skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables)

Not as well as you'd think. We see substantial packet loss to Iceland for long periods at least once a week, and very occasionally the entire country disappears from the internet (maybe every couple of months).

Also so far we haven't found a datacentre that we feel we can trust to care about reliability as much as we do. I've just spent the last four hours dealing with our entire Iceland presence being taken off the internet because someone at the datacentre misinterpreted our normal replication load as a denial of service and blocked the entire thing.

We're trying, but so far we do not have the confidence that we could reliably provide user-facing services from Iceland, or at least not to the standard that we do from New York.
Its the enormity of the abstractions that have to be embraced, in my opinion, which lead to distraction. There is much between a file and its handle.

And thus: Far, far more words - real, English and/or Development-oriented words, symbols - exist in all the infinite abstractions of a typical Desktop machine; whereas the 8-bit worlds' abstract taxonomy is very sparse.

There isn't really any good reason to throw away the 8-bit machines. They still work. And they still teach kids how computers work, even still today. I hope we see a return to this technology in a fashion that really compels people - young and old - to apply the ethos of those days, again. Distraction-free computing is one legacy of the earlier era.
NASA's Swift Mission Probes an Exotic Object: ‘Kicked’ Black Hole or Mega Star?
Was this black hole booted out of its galaxy?
Algorithms in python [pdf]
More accurately - "A few things I've found useful when traveling." They're not essential, but I freely admit that experience tells me they are useful.

But the title as it stands is classic click-bait hyperbole.
When Heineken Bottles Were Square
Code comment about git:

stupid. contemptible and despicable.

That sums it up quite well. Every day I pay thanks to The One Who Programmed Me that my workflow doesn't put me in need of that shitload of crap that is git. I pity those who do need git.
Yeah, it's going to be an uphill struggle on any distro that it isn't already well integrated into - there's a lot of effort that goes into making SELinux in fedora/RHEL/etc JustWork(tm). Duplicating this on a distro without tight SELinux integration is going to be hard - but I tend to feel that if you use arch, linux from scratch or other similar distro, it's not really fair to blame SELinux ;)
I decided to see if there was any merit to your snarky comment:

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd systemd-git
$ cd systemd-git
$ grep -r "assert(" | wc -l
7771

That looks pretty bad at first. But I noticed this in src/shared/macro.h:

/* We override the glibc assert() here. */
#undef assert
#ifdef NDEBUG
#define assert(expr) do {} while(false)
#else
#define assert(expr) assert_se(expr)
#endif

I didn't verify that macro.h was included by every file that used assert(). But I'm assuming it does. So it looks like assert() at least doesn't call abort() in their world. In fact, it's a nop in non-debug builds. And even in debug builds, the assert_se() macro logs a message and continues.

I didn't check for any external libraries systemd might use.
So if starfish eat pretty much anything that filters water (muscles), what effect would the Fukushima Accident (March 11th, 2011) have on their radiation levels? Could such an event have triggered a mutation in the virus or could the starfish be hypersensitive to slightly higher background radiation?
Meet the 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time
I'm not so sure lack of distractions makes that much difference. I think on my C64 it was frequently the case that we'd switch games every few minutes. We were easily distracted with or without something specific to trigger it.

But these computers were simple enough to "mess with" and get a mental model of the whole. By the time I was 7-8, I started "experimenting" with pulling chips out of sockets (to my parents horror) and seeing what happened if I put them in different places (...). If you even could have done that on modern machines with almost everything surface mounted, you'd fry stuff. With those old machines that was usually fairly hard. Amazingly, I never burned out any chips that way. The simplicity encouraged meddling with things in a way that is harder to see younger kids do with most modern computers:

PCs are outright dangerous to let a young child dismantle on their own - whether or not you disconnect power (I'm afraid my C64's were more than once opened up while connected..); machines like the Raspberry Pi are simple and safe enough, but there's nothing to do inside them. Likewise for tablets and smart phones: If you manage to disconnect the display without breaking anything, you're pretty much at the limits.

If you try to break into the black box as a child, you're faced with an image of something that is way beyond your comprehension.

The C64 and similar home computers, on the other hand, had clearly labelled diagrams in their manuals that even a child could understand. You'd open it up, and you'd see what the different things were, and you could tinker (at least if you didn't tell your parents) and see the effects.

It seems like it is harder to become "independent": Children learn a few "magic incantations" to get to the familiar things, and the knowledge required to bridge the gaps where exploration yields results that encourage further exploration seems higher. Or maybe that's what it looked like to our parents too.

A few years older, I soldered wires straight onto the pins of the CPU of my Amiga. You could make a "pause" switch and reset button easily that way - you could solder it onto the bus exposed on the left hand side of the A500's too, but I had a hard drive attached there.

Speaking of hard drives, considering the article mentions demonstrating floppy drives with the cover off, of course I did that with my 1541 drive for the C64 (and test what happened when moving the IO chips between the 1541 and the C64 - they're "almost" the same model; enough so that the C64 at least will run; same for the one from the Amiga - their differences are small enough to be inconsequential for most programs), but also with my first (20MB) hard drive out of necessity: I bought it used, and within 6 months it started having problems starting up. The solution? Open it up, and give the motor a helping hand spinning up the platter - after that it worked fine. The drive survived another two years I think after that.
> The patch is just rejected

Technically the patch isn't rejected (and I'm kinda peeved TFA claims it is). It's in limbo, waiting for further action from the submitter or an other contributor: it's marked as needing improvements since it hides the issue under the rug instead of reporting it to the caller/user.

This is a rejected patch: https://code.launchpad.net/~jamesodhunt/libnih/bug-776532/+m..., it has a "Status: Rejected" set (and a disapproving review).

Although of course the patch could have been merged and improved later, so that libnih wouldn't blow up the whole system in case of inotify overflow.
What Does a Digital Strategist Do?
Can we stop with the "I this doesn't match my ideology" critiques?
Mozilla's JS tests have for a while been run by everyone else because they have typically tested a lot of de-facto required behaviour that isn't specified anywhere. That said, the problem with both them and mjsunit (V8's JS testsuite) is they freely mix tests for unimportant implementation detail (say, details of enumeration order!) and what is de-facto required. In the end, with Carakan, we decided it wasn't worth the time to get the mjsunit tests running — they found almost nothing that weren't found otherwise — and coming up with proper expectations and keeping them up to date does take time.
24 Pull Requests is starting again soon
How is it Religion to have a theory that you're trying to prove? You seem to lack a basic understanding of the scientific method. Her theory is: "climate change is involved". And she is searching for evidence, that is, she is trying to prove it. She doesn't even claim that climate change is involved, it is clearly marked as her opinion. Just like Einstein had the theory that time had to be relative, and then set out to proof it.

Your reaction seems to be anger-fueled climate change hate that stops you from thinking in a rational, open minded way.

Edit: Gender Error
Kite. Micro-service framework in Go
Why “Let’s Encrypt everything” misses the point
Clear discussion of the basic concepts. Coincidentally, I was reading this two days back and before this link was posted.
Attempts to reason with them or ban internet have just met with stroppiness. Its like they have moved from being creators to being consumers.
Experts estimate that there are approximately millions [0] of AV converters around. At least, in my experience.

[0] not really
IMHO Good Thing is to have set of libraries and not a framework at all. Start with handcrafting all HTML,CSS with interactions you need. You HTML skeleton will depend greatly on what you want to achieve - like when one page changes to other and theres a ajax call between - where you put the wait screen: as separate, on old page, then wait, transit to new at once, then wait and so on. If that is done you know broadly what you need. Example configuration may be React for rendering, cherry picked Model (or State) from Ampersand, Backbone Events Standalone for event bus. Something for History/routes too, can't recommend anything specific because my projects did not had one (yes, you can build web-app without back button support). This way if something better comes up, you can switch, if something is abandoned, gets your way, you can switch. Or you can rewrite it in-house fairly easily. I imagine that when you discover that React is too much, too heavy, too bloaty (for example, i'm not saying, that it is, we are happy React users now), then preserving all API calls and replacing it with few lines of Mustache templates is doable. Not trivial, but doable.
Show HN: Yanado – Task Management Inside Gmail Is Fullscreen Now
W3C at least has this.
It's a pretty fun name. :)

Here's the core code, for the curious: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~scott/libnih/trunk/files/head:/....

I found it interesting that it uses a space after the unary ! operator in C, which (to me), provided yet another way of writing various (very common) tests. For instance "if(! fp)" after trying to open a file.
Back in the old, old days, we all started using 'less' because 'more' did not have the ability to scroll backwards through a file. Nor was it buffering pipe input to enable similar functionality. It seems there has been a bit of feature creep in the ensuing 25 years...
At times I do need an audio/video converter, and it is always a bit of a pain sifting trough all the dubious and low quality freeware programs. Although Handbrake is not really dubious, last time I tried it wasn't very user friendly or easy either. Anyone know why it seems to be hard to make a nice, easy 'convert arbitrary format to something commonplace' program? And since this gets upvoted, is Handbrake considered the current standard?
This article is a great example of the very tangible effects caused by hardware properties that are often disregarded. Very interesting read!

Also, I can't help but note the (probably non-existent) connection to 3-way partitioning for quicksort (which is consistently ~10-15% (iirc) faster than traditional quicksort). It is interesting how we seem to assume that surely factors of two must be the best choice, computers working in binary and all. But sometimes this is true only in theory, but not in practice (binary search), sometimes it's good but not optimal (quicksort), and sometimes it outright is the provably worst choice (dynamic arrays)!
Except CO2 from fossil fuels aren't even the largest contribution to "greenhouse gasses" that can be attributed to humans.

Climate change is inevitable. It's happened before many times in the history of the earth, and will happen again. The behaviour of man and it's resulting emissions are largely agreed to have been impactful on the rate of change.

However, I've seen statisticians and scientists poking rational holes in research (and pilloried for daring to do so by the green lobby). So I default to my standard position, which is that both sides are a bit wrong and the truth is somewhere in the middle. I'll stay here for a while, it's comfortable.
Writing to /etc/init.d requires root access. If you are root, you can bring down the box as it is.
Here to help :-)
> All fast RegExp matchers do JIT compilation. Like PCRE. Native code just can't compete.

I thought that most "native" regex engines basically amounted to small interpreters written in a compiled language. I'd be surprised if the languages that actually compile their regexes to native code are not competitive.
How Does a Debugger Work?
Rules of thumb in modern American political discourse:

1. The reason for the problem is always climate change, otherwise there is no reason. For example, credit bubbles, rising autism rates and people in other countries that don't like us happen spontaneously all by themselves, unless they are caused by climate change.

2. The solution for any problem, including climate change, is always to spend more money. Especially when it comes to education, national defense and health care. Spending more money is the only effective solution to all problems. Once the cost to solve a problem is estimated in a news article the only thing required to fix the problem is for the government to spend the specified amount of money.
Dr. Lesanna Lahner appears to be a "she". :-)

(corrected typo)
Mount Everest: Now with WiFi
The problem here was that the box went down by accident due to this bug.
I think in a lot of cases they actually aren't a good thing at all.

I have used a fair number of websites recently which used front end frameworks badly and ended up causing all sorts of havoc (not being able to save the page, random {{ things like this }} appearing all {{ over }} the place at inconvenient times, pages just not loading, janky controls, etc.)

In short, bugs that don't happen when you have static web pages and forms and a smatter of javascript.

In almost all of these cases I think users would likely not have noticed a substantive difference between an angular-style web app and simple HTML forms.
Try getting them interested in things like the Arduino. Make it father-daughter time or something to teach them the basics there, to get them tinkering, get them poking at code and seeing results. Maybe get a codec chip to work with them on making a music player. Alternatively, maybe try poking them at scratch ( http://scratch.mit.edu/ ) to have them make their own things.

One of the things that I think may be going on here is that exploration now feels daunting. It's hard to get excited about getting things to print "hello world" when in another windows are bright colored animated characters engaging in absurd hijinks. However, being able to create one's own absurd hijinks may just help rekindle that spark.
I meant to mention that in the blog post - great point. I really hope PCL support is added. (You could add your support to this issue: https://github.com/JetBrains/Nitra/issues/7)

Whether it happens or not probably depends on how JetBrains themselves plan to use Nitra; hopefully they intend to use it in their cross-platform products.
Go is actually more aimed at web applications than Rust. Rust is aimed at the things you'd traditionally use C/C++ for (writing operating systems, browser engines, code for your ARM board). Some people are working on libraries that will make creating web applications reasonably nice too, though.
A simple web chat for HN
Somewhat, but not completely unrelated to your story...

> Google recently released a new version of their developer console (https://console.developers.google.com) which is built on Angular.

Which actually works worse than the previous version. The layout is non-responsive and creates massive amounts of scrollbars on "portrait"-monitors, while 90% of the screen is effectively white-space.

Completely wasted. Completely pointless.

So whatever Angular-templates Google is using, they are clearly not (any more?) adhering to responsive design nor using pixel-independent CSS, and in 2014 that's pretty sad.
Firefox won't take me to the actual ticket purchasing page, claiming a certificate problem:

tickets.events.ccc.de uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

That's unfortunate. Doing s/https/http/ doesn't work either. Of course I guess all expected customers know how to add an exception to their browsers, but I couldn't be bothered when just browing out of curiosity. :)
Optiscroll.js – Custom scrollbars for modern webapps
Black Friday amplifies China – US air cargo surge
The Nordic Nine
Yeah - I'm surprised they are still in business, really. But then, I'm equally surprised that godaddy are.
You saw the woman spinning those shoes around.. changing them from one color to an entirely different color!
That kind of information should be published by the CIA, FBI, NSA, ... themselves instead of destroying Democracy with their secret gag orders. “I'm not allowed to say that I'm not allowed to say anything”. Can it still get worse than it already is? Any random terrorist is more honorable than the Feds. At least they're not lying about being terrorists.
Simple and functional. Nice emoticons too.
srclib looks interesting, I'll take a look.

Yeah, I've seen tweets saying they're working on the type system right now, and it will arrive in milestone 2; if it's done right, that's a big area where Nitra can differentiate itself from other parser generators.
Startup visa alternative
> , system languages (Go, Rust),

How is Go not another example of how "programming languages have stagnated"[0] ? You could argue that it is really practical and productive, but that is a separate point to whether it or not it is "more of the same".

Or maybe it is more of the same, just in the vein of languages that most people have forgotten about by now, so it is for all intents and purposes new. Certainly native compilation and some control over memory layout (I guess, with structs and such) and indirection have not been common features in recent memory (that is; those two points and automatic memory management, and overall simplicity compared to C/++).

[0] From the article:

> It included a chart lamenting the stagnation in [...] programming languages
Well there are a lot of companies that currently hire only the best of the best. Try working at companies that have notoriously difficult interviews. I've heard MemSQL, Dropbox, Jane street capital, D.E.Shaw and Palantir are a few of them. These companies tend to hire more competitive programmers (top coder, ICPC etc), who usually have very high IQ. Now, these may not be the best all-round developers but they'll definitely be among the smartest.
*Lesanna
For Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs, Startup Visas Offer a Chance to Finish
Yeah, sorry. I should mention that in the readme. Of course, if Nitra gets cross platform support, that would be even better.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Those "small interpreters written in a compiled language" have no chance against Just-in-Time compiled code.
Catb - cathedral and bazaar :)

Unless I am embarassingly wrong.
You would probably be better served by writing a 2 lines bash script to call sshfs and have it mounted through fuse.
I don't see a point in going through GIO monstrosity for this.
She doesn't posit a plausible mechanism for her theory, does she? It's just the fallback position, "it must be climate change", just a small upgrade from "it must be god". Click on that list I linked above (and they stopped adding to that years ago!).
Because the bug kills pid1 which took down production boxes:

> I should point out that this is not theoretical. I went through all of the above because some real machines hit this for some reason. I don't have access to them, so I had to work backwards from just the message logged by init.

> […]

> Let me say this again: this happens in the wild. The "touch * * *..." repro looks contrived, because, well, that's the whole point of a repro.
An interesting question: What is the best strategy for a group of mediocre chess players against a grandmaster in simul?

Similar moves with small differences to encourage mistakes? Very different to make the mental switching harder? Very esoteric openings to avoid "played this a 1000 times" situations for the grandmaster?
I guess there was a too high expectation of the audience, and it would better to just stick to what there is evidence of already.
You can't generically just "lose" a move; you can do some three-move wiggles but you'd be relying on your opponent cooperating with you.
Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?what had been changed?
I asked the same question 854 days ago .. i still love desktop app's wander if small indies can make a living from it ?
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That's supposed to be like that. If you don't like to see the warning message you'll have to import the http://www.cacert.org/ root certificate.
PolarSSL is now a part of ARM
To me it's not specific enough. In the first part the author claims that

>'Dependency injection lacks some functionality you will need sometime.'

But fails to reveal which functionality he has in mind.

He later claims that 'inheritance is an antipattern' and posts a link to google search results as 'proof'.

Not worth reading, in my opinion.
Werdbook.com – dropbox for information
the site lets you store the information with a werd you associate with it. Once you store (say your hosting info) whenever and whereever you want you can recall it via sending email to werd@werdbook.com. typical use is: send email to werd@werdbook.com with subject line like 'add werd' and body with the information loaded. it adds. to recall email the same address with just the werd at the subjectline.
Very interesting article, if you ignore the unnecessary jabs at Google, youngsters and the uncorroborated praise for GM.

But there is an interesting point to note here : GM is not fundamentally the same as Google or other software companies of today. Companies which make physical goods, make more money through making more and more of the same thing. If they have done it many times, the process is well-understood and can be managed by a specialized person ( who specialises in management ) in a central way and that is probably more efficient.

Software companies make money from making new and different things. To make a new copy of a software once it is written, all it takes is Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, or make a new web request. These type of companies are probably more efficient if you simplify the communication structures enabling more collaboration. The well-understood parts ( such as Amazon warehouses, Apple's supply chain etc ) can still be managed using the old management style. The creative organizations can still use the new management style.

You can see this style variation when the founders are ousted from the company and management is handed off to MBA folks ( Apple with John Sculley etc. ). Maybe by the time the founders from the new age tech companies have to pass the baton, the management schools of thought will catch up to this ( they already seems to be doing so ) and things won't be so bad as the author predicts.