skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What Citigroup has now done with the willing participation of Congress and the President is to set the country up for the next financial collapse in which it appears destined to play another starring role, seeing that the Fed gave it a failing grade on its stress test this year. The legislation that was just passed by Congress allows Citigroup and other Wall Street banks to keep their riskiest assets – interest rate swaps and other derivatives – in the banking unit that is backstopped with FDIC deposit insurance, which is, in turn, backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer, thus ensuring another bailout of Citigroup if it blows itself up once again from soured derivative bets.

This is a good example of how to write something that contains no actual factual errors, but nevertheless is very misleading by the way it chooses to state facts.

It gives the impression that the goal of the legislation, the reason that the majority of Congress supported it as did the President (and the reason the President pushed to get it passed, as mentioned elsewhere in the article) was to free the banks of this restriction.

The actual goal of the legislation was to fund the government, in order to avoid another game of chicken like we had last year that led to a government shutdown. The thing with the banks was just a small add-on to a large bill, and was reluctantly accepted by the President and much of Congress because they felt that another long deadlock and shutdown was worse then accepting a few bad add-ons.

Yes, it is a bad change, but the way Congress is currently functioning due to (1) the difficulty of getting anything bipartisan through the House, and (2) the splits within the Republican Party between the mainstream and the Tea Party, getting a budget through with only a few pieces of shit attached is a major accomplishment.
> Can anyone track and connect the dots from fed bond buying to increase in Facebook share price?

Sure. Government bonds are defined as risk-free, for better or worse. Regulatory and capital requirements ensure healthy demand for risk-free securities, aside from any "natural" demand for government bonds.

The Fed has pushed down the yields on USG bonds to miniscule levels. Firms which used to rely on a healthy yield for such bonds now have to find that yield elsewhere. The entire point, depending on who you ask, of the Fed's activities is to push investors into riskier securities.

Institutional investors forced into searching for yield bid up Facebooks and Amazons. Simultaneously, you have the more adventurous being pushed into various forms of VC investing. Some investors are desperate for yield, like underwater pension funds, and they won't get it from USG bonds. Think about the recent news regarding pension funds getting into bed with hedge funds. Other investors are sitting on huge cash balances and simply want to put them to work. There is a lot more money sloshing around the system compared to 7 years ago, some of it merely implied by gigantic reserve balances with the Fed, and is there really any question that the run-up in asset prices over the last 5 years is an effect?
I'd argue quality devs are mostly born and self-made and then slowly polished over a long period of time -- not the kinds of folks who are cranked out of a vocational school. It's an intellectual craft. It's not manning a fry bin.
Protected by the First Amendment - http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
I think most of these dates before Mayer took over however.
> Stop trying to do intrusive things like prefilling forms, as it doesn't benefit the user in any real way.

Speak for yourself -- I find prefilled forms to be a time-saver.

However, I don't want apps trying to read through my contacts in order to do it. What I want (but haven't actually configured) is xprivacy configured to make contacts appear empty.
I'd love to visit but the TLS Error: sec_error_unknown_issuer a.k.a. IDK who signed this cert isn't a welcoming thing to see.
For some reason I found this hilarious: "Going from a college frat boy to the CEO of today's hottest new startup isn't easy."
Are these one way flights only? I see nothing about return dates.

Also, when you click the Details button on a flight it just disappears and nothing happens. There seems to be a javascript error occurring.
> There is a lot of drama around the fact Linux core devs don't adopt these patches by default.

What is the main cause of resistance for implementing these fixes? It worries me that they haven't put forth the effort to do so yet.
I sat in on a couple Philosophy of Biology classes on the suggestion of a friend during undergrad. There was an entire series of these courses for chemistry, physics, computation, etc., with a mix of history and philosophy. There's a certain contextualization of a field that the technically oriented study track never seems to cover adequately (or if it does, it's the first paragraph of a chapter that gets quickly skimmed through).
I heard the exact same story in a Wall St. trading firm I worked for - except the story was about a trade gone wrong (trades X shares instead of $X worth of shares, causing the Dow to slide and all sorts of havok).
The Story Behind My Investment in Chariot (Marina, SF)
This is a good effort. I do have some concerns about it.

A true root cause would go deeper and ask why is it that an engineer could solely decide to roll out to all slices ?

The surface-level answer is that Azure platform lacked tooling. Is that the cause or an effect ? I think it is an effect. There are deeper root causes.

Let's ask -- why was it that the design allowed one engineer to effectively bring down Azure ?

We often stop at these RCAs when it gets uncomfortable and it starts to point upwards.

I say this to the engineer who pressed the buttons: Bravo! You did something that exposed a massive hole in Azure which may have very well prevented a much bigger embarrassment.
The last point is really not a good one.

It would clearly be better to have the chance someone spends a week wading through your code than explaining all the changes you made to avoid that happening. You'll spend more than a week doing that.

I don't disagree with your other points, though. Two heads are better than one, and code reviews are important for a slew of reasons at all levels.
The Web Setup: BuildZoom
"In the rental scenario, the customer has to face the 'extortion' of the broker to gain access to the unit."

Not really.

The owner of a property could certainly personally show a rental. They just typically choose to hire a property management company to handle that process (as well as the other management tasks) for them, and they outsource the task of finding a renter because it doesn't cost them anything to do so - the renter pays it. Doing it this way allows them to scale their operations by using 3rd parties to handle the showings for as many properties as they own without having to handle it themselves. They have no incentive to change.
To be fair, we switched to git only in December 2011, before that you would need to look at the ChangeLog. BTW, there is a http://gitstats.gnupg.org.
And being that he's a perfectionist, do you think he'd be fine with hiring people that cut corners?
Extend the Reach of Your HTML5 App to the Living Room
Depends on your planned career path- do you want to run a business, or be a developing badass? Few can do both extremely well-
If its development, move towards learning more about Software architecture, including SOLID principles, Patterns, best practices(as it pertains to Computer Science as a whole, not a particular technology or framework). While doing this, blog about it so your current and future clients can see your humble nature (rare for up-and-coming- to experienced developers) and progress.
More importantly, if you think about doing a personal project or have an idea for an app- don't focus on making money, focus on the knowledge and experience gained through the work itself.
I find it funny that it seems like any conversation about a particular tiling window manager will eventually turn into a conversations about window managers in general.

So to continue the trend, I used to use tiling wm's until I learned about Emacs. Emacs lets me do away with tiling mostly because it itself supports it in a way, namely C-x 2 and C-x 3. I can run all my shells and gdb's right inside Emacs. Nowadays I usually either have one fullscreened Emacs window, Firefox, 1 external terminal, and maybe LibreOffice open on my laptop. I don't mess around with moving them around and resizing them. For me, it's enough to simply have workspaces to manage all of them (I use C-M-[np] to switch back and forth through them, Caps Lock is remapped to Control).

It's true though that the benefits of tiling window managers isn't just the tiling itself, but often that they're programmable and configurable through plain text files. There's also the benefit of lower resource consumption if you run it bare.

As for what I actually use? Xfwm4 gets the job done.
As soon as FB Messenger or WhatsApp introduce a "view once" feature to their products I'd instantly stop using Snapchat.
The UK examples are likely to fall foul of the "Unfair Contract Terms Act"

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/blackpoo...
Is that still applicable considering Sony is a Japanese company?
Everyone wants an high dollar exit? That's my first thought.
The title wouldn't fit in the requisite 80 characters, so I cut it down.
I downvoted this comment, but that was dumb of me; I should have clicked through to the user profile. If you're going to write something like this and sign your name to it, you should get some of the benefit of the doubt. Which is what you did.

Sorry for the downvote.

Also: wow.
I know this. But I seriously doubt impeachment.

More interesting would be to see who supports a continued embargo and why? Instead of rubber-stamping it, congressmen would have to take a position one way or the other, and I doubt there's much good argument for its continuation en-masse.

Obama could force Congress to have to address Cuba head-on. I don't know if it's the most important thing or not, but you'd at least get to see why we continue a useless embargo.
And the Snappening.
I haven't really explored this but I remember a few years ago I liked the idea of using grsecurity on my VPSs. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a good way to do it.

I believe the idea I stumbled onto was to use kexec to load a hardened kernel after boot, which seems doable but I am not sure it would be a good route to go.

Have you/anyone ever tried anything like this?
New Personnel Test Sample Questions for All Accounting Jobs in 2014-15
Cane sugar, nickel (at least, looking at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#/image/File:Tree_map_exp...) and tourism. Until the Cuban Revolution, Las Vegas had tough competition from Havana (http://petermoruzzi.com/2011/10/31/family-feud-havana-vs-las...)
Extreme CSS Garden
I agree to a point. As a lead developer, you should care about it all, but it's also your job to be a mentor. Give your junior devs just enough rope to hang themselves, but be close enough by and approachable enough so that they don't. A little pointer like, "think about this approach" or "don't use a dictionary here because..." or "generics will be your friend here, but beware of x, y and z".

You should be holding your junior developers accountable for writing tests for their code, ensuring that the test coverage is there, ensuring they understand what problem they're solving, ensuring they understand the approach they're taking, ensuring they understand the repercussions of the decisions they're making. This is how they advance from junior to intermediate and eventually to senior.

It is your job as the senior/lead developer to groom your junior devs to make the steps forward and eventually do your job. You shouldn't be telling them how to write the code. When picking holes in their code, it should be constructive, don't just to pick holes in it to pick holes in it, making them feel bad. The goal is to help them understand what's not up to par, why it's not up to par and what approach they can take to fix it. You should neither be writing code for them, nor should you be expecting they make every decision in the same way you would.
Also of note is that Seaside uses the concept of continuations to manage multi-page flow which is a very fitting abstraction for this problem, and that most languages can't afford to do. That means they can code complex behavior as if the line between client and server did not exist.
They way I see it, it's not going to completely replace street lighting. It's going to supplement available light, thus reducing our energy consumption among other benefits like producing oxygen.
I'm especially excited about the possibility of genetically modifying trees that produce edible stuff to have bio luminescence, that'd be pretty cool.
Yes, it's custom built. Started it March this year. This is the latest iteration. If you like, tell me more about your usecase via email or irc.
He's already mastered the essential strategy of selecting a handful of indicators to make your point seem right.
Scott Hanselman had a really interesting talk that covered .net/Azure on Hack Summit earlier this month.

You can view the recorded video on: https://hacksummit.org/
It would be really cool if this film goes straight to direct-sales / netflix / dvd and remains successful due to all the marketing it has received from the hack debacle.

It would be even cooler if its high-profile, straight to market launch success was a turning point in reducing theater dominance for major label releases.
The really big missing piece that I found in this post mortem is if it only took 30 minutes to revert the original change, why did it take over ten hours to restart the Azure Blob storage servers? This was neatly elided in the last sentence of this paragraph of their writeup:

".... We reverted the change globally within 30 minutes of the start of the issue which protected many Azure Blob storage Front-Ends from experiencing the issue. The Azure Blob storage Front-Ends which already entered the infinite loop were unable to accept any configuration changes due to the infinite loop. These required a restart after reverting the configuration change, extending the time to recover."

The ten+ hours extension was the vast majority of the outage time; why wasn't the reason for this given? More importantly, what will be done to prevent a similar extension in the time Azure spends belly up if at some point in the future, the Blob servers go insane and have to be restarted?
And the first word of the second paragraph being "Prelude" was a pretty good clue, too.
What is it that makes writing an HTTP client so hard? It seems bizarre that a project like teepee could have been in active development for 8 months or more, and still not be anywhere near usable.
The Soil Pollution Crisis in China: A Cleanup Presents Daunting Challenge
I was wondering about that, such an exposure doesn't seem to help the guy's cause. So how did it get out?

Ok closer read, because Sony Hack.

Wow, that is really sad.
Furthermore, as Cuba lacks any agrochemicals, almost of their food production is organic, proving that agrochemicals are completely unnecessary.
Parasite test shows where validation studies can go wrong
Behind the Scenes at the Lab That Fingerprints Microbiomes
No Coin or Tile?
Not vanilla, CM's privacy guard does a fairly decent job.
A true root cause would go deeper and ask why is it that an engineer could solely decide to roll out to all slices?

Because writing code which contains a large number of checks and balances is generally orders of magnitude more expensive than human trust/judgment on the Ops team. Reading the postmortem makes me think that this sort of failure could have happened to anyone, and no-one really did anything wrong. The mistake was the blob store config flag not getting flipped, which is just a natural human error. The engineer who did the roll out could have been any of us. Given what he/she knew, he/she thought they had a good soak test (and a couple of weeks is a pretty good soak test) and made a call, similar calls he/she makes a number of times every day. This one didn't pan out.

I would hazard that most companies have a big red rollout button that is reserved for trusted engineers that will do a rollout without all the checks you're requesting.
>> "It's because we don't criminalize homelessness as aggressively as other major cities"

I don't think that matters - the op's point still stands. Do you think criminalising homelessness solves the problem? It just (poorly) hides it. There may be a different between the 'working' poor and the mentally ill that you point out but I'd be willing to bet the mentally ill aren't left to live on the street and fend for themselves in Cuba.
The relevant cost of the phone calls, the paperwork, and the travel isn't paid to AT&T or Staples or the metro.

The cost that matters is the time involved. And that's far from unlimited for a monthly fee.
Holiday app for creating snowflake designs. Both iOS and Android. Try it!
Sorry, I am silly, but what kind of applications could one build with this?
Agreed.

It seems like people commonly raise the fact that Cuba still jails political dissidents. However, while accurate, it ignores the many MANY countries the US hasn't embargoed which do similar or worse.

For one example, the US and Saudi Arabia are "best buddies" but yet the Saudi government is often doing extremely anti-freedom stuff. I mean this is the only country on earth where women are forbidden from driving.

So my point is less "Cuba is the good guy" and more "if they're going to continue the embargo then keep it consistent, hit Egypt, Pakistan, China, Yemen, and so on" for it also.
> and enough to buy some food

A food, anyway, provided you aren't spending your $8 a day on rent.

How would social services work in this system without minimum wage? Would people making below a minimum wage deemed necessary to house and feed and care for oneself be eligible for benefits?
I'm not working for that startup or any startup for that matter.
It's a good thing, but Cuba is about to be gentrified. I really wish I had visited before now, Cuba is going to lose a lot of culture in the long term. I can envision McDonald's and Starbucks everywhere.
I applaud this effort! It seems to me that templating is the thing that the Wordpress ecosystem could most easily borrow from more recent development workflows. Probably makes life a lot easier for newbies to the Wordpress world, too. Cheers!
Daniel Micay who works on security with Arch Linux explains why GRSecurity hasn't been upstreamed here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/150...

And you can see Greg K H (a linux core dev) snarky reply here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/150...

Basically a few people have tried in the past but Linux core devs are against large patches. And if you look at old threads [1] where people have attempted to break it up into small patches the core devs have been disinterested.

Just to be clear we're talking about many 2003-era exploit mitigation techniques not being adopted into the kernel. And as a side effect every year there are countless vulnerabilities that come out - for which proactive mitigations with up-to-date PoC's have existed for years.

Greg KH basically said in that thread that it would need to be broken up into tons of small patches. Then each patch will have to be submitted and go through the massive politics of getting it upstreamed. This would require a full-time paid team of people doing it, since Linux foundation or similar organizations don't seem to think it's worth paying for a team of security experts themselves to do similar work hardening the kernel.

Additionally, a long time ago (before grsec I believe) the person (or team) behind PaX, whose code is now a significant percentage of GRSecurity, is anonymous and the Linux core refused to accept patches from anonymous developers.

Also for a more meta-discussion on how security is handled by the core devs see Spenders summary here in "KASLR: An Exercise in Cargo Cult Security"
https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3367

[1] Spender links to old threads here where people tried breaking it up and submitting small patches:

https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/541797486479028225

https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/541797673419145217

https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/541797780482977792
Where in logical space is God?
Pros:
-they are sharing info
-they allowed some caustic comments to remain at the bottom of the page (so far).

Cons:
-This is almost 30 days after the incident
-Look at the regions, it was global!
-This was a whole chain of issues. I count it as 5 separate issues. This goes deep into how they operate and it does not paint a picture of operational maturity:

1: configuration change for the Blob Front-Ends exposed a bug in the Blob Front-Ends

2: Blob Front-Ends infinite loop delayed the fix (I count this as a separate issue though I expect some may not)

3: As part of a plan to improve performance of the Azure Storage Service, the decision was made to push the configuration change to the entire production service

4: Update was made across most regions in a short period of time due to operational error

5: Azure infrastructure issue that impacted our ability to provide timely updates via the Service Health Dashboard

That is quite a list. [Edit : formatting only]
Linus hates security and security related projects. He is against prioritizing security bugs over normal bugs. Also he is against embargo (coordinated release).

One example of many, many instances:

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/security_bugs.html
Where is the list price of a 32gb Nexus 5 $649? The price on Google Play is listed at $399, and has been since the phone was launched over a year ago.
Why stop settle for just -O levels? You could fiddle with all flags that might affect performance. You could even write a program that automates this and employs generic algorithms to reach good results quicker...

http://stderr.org/doc/acovea/html/acoveaga.html
I'd wager that that'd only hold if all (or a lot) of your Snapchat contacts did the same. I think people often overestimate people's unwillingness to use multiple apps while underestimating their unwillingness to switch to a different version of the same app.
Get started with FreeBSD: A brief intro for Linux users
If Cuba is selling itself to the US, then I am concerned. If the US exports its version of capitalism to Cuba then Cuba is doomed.
Reminiscent of how the CIA backed the production [1] of an Animal Farm cartoon as PSYOPS against the USSR.

Shutterbug is more fightning considering the content is conditioning for ubiquitous surveillance drones flying everywhere.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11209390/How-the-CIA...
I'm most amused when people notice the hilarity and bizarreness of arbitrary systems on the internet but lack the temerity to apply their newfound conception back to "the real world."
Ask HN: What could be done to create low maintenance, sustainable living?
Hi HN,
there is a lot of talk on hn about the government providing basic income, but my thought has always been in the future people would create a low maintenance, sustainable life style...

examples might be: owning your own home, owning solar panels for power, owning an electric car, using 3d printers for stuff, growing your own food (with robotic harvesting).

what other technologies or ideas might create help create an independent sustainable future? why doesn't this idea have much traction?
I hope it becomes a fireable offence. Any deviation from procedure has to be signed off at the very least.
I agree, such technologies could be of huge importance in the future,possibly far more than most breakthrough technologies we hear about from the media.

On the other hand, we hear almost nothing about such "desire/mind shaping" technologies, and in general people people show little interest in them. I wonder, why is that?