skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does this mean that version numbers for software in ports and pkg will be frozen and security fixes backported? That sounds like the relatively new quarterly model but with support lasting for 5 years instead of phasing out after 3 months. Given the sentiment elsewhere on this page that "this doesn't really change anything outside of providing guarantees," my guess is the answer is no.

Sure would be nice. Coming from Debian, I long for a similar model in FreeBSD.
A Scientist in Wonderland
Clearly, this picture is vastly different from the original picture you painted. I feel let down by the fact that you did not mention how outdated your original description was.

I live in a newer area of Bangalore and my apartment is surrounded by construction sites. There's a settlement of construction workers right across the road. What we see is small temporary one-room houses with satellite TV, and families that dress up and go out every Sunday. We even see them buying basic cosmetics in the local stores. Kids are not visible in the day time either in the settlement or on the construction sites, and I like to hope that they are actually in school.
Profit has never been high on Amazon's list of priorities...
Ugh.. I really consider putting every swipe-page as its own history in back-forward to be gruesomely annoying, especially on mobile. Yeah, I saw the point and played with it after five swipes, but getting out of the site shouldn't be a bad UX either.
IBM seems like it would be a terrifying place to work, Initech level. With the 1,2,3 system there is also probably tons of project protectionism going on, and you probably have to wear a tie.
They actually did something very similar to that :P

http://www.theonion.com/articles/reclusive-deity-hasnt-writt...
http://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/man-uses-assault-r...

It's really not the best choice for bear-hunting, but it is possible. More problematic is the barrel length and capacity than the cartridge per se.
for the love of christ, it's OS X, not OS/X
The entire voting population of a city [not] losing their jobs all at the same time is more valuable to a politician than a lot of things, really.
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.config/git/ignore

cat >> ~/.config/git/ignore
.DS_Store
.AppleDouble
.LSOverride
.AppleDB
.AppleDesktop
.apdisk
.fseventsd
.Trashes
.Spotlight-V100
._*
Icon
Network Trash Folder
Temporary Items
Icon
I've always wonders why apple doesn't have some sort of .app.gz "special". Why does DMG have any reason to exist?

Even if you really really think you need to ship a readme (Hint: No one reads them, and you don't) a zip is simpler and opens quicker.
People love to hate the messenger.
Native vs. Cross Platform for Application Development
Taxes + tariffs can solve that issue.

The main issue is if you push too hard, then the $49 to US shareholders suddenly becomes $49 to Irish Shareholders instead, as companies have the ability to move themselves to other countries to take advantage of tax codes.

So the tax / tariff systems need to be written in a way to account for that. Or we can get a quicker Congress so that we can keep up with (legal) tax evaders.
Arguably, al-Awlaki simply preached dissent. Granted, you can argue he was a traitor actively trying to harm the US.

This is a drastic oversimplification of what the USG believed about al-Awlaki. CT officials in the US believe al-Awlaki to have had direct roles in the "underwear bomber" passenger jet attack and an attempt to blow up two cargo jets with PETN. He was indisputably a counselor to Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood.

In sum, the USG and UK believed al-Awlaki to have been Osama bin Laden without all the money, operating from a secure location in Yemen, recruiting random people from around the world to conduct horrible crimes in the name of AQAP.

It does a grave disservice to the tradition and, one supposed, the very concept of "dissent" to equate the coordination of murderous large-scale attacks on civilians with "dissent".

Sharing this belief with the USG does not require someone to believe that it was justifiable to assassinate him. But you can believe assassination to be wrong without glorifying its victims.
There are many places you couldn't conceivably pull over.

You can always get around this kinds of problems by stating the functionality clearly (and limiting it's actions to a well defined set), but exactly this diminishes greatly the functionality of the service.

If you guarantee to people they can safely idle, they will idle and barely look at the road. If you don't, they will have to maintain attention at all times and all this will be is a "strain-reduction device" (i.e. not so useful). There's no good half-attention for humans.
Retrotechtacular: The Gossamer Condor
There is the GATTACA argument that unequal access to genetic modification will foster even greater socioeconomic inequality than we already face today. The film imagined a future in which genetic superiority could be measured by percentile and that job eligibility was based almost exclusively on your genetic score.

The implication is that the widespread but costly availability of genetic modification in tandem with free market capitalism would necessarily form such an enormous social wedge.

I haven't thought about the issue enough to agree or disagree with the theory, but I am stating it here as a potential answer to your question.
There was a patch submitted to the Darwin project to do this:

Https://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwin-kernel/2004/Jul/msg00120.html

I don't think it ever got reviewed though.
Apache Kafka 0.8.2 released
even relatively simple changes were not MFC'ed until someone asked for it

To a certain extent that's always going to happen in volunteer projects. That said, at least on the server side, the "ecosystem" of FreeBSD-using companies with committers on staff is expanding, and they're doing an increasing amount of this sort of maintenance. The topic of how we can make sure important MFCs happen has certainly come up.

Will this change in the support policy allow point -RELEASE's to be made more often, thereby more closely tracking changes on that particular branch of stable?

Maybe. Certainly there is significant support for doing more frequent point releases; but some of the reason they have been so slow lately has been due to operational issues (aka. re@ juggling too many balls at once) so these policy changes aren't going to have a dramatic effect overnight, but they might contribute to things improving.
sorry, not mine, found on SO http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/17285/make-the-m...
100 Years of National Geographic Maps
How much? 10 million dollars? That would let them hire keep an extra, say, 100 engineers for a year. Compare that to the more than 100,000 people being fired.
This reminds me of Litographs, a company that puts full text of books in poster form. While the concept works fine for prose it doesn't translate well for code.
PyPy dev here. Could you give us some info on how to help you more, for instance, a small benchmark of where we are still slow? We love to hear how PyPy is being used "in the real world"
> Why does DMG have any reason to exist?

History and backwards compatibility.

The format itself also does a bit more than just a file archive, as it's a disk image format. You can do things like style the background and so forth.
To distinguish it from its predecessor, Mac OS IX?

Trolling is a art.
Atom is essentially a web browser running a text editing web app. Given how much web pages tend to "expand" when loaded into memory in a browser, it's not so surprising.

I'm guessing that Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor.
Ask HN: How do you do your taxes?
I've always used some form of tax software, but it's gotten more expensive as I've done more freelance business. Also, at $150 when all is said and done, TurboTax isn't much less than the $225-350 that tax professionals have quoted me.

How do you do your taxes? Any recommendations or stories either for/against the software and tax pros?
I wrote this one so any comments are welcome and I'll try to answer them as best I can!
I've spent most of my life in Alaska. I don't really know anyone who would hunt brown bear with that cartridge; it would possibly suffice for self-defense. Many "smaller" rounds are fine - plenty of locals hunt with 30-06, or even 270 Winchesters, but those rounds are much more heavily loaded. Also, the comment in TFA article about the "tumbling" being key against bears sounds off; the hard part is getting through the protective mass of fur/bone/muscle/fat.

That said, bears (and especially wolves) surely represent minimal risk as compared to the elements and more generally being in got-damn space. Funny thing to worry about.
Erowid Recruiter (erowidrecruiter) – Twitter
Highlights include the ability to delete a topic, and Kafka-based consumer offset management.
Status quo? I dont see it as any different than "putting up" with $x.99 prices, its just not enough of a difference to change behavior. The quirky gas prices date back to a time when gas cost $0.25/gallon, so the 24 & 9/10 cents was a significant margin increase (vs 24 cents) on a product that was, and is, a low margin product (at least at retail).
Well.. the development that can come from traveling is never what you expect. There are many different facets to your experience but I can touch on one.

You're traveling with friends. My idea of traveling is to jump into something different. A different culture, sounds, traditions, animals, priorities. As we travel, we bring our own bubble of culture with us - we bring our perspectives and education and interests, etc. The first part of your trip, days or weeks or months, will slowly feather the edges of this bubble until you notice more differences and similarities between you and wherever your traveling. You will learn and grow when you start to recognize these differences and play with them. You attention to these things will become more refined as you are traveling and as you loosen that bubble.

Traveling with compadres only strengthens this bubble of culture that needs to wear down so that you are able to learn and grow.

I guess it's important not to be overwhelmed by some grand desire to grow or change but to take each moment as it comes. Seriously. Look at the fine details along the edge of an awning? what signage is there? Why was this city built where it was?
Get close to death and then everything will become revealed.
Ask HN: Is Learning COBOL a Good Idea
I'm currently tossing around the idea of learning COBOL. The reason this has been on my mind is because its a very very old language. It seems that it has long since been out of the lime light for a long time but, many companies still use old legacy COBOL code. As the years go on I feel COBOL will become more and more in demand as many younger developers and students are no longer bothering to learn it but there are still systems running it and there are still people who are paid quite will to maintain it.

What does HN think?
Show HN: Goto – A Linux shell 'cd' replacement tool
Thanks for the feedbacks.

The service is in its early preview state. The "Scroll" mode will be there soon to enable users to copy & paste the content properly.

I understand that it is a bit cumbersome to use from phone side devices. Please try the service from your desktop and use keyboards "left/right/pgdn/pgup".

All your feedbacks are great and hope that I can pull the level of the service to higher and higher.

Please contact me at minsu@bbdbu.com if you need to further discuss anything.

Minsu Chief Engineer buk.io
Contains directory shortcut Bookmarking and a Fuzzy File finder. Unchecked on a MAC.
The NT kernel is not a microkernel. It all runs in ring 0, including device drivers: I/O, graphics, HID, file systems, etc. It's modular, but there is no protection between the various parts, which all run in a single kernel process, with a single address space.

The NT kernel is sometimes called a _hybrid_ microkernel, but this refers only to the fact that the internal modules are logically decoupled (with message passing between them, for example). Also, graphics actually used to run in userland until they moved it into the kernel for Windows 2000.
1. Because a DMG can hold an HFS+ filesystem, and an HFS+ filesystem can represent files with resource forks. So, backward compatibility.

2. Because a DMG actually is a disk image, not a partition image—and therefore can represent a collection of volumes. If I recall, OSX's current "clean" install process effectively just takes a DMG containing {EFI, OS Base, Full Restore Image} volumes and uses the functionality of the "Erase and Overwrite with a DMG" option in Disk Utility to replace your disk's contents with it.
I understand that some hint of usage must be there. Anyway, please use keyboard from your desktop. left/right/pgup/pgdn.
Five year support for a release every two years still means three balls in the air.

Yes. Although this is probably better characterized as "two balls actively being thrown and one ball on its way down", since we've never done new point releases in the last year of a major branch (and I doubt that will change).

No dedicated timeline for minor releases. Could still be 13 months between 11.1 and 11.2.

Correct. We decided many years ago that FreeBSD worked better if we did releases "when they were ready" rather than working to a calendar. I'm sure OpenBSD's schedule works well for OpenBSD, but our projects are quite different (e.g., OpenBSD development is more centralized in a small number of hands).

Doesn't address question of what actually gets back ported. Will new em updates go into stable?

FreeBSD is a volunteer project. Updates get merged if someone merges them. Aside from policy restrictions, which are not changing (e.g., we won't merge ABI or API-breaking changes, because we insist on supporting third-party software), it's entirely up to people having the time and interest.
"Patronage is probably already ten times the size of microtransactions"

Any data / sources to back that assertion?
Page information on the bottom may help? Good point. Paging has its pros and cons. One feature that is not obvious is to bookmark or share the URL that has the location within the content. (Though anchor may do the similar thing).

The URL has all the location information if that is of any value. Thanks.
Ports is a separate issue. We simply don't have the manpower to maintain old versions of 20000 pieces of third-party software for five years.
You get the same answer if you only use '+', but you may get a different answer if you use 'x', that was my point. In other words, once you have a "canonical" addition table for the elements of a set, there are many multiplications tables to choose from which "extend" the addition in a straightforward way.

Sorry not very knowledgeable on this stuff so it took a long detour.
Right. it is pathetic that the service doesn't hint the user what to do. Will improve it.

Thanks.
I am a currently employed American software engineer who is interested in relocating to Germany soon, but I'm worried that I won't be able to find a comparable salary there. Currently I earn in the $80-100k range, is it realistic to have a similar compensation in Germany?
It means if you'd oppose yourself at some point in history then your ideology is contradictory and invalid.
It's not only from organizations and powerful entities, I like to apply this logic in normal day-to-day communications with people too.

If someone has a very strong opinion about something and tries to "convert" everyone to it (say, vegetarianism, meditation, emacs, or whatever), it is usually because someone is very insecure about him/herself this trait, and made it part of their identity. It usually has no point discussing this with a person like that.
That's pretty much my proposal, though with a few caveats.

It's a flat fee. That is, you're paying the same whether you fetch a single work or 10,000. Aaron Swartz's mass document mining would be supported. If you're interested in large-scale literature analysis, it's possible.

It's scaled to income / wealth. Information is part of what makes the system in which you're living possible. If the system's rewarded you, you reward the system back. Hence the tax element. Possibly scaling to some sort of connectivity plan might accomplish a similar aspect via price discrimination (of the old-school multi-tier service offering model, not the new-school hit-them-with-hidden-fees approach).

There are tiers of compensation. Pumping out white noise / easy-to-generate content doesn't necessarily buy you high compensation. Detailed scientific / journalistic work does. Penalties for inaccuracy in genres where accuracy matters, especially against deliberate distortion.

Implementation is the tricky bit.
I commit often, rewrite mercilessly, and thus I push to the big server infrequently. I do push frequently between local machines and servers. Mercurial Evolve makes propagating these edited commits across my local servers quite nice.

Anyways, besides the plug for hg, my point was that I would expect pushing could be a once-a-day kind of thing, whereas commits should be every five minutes. :-)
OpenJDK is unofficially ported and built for numerous platforms. But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK. To contribute to it, you sign Oracle's contributor's license agreement.

Oracle's no golden example as a leader in open source (let alone libre software), but they demonstrate the probable trajectory for the Microsoft projects at this point: a healthy, cohesive community of developers (developers!) using the technology in an ever increasing number of projects and platforms.
> You don't, and can't. The purpose of having watchlists is so counterterrorist investigators can quietly monitor the movements of people they think will organize terrorist attacks. Notifying the people on the list defeats that purpose: it ensures that none of the people it's watching will incriminate themselves, or lead counterterrorist investigations to the other members of the plot.

Fair enough.

> That doesn't mean the lists aren't fraught or regularly abused. For instance, you surely cross a line from "legitimate investigative tool" to "tool of oppression" when the watchlist ensures you get an extra hour of screening at the TSA checkpoint.

At this point, I want to say, "What can be done about this abuse?!" but I don't really have any answers. The best we can hope for is some form of independent oversight from someone who can remain some degree of objectively neutral (which is to say, not buddy-buddy with law enforcement), but who also can be trusted not to leak stuff to the press.

I dunno, does anyone have better ideas? This is way outside of my comfort zone.
I made a 0.1 release of just this idea back in 2001, then abandoned it because I'm lazy: http://wry.me/~darius/software/idel/

Well, minus the asm.js, which I kind of wish I'd thought of at the time.
Immortality via the singularity
"Favorites" in what sense? As in "favorite to hate"?

I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the hosts / domains they feed from.

They're absolutely worthless.
Decoding disruption: Frameworks for understanding industry change
I never knew how badly I wanted a store like this around, there've been so many times I'm mid-project or rebuild and the old bolt/nut/fastener/whatever either breaks/gets lost/shot and I just have to wait for the part to come in or wade through the bins at a hardware store which have been waded through by everyone else and now I'm frustrated...
Bah! Jesus. Price. no matter.
No it was not, because that would be very easy to disprove (I can imagine MySQL and PostgreSQL being far more popular).
I can just hear the guy who wrote the software for creating UK birth certificates: "I know for sure that I need to display two parents max on these."

And I feel for the poor programmer whose job it is to deal with the brand-new edge case of putting three parents' names on one.
Pre Approved for a Car Loan with Bad Credit
Bad weather and unexpected obstacles like pedestrians are actually trivial to handle. Remember that an autopilot's "visual" perception isn't limited to the visible-light range like ours is.

Poorly-maintained roads are the problem that would give me nightmares if I worked on these. Lane markers that might have been perfectly usable when the database was compiled may be too worn out or obscured by snow, leaves, or who-knows-what else to be usable later. How can you design a system to fail safely when every input source is independently fallible? And how can we redesign the auto insurance industry to make it possible to try?
This is pretty ignorant. Omnisharp + vim/emacs + ASP.NET 5 is a very clearly supported scenario by the ASP.NET team.

In fact, you'll find David Fowler advocating for emacs and Omnisharp's good-ness.

But yay for pithiness, amiright
I feel like daemonizing Emacs should be the default. I can happily add random stuff to my init.el which causes it to take a little while to cold start, but I never see a cold start so from my perspective Emacs is instantaneous for editing a random file. I keep hundreds of files open at all times and never have an issue with performance. I just go through and prune my open buffers once a month or so, for organizational reasons more than resource usage.
Angular is kind of old and outdated so I'd suggest something like React. React is more robust, and it'll be around for at least 2 years.
>Atom doesn't have a 64-bit version either

Hmm?

/usr/share/atom/atom: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64

edit: its here: https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v0.177.0/atom...
But no DNA is being modified.
They don't apply to military actions on foreign soil.

Assassination by drone is (or should be) considered a political act, not a military one.
Unfortunately the statistical analysis supporting that point sounds incorrect to me.

Their evidence consists of:

1. A claim that the mean return on equity of the previous CEO of -0.68 in the "savior" case (white CEO following a minority CEO) is significantly different from a value of 0.11 in the control case (white CEO following a white CEO). This can't be true because the low number of samples implies standard errors of 0.66 and 0.05 for the means. I'm computing a z-score of 1.18, corresponding to a two-sided p-value of 0.24, far above the claimed p<0.01.

2. A claim that the mean return on equity of the previous CEO is correlated with a binary variable describing whether we are in the savior case. While their measured correlation coefficient of -0.13 would indeed be statistically significant if it were measuring a correlation of normally distributed data, the use of a binary variable describing unbalanced classes means that 95% of the variance is concentrated on just 5% of the data (28 samples). Bootstrapping based on the published mean and deviation of each class shows a 0.11 standard deviation of the correlation coefficient, and more importantly a p-value of 0.12 which is once again non-significant.

An interesting feature is that the standard deviation of the return on equity differs a lot between classes. I assume that this is because the returns on equity are far from being normally distributed, and indeed data from another class with just 4 samples shows an abnormally low standard deviation, letting us reject the normal distribution hypothesis with p<0.001. Most returns are very close to zero, so necessarily some are much greater than the standard deviation. A few or even just one large-magnitude return in the 28 "savior" samples would suffice to create a spurious correlation.

I would contact the authors about it, but I would like someone here to confirm if my analysis makes any sense.