skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All five of you.
From a theoretical standpoint, we define our own borders, no? A 'society' doesn't have to be very large to thrive, especially when it can interact with global markets.

Obviously there are many ways to 'remove people from society', but I think it's clear that the most ethical and economical method is exile.

Such a strategy doesn't scale very well for an enormous society, so globalists like 'jessaustin' call me racist- but I think my political agenda is apparent- curiosity and discussion of theory. It's pretty clear who's trying to derail what.
Discussing the meme "worse is better" is difficult because there are different interpretations and usages of that phrase. It's description vs prescription. The blog author chose the prescription interpretation. I can't tell if the author unknowingly did this because he did not see a separate evolution of that meme.

First interpretation is the descriptive usage. We could explicitly prefix the meme and qualify it as RGWIB (Richard-Gabriel-Worse-is-Better). The original label was the observation that "simpler" software was more successful than more full-featured software with ambitious goals. Richard's thesis wasn't about "hacks" but about small and simple things that satisfy users and builds momentum.

Second interpretation is the prescriptive (or self-justifying) stance which I might call HOBWIB (Hacks-Ok-Because-Worse-is-Better.) This appears to be what the blogger is complaining about.

However, HOBWIB isn't Richard Gabriel's thesis. That "worse is better" has taken on a life of its own and repurposed by others who are unaware of RG's original meaning is just a circumstance of adopting snappy soundbites. Whatever behavior the author is complaining about would exist whether the exact phrase "worse is better" existed or not.

>“Worse is Better”, in other words, asks us to accept a false dichotomy: either we write software that is ugly and full of hacks, or we are childish idealists who try to create software artifacts of beauty and elegance.

That label does not have that power over us. For example, we have a label for certain human behavior and call it "passive aggressive." The existence of that phrase did not force us to choose whether to be passive aggressive or not. Likewise, thinking that the existence of 3 words "worse is better" is forcing us into a dichotomy of bad vs good design is flawed analysis.
Forty years on: the full story of the Leyland P76 (2013)
I find it hard to believe that six years could solidify a culture of monolingualism; what about languages other than German?
It's true that Nobel did not include a price for economics.

However, the price ('The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel') is still, right or wrong, associated with the Nobel Prize, since it's handed out at the same event, etc.

Also, people tend to refer to it as the 'Nobel Prize in Economics' [however wrong that might be].
Dropbox is distributed. According to the article, it uses AWS, which is a Dynamo based system. Among its other features, Dynamo allows you to distribute data across many servers, using a hash of the data's key in order to look it up (each server gets some of the keyspace).

Riak is a similar type system.

Dropbox is "centralized" in the sense that it is one service, but it's not the opposite of distributed which would mean "running all on one computer."

Edit: I said "hash of the data's key" but really it's a hash of the key plus the bucket.
Fires break out often. We have plenty of experience in how to handle it, and the likely variations.

They also take place in relatively small areas, where it's possible to stagger the training.

It's very hard to practice large-scale events where we don't know the details of how to handle it. A disease transmitted by animals or insects is different than water born is different than through bodily contact, etc.

We have quarantine laws in place, btw. See http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/specificlawsregulations.html . They haven't been used since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

How often do we need to train in order that everyone has an idea of what to do? Once a year? Once a decade? Without experience giving feedback, how do you judge if it's often enough?

In any case we know that hurricanes come to the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and we know that people are supposed to keep emergency supplies. Every year there's available training, reminders on grocery bags, mentions in the news shows, etc. We also know that they don't - one need only look at how quickly certain things like batteries are sold out.

If people don't plan for once-every-few-years events, they aren't likely to plan for once-every-century events.
Hello there,

This is Rishi, co-Founder at Dreamlance.

I apologize for not having C/C++ & Embedded software in our skills section. It'll be fixed right away.

In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me - rishi [at] dreamlance.io
I disagree with many statements, but I want to focus on two:

> why do free market systems produce by far the greatest standard of living as compared to any other system

What other system do you mean? I don't see two systems to choose from. Every wealthy nation and most poor ones have a 'free market' system with some social welfare programs. The question is what degree of social welfare do we want to provide?

> The debt piled up faking prosperity under the welfare state system has begun to come due

In fact Western economies grew enormously in the last 40 years. The U.S.'s recent debt and economic problems are because of reckless governance:

When Bill Clinton left office the government was running a surplus and the economy was growing. Under the Bush administration, the Republicans (and the blame falls heavily on them this time, there's no point in being falsely even-handed):

* Cut revenue (taxes) significantly

* Greatly increased costs unnecessarily by invading Iraq

* Greatly increased costs unnecessarily by failing to regulate the financial sector, resulting in the worst economic catastrophe since WWII. This greatly impacted revenue (reduced economic activity reduces tax receipts) and expenses (increasing demand for social welfare, and bailing out critical industries).

* Malpractice in governance, attempting even to default on the credit of the United States to score a political point!

Balancing the budget with excellent economic performance and social welfare policies was and is possible. We did it under Clinton. If you greatly both cut revenue and increase costs, and conduct malpractice in governance, then yes you will have a lot of debt and other problems.
Yeap at some point in time ARPANET was a military project too. So where drones, small GPS devices (iPhones?!) and google glass-like equipment :-)
Ethersheet – An open-source collaborative spreadsheet
I have think on that too (perhaps on top of sqlite). You can see some cool ideas at http://www.try-alf.org/blog/2013-10-21-relations-as-first-cl...
Upfront PLUS yearly 1-2%? Ouch.
>I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.

And now I am, too. Thanks for this.
Thank you for the explanation--I'm looking at different high-reliability OS's for long-time embedded deployments, and xBSD flavors are looking pretty promising.
I think that's what he was driving at with the following quote:

"Many people in the car business do not understand that a vehicle has an image. To them, a vehicle is a collection of attributes. If your attributes are better than the other guy’s attributes, you’re gonna win. It’s engineer thinking, along totally rational lines. Their advice to an alcoholic is “stop drinking—is there something about that you don’t understand?” That’s not how people actually think."

If you add up an Aztec as a collection of attributes, it was a damn fine vehicle. If you engage with it from the perspective of an actual consumer -- a sometimes irrational, emotionally-influenced person whose sense of self is in some small way defined by the vehicle they drive -- the Aztec is a fiasco. Part of the function of a car is how the driver feels to own it, so form is part of the function. And the Aztec was a complete failure at providing that part of the function.
The current revision of one specific model of highway guardrail may be deadly. FTA:

“Even though it appears that the ET-Plus terminal can still meet crash testing requirements,” the draft said, “the number of highway crashes with fatal injuries involving the ET-Plus terminal does not match the excellent history of the original ET-2000 terminal.”
"Linux can turn any song into death metal because all you'll be hearing is your own screaming." - Infosec Taylor Swift

my other favorite of her's:

"Mommy, what's Linux?"
"That's what systemd used to be called, Becky."
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=copenhagen+wheel#!/story/forever/0...
I don't understand why people would choose a non rolling-release distro (e.g. Debian) over a rolling release distro (e.g. Arch). Because the former come with the implicit guarantee that every few months, you have to update EVERYTHING all at once. Seems like a needless risk and pain.

Genuinely curious here. There must be an upside to this model, can someone tell me what it is?
To the extend that AES is a good random number generator, only if you have a complete dictionary of all blocks. Simply because a random number generator should produce independent output even if you only have a small perturbation in the input. That is, there should be no relation between a completely white block and an one where one of the pixels has a value of 0xfffeff.
I think "worse is better" vs. "better is better" is best understood as a continuum rather than a black-and-white dichotomy. The popular impression of Rust is indeed better-is-better as you say, but many folks coming from Haskell think of Rust as a worse-is-better language, as it has control flow, impurity, strictness, no higher-kinded types, method notation, object types (as opposed to first-class existentials), curly brackets, etc. The truth is that they're both right: Rust is pragmatic where it needed to be and novel where it needed to be.

I think"worse is better" vs. "better is better" is fundamentally business-driven: does your product deliver value through compatibility/familiarity or by doing things in a technically better way than the competition? Both have been successful, and choosing the right one is basically a question of business judgment.
Just saw the all-hands call on the IRC channels and systemd fanbois groups for an epic show of whiteknighting required yet again on HN where rational folks are trying to discuss the actual and real downsides of systemd - quick, post the rebuttals, choose from:

1. You're doing it wrong
2. Of course, if you use <insert something here>, then it won't work!
3. If you spend a month, it is simple! What, are you lazy?
4. If you hack these bits, disable these bits, run some pointless commands here, then presto it works!
> ...but rather is a confluence of the state of the market at various points in time...

> That is, we do not merely calculate in earnest to what extent tradeoffs are necessary or desirable, keeping in mind our goals and values, there is a culture around making such compromises that actively discourages people from even considering more radical, principled approaches.

If you can suspend your frustration for a moment, it seems that you and the author are both arguing for explicit consideration of the tradeoffs faced in the real world. Both sides of the field have a tendency to reduce this consideration to easily evaluated heuristics (eg "useless ivory tower wankery").

I think the authors earlier posts on generous reading apply here. There is plenty here to disagree with but noone gains much from taking sides and fighting to the death. Rather than getting wound up we could be having a much more valuable discussion of how market forces shape technology and how we might find ways to support and apply long shot research.

EDIT From the discussion you mention:

> What might otherwise be an interesting, nuanced discussion of the economics of technology adoption, network effects, switching costs, etc, is instead replaced with sloganeering like 'Worse is Better'.

> There may well be times where fighting for revolutionary change or finding some adoption story for completely new tech is a better path forward than incremental improvements. Questions like this can not be settled at the level of ideology or sloganeering...
Show HN: WHIDT, time tracking for Google Drive
There are several symmetric encryption algorithms to choose from, the default is CAST5 (according to this[1] random mail post). This would only be used to encrypt the private key on disk.

Now I'm curious of the methods of decrypting data in transit. Does the NSA have the tools to break PKI based encryption at 1 trillion guesses/sec? I have some wild guesses, but if anyone knows I'd love to hear it.

[1]http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2010-October/03...
This is fantastic. Great work. Random question: Is there an app/software you used to do these doodles? I'd love to do something similar but I'm not as artistically gifted. Thanks!
That's really interesting, but I'm not convinced that automation has no role here. When a human sculpts a last, she must be using some techniques and rules of thumb, even if a large part of the craft is "by eye". It seems that "starter" or "template" lasts could be produced using foot scans and whatever rules the sculptor will divulge. Then the sculptor could use the templates in making the final lasts...
As a die-hard C programmer.

For tools and toys that are not performance sensitive, python is great. It's a lot more expressive and requires a lot less boilerplate code.

I've re-written projects from C->Python before and had them work with 30% the number of LoC. I've re-written projects from Python->C before and had a 10-fold speed increase.

Right tool for the right job and all that...
Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon”
Now that it's been adopted, using that supposed
compatibility is "doing it wrong".

It has only been adopted in non-Stable distributions of Debian... I haven't seen anyone belittle anyone over "compatibility concerns"; I have seen folks belittled (especially in this thread) when they complain about imperfect stability in distributions which are not Stable.

At the risk of appealing to authority, I'd be interest to see posts from Debian/Ubuntu maintainers in which they express frustration at the various problems systemd is causing them. I haven't seen any and would appreciate hearing from them or getting some links to their posts.

EDIT: clarified area of "belittlement"...
Thanks Thomas.

I'll keep doing these sketch notes because they're valuable to me, however one of the negatives is that it rewards speakers who use hyperbole and one-liners.

I also mean these to be a companion; everyone should watch the videos.
Y Combinator is for every startup
> I don't understand it's use case.

If there's a chance that the Government or some other entity will come after you for whatever you're doing on Tor, and you don't want there to be any way that your machines (clients or servers) could leak their public IP address, you could put them behind this.
Automatically generate table of contents (TOC) for a given area of content
Absolutely! There's no way I know to get at partial blocks where you have some knowledge, but even then you may have the start of some plaintext-leakage with the known-data and dictionary approach.
I am one of the authors of the blog post.

I think you are referring to the description of Track 1 and 2. Seems like you were one of the contestants. Sorry, we didn't mean to label anyone a newbie. It is just that Track 1 and 2 had goals of bringing in newbies. Of course many of the contestants were even experienced hackers. Indeed one of the winners of Track 1 was also the Track 0 winner.

I apologize if the phrasing in the blog post seemed like a put down of contestants' expertise in any of the Tracks.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about all this either

So a side effect seems that some companies which used to be exempted from collecting VAT will now kind of have to, thereby either raising prices or taking a cut of about 16.7% [1] in their revenues. Because you'd have to be crazy not to opt into the "mini one-stop shop" (who would want to register in every EU country?), so you register for collecting VAT although your revenue is low enough to qualify for exemption in your own country and the customer's.

That's even harder to swallow for companies delivering electronic services, as having a VAT number is not a huge money saver (paying VAT on web hosting isn't a huge burden).

Which countries lack VAT exemption? If there aren't many, it could be okay not to take customers from them.

[1] 1 - 1/1.2 = 0.167 as the average VAT is 20% in the EU
Previous years, I used pen and paper and scanned them. This year, I used a combination of things: Paper (by 53), actual pen and paper, and Photoshop.

I'd recommend checking out Paper by 53; it's hard to not make something beautiful using it.
Uh huh. Pro tip: using the phrase "radical libertarian orthodoxy" is a strong indicator that perhaps you're not really interested in even-handedness.
Debian upgrades are highly tested. A breakage going from a old-stable to stable release is usually considered a release blocking bug.

Arch is great but it breaks all the time. They make major changes that are only documented on the blog. It's very different.
Fundraising: PDF signatures in LibreOffice
There are trusted software client things (Spotify, Netflix, etc.) that seem to work well enough. Snapchat should be able to do better.
That's harder problem than I originally realized. It's easy to write noisy alerts, super easy to not have them (or not catching some issues).

It's hard to tune them so signal to noise ratio will be high.
From the "About" page on complete.org (OP):

> I am a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, and have been since the late 1990s
How to draw beautiful things in the browser
http://framacalc.org/_start
Yet I will always remember the Aztek as the car that Walter White once drove.
It seems more like a historical observation than an uncritical assumption, that incremental change has shown itself to be more successful. The author's claim seems to be that incremental change has been more successful historically because it has more mindshare. I think that causality is backward.
"Worse Is Better" has evolved into a monster.

Originally, it looked like this:

* MIT philosophy: never compromise on correctness, even in bizarre corner cases. Aim for conceptual beauty to a programmer.

* New Jersey (Bell Labs) philosophy: comprise on correctness for simplicity or performance.

In 1985, six years before "Worse Is Better" was originally written, the "New Jersey" attitude was probably more useful. Most people, if they wanted to write acceptably performant software, had to do it in assembly. C was less of a leap, conceptually and in terms of average-case performance, than Lisp was. People who'd been writing assembly programs for years could learn how to write performant C. Writing performant Lisp would be much harder. A contemporary Common Lisp executable is at least 40 MB (obviously, that wasn't the case in the 1980s); at that time, 1 MB was a powerful machine. "Worse is better" worked in the 1970s and '80s. If every piece of computing work had to be perfect before it could be shipped, we'd be far behind where we are.

Also, quite a number of the original Unix programs were for natural-language processing (at a level that'd be primitive today) and paper formatting. With the resources of the time, it would've been impossible to get much of that stuff perfectly right anyway.

Bell Labs wasn't full of the anti-intellectual idiots who invoke worse-is-better, lean-startup tripe today. They knew what they were doing. They knew the compromises they were working under. They bet on Unix and C rather than Lisp machines, and they were right. In 2014, thanks to our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants that were built using C, we have machines that can efficiently run code in pretty much any language, so the C programmers and the Lispers have won. At least, on that front.

However, the "worse is better" lesson doesn't apply nearly as well in 2014. We can do about 500,000 times as much computation per dollar as we could in 1991. That's 500,000 times (at least!) as many opportunities for things to go wrong. A bug that happens once per 100 billion operations used to be negligible and now it's often not.

Unfortunately, we have an industry beset by mediocrity, in which commodity developers are managed by commodity business executives to work on boring problems, and low software quality is simply tolerated as something we'll always have to deal with. Instead of the knowing compromise of Bell Labs, "worse is better" has evolved into the slipshod fatalism of business people who just assume that software will be buggy, ugly, hard to use, and usually discarded after about 5 years. Yet we're now in a time where, for most problems, we can affordably do them correctly and, because things happen so much faster now, we often put ourselves and our businesses at serious risk if we don't.
It's not really clear to me what part of dropbox isn't distributed? (in the sense that it's hosted on multiple computers), the data is distributed and the processing is distributed.
Do they mean it has a central controller/router or something of that kind?
Debian Testing branch is always rolling except for a couple weeks/months before a freeze for a release.

I suppose if you really needed to keep rolling you could temporarily switch to unstable.

"Seems like a needless risk and pain."

And the purpose of the freeze is to iron all that out so it doesn't happen.

(edited to add, I'm sad seeing OP get downvoted. His post history shows hes an Arch guy and likely genuinely doesn't understand release tagging. As a Debian user since '97 I am not surprised that there exist both people who don't know the peculiar arcana of release tagging and there are people who are experts at it, so his confusion adds a little value to the conversation. Down arrow should mean a decrement of net worth of the conversation. People are learning things from his mistake, a down arrow is not an assessment that OP got a technical test question wrong. And I had to edit this about ten times to phrase it correctly.)
No, it doesn't.

You are sorely, severely mistaken and misguided (just like the people creating this Tor product).

> since it limits the target surface just to Tor (and the OS stack required to run Tor) as opposed to your browser, OS or any other software you might use that could potentially leak your true identity.

That is completely 100% false. The attack surface of the browser remains along with the attack surface of the OS. All this does is mask your IP address/network origins.

Tor is no more effective at "reducing the attack surface" of your OS & Browser as a VPN.
> implicit guarantee of "you have to change EVERYTHING
> all at once every few months"

This is a strange conclusion to draw. What makes you think that debian/stable requires updating everything all at once every few months? To be honest this does not even sound like a fair characterization of running unstable.
Interesting, it looks like it's based of ethercalc which is also a great project. We were trying to go in a different direction though and be a little bit more user friendly and also work on mobile.
How do you get a sum of a range of cells?
This link was already posted, you may want to make your comment on that link :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8434964
Good one! startup school was awesome this year! great talks and learnings!
Somewhat relatedly, check out this awesome new camera technology which essentially captures a rolling diff of the image rather than the image itself, with impressive results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LauQ6LWTkxM