skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it is scary when you realize how susceptible some of this infrastructure is.

Reminds me of an instance in 2009. I was working in Santa Cruz, CA. I was configuring some of our servers remotely, when suddenly I lost internet connection. The whole office was out. VoIP was down - no signal on my cell phone as well. I went to the front desk and tried the land line. No dial tone.

This was weird.

I saw a few people from other offices milling about the courtyard. I went outside. They were all experiencing the same thing. A few of us went to Starbucks. Couldn’t buy coffee because their registers were down.

At this point, people were starting to leave their offices in droves. Santa Cruz PD actually began to have a few officers walk around the area, since no one could make phone calls.

The only thing that worked was Verizon cell phones. These were being passed around so people could make calls (data did not work however).

All in all, this lasted about 6 hours.

This was caused by a single frustrated former ATT employee. He just went in and clipped some fiber lines and left.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344762,00.asp
Passive aggressive racism
That's a good question. Loeb's primary strength (apart from its exceptional typographics) is that it puts original texts side by side with translations, making it easier for a reader to make sense of the Greek or Latin source by comparing it to English. I'm not aware of any widely accepted digital formats for parallel prose that Loeb could offer for download; PDF or DejaVu have their obvious drawbacks; so that would probably leave us with some proprietary stuff, sadly.
Awesome article. Thanks for diligent work.
(I'm the author of the post.)

I went from software engineering to VC about two years ago, and I used to have the same opinion as you: a lot of business books/articles/blog posts are just platitudes, and anyone with common sense should already know this stuff or be able to figure it out easily.

Moving to the VC side was eye-opening. From what I've seen, people are very good at taking something they've learned in a blog post and seeing how it would apply to other people's businesses. They're not very good at realizing how those same lessons apply to their own businesses. For example, I've met many founders who talk about building MVPs but don't notice that their own pre-launch products are heading way past "minimum viable". I'm not immune to this, either. Like many engineers, I have a bunch of side project ideas that I hope to one day turn into successful companies. Literally days after becoming a VC, I realized that most of the pitfalls I saw in other people's business ideas were very present in my own ideas. It was humbling.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I agree with you that AoP's advice is not particularly deep (although it's much better than most books), and that the challenge is in applying it. What I loved about this book is that makes it makes profit model advice so easy to apply to your own business. You can literally go through each of the 23 profit models in the book and ask, "What would my product look like if I applied this model to it?" If you spend 2 minutes on each model, I bet that you'd have some excellent ideas in just 45 minutes. I haven't found many other business books that are as practical.
Nothing much? You don't have to fall asleep to feel rested from taking an hour long break ...
Ah, I didn't realize you were talking about underscore-semver. I'm sure that was done tongue in cheek.

> He's not released a version that obeys semver, he's released a version that treats any update as a breaking change.

SemVer isn't a law. It's a set of guidelines for versioning software in a slightly less arbitrary way. Maybe extra precaution could be taken for something as common as underscore, and to me that is the only argument worth having here.
One of the things I love so much about being in the high tech world is its natural tendency for a (more) level playing field.

It shouldn't (and often doesn't) matter what you look like, where you came from, or who you are. What really matters is the value produced for others by what you do.

This sounds like a great step in promoting that property to those who may not have experienced it before. I have a feeling it may work out real well for lots of people.
New Firefox start page invites millions to learn a little code
I'm a keen transhumanist, so yes I am familiar with the state of cryonics. I'm not a cryogenicist and couldn't put an actual number on the probability of success (neither could anyone else) but I'm aware of the serious challenges that face cryonics. For example, while the current chemical cocktail they're using as antifreeze is much more effective than the original solutions, the problem of cell deterioration due to cell membrane rupture still prevents the brain from being well preserved for the timescales cryonics is looking at. While we don't understand the brain that well yet, the extent of physical brain damage that would be seen over e.g. 100 years' freezing under current conditions would not be insignificant. That may not be a problem in the future, but noone can predict the future.

Also, to suggest I'm imposing my view on other people is asinine; this is a forum for voicing opinions, and I'm voicing mine. I understand that when I'm on my death bed I might well make the same decision to preserve my body - human beings are hypocrites by nature and I'm certainly no exception. However, if you're suggesting that raising an opinion/suggestion on the subject that is different to yours is arrogance then I'd take a moment to consider the idea that it might be _you_ that is being arrogant; reread my post and maybe you'll realise that my tone was more along the lines of highlighting an alternative use for this money, and with much more viable results in objective terms. If cryonics was known (or even generally considered) to be viable then I would likely hold a different opinion.
> When one country is habitually lying to the world and receiving sanctions from its partners, that trust is lost.

Well, the magnitude of this is still debatable, once you move outside the america-centric western propaganda bubble. But still, since we're comparing those two nations, I'd like to remind you that United States Government keeps lying to everyone 'both foreign and domestic', so we have exactly equal reasons to trust the US and the Russians.

Fortunately space is usually free of politics, but since you brought that up... did you know that it was NASA who first said (or likely was forced to) to Russians: "hey, we don't like what you're doing with Ukraine, so from now on, we're not going to space together"? The "sudden turn-about on" military engines and ISS prolongation on the part of Russians was merely a reaction to a completely asinine politicization of space by the US Government.

So to fix your sentence, what we know is that "the United States leadership has no problem with politicizing space".

But hell, of course it's the Russia's fault, Holy Freedom Loving America never does anything wrong, or stupid.

Disclaimer: I'm not pro-Russian. I'm anti-stupid-prowestern-propaganda and the usual assuming that America is Good, Russia is Bad. I think we're mature enough to not base our thinking on cold war-era action movies.
> It shouldn't (and often doesn't) matter what you look like

So why exactly do they need to recruit more black people? Instead of like, everyone?
Creating a Virtual Machine in C
Was thinking the same, considering that the first few transatlantic landed in Ireland. Recently visited a section of the first transatlantic cable in Valencia Island no idea how they got much of it on a ship.
They should share some analytics on this and see if this actually leads to more interest in development. That would be pretty exciting if true. I'd hope maybe others do this too. It would be a great way to reach out and get new people into development.
> Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.

The only people who would think nobody bitches/whines/complains on FB are those that have never used it.
'Sailing rocks' mystery finally solved
You should check out Database Systems: The Complete Book.

Those papers have a lot of that information, but it's usually a bit buried.

> What system calls do they make

I think that's actually kind of out of scope for a paper, because already you are assuming an OS and a language. Many papers/articles assume neither.

> what schemes do they use to minimize seeks

Look for information on buffer management/buffer managers

> how is the memory laid out

Almost always in pages that correspond to disk blocks. Also it's dependent on lots of things (transactional model, index types, column vs row orientation, etc..) This is heavily tied into the buffer management stuff too.
That part of world has been capitalizing on its position with regard to trade routes since the Sumerians pioneered exchange with the Indus Valley civilization. It's remarkable to see this development as the latest iteration of a truly ancient tradition.
The "mainstream users should use hosted wallets" meme is inaccurate.

3rd party wallets do not provide security via black magic. They use tools like passwords, 2FA, and email addresses, all of which could be compromised on a user's computer. Think key loggers, viruses, social engineering, people leaving their computers unattended with the wallet open.

There is no technical reason why the security measures that Coinbase implements cannot be done using a personal wallet. Moreover, when storing coins on Coinbaes, you are additionally subject to counter party risk (Coinbase goes under, loses their coins) as well as regulatory risk (Coinbase shuts down withdrawals due to regulations).
This isn't helpful. It's a perfectly valid question that even provides insight into some possible candidates. The candidates might not be the best options, but they commonly serve this purpose.

What is it about RabbitMQ or Redis durability that you find lacking? What alternative do you recommend?
Show HN: Async.legacy – Swift syntactic sugar for GCD
It takes a certain chutzpah to leave the sort of comments one sees on this issue and the similar one for Backbone. The author hasn't made a secret of his versioning policy. If you have a broken module, you shouldn't have used [EDIT: actually "~" would have been fine] "^" or (my favorite) ">=" as a semver operator when depending on this module on which you depend for free. Anyway, with a decent test suite, surely a modicum of (automated) testing has already identified the pinning that should take place?
This is awesome. A diversity of people will bring a diversity of ideas. You can find highly intelligent, driven people from all walks of life, it's a shame that there's a process broken in self-selection for software engineering and bay area startups. Although it's probably not just diverse self-selection that needs work, I imagine there's probably forms of discrimination and roadblocks that privileged classes of the majority don't even recognize.
I think what he means by "negative cost" is that you actually pay people (in credit), to take the bike to the desired station.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166983

I visited IBM's Almaden research facility years ago and a jolly old-timer sang me one of these songs. It went to the tune of Jingle Bells, and ended on this high note:

I.B.M. – happy men
Partners of T.J.
In his service to mankind
That's why we are so gay.

One doesn't forget such a thing.

The jolly old-timer also told me that the day he started work at I.B.M., a doorman ordered him to pull up his pant leg and then sent him home because he wasn't wearing garters to hold his socks up.
I fear so much. As if OED subscription at two hundred quid per annum wasn't bad enough.
Tracking Assets in the Production of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” (2002)
Startups with really unique business models
Maybe I'm biased by not having a widely used open source project, and my judgement is thus clouded by wanting to one day have a community of users for something that I've written.

That said, I do write code and have tools that are used by other groups of people, and have experienced feature requests and suggestions and patches that I don't necessarily agree with, and I've always tried to step back and consider the overall impact on the project rather than my personal preconception of what the project "should" be. I've merged features that I'd never use and adjusted things to make my project more friendly for users who aren't me.

I think that one of the greater things about open source projects is that over time the original author can focus more on the fun parts or on guiding the overall direction of the project, because the community can provide assistance with identifying issues and maintaining existing systems. Whether the version number is 2.0.0 or 1.7.0 or 50.0.0 is such a trivial thing, and as a developer I'd imagine I'd make my choice based on what made my project more usable for the community.
which is essentially on click. You don't want the details to only show up while your big fat index finger is in the way.
> I don't see how it is more fair to fine a poor person less for committing the exact same violation of the code.

You're familiar with the expression "let the punishment fit the crime"? For a poor person, the fine should reflect an awareness of how much he has, just as it does for the rich person.

> I just don't think they should be scaled based on income.

In a world where everything else is? What incentive would a judge have to levy a single fine that would annoy a rich person but bankrupt a poor one?

Taken to its logical conclusion, the same crime committed by a 15-year-old should be prosecuted the same way as though the offender were 40. But the world isn't arranged that way, for excellent reasons.

Once a girlfriend got ticketed for not wearing her seat belt, the fine was $250. She absolutely couldn't afford it, it would undermine everything she was trying to accomplish. She was in anguish. It never occurred to her that the judge didn't understand her position. I told her to write the judge, acknowledge that she was in the wrong, then explain that the fine was way too high, given her circumstances. The judge immediately lowered the fine to $25.
So, as someone who is a privileged class of the majority (white, male, 25-49), what are the roadblocks?

If there's discrimination, isn't that purely the fault of the Y Combinator organisers (in this instance), and is this article then an admission that they've discriminated in the past?
Part of it may be social networks. Recruiting "everyone" usually ends up being recruit "everyone you know". And social circles are often not terribly diverse: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/25/t...
Because "like, everyone" (aka people in the demographic they have supported as of now) often have had more chances/advantages in their lives. Listening to some ideas from people with different backgrounds couldn't hurt.
Surely Y Combinator should just recruit people that do the job the best, whether they are white,black..etc
This is nothing against Coinbase or other centralized wallet services for that matter, but Coinbase is practically being forced to ask their users for a blood sample during user verification these days.

This level of user verification, necessitated by KYC, AML policies and so on, is extremely burdensome for end users.

In fact, I've heard Coinbase is now requiring their users to declare exactly _where_ bitcoins are to be sent when a withdrawal request is made. Furthermore, Coinbase is having to shut down customer accounts that are known to be associated with online gambling.

Native wallets don't come with these "features". That's the benefit of being in control of your own money.
>>It shouldn't (and often doesn't) matter what you look like, where you came from, or who you are.

Then why are they giving black people preferential treatment?

Mind blowing.
correct. So why not use a multi-platform interaction like on click?
I think underscore-semver is "ha, ha, but serious". It does fix the problem of protecting people from what might be breaking changes, while freeing the author from having to carefully track changes. It implies: you should upgrade your Underscore if and only if you've made a conscious, aware decision to do so.

I think it's OK for an open-source project – a freely-offered gift to the world – to take that approach, if the author prefers to be personally indifferent about "breaking changes". It's a sort of technical declaration of "NO WARRANTIES", specifically no warranty of "FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" – that purpose being, "painless drop-in where a previous version was used".
I really wish this went into more detail. You are notified when a query is slow. You can EXPLAIN it in chat so everybody can see. What happens next? Are slow queries treated as high priority? Is there any tooling around debugging complex queries? Basically, what makes GitHub's process different to the decades-old "grep the slow query log and run an EXPLAIN"?
Yes that's what I understood as well, although that's just one component of "dynamically price". And even that isn't really going to work. That's equivalent to just paying someone outright to rebalance bikes, except it's ad-hoc, only moves one bike at a time, and significantly complicates the process.
Compatibility Case Studies: Paypal Glitch Costs a Website $5000 per Hour
Because the world is not an infinite plane of uniform density. Being a successful entrepreneur is achievable regardless of race, but the same opportunities are not presented with equal availability to everyone.
>The author hasn't made a secret of his versioning policy.

No one is going to see that unless they go looking for it though

>you shouldn't have used "~", "^"

That is how the npm ecosystem works, and in any case the issue arose from dependencies that in turn depended on underscore and thus are not under my direct control.

> Anyway, with a decent test suite, surely a modicum of (automated) testing has already identified the pinning that should take place?

My particular issue is in a new project I could not install several dependencies as npm downloaded the newest compatible version which was supposedly 1.7.0 - the only way to fix this is to manually create a lock file.

>you depend for free.

True, and I'm tremendously grateful for all the work that has gone into it and it would be a massive shame if that work was for nothing if a continued disregard for semver forces people to switch to lodash.
I don't think a story like this belongs on HN. Another story on this topic might generate interesting discussion and debate, but this one is written in an inflammatory manner and does not demonstrate deep thinking or clear analysis.

To summarize my problem with the article: it claims that the second amendment should not be used as a reason to allow 9 year olds to do dangerous activities like shooting automatic weapons. And yet nowhere does the article cite (or even describe) someone citing the 2nd amendment in this debate. The article doesn't say that the police used the 2nd amendment as a reason not to charge the girl's parents. It doesn't show the the 2nd amendment prevented laws against 9 year olds shooting guns in firing ranges. It doesn't cite people using the 2n amendment as a reason to defend the girl's parents.
I don't consider it a meme.

Yes, they use passwords, 2FA, and email addresses, but those are all things mainstream users are familiar with and have to use for any other major service. They are not familiar with the concept of encrypting a wallet or the fact that deleting a wallet can lose you money.

Of course you are at risk of something bad happening to Coinbase, but steps like getting insurance are hedges against that. I should point out that when I talk about mainstream users, I'm not so much talking about right now, but in potentially a few years when Coinbase is more of a known institution or existing banks or other parties have jumped into the game. At that point a wallet hosted by Google or something will be a much better bet for most consumers.
reddit originally ran on FreeBSD. They switched to Linux before I got there for ease of administration. I wanted to switch it back to BSD, but never got around to it as it wasn't very high priority. I tried to switch again when we moved to Amazon, but sadly it wasn't an option so I went to Ubuntu instead.

I've always thought that BSD is superior from an admin perspective, as in it's easier to do it right and keep it solid.

I may be biased though as my first job was IT for a company that had BSD committers so everything we did was on BSD and I learned how to admin from arguably some of the best BSD admins in the world.
Homoglyph Substitution
You're kidding me, right? Have you ever seen the map of the world?

Geography aside, were Russia really "almost too small to matter", it would have already been bombed by the US over Ukraine for some vague reason like "preventing evil regime from stopping people seeking true democracy".

If you take off the rose-colored, western-biased glasses, you'll see the US as a country that invades and destroys other nations for random made-up reasons like "they have WMDs!!!111oneoneone", that terrorizes innocent citizens of nuclear powers by constantly killing whole families at random by drone strikes, is probably single-handedly responsible for the rise of ISIS and basically looks like its trying to destabilize the whole world to fix its own economy.

So yes, I'll happily listen to USGov saying how Putin is evil, when they stop droning the living shit out of Pakistan.
Your question is answered in the article: YC is interested in making money and they seem to believe that having more diverse founders will help them do that.
Ask HN: How long it took you to get your dream job. Why that long?
I'm pretty sure that "recruit", in this context, means "expose to Y Combinator and encourage to apply if they have a good idea", not "give them a higher chance of being accepted because they are black".
Can someone do a good comparison with chargify? They offer usage based subscription billing in much the same way.
You are right, but if Bitcoin ever goes mainstream that kind of regulation that impacts both services and users is going to happen. It never was going to overthrow the flank the financial system like some people hoped.

If Bitcoin ends up relegated to native wallets it probably will look like TOR - something that tech savvy people can use for certain activities, but not something that really caught on in widespread use.

Being able to be in control of your own money is great, if you can do it, but I tend to think most people don't want or can't handle that level of responsibility. Kind of at the heart of Bitcoin is a very libertarian philosophy on life and government. Our political system shows us that the vast majority of people aren't looking for that, and by extension, it probably applies to financial matters as well.
Several years ago I worked on the redesign for the access request tools (ART in jQueryUI, and the backend system using ExtJS), it was a lot of fun, my understanding is ExtJS and YUI share some heritage. That said, I'm not really a fan of the likes of ext, yui or dojo... they're a bit bulky and unwieldy.

Today, I've been working more on Bootstrap, React, Flux, Webpack and a few other bits... It's getting nicer all the time. I'm really appreciating JS front to back over other systems (.Net, Java) in terms of actually getting stuff done. Higher testing is pretty much required for a larger JS system, but modularity, npm, git etc go a long way.
Mystery Structure in Cupertino Adds to Secretive Nature of Apple Product Launch
Underscore v170.0.0 released
Sympy can output Theano functions.
The 3 Axes of Mobile Growth
That's exactly what adults do when they encounter such situation. Talking about blame or looking for someone responsible is not a way to tackle problems of unknown origin that most likely will turn out to be a failure somewhere in the system. Such problems are almost never attributable to a single person.