skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before Google there was Altavista.

Before WhatsApp there was ICQ.

Before Facebook there was MySpace.

First isn't always that important. Whatever your current vision is ... it's likely to evolve in ways your competitor may view differently. It's rarely about the original idea, but often way more about how you execute, and how your idea evolves over the long-term.
We the people have the right to choose if we'd rather prefer a few more marginal companies or better conditions for our babies.
The general feeling that I got from the author is that these freebie days have gone by the wayside due to the ability for remote work. While it would be nice for the freebie days to become a traditional norm, the deeper underlying issue is the severe lack of yearly vacation. These kinds of days would not be an issue is the annual paid vacation standard was at 4-6 weeks per year as opposed to 2-3 weeks.

What the author does not target is the severe lack of yearly paid vacation that most workers
There's a tremendous amount of love in the world of technology. I'm writing in Firefox on Linux on HN. I spent all morning writing a post organized in Trello using Emacs. Each is excellent because of people who are motivated to create something that make the world suck less. And not just some little corner of it, but as much of it as kind find its way to the door.

That's not to say the world of technology hasn't found new ways to suck. Yesterday I got an email from Sasan Goodarzi
General Manager, Intuit TurboTax. He was offering a coupon in exchange for adding suck to TurboTax. Intuit took the Schedule C out of the Deluxe skew.

I replied (probably into the void). I've been using the TurboTax for more than two decades. The reasons are a trust of Intuit and the faith that using it this year would make life easier next year because I could import one return into the other. The product was deliberately made worse. The reasons for using it are gone. Intuit doesn't care. I'm not sufficiently profitable. Beyond this I'm not even going to rant about them making the world suck.

In the 1980's everyone used Basic because a C compiler was $600. Rexx for the Amiga was $100. And Lisp? Buy a Lisp Machine.

Today, the mountain of love that is Ruby is free. The heap that is Rails, that's free. The pile that is Racket, free as well. Audacity, Gimp, Mono, etc. - love is winning. Lots of businesses suck and now there are lots of software businesses.

Yet even Darth MicroSoft is serious about producing open source projects. What more evidence could there be?
That's both a lot of work and a lot of churn, though - people choose LTS because they don't want things to change!
Glad I'm not the only one. The most relaxing way I know of to open up strange, frequent security vulnerabilities.
Online games offer some amount of social stimulation along with the classic video game Skinner Box effect... sort of a double-whammy of gratification.

Online communities like Reddit and... ahem... Hacker News... that gamify the online discussion experience with up/down mods and such can also be addictive.

(... backs away slowly ...)
I tend to think that it's just really easy to look at things on too-small a timescale.

Consider the extreme: in a single second, there aren't any discernible market pressures in the ISP industry, and it would be weird to expect it.

Which is mainly to say that it is important to talk about how quickly you want competition and market forces to come into play (not just that you want them to) when talking about why and how to change "the system".
Why 2015 Will Be My Year
> With the advent of bigger screens on our mobile phones, typing in portrait-mode with two hands becomes easier

True.

> and landscape mode for keyboards less of a necessity.

Also true, but neither means I would forgo my landscape mode, especially when I can hold down the camera icon on my iPhone for the same effect.

Nice idea, it's just that more elegant solutions exist :)
The only reason I kept Chrome around is because I occasionally wanted to watch Youtube videos that were Flash only. I wasn't going to install Flash system-wide, so I was grateful for Google's approach of maintaining a private Flash instance. Now, that usecase is become less of a problem, so I can ditch Chrome, which I never used otherwise.
> This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.

Absolutely it is, yes. You're just not looking beyond that level.
The fast reproducing countries are developing countries. Most developed countries reproduce just a little bit over or under replacement rates.

Make birth control cheap or free, have some sort of family planning education and humanity will reproduce below replacement rates very quickly. See Iran for an example.
He's saying his only use of chrome, a browser OP does not prefer, was for flash. Now that OP's primary method of media consumption has switched away from flash, so can OP switch away from chrome.
> Thursday, February 9, 1995

Steve Jobs was not at Apple between 1985 and 1997.
The fun part is that when you find a language/framework that (e.g.) deserializes data by running eval(), it's so much easier to write portable exploits. 32 bit, 64 bit, x86, arm, mips, aslr? None of that matters. Literally eval(system("/bin/sh")) and done.
This is embarrassing. We now know that the line "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow" is just wrong. What we do know now is that the open source process does not converge to a no-bugs state.

It's time to start phasing out C/C++. Languages which don't know how big their arrays are have to go. If it can run efficiently in a garbage-collected environment, it should be in Go or some scripting language. If it can't use GC, Rust is almost there. (As I say occasionally, I really hope the Rust guys don't screw up.) C and C++ should not be used for new work.

It has been 1 days since the last buffer overflow vulnerability report.
The parent was downvoted, but this is actually true in the UK. The are utility boxes in some really strange locations. Such as a bicycle lane that runs straight into a box, then just continues on the other side.
The second paragraph explains the first. I imagine that's why somebody downvoted your reply.

Repeating though, in case it wasn't clear: When your boss says "Yeah, we're going to need you to come in on Saturday... yeah, we lost some people this week, and now we're gonna have to sorta play catch-up. And yeah, we're going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too". That's a request. It's something you can (and should) say "No" to.

It's entirely possible that there may be ramifications for standing up for yourself in the face of silly demands from management. But there's absolute certainty of bad things happening if you don't. (Namely, the terrible thing you've just been asked to do, as well as dozens of repeat performances now that you've declared yourself as somebody who can be walked over.)

The best course is always to remain professional, stand up for yourself, and ensure that you remain on equal footing with your employer. If they do choose to fire you for working the hours you agreed to work when they hired you, there are worse things than being a skilled developer in the single best market for talent in history.
And got whacked for it.
You conventiently forget to point out clearly that the Troika and Germany have give Greece extremely large amount of money for free. The bailouts for (mainly French) banks was free money for Greece. What the new governent is trying to do is get more of that free money.
I worked for a small company when my wife had our children. I was the first employee to have a child while at the job. I was lucky enough to be senior enough to negotiate the parental leave that I needed.

It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them.

A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified.

This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-n... ).
Interesting. I must've switched on HTML5 streaming ages ago and forgotten about it because I wasn't able to tell it was using flash until I right-clicked the video. I was pretty surprised at how stable it had been.
he probably only have chrome because it have the built-in flash
As opposed to code in some other language?
I really like the way they've implemented tab previews. I can hover at over the tab and it'll show its thumbnail or I can drag the menubar down under the tab bar and all the tab thumbnails show at once. It makes more sense to me than the way Apple implements it in Safari.
That fixed it - thanks.
I tried this a while back (a few months?), and it doesn't seem like it has progressed much. I think Vivaldi has a much better chance of getting somewhere. A bunch of coders doing work on a voluntary basis will have a hard time competing with teams of full-time paid engineers.
You find the author's view laughable, but I find your view laughable. Reasonable deployments of Ubuntu or Windows get upgraded with security fixes all the time, browsers update themselves all the time. Waiting a year between security fixes is just foolish.
"If you would like see things straight out of a a science fiction movie, you should visit a neuroscience laboratory."

I lose some of my will to keep reading when I encounter a typo in the first sentence of a long article...
Just counted my icons in the upper right of my OS X. 25. They all do awesome stuff though.
Do we really know that the open source process doesn't converge? No specification for the length of time toward convergence exists, and you could argue that this case is an example of inching ever closer to no-bugs state
If you need to say rude things in order to convey your message, you might take a moment to consider whether or not your message is actually worth conveying.
I've held jobs at both ends of the spectrum, from bleeding-edge to death-by-legacy. There's a good deal of pain with both approaches, that's the reality. Would your org rather deal with security vulnerabilities and no upstream support, or deal with things blowing up once in a while?

What I like about this article is it's talking about what the global optimum is -- what's the best approach for the entire ecosystem? Not just for one individual or one org. What's Pareto optimal? (Or maybe it's a little less general -- what's the best approach for those who depend on FOSS, and don't pay someone like RedHat for long-term support and CYA insurance).

And basically I agree. The world's upgrade cycles could stand to be a whole lot shorter than they are. Every time I think about all the hardware in this world that'll spend its whole lifetime vulnerable to heartbleed, or shellshock, or a gazillion smaller vulns, my skin crawls.
Parisian apartment built with Unreal Engine 4
I tried to remember my username and password here for a good ten minutes so that I can congratulate you. This is amazing!
https://lists.apple.com/archives/QuickTime-VR/2004/Jul/msg00...

<i>More than 250 million copies of QuickTime 6 have been downloaded in
> less than two years since its release. According to Frost & Sullivans
> 2004 Global Media Streaming Platform Report, between 2002 and 2003
> Microsofts and Real Networks worldwide market share percentages were
> either stable or declining while QuickTimes market share increased to
> 36.8 percent, a close second to Microsoft. Real Networks came in third
> place with less than 25 percent of the worldwide streaming market
> share.</i>

Apple was never an "open source/open technology" white knight in video.
Methinks these issues are specific to your environment. I've seen improved start times and all around better performance, which (for the start time, at least) makes sense considering it's not loading a beefy Flash object.

The only thing that seems to occasionally hang for a second or two is loading a pre-roll ad, but that's pretty reasonable given the additional processes around ad serving. On that note, pretty awesome that those are also HTML5...must be nice to be YouTube and control your own ad format.

Edit: For clarification, not saying I enjoy ads, but having dealt with the bizarre SWF formats that ad vendors pass along...
I know I don't have the most popular of opinions, but I at least expect people here to have the polite courtesy to read my post before they respond to it. Good day.
This isn't a concern on newer locks.

You can use longer codes, order matters, and they throttle failed passcode attempts to prevent brute-force attacks.
I was referring to your "is a very big issue.". I know what you are referring too: limited time, limited cash, tight deadlines, making payroll, acquiring customers. I know what you refer by "is a very big issue.", hence my expression.

My definition of talent is the same as your hiring decision. I used the word "talent" simply not to go into a long list of obvious employee traits :)
> This is a business plan.

It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though.

Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won.

Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's as a pure, existential threat that they must neutralize.

So, even if the ISP's upgrade or get really cheap, Google doesn't care. This is about making sure that no company ever has the ability to cut off Google's flow of ads to the consumer ever again.

Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.
Why?

Reproducers are standard fare and it's not like the code in this case is obfuscated. Are magic code goblins going to come and invoke Ken Thompson's untrustable computing and make your computer install windows and join a botnet or something?
That's not the point. The mass media knows nothing about security.

Here is what is happening when vulnerabilities get their own brand names, with logos and marketing:

1. Vulnerabilities are implicitly severe if they attract media attention (and only if they attract media attention). I've been featured in the press twice for vulnerabilities. Neither of them were as serious as the least serious, unpublicized vulnerability on this page: https://hackerone.com/internet.

2. It implicitly encourages rating a vulnerability's severity by how much media attention it receives, not by an objective scale.

It's causing a race to the bottom where coordinated disclosure now requires a PR firm, a presskit, a logo, and a brand name. For Heartbleed and Shellshock, sure, they're serious enough for all those hoops. For everything else, the race to the bottom will commoditize these things, making vulnerabilities without them ignored, and confusing vulnerabilities with them as severe.

The final result is that it's just extra, meaningless noise tacked on to vulnerability disclosure that makes it more difficult to achieve, involves more parties and doesn't improve anything.
Top 3 Tech Skills Everyone Should Learn in 2015
> Frequent upgrades amortize the cost and ensure that regressions are caught early. No one upgrade is likely to end in disaster because there simply isn’t enough change for that to happen.

Oh, how I wish this were true.

For what it's worth, it's pretty true as far as OpenBSD is concerned, in my experience. But OpenBSD is the exception here, not the rule. Everywhere else, developers all seem to have embraced "break early, break often".

Eventually you get burned. For me, it was a routine should-have-been-minor web server update where one of the packages I relied on suddenly became unsupported and every single hosted site stopped working. Since there's no way to roll back server upgrades, I had a marathon night involving building a new server stack and migrating all hosted sites there by 8 a.m.

But you can't yell at anybody when that happens, because the answer's always the same: it's not the developers' fault.

Who really believes sysadmins wouldn't update everything all the time if they could? Old, dodgy, out-of-date servers exist exactly because updates are butthole-puckering, because everyone's been burned at least once by a "minor" update, and because once the damage is done, undoing it is horrifyingly difficult.
I work in an industry that is highly regulated and law and policy must be followed to a T. Our policies are extremely specific.

It isn't "worst-first" thinking, it is "ok, I'm replacing a critical component, does this replacement meet all the the required specifications of the thing I am replacing it with? What are the potential consequences?" Which takes almost no time, its just a question that needs to be answered in my field.

Perhaps my work in such a regulated environment has taught me to think that way.

I have family in the insurance business, and they've talked about having to deny claims for various (kinda silly in a way) reasons. And getting death threats because of it...
Video cut into questions but full print transcript is also there.
It's nice that you mention because we inspired both our API and architecture to Philips Hue: the REST api is served by both our cloud servers and by the device locally.

The app connects to the unit via wi-fi when you are home, which means you can control the product even if the internet (or our service) is down.

Opensourcing a lot of our stack is part of the plan, we take a lot from OSS and we want to give back.
As far as the hardware, we'll make sure it's a pleasure to hack on, remember that we have to do it every day :)
How Big Data Is Transforming Health Care
Can you add a link to the instructions?
This looks incredible! I've been waiting for this product for a while now. If we had a different upvoting system (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/01/trade-quarks-not-votes...), I'd use all my upvotes on this article.
Right. But the whole point is that if you have just been handed a newborn then your option to 'walk out' is simply non-existent and so any principled stance would have to be postponed until the breadwinner is out of the danger zone. The employer here seems to be engaging in some kind of revenge tactic, as though the leave was to be made up for rather than something that left the balance between employer/employee and employee/co-workers in tact.

So I don't see this as a request at all, a request is something that you practically can say yes to, which doesn't appear to be the case here and does not come in the form of an order.
My first thought as well, but aren't there older youtube videos that haven't been converted to html5-friendly formats?
A similar effort by Facebook open sourced 4 years ago:
(I'm one of the author) http://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/Main
with indexers for PHP, C, Java, Ocaml, and preliminary support for many other languages.
Am I the only one that noticed:
"<h2> Moving to <iframe> embeds</h2>"
I'm not entirely sure if it's a little joke or genuine mistake?

Regardless, this is absolutely great. I haven't had flash for a while now and so it makes me happy to feel that HTML5 really is a valid replacement for most things.
A list investors mostly fund companies that go bust by pushing to go big. They grow massive or fail or become irrelevant. Odds are you and the people you know use Facebook more than Myspace.
Really a great idea! Unfortunately, you lost me at "proprietary technology"…
I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new.

One whole weekend! :) You don't want to know how many weekends of mine that netflix or videogames have claimed. I think I turned out alright though. For me, it's mainly about whether I feel motivated. If I do, it's easy to avoid that other stuff. If not, then there's an endless stretch of time with nothing to do and no money to pursue hobbies. That stuff is a natural filler for the void of endless boredom.

About the kids: I wanted to ask you, how did the kids handle it when you left? I guess you didn't get too into it, so maybe they didn't feel very strongly one way or the other about whether you played. But I think I'm going to try to cultivate a relationship with my kids over videogames, whether it's playing Minecraft with them or whatever MMO they want to play. It seems like hiking through the woods together, but virtual woods. But I'd imagine it's going to go like: They might get too into it at the expense of schoolwork, so I'll have to put my foot down and say no more, which will make them quite upset. And sure, that's the job of a parent. I'm their parent, not just their friend. But I can't help remember how misplaced my father's rules were, so I don't want to become like that. Yet I remember how much of a pushover my friend's dad was, which my friend took full advantage of; again, don't want to be like that. So I wonder how to strike a proper balance. It'd be great to hear from you and anyone else with children what your rules are regarding videogames.

Is there an instruction manual that comes with each child? No? Hmmm....
You don't think that the core of the issue is regulatory capture, rather than a failing of "the market"?

It takes a lot of money to break into a captured market, which is why it takes a large company to do it. Google entering the ISP market has done more to shake up and spur on the incumbents in the past couple of years than anything regulators have done. And furthermore, you can be assured that their doing so is absolutely self-interested; Google isn't building fiber for the betterment of humanity, they're building it to improve the delivery of their services which make them money.
Can they?

And even if they could theoretically sue, there's no reason at all to think that they would. This is the former Opera CEO. He's not that kind of guy.
In Spain even just sheets are too much :) Airco or sweat.
It's true, because man does not find meaning in leisure, only in work. Ora et Labora as the monks used to say. Video games give you a false sense of progress and labor. Its why gambling are so addictive, because it is not pure recreation but it more closely resembles work, especially insofar as that you can make rent money.
It does seem reasonable, but does that mean it's not okay to joke about unfair bad things in general? What makes a similar argument valid/invalid?
> The worse part was that after going through the motions, I had absolutely nothing to show for it. That empire I built, gone. The world I "saved", disappeared as soon as the PC was off.

This isn't any different than real life. Everything you will ever do or build will disappear (to you) as soon as you die. If you're the type who believes in leaving a legacy, then consider the heat death of the universe instead of your personal death.
Masters of Doom actually mentions Apogee a few times, and discusses a bit of detail about the Build engine and Ken Silverman (particularly pointed at its influence on the guys at iD, and how it influenced the development of Quake). The author does a good job of describing the landscape for developers and publishers at the time in general as well.
The cover itself is made entirely out of synthetic materials which has implications for quality of sleep. I love the idea but the cover portion needs to be natural fibers IMHO.
No, because they send modulated signals over the copper power cables. Therefor, if they had their own backup power and were operating over the powerlines, they would work.