skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spot on. Plasma is complete crap but nobody will acknowledge it. I was a very passionate kde user (and have also contributed a lot to the code base). I have given up on KDE since the last 4 years or so. The oxygen theme is such an eye sore. The problem is it's sacrilege to question all these decisions in the "community" (whatever is left).

And also the constant rewrites is so annoying. First Qt4, then graphics view, now QML. I don't blame them. Who wants to maintain code anyway.

/me is happy cinnamon user.
I've noticed that recent google infrastructure puts medium-to-strict requirements on timeservers. Does that mean that the idea of causality and vector clocks has been abandoned partly or wholly for a greater reliance on absolute synchronicity?
Very well said. It's a shame so many project managers (and coders!) don't understand that any sufficiently sized project is a million times better off when investing more time at the beginning to lay a solid foundation. I like that more and more people are beginning to understand nowadays.
Most of the people who are pushing for "features now, someone else's problem later" are probably not upper management but rather middle management. Upper management might understand capital underinvestment. Capital underinvestment is very nearly the sole job middle management is there for. And berating people for not being done yet. At least at a couple of the places I've worked.
I would have loved to use Ocaml for my compilers course, writing one in Java was a less than ideal situation, especially since the spec we were implementing was a strict subset of Java. Not much of a wow factor when you create a language that can't do anything the implementation language couldn't.
How I hate simulations that pretend to be Science. You get out of a simulation exactly what you put in, and no more.

"According to our model, the tipping point is somewhere between the 14- and 17-month sentences"

Surprise surprise! You put those numbers in and they came back out!

Or are we to believe that somehow society just randomly happened upon exactly the correct number to tip one race one way and one the other?

Their error check to California later doesn't help because that's part of the data they used to design their simulation in the first place!

And finding that sentence length alone explains everything is actually proof that this simulation is useless!

In the real world there is a huge difference in the number of single parent homes, and those without a good male role model between the races. Those are well known factors for crime, and the fact that there is no excess difference in the model that needs to be attributed to this shows that the model is just parroting their preconceived explanation.

Summary: They carefully tuned their model so that 14 months causes the incarceration seen by whites, and 17 months causes the rate seen by blacks. They did that for a good reason: In order to match the real world. But it's no surprise that those are exactly the numbers their model came back with.
All TCP/IP ports that in TIME_WAIT are not closed after 497 days
There is some beautiful advice in this article, but a lot of it seems to be correlation mistaken for causation, e.g. happy couples being kind to another - do you expect unhappy couples to be kind to one another? Does being kind assure you will stay together, or are happy couples (who would stay together anyway) just more likely to be kind?

That said, the openness expressed in this article reminds me strongly of "making dialogue safe" in Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al. I highly recommend that book and recently wrote a glowing review of it (it's on my blog).
Luis Suarez biting game
Facebook Security: Fighting Bulk Search Warrants In Court
One expects that judges will sort this mess out. In the meantime, what is the governer's statement on this? The only acceptable response to a 5-minute inquiry is "Massachusetts Police Departments are hereby ordered to publish their LEC records or withdraw from LECs immediately"
The content also looks to be open sourced on Github, too:
https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-content
The power is obviously lost on the way back, but this doesn't actually factor into the distance you can read from, practically speaking. If you can get power to the device, you can use a super high-gain antenna to receive its transmission. Same thing goes with NFC chips; the one I have implanted can only be powered feasibly from about 10 inches away (physically impossible beyond about half a meter, due to flesh and the fact that it's magnetic coupling), but if something else powers it, you can read it from an exceptionally large distance.
none of what you've quoted highlights her gender

why are you bringing that up?
I think a lot of it comes down to developers focusing on their own personal learning and development and not what is best for the current project.

Very few workplaces will let you work hard for 5 hours solving problems in the most time effective way and then spend the next 3 hours on your personal development.

On the other hand you can always spread the work over 8 hours and "experiment" with "on the job learning" leaving all sorts of sub-optimal solutions in the project. Then the next guy goes "Why on earth did Jim use X here?" and the truthful answer is because Jim wanted to learn more about X.
YES! This is brilliant, fuck the records requests, file conspiracy to murder charges.
I kind of like having standard private subnets. My router is always 192.168.1.1, or sometimes 10.0.1.1, and so is my friend's, my parent's, and my grandparent's.
Discarded Smartphones Upcycled Into Digital Forest Watchdogs – PSFK
Which is the sound of everyone's SMS alert going off within seconds of each other.
this thing is a mobile app waiting to happen. everyone has trouble with the four: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive
"Bad code" is a completely subjective measure which everyone is sure they will know when they see it, but few agree on the actual definition.

Extreme examples will be floated, but in practice what people consider "bad code" are things that made decisions that aren't sustainable. For instance a complete lack of permissions. A lack of logging. A lack of multithreading if it's a CPU bound process. Locks. Dependencies. Etc.

Each person and team really does define bad code differently, and often in complete contrast with each other. There are people who considered DI heavy code bad code. Heavily abstracted and layered Java code is considered great code by some, horrendous code by others. And on and on.
Smart Cup That Can Tell What You’re Drinking
Yeah, I've followed Clojure from afar for the past two years or so, but haven't yet had a reason to use it at work. I like a lot about the way the language is laid out, and whenever I watch one of Rich Hickey's talks I find myself instinctively wanting to sell all my possessions and walk the earth handing out "Data is Code, Code is Data" tracts. The few times it's seemed like Clojure might be a good fit for something small, I've ended up using Racket (for whatever reason I find all the infrastructure around writing and deploying Racket to be less cumbersome than all of Clojure's Java-ness)

So far, I've written all the "collection" type stuff in my system in Haskell, and I'm glad I ignored everyone's hemming and hawing about it, because it was actually a really pleasant experience. Now that I'm gathering a lot of disparate data, I'm in the "what the hell do I do with it?" phase of my project. I'm trying to resist sucking it all into Hadoop (partly because I'm a one-person operation and even a small Hadoop cluster would be larger than all of the systems that are generating the data that I'm monitoring, and partly because I can keep about a years worth of data comfortably in memory).

So I'm basically using this as an opportunity to try out whatever kinds of data analysis I think sound interesting, and then hopefully learning what is a good fit and what isn't. This is all uncharted territory for me, and I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can do what I want and don't have any time pressures.

I figure I can try to use this data to learn about statistical modeling, graph analysis, and machine learning. For the time being, I'm favoring Haskell for this, but that's not really any type of requirement. I just find that I enjoy Haskell a lot right now, so I should see how far I can go before the honeymoon ends and the awfulness is revealed.
Why would that be interesting?

Boies is an attorney, he doesn't display his own point of view, he is (one of the best in the world) professional presenter of clients' point of view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies#Notable_cases
It was based on the $4.50 cost in the comments from the reseller plus looking at alibaba. I'm not claiming it's super accurate.
To me, all code is debt so long as it requires maintenance. It will be read and modified hundred of times after being initially written hence why you want to have as few as possible. Code also need to be hosted on servers somewhere and that's a sort of debt too since you now are forced to maintain the infrastructure, keep the software updated, ensure it's always running. However, you have to accept a certain amount of debt otherwise you will never be able to launch anything. Everytime you can invest some time to reduce maintenance later down the road, it's like getting a lower rate on your debt. However no matter how hard you'll try, if the project is used it'll require love, time and hard work to keep it going. Then comes a time where either the project fails and you take it down (and stop paying any debt) or, if you're lucky, the balance between ongoing cost and benefits start to even out and you're finally out of the woods.
Fortress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language)) and X10 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(programming_language)) were the other two languages that came out of the DOE HPCS program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Sys...) that might be interesting if you liked Chapel.

Other aiming-for-HPC languages include co-array Fortran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coarray_Fortran) and Unified Parallel C (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Parallel_C).

I never really saw any of them while working in HPC, though. It was just Fortran, C, and sometimes Python. The Python would really just call out via SWIG to a C function for the numeric kernel.
Nobody would use scissors to fulfill a kickstarter project.
If this is a repeat of history, then the future of the U.S. is bright.
Experiences with a failing startup
Chapel emerged a while back from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems project along with the Fortress (now defunct) and X10 programming languages. Out of curiosity, is there a reason Chapel is a getting attention now?
As a CS major, the only way that PM and AM ever made sense was to realize that hours were really mod-12 and started counting at 0. Noon is then 0pm which is followed by 1pm and makes everything entirely consistent.
Incarceration equals the period of contagion, Lum explains. "The longer you're imprisoned, the higher the toll your incarceration takes on your family and friends, and the more likely they are to ‘catch’ your incarceration from you.....The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks..."

This study seems to completely ignore the socioeconomic factors that often lead to the more serious crimes and resulting longer sentences in the first place. It isn't the longer sentences that are causing incarceration to "spread" to friends and family, it's the fact that the friends and family tend to be in the same socioeconomic position as the person that received the sentence, and thus are just as likely to display similar conduct.

The flawed conclusion in this study is like saying that a whole family is more likely to get wet because one family member gets rained on. While statistically accurate, the fact that one person gets wet doesn't cause the others to get wet; the cause is that they all live in the same environment and are thus far more likely to get wet than those that live in areas where it isn't raining.
You can have that in IPv6 too, with link-local addresses (fe80::/64). In fact, it's becoming quite common to assign fe80::1 to a subnet's default gateway.
> Run in multiple clouds from day one. Take the pain. It gives you flexibility. Basic vendor management 101.

While "taking the pain" may yield flexibility in the long run, the most important thing in the short run is making sure that you are building something that people want, listening to users, and iterating the tech side of things as quickly as possible. I suspect that most devs have enough trouble dealing with a single cloud provider and that trying to work with multiple would could a significant decrease in iteration speed. I think that approach would kill most startups because of the technical overhead incurred.
This isn't a 'primer' about Technical debt - it's an opinionated piece about the value of the concept of technical debt, which I think is at least a 102 or possibly 201 level course on the subject, and needs to be taken in the context of other material. I suspect it hasn't been tested out on many nontechnical managers, either - using the concept of electron spin (for a nontechnical audience, remember) as an analogy for the concept of analogies is the kind of meta-analysis that I think will lose them pretty early on.

I think the real problem of this piece is that it flatters nontechnical managers, as businesspeople, by describing technical debt as a sensible business decision they can get into consciously through clearheaded negotiation with their technical team; then characterizes 'bad code' as something different, that happens when the technical team just don't do their job. This alleviates the nontechnical manager of any responsibility for bad code. The fact is that knowing about technical debt is not necessary to find yourself up to your neck in it. A team which goes for years taking shortcuts, being forced to hit unrealistic deadlines, or which lacks the skills to really build a good, robust system, is like a kid with a credit card who doesn't get that just paying the minimum payment each month isn't going to work forever. Every shortcut they get asked to take, they swipe the card, and they get to walk out of the store with the goods, and it seems to just keep on working; thousands of dollars worth of stuff, and they just have to pay a few hundred each month. It's magic!

But the consequences will show up in the end, either in the form of a long period of hard graft to pay it down, or declaring bankruptcy and abandoning the codebase.

That's why I love the technical debt analogy - different people manage financial debt differently, and most businesspeople understand the concept that planned debt is necessary and beneficial for growth; arguing that Ward Cunningham and the author don't think you should call other technical debt by that name seems petty, and not particularly useful, when extending the analogy to runaway debts works so well.

Overall the problem I really have with this piece is that if I tell a manager "This project is carrying a bunch of technical debt," now they'll google it, find this, and come back to me with "You mean it's a pile of bad code." Which is true, but how does that help us? When I make the argument that a troubled project needs to pay down some technical debt, I'm trying to make clear that we need to start paying off more than just the minimum payment every month. If the technical debt analogy is removed from the table, I'm left with just saying the team needs to replace the bad code with good code. And then they'll tell me that this piece also told them that the 'big rewrite' was a bad idea too... So how has this helped?
Android was the first platform to have a Chromium based release (and that was WebKit based, pre-fork!) with Opera 14 (no other platform has a version 14; all Chromium based Opera releases are just Chromium version minus 13, and nothing else shipped based on Chromium 27).
That's what I was thinking too. How could an arrest hold up in court? This could go both ways.
This is very inspirational, congratulations. I suppose I am where you were at 2 months ago. Have basic HTML/CSS and starting to learn fundamentals of JS and want to start actually completing projects. Would you recommend Treehouse?
unfortunately police officers are _almost_ _never_ _fired_ _for_ _any_ _reason_ _whatsoever_.
Seems like an alternative to jquery-pjax but I don't see real upside of adding json to the equation.
Has Facebook ever been public about the tools they use for deploying new machines onto bare metal with Chef? My company faces similar problems, albeit at a much smaller scale, but still...I'm wondering what they have in place of a tool such as http://theforeman.org (which is very coupled to Puppet).
#onlythebeginning

On another note, do the Israelis still eavesdrop on the White House phones?

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/06/us/israeli-spy-inquiry-finds-nothing-officials-say.html
Incidentally, weekly+free is actually a really good approach from the newspaper's perspective, not just for the readers. The weekly run keeps production costs down, and revenue from purchases is generally pretty low compared to the ad money, so for an operation like that it's easier just to optimize for eyeballs.
8 npm tips for better Node development
it seems that they are employees of the particular law enforcement agencies, but the equipment and activities related to SWAT are managed within these corporations.
No it's not and no they aren't.

You are not Aereo and Aereo is not you. That's the point. You can pull down content for your personal, non-commercial use, and Aereo can pull down content for its personal, non-commercial use, but the moment either of you pull it down then transfer it to the other - especially on a commercial basis - then you've run afoul of the laws prohibiting retransmission.

Capiche?
7 Patterns to Refactor JavaScript Applications: Query Objects
This is the takeaway for the TL;DR crowd :)
""Under this model, small increases in sentence length led to large differences in the rate of incarceration regardless of race. That means harsher sentencing policy may have the unintended consequence of increasing crime, rather than reducing it.”"
congrats man. time to publish fart app!
I recently did data (log) analysis with Clojure. So far, really enjoyed it. I use gorilla-repl, which is the reason I picked Clojure in the first place. Be able to use (in browser) REPL to play with data, and display table/charts just using Clojure in browser really helps.

I have studied and still a fan of Haskell, only did some small sideline project with Haskell before. Would love to read this book. and maybe use it in the future.
A very nice illustration. I often played the part of the "bad expert" when I was growing up, but I was able to get over it by asking myself the simple question: What do I actually have to prove? I love learning things myself; why should I deny someone else that joy of having a concept explained with empathy and respect?
"One expects that judges will sort this mess out"

Who expects that? Judges failed to stem the growth of militarized police forces for decades.
The expression "X is eating the world" is eating the world.
Why I Cancelled My Oculus Rift VR And You Should Too
I don't think that's true. The ideas of causality, logical clocks and vector clocks have not been abandoned in any sense. In fact, there seems to be significant new interest in eventually consistent systems over the last few years, and interest in vector clocks and highly available (in the CAP 'AP' sense) systems is still growing. The excitement about research into CRDTs is a good illustration of this.

More fundamentally, though, Spanner doesn't involve absolute synchronicity in any real sense. Instead, at least as described in their paper, the focus is on using the special clocks to improve some system properties by bounding absolute clock skew. The ideas of causally related operations, and the orderings between these operations, is still important even in that environment.
Check out Webmin, no PHP/Apache required and it's super powerful, though its look smells a bit of the 90s. :)
And those "numerous integration points" are?
Could Verizon file suit against the US Government over this?
Back in 1963, I was tutored in calculus by a 15-year old who won that year's Science Talent Search for his research in nuclear magnetic resonance. He had completed essentially all of undergrad math and physics. I think you have a badly warped view of what is possible for smart people, whatever age.
Chrome is expressing intent to implement VR APIs

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...
I like the way you think, but too many judges are inclined to see things through the eyes of law enforcement.

A friend of mine had his feet put to the fire during sentencing by a federal judge over whether he thought it was 'funny' to bring a 'department of injustice' sign to a protest where he was later arrested for assaulting a marshall, who in fact kind of stumbled into him and then created a melee.

The judge seemed quite clearly to believe that he was a part of the 'department of justice', though the DoJ was the plaintiff in the case before him.

Even when you get a precedent set about the role and behavior of law enforcement, it's very difficult to get judges to apply it sanely.

"Well, you see, in this prior case the defendent had yellow shoes, so..."

That said, something has to be done.
Google's Chromecast will use ultrasonic sounds to connect with nearby devices
I thought Fail2Ban hooked directly into iptables? How would you get locked out or overloaded?

I don't necessarily think Fail2Ban needed a GUI, but I guess I never thought it was a "bad" thing?
7 developer takeaways from the Google IO keynote
I wonder why Instagram wasn't using VPC in the first place. I've been using AWS for a startup for a few years now and I had our instances running in VPC from about the second month onward.

It's been one of the best architecture decisions I've ever made. At this point we only use one public IP address. (If direct access to a machine is needed then you can connect via VPN running on the one bastion host with the public IP address, and this gives your machine access to the local IP addresses of instances running inside the VPC.)

All the machines in our cluster are protected inside local VPC address space, with the access by the external world being ELB to expose public service endpoints like the API and website. I can't think of any good reason why you wouldn't be using VPC in the first place. Having public IP addresses for private machines sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ever accidentally miss a port in your security rules.
Michael Abrash (Valve, Oculus): http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-n...

John Carmack (Id, Oculus): http://www.altdev.co/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategie...

Both of them have done testing with custom very low latency systems.
It creates a lot of pain when you need to connect these networks to each other, though. Admittedly, that's probably not a problem for parents, friends, etc.

At my Old Job I demanded we keep a "registry" of the RFC1918 address space we allocated to Customers. We never allocated Customers in overlapping address spaces. It made VPN connectivity to Customer A while on-site with Customer B much easier. It also helped out in one case where one Customer acquired another.
KDE is going straight ...
Down!

I'm sorry to see it go (was my first Linux DE), but it's userbase has become a niche. It's mostly Unity and Gnome3 now.