skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Internet simply ended up having to swallow far more than it was designed to handle. The dot-com boom paved the way for it becoming essential and inseparable to our livelihoods.

Michal Zalewski's The Tangled Web is an excellent technical book on how the technologies that power the web are interconnected, and how they're all a vulnerable mess of hacks. On the surface, it looks like everything is running smoothly, but on the inside, everything we've architected is subpar for our current needs. It's amazing that the web is hanging by its nooks and crannies, but the constant series of gaffes that is infosec and most people's refusal to accept it, speaks for itself.

Who knew that one day, a handful of nerds and social outcasts would end up maintaining core infrastructure that the entire Western economy depends on so dearly?

Of course, people have realized this and have been hard at work building new protocols, abstractions and mechanisms on top of current cruft. It's still a mad, mad, mad, mad ecosystem out there, though.

The author's sentiments go completely off rails by the end of this, however. It's almost eery. What is there to possibly trust?
> I have no use of python 3

You admit you haven't done any research, so you clearly don't have any basis for making that statement.
I for one like the 2.x style print function. I see why it would be a bad idea to have a separate syntax for print from a purist point of view.

But least for smallish scripts which print a lot it give you a better overview because the print line look different than other lines. Sometimes prints can almost be like comments.
Its a lot like the difference between torture and enhanced interrogation.
You can also do that by just creating an Issue, and then converting it to a Pull Request later with `hub pull-request -i <existing-issue-num>`, when you actually have some code to commit. That uses the software Hub, mentioned in the cheat sheet. Or instead of installing Hub, you can convert the Issue using one of the other methods listed in http://stackoverflow.com/q/4528869/578288.
> Well honestly, python 2* is a lot more convenient to write in a lot of ways

In what way is python 2 more convenient to write? Outside of the rapidly shrinking set of cases where the best approach to a key problem is addressed by a Py 2 only library -- or the case of "I want to deploy on Google App Engine" -- I don't really see how Py 2 is "more convenient".
PC gaming has 24 billion dollars estimated yearly revenue
I'm still programming happily in 2.7, it's (obviously) more than viable. Increasing numbers of people are programming happily in 3.X. People are getting real work done in both languages.

Is this really a problem for more than a handful of unfortunate niche-dwellers? Can a niche-dweller comment?
What upsets me most is that now they're using lobbying for stuff that are clearly against our interest, such as diluting privacy restrictions and fighting against restrictions on Internet surveillance, even though in their press releases they make it sounds like they would do the opposite, and would fight against Internet surveillance:

http://www.vice.com/read/are-google-and-facebook-just-preten...
This is the path that all dynamically typed scripting languages must follow. Over time, change becomes impossible because the lack of typechecking or static analysis tools means that any change might break something in a subtle and hard-to-diagnose way. And so the language grows by accretion. You end up with something like bash or perl, where there are a million ways to do any one thing. Each way was added at a particular phase of the language's life, and it could never be removed after that. And so the language becomes difficult to learn and unattractive to newcomers, so another scripting langauge pops up, and the cycle of life begins again.

Compare this to a language like golang, where you can just run "go fix" on your code to update it to the latest version. And you don't have compatibility hell, because when you distribute your application, it's a standalone binary. Stuff like go is the future. Get off the dynamic language hamster wheel.
One is Python, one is Clojure. Different namespaces; no collision.
> It even has a name over there, the "reddit hug of death" when it's overloaded by the new demand.

And the OP's point is that even if this happens, the cost of trying to overcomplicate things by adding HA, multi-tenancy, etc outweighs the cost of just getting the app into people's hands. We have this innate fear that overloaded our servers is the "worst thing ever". It isn't. If your server gets overloaded, that's a good problem to have.
With general investment firms like T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, doing SV venture deals, is that a sign of a bubble in tech valuations? Typically by the time "main street" investors get interested, the growth potential is all but tapped out. Or so I've heard.
Aphyr's Clojure from the ground up [1] series is the best place to start in my opinion.

[1]: http://aphyr.com/tags/Clojure-from-the-ground-up
Hi Yaur! Thanks for your reply. Yes I am trying to keep it at a reasonable price. I was hesitating but would love to share the website with you. Your comments and suggestions will be appreciated.
www.silberlosung.com
IPv6? You shouldn't be trying to stick an IP Address in 4 bytes in 2014.
> But before telling someone to hire a lawyer, you should make sure that the case in question is not taking place in a country where doing this is generally taken as a big offense.

Interesting. Can you give an example of such a place, and how things tend to work there? What would be your advice to the founder if they were in that country?
I have ample Java experience and had been using JavaScript and Node for three years now. I have spend quite a lot of time programming in Clojure with just toy examples and am building a simple game to get a handle on it from a more practical standpoint.

That said I too still can't figure out how to use leiningen and it seems clunky and slow. It's also easy to find examples that don't work. I'm not sure if getting it to work with as little hassle as npm would help it's growth, but seems like it couldn't hurt.
A few thousand million-dollar bounties? I don't really think it's worth billions of dollars to those companies.
> py3 has a few tweaks and some annoying syntax changes to make things more "pure"

That may have been true of Python 3.0 vs. 2.x, but Python 3 has moved forward quite a bit since 3.0.
Webservers shouldn't have direct access to keys
1. Implanting gold or silver molecules in clothing has been done for at least 3 years now.

2. They've found over long periods of time, the molecules get transferred to the body, which can be problematic.

3. Smell is more of an issue than cleanliness.
I just purged Python 3 from my computer. Will not serve much in the next 5 years I guess...
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7579614
At some point you've made a successful web app, and then you need to make a successful business and supporting services, and you need to minimize costs and meet SLAs that are required to secure your revenue.

So the subset for a 'successful web app' is a useful distinction to get started, but the condescension implicit int he second list just comes off as ignorance.
> I for one like the 2.x style print function.

2.x didn't have a print function, unless you mean the one from 3 available with a from __future__ import.
Isn't this what http://akka.io does?
The practical definition of lobbying also includes hiring the relatives of people in positions of power, and funding sinecures. It amounts to corruption with a fig leaf.

We don't have a government that produces representative policy outcomes for reasons of corruption and systemic flaws, like bad election mechanisms.
You're looking at the wrong thing.

If you don't replace yourself, you're a dead end, a historical curiosity at some point if you're lucky. Imagine a Japan that is one day remember mostly for and about it's anime and manga.... And, oh, yeah, they found a superior way to make good quality cars, assuming we're still using those in the 24th and a Half Century.
Ick.

Here's the thought pattern you have to fight, and people are not going to say this to you as clearly as I will, because of taboos:

Where does the dirt, dust (human skin flakes, semen, lube, dingleberries, etc.) go? I'm sorry for going into ugly stuff but you need to hear it.

I don't think people are going to buy into this mentally, which leads me to think they aren't going to buy it with their dollars, either.

Also don't assume that having an answer for this concern removes the concern as a problem for your business. You may have an answer, but people need to buy your answer.
> If I switch to anything, I'll probably switch to Go.

I think this is what is often happening, given that Go is attracting more Perl/Python/Ruby types than its original target audience of C/C++ developers.
The best way would be to release a python 2.9 which incorporates most of the changes from 2 to 3 but the unicode change.

The Δ between Python 2 and Python 3 was just too wide. Even with breaking changes, with a small Δ people will just migrate eventually. Migrating projects drag each other over the "barrier" just like water in a hose can be sucked over a wall.

The issue definitely was not the print command, but other things such as ``iteritems()``, etc - by themselves not much to keep you from migrating, but there is a pile of these boring changes next to the big one (unicode).

I think Guido overestimated the appeal of the new unicode handling and underestimated how resentful people are to change. I figure that at least 1/4 of programmers are actually very opposed to each and every migration and a new version has to have enough incentives to counterbalance this built-in conservativeness.
Nor have I done research on Perl, Scala, etc. Your missing my point. I am successfully getting my things done in Python 2. I do not have any use for Python 3, Perl, Scala, or any other language. I might have in the future, and hey, some language might be better suited to solve the problem - but as long as it's not drastically better the sensible tradeoff is to stick with Python 2.
Clang's user manual has this to say: "clang does not support the gcc extension that allows variable-length arrays in structures. This is for a few reasons: one, it is tricky to implement, two, the extension is completely undocumented, and three, the extension appears to be rarely used. Note that clang does support flexible array members (arrays with a zero or unspecified size at the end of a structure)."
They made cheap products because they were asked to, because back then Japan had cheap labor. These products weren't considered fit for domestic consumption (only foreigners would want that junk), and their own standards of material goods were always high. I'm sure that something similar could be said for the Chinese.
Ask HN: What are your favorite non-technical books?
If you're going to build up a large code base, you don't want to have to port it when the libraries you need stop supporting Python 2.
There is a lot of misinformation about lobbying. My wife used to be a lobbyist, so let me dispel some myths:

1) Lobbyists costs a lot of money. The amount Facebook spent on WhatsApp is equivalent to fifty times the annual lobbying revenues of the top 10 DC lobbying firms combined.

2) Lobbying money goes to politicians pockets. American politicians are some of the most thoroughly scrutinized on the planet. Lobbying money doesn't go under the table to some politician. It usually doesn't even go to campaign contributions. The major source of campaign contributions is rich peolple making personal donations, not lobbyists. Lobbying money goes towards advocacy. For example, a lobbyist might commission a survey to show a politician that a particular position, advantageous to a client, is politically popular. They may also propose draft legislation, connect politicians with experts, etc. What Google is doing is a good example of the bread and butter of lobbying: simply helping politicians understand the prevailing point of view of an industry.

3) Lobbying is the same as corruption. The vast majority of lobbying is about helping politicians find votes. Its about showing how what's good for an industry is good for constituents. The message is overwhelmingly not "if you vote for this, there is money in it for you" but "voting for this will save 100 jobs in your district."

Do lobbyists help corporations exercise substantial political power? Yes. But most of the american labor force works for large corporations. Their livelihoods and that of their kids depend on these corporations. Their healthcare and retirement depend on them. Corporations don't need to corrupt the political system to wield power.
This is not really helpful, but I love the music sample! Sounds great.
CVS is in use many places, especially in decades old source trees where migration would result in the loss of to much metadata or to much build automation is dependent on CVS. I personally know of several instances of this.

Windows 3.1? I run into it occasionally in places like manufacturing where upgrade cycles are decades long (was recently at a client who's most critical machine was built in 1905). FWIW, DOS can still be found everywhere.

Magnetic tape? Really? LTO-6 is up to 2.5TB uncompressed and LTO-7 is imminent.

Punch cards? See: Scantron.

Just because there's a cool new replacement for something, doesn't mean you should jump on it, or that the old tech is now worthless.
The cheat sheet has been updated to include that: https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet/commit/a6d33...
Precisely. The daily beast has more to say about this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/27/get-elected...

I think most people are not aware how commonplace this is.

Take Senator Ron Wyden’s son, Adam—directly upon graduation from his Columbia MBA program he started his own hedge fund, no doubt capitalizing on contacts he made interning at the $19-billion fund of one of his father’s supporters, David Shaw. “Not many college kids get to intern on a D.E. Shaw portfolio for the summer,” Brian Marshall, who once ran the fund, was quoted as saying in a 2011 Bloomberg article on the younger Wyden.

It might be a stretch here, but I think this is quite related to Piketty's groundbreaking book on capital -- this is the nature of the beast, wealth remains in the family through connections, and this is just one of the ways how it happens.
I'm not an expert on licensing, but couldn't Apple continue using the current version of mogenerator? A license change would only prevent them from taking latest.
manglav, you are right about silver being used in clothing but there is a difference. A lot of companies are using silver/metallic ion surface treatments that result in the transfer of "molecules". But I am using polymer that has silver bonded to it permanently. This has been approved and certified.
The other major development is my patent pending Silver double system. Normally, companies use a very low percentage of silver that is not uniformly present across the surface of the fabric. I have used this special weave structure where silver and milk fibers are present uniformly across the fabric.
Yea, my company paid for my trip, hotel, and conference fees.

Pycon, through the support of all the sponsors, is actually fairly cheap. Only $300 to attend, and they did an amazing job organizing it. Lunches and breakfast included. I know of other tech conferences that are much more expensive.

I think it could be easily argued that sending employees to things like Pycon directly benefit your company. We work in a really fast moving industry so it's a necessity to keep employees on the ball. Going this year I learned a ton of new things about Python that made me more productive.
Reducing the number of includes in the header is very much not premature optimisation. On a phone with poor connectivity, a single blocking Javascript in the header might cause a one second delay (or longer).
VMware Hybrid Cloud Service – To the Cloud and Beyond #SDDC #CloudOps
I wouldn't say he gave them perfection, but rather that he tought some companies how to achieve the perfection they already desired from mass manufactured goods.
Indeed, look at the domains of civilian aviation (Japan Airlines Flight 123, where the sound caused by an incorrect repair was ignored for years, and let's not even get into how face is more important than saving lives, see also the Kobe earthquake response) and nuclear power.

I realized long before Fukushima that Japan's nuclear safety culture was impossibly awful, and I'm afraid I have to agree with those who say they have no business running serious reactors.
I want to highlight the trust issue. If there is an issue of trust, it must be dealt with immediately and decisively or the company will tank (and you don't want that because you want a successful business more than smug self-satisfaction).
As far as I am concerned, they can go cry in a corner for what they have turned Gnome into. Gnome 3 and Unity can go burn in hell for all eternity (yes, words are a poor outlet for expressing my hatred towards that interface). My donation dollars should be funding things better than such abominations!

This is far more deserving: Project Gooseberry and the Blender Foundation.

[0]: http://gooseberry.blender.org/
I really have to disagree when you say that high-speed trains are for the "jet set": There are countless people that need to commute between different cities for professional or private reasons, and most of them are from the middle-class and would definitely value and be ready to pay for speedy transportation. I agree that such a system would not be for the "average worker" though (whoever that is these days).
> apart from my time, and opportunity cost I invested all my personal wealth.

You can try to negotiate a settlement (still consult a personal lawyer) of retaining some of your money put in (maybe after they receive investment) as well as an additional accelerated vesting of a small part of your remaining unvested shares. You still have some rights to make a big stink about all of this, but I wouldn't advise trying to stay on. You may end up with nothing and have burnt some bridges with the CEO and future investors.
Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world
So, counter-intuitively, the bigger leaps are easier to make than the small ones!
How did only adding parts that are relevant to the current project become some sort of “optimization”? There is more work to do if you start from someone else’s boilerplate that has lots of parts you don’t want, because you have to actively delete things that you need to replace or just don’t need at all.

In any case, some of the defaults in HTML5 Boilerplate can have real negative consequences if you just use it without fixing them. If your market will be using mobile devices a lot, or tends to have limited connection speed for any other reason, then making half a dozen extra requests before you even start doing anything interesting can have a significant impact on performance. Playing around with viewport settings can have significant adverse effects for usability if you don’t know what you’re doing. That little message about IE8 that isn’t going to show up on the recent browsers your developers usually use is going to get you in trouble with a client one day if you develop a lot of intranet sites and forget to remove it.
Maybe a little bit off topic and probably depends on the app, but how sane is developing a web app/UI that works for mobile/desktop these days? or is it just better to develop for desktop and mobile separately?
PageRank GoogleΤι είναι; – Para Marketing Blog
H1-B is not likely given the requirements (heavy emphasis on education)[1]. The age of the company isn't so much of an issue as long as they have money in the bank to pay the prevailing wage to the candidate. It is possible to become a permanent resident while holding an H1-B (it's a "dual intent" visa). Source: myself and others I know who have done it.

[1] http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...
It is easier. On the other hand, Java doesn't drop any deprecated API's either, so static types may not help as much as you think. Migration still has to happen before dropping something.

It seems to be that automatically upgrading your code, even with "go fix", is staying on the hamster wheel. Using a stable language like Python 2.7 is getting off the hamster wheel, since the "hipster" programmers (including me, sometimes) have moved on.

So in a way, Python 3 helps you if all you care about is stability, since people will make changes to 3 and you can keep using 2.7.
" why bother learning Python 3?"

Unicode

And of course, you'll move from a platform that's shutting down to one that's evolving

Really, it's worth it.
I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but fix any of its version updates fundamentally break backwards compatibility the way Python did with the Unicode string changes in 3.0?

My organisation has a massive internal platform, with hundreds of applications all developed in Python 2.6. We are in the process of upgrading the base platform to 2.7 but I believe we will never be able to upgrade to 3.x. We have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lines of Python code and it's growing all the time. When we started the project version 3 wasn't really a practical option.
Thanks for the link! That's just what I was looking for re: interpolation.

Looking their acquisition rig, however, it seems like a choice between a large array of cameras, or one camera and a still image. It will be interesting to see if that can be made to work as video, with a large FOV, and interpolated movement on 3 axes. Seems like a big challenge.
Your article doesn't give any insight into how "commonplace" this is.
Fred Wilson Talks Retirement, Tumblr's Exit, And Getting Over A Tough Year
It's alarming to me just how many supposedly "secure" websites follow such awful practices, such as:

- Using HTTPS only for the login or purchase page, and sending the user to plain-old HTTP for everything else

- And to make the above even worse, storing passwords in plain text in a cookie

- Disallowing certain characters in passwords, or forcing passwords to be under a certain length

- Allowing people to reset passwords from the browser with just one answer to a security question, i.e. not even sending a confirmation email

- Not supporting any form of two-factor authentication

The question I keep asking myself lately is, is there a better method to authentication than just plain ole' passwords? There are other systems that we're starting to see now being used more often in consumer devices, such as RFID and fingerprint/face scanners, but those have some obvious weaknesses as well.
They certainly don't have the kind of relationship that could justify the GNOME Foundation running their women's outreach programs for them. GNOME's absolutely miniscule compared to both of them, in terms of money, developers, staff, users, everything. To put this in some perspective, the Mozilla Foundation alone has approximately 3 orders of magnitude more income than the GNOME Foundation, so it's no surprise the majority of GNOME foundation cash flow was for the Outreach Program for Women rather than for GNOME.

I could understand if, say, Mozilla decided they wanted to help other open source organisations that were only tenuously related to them in this way because they can afford to, but the GNOME Foundation is simply too small to take on this kind of big project.
SKYLYS – The flying car