skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Q: Why Did Quora Join Y Combinator? A: It Was Almost Free
The content of this article is missing (from Techcrunch). Anyone knows more about this?

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/10/quora-y-combinator/
The theme of Monolithic vs. Modular reminds me of Linux vs. Minix.

The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding Linux and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. Other notable hackers such as David S. Miller and Theodore Ts'o joined the debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...

A link to the newsgroup discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.minix/wlhw16...
Rephrased: This "Your cake is poisonous" talk is tedious. Tell me about the healthier cake you've baked or STFU while I eat my cake.

What I mean is, criticizing something is useful in itself. It's not necessary to also propose a better way. Sometimes it's enough to STOP doing something, you don't have to find an alternative for it.
You make it sound like a bad thing?

Not at all. That's my attitude as well. I don't want to waste my life on Type-2 work.

"I only want to do interesting work" sounds entitled after being conditioned by corporate mediocrity, but I think it's a reasonable attitude. Companies frown on self-assertion, preferring agreeable mediocrity, and I hate that. I tend to be honest about things.

You can't say, "I leave bosses and companies that assign me crappy work" on a job interview. I wish people could be honest about such things, but it's just not socially acceptable to speak the truth about anything that matters (e.g. politics, religion, sex, money, power, careers). On HN, I try to be as honest as I can be. Sorry if it comes off as obnoxious.

Despite the rah-rah I hear from programmers about how they are unique snowflakes, being only a programmer is like being a janitor. A prime way to get discarded at the age of 40.

Agree.

If I can make sure that I am valuable because I bring other things to the table (Math, Product vision, people skills), why on earth wouldn't I rebrand myself to better reflect that?

That's absolutely what you should be doing. If it's not obvious, I'm on the same side with people who say "I know math, so use me for Type-1 work only". I am one of them.

The reason the job distinction is toxic in many companies, however, is that software engineering should also be respected rather than commoditized. To me, the rush of people like you and me to get "superior" titles on our resumes is a sign that the business world doesn't respect "regular old" software engineering. That sucks, because the skills of a truly good software engineer are also quite important.
As long as it doesn't supposedly conflict with their core values[0]… because you know your search engine should censor such things that don't conform to your world view ;)

[0]https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/pull/100
The team behind social media revolution in India for Election Campaigning
Because the blog admin area should be on https anyway and it's an opportunity to play with https.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Atechc...

You can get it from Google cache.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but FYI, MSVC 2013 supports most of C99.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "massive integration issues." Can you identify a "massive" (i.e. show-stopping) problem in Linux-based operating systems that (1) is due to software A not correctly interacting with software B, (2) that systemd solves, (3) that existing tools cannot solve, even with proper configuration, necessitating systemd?

I'm having a hard time thinking of any, but I'd love to know of some.
> Where on the filesystem does it store the saved values so you can debug if things do go cactus?

Quoting the page you linked to: "On disk, the backlight brightness is stored in /var/lib/systemd/backlight/."
I agree with your general message; this freedom for all is confusing to me because it's not at all natural for the operating companies.

Your statement about UDP is wrong though. TCP vs UDP is not a two-tier mechanism for quality. UDP delivers more effective throughput in most cases, as long as the application doesn't need the features that TCP provides. Consider that most TCP connections start with a UDP exchange for the DNS resolution. Even in conditions where you own all the bandwidth you may wish to use UDP.
Storing Bandwidth with Quantum Teleportation
Light Field Photography
Or a patent application describing the automation of the application of patents that were generated by patent-generating software.
God is perfectly just. Relax -- it is impossible to gain or lose you balance of karma in an instant.
So have a peak rate and an off-peak rate.

That's exactly what my ISP (Andrews and Arnold[0]) does. I pay for a specific number of 'units' which are consumed faster at peak times (09:00-18:00) than at all other times.

A&A's policy[1] is to never be the bottleneck in the network and they also kick up a stink with their transit providers (mainly BT) when they detect a problem (which is very often, as they monitor their network's health closely). They even publish statistics[2] on dropped packets classified by their uplink - for instance over the last 28 days they have a 98.48% success rate at a 1-second granularity one of BT's backhauls, and 100% on TalkTalk's backhaul.

They do work out to be more expensive than other ISPs (I pay ~£33 a month for a 40mbit FTTC connection with 4 units) but you pay for a good service and competence.

[0] http://aaisp.net.uk/
[1] http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html
[2] http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi
I just can't wait until someone cracks the nut on competition FPS again. FPS competition is interesting to people who don't even play games, the way boxing is, so it will inevitably be huge at some point.
They are calling it DuckDuckGoodies if you click through to the page.

(I admittedly can't be certain they were an hour ago when you asked.)
How else would she add the sugar that was provided separately from the already closed cup? This was "by design".
Why do you prefer xelatex to lualatex?
I have to note the stereotypically Texan emphasis on sheer size in the above narrative.
New York
Full time Local (Remote considered but not preferred)
Trusted Insight
Disrupt institutional Finance. YC partners, Founder Fund, and Data Collective are investors amongst others.

Trusted Insight isan Angellist for people that manage $1 Billon dollars or more. We have over 100,000 members and counting.

We are looking for full stack or back-end developers with
Python/ Django
Experience with jQuery (preferred)
UI / UX design skills (preferred)
Strong experience with SQL databases

Please email me at Alex or info (at) thetrustedinsigh(dot)com
with:
- GitHub profile or equivalent. Please point out some code, project or open source contributions you are particularly proud of!
- Resume A link to your LinkedIn is fine
- What interests you with Trusted Insight
Why not? Why shouldn't everything be encrypted? Yes, you're probably only leaking the specific page you visit, but the principle stands.
This is essentially just a bikeshed.

"Wait, this code is hard to understand and requires deep domain knowledge. Better nitpick the code style instead. Also, bikesheds should clearly be orange. Green is way too fishy."
>an issue that, to date, only involves for-profit companies.

Because that isn't what this is. The arguments between these massive companies are deciding the future of peer-to-peer communications on the internet.

If the ones who own the wires win, the internet will be officially divided into two classes: servers and clients. Netflix will still be as fast as it ever was (if not faster) if it pays, and if it doesn't, the wire-owners' new replacements will be just as fast as Netflix was. All of the current players will be making massive content and distribution deals with each other, and the internet will become cable TV.

There's no technical reason that the internet has to be structured that way. This is all just massive incumbents locking out all small fry, and consequently all newcomers. The scale this is being played out in is so large that Netflix is really the newcomer in the situation; this is not just a matter of protecting an oligarchy of entertainment providers, but even a war between content producers and content distributors that has implications that affect how fast the traffic between you and your mother will be, and what programs you will be allowed to use to produce and receive that traffic.

Ultimately it's a defense of a primitive accumulation. Some people own the wires because they were first. We can either let them manipulate the market so all of their vendors have razor-thin margins and all of their consumers have the most constrained agreements and highest prices, or restrict the right of the owners to shape and filter traffic for business purposes.
Fainter doesn't necessarily mean "less important": it may just indicate a separate channel-of-interleaved-information, sometimes skippable. (And, since comments are less rigorous and less-definitive than the code, code readthroughs often want to toggle between considering them, and not considering them.)

Red doesn't necessarily mean danger or disfavor. Its use for removed-ranges owes mostly to longstanding use in editorial review (red pens), emphasis ([rubrication]), and as indication of stopping/ending (as in "discontinue this text") – without any inherent 'badness' evaluation.
This is, I think, the best advice I've heard. I've been listening and reading WPCurve (Dan Norris) - http://wpcurve.com/blog/ and he gives the same advice.

Love this post: http://wpcurve.com/business-ideas/

Thanks
I am a little confused. Did you use a tikz editor/assistant that they have? Or did you type your tikz just like you would with ed/vim/emacs? I did not see anything that would assist with creating tikz illustrations when I was poking around. Lowering the tikz bar would be awesome.
Here is one paper that describes it: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/pldi11-preprint.pdf It is the CompCert compiler, which is formally verified. It looks as if the errors found were in the unverified portion. Those errors have been found and the verified surface has been expanded.
The amount of compendiums sold isn't acurate. The prize pool is being buffed by the purchase of compendium points to garner additional features (with many players sinking money many times more than what the compendium cost).
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a big factor behind how fast the prize pool is growing.
Neo4j is listed twice.
I don't know much about Haskell but I suppose it would work as well. I just took an example of a statically typed, compiled language with which I'm familiar and which seems to have a decent amount of momentum.
> you upgrade your compiler, and you see some mysterious new backtraces showing up in the crash reporter, then it's entirely possible your compiler is buggy.

Or it's not a compiler, but a linker now sticking 64bit code above 0x100000000 for shit and giggles. Fun times, ask me how I know :)
https://www.tindie.com/products/ubldit/truerng-hardware-rand...

But I'll give two cautions:

1. This device has received less auditing than linux's software crypto. And some HWRNGs are quite bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060636

2. You don't really need that much randomness. After your machine has been on for a while and has seeded correctly, /dev/urandom is just as secure as /dev/random. Entropy is not gasoline - it does not disappear as you use it.
Lebron stack? http://lebron.technology/
so i know storm already supported python bolts/spouts. I'm sure there is value added here but I would love an explanation/example of why this is better than simply implementing my topology on top of storm by it self.
what good is such increase, if client (un-altered, standard Tx power) devices will hear router from afar, but router will not hear their replies from the same distance?
I think you are confusing 'a desktop environment' with Linux. He was talking about Gnome.
memcached as a database is a stretch.
>If Comcast wants the extra money they're trying to get from Netflix/Level 3/etc, but is politically prohibited from doing so, then can't they still just raise end-user's prices?

Of course they can, and will. That wouldn't divide the internet into fast lanes and slow lanes, though, and would be transparent.
No SQL Server?
I make no assumption about the average - or at least I don't in what I wrote. Though I can understand where one might read that in.... :->

My actual assumption is that long-form writers have always been and likely always will be a definite minority - hence our value in many situations. (A necessary step to attaining that value is, not so ironically, learning to summarize and to "hook", because like it or not, even if we deal only with other long-formers, we all have so much on our plates that we cannot devote sufficient time to reading through everything each other writes to decide whether it is worthwhile to read. We need abstracts, filters, curation, etc. It's not ironic because we have to have had the hard slog first to get the long form before we tweet, bullet, etc.)

My other assumption - more of a grumpy old man conclusion, really - is that the rise and acceptance of the bullet and the tweet and the SMS has given voice to a great many who otherwise would be excluded from many serious conversations.

Yes, there are gems in their output, but so few and far between that their output rarely rises to the level of discourse and rarely becomes impactful or lasting. On the whole, intellectually I think we are worse off for the additional noise, but socially better off for the addition of their voices. Overall, we are slightly better off, and if that means we need to work harder to filter for the signal, so be it, better to have more voices than fewer.

At least socially we are better off. As a whole.

But a great many specific communities are worse off because of the minimal level of effort required to inject one's meanginglessness and laziness into serious discussions. Witness "me too"/"this"/"+1"/etc. in comments, tweets, emails, etc.

So I'm happier human being because so many people are able to join in global conversations, but I'm grumpier subject matter expert because too many are wandering about my enclave leaving mud everywhere.
Can Bob backup Time Machine backups?
The obvious solution for this would be for Android to expose "derive random numbers from image frame" as a permission. But this is unnecessary, because they can just seed /dev/random from this source at boot (or if the device is unseeded).

That said, mobile devices really aren't lacking in entropy sources. With all the radios and sensors in a modern smartphone, why do they need additional methods to generate random numbers?

For information security purposes, a cryptographically secure PRNG is typically at least as secure as the encryption algorithms that it protects.
I ran this on my thesis: http://ix.io/cfV and it's scarily good.
> Talk to anyone

Talk to anyone using an iPhone
>In this case there is no "Beat to the patent."

The fact that they were issued a patent says otherwise.
The follow-up becomes: is it better if more of the cost for bandwidth-intensive services is passed on to every consumer, or just to consumers of those services?

I don't know where I fall on that one.
MonetDB
No CouchDB?
I have it in as 'Microsoft'.
No Solr but ElasticSearch?
At work i inherited a mysyiam,no foreign keys, no transactions,duplicate indexes,bad indexes, no composite indexes, no backups mysql db and many other stuff.

But at home and for personal projects i use postgresql + it's advanced features. So voted for both.
Are you saying I should have seen more of a difference than I actually did? Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I said it makes Node's performance look "mediocre" rather than "bad" because Node is still pretty damn fast compared to the rest of the field (also, I like Node.js a lot and use it daily).

Also, this was by no means a scientific benchmark - it wasn't a comparison of raw ops/sec, or anything like that: just the requests/sec on a few different routes (pretty close as far as implementation logic). I'm sure the chosen frameworks played into the results as well, but I'd consider that a more pragmatic benchmark anyways.
Golang: The next great teaching language
You have an interesting approach: more or less a wrapper function around the original API^h^h^hUI. It has the advantage of preserving the—presumably verified, and maybe even certified—safety protocols.

This technique might have application in the healthcare field. We have already seen evidence [1] of diagnostic or therapeutic equipment going unpatched for years because the manufacturer disallows configuration changes after FDA certification for fear of triggering a recertification event. Besides adding convenience features, it might also be suitable for retrofitting safety features to existing, irreplaceable, but hazardous equipment [2].

A similar approach was used to control a toy Big Trak in BYTE years ago [3].

———

[1] David Talbot. 'Computer Viruses are "Rampant" on medical Devices in Hospitals'. Technology Review, 17th October 2012. URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429616/computer-viruses...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[3] http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-02/1981_02_BYTE...
CS:GO is becoming quite popular.
http://blog.counter-strike.net/
No, I don't. That seems really cool though! Thanks for pointing that out.
When has Linux ever been beholden to an independent standards body? This is an operating built on de facto standardization, not top-down bureaucracy.

The W3 is a "tell me where the people are going so I can lead them there" type of organization. Almost every standardized feature in HTML was first implemented as an extension in some browser. When they did conceive of RDF in a committee it received only sparse adoption. We're no closer to a semantic web today than we were in 2002.

Linux has only adhered to standards where the standards are actually useful. And it has never waited for an official standard before venturing in a new direction.
I love the reverse idea here - take an assessment test and then release that data out to the public - presumably as anonymised as possible.

Then folks can take the same test and see if they should run screaming from the interview
I bet you get wicked performance.
Right, that's the point. Removal shouldn't be thought of as "bad" and the red/green == bad/good association does seem to be fairly deep.
Does anybody know more about the joke with the reference to [Haeberli, 1872], a paper by Paul Haeberli and Paul Heckbert, which is "to appear"?
On mobile, maybe check the deletopedia
Well, in western culture yes, definitely.

But the whole point is that code removal shouldn't be associated with being negative and so shouldn't be coloured red.
The vast majority of places I've worked at used MySQL, which isn't surprising considering most have been LAMP shops. Only one Postgres, and one MSSQL
Ah, thank you for correcting that.

Valve's profit is probably a function of the current prize pool, right? So it seems like they should have made at least 2x above what they're offering. Since the pool increased by $1.76M, it seems likely they've made at least $3.5M. But I'm just speculating based on intuition. If you have hard details, please post 'em!
JavaScript for Java developers
This is the longest HN comment I have read that includes exactly zero important things. The ultimate problem is the lack of a standard in the init family of software. If I have to write eight initialisation scripts to support eight different Unices, then the major problem is this, not the features, or the philosophy.
Currently using Postgres, but not utilising any of its more powerful features.
Virtuoso Open Source
Just like there are no barriers to changing the GPL so it is compatible with the CDDL, other than the FSF not wanting to?
Would be interesting to know the context; small or large company / is there a strong IT focus or is IT just an internal service for the company, etc; think that may give more telling results (i.e. enterprises that buy off-the-shelf are often forced the Oracle/SQL-Server route causing them to select the same techs for bespoke systems to limit DB diversity).
The reason I thought of adding ElasticSearch in the end was because some projects have started to use it as a DB on its own.
I think this is cynical and forgets the reality of competition. In this 'big data hiring' future companies still need to compete for talent. Companies which hire on the basis of arbitrary factors like political views, porn habits, family infighting risk losing talent to competitors. There are incentives to find the right factors of a good employee, just like there are today. In fact a lot of these concerns can happen with the human interview process today.

The algorithm to hire people in this future is a competitive asset of a company and they would spend lots of time & money to narrow down the actual important factors. I highly doubt companies would just all settle on the same algorithm given the incentives to compete.

Also if you are concerned about this info impacting employment, just don't post it online. Not much different than today.
I missed it. I guess I've gotten spoiled by BSD manual pages that have file locations in a subsection labelled Files instead of stuck in the description. At the same time, it gives a directory location, instead of an actual filename, which lends one to believe that the actual name and location will be subject to change without notice, as well as the contents of the file, format, etc.
Dtrace is under a more liberal license as linux. Why not relicense linux? :)
My World-Class Education At MIT Totally Screwed Me Over
Please don't complain about being downvoted on HN. As the guidelines say, it never helps and is always off-topic.
There is obvious up trending of terms like 'big data', 'predictive analytics' and 'data mining'. I have worked in this area since 1998. So here are a few thoughts:

- Good analytics (I'll combine the three terms into 'analytics' for the sake of simplicity) requires an understanding of the tools, as well as a significant understanding of statistics so that you know which analysis to pick. But in addition, it requires a lot of creativity (see my examples below) and a significant amount of time to analyze/slice/dice data in a zillion different ways.

- This is a huge opportunity. Much, much bigger than people realize and much bigger than past trends of new technologies like client-server in early nineties or web apps of 4-5 years back. Why? Because it has the power to affect business processes very powerfully.

- Example 1: I spent 10 months working for a $5B shipping company analyzing data from their Marketing department. I combined it with several hundred global data sources. I worked on over 100 hypotheses. At the end of it, I came up three specific actions that their existing customers take about 6 months before going to a competitor. The Marketing department was thrilled. They spent $17 Million coming with a plan to tackle this. It has been a few months since then; and they have not lost a single customer. This is a powerful proprietary competitive weapon for them now.

- Example 2: I analyzed 10 years of power meter reading data for a large utility company. I combined it publicly available data sources of power consumption of major appliances and census data on family composition/wealth for various neighborhoods. I was able to reliably predict the lifestyle of every family, down to whether the person living in the house streamed a movie on Friday evenings and a whole lot more. So the company decided to use this analysis to change their Direct Mailers with very specific, personalized offerings. Their response to the first test mailer sent to 10,000 people? Twenty seven percent!!! They predict that a significant portion of their profits would come from DM's.