skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VS is not designed for code base this size, because there aren't that many code bases this size out there. Same reason VSS ain't used for code versioning. Having said that - I don't see how having msvc build drops earlier than anyone else and testing it on the Windows code base is bad for the compiler and goes against dogfooding.

Speaking of dogfooding - using unstable builds of VS (the IDE, not the compiler which tends to be pretty stable) for something else than developing VS itself sounds like a recipe for disaster when it comes to something as massive as OS. If you read some OSS mailing lists devoted to low level dev, you'll see that what low level developers actually want is LTS compiler, not some half baked C++ year 2135 early draft compliant turd. This is why e.g. OpenBSD sticks to some old GCC with custom patches.

This and GPLv3. ;)
What's makes that better is that Homejoy is rated 2.7 on glass door. To be fair though, I don't have an account on there so I couldn't read past the first page of reviews and most of the negatives were contractors.
Sure it's doable. I wrote some DirectX apps in pure C back in the days. Heck, I wrote one in ASM. But it's art for art's sake. There's no point in complicating your life like that, especially not when you're working on a commercial project.
I should also mention that we're offering a paid internship/fellowship for college students this summer in Washington, DC. More information here:

http://techchange.org/fellowship/
Xbox, PlayStation networks down, hacking group Lizard Squad claims credit
This, and also I am specifically interested in if you can do modern web development in it, and if playing with smalltalk will result in similar epiphanies that learning multiple functional languages did.
So their conclusion is that LaTeX is best saved for documents with much mathematical content. But it's also worth considering that LaTeX workflows offer better compatibility with revision control systems. The change tracking features in MS Word have never impressed me the few times I've worked with them.
Anatomy of Frankenstein's 2 part 1 (Markdown to html via sed and bash only)
When formatting goes awry, press Shift+F1 to open the 'Reveal Formatting' pane.
Vacation Homes: Make Out of Town Buyers Feel at Home
Citation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170559
14 things you better love before becoming an entrepreneur
It's not just that the syntax looks weird to people -- though that doesn't help -- but it also looks weird to other programming languages.

Not sure if it's any consolation, but Smalltalk was the first non-ALGOL language that I really "got", and remarkably quickly. The saying that Smalltalk syntax fits on a postcard is no joke, see: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkSyntaxInaPostcard

The hardest part is wrestling with the class libraries and getting used to the hermit kingdom that is the image-based environment, though the community behind Pharo and other modern Smalltalk environments have done some interesting advances when it comes to bridging the gap, such as the Monticello VCS for snapshotting code state to a regular file system in the form of an archive.

That said, I haven't used Smalltalk all too extensively.
I'm writing an HTTP reverse proxy in Rust, and my main gripe so far is that I have to roll my own async I/O. Binding node's HTTP parsers over is going well, but also takes a bunch of effort. Safe-by-design and close to the metal are proving very enjoyable to work with for this, however.
How Bad Software Leads to Bad Science
You might check out TechnoServe: http://www.technoserve.org/get-involved/volunteer

I believe some of their projects make use of technology, but it's more business/innovation oriented.
"...all of us were burning to write up whatever we learned in some technical journal that, years later, an associate professor might glance at on his coffee break."
Having read Disciplined Minds, I'll take that as a strong recommendation to read Foucault!
In the teams where one person does more than all others combined, why is that described as "a successful team" rather than "a successful person who succeeds despite a bunch of hangers-on"?
I immediately thought of your startup when I read this post. Glad to hear it is still going strong.
Autodesk offers this as a service:

http://www.123dapp.com/aboutlasercutting

It's a low-rez way to do 3D printing, but it's fast and cheap.

You can take a cardboard model made that way and vacuum-form a sheet of plastic over it to get a smooth model. That's how commercial relief maps were made - print topo on plastic, vacuum-form onto 3D master to make a 3D object. Like these:

http://www.mapshop.com/raised_relief/raised_relief_maps.htm
Writing on a disk doesn't imply that anyone's going to read.
That argument came from C.S. Lewis, and the primary counter I know is that it assumes "lunatic" is a binary condition -- someone is either delusional or not. We, today, know that this isn't the case. There are people who have truly bizarre beliefs that don't otherwise hinder logical functioning.
Merry Christmas Colin! Nice to see this worked out. I'm confused as to why you're surprised they had working whois contacts, most real businesses do, it's usually the scammers, the spammers and people that are up to no good that use whois privacy, rarely you see that used for someone who genuinely needs some protection.

If a company uses whois privacy I don't do business with them as a rule.
I'm not sure what you're trying to ask. The core problem with rights is that they are weaker than rational decision-making, and thus they are fundamentally flawed. Rights can be (and should be) revoked by 'very good reasons'. And it stands to reason that they should be established by comparatively strong measures.

So if rights are always secondary to rational arguments, what extra value do they bring to the ethical picture? They only mean anything if you are making irrational decisions, 'blindly' protecting them and whatnot.

>[rational arguments] produce much more fragile legal structures than rights infer.

I don't believe this, and I don't think there are any examples to suggest this. Laws are notoriously less flexible than they would need to be to be engines of rational decision-making, and thus there are no 'rational' legal structures. The fact that we have judges, juries, and opportunities for defense against the law are constructs that we invented to inject rational flexibility into a legal systems which would otherwise be blind draconian monoliths.

But this means you step outside of the legal structure and into the ethical structure of the minds involved: a judge/jury can rule that, even if you violated some law, you might be _justified_ in doing so and should not suffer any consequences. This kind of argument is often made in terms of rights, but then, so are the laws that are being ignored. One must always apply a rational argument, because every right is in conflict with some other right -- being that they are vague, underspecified things to begin with.
Yes, yes and yes but professionally will be hard. Plenty of folks on the pharo list would be happy to help get you started.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/schmidt/responses/...

"While employed at Physics Today, Jeff led a contentious effort to force the magazine to change its long-standing pattern of hiring and training only whites as editors, and to live up to its claim of being an affirmative-action employer. These actions were part of the expression for which Jeff was fired"

Maintaining a physics magazine as a whites-only environment is the kind of thing that requires that level of employee repression. It's all about ethics in physics journalism.
As a long-time LaTeX user, I'm a little disappointed to read these results, but I fully believe them.
I've spent countless hours fighting against the layout algorithm to get images to go in the right place, among other frustrating issues.

Efficiency aside, using LaTeX is expected in fields like physics and math, and if you write your paper in Word, readers will be biased against it (consciously or subconsciously).
On the ArXiv, the vast majority of papers are typeset using LaTeX, and of the non-LaTeX papers, a large fraction of them are low-quality or written by cranks, hence the negative association.
If you're relying on HTTP for all your microservices, you're doing it wrong.
This is quite interesting, and given my experience with LaTeX (I am a post-doc and prefer working with LaTeX), I often wonder if it is all worth the trouble. Although I have only used Word (and LibreOffice Writer, odd the article doesn't even mention it) sporadically over the last years (and only for simple documents), I do wonder how Word and friends perform in settings that were not part of the experiment that is reported here:

* Large documents (50+ pages) (I remember having to deal with file corruptions, figures appearing at random places, formatting suddenly has a free will, ...)

* Lots of figures that get updated during the writing process

* Collaborating: merging several documents into one big report, especially if other authors do not follow formatting guidelines etc.

* Citations and references

* The authors mention it in the conclusions, but I think the test should also have included a scenario based on using templates instead of building something from scratch.

Other aspects why I prefer LaTeX:

* Version control with plain text files is rather convenient. And so is collaborating.

* Comparing different versions of the same document(s) is much easier with plain text (diff), although you can do something similar with PDF's

* I agree to a certain extent with the authors that scientific content is more important than the form, but I do prefer a traditional LaTeX look over Word documents. By far.

* I always use templates, and this speeds up the writing process significantly. Ideally, you can forgot about the formatting in those cases.

I think the authors make a good point though. Maybe we should invest in smarter/better/more productive LaTeX editors?

edit: formatting, added citations point...
That just shows you the properties though, doesn't it? My usual problem is that the style properties seem OK, but the styles themselves are being applied to the wrong bits of text. Then when I try to fix it by removing the unwanted style from the incorrectly-styled portion, the section that was OK loses its style too! It's as if word's internal record of where each block of formatting begins and ends has got out of whack somehow, and when called upon to change a part of one styled section ends up changing the whole thing. (Or perhaps my mental model is wrong? But most of the tine, this sort of thing does work...)

This doesn't have to happen that many times to become really annoying...
You're the 8BBS first user to speak up. Any stories?
It's hard to embed in your regular flow because of the image based nature. If regular files systems and git(hub) are your thing be prepared for some drastic adjustments.

Also, it is quite slow. But it is definitely worth a look just for the added insights into what programming could be like.
Many companies on that list like thoughtworks are not tier 1 companies.
Indeed, the brilliant part of immoral espionage is that they are the best people on the planet at not getting caught. As John Le Carre would say: the only rule of espionage is that it works. They often don't have to deal with the complex moralities of the public world.
I think that's looking at it the wrong way - you have one person who's talented and/or hard-working; contributing to the majority of the project and the others are the supporters - they're function may be primarily to allow the core contributor to do what he does best and while they take care of the more mundane tasks, provide their knowledge / experience and so forth when needed.

A little bit of encouragement and support goes a long way.
I would consider continuing to spritesheet the button itself. The main difference is that each roll-over effect can be separated from all the other spritesheets in the world.

Still, an exciting time when we can combine files based on what is the most logical grouping, rather than what is the most efficient. I look forward to the day when HTTP2 rules the world.
There is "Engineers Without Borders" although I think they are more focused on traditional engineering disciplines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_Without_Borders
When the PS4 first came out, it was a royal mess to get online just to get connected and activate the console. Seems they were also targeting Bungie's servers, but their server / network system has been a complete mess since they released the Destiny console game.
Hi

My email is dale@arandomurl.com, I am trying to improve the feedback flow between users and development of the OS, if you could email me about particular issues or how you would fine your feedback best sent / replied to I would really appreciate it

Thanks
Dale
Granted that this is Canada so is a bit different from where I live, I personally would still at this point fear malicious prosecution just enough that I would not have taken action. That's a little sad all by itself.

Hats off to Colin for the (brave) good deed.
The real life Addams family
You can never thank them "enough". But taking a good moment for a heartfelt thanks, is more than most would do, and all you can do.

I feel the only way to "repay", is to pay it forward (since in general it is unlikely your helper will have the same need as you).
It should be noted that while Firefox doesn't have tab sandboxing, it does isolate Flash (by launching it in a separate process called plugin-container).
Why? What's wrong with this approach?
Novus is great, they offer some of the highest speeds available in the areas that you can get access.

My biggest gripe with Novus (besides limited coverage) is they have no unlimited bandwidth offering like my current provider has. Despite that, I'm still considering switching to them for those awesome upload speeds. In light of this, I'm probably going to sign up.

Last I heard, when you went over your bandwidth limit with Novus they cut you off to prevent overages. I really liked this because you have the freedom to call them and confirm that you're fine with additional charges and they'll immediately reconnect you, but I'm curious about if they still do this. Any current customers able to clarify?
Yes I disagree that UX decisions can't be argued. File bugs (start at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=firefox%2...), and cc firefoxos-ux-bugzilla@mozilla.com

For sure it may not be easy to get changes, but that's the same for paid contributors (I still have bad memories of keyboard changes I fought against and could not get in).
I assume this only applies to internet tech companies that should know better. If the non-technical guy outsourcing a company's IT got upsold on whois privacy, I'm not about to hold it against them.
Relevant Wikipedia quote [1] about New Mexico whiptail lizards:

An interesting aspect to reproduction in these asexual lizards is that mating behaviors are still seen, although the populations are all female. One female plays the role played by the male in closely related species, and mounts the female that is about to lay eggs. This behaviour is due to the hormonal cycles of the females, which cause them to behave like males shortly after laying eggs, when levels of progesterone are high, and to take the female role in mating before laying eggs, when estrogen dominates.

It blew my mind when I first stumbled upon it:

There's a species of lesbian lizards that reproduce by cloning!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Reptiles
A Social Network in Rails: Activity Feed
It's not uncommon for the whois contact to be a non-private but unhelpful number for the company. If you call any of the numbers in, say, `whois google.com` or `whois dropbox.com`, I'd expect that at best you'd reach front-line technical support, and more likely a phone tree or a voicemail box, not a live human who runs their infrastructure.
Nexus 5 is our main Lollipop target so all these issues will be fixed.
they aren't aren't hacking anything. It is a DDoS it doesn't take any "skill". Any person with money can hire them, and it isn't hard to build a bot net if you don't care about breaking the law.
Two or three thousand altcoins? The biggest list I can find has 601 today:

http://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

8 have a daily volume over $100,000: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Dogecoin, Stellar, NewBits, Paycoin (XPY; there are two Paycoins), and Bitshares. Those, you might be able to sell without crashing the market. (Maybe not Paycoin, which looks like a pump and dump in the "dump" phase. See Reddit or any Paycoin message board for details.)
I can imagine the title of the next bbc article -- "Eloquent speech by a 3 months old middle eastern Homo Sapiens is no longer rare".
Latency, for one. "Microservice" means reaching out over the network to perform an action, not necessarily: make an HTTP connection, transfer JSON, receive JSON back and deserialize. Microservices can just as readily be performed via protocol buffers or Thrift over ZeroMQ, raw TCP/UDP, etc.
when wordpress is your hammer..
Ah, this. To be fair, I don't think the system is "soul battering" for most people. A large number of people-- more than one would like-- are perfectly happy to trade their autonomy and freedom for a bit of (temporary) security in social status and income. That might be one of the more surprising (and disturbing) realizations about white-collar hell: most people don't perceive it as a hell. They're fine, they're happy, and while they're being drained of the traits that made them interesting people when they were younger, it happens so slowly (boiled frog) that they neither notice nor care.

What I think is a key insight in his work is on the politics of "not getting political". Please correct me if I'm butchering the concept, but part of the process of turning salaried professionals into obedient drones is to convince them that it's undignified to "get political" at the workplace. The problem is that the people in charge can easily define their position as the default, apolitical one and any opposition as "getting involved in politics".

To me, whenever a hiring manager says that there's "no politics" at his company, that's a strong sign of a toxic environment. I'd rather work for someone who's politically aware and can help me navigate what politics exists (there's always a political environment) than one who is delusional enough to think that an organization of 10 or 50 or 200 or 20,000 people can have "no politics". Too often, "there's no politics here" means "I'm in the in-crowd and get my way, so 'political' decisions-- meaning ones that I don't like-- are rarely made".

This is how I feel about Silicon Valley "meritocracy". The only people who believe in it are those who've been in the in-crowd for 20+ years and lost touch with reality. They think that they live in a politics-free zone because they're oblivious to their own privilege.
How is being tied to a clunky text editor different from being tied to a clunky GUI? No matter which alternative text editor you use, apparently it's still clunky (slow) according to that somewhat limited research.
We can't calculate the probability of life arising though because even if we did know how it arose here—which we don't exactly—we don't know all the possible different ways it can arise, which may or may not also be a number raised to a large power.

We can't, but we can assume that any process that arises from a series of unlikely chained events (where the likelihood of each event are not correlated) will most likely occur near to the latest time possible. For example, if you run a trillion parallel 10-step chained experiments over a year starting at Jan 1 where each step is very unlikely to occur so that only 100 reach step 10, then the last steps are all likely to occur in December. The less likely each step is (or the more steps involved) then the more the experiments that reach the final step will cluster towards Dec 31. If you have a group of such events then you can actually calculate the likelihood of the chain series.

Intelligent life in a large universe is a similar to this imaginary experiment. While we only have one observed data point, we do know how close the appearance of intelligent life on earth is to the last possible time that it could occur. Outside of our geologically recent anthropogenic boost to the CO2 in the atmosphere, the long term trend of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is down (this is due to the sun becoming warmer over time requiring CO2 to be removal from the atmosphere to keep earth in the habitable temperature range). We are in geological terms close to the point where any further removal of CO2 will mean photosynthesis will no longer work (plants are already CO2 limited) - maybe a few 10 millions years. In geological time this is very close to our Dec 31.

What does this all mean? Basically it appears humans have evolved close to the latest time point possible. While we can't calculate the exact probability of intelligent life arising in the universe from our one example, we can say that the evolution of humans is consistent with the hypothesis that the evolution of any intelligent life in the universe is very unlikely.
How about the theory that we are the way super-civilization spreads?

If physical space travel is extremely expensive (as it should be, considering the distance), then may be it is better to send a signal that would trigger creation of life (in our case on Earth).

Then when Earth civilization is advanced enough, it would be able to receive complete boot sequence and then fully advanced alien civilization would be replicated on Earth.
Stephen Baxter's Manifold novels deal with this problem quite extensively. I would recommend them from anyone interested in the implications of the Fermi paradox expressed in science/speculative fiction.
What i miss in the discussion is that using latex you concentrate on the content and not on the formatting.
If you are looking for good layex editors there is one that outshines them all : emacs.
Google's tech whois number is a different number than the one for their main contact and a different one for the DNS admin one.

Dropbox uses the same number for all three.

Neither company uses whois privacy. Agreed that for plenty of companies you'd end up in an IVR system but that seems to go for every kind of company these days, not just internet companies.
i used word for a large project (undergrad project report of 100+ pages with 4 member team) in 1997 and even then word had features for most (if not all) of the items in your list:

* large docs can be handled by splitting them into master-child documents. You can format across all child documents from the master.

* figures can be edited in-place or embedded from original source.

* collaboration was possible then with child and shared docs, it should only be better now.

* citations and refs are supported, although I dont know if all styles of citations are.

* templates have been in word from a long time and imo are quite natural because they're prototype-based (ie, you can make any document AFTER you create it into a template. other documents that use that as a template inherit all styles and so forth)

* the visual "View changes"mode in word is quite natural and even allows for some offline discourse with your collaborators as each user's comments and changes are marked with a different color and comments are allowed.

*words symbol editor (which also existed pre-1997) is quite up to the task of most equations (again, imo; i've not done a lot of hairy equations)

word is just a better tool for large documents, and i say this asn ardent anti-ide guy. my preferred setup for code documentation is sublime text and markdown; but when you want to Just write a document, word it is.
I find that most mature projects are incredibly hesitant to accept patches.

I have found critical bugs in some projects and the people with repo access let the pull request sit there for a year or more.
You honestly think this is worse than death and rape threats that push people out of their homes?