skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think the USAF will look down on Textron's "world’s most affordable tactical jet aircraft."[1] and the concept of private companies building tactical aircraft prior to orders

You mean like they did with the F-20 Tigershark? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-20_Tigershark
Nobel Prize medal fetches record-breaking $4.76M
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706700 .
Thirded.

Ever since Google Reader shut down, I've stopped using RSS. I much prefer to get newsletters in my inbox now.
December Week 1
I think fixing the calloc example and explaining it would be a perfect opportunity to educate people about the dangers of integer overflows.
Why were mid-century futurist predictions – like flying cars – so wrong?
Sure, it was sent from a stolen laptop in a Starbucks via a rooted AWS box and a spam botnet.
Servant.io brings cloud management and web farm support to Windows web servers
This thread discusses some issues:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=533255

Among them are size (it's wingspan exceeds the F-14) and the structure of the airframe (which wasn't designed for catapults/arrestors).

The other question is how the operational success of the thing doesn't stand up to the political process than creates mudballs.
Best overview of all crowdfunding platforms
Who cares about the "technical merit" (which is a completely arbitrary measure) of a language? There IS no "objectively better" language. Not everything is on a scale ranging from 0 to LISP.There are different tools for different jobs, each has performance characteristics along different dimensions.

There is only one question that matters to developers: Is this productive?

By that measure, the language itself is a small part of the equation which includes tooling, libraries, community, documentation, etc etc etc. This is completely normal and not depressing. It's sane.
Exactly this.

It's one thing to knowingly keep use simpler data formats or approaches (callback based concurrency model) to build systems that are small, _and will remain small_.

That's defensible.

But what I see is a bunch of new programmers not bothering to learn established systems, systems that have tackled a much larger problem domain, and deriding them as legacy garbage.

XSLT has its cruft, but lets see the JSON YAML fanbois tackle the same problem domain with their toy formats, then we can compare like with like.
I'm not sure their sources were that much better than what I had with langpop.com although they certainly go more in depth.
Outstanding comment. I'm working at a distributed queue and those are exactly the set of questions I ask myself when building different parts of the system, but your exposition is something I'm going to cut&paste and read every time I'm going to work to my project. Btw, we both work at Pivotal :-) Just a question: "Is queueing partially/totally consistent across a group of servers or divided up for maximal throughput". I'm not sure I understand this fully, could you please extend that a bit with some more context? Thanks.
Author here. A bit of a pleasant surprise to wake up and see this on HN.

Thanks for the detailed response. Here's some answers hopefully can help clarify things a bit.

* Are messages delivered once and only once?

A: MQTT allows QoS 0 (at most once), 1 (at least once), and 2 (exactly once.) The performance numbers in the blog are for QoS 0.

However, SurgeMQ implements all three and there's unit tests for all three. I just haven't done the performance tests for QoS 1 and 2.

* Are messages are messages delivered at least once?

SurgeMQ supports it though the numbers posted are for QoS 0 (at most once)

* Can messages be dropped entirely under pressure? (aka best effort)

No. Currently no messages are dropped.

* If they drop under pressure, how is pressure measured? Is there a back-pressure mechanism?

See above.

* Can consumers and producers look into the queue, or is it totally opaque?

Not sure what this means..sorry..

* Is queueing unordered, FIFO or prioritised?

Ordered, FIFO...MQTT spec requires that messages from publishers to delivered in the same order to the subscribers.

* Is there a broker or no broker?

Brokered

* Does the broker own independent, named queues (topics, routes etc) or do producers and consumers need to coordinate their connections?

Brokers uses topics to route. Publisher publishes to a topic, subscribers subscribe to multiple topics w/ optional wild cards.

* Is queueing durable or ephemeral?

Ephemeral currently. Though MQTT spec requires that any unack'ed QoS 1 and 2 messages be redelivered when the server restarts or client reconnects. So once SurgeMQ meets that spec, it could be considered somewhat durable.

* Is durability achieved by writing every message to disk first, or by replicating messages across servers?

N/A

* Is queueing partially/totally consistent across a group of servers or divided up for maximal throughput?

Currently SurgeMQ is a single server w/ no clustering ability. However, MQTT spec does mention the bridge capability that is a poor man's cluster. Not yet implemented.

* Is message posting transactional?

QoS 1 and 2 starts to be more transactional. QoS 0 is strictly fire and forget.

* Is message receiving transactional?

See above.

* Do consumers block on receive or can they check for new messages?

Block on receive.

* Do producers block on send or can they check for queue fullness?

Block on send.
Show HN: NLP-driven news alerts [Android app]
Really nice product! Been beta tester on it for a while now and i must say I've become a bit dependent on it.
Then again, the US chooses to go to war a lot, so that doesn't negate the value of this aircraft.
Search Gives Us Superpowers
Chaos Computer Club on the blocking of our website in UK
I find the "Stories" section at the bottom to be particularly distasteful.

As far as I can tell, they've just taken stock photographs, labeled them with plausible names, and made them seem like testimonials without actually being real testimonials.

I don't expect marketing efforts to always be completely honest, but these "stories" seem like a really condescending sham to me.

I wouldn't mind it if they discussed how this technology could benefit certain business roles, but to attach fake (as far as I can tell; please let me know if I'm wrong!) personae to these stories comes off as deceitful to me.

Marketers, please, stick with actual testimonials very verifiable people, or don't even bother!
A plane that can fly at a slower speed means you need a shorter distance to take off (all other things being equal).

I think the biggest problem is their huge wingspan. They don't have folding wings, so there is no storage space.
Define Value:

Person A wants long term growth of the share price so they can sell down in many years to fund their retirement.

Person B wants rapid growth in the share price (even if it eventually kills the company) so they can sell it soon.

Person C isn't much concerned by share price growth, as long as the dividends keep coming each year.

Person D invested because they want to support environmentally-friendly companies.

Person E isn't concerned about tree-huggers, but a lot of people in his town are employed by the company so he wants to support them.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Which of these Shareholders' Value will you maximize?
Excellent question regarding latency.

Tyler Treat who wrote an excellent blog post on MQ performance tested this and got mean latency for 1000000 messages of 98.751015 ms.

https://github.com/tylertreat/mq-benchmarking/pull/5
In other words, the state surveillance in the US is only going to be effective at tracking and suppressing dissent, not at fighting actual crime.
I post questions, born of ignorance, that I wish to be corrected or informed about. Most of what I know, I've learned by this method.

If I come across as supporting the detox industry, I apologize, as I didn't mean to. I don't. The article merely brought up other thoughts that I hoped to learn more about.
The commute that divides us
I have been using IBM Watson, and it is also sensitive to clean input data.

I think that both IBM and Microsoft are doing a good job at "reinventing themselves", BTW.

edit: by 'clean' I really meant data that is in a regular structure with good example questions specified for each paragraph in input documents.
That will not happen because current nuclear power just isn't economical without government guarrantees.
The JSON spec has no opinion on that and that's a good thing. It is up to you, your language and your parser to decide how large the largest JSON number should be.

Would it be simpler to enforce a global 32 bit or 64 bit limit on those numbers in the spec? I don't think so. Why should the limitations of embedded microcontrollers exchanging data apply to those of astronomical systems and vice versa?
"the common media use is more ancient than ours"

^ That is by no means a settled debate. Even in the comments section of the link you produce as evidence ( http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/ ) there is plenty of debate on the conclusions.

You should have just ended after suggesting that hte debate is pretty much unresolvable. :-D

And just to be up front about the whole thing -- I prefer the non-malicious use of the term. Hollywood has a pernicious tendency to stereotype anything and everything, and the fact that that culture is mostly responsible for promoting the malicious use of the term means that in my book they shouldn't get to determine its meaning.

Again, unresolvable. :D
How'd you centralize your decentralized system? It sounds like something that shouldn't be possible unless it's actually centralized to begin with.

I'm a layperson when it comes to crypto currencies, but my impression is that most people would consider the fact that you can centralize a bug (separate to the hiccup you had in the article).
These numbers are great, but they are also highly dependant on hardware architecture and a strong coupling with network architecture. Another big contributor to messaging is in the message size. One can claim 10M messages/sec but for 1 byte messages, 10m messages/s is hardly impressive.

I can say that on today's hardware, achieving 3-7M msgs/sec in a single-stream, guaranteed, in-order messaging is possible. This us also with 120 byte messages, which amounts to about 3-7Gbps if sustained messaging in clusters of 2 to 200+ machines. What do you need to achieve this?

* Kernel bypass network architecture e.g. Solarflare 10/40gbe

* 10gbe switches

* decoupling of transport layer into a dedicated processor cores

* busy-polling processes

* business logic placed on dedicated cores.

* use of shared memory and/or memory mapping to transport messaging between processes.

It all sounds fairly convoluted to throw up processes and burn a core on rx/tx, but if you need to process millions of messages a second at fairly low latency, this is about the limit of where it goes. Using traditional application and socket tied to a single process will get you to around 1 million messages/sec with some very large buffers and efficient business logic, but thst eill be about it. The next step would be to start sharding streams, but that comes with its own complexities.
Total consistency requires global consensus and that puts a definitive break on performance.
Author here. The message size tested is 1024 bytes.
>When the CEO makes decisions with an eye on the very short-term (to hit share price or EPS targets) he or she potentially destroys capital.

The crucial difference is that, according to the article at least, the short-termism leads to them not taking +NPV projects, instead returning money to shareholders. This money can be redeployed productively, so even if it's not earning the NPV of that theoretical project, it's earning something very close to it. The opportunity cost is very small.

Stakeholders undertaking -NPV projects is a whole other ballpark. Just consider the growth implications when this happens economy-wide.
MLH Local Hackday (worldwide hackday)
This is, what, the 11th time this sale has come up in the last week? There were 51 comments in yesterday's posting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703155 , for example.
No. Oddly similar title, but different article.
Thank you for covering this, numbers are great but it's the details that matter (and end up biting you in the ass). I have nearly a decade running and working with high-volume transactional message systems and it came up fairly regularly that Product A (WMQ-LL, 0MQ, Tibco FTL, 29West, or Solace) was faster than Product B (WMQ, AMQP- Rabbit, Active, Swift- or Tibco) ignoring recovery, transactionality, durability, reliability, ordering, and delivery (a favorite head scratcher is when you expect FIFO and get unordered). Matching the requirements to the system and setting expectations, especially expectations around how and when it goes wrong, is so much more important the benchmarks.
谢谢.

Have you ever read this? http://zedshaw.com/archive/programmers-need-to-learn-statist...
Wobblies Past and Present
Another aspect that is often overlooked is Microsoft's decision to closely couple IE with Windows. On Windows, the installed IE version was used within third-party applications as part of the standard application SDKs provided by Microsoft. For example, any QuickBooks user can tell you stories about IE security settings affecting their accounting software in a negative fashion. This made it difficult for Microsoft to iterate IE, because so many applications relied on proprietary aspects of IE's rendering engine.
And YAML is a better JSON with comments and no need to balance braces.
Avoiding road/sidewalk can make a huge difference for beginners.
Yep, but are we talking about consistency in the order of messages? That was not clear to me.
Bitcoin does not require "identity management". That is why it works. Ripple/Stellar requires explicit trust - money gets created through obligations. That is also how the fiat money system works. In Bitcoin there is no central authority making press releases.
TED Talk: The Internet Is on Fire (Mikko Hypponen)
Ask HN: How to get started writing as a programmer?
Hi, I'm a programmer. Like most of us are.

There are a number of people, programmers, if not very good programmers, but yeah, programmers who are great writers, like for example Pual Graham, Aaron Swartz, Quinn Norton and others in the line.

But my simple question is, how and where do I get started writing ? I mean, how do I "get" to my audience ? And how do I tell people I write ?
...
Manpads are a threat to all aircraft. Any good CAS means going low enough and slow enough to see what's going on. This makes any CAS vulnerable to a variety of ground attacks. The AF solution is to fly higher and faster: great for them less good for the ground troops. A better solution will probably be drones. But, again, the AF is cool on drones when everyone else loves them (including CIA). The major problem is the AF won't let the army provide it's own ficed-wing CAS, but doesn't have enthusiasm for the job.
I have not. But I am going to assume you are telling me to learn more about how to calculate my performance numbers. :) Fair point and I will bookmark for future reading.
Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman (1997) [pdf]
Long vesting schedule isn't a viable solution for many companies. I think 3 year is reasonable.

But this is what I would do if I were in charge.

- Eliminate options grant because if share price declines, execs are not exposed to downside. Yet when share price goes up, it can be a complete boon.

- Cap ratio of base salary to incentives so that bonus is no more than 100% of your base. When much of your total compensation derives from your bonus, you are not incentivized to make 'right' decisions.

- If you want to participate in equity sharing, execs need to make conscious decision to spend part of their after-tax paycheck. This is having true skin in the game.
Are you cpu bound or (net) io bound?
I don't think I agree.

If a company's "owner" is mainly short-term money, then any publicly traded company is vulnerable to takeovers that destroy long-term value in favor of extracting cash in the short term.

For example, imagine a scotch distillery. For the last couple hundred years they've been reliably producing scotch, with their most common version aged 12 years. They've got solid people, many of whom spend their whole careers there. They have a very well-regarded brand; sales and profits are solid and consistent.

A corporate raider buys them. They immediately stop putting new whiskey in barrels, fire anybody who has been there more than a few years, and start selling off property and distilling gear. This frees up a lot of cash, making quarterly results look great. They then increase sales volume 3x by buying inferior whiskeys and selling it under their brand while increasing marketing. Quarterly numbers look even better. The raiders load the company up with debt, extracting cash, then take the company public. There is some grumbling from whiskey aficionados that it's "not the same", but the public, looking at the strong numbers and the beloved brand name, eagerly buys the stock.

A few years later, as the aging whiskey runs out and the lowered quality harms the brand, sales fall. Interest rates go up, making the debt hard to manage. The house of cards comes tumbling down and the company declares bankruptcy. People mourn the loss of a once-great distillery, many good people are out of jobs, and a lot of stockholders take a loss on their tax forms. The raider uses its now-larger cache hoard to repeat the process elsewhere.

An outcome like that is within the current rules of business, and is depressingly common. But it's not why we as a society provide for and support the whole notion of companies. Sure, sometimes takeover defenses are management getting comfortable. But "management operates the company for the benefit of the owners" is an ideological statement, not a descriptive one.
Could an A-10 survive a direct hit from a MANPADS or two?
FORTIS Exoskeleton
Give those shares votes, and let shareholder interests define value for you.
I'm also curious.

I wrote a Markov text generator in Lisp a few months ago (https://github.com/jl2/markov), and had fun generating text using some old sci-fi books from Project Gutenberg and some documentation we use at work (Fiber Channel and ISCSI specs), but the sentences mine generated weren't as coherent as these.

I'm curious if this is generating thousands of sentences and only posting the best, if it used the basic algorithm and a ton of sample text, or if it's using a more advanced algorithm.

I was planning on making mine use parts of speech to help avoid some of the nonsense sentences, but never got around to it. And it would be harder to find source text to feed into it.
Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees

I think the title of the article needs to be less generic, as my first thought was "yes, and Sony's employees probably get a lot of other emails from non-hackers too..." A bit clickbaity.

And of all the things to leak I think these hackers chose the most mundane and boring info - perhaps this was deliberate? Supposing they had the access, I'd think all the proprietary format specifications, datasheets, and other IP would be far more interesting things to leak... to me it seems these hackers' only purpose was to intimidate, and not to "free information" per se.
There are (roughly) 192 countries in the world.

It's a bit of an effort, but you could find an interesting fact[1] about each one, overlay on a creative commons photos from that country (or the national flag; or a map), and share the rest of the world with daily commuters. You'll even have a few days left at the end - maybe add a similar concept for each Japanese Prefecture.

[1] Or some statistics. Or even some simple phrases ("Good morning"; "have a nice day") in the local language.
Not a challenge I expect to ever really face, but if I were in a position to face it, I'm guessing my answer is:

The person with the most shares.

I suspect that that's about the only way I ever even get a chance to accept this challenge.
Alternative link in case of censorship:

https://213.73.89.123/en/updates/2014/ccc-censored-in-uk
That means that 50% of ads weren't a waste of money, which is a very good return rate for ad spend.
Google App Engine Java security sandbox bypasses
Interestingly www.ccc.de is completely blocked in Egypt.
Wow. Quite informative. I urge anyone interested in the politics of Wikipedia to read it.

I didn't know about "affiliate entities". But most surprising was the breakdown of employees. I certainly wouldn't have expected this:

the Foundation’s paid staff and contractors
page lists 215 people ... They comprise
2 people in the Office of the Executive
Director Lila Tretikov,
18 in Grantmaking,
17 in Fundraising,
14 in Legal and Community Advocacy,
4 in Communications,
17 in Finance and Administration,
and 11 in Human Resources.
The remaining 132 ... work in ...
Engineering and Product Development

They have 11 HR people out of 215 paid employees???

Finally, to keep it all in perspective, remember what Michael Scott said:

"Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in
the world can write anything they want about
any subject, so you know you are getting the
best possible information." - Michael Scott
I think any serious projects should have a CLA, or require sign off like the Linux project does, and suggesting a change is the only way to get around having to deal with that.

For known contributors, yeah, it's a nice feature.
When I ran this I gave the server and client 2 cores each. Neither were maxing out the cores.

At about 856K MPS (sent + received) @ 1024 bytes/msg, that's less than 1 GBps. So I can't imagine it being io(net) bound either.

So inconclusive...unfortunately. Need to profile a bit more to know.

Edit: Tho this is TCP based so it's possible that it's netio bound given the protocol overhead. At this message rate, each packet is almost guaranteed to be full size. So we are doing about 600K pps, approximately.
The link was mostly for the 95% stat for the Sacramento Valley. A lot of people who trot out the rice talking point seem to think rice is mostly being grown in a "desert", when it's really not.
I took a look at the B-52's Wikipedia article. Apparently, it's expected to serve until the 2040s. If the last B-52 is active until 2045, B-52s will have been around for 90 (!) years. Isn't that utterly ridiculous? Imagine if any militaries were still using bombers from 1924 in 2014.
I think you're missing the mark with F-20 Tigershark. The development was started under one political mindset and that mindset was blown away by Reagan. It doesn't make sense to develop an export aircraft when there are existing aircraft with superior capabilities suddenly available for export.

There is a point to be made: aircraft are chosen for political reasons, not for their suitably to the mission. The A-10 is an example of an exceptionally suitable aircraft as is the B-52. This is not a reflection of good decision making, but just the outcome of random selection. If you build enough boondoogles (i.e. JSF) you eventually accidentally build a useful aircraft. These aircraft prove their utility and are kept around whereas the glass elephants are quietly retired.

For example, consider the B-58. By all measures it was an amazing aircraft that met all of its goals. But by the time it was complete, it was built for a mission that no longer existed. The aircraft literally had no role by the time it became operational.
F, neither.

You give B a swift kick out the door, because there is where all the trouble comes from.

Once there, balancing up the interests of A, C, D and E become easier as long as nobody within A, C or E take extravagant living for granted.
Alan Turing ran to stay calm. He said: "I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard."