skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Differential Diagnosis is an excellent approach to debugging. Seeing debugging in the wild before, I've seen two, maybe three different approaches to debugging:

1) Magical thinking: This is the fear that the computer system has suddenly changed its mind and decided to stop working. The approach here is typically to try some cargo-cult knowledge on how to fix the system without knowing what's wrong, and then just start hitting random things, and see if they come back.

2) Panic / Fixation: These kinds of developers usually get into a state where they are in a panic over what's wrong and fixate on one component of the system where they believe the failure to be. This is slightly more productive than the earlier, but not changing your assessment based on the new information gained is also counterproductive.

3) DDX: This is very much the Sherlock / House type of debugging. It tends to require a lot of wide-shallow knowledge, as opposed to in depth knowledge of the system. Typically, you work backwards from the symptoms, and essentially do a binary search based on the widest type of problem sets to the narrowest.

DDX in-fact is very difficult for most people to do under stress. Nelson from Stripe wrote a post on keeping a notebook to store wide information, and enable caching b-tree searches. This is a very good approach.
viper-mode is pretty outdated and broken in many ways. You should try evil-mode.[1]

[1] - http://www.emacswiki.org/Evil
For Bono and U2, Apple iTunes Partnership Finally Hits a Wrong Note
Too long, worth reading. This is a writer who enjoys words and uses them with care.

I just really enjoyed this, thank you for the link.
If you put a 4 x 8 purple block in the center of each color, the outcome will always be purple taking over the entire map. It seems like a fairly complex, and similar tactics in Go can achieve victory (victory being purple overtaking the map).
Posted yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577821
Apple is rolling in cash from the 20+ Macs/iPhones/iPods I've personally owned or got from work over the years, I don't feel a tinge of guilt, I'm probably one of their best lifetime customers.
Saying "use PostgreSQL for everything" is much more like saying "use Linux for everything" than it is like saying "use C++ for everything." It is a reasonable and profitable constraint to make on a given system architecture.
The tone of the email is very definitely meant to get the end user angry, this is not a true shutdown email or public service announcement of any company that expected to continue to exist / avoid lawsuits.

... Whether the company will continue to exist after this email is another matter.
Can you help me for this Clojure programming problem?
I don't know if they're shutting down, they have to feel the heat somewhat from Microsoft's free IE testing service[1] though. modern.ie still has references to browserstack, but I wonder why.

[1] https://remote.modern.ie/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8578671 (9 points, by kdhandy, 1 day ago, 6 comments)
Standard post potential security incident rules apply folks.

Don't engage with suspicious emails.
Do not attempt to access your account for now.
If you have used your Browserstack password elsewhere, go and change it about the place.
Watch out for any links from untrusted sources on this subject as they may be malicious.

Hopefully there will be more solid updates soon.
What did you feel when you wrote "slam a gate on a pimp" just now?
Repeat post with better formatting:

Standard Perl 6 has just these non-English variables:

- $_ means "it"

- @_ means "args"

- $! means "current exception/error"

- $/ means "last match"

- $0 means $/[0], the first captured value of the last match

All other system variables have understandable English names, eg:

- $IN means the STDIN object/handle

- $OUT means the STDOUT object/handle

- %ENV means a hash (dict, associative array) of system environment variables

- $PID means the system process id

- $*KERNEL means the operating system kernel running under

Etc.
Hope they don't retina the air like the article assumes. I don't need the pixels to code, and I prefer the battery life, performance, and weight savings of not having it.
Communities Fight State Laws That Can Divide Broadband Access
Ireland Vies to Remain Silicon Valley’s Low-Tax Home Away from Home
> Most people make mistakes when it comes to balancing work and leisure, but to claim such mistakes are killing us is preposterous. People in developed countries live the longest, healthiest lives in the history of humanity. The nation with the longest life expectancy is the workaholic Japanese culture so disparaged by the author!

I am pretty sure that the agricultural, traditional type lifestyle of Okinawa(which is the region which has the famed life expectancy) is nowhere near the same as the lifestyle in Japan's urban cities where that workaholic ethic is.
The best one is about continuations. Zelda N64 Timetravel.
The HN guidelines don't discuss whether it's OK to post information about individuals like this. @dang, if you're here, can we make it explicit that this isn't OK on HN?

[disclosure: I don't know the doxer, doxee, or Mark Suster]
[edit: I thought doxing was the word for this - have clarified]
Too bad that they've partnered with browserstack!

>We've partnered with BrowserStack to bring you interactive browser testing on the cloud.
Unhappy with my existing copy and as part of a general effort to replace low-quality physical books with either higher-quality dead-trees or ebooks, I surveyed every translation of Meditations that I could find a few months ago, comparing key passages between them and with the original Greek.

I settled on Maxwell Staniforth's translation. The only hardcover of it I could find was from the Folio Society[1]. There may be paperbacks available from other publishers, I don't know.

Folios are somewhat cheaper on the used market, and used copies of Folio Society books tend to be exceptionally well-kept, probably because they're so pricey new.

As usual, most older (public domain) translations don't have much going for them for a modern reader. Several of the newer ones were OK, but Staniforth's manages to hold very close to the original while remaining easy to read, besting most other translations on both fronts, IMO.

The Hays translation linked by the parent strays, to my eye, exceptionally far from the form of the Greek text, so if fidelity to the original is important to you I'd avoid it.

Hopefully that helps save someone the three or four hours I lost to this :-)

[1] http://www.foliosociety.com/book/MDS/meditations
Even though some valuable ideas are expressed in this piece, there's a lot of conflation of highly distinct social phenomena that goes on. The author looks at the notion of "productivity", judges that people blindly rush from birth straight to the grave in the pursuit of being "productive", somehow lops that in with GDPs (not per capita, not at PPP?) and the weird way in which we have industrialized pleasure, and concludes... what, exactly?

Regardless, the author expresses a valuable point that suffers from her conflating topics.

I think that point is that there's a certain industrial culture -- a focus on productivity and structure -- that dominates our lives, whether in work or in leisure (see e.g. tourism). I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's important to be aware of it.

Some people do indeed wear blinders as they race through life, being as productive as they can -- not for themselves, but maybe for society. Or for their boss. Or for someone else, whose interests are not necessarily aligned with their own. Maybe that's a good reminder to carefully define productivity for yourself, however you see fit. The idea here is to have a notion of productivity to strive for that is well-aligned with doing things that make you feel good for the time invested. And then we're right back down to those age-old platitudes, so obvious and ubiquitous that we forget their truth: "spend your time wisely."
Well, there isn't an incentive because typically it isn't physicians (or, at best, it is physicians who are primarily administrators and somewhat out of touch with clinical practice) who are making the purchase decisions.

I can tell you that most clinicians would be jumping for joy if software that was more physician- and patient-oriented became the norm.
Nit: that almost certainly wasn't something Meier wrote. It was either Brian Reynolds or somebody on the writing staff (likely Michael Ely, who wrote a lot of the fluff). Meier's involvement with Civ and Civ-alikes steadily decreased after Civ I.
> This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it.

In Notes from Underground the hero attains his own measure of happiness through spite, i.e. self harm, i.e. misery. Any measure of human happiness is contradictory, or it wouldn't be human. Try to imagine the most perfect utopia you can, where any measure you come up with is maximized, or optimized (to use the SV parlance). Then think if people would really be happy in such a place. Even if your measure includes just the "right amount" of misery, it would still be wrong, because, by virtue of its reality, it will no longer be optimal.

If I were pressed to come up with one ultimate measure for human happiness, it is this: people are happy when they have what they don't have. Now optimize this. Of course, under this measure, people's happiness is constant at zero, but there are other (smaller) terms in this formula that basically amount to compromise :)

I am sure you can appreciate the constant inner conflict of the human condition. Apparently you can't measure soul.
I'm a nurse/programmer and working with EMRs are maddening. The problem is the requirement that EMRs are built to protect against every potential thing that could go wrong. As a nurse, I'm spending a minimum of an hour a day clicking boxes and copy & pasting CYA lingo for all of my patients to protect against the 1% scenario.
Worth mentioning that Saucelabs takes security very seriously. If anything in this email is true (I can't speak to it at all), then I wouldn't use BrowserStack for testing anything connected to my systems. Sauce, on the otherhand, destroys every VM after each use, guaranteeing that you get a known good (and uncompromised) state for each usage. And unlimited manual testing is $10 a month, which is a great price.

(Disclaimer: Former Saucelabs employee. Currently doing other things unrelated and don't keep in touch, but I definitely know the Sauce claims in http://sauceio.com/index.php/2011/09/security-through-purity... are true.)
Does that require some barrier? I don't think that's at all obvious.

Previous models for funding content are built around natural distribution barriers. E.g., it was hard making and getting books to people, so you used the distribution channel as the revenue channel. So I think most of our experience is like that.

But we now live in an age where distribution is effectively free. I just bought a book (yay, Ancillary Sword is out!). I paid for most of the distribution (I bought the tablet and pay for an Internet connection); the publisher, distributor, and retail channel together have a marginal cost measured in fractions of a cent. That changes things.

I think our closest historical example is broadcast radio and TV, which has never had a barrier to distribution. One way to fund that is ads, but there are others. For example, US public radio and the BBC produce a lot of high-quality, professionally-produced media and have for decades. Or we could look at newspaper serials, the format that gave us The Three Musketeers: newspapers print so many copies that sharing is easy; people paid because it was cheap and convenient.

But the interesting stuff is just getting started. Plenty of professional writers give a lot of stuff away for free on the web. I've helped fund a few different Kickstarter films, and would have been perfectly happy to throw in more if they had wanted to make the films available freely. Micropatronage is just getting going.
The whole culture behind this is also an interesting phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Shanzhai_culture
I have received the same email notification, and submitted a story to Slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/submission/3969603/browserstack-compromi...

Up-vote it (+) if you have received the email and you ARE a BrowserStack customer.
The testing was done on mice and the number measurements are limited.

It is probably safe to say, this research has a long way to go before it is safe to claim we can return an adult human brain to the "child-like" state.
It depends on the problem domain you are working in. I can't think of an application I've done where this wouldn't have required complex serialization and parsing. Those tools are already built for me in the form of ORMs and RDMSes. Why should I write my own?
How dogs could hold the key to anti-ageing
Maybe you can replace a document database with the file system (though reinventing indexes for reasonable performance--which in so many use cases becomes remarkably important past a few hundreds of thousands of records--will be fun for you), but modeling relational concepts on the file system is both hard and time-consuming. And I'm comfortable saying that most nontrivial business applications are fundamentally relational.
Ha! I haven't touched my .emacs since '98 when I left Cal and just keep trucking along w/ viper-mode.

You kids and your fancy new stuff. :)

I'll check it out.
Calling out bad actors is now doxing? That's an impressive broadening of the definition. Are you just trying to tar behavior you don't like for some reason, or do you seriously think calling out bad actors is somehow equivalent to, eg, gamergate assholes posting Felicia Day's home address? Andrew Roman's address or ssn has not been posted; the only thing going on is the linking of his name with his actions.
I'm going to buy a Tempur Pedic now ;)
Hopefully better formatting:

proto A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { @[𝑚][𝑛] //= {} }

multi A(0, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 1 }
multi A(1, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 2 }
multi A(2, Int \𝑛) { 3 + 2 𝑛 }
multi A(3, Int \𝑛) { 5 + 8 * (2 𝑛 - 1) }

multi A(Int \𝑚, 0) { A(𝑚 - 1, 1) }
multi A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { A(𝑚 - 1, A(𝑚, 𝑛 - 1)) }
Oh I know their roles - there's the guy who owns all the images, the guy who handles file-system permissions, the guy who handles firewalls and virus scanners, etc. They have roles and specializations and whatnot, what they lack is a nice verb-oriented job title. Managers manage, developers develop, testers test, analysts analyze... they support and maintain and operate, but we don't call them a nice verby name like "operators", we just associate them with the noun Information Technology and so they get the abbreviation and suffix "I.T. Guys".
In india when you borrow for business ,it's usually personal friends, family and distant cousins.

I never borrowed but from my family , but since my business partner borrowed hell lot from friends, cousins, to keep it going , we were essentially paying 24%-36% interest on the debt, almost all the profit was going to just pay interest.

And since we were
Not making operational profit , we did turn over of 5million usd , paid interest of 2 million and operationally we were in a debt trap. It was classic case of denial of risk and peril.
just thought that I will come up with blockbuster product and wipe it all,it never happened in 7 years the problems multiplied. Debtors were hounding on the door for their principal, even though we paid them huge interest,it's like bank run, once they sense things are wrong , everybody wants their money back on that day. Got into new personal guarantee agreements ,made huge sacrifices and finally here I am.
Mr. Doctorow is why I stopped reading BoingBoing. If you are familiar with his work this is not a-typical.
coming soon! (i also write my own databases, because it's fun)
The pace of innovation in JS is inspiring. But as someone trying to get back into front-end development after years of doing native apps it's also a little bit discouraging that there's so little consensus on how web apps should be built. It seems like today's hot new technique is tomorrow's discarded anachronism. How do people actually get anything done when it's so hard to build a stable foundation for anything?
I have a strong conviction that out of all the professional postgraduate degrees out there, a MBA is the most "rational" for people to obtain for financial and professional progress purposes. Thus the cohort it attracts are hyperrational people (which is partly why I think "most" -- not all -- MBA graduates are ill-suited for starting companies, since a startup is a highly irrational affair from a financial perspective), and thus their decision making will be rational. It just makes sense to pursue a career in finance. After all, it is by far the most lucrative path on average.

Also, I can't shake the suspicion that the output results from the program are affected significantly by the inputs (the students accepted by admissions), and the effect of the relative cyclical attractiveness of the industries must thus be attenuated significantly.
crappy article. Nothing useful. Just all about buzz words.
Everybody knows paxos and raft. Everybody knows partitioning and CAP and merkel tree. This article is all about bullshit and nothing substantial.
The biggest reason for using "new" in my practice is to keep the value of the "this" keyword on the instance within the function scope. Ihave to agree with the other commenters here. We all know JavaScript isn't OO. I just wish OO programers would stop trying to force their concepts and patterns on it. It makes maintenance a nightmare for those who didn't write it and didn't code Java/C#/Lisp or whatever OO language their concept originated in before picking up JavaScript.
new items are signed with the operator's key, and uploaded to Freenet, along with a list of all items on the market in question, also signed by the operator (with an increasing nonce).

It really confuses me why people insist on thinking about electronic systems of exchange in broken physical world terms: market/store, buyer, seller. See https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar/issues/961
Enterprise applications typically need a data store that offers multiple connections, transactions and atomicity.

Even for very simple apps though I like using a DB to store data, and then text files for import/export to other programs if necessary. Once you have a DB you get so much useful functionality without having to code.
Poll: Pro bono coding for a social cause?
Would you contribute coding time to support a social cause (i.e., non-profit) that you believe in?
Yes - 1 to 2 hours per week
Yes - 3 to 4 hours per week
Yes - 5 or more hours per week
Yes - On an ad hoc basis (several hours a month)
It's just a generic basic white girl voice. It's not specific to any one individual.
cuz everythang with a TLD is a website! and it's long!
This is one of the best books I have ever read - I highly recommend it. It inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi, and many many others.

There were many quotes in this book that have had a deep impact on me. One I thought was interesting is this:

> Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

It struck me that even if Marcus Aurelius had actually lived a thousand years, he would have died a thousand years ago.
I just got an email that my account was automatically renewed, so I hope not!
exactly. Even if we believe that "guys" is gender-neutral, "guy" singular obviously isn't.
medium is confusing, it was actually written by Quinn Norton.
also female, so your point still stands
When is anyone 100% sure of anything?

throwaway77077's post seemed appropriately self-doubtful to me. I'm not walking away from this feeling certain that I should never work with Andrew or Rubicon. But I do value throwaway77077's work in looking into who it might be, and honest representation that it is a guess, backed up by these specific pieces of evidence.

It's exactly what I'd hope for in this case. (Besides Suster just coming out with it, but who likes to look like an a-hole?)

Remember, Andrew can (and hopefully will) come here to defend himself - if he's a VC in SV, he really should have at least one friend who frequents this site and cares enough about him to forward the debate.
You'd be stupid to try and find out.
Y'all.
Regarding some of the actual claims, I had an issue a year back when I logged into a session, and could perfectly see another user's session in progress, internal url in the browser, mouse moving around.

I freaked out, watched for 3-4 seconds, and then got kicked out of the session.

I opened a ticket with support, and they got back to me saying they had "fixed the root cause".

I still use browserstack, but I'm really careful with passing along private credentials.
It seems I had the definition of doxing slightly wrong - I've updated the comment.

[tangent: You've made a lot of invalid assumptions about my motives. I find it's often better to try to get on the same page as someone else before attacking them.]
I think the parent responder's point was that you're using a throwaway account because you're making a claim of which you're so uncertain, that you're not willing to risk staking your own reputation on its accuracy. Ironically the claim you're making affects the reputation of the person you're identifying at least 100 times more than your own, whether it turns out to be right or wrong!

In short, whether or not you're right, you're a) being reckless and potentially libelous given that you don't actually know any details about the issue in question other than what was stated in the blog post, b) completely aware of what such statements can do to someone's reputation, and c) simultaneously more concerned about how your actions affect yourself than how they may affect others.

Now, I'm not saying that I disagree with your sentiment. If someone is a bad actor, then I'd prefer to figure out how to help others avoid getting taken by them. But how many witch hunts do we have to see happen only to find out there's another side to the story, before we stop encouraging witch hunts?
"I really question your experience with databases. "

I have used SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, MS Access(!), Sybase and ... CouchDB! I have optimized queries in SQL Server and Oracle. Most of them commercially (not CouchDB).

"Because blindly grouping all SQL databases together is a sure fire way to get yourself into a world of trouble. They don't store data the same way. They all have subtle differences in their support for the standards. They all have proprietary features. And their operational characteristics couldn't be more wildly different."

Spot on. Not sure how it relates to my post.
There are a bunch of people that are going to hear about this, get excited, and then test it on themselves. Well, there would be a lot more if it was a simple chemical and not a protein, but still, it's the kind of thing that grad students might share with their friends.

And it can and will be a crazy thing to do when they take it. But the point I'd like to make is that whatever they experience won't be added back to the sum of human knowledge, because their self-administration will be illegal or un-condoned.

I wish there was a way for informed volunteers to consent to legitimate studies about this, because it's like an untapped resource to waste the courage of the nootropic fanatics who are going to do experiments on themselves.
I also encourage people to use evil-leader with evil mode and check out other evil plugins, like the * to select all instances of the word under a cursor. Evil is very good, in some ways even better than vim, for example the live updating search and replace is pretty awesome.