skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Updating patch levels _has_ broken my code, several times, over the past ~18 months. Sometimes it's acknolwedged as a regression and another patch is released fixing whatever went wrong; there has been at least one time that did not happen (I could find it if you really don't believe me).

Yes, bugs happen, in-retrospect-wrong decisions happen. This is life. And this is part of what makes maintaining a handful of Rails apps developed under different Rails versions a pretty labor intensive thing, even with no new features.

Rails maintenance policy is summarized in the OP we are discussing. Rails 4.2.0 is now in beta. Once it is released, support policy is no more security fixes for 4.0. Rails 4.0.x was the latest Rails release until April 8 2014 when Rails 4.1.0 was released. So if you developed an app against the latest Rails minor version in March 2014, within 6 months your app is on a version that doesn't even get security updates, and needs to be upgraded. Yes, it's probably not that hard to upgrade it in this case.

And, yes, when you have a handful or more of legacy apps, and upgrades happen every ~6 months, you spend a non-trivial amount of time on the treadmill. This is my only point. I am not a Rails hater. I use Rails daily. I know of nothing better. There are all sorts of reasons that lead to maintaning Rails apps being such a time-suck, and none of them are that Rails devs are mean or moronic. But it is astonishing to me that Rails inspires a level of 'fanboy'itude that has people insisting that in fact it's not hard at all to maintain legacy Rails apps. Have you done it? With more than one app at a time? With more than 5 apps at a time?
Great. But why are you saying this in thread about something completely unrelated?

It's hardly "redoing an existing project". It's about giving user control on what he/she executes on his/her machine. It's just NoScript with automatic whitelisting of free software, nothing more.
The "One True Brace Style" is actually a specific style with that name. It is based on the K&R style, with the additional stipulation that all `if`, `else`, `for`, and `while` statements use braces.
> We do have a well-functioning standards process in the web space now - which we did not have back when JavaScript was introduced.

The "well-functioning" process, to the extent it exists,includes the same features -- things are introduced by a vendor and proposed for standardization, but generally do not become standardized until there is uptake in the wild of the implementation. And, to the extent processes exist that didn't when JavaScript emerged and are even arguably "well-functioning", they apply largely to modifications to existing core web technologies (particularly HTML and JS), and not to new alternative or supplemental technologies, where, to the extent that processes exist, they are largely similar to (or exactly the same) processes that were available when JavaScript emerged.
Right, just like Debian. Nobody uses that.
Yep. I wrote SRE, and then wrote a game engine (modem communication, bbs interface, logins, menus, inter-bbs communication, ansi color, etc.) so that Mehul could write AC6 and BRE. He continued writing games (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swirve.com). I had gotten bored of BBS games and decided to try a hex-board strategy/sim game. That didn't go anywhere but I learned a lot. Fun times.
Classic GNU/Stallman. Putting ideology ahead of actually accomplishing anything. Thankfully, less than 1000 people will ever use this.

It is not evil to make proprietary software.
Swifter: Write web apps in Swift
Looks (and sounds) like it might be very helpful.

However as I'm in the UK, any chance of currency conversion?
Ok, let's assume for a moment that we want to stick to the idea that programs ought to be readable/comprehensible by the user, thus "trivial" in a sense. But who decides on "nontriviality"? How did they come up with those heuristics? I can hardly find any nontrivial js code with my years of experience in it (except some jsfuck perhaps), yet at the same time I see every other day someone coming from .NET/Java land crying about all the wtf's of js. So how do we decide what is trivial and what's not?
Do all bills have magnetic ink?

I cannot seem to find a list.
Agreed. I have worked in academia as well as the private sector (banking amongst others). PHD's really amuse me how they think they are getting some sort of freedom, by working long hours for crap wages, but not needing to wear a shirt and tie and not needing to be in by 9.
Can it pull financials from Stripe (plans, MRR, customers)? This would be amazing.

My other advise. Start charging (do a 1 month trial) and something like a flat rate of $12 a month to start. You can iterate later by charging per user or another model.

We are looking forward to trying Opstarts out, and if we like it and find value, totally willing to pay.
In this case, wasn't a shipping employee involved?

I seem to recall that the package (drugs, etc) was addressed to the Mayor's home but was intercepted at the distribution center by the shipping employee (involved in the scheme) before being delivered.
Django Security releases issued
Worked great on the first song I tried. Thereafter it crashed my browser several times (FF 31). Would be awesome if you could mix in/out with the actual song a MIDI track of the chords themselves, just to verify that they are correct.
That's pretty nice. I recently slapped a (buggy) sharing application together for Android so my wife could "send" large(-ish) videos to friends and family directly from the Gallery/Photo app, via the "Share" option, since files of a certain size are disallowed from the e-mail service she uses.

I think this is far more useful for these kinds of "one-off" shares than going through a series of third-party gates like Dropbox for example, especially if the intended recipients don't have accounts on those sites.
I like Dart, but Polymer code converted to JavaScript doesn't work on IE11, just Chrome.
The color of the Universe is white-green according to this analysis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
Backscatter machines (the big blue boxes) were removed. Millimeter wave machines (the clear plastic cylinder) are still in place.
> self-imposed, owner-initiated DRM

That's like saying that choosing not to go out for drinks is self-imposed house arrest. Nonsense.
Maybe so, that's why he asked people like John Resig (creator of jQuery) and myself to assist him.
Is this issue really a tragedy of the commons though? What resource is being depleted?
this is great for its audience(true gnu believers) and idk why every other comment is defensive like you feel personally slighted by some peoples' decision to avoid unsigned/licensed js code running on their machine without explicitly feeding it to a runtime(don't tell me they should curl down 'source' and dependencies and check licenses before viewing a page, this actually does it for them!).

If you don't care about GPL/"as in speech"/etc then it's not for you, don't install it.

RMS is a zealot but he backs it up with his crazy ass longsoon unlocked bootloader laptop from china(and other unusual practices, look up his speech rider sometime)
No. You're posing an argument against a set of slides at Black Hat, but we're talking about a paper submitted at CRYPTO. Two totally different teams. You need to read Eran Tromer's article. It gets into the details of how they acquire signals, what filtering they use, and what their noise thresholds are.

You are much, much too quick to dismiss this work. That's understandable, because you're reading a crappy MIT Press article about the work, and not the work itself. Unfortunately for you (at least rhetorically), that dumb article has left you trying to dismiss the work of someone who is essentially one of the godfathers of sidechannel cryptanalysis.

If you're not going to read the original paper, just take my word for it: they've worked in signal processing too.
Hard to completely released the ability to order cars through any app to any person. Although, the API is largely going to be a part of the marketing more than anything else I would assume.
One dollars do not as of yet
How We Chose Our Social Media Tools At Trello
I lived in Ecuador for 5 months, which uses the US Dollar.

A couple of local guys that worked for me had a lot of fun testing my abilities to detect fake bills, which are plentiful in Ecuador. Even when they gave me two bills and told me one was real and one was fake, I couldn't discern any difference after 5 months of them showing me all the tricks of the trade.

The copies are extremely good, and I suspect not many people in the US are going to spend the time to check if a $10 or $20 is fake.
These days, I describe malloc() as "a function which allocates address space", to avoid confusion. Which means it makes sense that malloc() returns NULL if you are out of address space, even if you have lots of memory. (But so many people don't check malloc()'s return anyway...)
The thing is, its all very well saying that people shouldn't judge based on what we wear, but like it or not some people do. Its just a bit dumb and teenager like to not accept that and put a shirt on if its going to give you better options in an interview or whatever.
Are you forced to install this extension?

If I'm an abstainer and I refuse to go drinking to a friend, does it mean I'm infringing his freedom to take me drinking, or would he infringe my freedom if he would keep bothering me about that against my will?

It's my freedom to say no. I won't use this extension, as I don't really mind non-free JS code being executed by my browser (aka I don't mind some beer from time to time), but I fully support and understand people who develop and use it. There's simply no other way to use the web and not use non-free software, aside of disabling JS completely.
And at the time of the first 32-bit processors you could potentially say the same about 32-bit pointers.
There's no receptor that actually peaks at red, though - it's more like we have indigo, yellowish-green, and greenish-yellow receptors, usually called S, M and L respectively.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1416_Color_Sensitivit... (note the sensitivities are normalized - in actuality the blue receptors are much less sensitive than the other two)
Would this be a good choice for Tor? Although I think Tor is even more restrictive since it blocks all scripts and even Mozilla's JIT.
Which probably can be summarized as »global state is a really bad idea«.
Preach.

I understand the OP's frustration, but at the same time... the world really doesn't owe you anything.
Very similar to MinBox which I've used a bit. Minbox is cool because it works on your desktop and allows the recipient to trigger the donwnload while its being sent. Haven't used it in a while though https://minbox.com/
New research sheds light on how children’s brains memorize facts
Yes - but note that there are about 30 Mayan languages, not just one.
Isn't a "wiki-style site" by definition just a wiki?
All your transportation are belong to us
mailbox had their signup that showed you where you were in line to get the app which was pretty cool because it ticked down every day and you could see the number of people behind you.

Gmail was pretty awesome too.
Yes, you care about avoiding the JavaScript trap, that is running nonfree software on your computer, via the web browser.

So, you exercise freedom 0 (the freedom to run the program) and install GNU LibreJS as an extension into your free web browser.

Now your browser blocks programs from running in your browser unless they are free software or trivial in their nature.
Not after exit(0) returns, no. Instead, you're going to want it after some programmer removes exit(0) six months from now.
Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto platform for team communication.

[1]: https://slack.com
VMware Acquires CloudVolumes
Note that Krebs hasn't verified that any orders have been received (fake "reviews" in underground forums are very common). Lots of people have claimed to sell fake currency in these marketplaces and are almost always a scam. This looks like one too.
As everyone knows, they aren't there for security.

They are there for theater.

Meanwhile the number of TSA "officers" arrested continues to grow each month http://tsascandals.wordpress.com/
Minification improves the effectiveness of algorithms like Gzip by a large margin. It is generally a great idea to minify then Gzip.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...
I don't use fork() that often, but my own paranoia is why I always test for <= 0 instead of == 0. Some people think I'm weird for doing something like:

if len(some_list) <= 0:
# Test for empty list

But it's just my way of covering my ass in case the laws of physics change during execution, or just in case weird bugs exist like those found in this article.
Can second labaraka - the inventory-holding startup world needs a product like this desperately! To the developers: I included my contact information and a writeup about our fashion brand's pain points in the signup page, and I'd be happy to give feedback about the product at some point - just send me a ping!
I only know his history in broad strokes. He has a "reputation," I just don't know the specifics. He hated the guy that I replaced - 3 months later and he is still publicly bad mouthing the guy. Very unprofessional, makes for a hostile work environment.
So, all that in-line javascript on my website suddenly is "proprietary" even though it's usually just a few lines?

(as a consequence, my entire site won't work for users with this enabled)
I would leave that job as quickly as possible. Life is too short to work for a boss who is crazy.

You have the drive to learn and grow. Go to meetups, user groups, etc. and get to know others who are like-minded. You'll build the connections you need to find a better job, even if you are a junior dev. They'll see your passion and potential and hire you for that.
Apparently not, but to be honest the reasons are beyond my full understanding.
I don't understand why it's presented as such a mystery? The average color obviously exists, and if I had guessed it would be a reddish/yellowish gray (due to the ubiquity of incandescent lighting, the non-UV-reflecting properties of surfaces etc).

I was hoping to also see a covariance matrix, or maybe even a 3d histogram of pixel colors on the web -- that would be interesting. This person is clearly not a data scientist :)
> starting the job ad at #4

FWIW, job ads start at #6. I think you're right about the decay but I haven't looked at the code.

You were certainly right about the bug.
So the amount of value they provide? The pleasant drivers? The unique value they provide over taxis? The ease of everything? This should all be overlooked because they scaled quick and a few things got out of control?
Bitcoin Sharing at Burning Man [pdf]
Do you actually need currency conversions (in the sense that you deal in multiple currencies and want to normalize them to one) or do you just want to be able to use pounds vs dollars and have the numbers like reasonable for a UK person?

For sure we ultimately want to support the former, but worked on systems that do this, there's a fair amount of complexity depending on what you really need to do.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to forego the notion of a CWD for processes entirely.
I think this involves a big misunderstanding of the web as a medium. You may produce non-free content using Open Software as a tool. E.g., I may write a book using LibreOffice and sell it (with copyrights). I may also embed this book into HTML code and provide it for free to my readers, even when not granting rights to copy or change the text. But, if I would use JS for the means of embedding the same text, I'm off.
And I haven't even mentioned of all the use cases, where a web project is the final product, aka the text, in its own end ...
I'm not sure this isn't satire. It reads like you did a search/replace on a defense of Blockbuster against the upstart Netflix.

To your specific points:

1. Locality is a huge competitive disadvantage. Real-estate, staffing, infrastructure, etc.

2. More-efficiently managing a wide selection and optimizing for product that frequently turns over is a key advantage of warehouse/delivery operations.

3. It makes no sense to compare an interruption of your day with an asynchronous order/delivery method. No-one uses Netflix the way they used Blockbuster. No-one misses Blockbuster.

4. Personally picking fruit directly off plants was more accurate than personally picking fruit in a grocery store. It's also something most people don't miss as a regular chore. Warehouse/delivery has a massive advantage here as well, as they'll be able to better manage inventory flow and don't have to suffer the same exposure to elements/contaminants as a grocery store.

They can even offer "ugly produce" at a discount, bringing the same implicit assumption of responsibility for odds and ends and generating sufficient extra revenue from the particular buyers, to effectively serve them and any returns.

There's no "niche" for this. The niche will be serving the people who enjoy farmer's markets and those who dropped a dozen eggs and will pay a premium for their replacement.
Well, to me it's fairly clear that this guy probably has a very misogynistic view of the world in general, and that he genuinely doesn't have the self-awareness to realize how inappropriate and douchey his behavior is (I guess anyone with that sort of behavior doesn't have that self awareness).

The problem is that when "we" call him and out and shame him, he'll play the apology game because he's smart enough to realize that that's what you should do - but his underlying thought patterns and behaviors will remain the same.

So, what do we do/what can be done for people like this, who have lived for several decades with their way of thinking, to actually shift their perspective and make them be respectful towards women/minorities/etc. beyond just mere PR reasons? (or, to state the same problem in different words, how do I make my 70 year old uncle Mitch respect black & gay people "for real"?)
But what about old $20 bills. Strange I cannot find a list. Kinda worried.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but that's wrong too. With fork() you need to always test 3 cases:

* -1: error
* 0: success, in child
* > 0: success, in parent

Testing for <= 0 would cause you to think there's an error when you're really just the child process.
Experience.

A lot of being a good programmer doesn't have to do with technical skills.

Take a compilers course. This was required at my school and I figured it would be boring (I mostly likely the theory classes). I was wrong! Writing a compiler really made me understand what they do. I had seen a lot of people who were trying to appease the compiler. Instead, the compiler is now my slave.
> cannot possibly fail in a well-formed program

I think that's your answer. A mutex error return probably indicates an application bug, such as double unlock. You should probably assert or abort on "can't happen" mutex errors.

Programmers are lazy. If they take the time to document an error return value, then you should probably heed their warnings. :)
I found this to be a much better article than the OP since it is very focused on the practicalities.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

Our tentative policy is to consider a JavaScript program nontrivial if:

* it makes an AJAX request or is loaded along with scripts that make an AJAX request,

* it loads external scripts dynamically or is loaded along with scripts that do,

* it defines functions or methods and either loads an external script (from html) or is loaded as one,

* it uses dynamic JavaScript constructs that are difficult to analyze without interpreting the program, or is loaded along with scripts that use such constructs. These constructs are:

- using the eval function,

- calling methods with the square bracket notation,

- using any other construct than a string literal with certain methods (Obj.write, Obj.createElement, ...).

How do we tell whether the JavaScript code is free? At the end of this article we propose a convention by which a nontrivial JavaScript program in a web page can state the URL where its source code is located, and can state its license too, using stylized comments.
That's not quite true, but not a terrible approximation.
Ice Bucket Challenge founder drowns in diving accident
Harvard to Homeless – all because of animated GIFs
Wells Fargo invests up to $500k in startups
The problem with Linux on the desktop is that it doesn't have any significant, practical advantage to offset the significant, practical disadvantages.

BENEFITS:

-- Costs $0: But that is also the marginal cost of Windows and OS X. When you pay what you must pay for the hardware you want, you can almost always have Windows or OS X at no additional cost. So, if Linux is also available at no additional cost, so what? The benefit to the end user only shows up when building custom hardware, repurposing old hardware, or using a VM--things I care about but the average consumer doesn't.

The zero cost benefit of Linux is of more value to hardware manufacturers than to consumers.

-- Freely modifiable: But you can freely modify Windows or OS X systems, too, with preference settings, or utility apps, or writing your own code in any number of languages, including code that uses system APIs to make big changes.

The fact that Linux lets you change even those things that are not exposed via APIs is once again of more practical value to hardware manufacturers, or certain other businesses or organizations, than to consumers.

COSTS:

-- You have to set it up yourself, and it never seems to work right. The problem is not Linux itself, but the fact that Windows and Mac are pre-installed, pre-configured, and tested by teams of experts, but doing that job for Linux is up to YOU. Few consumers want to deal with debugging system service (audio, network, battery, etc.) problems. Even the little bit they still have to do with Windows or Mac outrages most consumers. The last thing they want is for this problem to be WORSE.

Where Linux has been successful, it has been on the server (no audio, GUI, no battery, etc.), or on client hardware platforms (like TiVo), where the Linux configuration was done by the platform maker, not the consumer. Once again, manufacturers are the direct beneficiaries.

-- You can't run a lot of the software you want to use. This problem has dogged Mac users for decades. It's far worse on Linux.

-- You have to do your own tech support. Your techie neighbors, friends, and relatives can usually help with Windows problems and, in some geographic locations, even Mac problems. But online is all you have for Linux, and some of those people are not as "sociable" as your friends and family. To be a desktop user (or even a Mac user in some places), you have to be a techie yourself or have a close, personal relationship with one. That rules out most people.

-------------------

I still want desktop Linux to succeed, too, but I'm not sure what could make that happen. I'm afraid it would take a big, powerful company that DIDN'T already have its own non-Linux OS to push, that would build the hardware and pre-install Linux and somehow resolve the lack of Excel, Photoshop, ....

Google is the only remote possibility that comes to mind with maybe a desktop-Linuxy Android or something, but I'm not holding my breath.
The fact we are having this conversation means you are in denial on God. Take some time and talk to God. Then you will not be so stupid.