skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminded me of this essay: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/08/a-generation-lost-in-the-baz...

I don't think it's fair to attribute the issues he brings up to "shipping culture". Rather, the causes are two-fold:

1) Lack of appreciation for history, being doomed to repeat it, all that

2) Making anything above the level of 'just not-terrible enough' without a benevolent dictator is hard.
You can't. Unless you write your own HDD firmware. Buying new HDD won't help much as well, because all major HDD manufacturers have been infiltrated/persuaded by NSA.
Heh, the classical story of when it is when you steer away from the keyboard that you find your solution :-) You learned a great lesson that day.
The problem is that the Author is assuming that 90% of software we write to make a living is set into stone and suppose to run forever. Almost everything we do is disposable and replaced within the same decade.

So he does not like Javascript and Nosql. Is it hard to find a JavaEE job? I think not.
> Once I had to port a large legacy FORTRAN program to a Unix box. It was structured entirely with goto, no procedures, functions

Sounds a lot like FORTRAN IV. From what I remember of that version, that was pretty much all you had.
Said variable could be in memory, but the point isn't to save DB reads, but to avoid saving data you don't need to. This is a technique to implement the same feature without having to store additional information in your core business logic, that is relatively useless outside of this password reset or user signup. Of course you may want to save this for BI of audit purposes, but then you can (and should) use an appropiate seperate system.
> "The major influence here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who taught us that the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right."

He's done it again, using Germany's own history to his advantage:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31170591
I am aware that there is no silver bullet, but at the same time certain pieces of software have worse reputations than others (Adobe Flash, Java for example). I assume this is for a reason.
>Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the hands of cancer or heart disease.

There is a vast difference between an untested, experimental surgery to save you from death and a tested, nonworking procedure that relies on beneficent future people to invent wholly new technologies to save you from death.

Cryonics is not about saving lives, it's about hoping against the evidence to recreate them when they are already gone.

If you want to cheat death, you need to actually conduct an experimental science of cheating death (ie: preserving and restoring people before they are truly dead) rather than just buying the first available option, no matter how scientifically unworkable and technologically unrefined, like a lottery ticket.

The Wright brothers did not bet that their first design for an airplane would work. They experimented until they arrived at a design that did work.
Better toys. ;D
That would not surprise me. Horse riding is an extremely dangerous hobby

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8339097.stm
Is it any different from HipChat ?
When the state conducting torture and assassinations without due process of its own citizens is the one making the calls about who to round up or kill via metadata they are vis a vis.
IP changed, and DNS failed to update.
Clear cookies or use private/incognito window.
Instathink
This learning app, Instathink, is about developing businesses and individuals to think clearer, critically, creatively fast and fun.
Lopeca – Discover places live from local people's camera
Raspberry Pi 2 update – (unofficial) Ubuntu 14.04 image available – Ryan Finnie
> What were they smoking to come up with 3MHz 8bit computer when market moved on to 16/32 bit?

I think the A500 cost more than 8-bit money, and back then a barebones 386 from a computer shopper ad cost about the same. Add VGA, monitor, sound card, hard disk and you far exceeded the A500 cost and there still weren't many good arcade type games for the PC.

They probably wanted to sell to gamer-pirates. I remember thinking NES users were getting shafted buying $40 rom chips, when 100 floppies cost $25 and some of my friends had huge libraries to copy and trade.

Edit: I liked the C128. I used CP/M on it at times. Ultima V was cooler to play in 128 mode. 80 columns, wow, I used that all the time with a 128-mode terminal (was it "desterm?"), some word processor I can't remember now, and GEOS was better except that it did not know how to handle the display aspect.
The trouble though comes about once you have to start working with a UI library. It's a mess and a half unless you use C++. I'd like to try using Elm, or Purescript for UI work using atom-shell or nw.js. That opens almost the same can of worms (how easy it might be to 'bind' your engine to your UI/view).
I've written a non-trivial application using QtWebkit entirely for the UI and it was a very agreeable experience. The engine of this app was C++ but it got my gears turning.
I've used it on and off since it was in beta, almost a year. (I should have added a disclaimer that the developer is a friend.)

It's good if you want to set goals for N pomodoros on task area A, M pomos on project B, etc. and then work predominantly in pomo-mode and track your progress on your goals. If you don't use the timer mode, hand-entering time spent probably will get tedious quickly. It's designed to help particularly with time-boxing (i.e. when you're budgeting out a limited amount of time across projects), though I don't use it that way.

I think it's pleasant to use in day-to-day use, decent UI.

Cons: I find that I have a hard time doing my planning (time allocation) on a mobile device screen. I want to do it on a big screen where I can see everything, or on paper. I'm not good at regularly triaging the list and adjusting it, so the goals tend to grow stale and I start ignoring them a bit.
They mention using BEM (https://bem.info/) Any idea what it is? The site is not at all clear.
No. A modern device (PC, tablet, phone) is full of firmware/binary blobs: graphic accelerator, WiFi/Bluetooth module etc. There's a small Open Source Hardware movement (http://www.oshwa.org/definition/), but it's nowhere near it's software counterpart. I hope such revelations will help to get it moving.
Yes, and some programming languages will let you express that, eg C you can compare &x == &x not x == x.
The solution is simple and obvious: skip the loan.

Get the car when you've saved enough to buy it without a loan. Just about the only thing which mandates a loan is the purchase of a house, anything else should be put on a back burner until such time as it can be purchased without 'financial assistance'. If you absolutely need some form of motorised transport while you can not afford a car, get a moped or small motorbike. It'll use less fuel, be cheaper on insurance and still get you where you need to go.

Live according to your means, not according to some projected ideal. Don't even look at the ads for 'cheap loans', credit offers, credit cards and whatnot - use 'm to light the stove instead. Better still, don't look at any ads as their purpose is not to help you make informed decisions.

Don't play the money game, you can not win and it never ends.
The drives get infected if the virus is executed, they don't come pre-infected.
There are only three possible outcomes.

- Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc)

- Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.)

- Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!
Removing Libsystemd0 from a Live-Running Debian System
Try to understand the data model. Dump all the SQL schemas , diagram them if required and study them.
"debugger" in the broadest sense. I would start by intercepting the network traffic (at appropriate protocol level) and getting a feel for what is going on, and if it matches the docs.
I totally agree with Rich Hickey. Very important to have mastery in one language at least. Once mastered feel free to experiment with other languages, but do not just learn several languages and know them only at a surface level
Why not mention factorials? 9!! is way bigger than 9^9^9. And you can write many exclamation marks in 15 seconds.
True, thats the right context - in my case though, the Telestrat was "the machine that almost made it to the 90's" in a similar fashion.

It was a great time to be interested in computers. Much complexity, many options, and so little time .. which eventually ran out for all of it. Only a handful of us are still using these machines for things these days..
Regretting things in your life is awful. I learned a LOT from not finishing deadlines, messing up complete branches of code and working on projects I don't like at all! In the moment I could have a regretted it, but looking back on things, it was always a valuable life-lesson.
The old pacifist keyword, its a bit like the communist keyword.

The only war we have at the moment is the one you (assuming you're a shill) created and want to sustain. Because if you don't, it all falls down. Its about the US dollar, and oil.
How to Unlock Samsung Galaxy S5 Plus Using Unlock Codes
A video game smashes crowdfunding records by raising $72m—and counting
Ah, ok, well thanks for the inspiration! :)
Why, you didn't actually think that the links that Google displayed were actually _links_ to the websites did you? ;)

For a variety of reasons, the links that Google displays when you perform a search first redirect you to their servers, and then they redirect you to the site.

For example, here's the link for "sluggy.com" obtained from the search "sluggy"

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sluggy.com%2F&ei=7PziVMTAL8rroAS3xoGYBg&usg=AFQjCNFqb4P18q_i2jlYMUeBe1vo-1j_Hw&sig2=g4mQfqQ6NB1twrtQ5Vq7Ng

As you can see, the original url is in that, along with some metadata. 'usg' seems to be consistent across searches, so it probably ties back to me, or at least my browser's USeraGent. 'ei' is inconsistent across searches, so it's probably a per search token, which will presumably allow google to track the spread of this link, and prevent abuse. sig2 is likely the signature of the whole thing (and thus also changes from search to search).

* Disclaimer: I do not work for Google, and knowledgeable engineers there are probably laughing at the poor dweeb on the internet who thinks he knows more about their infrastructure than they do. ;)
Incidentally I wrote a simple CLI RPN calc in half an hour recently: https://github.com/alexander-b/clac

I was planning on adding a REPL-mode to it today for fun, and then someone linked me this post, saying "this could have been clac!", hehe.
I agree with your comment, mostly.

Just mention that comparing MHz is not quite right in that era. For example Speccy's 3.5MHz were not that much of an advantage compared with the 1MHz of the C64 if you take into account that it didn't have hardware sprites and all had to be implemented by software, 48K models didn't have dedicated audio chip, etc.
I find it strange too that people (even some with more technical background) refer to a firmware as something obscure/magical. Chip technologies are so advanced today that you can run a code, that was only possible on a PC a decade or so ago, on a tiny controller. It would plainly stupid for NSA and the like to ignore such opportunity.
What's the language of the sources?
Yep. Washing dishes, taking showers and sleeping - the best methods for solving complex problems.
A 100% bullshit-free textbook on math, calculus, and mechanics
It's not a mainstream malware, so if you get infected it means you are on NSA list and buying new HDD won't help, because vulnerability remains unless HDD manufacturer fix their firmware.
I'll skip right to the end from now on, to know what I'll be getting myself into.
The Artic Ocean is stirring. The consequences are both good and bad
1. Start at the simplest subsystem, and work from there.

This is especially true when working with third-party, legacy, or undocumented code. In the absence of documentation, your only way forward is to read the source code[0]. Find the main() of the simplest/smallest module in the system, and begin tracing through the code. This could be with a debugger, print statements, or the search functionality in your editor/IDE (Find Usages and Go to Declaration in Intellij are lifesavers).

2. Don't be afraid to break things apart.

If the simplest module in the system is overwhelmingly complex, start commenting out parts of the code. Go until you have effectively reduced it to "Hello, World", if you have to. From there, you can gradually add features back.

3. Constantly test your assumptions.

Don't assume comments do what they say they do.

Don't assume that config flag produces the behavior the documentation claims it does.

Do take inventory of you assumptions whenever the behavior of the system contradicts your current understanding of how it works.

You should be able to back up any claims about the system with empirical evidence e.g. when I change A to B, X happens; if I change A to C, Y happens.

[0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/learn-to-read-the-source-luke/
The things most likely to kill you in one infographic
How is that targeting OS X if it doesn't support HFS+?
Chinese Startup Giving Employees Teslas
Microsoft will support biometric password-killers on Windows 10
It's not just the blog - news.bbc.co.uk also intercepts middle clicks to external sites. Middle clicks on links to other bbc.co.uk pages work fine though.

Is it an accident or intentional? Anyone know?
Yes the spyware would have to be targeted to the OS they want to infect. There's no reason to believe Linux would be immune though.

I imagine using an encrypted filesystem would be immune though.
A few quick observations:

⚫ Having all your eggs in one basket is a poor option. And by "your" I mean "my".

⚫ IP-based reputation tracking's been useful. It's dead. Get over it. Thank the NSA. And Google. And Verizon. And advertisers. Not necessarily in that order.

⚫ If you're not offering me GPG/PGP based multi-factor authentication, fuck you. Seriously. Just fuck you.

⚫ Have your CEO go through your account recovery process. Try not to piss them off or hand the keys to their castle to the wrong party. Like I'm supposed to remember the month and year I signed up for your service? Not. Bloody. Likely.

⚫ That and about a half-dozen other questions would have been impossible to answer if I didn't have local archives of much of my data (thank you OfflineIMAP). The cloud really sucks at times. Especially when your feet are glued to the ground.

⚫ CAPTCHA's just about reached EOL as well. I might be able to solve about 1 in 5 these days. If that. Your goal isn't to absolutely prevent someone from getting onto your system. It's to slow 'em down and raise attack costs.

⚫ If you're offering Internet-based services, start sorting out how you're going to manage reputation with your Tor clients. Because you'll be having Tor clients. FAUST and Fair Anonymity are two projects I'd uncovered in the not-too-distant past, though both appear to be little more than research projects at this point. I'm not aware of implementations of any Tor-related reputation management. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf https://gnunet.org/node/1704

⚫ You don't trust your users. With good reason. Your users don't trust you. With good reason. And yet you live together on the Internet. Figure something out.

⚫ No, Yahoo, I'm not giving you my mobile number either.

⚫ There's a lot of money not to be made in offering free email service. But I'd be happier if a few more folks were doing that. Or if we could figure out a p2p direct messaging system that wouldn't instantly die under a blizzard of spam. I think something involving clay tablets might work.
wow you use nodejs. how amazing that is
Just do -1 on an unsigned number if you're that lazy.
Amazon has started shifting some demand to it's sorting centers and from there to the USPS - to individual post offices. Maybe this explains the fixed number of UPS drivers.

The nice thing in this for Amazon , is that this really shortens the delivery distance they need from their external supplier(which means faster, cheaper shipping) but they also have more control on their shipping network, especially around Christmas , when resources are tight and it can cause lots of problems, which means better trust with the consumer over other companies.
Millions of harddrives, millions of infected machines all over the world. Sound very targeted to me.
The avocado stuff its not really true. The avocado shouldn't exist, because the animal that propagated its seeds went extinct a long time ago (if the term "Megafauna" comes to your mind when you think about that, you are not misguided), but wasn't created by humans, in the same way that corn or wheat are, because the avocado survived even when there were no humans around to propagate its seeds.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-s...
There seems to be some kind of bird theme going on with their CSS classes.

class="distinct-component-group container-buzzard"
class="distinct-component-group container-pigeon"
class="distinct-component-group container-macaw"
class="robin sparrow-container"
class="sparrow-container sparrow-columns"
I believe there is a bot that monitors websites for changes, and whenever they change enough it posts randomly generated strings along the lines of:

> The new <sitename> design is terrible! Bring back the old one!

Whether it recognises the irony that it also moaned about the 'old one' when that came out, I'm not sure.
Why aren't there more women airline pilots?
No, I don't believe that handing weapons to people turns them into fundamentalist terrorists, and I don't believe the Iraq war created a group whose modus operandi has been the same since the 1800's.

Take a look at the article I linked above; this form of religious extremism has been a powerful ally to those seeking political power in the Middle East for a long time. Saudi Arabia was built on the back of Wahhabism, which it then tried to subvert into a conservative institution to ensure its rule.

In short, these guys like to play with fire to further their ambitions, and ISIS is the latest explosion. If you reduce ISIS to 'this happened because we did this', then you're missing a whole lot of narrative, not to mention understanding of the situation.

Why do you think they're so well-funded, and well-organised? This is not the result of a corrupt war that decimated Iraq's population, it's an ambitious power play that appears to be getting out of hand (again).
What can be the real “Travel 3.0”?
i don't see the connection. if freelancing is such a transferable skill, then you'd see a lot of successful startup ceos with freelancing backgrounds
> I'm asking if you notice the gulf between how politicians speak, and what motives they give you the impression they have

okay.

> No one who is not self-deceived, or deceived by others, works in that way. They are self-interested for the most part. They don't want to help everyone in America

wat. maybe you're the one who is self-deceived. how could you even know?

> You see, there is no America, in reality.

wat

> Their professed "to protect America" motive is just a fork-tongued, or sugar-coated, rhetorical device that does not comport to the reality in their own heads

wat

None of your rambling and incredibly cynical post precludes the idea that a person who works for the NSA can have strong beliefs that are sympathetic with (some portion) of the USA. Or maybe they intend to help out other parts of the world. If you are not too dulled by your own view of things, you should be aware of various crises that have occurred and are occurring around the globe. Accurate and timely information in these events can and will save lives.

Why join the NSA? It can be hard to help people when you lack the wealth or resources to support your endeavor and when you lack the power and control to execute. The NSA has all of these.

Or maybe they're all terrible people. Maybe they're in it for the thrill. Maybe they have no choice. I don't know. But there's just no way you can be so certain about any of this.
It's draft of the article
> What the article doesn't reveal is the attack vector, how did the firmware in these drives come to be infected?

http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2015/Equation-Grou...

Classic spying methods to deliver malware

The attackers used universal methods to infect targets: not only through the web, but also in the physical world. For that they used an interdiction technique – intercepting physical goods and replacing them with Trojanized versions. One such example involved targeting participants at a scientific conference in Houston: upon returning home, some of the participants received a copy of the conference materials on a CD-ROM which was then used to install the group’s DoubleFantasy implant into the target’s machine. The exact method by which these CDs were interdicted is unknown.
Show HN: Aiomas – An asyncio based library for multi-agent systems in Python
Yeah, that was a great contest as well. Though the numbers involved are necessarily much smaller than even the BB numbers, because they must be computable.

Also see this old HN discussion where Eliezer proposed a good way to beat the winner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542770
I wonder if ship-it-now isn't more a reflection of the times, rather than the right answer.

"Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar.

There's a quiet theme that runs through the community here, and tech in general, that suggests everything that's new is often just old-again. A lot of these "rapid changes" really do feel like reinvention and change for its own sake, and seems plagued with the same issue as above -- building new iterations on existing ideas, picking off low-hanging fruit but not really going anywhere.

edit:

The problem is that these technologies, being so beginner-friendly and aggressively marketed, rapidly pick up steam and become the “cool” things to use, regardless of actual merit or lack thereof.

This line hit it on the head for me. I've been in the business for a while but have only been programming directly for a fraction of that -- I can readily admit, a lot of the newer JS libraries and frameworks made me feel like a superhero with almost no proper training or understanding of computer science.
Wow, 9!! is so large that the exponent almost needs it's own exponent.

9^9^9 =~ 2e77
9!! =~ 1.6e1859933
That's true. But it does help a lot that there's a merchant ship equipped with these things as well as a fast rescue boat if you're ever in distress. Furthermore, writing free software for the big ships will also help the little guys too, even if it means running the software on a laptop for extra situational awareness.

As for security, yes, this is a problem. It's the same in aviation with ADS-B, completely unauthenticated messages that the on-board software will happily digest,[1] whether it's to mislead the pilots or find some vulnerability in the avionics software to exploit. How can this be anything but gross negligence on the part of both the regulatory committees and the industry at large?

1. http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/security-fla...
Any plans to extend this for cycling? Been looking for something like this.
Spain shoeshine man gifts prized Twitter accounts