skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the AS/400 there was no traditional file system, the only storage was in a database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i

Unlike the "everything is a file" feature of Unix and its derivatives, on OS/400 everything is an object (with built-in persistence and garbage collection).
Look up Common Lisp's file handling functions. The number of options to open a file seems ridiculous in our world, but in that one function you can see a history of how many different ways "files" used to be accessed.
Trying to provide some balance :)
One should consider statements Paul Graham has publicly made as to where he places his bets.

"This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old."

"By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids"

I would be wary approaching an organization that has publicly expressed such age discrimination.
Hi, I am the author of the article. It does not state containers encapsulate applications from a 'security sense'. You make a point which is not stated to draw conclusions which were not made.

It states 'Containers decouple your applications from the host OS, abstracts it and makes it portable across any system that supports LXC'. You can run the app in the container in any other system that supports LXC, isn't that what decoupling is?

I think you are looking at this from a technical perspective and not an end user perspective. Why don't you download and try some of the Flockport containers available on the website, those apps are decoupled from your Linux OS and will work in any LXC environment.

This is an article about containers for end users, not technical users, to help them understand the concept of containers and how LXC differs from Docker.

If security, multi-tenancy, running other OS's or specific kernels are your core use cases, virtualization makes more sense as is stated a few paragraphs below that quote, and in the LXC getting started guide on the same site.
Check out boundless (boundless.com). They offer alternatives to the typical intro college textbooks for $20 each by leveraging open educational resources (OERs).
I think we're in the midst of something like the "Industrial Revolution", but can't quite see it yet. Only in hindsight, once the dust settles, will we be able to make sense of what's happening and changing. We're entering a new kind of economy at a macro scale that the world has not quite witnessed before.

But the changes are happening around us, and I think this "independent contractor" model will be a big force during this new "industrial revolution." Companies, empowered by technology, are trying to become more cost efficient, and in a short-sighted way, the single largest cost sheet for any company are its employees.

Personally, I think Capitalism as we know it will reach its limits once technology reaches a certain threshold of efficiency; we just don't need as many people working the same amount of hours anymore.[1] (isn't that the very definition of efficiency?) Then we as a society will need to figure out another way to live (new-style of feudalism? welfare state?). But until that new model comes in to play, and we're in the middle of this new "industrial revolution", the contractor model will be set to dominate.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-tec...
I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks. This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.
I agree with you. Tools are serious business.

Selling consumer lollipops? Use all the whimsy you want; it's part of your marketing.

I don't expect the beams of a trestle to spell "LOL WTF". I expect a bridge to be built by a person who does-not-fuck-around. My life depends on it.
React Community Round-up #22
Why not have a social network for professional drivers. Let that network destroy any type of information withholding that companies like uber do.

Leverage the power of scale. Unions 2.0
Taxi rides are basically futures contracts. Not exactly fungible due to location but you might be able to price that in, somehow. Bring on a generic taxi ride commodities exchange.
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE > Making The Expensive Cheap:

I have been working (and still am working) with incredibly expensive software from IBM. Now it's somewhat trivial what it does and I have open sourced it (http://www.use-the-tree.com). Feel free to contact me. My dream is to find a team, apply to YC and crush IBM (I am somewhat serious).
Why link this now? Right when it's 'undergoing maintenance' and we haven't a clue what it is. That page is even less descriptive than a blank one.
You realize that "structural employment issues" refers to the either a) an inability for buyers and sellers to find each other or b) a bunch of sellers have no willing buyers at any price?

Homejoy is resolving those structural issues by making it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other.
Actually, the bombs were already falling short of the target. The British instructed captured German spies to report they were hitting their targets. They were quite subtle about how they did it -- they would simply omit news about the bombs that fell short.

My favourite story is about Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), where German bombers were guided by radio navigation. The British started broadcasting their own radio signals to make it appear to the German planes that the beam was slightly bent. It meant they could get the bombers to drop their bombs in the middle of nowhere.
"Come at me bro."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS1esgRV4Rc
I'm not by any means the guy who wrote that easter egg, but I'm in absolute solidarity with his sentiment. I don't want to be a Randian Ubermensh like Howard Roark, in a soviet world stripped of all artifice and caprice.

The world needs to stay playful - and my world is software. Fun isn't optional; it's absolutely necessary for the human psyche - any description of a world without it is isomorphic to a prison or a hell. The price of fun is frivolity - one man's fun is another man's "stupid waste of time". There's no way around this; it's just the table ante we have to pay for having a non-spartan culture.

Yes, the overhead cost sucks ... but the alternative has been proven to be much much worse.
The best thing you as a customer can do in these cases is if you find a good cleaner, work with them directly instead of through Homejoy. Then you don't have to pay for the middle man.
It doesn't matter that a student can't afford their books on $7/hour. No one seriously expects a kid to make even a dent in the cost of his education anymore, because relative to cost of attendance (except at community colleges) kids in general just don't have the earning power.

Cost of attendance at my state flagship is $24,000. Full time at minimum wage is $15,080. Any education worth that kind of money is hard enough that you physically can't work full time while doing it. Student labor is pretty miniscule as a source of funding.

In other words, $264.39 is not actually 37 hours at McDonalds. It's a rounding error on a parent's 6-figure contribution over 4 years. Or a rounding error in your monthly loan payment when you're making $50k instead of $8k. Or it's coming out of interest on the school's endowment if the school is good enough and your family poor enough. Or it's coming from whoever funds your scholarship if you are one of the handful of people smart enough to get a merit-based full ride. Etc.

(No, your experience of putting yourself through a state flagship in the 80s is not relevant. Minimum wage is roughly what it was; tuition is decidedly not.)

I believe the textbook publishing industry could adapt (or be disrupted) to be more cost-efficient, but you would first have to vastly reconfigure the higher education system such that it's reasonable for students to pay their own way. Then you'd actually have incentives to price things for students.
Want to own a business with less struggle? Buy one with a business broker
If you're hiring local look into what is popular in the area. Where I am it's C# or Java. Anything else and you'll have a hard time finding talent.
> there are plenty of out-of-work STEM majors here, there is no need for importing more foreign workers.

Is there a citation for that?
At that point they're in contempt of court. There's really no saying how long it would have stayed $250k/day. A week? A month?
Sounds like the market is demanding UberX, and Uber is responding.

I'll keep using UberX in cars that don't need $80/day in gas.
What was the open source project out of interest?
Fair point on WebRick.
Unicorn is also a good choice for a Ruby HTTP server, although it doesn't run under JRuby.
Puma I think is particularly interesting as it offers decent performance in both MRI and JRuby - although JRuby is still quicker in that case. (should add the results for Puma under MRI to the site)
It's unlikely to work well for offices and high rises, granted.

But it wouldn't be too hard to imagine this kind of set-up being modernized and applied to many suburban homes in the US Southwest, for example.
Yes, I agree that Homejoy's scheduling and billing experience is very nice.

I've been using different cleaners every time because of my experiences. But maybe next time, I should try sticking with just one. That way, the cleaner and I can start to build a relationship and they can get to know our apartment better. Then, maybe we can have a better overall experience.
If you're actually spending $100k on hosting, one would hope you're making at least ten times as much. Otherwise, your engine of growth is fundamentally broken and you need to pivot.
Even within the domain of informal writing, there's a lot of fat in this piece that should be trimmed. I think that's what's triggering your distaste. However, once that is removed, as I'm sure it will, the tone will improve dramatically, and I suspect you'll only find it slightly annoying.

My guess is that by far the most likely reader of this document is a noob to Rust with some degree of experience in other languages. To be safe we'll only assume basic programming experience. As a more experienced programmer, I don't mind seeing a few explanations of things I already know. From that perspective, this guide is a good compromise, once the technical issues are solved.
Indiscriminate surveillance at MIT – Logging of card access data at CSAIL
Not cooperating?

The blocking done at a decentralized level as is imposed by the central government. You can read the policy documents in English if you look around.

This is why sometimes sites work in one part of China and not in another. And sometimes the firewall will go down for periods of time.

The telecoms cooperate with Chinese government as much as they need to, in much the same way Google and other cooperate with the NSA.
I remember my commencement ceremony by a C-level Sun executive, where he rambled to a class of 600 graduating from STEM fields about the need for more H-1B workers. You could hear the crickets chirping, as Sun never sent a rep to any career fair, and most of us did not have a job offer lined up
I always thought it would be cool to record audio the whole time the editor is open, and the programmer would just talk the whole time about his thought process. Then the audio would be broken up and indexed with the source code.

So you could choose to hear what the author was saying right when he was working on a certain area of the code. (You'd normally turn it off, but if you're really stuck it might be a good last resort.)
Qualities of Quality
> A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense.

That's called 'contempt of court' and would cause the fines to go up the second the judge realized how they took it.
class M(object):

is a new-style class in Python 2.x, in which it's the correct syntax: https://docs.python.org/2/glossary.html#term-new-style-class

It's different in Python 3 but that doesn't matter because Python 3 is largely irrelevant.
Ah yes, I see. I thought you were saying that coal wasn't a fossil fuel and that's what the error was.
I have to agree. I think the "independent contractor" model has massive risk to the future of the US. Some of the biggest startups (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Homejoy, etc.) are building huge business models built on huge workforces of "independent workforces".

If the trend continues, this could mean a massive shift in the US's labor force from salaried jobs to independent contractors. A lot of folks in the Valley view this as a positive innovation, but I think this is a clear case where the free market is not going to work out what's best for our society.

Imagine a future world where companies like Uber are the norm. A majority of the workforce will face issues like:
* No regulation on working hours (i.e. the industrial revolution v2)
* Massive healthcare costs born on the taxpayer due to lack of employer provided healthcare (i.e. going past what we already see with corporations like Walmart)
* Lack of retirement benefits for the workforce as they age (401k, pension, social security). People may argue that the government shouldn't force people to save, but what is likely to happen is that the taxpayer will bear the burden of supporting a lot of this population.
* Lack of unemployment insurance which means that our labor force will largely be unprepared for the normal boom & bust cycle of our economy
* Lack of worker's comp which means that employee's won't be shield from low probability high risk events

The scenario feels like a deja vu; during the Industrial revolution, we hit a point where technology progress was leading to inhumane working conditions for manufacturing workers. Eventually regulation caught up, but this was definitely not something that the free market sorted out on its own.

Are we really prepared to live in a society where independent contractors are the majority of our workforce and lack basic labor protections?
Introducing Open PostgreSQL Monitoring (OPM)
You can even run 1.x apps with some bithacking: http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html

I downloaded the 2.x pack. Incredibly, I can copy a screenshot from that page to my OS X clipboard, open CLIPBRD.EXE on my 64-bit MacBook Air in WINE in 2014 and it will display that image (slightly mangled) with full metadata, despite CLIPBRD.EXE being from 1987!
I posted this yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8305709
I'm curious why you consider government meddling, blackmail, coercion and manipulation as an "invisible hand"? Purely because it's not known to the populace?
Parenting Tips and Tricks from Tech Entrepreneurs
Wow, I just typed out something similar, referenced the "Industrial Revolution", and was thinking along the exact same lines as you.
The One Laptop Per Child laptop uses a Journal instead of folders -- http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal -- and GNOME's "Activity Journal" project is similar. (Smartphones are starting to use some of the same ideas, too.)
No.

Sure, they can do research on cool stuff. But do you see Google selling and distributing these utensils anytime soon?

In other words, will this acquisition put more useful devices in the hands of those who badly need them?

I don't think so.
who ever said was supposed to be good for workers? remember that the US is the only country to still allow at-will employement... it doesnt care even for the native workers.

those laws are justifyed as "if we dont get those visas we open offices elsewhere and you dont get our taxes". then congress/states allow the conditions the conpanies demands and they avoid taxes anyway via income routing in ireland or who knows where.
If these taxi cab drivers are "contractors" they should be able to just take on whatever business they want.

Carry one phone for Uber and one phone for Lyft, and swap out the branding when representing one or the other.
Apple's Newton OS used object-oriented data stores called "soups" rather than a file-oriented storage paradigm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29#Operating...
How do they plan on getting around sex discrimination laws?
Dominica Lets the Bit Drop
It's going to scale just like you'd imagine it would. All the people saying "oh, tar was built for this" obviously haven't actually tried replicating the experiment using tar.
So why doesn't this make you generally in favor of single-payer?
Based on the colors chosen for the site (blue for the button - i.e., boys click the button - and pink for the title logo - i.e., the gift is for girls), the images (jewelry, women's shoes, a notebook that says "LOVE"), and the 'spoilee' suggestions (your lady crush, that girl at work), this site seems unfortunately and unnecessarily supportive of a heterosexual and outdated men-giveto-women gender binary.

I feel like if you made the imagery and wording more inclusive, you could have a really neat thing that appeals to a much broader audience of gift-givers.
The BSP* algorithm used in Doom was research paper material in 1991, and Carmack was among the first to apply it to low performance PC games.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning

I keep thinking about the Malcolm Gladwell "Ten thousand hours to expertise" idea, and for Carmack to be looking at this sort of stuff at the age of 22, he basically had to eat sleep and shit computer graphics for years and years on end before he could be in a position to apply this to a computer game.
So you agree with the narrative that non-union employees are no better off than slaves? I would be interested in how you reason to that point of view.
> and that the merchant has the reader.

Starting next October (2015), the liability of fraud will shift from the issuing bank to the merchant/card issuer. So Apple is ripe to take advantage of this because most (I assume) merchants will want customers to use Credit+chip or Mobile NFC because they will lessen the risk of someone committing fraud with a stolen CC. This will mean upgrades across the nation. Even card issuers like Walmart will want all its stores to upgrade.
It's not about the abstract regulators, it's about the voters. I imagine we're not too far away from the uber-ization (really, the contracter-ization) of the economy becoming a political issue.
Whatever they bias is, invalidating software patents is an action that favours entrenched/moneyed interests. It favours them almost as much as it favours small inovative firms and sole professionals.
Also, the companies are deflecting costs back onto taxpayers by ensuring that many of their workers will need to depend on government services for health care, housing and food assistance, etc. Sure, some of these taskrabbits/ubers/lyfters/whatever are making a real wage at this stuff, but many of them are also minimally employed –– and trying hard to get work as they can get it.

In so many ways, we are all subsidizing these companies.
You seem to have an inside perspective. Care to share more?
Perhaps Homejoy should put this on their site in order to make sure customers are informed:

“THE COMPANY DOES NOT PROVIDE CLEANING SERVICES, AND THE COMPANY IS NOT A CLEANING SERVICE PROVIDER. . . . THE COMPANY OFFERS INFORMATION AND A METHOD TO OBTAIN SUCH THIRD PARTY CLEANING SERVICES, BUT DOES NOT AND DOES NOT INTEND TO PROVIDE CLEANING SERVICES OR ACT IN ANY WAY AS A CLEANING SERVICE PROVIDER, AND HAS NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY CLEANING SERVICES PROVIDED TO YOU BY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.”
http://www.reddit.com/r/showerthoughts
Oh, I am not trying to imply that the same approach will work for everyone, in fact I suspect it will stop working for us once our child grows older. But I wanted to provide an interesting datapoint.
Running arbitrary JavaScript on your server will likely cause performance, security and compatibility problems. It's not practical at large scale, and it's not something that would "fix" all the use-cases anyway.

Also, very few companies and no individuals will have the same technical capabilities as Google with it's horde of developers, years of experience in the domain, billions of dollars and ability to control everyone's visitor stream. They shouldn't be the only company that can effectively innovate in this field.
I remember programming a Lego robot with this visual puzzle piece method as a kid. It was awesome. I have a feeling something similar already exists for general purpose programming. I can definitely see something visual-based that hides a lot of unnecessary details working for a lot of basic applications - at least to get the skeleton of an MVP up.
But in the end, isn't that just a putting files in database?
In fact, it's almost like a typical state-of-the-art computer is a limited (perhaps even poor) metaphor for the brain.
you just nailed the reason US rather cavendish aberration. it looks pretty on the shelf
One of the things I like about working in tech is the absence of the "they terk ur gerbs" type crap.

If you're out performed by an H1B you need to step up your game not worry about H1Bs. If you don't have H1Bs they will just out compete you from another country. Did you notice the manufacturing sector leave?

Turns out working hard is a bit more important the graduating from a prestigious school.

How does one have a STEM degree and not have a job? Do they not know about craigslist? Career fairs? Recruiters? elance? etc? Are they somehow physically disabled that prevents them from taking a day labour job? Are they unable to find their library and open a book on Javascript? Ruby? Python? C? C++? UNIX? TCP/IP? HTTP?

Perhaps the real reason they do not have a job is that they feel work is 'beneath' them. Like how can you not find a job... I have a high school education and I get called twice a day, in Vancouver not SF...
Yeah, we've been there for about a decade now, and the mask is slipping off.

The biggest question is what to do, and how to do it. Clearly, we have to fix things, but how do we fix a fascism problem that is deeply ingrained in the roots of power and spans multiple countries economic, social, military, and political structures?
First, read this post and understand. If there was a true shortage, wages would be increasing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-19/only-rich-know-wage...
This is cool, but super naive for all the problems already mentioned and then some.

Warren Buffet said that some companies are already bankrupt, they just haven't run out of money yet. Sadly, this is true of Radio Shack.
There was a photo going around Twitter recently of a driver with five or so dash-mounted phones/devices doing more or less what you suggest.
Looks like a telescope app (Meteor): http://www.telesc.pe/.
Consequently, the cost of a ride will approach the level of direct costs like fuel and maintenance. There won't be much left for driver compensation or vehicle depreciation, much less a durable surplus for the network operator.

Paradoxically for the disruptors, the way out of this trap is for Uber and Lyft to lobby for greater regulation, stringent requirements for insurance and liability, background checks, safety inspections and government licenses. They need higher barriers to entry.

They need to carve out a space safe from competition, or it will rapidly devolve into a lowest-common-denominator market.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The interesting thing is that Homejoy built that software, but instead of selling it to all of the local cleaning companies, they started a business to replace all of the local cleaning companies.

We'll see long term which of those two areas is more important (i.e. running a cleaning service, vs writing software for a cleaning service).
I forgot about uBiome:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/18/ubiome-raises-4-5m-from-ang...
Please drop the doublespeak for the title, it should be re-titled as "How China is blocking Google CDN"
There's nothing to be gained by throwing an idiom away, but maybe there's a lot to be gained with a new idiom.