skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder why people bother showing up at conferences and talks if they can't but down their laptop, phone or table for the duration of the talk.

For most going to a conference involve setting aside time to travel to the conference, pay for a hotel and perhaps pay for the ticket and taking time of if it's not work related. Either way your wasting money and time by going and not paying attention. You go to conferences to learn, so put the gadgets down.

How will people know if your interesting if they're not paying attention?
Shellshock: Better 'bash' patches now available
Perforce does this with the Revision Graph/time-lapse view. Super handy feature for understanding new code and how it evolved (or regressed :-)
This article struck a chord with me (a young millennial). I spent a lot of my childhood doing camping and other outdoor activities, and in the past six years or so turned to programing. In both situations, problem-solving is much more valued than abstract senses of justice or "how things should be". If you firewood is wet, it accomplishes absolutely nothing to complain about how you're being victimized by nature—you need to get over it and figure something out. And I'm sure we're all acutely aware of how it matters not one bit whether your software "deserves" to have a bug or not; you're still stuck fixing it.

Far too many of my peers expect natural talent to yield success, expect effort to count more than results, expect life to be overwhelmingly fun, expect to be carefully nurtured until they're completely comfortable with the problem at hand. I had a friend who was amazed that boys didn't come flocking to her (despite her aloofness) since she was "beautiful like a Disney princess" and "guys enjoy the chase". Another thought that her years of classical violin training entitled her to win an American fiddling competition...despite not being nearly as comfortable with the style as the other competitors.

There's a lot to be commended about my generation's focus on social justice and equality. But hopes and dreams about the future shouldn't come at the cost of being unable to grapple with the reality of the present.
The original was on HN a few weeks ago too, but apparently did not get much traction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297995
SALT Locks Your Phone Automatically When You Walk Away
New beta for Planets Multiplayer: fast mode with bugs
The Alzheimer's Enigma
This is an Op-Ed article, so it's not a replacement for news content. That said it does seem to be a few notches below the grey lady's usual standard.
As many pointed out, its a lack of motivation, flexibility and etiquette.

* Instead of stoking motivation and interests, teachers often go the easy way and squeeze knowledge into students. Which leads to even more bored students with no chance that they start to learn by there own motivation.

* There is a lack of flexilibity. You must learn specific things in specific time. Not even free courses can handle the temporar interest of the student and the students own specific interest.

* And bad etiquette. When its up to you to visit a lecture or not, many students go anyway, because thats what society expects. Even when its a big waste of time and motivation.
> The article does a good job of justifying this claim, though it goes a bit far in saying that students just cannot help but get distracted. Having just a text editor to take notes requires some discipline but it's not entirely impossible either

Even if you have the discipline to just use a laptop for simple not taking, research suggests that this impairs learning compared to talking notes by hand. See "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking", Psychological Science June 2014 vol. 25 no. 6 1159-1168 [1].

Here is an article about that research [2] for those who do not want to deal with the paywall the paper is behind, or who want something more readable than a scientific paper.

[1] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/6/1159

[2] http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5776804/note-taking-by-hand-vers...
You're storing exactly the same data whatever you're storing it in. The point is that there's rather few use cases where your primary database is going to be more than a few terabytes, which is usually easy to handle with a single machine + some caching. I pointed to Stack Overflow as an example of a large site which still manages to keep its entire database on one machine.
Speed Test of Every Apple iPhone Ever – 2007 to 2014
This post is more appropriate for http://www.blackhatworld.com/ maybe you'll find a home there.
Responding to LinkedIn Recruiter spam
No it's not quite the same, the fact that all the conversion factors between ft and in and lb and oz are weird numbers rather than power of tens means that if someone gives me a weird compound unit (for example forces and distances in DNA are measured in piconewton and nanometer) I can't do the math in my head.

tl;dr the point it's not the fact that it's metric, but that it's decimal.
The major benefit of putting your queue in your RDBMS, which isn't commonly brought up in these discussions, is that it lets you protect your jobs with the same ACID guarantees as the rest of your data. This is very valuable for some use cases.

I have a Postgres-based job queue that uses advisory locks to get around some of the drawbacks he mentions (job lock queries don't incur writes or block one another like SELECT FOR UPDATE would). Feedback is welcome: https://github.com/chanks/que
Doing user research on this new platform that is about to launch
Talkray (YC W12), an under-the-radar messaging app, takes off overseas
Oh sorry, I missed the obvious. So it's really rather a simplified Makefile mixed into the source in the form of specially formatted comments.
No offence, but considering that their Pro plan which include SSL starts at $20 for first, and $5 for the rest per account. At 50*$20 it's only $1000. That doesn't sound right.
> I wonder why people bother showing up at conferences and talks if they can't but down their laptop, phone or table for the duration of the talk.

The so called Hallway Track. It is very unlikely you will learn anything at a conference you couldn't learn on your own. At best you're going to get interesting ideas for what to look up next, or get a pulse on what the next direction in your field seems to be.

And you are also very unlikely to be able to meet so many [passionate] people from your industry at the same time without going to a conference.

You don't need to pay attention in talks for any of those benefits. It might even be detrimental.
> I don't want to help bad programs run; I want to stop them from running.

This attitude is the OPPOSITE of what Linus Torvalds advocates and may be the primary reason why Linux is more successful than OpenBSD.

I should add that successful software may be valuable to some but less to others.
What a terrible article. Why even publish this NYT?
I think you're in violent agreement with the comment you responded to in this case (especially judging with what he's written elsewhere on this thread).

He's saying if Apache passes a request to mod_cgi, which spawns "someapp", it is not Apache, but "someapp" that should sanitize the environment before it calls bash.

(and of course if the developer/admin has chosen to write their script to be run by bash, that's their mistake)
Why there's not a bubble (in one graph)
15 Lessons from 15 years of blogging
How has VC funding changed since 1995?
That's really the only meaningful question here. It doesn't matter if it's quantifiably more likely to bend, what matters is if that results in enough phones getting damaged in normal usage to be an actual issue for people. No one will know that for a while.

Non-ECC memory is more likely to get corrupted than ECC memory, but that doesn't mean that every single person who uses a computing device should be using ECC memory. Just because one thing is quantifiably less robust than something else is meaningless without a concept of "how robust does it need to be?"

Obviously the company thinks the phones have sufficient tolerances. A few people on the Internet have posted firsthand accounts that they think proves that the phones are inadequate. A much larger group of people on the Internet who don't like the company that makes the phones practically salivate over these sorts of events, and have been making sure that absolutely everyone who reads any tech forums is HIGHLY AWARE that this is a very important thing that we should all know and care about very, very deeply. Journalists of course will write about this stuff because many of them interpret their job as writing about whatever people are talking about.

Which brings us to the present, in which the only truth that anyone can point to is: no one actually knows if this is actually a problem or not. The only way to answer that question is to wait and see how many returns there are due to breakage. For people who care about truth, well, that's the truth, boring as it may be. In a few months we'll find out if a big company might make less money because somebody should've used a bigger number on a spreadsheet. Exciting! On the other hand, for people who care about arguing about things on the Internet, well, to hell with them, honestly.
There is a recent paper suggesting it may in fact be essential as a trace element: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24906154

Although exactly where modern diet/exposure lies on the necessary/harm spectrum is substantially different question.
Are there? We thought the same thing about our "worst" professors/TAs. Yet students ability to differentiate/integrate seemed unaffected.

That's a data point worth paying attention to. However, I'll submit that the intellectual world is larger than integration and differentiation. I'll further suggest that there is a world of difference between understanding enough calculus to integrate and differentiate, and understanding calculus in sufficient depth to apply its principles to problems and in settings that do not afford simple template matching -- I wrote an integration/differentiation package in Scheme my freshman year, but would not claim that it understands calculus.

This is one of the ways in which a good teacher and a bad teacher can vary by an order of magnitude. You might counter that your tests were so rigorous that any such differences would fall out in the data. Perhaps you have achieved this apex of testing methodology, but I'm suspicious.

Now this suggests one of two things. First, that there really are no "worst" professors/TAs. Second, that students have the ability to replace a $3-4,000 class with reading a $50-150 book (+ Khan academy, etc).

Or that your measurements are not sufficiently granular, as described above.

This is a familiar platitude. I've never seen an actual argument that didn't appeal to invisible dragons.

Many parents produce children who survive long enough to successfully reproduce themselves. By one of the most fundamental biological heuristics that's a rip-roaring success, and yet presumably you would aspire to more with your own children. How's that for an invisible dragon?

EDIT: figured out how to make quotes italicized.
If a tech company's success depends on the traffic from HN, I would question its long term prospects in general.

If a tech company does not depend on the traffic from
HN, then who cares if HN is optimally neutral and efficient.

In general, I think quite a few people overestimate the importance of HN specifically, and web forums in general.
"if they make large numbers of errors or have difficulties with the command language when these could be reduced by changes to the program, then this must be regarded as a failing of the program and not of its users"

This is an excellent point, ahead of its time, and a controversial position as late as the mid 90s. ("No, it's a training problem.")
Is there a succinct rundown of differences between Julia and R? As in, why would you use one over the other. Thanks!
75% of all VMWare installations are running Windows because you can't disentangle the application from the operating system.
Actually, one of the selling points of PCI in contrast to competing standards was that it was significantly easier and cheaper in terms of transmission line design due to reflected wave switching (ie. no termination), this essentially means that only the steady state is relevant for signaling. While not good practice by any measure, this means that PCI bus does not have to be physically an linear bus, but works with arbitrary trees that does not contain excessively long paths (see for example aftermarket right-angle multi-slot PCI brackets for SFF and rackmount systems, that bus most of PCI signals for multiple slots together and only break out REQ#, GNT# and IDSEL through few wires to other original board slots).
What patents does J2 Global post to their web site?
Mothers, Tell Your Children to Be Software Coders
be careful about your use of power because you never know when some whiny, self-righteous snot with a massively inflated sense of preciousness will go crying to mommy.
sorry candid camera, /r/dashcams has you beat. you're about 20 years too late.
GitHost: SSL support for custom domains
The Evolution of Content Sharing – Medium Post
Apple's position here is that my private iPhone data belongs to me. If the government suspects me of criminal behavior, the search warrant should be directed at me, not Apple. I'm not a lawyer, but I think this makes perfect sense.

The next logical step is for Apple to encrypt my private iCloud data as well, and protect it from anyone except me (not sure if the technology exists to do this yet.)
I've got an old red hat somewhere, without yum and apt-get, what can I do to update bash on there? (RHEL3).
iOS 8.0 to iOS 8.0.2 iCloud bypass download
MLB playoffs
Because of popen(), it's near impossible to know which binary programs might unwittingly invoke a shell.
I like the tone.

> Basically, quantum mechanics is the operating system that other physical theories run on as application software (with the exception of general relativity, which hasn't yet been successfully ported to this particular OS).
Yeah, all of the manual casting (which I feel like sometimes takes more trial and error than it should to get to compile) and the awkward null checking are the two most painful points. The debugger being basically useless is a problem, but it's something that will get fixed eventually. I have less faith in the first two points though because initially they were less painful but in later betas they became more painful.
Pellegrini-di-pusingkan-oleh-lampard
If an environmental variable is like a file, this bug is like automatically executing code stored anywhere in the filesystem if the file happens to certain a magic number. Using a prefix (if documented) is like looking in a certain directory. It should have been obvious that scanning ALL environment variables is a bad idea, if not for security than for correctness, because interpreting data belonging to another program is likely to cause unpredictable behavior.
People in the 70's knew a lot more about programming than you seem to think.
That's for desktops where boot times are more important. Starting A and B at the same time allows to lower that time.

On servers you want to wait for A to be ready before starting B. Otherwise the socket min timeout from B to A is dictated by the startup time of A and not the normal runtime timeout (seconds vs millis).
>> Leaving a border will generally not make soldiers shoot at you from the country you leave.
Is it really so? Which countries can be left safely this way, in view of the border patrols? :)

>> I didn't read the rest.
Arguing through not listening may indeed be an effective (albeit a solipsistic) strategy, but not in a public discussion :)

"Your schools covering up recent atrocities!", and Russian leaders historically outperforming the West in enslaving nations -- is that really what you've been taught?

Again, what cover up are we talking of? You very much cannot sell a 60 M dead from famine story to anyone here, due to presence of alive witnesses -- but it obviously flies much better over the curtain and far away. What is taught builds on information declassified during the 90-ies, when "dozens of millions dead" claim was fashionable, but found no supporting ground, to quite a surprise of those insisting on access to relevant documents and their publication.
x0x0 and Htsthbjig are right, this is an industry puff piece. In a previous job I researched brominated flame retardants and it is well documented that they cause developmental disruptions, cancer, and reproductive toxicity. One of the main dangers is that they are not chemically bonded to the plastic and foam that they are added to, like in your couch cushions. This means they get into dust, which is particularly a hazard for babies crawling on the floor.

The laws are also outdated and not very practical- in California, which has some of the most rigorous regulations on environmental health, the test for a flame retardant cushion is to hold a candle to a piece of foam for 12 seconds.

The Chicago Tribune did a series on the tobacco industry's role in getting brominated flame retardants into furniture, which I recommend reading for some context on the current US regulations: http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

Edited to add links to some studies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866688/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3569691/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3349420/
Yes, but...

Often better libraries and tools can only be built on a better language. That's easy to say and very, very difficult to pull off, but when it happens the result is like magic.

I recently encountered this when I was getting into the nix package manager. At first I thought it was ridiculous that they had invented a whole new language just to describe packages. It was a lazy functional language at that, obviously an exercise in academic preening. Boy was I wrong. Because it's lazy you can have a program that describes a whole Linux distribution, and only run the parts that are necessary for the task at hand: installing nginx or whatever. Outside core they use all sorts of non-trendy languages, but the core is written in a new language with carefully-designed characteristics.

The result is amazing, as much of an advance as going from manual to automatic memory management.

It seems to me that the OP's complaint is that Swift wasn't designed to make better libraries and tools possible, but rather to work well with the ones we already have.
RockStor: Store Smartly: Free Advanced File Storage
Everything I've read (status link from the official wiki: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-03-23_Btrfs-Ra...) says don't touch raid5/6 yet. Maybe the pages are overly pessimistic but lack of recovery features sounds like a no-go for me?
I believe it's http://www.amazon.co.uk/6-5-Alexandre-Laumonier/dp/293060110... (although that's still the french version)

And the author is https://twitter.com/SniperInMahwah

I do hope there is an english version around, it's definitely something I'd like to read.
You know why people dont like facebook ? Because they fucking manipulate people.
Large social experiments are conducted to manipulate opinion of people.
How ethical is that ? You must be some shill for facebook or US gov to ask why people leave facebook ?
These experiments are so subtle that you would not even notice they are being conducted.
You feed is manipulated to show you content that either make you angry, rage and on and on.
Beside, there are always some kind of campaigns going on. Male hate campaign, feminism campaign, black racism awareness campaign on and on. I mean come on, once in while getting some message is okay but 90 % of time peoples feed is filled with some campaign, message.
Plus, kids and dogs -- dont even get me started. Stupid kids everywhere.
Beside you can't block everybody and every message otherwise what's the purpose ? So its better to leave facebook. You should too. I guarantee you will feel more happiness. Try for a week.
and yes, please go shilling somewhere else.
Another happy customer
Its more than that. You can't put move-only types into std:: containers if the target doesn't have a C++11 support. There are many other pitfalls like this that are hard to notice until you try it on a pre-C++11 target.
The way to do this is to have a field in the message record that says which consumer it is assigned to, so the consumers set that, process and then set the consumed flag. Then the db can be coherent, and show which consumer processed what.
Per the footnotes at the bottom this builds on the work of Hardy a few years ago, who demonstrated that QM could easily have been derived by Victorian era mathematicians as a generalization of probability theory available at the time.

While not everything in the book is perfect, it also reminds me of Penrose's Road to Reality, which painstakingly takes the question "what is a number?" to build up a sophisticated understanding of what that means and then explains how this impacts Physics in a very real way.

We've made so many advances in recent decades we sometimes forget to step back and reformulate our teaching methodologies to incorporate what we know, simplify the teaching, and make the ideas more accessible earlier, so we can put more minds to work on extending them. That's a shame.
Between Scott Aaronson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who both wrote articles explaining QM "directly from the conceptual core", is there any textbook that follows this path further and with a lot more of details?
Shirky quotes Sana et al [1]:

The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.

I want to kiss all these people on the mouth. I feel like a cross between Don Quixote and the stay-off-my-lawn guy for fuming whenever someone sits down next to me when I'm trying to concentrate, and engages in a constant stream of messaging, or playing some game that's chirping and beeping and booping. There is such a thing as a 'tragedy of the attention commons' but it seems like nobody gives a shit about it. But maybe this piece, and this research, means the tide is about to change.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...
Unfortunately the specs for system() and popen() require the use of shells. It was known that you had to escape arguments and control the names of environment variables, but it's entirely bizarre to expect people to know before shellshock that the values of otherwise completely safe and sanitized variables might still be interpreted by bash as code.

We shouldn't have to give up popen() just because bash was designed insecurely; we should fix or replace bash.
I don't know much about docker. What is he saying I makes easier?
> but I just could not bring myself to pay attention to the presenter for longer than a minute at a tim

Then maybe the problem is you, not the presenter.
No, putting your phone in your back pocket has always been crazy. Some people do it, but it doesn't make it any less crazy. The only that's changed recently is that people have been discussing the practice of putting one's phone in a back pocket as a result of this story, to which the only rational response is, "that's crazy!" :) This is not a usage pattern that any handset maker tests for or designs their devices to deal with. If it works for you, great, but that's more a testament to either your relatively light weight or the sturdiness of the iPhone 4. It is most definitely not something the people who make smartphones assume their users are going to do.
Maybe because not even snails go that slow (They can achieve about 80 furlongs per fortnight, if no lettuce derails their velocity)
> "if they make large numbers of errors or have difficulties with the command language when these could be reduced by changes to the program, then this must be regarded as a failing of the program and not of its users"

By this standard, automobiles have an absolutely terrible design.