skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I navigate to switchboardhq.com, it wants my browser to run Javascript from about ten different sites (as reported by the NoScript FF extension). Yuck! Craigslist only requires Javascript from one domain: their own. That is refreshingly clean, man. You know what other site is like that? This one! HN only references ycombinator.com for scripts.

I don't want to have to create an account and go through some incubation stage to first prove that I'm not a creep or flake, so please can I finally sell that cabinet now! I don't want to send myself an invite to "start a switchboard" whatever that means. I want to post an ad, now, this minute, and have that thing gone by seven tonight if possible.
I think the big problem with semver is point 2 in their summary: "MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner"

That may make sense for very large software projects or operating systems where backwards compatibility is a huge concern, but it's not a good fit for the majority of software projects. This is especially true when these projects aren't compiled and thus don't even have an ABI to worry about.

This view on versioning I think comes from a time when most software was compiled and when compiling that software would take a _long_ time or require downtime; thus protecting ABI compatibility was worth the effort.

For modern projects that are in an interpreted language, I think constraining the middle version number to "non-breaking" changes is silly as it's copying a concern that no longer applies. It forces you to choose between "bug-fix" and "feature" releases and pace your project development in a rigid fashion that may not make much sense.

Also, I think it's ridiculous to require anything other than big-fix releases to be non-breaking in the first place. If 1.6.x worked for you, why are you even trying to use 1.7.x if not to access new features? If that's the case, you're going to be editing your code again anyways.

Worrying about a release manager automatically pulling a 1.7 codebase to upgrade a 1.6 codebase is silly; why is the package manager doing this in the first place?
Gencon: My journey into the heart of the nerd kingdom
Worthy thoughts. But you should think of the Icelandic eth ("ð") as a variation on a "d", not an "o". :-) Not that I know any Icelandic, but a capital eth looks like this: "Ð".

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

EDIT: As for "クッキー": dealing with this is mostly straightforward, if you're willing to allow multiple ASCII characters for a single unicode character. Most of the katakana (which these are), along with the hiragana, have a standard romanization. For the first three here, the romanizations are (if I'm not mistaken) "ku", "tu", and "ki". The dash-looking thing lengthens the last vowel, so this is "kutukii". That probably requires more intelligence than you're wanting to bake into this thing, but I think "kutuki-" wouldn't be bad.

Korean characters similarly have standard romanizations (e.g., "원" = "won").

Figuring out all of the above would take some work, but it could easily be crowd-sourced, and it would only have to be done once.

The zillions of Chinese characters are the problem. These could have different romanizations depending on which of the Chinese languages they're being used for, and often multiple possible romanizations when used for Japanese (in which case they are "kanji"). So there might be no good solution for these.
Many Japanese companies still have corporate songs, although they are not sung that much anymore.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3725775.stm
The distinction you describe is exactly the case, I think, yet the word "recruit" may lead to confusion.
It's a false promise... but also a worse-is-better phenomenon. Good enough, if your ignore the problem cases, to allow rapid progress. It tempts you, and delivers convenience often enough you come to rely on it, only to then discover more subtle problems it was hiding later. It's the worst system, except for all the others.
A snippet of that song is on YouTube from that documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afACnAMG9iM

You can also hear 'Ever Onward' from the songbook here, which I am oddly drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU
I'm a white startup founder in SV.

Systematic discrimination due to unequal access to infrastructure really, really sucks for the black community as a whole, but if you managed to overcome it as an individual there are multiple interrelated reasons why you have a massive advantage in startups/tech that you probably aren't aware of yet.

Firstly, the market is ruthless. You can't lie to yourself or others in a startup -- the thing you're doing really has to work, so the decisions you're making have to be right. You're white, had a great education, and a well-padded resume? If you don't make precisely the right choices, the market couldn't care less, your company will die. Now, white well educated people with well-padded resumes will probably have easier access to venture capital, but that brings me to my next point.

In my (totally unscientific) experience, skin color, education, and experience has no correlation whatsoever with fluid intelligence (essentially, how well you make decisions without knowledge). In a big company, fluid intelligence doesn't really matter all that much -- the culture is well established, you aren't that important, and if you can just play ball the way everyone else does, you'll do ok. Not so in a startup. In a startup you're dealing with completely new territory, so you have to figure things out from scratch, all the time. You might as well take your knowledge, and your experience, and your education, and throw it all away because it will make a zilch of difference. Fluid intelligence is everything because you have to figure everything out from scratch.

All the white, well-educated, experienced young men who have relatively easy access to VC capital? Without fluid intelligence and wits about them, they'll just burn through it and be left with nothing at the end. The market is ruthless -- it doesn't care. So you're on equal footing.

Finally, the space is hyper-competitive and even in a recession there is too much capital chasing too few good ideas. All those white, traditional, middle aged male VC partnerships really need a win. And I mean really, because if they don't get one they won't raise the next fund, and if they don't raise the next fund they won't be able to pay property taxes and their kids's private school tuitions, and they really, really don't want to end up there. Don't like black people? Have unacknowledged bias? Too bad -- your kids are going to public school next year. So if you come in with a killer idea and the seeds of a working business, you bet they'll invest. The pressure's too high not to. They might care what you look like, but the market doesn't care about them. The market is ruthless and indifferent, and forces them to act ruthless and indifferent, because if they act on their prejudices their fund will die.

This is getting a bit long, so here's my TL;DR: if you've been discriminated against your whole life and want to start a company, don't get discouraged. The market is ruthless and indifferent -- it doesn't care about you, or me, or anyone. For you, that's an advantage. Build something people want and you will be rewarded.
These (banned in the west?) pesticides are produced by FMC Corporation (headquartered in Philadelphia) and Bayer CropScience (headquartered in Germany).

It’s kind of gross how American and European corporations (not just chemical companies, but also weapons manufacturers, oil companies, etc.) seem to have no problem with their complicity in this kind of thing.
the difference here is that a library does usually have some notion of well-defined interface/API and thus it is possible to determine/track and thus to communicate when the major (backward compatibility breakup), the minor (improvement, extension), and bug fix level changes happen. In case of the products like Chrome there is too much internal engineering effort would be required for too small payout in trying to define and maintain what the "interface" of the application is and when and what kind of changes happened to it.
It means 6 weeks have passed since the last Firefox release, and they are releasing a snapshot of whatever features they were able to make stable in that time. Also, it will not be an extended support release, because 32 % 7 != 3 (every 7th release is an ESR starting at version 10).
Very nice. Any chance of Boost licensing it?
I've looked and have not found any alternatives that are better.
Syrian Civil War:Factions Explained
I suspect you can be quite rigorous about the definition of a "breaking change."
Removing methods from a public API or changing their interfaces (including adding or deleting required fields from payloads, or removing/re-typing any existing fields from responses) is just a quick stab at it.

It seems like, rather than attempting to document some of the complexity of API changes/versioning at an admittedly coarse grain, your argument is that we should stick with version "truthiness."
I don't think I can get behind that.
The faults you are identifying are not related to the article. The implication of the article is broader. It would seem to imply that the statement

Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even.

may not be true. Of course, this topic needs further study.
Probably referring to:

http://aphyr.com/posts/315-call-me-maybe-rabbitmq

But all systems like this have weak points, just look at the other systems aphyr has analyzed.
Are all github internal services a dark colour scheme? good way of determining internal vs external I suppose
Good decision and there is no further argument to say, you wrote everything in your post.

Hope Yahoo continue to develop more smaller libraries, purecss is a really nice example for a small clean project.
> Failed to issue message call

Reminds me of some mad attempts to debug some problem in Unity/GNOME... I gave up pretty fast after stranding on orphaned freedesktop.org pages.. I distinctly remember ranting on reddit about the problems and I've got a few .odt presentations from GNOME developers that not so really explained some concepts.. it's a different world. I can't judge if it's better this way for the Desktop but I've found it impossible to debug without sacrificing enormous time and energy about things I'd never wanted to deal with.

Stark contrast has been xCAT by IBM.. it's used to manage clusters of 10000 machines and it's only small readable Perl and Shellscripts.. totally awkward at the beginning but once you get a grasp it's a flexible power tool.
Why is this a problem? If X people take bikes into the city center in the morning, and then the same X people take bikes back out in the evening, that sounds balanced to me.
VMS isn't dead yet.

HP just licensed VMS to vmssoftware.com:

http://www.vmssoftware.com/news/announcement/faq.pdf

Roadmap: http://www.vmssoftware.com/news/announcement/RM/VMS_Software...
When underscore does get a major change that the author feels is actually worth a major number signal, then it's quite possible that we'd be better off served by a name change: 'super underscore' or something in the same vein.

When such major changes happen, there are usually a large contingent of users that are disappointed because the old version will probably stop getting enhancements and may even stop getting bug fixes.

A name change is also a very strong signal that the API changes are significant. Wider adoption of SemVer has ensured that major number changes are seen as less significant than they used to be, especially as the number gets larger.
Brazil is actually proposing this after the NSA revelations ( specially the one that our president was personally tapped, she is furious with that )
true, but running a highly visible and successful open source projects are viewed as good engineer recruitment and retention tools.
> correct, Wells Fargo's market cap is 267 billion, 30% bigger than Facebook.

When did Facebook become the benchmark? Facebook is tiny compared to an awful lot of companies.
Roadmap to Alpha Centauri
Vikram Chandra Is a Novelist Who’s Obsessed with Writing Computer Code
That's great to hear! Our shop will continue to do new dev work with it.
I was recently looking at bloom filters as a possible piece of a permissions system in a typical database object model. Imagine:

- users have various permissions
- other objects in the system require one or more permissions to be viewable by those users

you can accomplish this easily with joins alone, but it becomes a performance issue rather quickly. I have a large-scale system and my intuition was that supplemental indexes based on bloom filters could help me solve this problem. i haven't figured out an exact way to apply them however.
I call upon the over-the-top stylings of professionally trained chef Alton Brown:

http://youtu.be/iKkf9YYwmGQ

... to explain, kinda painfully, that you can't use a sharp knife on a stone counter or you'll dull the knife. You need a cutting board. Or a wood countertop.

I understand the concern about heat but I've cooked with linoleum counters for my entire life, mostly as a baker, and I don't remember damaging one. It's just a question of not getting into the habit of setting hot objects on arbitrary surfaces. I and every cook in my family has a nice little collection of trivets, which cost a few dollars each and often come with college logos or bad jokes on them. Of course, this probably makes us look lower-class. See above under "status symbol".

We also have the confidence that, should we make a mistake, we can always buy a second or even a third linoleum countertop and still be saving money over granite or engineered stone.

That said, there's a good chance I'll end up owning a stone counter someday anyway just because, in the Massachusetts market, status symbols matter, and signals of recent renovations matter even more. We have a lot of lead paint, buried asbestos, hidden knob-and-tube wiring, and sixty-year-old hack-job plumbing around here, and anything you can do to suggest that your kitchen's walls have recently been opened and pronounced up-to-code is worth doing.
I must be missing something.

I was under the impression that Mozilla was incrementing Firefox's major version number with every new release, even if new releases didn't have api changes. As described in http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/its-not-about-the... for example.

Is that not the case? Is there actually some part of Firefox that other software relies on that's getting changed in not-backwards-compatible ways with every release?
"Think a lily-white Stanford graduate would see a market in top up cards? I bet you they wouldn't!"

Maybe you don't realize but your comment is quite racist. So, you think by virtue of being black, every African-American somehow has an inherent understanding of African nations.

Here's a excerpt from Jumpa Lahiri's book The Namesake about similar sentiments for a second generation Indian-American man talking to friends of his white girlfriend about getting sick while visiting India:

"But you must be lucky that way"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, you must never get sick."

"Actually that's not true," he says, slightly annoyed... "We get sick all the time. We have to get shots before we go. My parents devote the better part of a suitcase to medicine."

"But you're Indian," Pamela says frowning, "I'd think the climate wouldn't affect yo, given your heritage."

"Pamela, Nick's American," Lydia says ... "He was born here."
Because comments interpreted as "good job team!" often get downvoted for not adding much value to the conversation.

I wanted to show my support for Lyft and dislike of Uber regardless of how it would impact my karma.
> Their market valuations are entirely dependent on large government bailouts

Hasn't been the case for years (and I'm pretty sure it was never the case actually). They are valued by their assets (funds in accounts, real estate holdings, equity in companies/investments, etc). Facebook's valuation appears to be based on nothing but magic.
It's understandable when you know that httpd was spun out of relayd: they basically had almost all the work done and figured they'd might as well do the last few bits needed ot make it a standalone HTTP daemon.
Having both MINOR and PATCH to mean non-breaking changes really seems excessive and based on very large waterfall-based software projects, because for most open source development it's completely arbitrary whether to bump patch or minor. I think it would be far more useful to have both MAJOR and MINOR to signify breaking changes (with MAJOR being close to the romantic versioning that Jeremy alludes to, where the software effectively enters a new phase.) And a number like 1.7.247 is more intelligible than 170.2.5, and really, if you're the rare monolithic long release-cycle software project, just use an extra number after PATCH. It's not like there'd be an acute concern over the verboseness of that version number internally compared to all the other highly bureaucratic processes going on in the organization.
SemVer has some objective meaning. How much meaning, how accurate it is, how objective, and how useful it is can be debated. The point is that it has some kind of objective interpretation at all.

This is in contrast to almost every other versioning system which basically boils down to "and how does this change make you feel?"
Oh man, black women's hair is a HUGE under-the-radar discrimination issue. It's one of those issues that get dismissed because of how silly it sounds (and a prime candidate for people saying "for fuck's sake is everything discrimination now?!?!"). But seriously, the natural hairstyles of many black women aren't considered "professional" in a lot of contexts, and spending a pretty-large amount of money and time at salons torturing your hair into looking white is pretty much the only option in some circumstances. AFAICT, the solution is "easy" per se, but difficult considering how slow culture changes: don't define "different" as unprofessional. Thankfully this is one of the problems that tech is better about than other places in general (because seriously, who gives a fuck about your appearance unless you're a model/actor/customer-facing/etc).
> Now, white well educated people with well-padded resumes will probably have easier access to venture capital, but that brings me to my next point.

Isn't this really the key here? I agree with your other arguments about ultimately needing to have fluid intelligence etc. But assuming two people (one white, one black) have the same amount of intelligence, smarts etc, but one raises $10 million from Sequoia and the other doesn't.
That pretty much makes the difference between succeeding and failing.
There are ideas which are so world-changing or brilliant that the market and VC's just can't ignore their eventual prominence (Google maybe?). There are other ideas which need lots of capital and talent injection in order to nurture them to the point where they are big.
Mining 1000 times more hashes doesn't maintain the integrity any better than the current situation.
How Many Hackers Smoke? This Is Why You Should Stop
Bitcoin, btcd and Golang
Love the instant functionality. I immediately bookmarked it.

I absolutely hate the design though. I almost left the page before trying it because the design is so hard to look at. It literally hurts my eyes.

Use lower-contrast colors, and probably not a dark background.
> So, you think by virtue of being black, every African-American somehow has an inherent understanding of African nations.

I never mentioned African Americans in my comment. It seems that you're taking "black" to mean "African American", but that's not what my comment said. Nor the article, for that matter.
Libtask[1] by Russ Cox (one of the creators of Go) may provide some inspiration. It implements channels but uses coroutines instead of threading. As a consequence it has some cool stuff like networking and it does all of the hard parts of saving/restoring registers for task switching.

[1]: http://swtch.com/libtask/
Well, what can one do :(.

Anyway, I must say I found the technique I used above quite effective at figuring out continous disagreements. You state some simple true/false statements describing your assumptions and ask the other party to agree/disagree and explain the points of disagreement. Apply recursively if needed. Kind of a discussion equivalent of git bisect ;).
Italian doctor works just 15 days in nine years
How do you explain Bell inequality violations without involving entanglement?

If we get quantum computers working at a non-trivial scale, would you consider that to be strong evidence for entanglement?
Which is what they do already, except they pay employees/vehicles/fuel.

The providers have some philosophical problem with paying regular people to do the very same.

Once they overcome this, the system will work a whole lot better and more profitably.
For normal extensions that use supported JavaScript APIs, most releases will not break any APIs. The blog post you linked to is talking about the compatibility process for these normal JS extensions.

But there is a special class of extensions ("binary add-ons") that link to Firefox/libxul as a C++ library. This has been discouraged for a long time now, but still supported for legacy reasons. These extensions have full access to Firefox's internal C++ and XPCOM interfaces. Since Firefox 4, the ABI of this internal library changes with every major update, so every release is breaking for binary add-ons (except security patches, which take care not to change the ABI, and also do not increment the major version). This is mentioned briefly in the comments of the blog post you linked to.

Since that blog post was written, Firefox's add-on system has changed to address this dichotomy. Non-binary add-ons new use "lax" version checking by default (a minimum Firefox version is checked, but no maximum), while binary add-ons still use "strict" versioning. This is documented here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Install_Manifest...

[disclosure: I'm an developer at Mozilla.]
Can you explain how this happens?
Pretty nifty. I like the names of the functions chan_can_recv() and chan_can_send(). Made me think think of the old cooking show "Yan Can Cook."
The membrane cells of chicken eggs (the egg itself is of course one cell).

When I last looked at this, during the swine flu pandemic, companies typically get 3 doses of antigen per egg.

And this is a very slow process for new strains, first a seed culture has to be created by serious specialists that will both grow well in eggs (can be hard for avian flu...) and expresses the correct surface antigens.

Much better approaches like this company's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Sciences are desperately needed if a killer flu is someday brewed (this tends to happen in an animal that is simultaneously infected with two strains of flu, so it's not mutation per se).
That only works if there are enough bikes for each bike to be used only once during the morning or evening commute. If you need to reuse a bike multiple times in one morning (say at 8am, 9am, and 10am) to serve everyone, it has to somehow go where someone will use it.