skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw a pneumatic tube system in operation as late as the 1990s. The main library in Madison, WI used one for communication between the main floor and secondary storage in the basement.
Thanks for the tip; donated. This guy was my heroes' hero, around the time when I found my first copy of 2600.
Reminds me of a Ghost in the Shell plot, where one man wrote software that dominates the Japanese market. I'd make a joke, but that would fall into spoiler territory.
Also -- it's not clear that he is being bashed. Can someone post examples?
There was a backlash of sorts against the statement the FSF did regarding Shellshock.[1]

[1]: https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-statement-...
So there's been one article that is mildly (to put it nicely) critical of rms about the ShellShock exploit and this guy blows a gasket calling thousands of people clueless assholes?

He needs to grow up.
How is a "socialite" and "social justice whiner" different from "free software whiner"? Idiot.

Also, RMS is a socialist if you read more of his writings. So you should go die.
I guess older sites can drop the NOYDIR meta tag. A few weeks ago i noticed my site still has the NOODP tag. I have to think that Google doesn't even bother with that anymore.
Hi Nick. I am looking for a business partner and I am technology focused. My email is hani.qassim@lukemani.com
Better yet, what's up with Google+? I get kicked back to Hacker News when I try to close the photo overlay. How to view the original page?
This is plain garbage. An adult is not necessarily seriously and nobody needs to learn to "write like an adult".

There are more "adults" using the internet then _placeholder_ and nobody ever told me I should take the internet seriously.
Occam's razor doesn't say "pick the simplest theory", it says "pick the simplest theory out of all that agree with all discussed experimental evidence". We didn't throw away four elements because they weren't simple enough; we did it because that theory didn't explain the things we saw.

As for the notion of simplicity itself, we have Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction, they capture the essence pretty well (though I heard that with some caveats).
The only thing cute is the way you are desperately trying to come up with ways to turn "I don't like what you say" into "it's wrong what you say" in your head. :-)
Thanks for this advice, I really liked your CV. I'll take some inspiration from it!
Flat out hire a technical advisor. Don't bother dangling equity, just pay their rate like you would an attorney - retainer + hourly. Ask them to create a technical roadmap and architecture. With that in hand you can then find a first employee to implement it.

In this way, you can leverage the expensive expertise of a very senior level person where it's most needed and then hire a less experienced and less expensive individual to perform the daily work.

It's like building a house, hire an architect first, but then a general contractor to make it happen.
It's the coefficient of the linear term in the q-expansion of the j-invariant. The j-invariant of isqrt(163) is an integer exactly, and e^{pisqrt(163)} is the first term.
> Proprietary software gets compromised all the time.

All software gets compromised, all the time. Compromise rate has a lot more to do with the number of users than whether that software is open or proprietary.
Why a SaaS CEO must carry a sales quota
The Guardian seem to have chatted to RMS as the most prominent advocate of free open source software.
Nobody knew BASH enumerated every environment variable and - depending on its content - maybe evaluated part of it for immediate execution.

It wasn't documented and it wasn't expected. It's not part of the expectations people have for a POSIX shell.

In your metaphor, it's more like the ice cube manufacturer has been making brick-shaped ice cubes and selling them through building suppliers, and they've been widely used as a building material for many years and the ice cube maker has never said anything about the slight risk of it melting at room temperature.

What you're arguing is that bash is not and was never a solid POSIX shell.
®
>> "Don't understand that Europe accepts such huge /closed/ application ecosystems."

Because Android is the dominant player by a large margin in Europe.
Is Android doomed?
Except the FSF never said anything like "Please don't use bash for CGI, it's not secure enough". If they had, then they would have to recognize that bash is not secure enough for other uses as well.
Safecracking aside, I imagine trying to forcibly compromise a decent safe stands a decent chance of killing a child locked inside, particularly if you reach straight for your plasma cutter.
This has been a bug since the early 90s. With both heartbleed and this coming in the same year, is it time to stop thinking and teaching the concept that open source inherently makes bugs easier to find?
Except that, in a world where Unix systems are almost exclusively used to handle network traffic, that off-road usecase should probably be considered the default. They've been selling city cars in a country that doesn't actually have any paved roads.
> but it is being improved

The things I care about can't be fixed, because they are fundamentally wrong in Go, they are not just some little oversight.

> I already prefer it over many other languages.

If I would start aiming low enough, I could also certainly find languages which are even worse than Go.

Honestly, I don't care. I prefer languages which do things better than X, not languages which are less worse than X.

> You mean... [...]

Eh no? I meant what I said. If the people who created Go wouldn't have been able to leverage the Google name (either by working at a company or by Google saying "don't use our brand for your toy projects") nobody would have cared.

But people said "OMG, Google invented online search!!! Then–by definition–they have to be language design experts, too!!!" and the tragedy unfolded.
The problem is not being offensive but being childish. The vocabulary used gives you a hint about the level of arguments you are about to read, and if you read the rest of the article, you realize that the author of the post is indeed quite immature.
weev's fame and notoriety is based on not only offending but also direct harassment, often of people who could not fight back. He's a classic bully & troll, and his opinions on this matter cannot be taken seriously.
Apparently taken from real life allegedly one vary parochial Scottish news paper reported the sinking of the titanic as "North-east man lost at sea"

And they didn't mean north east Scotland it was an even smaller area.
The clueless assholes could not be stopped, because it is another name for the vast majority - the 84%.)

The problem is the same as with openssl's flaws - when we accept all the contributions without detailed code-review we often incorporate code written by over-enthusiastic amateurs (and sometimes even over-confident idiots).

Lots of problem of really open open-source projects (sorry for this tautology) are from the fact that they are open for everyone.

Imagine everyone could commit (without code review) in Haskell compiler tree, Linux kernel or, say, OpenBSD. But in early times of GNU movements this was a very common case.

So, the problem is in the lack of code-reviews, not in GNU movement, let alone Stallman himself.

It is quite easy for ignorant to under-emphasize the importance of GNU tools to what we now call the Internet. It is not just bash, which is very important tool, but in the first place Emacs, GCC, Binutils, GNU make, flex, bison - all the development tools which made possible the raise of early BSD and Linux systems. It is impossible to imagine the world of free, open source software without GNU toolchan.

Nowadays I very much like the example of nginx - it has bigger market share than IIS, while originally was a solo effort, compared to millions of dollars and man-hours which have been spent on development and marketing of IIS. This is how open source model works. Another good example is Erlan/OTP.
A couple links for those who, like me, want to learn more about bitwise operators:

http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/bitwise_operators.html (A decent intro to the concept of bitwise operators and what you might use them for.)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Referen... (Their use in JS.)

And Peter: I'd love to watch that talk! Was it recorded? A quick search for "peter cooper future of code" brought up some references, but no videos (at least not yet).
DM me at @kpatel79 on twitter and I will be able to point you in right direction.
code should be clear rather than clever

But clarity depends on context. Personally, in context of the C language, I find code like

while ((string = *env++))

(which is how the offending loop could have been written as well) perfectly clear. I doubt someone coming from a, say, Java-background would agree.

Similarly, he complains that the loop index was called string_index instead of the 'far superior' i.

With C99, I'd agree. But in a C90 codebase, do you really want to have declarations like

int i,j;

instead of

int char_index, string_index;

at the top of a block?
Ask HN: Final year project in CS
Hey I need to choose the topic of my final year project of BSc Software Engineering. My uni obviously gives whole bunch of topics to choose from, but none of them are interesting to me. They are super boring (build a website for some uni department, etc.) - BOOORING!

I would love to do something outstanding, something what I could show of with to my future employers.

I am interested in big data, AI. I was thinking of doing something with drones, or some social media data analysis, or something with computer vision.

Any advice?
Wouldn't that violate freedom 0?
You can pay someone to improve open source tools, too.
Math continues to fascinate me. Here's another one I love: http://xkcd.com/217/

I've spent hours in front of Google trying to find other random symmetries.. :]
I always open in a new tab, and then closing the photo takes me to here:

https://plus.google.com/101584889282878921052/posts/7u73y5Fz...

Is that what you intended?
You're right about this being a iOS 8 bug, i haven't tried your keyboard yet but have swype installed and it frequently fails to show up in things ( mainly spotlight for me )
ObjC is a very small, simple language. The hard part is Cocoa. The JavaScript bindings don't address the hard part at all.
I was pleasantly surprised by the click animations on the buttons.

I didn't like the save icon.
Yeah, I see code that allocated small amounts of memory when it would be easier to put it on the stack.
That would be nice. But didn't Europe try to force Apple to use standard chargers and they just ignored that too? I don't think Apple cares very much. For the charger issue they made some sort of crappy adapter no one will use. So if you forced them to make an open app store it would probably be a similar joke.
Exactly the point I was making. Rapid response to vulnerabilities found and perhaps even a bounty on new ones might be the more time efficient approach.
I see many people calling him out not for making a mistake, but for downplaying its significance when confronted with its full ramifications.

I agree that mistakes happen. But someone who deserves respect, in my opinion, owns up to mistakes and tries to get them fixed.

Someone who downplays the mistakes in order to save face deserves nothing from me.
Putting things that way, every accelerator outside Silicon Valley is class B at best?
Isn't that what caused the Debian random number bug? Valgrind and purify spotted weird code; a Debian package maintainer removed it and submitted a patch upstream; upstream didn't notice it.
> What they are teaching in the CS department has nothing to do with what physicists learn.

This line of thinking is a huge problem in science and the reason Scott has to write articles like the one discussed. "Yeah, so those computer guys are so full of themselves that they dare say they know something about how the universe works". Well, the thing is, they actually do.
Yeah, that's a rather obnoxious behavior. Perhaps someone can change the link to the following?

https://plus.google.com/101584889282878921052/posts/7enyPxZW...
That doesn't mean that bash is suitable for handling network traffic!
I think its more an argument for supporting software, free or proprietary and making sure it is good via transparency and continuous improvement.

I do agree that code should be able to be critiqued, but criticism is generally taken poorly by an individual when your critique is hyperbolic.

Anyone who has the ability to critique it should have spent the time it took to write an outraged blogpost and try to contribute back to the project, it would both make you feel better and look better.
the avx registers have 512 bytes of storage.
Love this; what a great example of creative revenge! I thought we'd heard the last of stories about the bullying of ad clients at Yelp, but apparently not.
MailChimps email newsletter design guide
This is better than any art exhibit in any museum I've ever seen. I hope to see this series of pictures in Computer History Museum or the Smithsonian someday.
It's all good, but if there's a sizable std::map with std::strings somewhere in the code, it only makes sense to use a faster allocator when one is available. It's basically an optimization freebie.
All it does is confuse programmers

...programmers who don't know C? None of this is particularly tricky C code.

While these functions can be used safely by careful programmers, it's simply better to ban their use altogether.

"If there's a chance something could be dangerous, ban it"? This feels like the same sort of reasoning that the government uses to deprive people of personal freedoms... all in the name of "security". It's not unexpected given these people are in the security industry, but sometimes I wonder what kind of world they really want...

The whole article has the feel to it of being written by someone to whom "best practices" are the gospel, and misses the extremely simple reason behind the bug: accidentally reusing a function that does both command parsing and execution to evaluate function definitions. The reason for this misuse could be because command execution is being conflated with evaluating function definitions, but more importantly, none of the complaints raised in the article matter; neither changing function definitions to C89+, removing global variables, rewriting the style of loops and renaming their variables, nor using "safer" string functions would've eliminated the bug. Without all of these, the same mistake could be made. It's a little amusing that one of the gripes is about variable naming, when I think one of the functions involved in the bug couldn't be named any clearer: parse_and_execute().

There is a certain allure to ticking off some list of "best practices" and thinking that it'll somehow solve everything, but as this bug shows, there's simply no replacement for thinking carefully about the code and what it does when implementing functionality.
Sure it is. Users are already getting inaccurate 'floors' measurements and posting the associated bug reports in their forums. If Apple had paid attention to FitBit's featureset over time Apple would have realized the feature was removed because it was uselessly inaccurate. A barometric sensor doesn't become more accurate for tracking flights of stairs climbed just because it's in a device with an Apple logo.
The Cult Deficit
I'm a dev too, but have some photoshop skills and have to learn this stuff myself. I can really recommend that one of you gets to know Photoshop/Pixelmator/Sketch and browses a lot of other product pages and apps (so you can "borrow" there.. stealing shamelessly is often a good idea ;)). A product needs someone who cares about that stuff.
I haven't seen anything official, but I think you can. Mavericks introduced Code Signing for applets http://macosxautomation.com/mavericks/codesign/02.html so you can at the very least distribute JS Apps. The first time someone tries to push one up to the app store for review will be interesting.
This is as helpful as a windows admin saying 'this whole thing seems to be blown out of proportion, none of my servers are vulnerable'.
IOS is completely home rolled. IOS-XR is now Linux based.
I've been a programmer for 15 years (web dev, self-taught) and I don't know what those are. I think a linked list is like a JSON object, right?

Yes, I am a real developer but the technologies I use don't have those paradigms. I doubt it this is good or bad, just different.
Command Exit Statuses: An exercise extending the shell's API
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of programs that make up a full open source system and frequently they are maintained by different groups of people with very different situations as regards to motivations and funding. There's no reasonable way that anyone outside of a few big tech companies can possibly review all of these and ensure that funding is distributed appropriately.
Which celebrity is taking a taxi where? A year of NYC cab metadata
DMOZ is still around, but I think the best directories end up being the niche directories maintained by people who are really into something. Wikipedia also has some amazing lists.
Fluent Startup Packages – SEO and Social Marketing for Startups
There's still https://delicious.com/
I've had some more thoughts in the meantime:

- switch from using a word processor to a typesetting system (latex or lout); this is important because of signalling[0]. There are numerous CV templates on writelatex and sharelatex. Email me if you need help with this. I use Gummi on Ubuntu with a template I exported from writelatex.

- recruiters want to avoid risk. this means that the CV they present to the hiring managers needs have a good chance of being liked and selected by the hiring manager but it doesn't need to be the best in the batch of CVs that were submitted to the recruiter. a recruiter will get flak if he gives the hiring manager ill-fitting CVs but is unlikely to get flak for not giving the hiring manager the best CV in the bunch (simply because no one else will go through all the CVs)

- recruiters and hiring managers also want the candidate that gets hired to be able to get the job done because otherwise it reflects poorly on them. keep this in mind always. you know you can get the job done, now you need to signal it to them too. if you see they are undecided, propose to them to give you a 2-week trial project at no monetary cost to them: this tells them you are committed to get the job (and that if they hire you, you'll probably do a good job because employees that are interested in the job do it better than uninterested ones)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
Nixie Is a Wearable Camara Drone That Can Unfold Off of Your Wrist
Unfortunately, OpenCASCADE is an unmaintainable pile of code. There's https://github.com/tpaviot/oce but does anyone really want to maintain 3 million lines of poorly written source code? Here's what you will have to deal with if you dive in: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade :(

So far the absolutely cleanest implementation I have seen is http://verbnurbs.com/ which is amazing. Seriously, go over here https://github.com/pboyer/verb and compare. This is way, way cleaner than OpenNURBS like uh https://github.com/kanzure/brlcad/tree/master/src/other/open... here. And it has tests distributed with the source code, so hey you can actually attempt to maintain it if you are into that.
The time commitment for open source contribution and for writing blogposts isn't even in the same ballpark.
I think this post misses the point. It is notoriously difficult to write robust code for most varieties of unix shell. This has been the case for decades. It's a bad situation and the GNU project's attempts to remedy it (e.g. Guile) haven't got any traction. It is an embarrassment.
Yes, you can! Which is totally cool. There is a sample app written in JS that uses Xcode. They have it set up with a main.js file, they use the same ObjC.registerSubclass to create an AppDelegate. Then they have .xib for the interface. You can make the same connections from IB to the JS as you're used to.

If you have an Apple Developer account, you can download the sample project here https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/resources/sample-code It's listed under "JavaScript for Automation Cocoa Application"
Oh come on, you can't seriously say that Erlang/OTP is good open source. It's mildly-good corporate open-source, that's not making it good open source in any way. But that's off-topic.

The thing is, code review is a necessary thing where the audience is large, the tool is critical, and the tooling (here, the compiler) doesn't give any warranty in term of code correctness.

Code review are important, but it's an human process, which have its own flows and inconsistence. That's no silver bullet, no more than static checking, strong typing, and test suites. If you want to warrant, you'll have to prove. If you want to prove, you'll have to take time and do it mathematically. This process would have killed any OSS project, that's simply not feasible.

Shit happens, man. That's no reason for protectionism, elitism, and OSS aristocracy. OSS is open and should stay open whatever it cost, period.

Moreover, even if this hole is big, environment has always been a real security hole in Unix. ksh, anyone ? Or worst: csh ? The situation has greatly improved since, and we have all rights to be disappointed to lost a security we all took for granted. That shouldn't make us forget the road we already crossed.
Qwiki pivoted in the past year or two. They made an iOS app with the tagline:

Share your life through brief, beautiful movies

“Qwikis” created in just one tap.

---

Their blog shares several example "Qwikis" (videos):

http://blog.qwiki.com/
Hire somebody as a senior engineer at market rate, and if you're happy with their leadership, you can convert them to a senior position and/or upgrade them to a cofounder. But you'll want to see if they can architect your tech stack and build and lead a team first before you marry them.
If anyone is looking for an alternative I've been working on something similar over at http://hulimail.com.

Not a direct replacement but I'm now adding some additional features to try to make it that. If you're an existing Stacklead customer I'd be interested in talking to you about getting your data migrated and making sure everything works as well at Hulimail as it did at Stacklead.
Major projects take a lot more effort than you might expect. I would try and have lot's of small milestones that actually do something useful. The idea is even if you don't get everything working you still have something significant to fall back on.
Jellybean test. An open timeline for ideas and problems
I have been looking for an easy-to-use cloud database and this looks like it!!!! I am kept being amazed at the lack of an app equivalent for MS Access. That is a very useful tool but not fit for the cloud/collaboration age. Kudos!!I think there are tons of people that will use it.
How about steganography?
> Then tell me how many liters of water are needed to fill a cubic meter of space without looking it up or writing it down.

1000. I had the answer calculated in my head before I finished reading the sentence. I knew that conversion by heart before I was 10. Also as a grown-up my water usage is billed in cubic meters of water used per month.

This video is all you need to see why using imperial for anything is idiotic: http://youtu.be/EUpwa0je6_Y - this is a group of people who use imperial measures daily struggling with a basic arithmetic operation that any second grader could solve in metric.