asked to justify their actions.
You are now an expert in College. What do you know now that a freshman does not? Not just the schooling, but the ability to use the school more efficiently. The people you know, the places with which you're familiar, and the little nuances of college life are all part of your achievement. Similar processes happen in the software world. With time, your toolset grows, your professional capability grows, and your ability to produce higher quality with less effort grows.
I recently began reading HN, and I really appreciate the quality of this forum. I was on Slashdot at the beginning, and having watched it slide into irrelevance with poor quality comments, it's heartening to find a place like HN. So, thank you.
I'm with you 100%. Often times I do use Linux as a dumb platform to do work like I would Windows or OSX, but occasionally I love tearing into it and messing with it, which is priceless in my book.
So this in effect makes XWayland just another Wayland client, rather than what it used to be - the usual Xorg running in a very careful way not to step over Wayland and drawing on Wayland surfaces? And now nvidia are complaining that unless XWayland can have direct hardware access, they don't really have a path planned to supporting OpenGL and the like on XWayland, presumably due to them not supporting Wayland?

Perhaps their time would have been better spent finding ways to support Wayland proper and not coming up with proprietary workarounds that will stop being feasible the moment someone makes a small change.
True, those are a good target. I'm thinking of the more dangerous types though, where the person genuinely thinks that their negativity is highly valuable, when it isn't. Those are everywhere on the "Show HN" threads. Elsewhere too. The Internet loves to hate.

Hmm, seems like I'm being all talk. I'll just put my demo online, within the next couple weeks.
I do wonder why this question is downvoted though. People don't have a right to ask anymore?
Ok!.
Big companies always claim, that make the IP (so called "intellectual property") rights stronger does strengthen the innovators. The opposite is true!

When old (and stupid) patents hinder innovation (what happens all day today), than the patent system becomes the biggest hindrance to innovation.
Somebody said about IP: When it is better to "own" old IP than to make new one, the system is strangling innovation, nothing else. We already at this point (and it was fostered by the owning people).

Patents once where made up, to bring inventors an incentive to share their inventions with the others. But this "sharing" brings only benefits to the society, when the inventions bring any knowledge gain to the community.

Software patents are the worst: Most of them include trivial things that do not bring any new knowledge to the industry, but are blocking other inventors. Good example is Amazons One-click patent (but this is only one of maybe thousands examples): What is the knowledge gain of the world, by having this patent?

This system is for the "owners" not for the "creators"!
It's not as good as it has been in the (far) past, but it's better than it was at its nadir, when the front page was saturated by stories from a few obviously baiting sites on a very few topics.

One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of getting a good story onto the front page. Mediocre stories with immediate or simple appeal do seem to be doing a better job of outcompeting Rilke than they ever have in the past.

It's a good site for halfway-decent posts about Golang or CSS compilers. Thankfully, it's become less hospitable for nakedly ambitious Bitcoin cheerleading or comically inept copyright law analyses. It would be great if the site could come up with some way to let the kinds of posts 'gruseom's submission log models get some space on the front page, but it would be bad if that attempt reverted us back to the worst of the Venturebeat and Techdirt days.
There are some sources which are used that perhaps shouldn't be. Sadly lots get posted from those sources and people up ote them so there's not much to be done.

As always, visit /new and upvote the great stuff and flag the flagable stuff.

If you notice weird vote patterns a short email with links usually gets results.
This article assumes -e working in netcat, that is not the case since many years ago.

For -e to work, you have to compile netcat.c defining GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE, one of the best self-documenting options there are.

Needless to say, most distros do not activate it.
I'm not going to make any value judgment on how much fulfillment you get out of working for your customers.

But you're getting downvoted probably because you don't understand that, as a consultant, you have a job, and you work for your customers.

Everybody who does work has a boss of some sort.

If being a consultant is what you'd be happy to do in perpetuity, even in lieu of retirement, more power to you.

The OR guys also now have a master. Facebook. Ultimately, their reporting chain is to Zuck and then to the board and then to the FB shareholders. They might feel really passionate about what they're doing, but it's not like they don't have jobs.
doesn't let me edit, but Merck also has an entire slew of searchable information as does places like Bloomberg or other financial data companies.
Will there be any intermediate solutions before slow/hell banning people?

FWIW I was slow banned years ago and it still hasn't been removed.

It may just have been a moderator having a bad day, but the message when it's left there is clearly "You're not welcome here.". That's a message you might not want to be sending to people who are saying what you can't say.
It's kind of funny that now that everything in a car is effectively software-controlled something like a mechanical ignition switch is still left to control a main circuit that's so crucial it will stop the engine if broken. To think, we do have wireless car keys already, with just a start/stop button on the instruction panel.

Even with physical keys I would assume that this particular circuit would be controlled via a relay and the car computer would only let the driver to stop the engine by removing the key if the car was not moving.
Ask HN: What do I say to a university class about “women-only” opportunities? 
My school is being asked to participate in a Women in IT, all expenses paid event hosted by Microsoft. It includes mock interviews and general preparation for interviewing at big tech companies, and as such is a great experience for any student. The event is geared towards women and women get priority registration, men can fill the extra spaces that aren’t taken by women if there are any. I feel like this is a great event to encourage more women to get involved in the largely male dominated field. But after this event was announced to one of our more introductory classes, it blew up on that class’ forum, the men in the class felt that they were being “excluded” from this cool opportunity. We are going to go talk to the class again on monday, but I’m not sure what to say to them. On one hand, it does feel like it’s widening the gender divide by being a “women only” event. But on the other hand, it is rather intimidating for women to get into Computer Science when they walk into a 95% male classroom, and if more women joined, the gender gap would become narrower.
Well yeah, I wouldn't just stare off into space till my heart stops functioning.
Mod logs are a call to concern trolls and bike shedding.

They're usually a bad idea.

Better is to assume good faith and accept that mistakes happen, rather than assume mods need to be kept in check and all actions need to be scrutinised.
In terms of Performance Testing, most of the tools out there are either expensive or awful.
However a couple of weeks ago, HP released a community edition of its flagship LoadRunner 12. It's basically the full LoadRunner product for up to 50 concurrent users (plenty for most startups).
I don't realy mind the downvotes, just asking out curiosity and turn out to be a very interesting view: The world is getting darker and darker by seconds.
In a choice between (a) uninformed but relatively infrequent debates about the moderator (b) routinized and personalized debates about the moderator, I definitely choose (a).

I have a different perspective on HN than I think many other people do here; I consider myself a guest, and don't see myself as part of what makes HN HN. In the somewhat unlikely event that Daniel and Nick do something to make the site unworkable for me, I'm not going to get angry about it.
No Jobs, No Opportunity: America’s Young Face Permanent Setback
Another solution to _this_ problem might be to get your site reviewed by a conversion specialist or using some sort of heuristic review. In many cases my experience is that a combination of more qualitative methods such as user testing combined and heuristic evaluations and heatmaps and with Google Analytics solves _most_ of the issues you have with your site.
I was indeed surprised when i checked HN on mobile last week. The simple layout would suggest it would scale on mobile. Glad it's being worked on.
Have you ever used Facebook?
Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders
Being German I'd argue that a problem is that Germany relies on the US to conduct intelligence for them and hence ignores the fact that the NSA is violating the rights of it's citizens on a massive scale.
I guess you don't consider gaming a worthwhile endeavor on Linux?
You're missing the point. Sure suffer in the minutiae of all the implications / implementation. End of story its a single question: Do we want to have this "problem" ? Yes.

To phrase differently: Lets NOT have planes because they might burst into flames once in a while. Do you see the absurdity ?

Want to know a good way to pull yourself out of squalor? Fix aging.
Blah-blah-blah HR stuff, blah-blah-blah, leaders, goals, performance, roles.

The true science approach should aware that massive surveys can measure everything but the thing you want.

People don't "trust" that survey anonymous and trying to reflect what they expected to say in survey. Human can't seriously tell something to the stone, communication doesn't work this way. If there is a really stone of anonymous survey, human have to give him imaginary human trait, expectations and ability to evaluate him. "What are you want from me, dear stone?" So, confidentional procedure doesn't mean that people anser like it is confidentional.

Interviewer presenation - that the sociological surveys is actually measure, and there is only the ghostly shape of personal realtion behind this.

The second thing is the question interpretation:
"I don’t like to have to think about work while I am at home."
Can mean:
1. I don't like any serious thoughts at home.
2. I thinking all time about work ant don't like this.
3. I just don't like and not thinking.
4. I'm deep in self-estrangement and prefer not to thing about work at all.

Event "think" can be perceived in many ways: specific persons, tasks, it domain at all.

How massive survey is doesn't matter until we have raw data in hands. Some manipulation with R or whatever and there is a some groups and strict classification, some more and there is completely different classification, one question data can change everything or be just excluded to make picture "clear".

The point is that any changes in methodology of survey researches usually demonstrate applied catastrophe theory when any shift can significally change the results. Don't trust any conclusions without detailed step-by-step description of methodology.

In general, measure the pressure, scan brains, make tests aimed to somatic responces, use anal probes, but dont't ask the questions if you really want to understand something about people.
A couple of personal points that I may as well insert here.

The account I'm now using, dang, was used briefly in 2010 by someone who didn't leave an email address. I feel bad for not being able to ask them if they still want it, so I'm considering this an indefinite loan. If you're the original owner, please email me and I'll give it back to you. The reason I want the name dang is that (a) it's a version of my real name and (b) it's something you say when you make a mistake.

Second, very minor, but I need to leave this discussion for a bit while I bike to a different location. After that, I'll be in the thread... but I'm not giving up my bike ride for this :)
> A senior engineer might be able to be tech lead a small month long project,

Hmm. While I really like your definitions, I'm surprised that a senior engineer can only be considered responsible enough for a small, month long project.

I say this because I've only ever seen the first two titles ever.

New career goal: be a distinguished engineer. What company was your previous company?
You're assumption that people want to retire is wrong. People are retiring because the aren't capable of full work hours. With right medicine people would work more, maybe in the future there won't be such thing as "retirement funds".
Patents block copying only exactly what's covered by the Claims and thereby encourage finding alternatives or develop new ways. Society benefits from having alternatives to choose from.
I have a lousy connection and HN is pretty snappy for me. (Chrome on iOS on iPhone 4)

http://imgur.com/o8HOoDX

Image is proof of lousy connection.
CodeFlower Source code visualization
I didn't say mere "increased" demand, I said "incredible" demand. I meant to imply that economies of scale would develop, as I imagine most will pay everything they have for the ability to live forever. (At least I would, as long as I was purely rational. I can imagine getting bored of life in 500 years or so, but I doubt it).
Wasn't the last big "server failure" due to a hard drive kicking the bucket?
I don't think I've seen any mention of what's going to happen with the "pending comments" plan that raised some controversy on HN a few days ago (and which I feel is a suboptimal idea that solves a problem nobody has while creating a host of brand new ones). Is this still in the works?
I had no idea that was your intention and I get the volumetric pixel thing, since I moved into working on other areas I haven't stayed current. Texture mapping on low poly count models was where I left things, back then the hardware didn't have the horsepower for anything much. Best of luck with the project.

The irony is that back then we thought if we could just get more than 50 polygons per second we'd be in with a chance of making something good and now flappy bird with 80's style sprites captures the whole world's attention. I got out of that world when MSFT was ruining sw dev by turning the nice simple apis into COM.
Wikipedia's impressive documentation goes hand-in-hand with a Wikipedia community problem --- lawyering. Spelling norms out in that level of detail risks making a sport of out spotting and "enforcing" the norms.

Wikipedia's problem-solving mechanisms are impressive and effective for a project with a single coherent goal, but they aren't good at fostering community. In fact, they do the opposite thing: they artificially factionalize the community, which holds together despite and not because of those mechanisms.
I am suspicious. I think it would certainly be easier in some ways for rank beginners- it would make spelling errors and certain classes of syntax errors impossible- but those aren't really the bugs that cause experienced programmers grief. It's generally subtly bad logic, which is more about how people are terrible. Plus, we already know how to create computer languages that largely avoid those problems.

Written language is wonderful in many respects, and I sometimes thing people discount these things out of familiarity. Keyboards too- you can do things very quickly and very precisely with keyboards. Those things matter for your sense of productivity and satisfaction.
With the Federal Circuit punting it to the Supreme Court, I don't they will leave it that vague. The Supreme Court does not like bright line rules for patents, I think they will come up with a balancing, multi-factor test.
Many of the big companies don't care at all about customer care calls. Public shaming via a discussion board may work better.
This seems like a great change. A dream team, and it's interesting to learn who the secret moderator has been!

My fantasy would be some way of fixing /newest as well as adding topic tags; perhaps topic tags just within /newest. I'd be happy to read everything in /newest which matches: security, crypto, hypervisor, hardware, wireless, ...; I basically find it unusable as it is now.

I don't find the level of (in)civility to be a personal deterrent, but I grew up on EFnet and alt.*, so that would be an almost 4chanian bar. I do dislike when it deters worthwhile contributions from people who are less thick skinned. I'd generally err on the side of "let people say stupid things so they can be debunked in public" vs. "censorship", but at some point lack of filtering becomes a form of censorship of its own (crapflooding, etc.)
Are these vendors pricing their product/service in BTC or USD/local equivalent? How much extra are you paying over the traditional costs for the ease of a bitcoin payment? At some point the volatility and cost of obtaining bitcoin will outweigh the ease of use. I'm curious to know where that might be.
You're actually wrong. If you read the article I mention both -e and -c. As of today, most of my Debian servers support -c and -e out of the box, Manjaro/Arch runs -e without problems, the other Debian/Ubuntu servers I have also run -e out of the box.

Of course, this is just an educational post, there are better ways to take over a victim's machine. And there are a million ways this shellcode could go wrong, the availability of -e/-c is really the least of your problems in 2014.
I don't exactly remember but a cloud solution would have prevented that. :)

Edit: oh, I'm talking about failures that were not planned
I'm talking about right now. Most people are retired by 65. Now we suddenly extend their lives to 100. You think anyone would hire them again after being out of work force for 10-15 years?
I mean, your examples really capture the debate at issue in the case. Trying to draw lines based on whether the idea is implemented in software or hardware is just arbitrary.

The real question is: what sort of algorithms do we want people to be able to patent? This is an economic question, not a legal one. At what point does the benefit from disallowing free riding out weigh the cost of granting the temporary monopoly? The problem with the law is that it sidesteps this question. Its based on an 19th century notion of invention, whereas the real value of patents is protecting investment into R&D.
Most business school problems (e.g. linear programming) are easily translatable.
I have one RMBP MS2 adapter that only works if the cable is positioned just right (ie, I can charge from it overnight on a table, but it's ineffective on my lap).

The new ones definitely do seem to be better.
For what it's worth my experience mirrors the OPs, even when writing new functionality in React. The use of components really makes composing functionality and breaking problems down really easy. Backbone doesn't give you the structure to solve this problem easily.

Still <3 backbone, but React is a really great solution to the view layer, which is a problem that backbone doesn't even really try to address.
People who get banned can either start again with a new account or can write a short email showing understanding of why they got banned and asking to be unbanned. Sometimes bans are weird accidents and writing a short email asking why you were banned will get an unban.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304
Are you familiar with Ninja? (which is absolutely excellent IMHO)
http://martine.github.io/ninja/

> Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. It differs from other build systems in two major respects: it is designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system, and it is designed to run builds as fast as possible.

Obligatory:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Who would you be conversing with? A video of your family with screens attached to their faces or some avatars representing your family members? I don't understand why so many people have trouble understanding that you can't see the faces of people who have something blocking their faces.

So if it's avatars, what are those avatars going to be? Some off the shelf selection of Mii/Second Life/WoW avatars?

But you'll say "modern technology can provide avatars that are very realistic simulacrums of actual people!"

and I say, who will build those models? Now people have to buy high-res 3d scanners for their home as well? Or spend loads of money on modeling teams to build these avatars? Or go to Facebook centers where people get their faces scanned and avatars built?

And the rift doesn't yet even support facial expression mapping.

How do you think this is going to work?

You think people lose their shit over privacy issues now? Wait until Facebook has a sub-mm accurate 3d model of every person's face!
>>To be honest I would just keep clam and carry on...

Yes. In times of stress, I too often seek solace in mollusc husbandry.
Planned hard forks aren't especially uncommon, either. Dogecoin recently went through one.
Just to add - My '07 Vauxhall Corsa has a throttle cut off - so if you a apply the brake pedal, the car [ecu] ignores any/all throttle inputs when in gear; which I assume is what you meant by fail-safe.
The problem with Facebook's behavior is not that their changes insulate you from spam so much that they may encourage it: the new equilibrium for spammers being not to publish less so much as to ramp up publication and reach the same number of people through volume. Meanwhile, smaller publishers who create limited volumes of good content are less likely to bother at all.