skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i agree that Mozilla has a better track record than most large tech companies in most areas, but that also sets a pretty low bar. i'm more of the opinion that if Mozilla really were as committed to user privacy as they claim to be, they might not respond so flippantly to questions about server logs. If it wanted to, Mozilla could even stop logging "certain temporary data such as your IP address."

regarding Mozilla's intention to advertise: http://www.zdnet.com/mozilla-clarifies-defends-firefox-ad-po...
Sure... would love to. Shoot me an email. james@psychsignal.com
This is unfortunately a case of Twitter biasing technical discussions to highly literate, careful people.

Good tweeting requires almost Orwellian control over writing.

It needs to be extremely terse and explicit.

You need to be the kind of person that will write a tweet, read it and if it could be misunderstood in any way delete it, before rewriting it several times.

You need to do this until you are able to fit each inalienable component fact into 140 characters.

This kind of writer is often careful to form only one idea per tweet, considers using mathematical notation if it requires less characters, and will finally consider placing a [...] on the end of sentences which leave their argument hanging. Though when you have to do a lot of these things, it's often because you have not fully analysed the concept to a point where you understand it well enough to say simply.
No doubt, for me this is Richard Stallman. He follows his ideas of free software for the whole live, never betrays them and with time, his philosophy [0] looks more and more modern (especially in the post-Snowden times).

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
4Chan as a BBS [Telnet bbs.carteryagemann.com 23]
https://bitbucket.org/carter-yagemann/4chanbbs/
Growth Hacking 101: The Basics
How Facebook just blew a great quarter
> The hardware form is just about convenience it [no longer] describes a logical difference or significant processing ability

What exactly is a logical difference in this case, and how is it relevant to the discussion? Is my decision illogical if I consider the ergonomic implications of using a particular hardware/software platform?

Aside from ergonomics, I'm not sure what is so controversial about assuming that the different user interfaces will (and quite obviously do) cater to different use cases. What I can realistically do with a keyboard and a 24" monitor is certainly different from what I can do with my mobile phone. What I can realistically do with Debian is certainly different from what I can do with iOS or Android. These differences alone convince me that the distinction between desktop computer and phone/tablet/crablet is still meaningful, regardless of the literal meaning of "desktop computer". Manufacturers, retailers and consumers generally understand this, no matter how much anyone pretends that a tablet is equivalent to a desktop computer.

> "year of Linux on the desktop"
People have been using [insert any relatively obscure OS] as a desktop OS for plenty of years. The fact remains that Linux doesn't hold a significant share of the desktop market, which is what the idea of "year of Linux on the desktop" has always been about.
I think an open source list of common words and expressions is a very good idea. Ideally, that kind of tool also plugs into Google's Adwords tool, so you'll get the amount of searches each expression gets.
HTML + CSS + Javascript is obviously far from perfect, but is there any other way TODAY to write a single piece of code that will run on just about every computing device in circulation?

Honestly, I challenge anyone to write a simple UI (lets say draw a circle and put some text on the screen) that just works across ALL major operating systems, screen sizes, versions, etc.

If do actually end up doing it in anything besides "web" languages, its going to be more complicated and take longer as well....

To make a car analogy, The Chevy small block V8 engine was/is never the best, fastest, most efficient engine. It's just that for the past 40+ years they've put the damn thing in every vehicle imaginable. It's pretty ubiquitous in the auto world....It just works and everyone still uses it. Sort of like how you will find a HTML, CSS, Javscript rendering engine in everything today...
BTW, this also brings to mind another thing I've come to believe over the years:

> "You have clearly not understood how the math works or why tail latencies matter in dist sys. I think we're done here."

If, when you write something, it sounds like it's coming straight out of The Simpsons' "Comic Book Guy", you should probably rethink it unless you really mean to be a bit of a jerk.
> how can you be so confident that no mistakes were made?

You can be 100% confident mistakes were made.

This method is useful for apps that don't care as much about quality.
Show HN: Passwds.io
Yep, within a week or so you will be able to connect your last.fm account. All your available data on last.fm will be imported into your library in cubic.fm. I'll let you know when it's done! Thanks!
There was never a shortage of people taking some of those words out of their context, and arguing against what those words supposedly say.

Long ago I learned that if you want to have "viral" success, even on a more informed site like HN, avoid making more than one statement or claim in a piece.

"Modern Java application servers offer surprisingly high performance" (followed by details of performance improvements, etc), for instance, is okay: everyone who agrees will forward and agree and post, while those who might not agree or care will remain ambivalent and disengaged.

Change that up slightly, though, and conversationally add "...which might allow you to deploy on fewer servers than a similar solution built in Ruby" and you'll instantly gain armies of very motivated detractors who will go forth to denounce everything you've ever said, declare everything you've written stupid and misinformed, etc. Not based on objective disagreements, but based on a knee-jerk opposition that, much as with politics, can't be on a point or issue (e.g. "agree to disagree"), but has to encompass everything.

People who might agree or yield value skip the piece after seeing endless criticisms and complaints.

The crux being that it's very hard to gain agreement, easy to gain enemies. If you state ten things, people who disagree with but one of them will often fall in the latter camp.

Not that this changes how I personally write -- where I'll load pieces with things that people can disagree with -- but I see it constantly as stories tread the bottom of the front page, the detractors who find that one tiny thing they disagree with and blow it up to be all-encompassing, and it gets flagged to oblivion.
your face is weird.
Not meant as a criticism, but a thought: It's a bit ironic that for a thing meant to demonstrate the concept of emergence, players are designing states rather than rules conducive to emergence.

For example, imagine a game where flocks of boids[1] did battle, but instead of setting their initial position, you programmed the rules of behavior that governed each boid identically. The fixed rules of the system are such that the more "cooperative" the behavior, the greater the chance of success. Individual boids aren't allowed to have any memory (i.e. stateless), so AI solutions are precluded.

[1] http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
To the author: you should probably use VODKA index.
>I feel fairly confident saying I'm not significantly influenced by advertising.

Either that or outliers in a sample set are not indicative of the general values.

I mean on one hand we have huge production and consumption levels and gigantic advertising budgets (and studies in consumer behavior), both rising enormously in the 20th century -- and those are hard facts --, and on the other hand we have the anecdotal evidence of a single person whose possessions fit in his checked bag and carry on...

>But I'm sure you are right, everyone else lacks free will and the ability to make choices.

Speaking of free will, one could perhaps resist answering every argument with quick snark like the above.

As if my argument that advertising has a major impact in consumption levels implies the extreme BS that "everyone lacks free will and the ability to make choices".

That free will and the ability to make choices can be compromised is a known scientific fact, with lots of studies and experiments behind it, and it's something put in practice daily, from the design of casinos to websites showing three pricing options to you so you will choose the middle one.

That of course doesn't mean that "everyone lacks free will and the ability to make choices" -- that's a BS strawman if I ever saw one.
are only cargoes insured or is the entire launch vehicle insured? I am curious as to how an insurance company assess risk in these launches, let alone what the starting point for any insurance would be relative to the value of the rocket and cargo.
In the end we shall have:
Walled gardens - kindle, nook, etc...
Regular Printed books
Free stuff

The free stuff will consist of:
Books with expired copyright - Project Gutenberg
Books that authors decided to give away for various reasons
Illegal copies of stuff

The illegal copies are the reason for the walled gardens of course. This unfortunately doesn't help the blogger who wants to transfer his stuff to different devices, but that's the problem with DRM.

Anyone selling non-DRM books is likely not to be as profitable, will not get big names in their catalog, and will either fail or stay second rate.

Meanwhile, B&N stores are full of people. IMHO they would have to screw up badly to go out of business in the next few years. ebooks just aren't that great from a business perspective.
Entrepreneurs Thrive on the Learning Curve
Indicates a new account (<1 month?)
Telegram is "free". I'm not sure why "free" needs to be in quotes. I don't know how I feel about Privacy being touted as a benefit of using anything owned by Facebook.
Sounds great! I'll check him out, thanks!
Snap! I've been doing the very same since Turbo Pascal back in the 80s. I'm recently trying to get to grips with Android, hence I present: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.singlemost..., if I may be so bold. It's had precisely zero downloads since its publication a week ago, which has itself been a lesson. Hopefully I'm not too out of order running it past some cellular automata enthusiasts on this thread.
the problem is twitter isn't for conversations.
I'd love that! Can you send me an email : onur@cubic.fm. (I couldn't find yours in your profile.)

Thanks!
OHHH that sucks! That's mah old project - I run https://knoxpayments.com now
Read the source, it's rather famous.
>There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.

Those are animal species. We have other talents, and other issues to solve.
> Given the sheer volume of demand for rides, the relative ease of copying this service, and the number of cars owned by Americans, I don't see how their large revenues can be anything other than temporary.

I think part of it is a bet that individual car ownership will decrease with technology, which I think is a great bet. Not to say that investing in Uber is the best way to bet on that.
Tilt (YC W12) Is Hiring an Android Lead in Austin or SF
How Could Quantum Physics Get Stranger? Shattered Wave Functions
I am an South Korean iOS developer in college (well, now, "Korean American"). I am willing to take some translating work. As an intern, my best work was with Code 42, the makers of CrashPlan.
Complexity can hurt on the server just as much as the client. The same thing that Shopify experienced with Batman.JS had affected our server-side codebase: uncontrolled complexity stemming from ad hoc design and frameworkophilia. We achieved incredible performance improvements by moving away from server side rendering to a lightweight, in house micro framework [1] and making improvements in our server side API code, going from many tens of thousands SLOC down to one-tenth of that, and from 0% test coverage to ~85%.

AFAICT its very rare to find developers with that unique ability to write truly minimalist code. The natural tendency of almost all of the developers I've worked with seems to be to add complexity and to revel in their ability to navigate that complexity. That's why, given the choice, I try to hire or recommend developers who also have a background in music composition and/or visual arts - people who are motivated more by producing an end product that evokes beauty, not by the intricacies of the medium used to produce the work.

Batman was led by someone who previously worked on the Cappuccinno web framework, which is based on its own programming language (Objective-J) and an attempt to port most of the Cocoa framework over to the web environment. Batman was different, but it might say something about its tolerance for complexity. Cross-compilation from 3rd generation language X to 3rd generation language Y has always been a bad idea imho, and seems to be based on a desire to mitigate the effort of learning, much like the tendency to reach for a framework with the most bells and whistles instead of understanding the simplest way to solve a problem. Trying to counter that tendency towards complexity has motivated a few talks I've done at our local JavaScript meetup [2][3][4] (apologies for being overly self-referential).

[1] https://github.com/darrenderidder/talks/tree/master/jswidget...

[2] http://ottawajs.org

[3] http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-simple-intro-to-mvc-p...

[4] http://darrenderidder.github.io/talks/ModulePatterns/#/
Reduce food production is the only sustainable option. Best done by reducing the nation's population through attrition.
> Postgres IS NOT the solution for a lot of things

Well, for a lot more than Redis.
Is Believing in God Evolutionarily Advantageous?
And the freaking FBI warning at the beginning of the disc, and then with some publishers (Disney, you're the worst offender) forcing me to sit through ads every time I put in the disc.

It's like you're being punished for being honest.
> I'm still curious after your response. How would a fitness app and device helped me?

It might not have. Not every product on the market is designed for you personally.

Again, you keep saying that you have lots of exercise activities you know about and enjoy, and that the challenge you've had is overwork. Lots of other people don't have lots of exercise activities they enjoy, but measurement, and the feedback and sense of accomplishment from improving their numbers is something that they get positive feelings from which help counteract the negative feelings from an unpleasant activity that doesn't produce immediate tangible results (although, for people whose challenge is overwork, measurement can be an early signal that an imbalance is occurring that might be visible before tangible harm, so it could be useful for people whose situation is more like yours, as well; come to think of it, lots of people I know who have found trackers useful seem to be more like you in that regard -- several, for instance, are usually regular ballroom dancers, but have lots of other commitments and less-fitness-friendly activities in their life, so...)
So what is this? A project based off of openstack, a complete re-working of an openstack-like environment or something different?
This is a two-for one. Not only do you get a framework framework, but a mixed metaphor to boot!
This ftp is otherwise known as tnftp and originates with NetBSD.

It is part of their base install and is the only ftp/http client installed by default. It is the default client for installing packages.

Aside from the popen feature (-o"|utility" pipes output to utility), getting this program to segfault is quite easy. If you are concerned about security I would seek a workaround that you trust.

tnftp does not link to libfetch, but on NetBSD libfetch is still present (why? I am not sure), so a user could install fetch(1), the default ftp/http client from FreeBSD, which is available as a package, and it will work "out of the box". FreeBSD's fetch(1) does link to libfetch.

There is also example code for a libfetch-linked client in the NetBSD source tree.

Whether the fetch(1) client has security issues of it own, I do not know, but at least it does not implement the popen feature.
Data Science School – NYC
Website offline, github page - https://github.com/virtkick/virtkick
"It makes much more sense (both economically and technically) that they simply crippled the free feed. Especially since it is provided by a private third party who makes bank on the people who purchase the premium edition."
Not sure this makes sense at all - if the push version is better half the time, that means the other half the time the free or non-push version is better. Since "better" is a matter of seconds here, it could be something as simple as "half the time, push notifications go out before the site finishes replicating".
Are you saying that mathematics will never be able to describe certain systems, or simply that mathematics is not yet complete?
I'm afraid to say that I haven't had a positive experience either, but I was just interested in CoApp out of curiosity: I tried to see if it was doable to use it to package pure Python (or other interpreters) libraries.

Obviously it was not ready yet, but I wasn't really let down: I seldom use Windows, so I don't have any real need for it, and my perception was that with some more months/years it would get there.

But CoApp and OneGet are worthwhile endeavors, so I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll eventually build something that can make software installation on Windows less painful

PS: uh, I just realized that you're a Microsoft developer as well (just like Garret Serack)... is it so difficult to get hold of him even inside the same company? (I don't know... maybe you're actually on different sides of the ocean, and this would make the matter quite a bit more complicated)
My Captivity
We owe a lot to those who work on package managers and the packages, but he has a point in that if it works so well it has a lot to do with the software being free.

Important things like good and efficient dependency management and library reuse are far easier to achieve when all the relevant sources are available to packagers.

IceWeasel and Chromium visually are Firefox and Chrome with different icons and you'll find them if you search their "real" names in the package manager. Not so hard, right? You can find about why they exist if you are interested, it's not required.
British Spies Allowed to Access U.S. Data Without a Warrant
How do I leave feedback?
Antares rocket explosion: The question of using decades-old Soviet engines
Why not simply require the SSID to end in _map? If Google think it's so easy for users to do, then surely this shouldn't present a problem?
No, it is not a function of the app, but a breakpoint action in XCode. It only works when you are debugging the app.
You're also getting paid less over time.

Meanwhile my savings are slowly growing in economic power, even though all I've done is stuff them in an old mattress.

New entrants to the labour market can never aspire to have the kind of cash their older peers have put away because work yesterday is valued more than work today.

Not a world I want to live in.
I don't deny that Twitter constrains conversation in a way that can be negative, but is that what's going on in this case? Consider: antirez's blog post represents exactly the kind of one-sided un-nuanced polemic that he blames on Twitter, even though he has infinite space in his chosen medium to do better. What more could he have done to prove that the medium isn't the problem?

The problem is desire for control of the message. People who want that sort of control should just issue press releases. People who try to use the Twitter megaphone to promote their ideas, their projects, or themselves have to understand that others are doing exactly the same thing and sometimes the messages will conflict. The community into which antirez dropped this particular comment is one full of people running their own data-storage projects, academics promoting their own ideas, and others with more abstract (but no less passionate) beliefs about things like data protection or 99th percentile latency. I'm part of that community, and I've certainly had to endure pot shots against me or my project because of my presence on Twitter. It's part of the territory - just as it is on sites like this, or has been since forever on Usenet and BBSes and all the way back to the first town square. Among a thousand competing voices, yours might not be heard or understood perfectly.
I made it through almost three paragraphs of that. I expect your target audience will make it through much less. You may want to condense this before you send it out.
Maybe a nitpick, but in this image: http://0a.io/assets/img/1d_2d_3.png

The red triangle should be above the line so it touches the X-axis, as the "area under the curve" should always be towards the X-axis, not the Y-axis. The picture as is just happens to give the right answer for a straight line going through the origin, but is illustrating the incorrect reason why.
Joker Is Cool but Not the New Popcorn Time
Demo - https://demo.virtkick.io/
Did you read the post? "the 99% percentile is bad" is something I never wrote, it was part of a larger sentence where it was obvious it meant if the 99th percentile figure is too big.

About pointing to relevant papers: things like pointing to timestamped replication paper, which is a CP system for replicated state machines, in response to the fact that Redis does not support slaves when the master disk persistence is turned off, is actually just another instance of why it is not possible to have decent tech conversations on Twitter.

The problem experienced at Stripe is a result of Redis replication documented behavior, regardless of using Sentinel or not. Redis replication is a very simple system where replicas will try to exactly mimic the master, and if the link breaks, will try to connect with it again and again forever. There is no builtin HA, nor failover or alike.

So before considering failover (and yet IMHO pointing to timestamped replication is not very informative even in this context, since in distributed systems the details matter, and you can't just give a random reference to a completely different system which happens to have just superficially similar issues to fix), there were different useful observations to do.

Like: Hey @antirez, what about supporting master-slaves setups where the master can be configured without persistence at all, and yet when it reboots, it will not be considered viable for reconnections? Which is the fundamental problem: stopping the basic Redis replication behavior from working as it works, with slaves that always want to replicate the current master, which is not ok if we want a system supporing the master restarted without persistence (which wipes the dataset on restart).

However the whole problem with that is that there are a lot of people like you that will regard linking to a paper as a great way to help, and as a very smart thing, while there are other that are instead trying to work to really make stuff better. Before commenting you should make the effort to understand exactly the problem domain and its subtleness: exact details or what you say is not relevant in a discussion which is all about details.
Small elements of Twitter's design really exacerbate this problem.

In a strictly time-ordered tweet view, you'd see one or another of antirez's tweets, be be curious, and go back into his & other respondents timelines to see the full conversation, w/ whatever context was originally there.

But how Twitter works right now is you get what appears to be a full conversation neatly tied together, but it's actually been selectively edited by an algorithm maximizing (I'm educated guessing) engagement, which ends up basically being an automated filter to create misunderstandings and controversy.