skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading his original post (of unnecessary expletives and excessive nitpicking) can't say I feel sorry for him
12,000-Year-Old Human Skeleton Found in Underwater Cave
One interesting animal mirror implementation is with chameleons.

Chameleons get very upset when they see another chameleon in their space who refuses to back down no matter how threateningly they may posture.
FilePreviews.io now generates image previews for most Audio & Video formats
An analysis of news reports suggests that you're mostly right, but there is a huge factor of the personal charisma of this man. Like Obama, he has played on the "hope & change" motto. Can he deliver, we will have to see.

You may downvote if you like, but I still do not see why this should be on the front page of HN!
I think it's more brutal honesty, than anything. As an engineer and a disliker-of-politicians, I appreciate it, even though I agree it can easily be seen as egotistical or eccentric. When I have hosted guests, I have really wished I had such a clear "opeating manual" (as others in this thread have called it) for them, so I know how I can make them feel comfortable and make their trip most effective.
I've not seen the residue of these problems get worked out yet. We're still committing sins of architecture with undesirable side-effects of byzantine frameworks which are amazing for Hello, World, but devolve into an exhausting mess for modification and long-term maintenance...

3-5 years from now, when new low or framework naive mid-tier devs approach our current javascript MV* frameworks, they are going to be getting screamed at by the business and exec parts of orgs because they seem inefficient or incompetent.

They may be working on dead platforms, without strong communities, breaking things as they fix or change other things, and doing it all so much slower than the original dev did. It will be interesting times.

It's bad enough to try to work on 5-year-old, well-known/popular paradigms in the brownfield, but try making what seems like a simple change to the brownfield while not being able to tear out the deadwood, and since-maligned, framework trends we've been building on now.
Vector data has a much smaller footprint in most cases, but takes lots of processing to render, and even more if you need to be able to zoom around the map. Rendering the US down to z17 as raster tiles allows for efficient processing, but could easily get into 10s of GB (which makes sense, since it is creating thousands and thousands of png images). The size grows exponentially with each zoom level though, so if you only need something like z12, you might be able get it into the 10s of MB range.
Just a friendly FYI: "electrocuted" implies a fatality. (I learned this similarly on an internet forum I posted the word to years ago.)
I think this explains the vastly different reactions to the author's post. His mental state, I can easily empathize with. So if I focus on that, my reply will be very positive. But at the same time, he is calling the every day experience of something like 1/3 of Americans "as good as dead", which is frankly insulting to those who do it their whole lives and even support families doing it.

Having to do manual labor for minimum wage is not as good as dead, it is an obstacle. And it is an obstacle that many people have overcome.

I wish the author nothing but the best, but his ability to improve his situation is going to depend on his ability to change his attitude regarding work and what he needs to live. I hope he does. I hope he finds something or someone that will push him in the right direction. But that's what he needs, not a monetary handout. Working as a dish washer isn't going to kill him. It hasn't killed the thousands of other people doing it, some of whom are even happy about their lives and hopeful about the future.
Fixing the hidden /Users bug on OS X 10.9.3
TakeItApart – Turn screws. Void warranties. Open minds.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.

I think this is the fundamental fallacy that SaaS companies are promoting.

Objectively, the answer is quite obvious in my experience: self-hosted systems are much more reliable than external ones, as soon as you have a reasonably competent person to run them and a second person with basic competence who can take over in an emergency if the first person is not around.

For a start, one of the most consistently unreliable things in many business environments I've worked in was the Internet connection. Workmen cut through underground cables while they're building the new office block down the road. Someone at your ISP accidentally disconnects you while they're in the cabinet hooking up their new customer. Someone moves in across the street with a badly configured wireless router and screws up the wireless frequency for everyone until the regulatory agency gets someone on-site to track down the problem and make them fix their router a week later. Relying on any Internet-based service for something you need full-time adds one more potential point of failure with a demonstrable risk that it will actually fail from time to time.

That is quite separate to the unfavourable track record of many large cloud/SaaS/PaaS companies, including almost all of the big names, compared to running systems in-house. I was genuinely surprised by some of the comments when GitHub was down the other day, where some people were complaining about not even being able to push changes to production because they were so entangled in dependencies on GH and related on-line services like CI systems that they couldn't extricate themselves.
AGPL enforceability (under copyright) rests on the concept of modification rights. The basic idea is that one must get copyright permission in order to modify a protected work, which then AGPL adds conditions for.

This has been semi-tested in the past. In a court case regarding sold paintings, the court sided with the painter when the buyer wanted to chop the art into pieces and rearrange them. The court decided that the act of modifying the art created an derivative work which the painter had not given the buyer permission for.
I'm glad that CloudFlare has a sensible approach to hiring, but sadly I think they will be the exception, rather than the rule.
My favorite shortcut is:

ctrl-shift-eject

to start the screen saver and lock the screen if screen locking is enabled.
It seems like a timeout is less reliable/safe than some broadcast/ping mechanism that can check availability perpetually and if a node has disappeared the validity of the lock changes.

Trying to remember which distributed system model it is that sort of does this. Ring? Mesh?
This is an old trick. A little while ago someone was putting the EICAR test string in email subject lines, headers, inside PDF files, in mime headers, and in other random places. He managed to crash a lot of enterprise level AV solutions and email servers. If you want to be a dick, just copy and paste that string everywhere you can. The AV will treat it like a real threat.
I just can't see the OUYA surviving the Fire TV
It's behind a paywall. :/
I have most definitely followed the advances in the industry because I worked in it in the past few years.

Heuristics are not a new thing in the AV industry and have been in the works even before the dotcom boom. Even with advances in it, it has been proven to either not scale or be absolutely worthless.

Anti-virus "cloud lookup" is just a stop-gap between signature updates. It's not a new idea and all you're doing with that is cataloging MD5s and making them available via whatever network server you choose to use. It's still a signature.

Here's a perfect example of why AV is useless: until 64-bit Windows was commonplace and before XP support was dropped, it was ineffective in stopping the likes of Aleurion (also known as "TDSS" or "TDL").

How did this malware work? Well, in its many, many different permutations, it would get dropped on a machine, become executed, and if the machine was running XP Service Pack 2 or less, it would make use of a vulnerability in the print spooler, get system-level control over the computer, and then it would infect the master boot record with its own bootloader.

How does AV remove it? Well since every time you reboot, it restores its copy of the malware, all it can do is scream that the world is falling because it can do absolutely squat about it. You have to remove it from the bootloader and then do a scan afterward while having taken the system offline.

What fixed the problem? Well applying a patch in the OS is what fixes the issue once and for all--SP3 was the easy way.

If heuristics really worked as you suggest it does, we wouldn't see Cryptolocker and the likes getting around AV. AV evasion is better than ever and heuristics have done absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I used it on the desktop for about six months to a year (1999? 2000?). R4.5. Switched away when they sold to Palm.

I still have a copy of Giampalo's "Practical Filesystem Design" somewhere in the house. It looks like he's published it online: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf.

I remember at the time being upset that Apple had gone with NeXT instead of BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History), but in retrospect it was obviously the right call, even from a technical point of view. It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time, but now fits in a phone...

PS: Does anyone know if Be's developer notes/articles are archived anywhere? I remember there being some really great articles from the OS developers about stuff like how the app_server worked, etc.

EDIT: Ah yes, the Be Newsletters: http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. These are fricking great. I strongly recommend reading them for anyone interested in OS internals.
Use incognito/anonymous browsing mode.
So High, So High
This is not about rigorous statistics, it's about human nature. In the sixth grade, my math teacher offered a test at the beginning of the year that included quite a lot of complicated instructions. The last instruction told students to ignore all the previous instructions, and just write their name at the top of the paper and turn it in.

Guess how well the typical top scorers in the class did on this one.
Courier: Secure News Reader from The Guardian Project
hey, i would be keen to connect with you when i'm about ready to go to toronto. i'm leaning towards toronto at the moment, but i'm also reading many articles and forum posts about how vancouver is actually heating up in terms of its startup ecosystem as well and it's swaying me a little.

if my goal to attend school (either UBC or UofT) is to recruit my team to found a startup, which school would you think is better?
Narendra Modi's victory speech: Government is for the people
I really hope so. That's what has largely killed commercial video games for me...
The Plots to Destroy America
Load Cells are SO Yesterday
If you really think you can code, Fiverr (http://www.fiverr.com/) is the place you have to go. There're many little jobs for you. Do 5 per day, let's do it now mate.
Agreed, the background (social and other) of the 'participant' ought to be very different.
Are you using Chrome? Ctrl+shift+n and you can read it :)
You're right about being able to point to the same tail from two different lists in common lisp, of course. I'm not very experienced with scheme so I can't comment much on that. Clojure is different in the way it implements its data structures, so "structural sharing" in that context refers to its use of tree structures to implement vectors, maps, etc.

Still, though, I think you have it wrong about Clojure's design. You mentioned the talk "the value of values." Immutability and functional programming are core to Clojure's philosophy. This is pointed out on the clojure.org home page. I'm not sure why you think it's not?

Also, Clojure is meant to be a general-purpose language. Also from the home page: "It is designed to be a general-purpose language". So I'm not sure why you think otherwise? I started learning Clojure with 0 experience with the JVM, and many others are doing the same.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "education is entirely orthogonal to Clojure." I think you're commenting on the value of producing an introductory Clojure book? In any case - you mention that "there are better languages for teaching functional programming." The point of Clojure for the Brave and True is not to teach functional programming, it's to teach Clojure.
Common Algorithmic Trading Implementation Mistakes
> what constitutes a "public" station in France?

We have three (four?) of those: and the content is quite similar to private stations except that they receive money from taxes and ads instead of only ads.
Of course they have some constraint that private stations don't have such as coverage of elections, etc.
A lot of his arguments (good party console, hardware doesnt always matter, etc) also apply to Nintendo consoles. Ive always loved the Wii for similar reasons (the fact that it is easy to softmod doesnt hurt either :P )
Obsidian Menu Bar
Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me.

Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer.

And that just feels unfair, and frustrating. I do understand that social skills matter when you work for a company, in a team, but it often feels like they're way too important (evidence: incompetent people at top positions in companies who primarily excel at manipulation or are extremely socially skilled).

Of course, there's a difference between a geek who just lacks social skills, and a geek who is just not a nice person and also lacks social skills to hide this (or lacks social skills because of this). I've met my share of those.

But even then, it's hard to (fully) blame the person in question. I've met my fair share of arrogant, abrasive, unsympathetic, or misogynistic geeks who seem to have mostly become that as a reaction to having been bullied or ostracized. Often, it's self-defense or just inability, and quite frankly the main reason I didn't turn out that way was because I was in the right place at the right time, and I had wonderful peers who dragged me out of my isolation.

It just sucks. And I wish I could fix that. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to know that you are competent, or even well above average, and still not get the jobs that downright incompetent people seem to have no trouble getting.

(I don't mean to justify 'bad' behavior, by the way, but to a degree understanding where it comes from allows me to still sympathize with, say, a racist.)
one reasons i'm seriously considering UBC is because the degree i'm offered can be completed in only 20 months, and i've also heard the weather in vancouver can be very nice.

but there is an overwhelmingly larger number of articles and people saying toronto is the better place for startups and i can't help but feel that i might find better talent in UofT vs UBC.

is cost of housing in vancouver really sky high? and i do like the outdoors - i enjoying skiing and intend to do that perhaps once a month or so.
I posted on server fault and nobody seems to think that it's a hacking or scraping attempt. Thanks again.
Slavoj Žižek’s Jokes: A Sampling of the Theorist’s Humor (NSFW)
Personalized Customer Experience: Not Just for eCommerce
The Ouya has some fun games and it's a cool little console. It's not even remotely perfect, but I'm glad it exists. Between Ouya, Kindle TV, and maybe someday Apple TV or other smart TV's, there's going to be a nice place to put fun little indie games in more places, which is good for developers.
I've worked on many urban planning and transport infrastructure projects in India, since 2001, and have seen first-hand how the Congress government have sent the country into a mire in recent years (after what I regarded as a very promising start). Even when they were not actually corrupt, their decision-making processes became so poor that it was impossible to get anything done. I do have high hopes that Modi will change that.

At the same time, nationalism is dangerous in any form. I remember the last BJP government -- I was living in Ahmedabad in the run-up to the riots, and got out a few days beforehand, as it was increasingly clear that Something Bad was about to go down -- and I remember the way that Vajpayee would beat the war drums with Pakistan whenever anything he needed to divert attention from something on the home front. Hopefully Modi has learned that fanning the flames of communal and international tension is not, in fact, to India's benefit.

If Modi can stay focused on cleaning up the government, building infrastructure, and generally making the country a less difficult place to get things done, then India can resume its trajectory towards becoming one of the world's great powers. If, on the other hand, he goes for the cheaper and easier political points that one can score by slagging off Muslims, then I fear that India will tear itself apart, leading to far worse outcomes than Congress could have achieved. On balance, I'm optimistic that he will steer towards the former more than the latter, but I'll be watching carefully.
>Focusing on governments seems like a good focus.

They aren't really focusing on governments plural, just government singular: the US government. To comply with US law these American companies must provide information about non-US users to the US government, without any warrants. The 'warrant for content' star is meaningless to non-US citizens.

>opting out of giving info to businesses is much more realistic

This EFF report is only talking about government surveillance through corporations. If you opt out of using Google (note: this isn't possible if you use the web) then it doesn't matter if governments are requesting your data from Google because Google has nothing to tell them.

Solving corporate surveillance would solve all of the of government surveillance that this EFF report is concerned with.

The text on the page is pretty misleading as well. It starts off ok:

>We entrust our most sensitive, private, and important information to technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Verizon. Collectively, these companies are privy to the conversations, photos, social connections, and location data of almost everyone online.

But then they ignore what they just said and focus only on government data requests, instead of asking the most relevant question which is what do the companies do with that data that might impact users privacy. Is the company selling a profile about me to health insurers? This page won't tell me, yet the page is giving these companies an EFF badge of approval for 'privacy'.

Further on they say:

>In the face of unbounded surveillance, users of technology need to know which companies are willing to take a stand for the privacy of their users.

Again this is misleading. Standing up to government data requests is not the same as 'taking a stand for the privacy of their users', since the company may also be selling the information to anybody willing to pay for it. Standing up to one type of request (that has no economic benefit to the company) doesn't tell us how the companies act when it comes to protecting the data in other ways (where they have a direct economic incentive to mine the data and to sell the data). The text continues on in a similar way, constantly implying that government data requests are the only thing that could possibly violate privacy.

I can only agree with the other commentators that are calling this report a corporate propaganda exercise. Some people have implied that it's just because these companies are funders of the EFF. I'm not sure it's a simple as that. The EFF has always involved some people with pretty extreme political views that are very pro-corporate. The 'Freedom' in their name has always been as much about freedom for corporations as it was about freedom for individuals. That is probably why this page acts like corporate surveillance can't exist; by definition (according to their politics) only the government can spy on you. Everything else is just 'the market'. I doubt many people reading the page will be aware of the extreme political view behind the design of this report, which is of course the sign of well executed propaganda.
Exactly, and it's a big reason why some places are reluctant to hire them. They'll rain on your parade faster than anyone else, and people don't like to have their parade rained on.
Our of curiosity, what do you think about the events in Gujarat in 2002?
You could say that my views are based on the environment but I would describe it as being on the world on a whole. All your benefits are to our societies and other related tribes. In that regard I agree that the average person provides some good but at a world level that includes the environment, other species, resources, etc I think the in most cases we are a negative force.
This is true, but it is awfully simple for getting a site stood up quickly in the first place.
This is a much-needed reality check for those of us who work on technology.

What we imagine: if we keep digging the tunnel, we'll get to the post-scarcity world on the other side.

What actually happens: Uber and Clinkle. Drone warfare. Time-tracking software originally intended for self-employed consultants to install on their own machines, to monitor themselves, being used to torment corporate serfs and aid in layoffs. "Story point" tracking systems. Services that help HR departments of banks and technology companies collude on compensation and make illegal inquiries (back channel references, aka discrimination) about employees. Evil tech, in other words. Not even Microsoft "evil" but actual evil evil.

We have this idealistic but delusional belief that just by working very hard we can, collectively, obsolete the overlords and criminals who (for the most part) are the ones who pay us. It rarely works out that way. Whether technology is ultimately to the power of good versus evil may be the core question answered by the coming major conflicts of the 21st century.
Look, if we're going to stop using terms just because they don't mean what they originally meant when first coined, we lose about three-quarters of the English language. That ship has sailed.
I'm curious how this would handle rolling restarts (maybe a randomized delay before deploying?) or rollbacks on failed deployments...
"the home page of their website, what are they thinking?"

You're right... this should be put in the 'bad ideas' portfolio for web design instructors to use in future lessons.

Even after you know that it is not a "come back later", it still feels wrong and awkward having to ignore your natural instincts to leave, as you look past the big red circles and explore the site!
Down-vote me all you can, but OP's situation is most definitely self inflicted.

It's the same with drug addicts. They can't help it. You can be compassionate with them, but it won't help them. What they need is a kick in their arse to fling them out of their comfort zone and embrace the big changes.

Hopefully, OP's new job shall open his eyes and guide him in the right direction.

He does not seem to be handicapped neither mentally nor physically -- and there are millions of people in much more need than such a victim of procrastination.

Don't fret, OP'll be fine.
Some people are just assholes and do not have mental health problems.

Unless you're widening the definition for MH problem to include things like anger or Asperger's syndrome.