skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Weirdo.

I'm just going to quit my job and give freelancing/consulting a shot. In the middle of West Virginia. I don't think I could ever leave programming. I started around 9 years old, I've already been through my slump and come out the other side more interested than ever. In programming, that is. The way most companies handle software development, though? That is certainly downright terrible. My knowledge of history and economics encourages me that this is probably a somewhat temporary situation, though. Companies are disemboweling themselves with astonishing fervor while the infrastructure their employees need to serve customers directly is becoming ubiquitous. It should be fun to watch.
Should be this link: http://www.asus.com/Phones/Fonepad_Products/
One of my friends got similarly burnt out of 10 years of coding - he left software engineering for teaching English to kids in Vietnam.

Everyone's desires in a career/life are different. We also are wired differently. For me, I would like to become wealthy enough to live comfortably & support my friends, financially & coding-wise, in their endeavors (many of them are musicians)
Because the Bitcoin hash function doesn't change, can't change, without effectively wiping out Bitcoin. Which is a bad thing for a currency in general. Which means SHA256 is getting weaker proportional to all power in the world - since confidence in Bitcoin depends on the idea that it can't break - not that "only people using it can't break it".

Of course, this is already true anyway - the largest mining pool has been large enough to carry out 51% attacks for a while now, even before it was shown you could do it with much less power.

>Likely in the same way as your current multi-core smartphone?

Battery technology hasn't gotten appreciably better in a decade. And even if you could get enough power, how do you handle the heat? And even assuming all that...you then run into the problem above. The power of every other computer in the world will be a lot higher.
The idea of the “hello world” program was promulgated by Kernighan and Ritchie in “The C Programming Language”, and they saw it the way kylec does. Quoting “The C Programming Language, Second Edition”:

“This is the big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy.”

(I got rid of my first edition years ago but as I recall it described the purpose of the program pretty much the same way.)
How does a single company go about buying an entire TLD? Doesn't seem very "forward looking" for ICANN. Pretty soon it will turn out like our .com issue which all "premium" domains already purchased and/or squatted on.

As an aside, I really don't like all these "cutsy" TLD's that are showing up. To me, whenever I see a .info or .biz, I'm already wary of the link... now there's things like .ninja, .technology, .academy, .bargains, .bid, .build, .builders, etc etc etc...
Oh, certainly I'm not saying that a developer gets a pass for not using everything at their disposal (especially if it's something the developer had a choice on).

But the implicit requirements in tooling, the fact people are blaming a developer for using the language without also relying on third party tools, tells me a lot about the language's deficiencies. Also a bit about the language's community.
I was asking about "MSYS2/MinGW-w64".

You seem to be confusing mingw.org (http://www.mingw.org/wiki/getting_started) and MinGW-w64 (http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net) and your rant seems entirely directed at mingw.org.

The software distribution I was asking the parent poster about is MSYS2 (http://msys2.github.io/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/), do please come back with constructive criticism on that project if you are interested enough to investigate further.
How did you get back to the software industry so easily after a long industry break working as a bartender...

I would like to read the response to this question. I think there are many software engineers out there who would like to take a break from office and/or coding jobs to work simply – be it bartending, woodworking, volunteering – using their hands and interacting with a diverse community of humans.

As someone who has interviewed many candidates for coding positions, I always give attention to those who have ventured out of the field and ask for insight into those experiences.

Note: this is a bit of a cross-post since I commented on the article, too
I'm happy that OP found what he wants, but honestly... I'm actively repulsed by the idea of living a life like the one OP is starting.

I'm close to OP's age (I'm 30; he's 32), and the idea of working on a farm, doing manual labor, and raising a kid is like living hell to me.

To me, the ideal job is one that involved having 16 terminals open, and I'd rather work in an office than in any other environment.

To each their own, I guess. OP can do what he wants, and I'm enjoying being a childfree lesbian who slings code, happily works a white-collar job, and eats, sleeps, and breathes technology.
Something physically taxing and which requires complete attention. My best example is skiing. Try to think about a hard problem at work, while doing 15mph on a black slope, and you'll soon be hugging a tree or doing a five point yard sale[1].

Of course, you generally can't ski often enough to relax. Other activities abound. Tennis occupies mind and body, most team sports too. Swimming, cycling and running don't cut it for me, but for some people do.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yardsale
Sure. I simply meant that the assumption that an average person participates only in 2 chains per year and performs 3650 transactions in one chain is really far fetched.

Consider the amount of transactions you do. Basically every party becomes a single side channel which requires some activity in the actual blockchain. It would reduce the amount of transactions that are the style of "My local supermarket which I visit every other day" but not anything else.
App and data neutrality should be next. Apple shouldn't be able to monetize the phone they already sold me by extorting 30% of all apps I buy.

Google shouldn't be able to horde all the data. Make google a dumb pagerank index!
Or make people want what they produce...
Maybe it is the way these colors are represented on screens? If we were to see this dress in real life would there be any argument? Or are there any real world objects as simple as a dress that aren't designed as optical illusions that would evoke the same response?

My opinion is the picture is just terribly poor quality. Maybe that has something to do with it.
> if anything, this is an example of how peace of mind can't be found on either ends of a see-saw

Well, there are different personality types out there. This may be "peace of mind" for him.

Personally, I split my time between the "real world" and getting my "hands dirty". I think it's important to have both at the same time, so you don't end up see-sawing between the two.
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages: Print the words hello, world" - p5, The C Programming Language, Kernighan & Ritchie, 1978.
yeah, i'm trying to figure out how to "be your own The Man" - its just a different problem to solve. easier said than done but we like hard problems, right? I've not solved it yet so let me know when you do. currently early 30s, family of 4, Boston

Current Objective:

Write a function that creates HTML that generates webpage views and prompts for creditcard numbers. Use monthly account deposits as metric to optimize performance.

FYI Rob rocks - see http://startupbook.net/
Most off the shelf VCSes are designed primarily for code — and line-based code at that. Look at the revision tracking support in Word or Google Docs — it's character based. That's what we really need some decent tool and hosting for, with stable URLs, that can be relied on. Arguably Word is better than Google Docs for this, as its revision tracking ultimately goes into one of the better defined parts of OOXML. (Last I looked LibreOffice was pretty poor for this, but I haven't looked all too often.)

Still, I'm unaware of any VCS that actually does half of what many of people want to do — in diachronic linguistics you often have to deal with variation in source texts that /isn't/ semantically important (Romeo & Juliet v. Romeo & Iuliet, for example), and then doing n-way diffs between various copies of the "same" text. You don't want every single i/j or u/v to be flagged up, because the signal:noise ratio would be astronomical. Lots of different groups have lots of very subtly different requirements, and basically nothing off-the-shelf works well.
TLD squatters. Same exact problem as before, just more expensive.

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...
Ask HN: Tool to post new referrers from Google Analytics to Slack?
I'm starting to build a tool that I imagine already exists. I want to have all new referrers from the real time section of Google Analytics be posted to a Slack channel. Hard requirements are:

1. Based on the real time data from Google Analytics. E.g. no one day time lag. No data from crawling the web.

2. Use Google Analytics Real Time API or something else approved by Google so it isn't going to get Google blocking my analytics account.

3. Only posts referrers that have never been seen before, or never been seen for some trailing X day window.
Operation Earnest Voice - the post
This was my reaction, too. Thinking it over some, I think it's likely that certain tiers of instance types are more affected than others. And it's also likely that even though AWS seems to have lots of open capacity available, they probably are operating at a pretty high percentage, so gradually idling 10% of their host hardware would probably put a pinch on availability. The average lifetime of instances may also be a factor. I have a few long-running instances going most of the time, but I do tend to start and stop dozens of instances within minutes, depending on what I'm working on. So for those use cases, it hardly matters.

And of course, Amazon has an interest in encouraging its users to build their systems in a cloud-friendly way. ie, properly designed services on AWS should not suffer from having a handful of VMs get rebooted at any time. So, from that POV, it's just good medicine to encourage the culture they built their service to accommodate.
Anybody knows what this 10% mean? I mean :

a) only 10% of the fleet are running a version of the hypervisor that is affected by the bug

b) based on the turnover rate, they expect 10% to need rebooting under the customers by the date the bugs are being released.

c) 10% are running a combination of the affected hypervisor and vm's that are reasonably at risk of exploitation, other's may have the faulty hypervisor but either are being used as single tenant (there is no risk of someone breaking out and affecting someone else) or are running vm's that may not be able to break out depending on the nature of bugs.

Just speculating, any ideas?
Full-on agreement with what you're saying here.

And if someone really wants to place blame, it's pretty tough to ignore the regulatory and interest rate changes that created the environment that allowed it all to happen. But again, like you said, good luck improving human nature.

Banks have shown themselves to be pretty irresponsible with (practically) free credit though. That's a mistake we shouldn't repeat again.
"Weary" as in tired of seeing them? Or "Wary" as in "Not sure I want to click on that link"?
I wonder if he'll post a follow-up blog where he bounces back yet again to programming when he realizes how back-breaking, if not soul-sucking, farming is.

Or maybe he'll start blogging about and writing software for small family farming? There's an audience for it so maybe he can find the middle of that see-saw?
I think it will be interesting to see how other providers handles this.
> "Weary" as in tired of seeing them? Or "Wary" as in "Not sure I want to click on that link"?

Both?
They explain this in the second paragraph.
I've been trying to show people this image all day to explain why I see it as white and gold. Lighting and shadows can strongly affect tints in a scene.
http://www.incense-man.co.uk/T-shirt_whiter_shade_of_pale350...

The shirt in the sun is white, the shoulder in the shade is blue. There's enough info in this image that everyone should be able to mentally balance the whites. In the case of the dress, some are applying this white balance without a strong reference point, others are not.
foo-bar dear friend.

Lorem ipsum :)
Ah, yeah, I did leave out that they have some FiOS build out commitments in various cities like NYC, but from what I've read they are not putting money into anything else or anywhere else, see e.g. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en...

"I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said yesterday in the Q4 2014 call with investors.

Although maybe they're replacing DSLAMs as they become unmaintainable; AT&T is just moving hardware around (even pulling an old DSLAM out of a training facility), adding newer generation DSL here and there, and in many places where we supposize all the DSLAM slots are filled just refusing to supply new service.

I don't think this invalidates my argument about capacity, though. If you're not in a Verizon FiOS area, or worse, in one of the many states and territories they've sold, you're not getting more capacity out of your DSL line from them, right? They might, though, be putting in more backhaul to satisfy, and I've heard no reports of AT&T DSL suffering from saturated backhaul.
.info and .biz have both been around for 14 years, so they're not exactly just starting to show up.
> Also that there's almost no reason to want to make truly anonymous purchases.

That's just silly. You can certainly think of things people have a legal right to do that they still wouldn't want any record of. If you're paying for an abortion it's perfectly reasonable to want the payment to be truly anonymous. The same goes for other types of medical treatment, any purchases of an embarrassing nature, donations to politically charged organizations like Planned Parenthood, charity by people who believe altruism is only satisfied when the donation absolutely cannot be attributed, etc. There is also the simple metadata concern that giving anyone a record of everything ever purchased by you (and everyone else) could be used against you or for evil purposes generally.

The ability to make anonymous payments has been the norm since money has existed. Cash is anonymous. It's only the last few decades with the rise of electronic payments that tracking them all has even been possible, and there is no law of the universe that says we have to accept the loss of privacy.
President Calvin Coolidge, on the subject of farm subsidies, from Wikipedia: "Farmers never have made much money," said Coolidge, the Vermont farmer's son, "I do not believe we can do much about it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge#Farm_subsidies
Paras, great answer. Zoho founder in one of his interviews said that it is possible to drive down costs of a mature stable software product by following model similar to theirs. This can be a key differentiator for such products. What is your opinion on that ?
Man, I love programming but there are times after sitting at a desk for seven hours then spending another hour at the gym to get exercise that I feel like modern life makes no damn sense. It's moments like these that the idea of working on a farm, doing something real with my hands, sounds really great.

But who am I kidding.
Since I've done cleaning, not moving, I think I can still suppose that it is quite different than farm work. I can see how it's physically hard, but I think I would actually prefer moving. When I move heavy stuff, and I moved probably 10 times, I have a whole routine for picking stuff up correctly, and it's kind of like squats. Anyway, I think farming might have actually given you a more visceral experience than moving. In general, I think the hardest things we used to do when growing up are our brightest memories. For many people I know from Russia, it is the army.

The point I'm trying to make is that our experiences are complicated and are a combination of many circumstances. Programming is certainly more abstract and hard to remember as an overcoming experience, but it is what you make of it, and what you want to make of it in the future. If you ended up in software, there must be a reason for it, and hopefully it's more than just pay. I'm an introvert, I've always loved reading, programming, and abstract tasks, so I am happy. Maybe for you, programming is not as interesting as being social, physical, traveling.

Maybe the author is more like you than me, in which case, great. To each their own!
Bounding Viral Impact in Experiments
White snow looks blue at dusk

White snow looks gold under the sunlight

Your brain controls for these effects (mostly) and you still think 'white snow'
What traits make up a good developer?
> I found a job that doesn't require me to be thinking about things non-stop.

Where?
If you enjoy it, then it's a benefit. I find that having bigger problems really helps me switch context. I have young children at home who demand a lot of attention. It's impossible to focus on work when they're around, so I don't.
Rackspace is doing the same due to the Xen vulns announced.
Yeah, there's so much wrong with this paper that it ceases to be wrong and just enters a realm of academic Dadaism. It's basically impossible to even formulate a working hypothesis without having a deep understanding of the socioeconomic drivers and effects around educational attainment and post-graduate alienation. The idea that engineers are inherently radicalizable runs counter to the academic thinking on the subject -- the article is provocative, sure, but extraordinary claims &c....
I agree that composability is an important concern, which is why I like to use what someone above called an "ARM" (abstract relational model) library, instead of an ORM. I'd put in that category Squeryl (Scala), jooq (Java), and SQLAlchemy (Python), which all allow building relational queries "on their own terms" and allow for easy composition.

Another side benefit is it lets the library authors worry about portability between databases so it's much less of an issue.
So they’re happy to ship me 80% AR15 lowers, along with the jig used to cut the fire control pockets. Plus all the other parts to build the AR15.

But not a machine that can cut the fire control pockets for me?
Well, it's the difference between getting paid (salary, fixed, no logical incentive to grow/improve) versus getting paid (percentages of benefit, the more benefit you create the more you make, growing non-linearly with your actual output).

(postlude)

It occurred to me this morning that even in theory, market economies don't pay to the seller a percentage of the buyer's benefit. They never do: it's not how they work. The full area under the demand curve, above the line indicating price, accrues to the buyer. Buyers that get a very great benefit (tangible or intangible) out of buying a pencil, a gallon of gas, or a computer generally pay the same price as those for whom the benefit is very slim; and there is no limit to that benefit.

This is mostly beside your point, I know. I just thought it was a nice idea, worth sharing.
My understanding is that copyright is null if it relates to a state that doesn't exist anymore. I think it's almost always safe to assume that Soviet-produced images are public domain.
what, you can just tld squat? (without founding a nation)?

How is that not like squatting on all domain names that start with an "a"? I mean, how can it be technically possible.

Did some guy just pay 20 bucks for the .app tld and ICANN was like, cool, nobody has registered this one yet - you can have it?
Uncertainty in Business
Show HN: A Python DSL for Describing JSON Schemas
Which will cost less: sending political money to the current party controlling the Administration, or those build outs?

Comparatively speaking, politicians individually are cheaper by, say, 3-5 orders of magnitude, as a whole, maybe 2.
Maybe you should move out of your city ? ;)
Amazon's security advisory seems to indicate that they have this capability for 90% of EC2 instances (leaving 10% that must be rebooted). https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/
Amazon’s Twitch Site Bets on Poker
Name-calling doesn't really add to the conversation.
Rooting Out Malware with a Side-Channel Chip Defense System
The dress that broke the Internet
This extended TLDs are the biggest scam ICANN ever pulled. Huge money grab for companies to buy more to defend their brands.
This Is What the World’s Greatest Pop-Up Restaurant Looks Like
While I agree that programming attracts a lot of people that aren't in it for the love of the craft, I disagree with most of your sentiment. I see a creative person who struggles with having to focus on someone else's agenda.

Most non-developers see programming as tedious, mind-numbing work that involves zero creativity.

Most people who have never worked on a small farm or built a table/shed/house/whatever think of the manual labor as tedious, mind-numbing work that involves zero creativity.

Both working on a farm and programming are surprisingly creative professions. I grew up on a farm, and farming requires a love of creating and building and an incredible amount of creativity. ("Big agriculture" is a bit different. I'm referring mostly to single-family operations, though many of those are quite large.)

In both, you have to love building things from the ground up. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty and put up with occasional tedium, be it fixing a particularly annoying corner-case or riding a tractor for 12 hours.

In both, you have to solve complex problems with limited resources under time pressure. (The things I've seen my grandfather fabricate or fix with random broken junk and an arc welder are simply mind-blowing.)

Most farmers I know embody the "hacker culture" more than most self-proclaimed "hackers" I know.

I'd argue that going back and forth is less of an extreme than you'd think.
> Or we're all cynical assholes. Just possibly.

Unlikely. HNers are wide-eyed Utopians in the Platonic fashion of believing in virtue through central planning. There is no cynicism here to be found, but in the downvoted comments.
VLC 2.2.0 multi-releases
This technique can be applied to created side channels among any connected sub-network of Bitcoin users, so if we're able to build good technology to figure out when to create a side channel (and with whom), it's likely that a large fraction of all transactions could be moved into side channels. It really does have very good potential for scaling the Bitcoin network by an order of magnitude, or two or three.

Combined with increases in the block-size limit, this technology and others are increasingly making it seem like scalability is unlikely ever to be a real problem for the Bitcoin network. (And file that under great problems to have.) Recently I've seen scalability cited as a demerit of the Bitcoin network more and more by people who don't keep up with the technology and the community developing it—and less and less by people who do. Good progress is being made.

But I agree with you that the rough assumptions the authors used to quantify this technique's potential to scale the network don't make much sense.
Any idea what they might want to use it for? Give every Android app a domain? Just sell domains like every other registry?