skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I passed the FE exam in the mechanical engineering field, and I'm considering getting a PE in software. I have the same feeling you have that this test seems like it is tangentially related to software.

The mechanical engineering exam tests your knowledge of the various sub-topics within the field. It covered thermodynamics, dynamics, fluids, vibration & control, heat transfer, etc. In addition to that there was a section on ethics, and a short bit on accounting/economics.

I had imagined a software engineering exam might have sections such as algorithms, data structures, concurrency, cryptography/security, etc. Basically it should prove that you have a complete, broad, knowledge of the field. The questions in each subject matter are not particularly hard, but I can be sure someone that passed the mechanical engineering FE has a basic understanding of every topic covered in a bachelors degree.
Could that be a honeypot to trap bots that don't respect robots.txt?
Great handling of the issue (as usual). Bravo.
Do a google search for some of those products - ends up being even weirder when you see some of the sites linking to them.

edit: especially considering that google still links to them, it just doesn't show their description, just gives the standard error for "couldn't show this description because it was blocked by the site's robots.txt"
How to survive picking the wrong technology
Right, so I agree that the engineering challenges aren't very great, but I would argue that little of the current infrastructure was designed with the ability to de-prioritize packets based on their origin, and so there'd be a pretty massive replacement of hardware in order.

I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle.

The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind).

The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do.

> My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present.

I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long:

http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber...

Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.
Seed, and small accretions. Very neat.
It does seem not unusual that, at their peak, technology companies embark on a project that will eventually be their tomb. However, closer inspection reveals that this is really just survivor bias, as many companies continue on post tomb building. Apple built the Infinite Loop campus, Sun built its Menlo Park campus but really didn't "die" until after the Agnews complex was being built.

Interestingly for me, they are getting bigger and bigger. The space ship complex for Apple (and this proposed Google setup) are both quite large. So harder to lease out as a unit to the next company that comes along.

Still, if you have the extra cash laying about companies like IBM have proven that investing in real estate is a good hedge against the future. They have several really beautiful campuses.
Yep, I was making my own web based irc bouncer/client until I saw irccloud and my project was instantly dumped and I'm now gladly paying them!
OAuth 2.0 comes to mind as well.
Brian Krebs' book Spam Nation talks about this quite a bit. So many people still buy prescription medications and fake watches and such through junk email. Enough that it still makes financial sense for the spammers to keep at it.
Shameless plug, but I have a project with 24 languages if you want: https://github.com/bfontaine/Katas
He's an uptalker?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdhJxAmUu3Y
For what it's worth, I live in Sunnyvale just next to Mountain View and I have never seen or heard this abbreviation used. I thought "I work at Google in MTV" described some internal Google department, and it wasn't until I saw "commute to MTV from SF" that it clicked.
It's unrealistic to compare WordPress php and Facebook php. Most website running WordPress do not need the optimization required to run facebook.

If there is something that slows down WordPress it's the database queries, the amount of external assets and bloated themes. There are more then files being downloaded for each requests and all served from the same server.

Throw in hhvm or any optimization on the code and you still have to deal with the other issues.
But then I'd have to manage and maintain a server.
What if I don't want to be a server administrator?
Good point. I wonder how many projects have that much languages in a single repo.
Six Reasons Why the Containerized Future Is Closer Than You Think
I can't think of a single reason. Some of the URLs still work too.
There's even an example of this code page in the article - it mentions the name "Markku J{rvinen", which is presumably intended to be "Markku Järvinen". This is probably accidental, as the page is served with charset=iso-8859-1.
That's simply inaccurate.

When you are constructing a building, the owner hires engineers to oversee the work done by the general contractor. There are a lot of intricate details here, but the work is exactly as the parent to your comment described.

My brother is one of the owners rep for structural work on a 60 story building going up in Manhattan right now. They're pouring an 8' thick foundation tomorrow. The people involved are all engineers working for the developer, and the inspectors aren't showing up until after the fact.
Man....

I heard he was hospitalized a day or two ago, but I just assumed he would make it. He was always one of those people who just came off as... immortal, I guess.

I mean, I know intellectually that everybody dies, but emotionally I didn't even think it was a possibility that he wouldn't make it.

I'll miss him :(
That Wikipedia page is not very useful.
The complaints as I read them are:

* Large repository size because of blobs, large histories, or many files

* Difficulty of using git

* Pull requests aren't easier than patch bombs

Only the last one has to do with Github.
Reading, reading, reading... wtf! I hope that is an abbreviation for something, but to be honest, I don't want to Google and find out.

Disallow: /sr/extra-small-teen-porn*
Whenever you hear anyone talk about 'growth hacks,' just mentally translate it in your mind into 'bullshit'.” PG
"reads front page of HN" omg VLC 2.2 resume playback finally!

"alt tab"

pacman -Syu

extra/vlc 2.1.5-5 -> 2.2.0-1

Neat.
I work from home and it's pretty nice never having to commute. I miss other people though. If Google built nice apartments or condos and rented them at discounted prices to employees, you could wake up and get dressed, take some little robotic electric vehicle to the nearest cafe, get a free breakfast, and then pop into work. To me this sounds amazing, because it's like working from home but with other humans to interact with.
Plenty of people got partial grabs of Geocities. No one knows how much was lost. This is the most complete single collection I know of, pieced together from several people. https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6353395/Geocities_-_The_PATC... If you just want to browse, Reocities is probably the best interface. http://reocities.com/neighborhoods/
maybe, but why would THAT be the honey pot? it could be any phrase, really.
Indeed, the very next paragraph lists limitations:

"Computers with users regularly attached to them, like laptops and smartphones, often have no baseline routine from which abnormal behavior can be inferred. [emphasis mine!] So, PFP officials say, their technology is at the moment better suited to things like routers, networks, power grids, critical infrastructure, and other more automated systems."
Nearly Free Speech. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
'The Dress' Inspires Outpouring of Cool Optical Illusions
Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web
You're right, it has awesome potential, and said potential has been realised in the past with apps such as Paper and Cook. But due to the race to the bottom in app prices, nobody can make a living out of the App Store any more (besides cheesy games) and thus we're seeing very few great apps any more.
Amazon is working on an SDK for Echo
I agree about safety critical areas (what about financial?). Nevertheless, my understanding is that the principals at engineering consulting firms must have a PE, and so if that is true, what about software consulting firms?
At first I was surprised to see it implemented in Bash shell.

Then I saw GNU Make.
The future of smartphones: Sensors, machine learning and virtual reality
Asteroid strike, massive volcanic eruption, etc...
That's just way too specific to be an accident, wonder what the story is..
You definitely did not have a deep look at "how to optimize wordpress". It's a massive spaghetti piece of awful PHP that does A LOT of completely unnecessary work. Now as a smart VM, it's possible to reduce quite a bit this amount of work (inlining etc.) and the JIT coming from HHVM can come handy in here.
Way to go Loren, the people have spoken and they like it!
If they follow through, we will finally have a mass market PC maker recognize the importance of a clean install. If they follow through completely enough to get Microsoft's "Signature" branding, then I just might have to start recommending them again.

All because they screwed up so colossally that they had to turn it around or see themselves decimated.

Interesting times.
Interactive Online Introduction to LaTeX
BTW, the cases are other way round: {|} are lower case äåö and [\] are upper case ÄÖÅ. That is important for sorting order in strings.

The sorting wasn't flawless though, because in ASCII these are ordered {, | and } but the proper (Swedish and Finnish) collation of the end of alphabet is ...xyzåäö. So unless you specifically programmed around it, you'd get slightly incorrect sorting.

Yes, you would get used to having ÄÅ and äå as brackets and braces in programming. If this thing came back I'd be in an hour happily saying things like:

while(<¤fh>) ä
Él=split ' ';
print "¤lÄ0Å, ¤lÄ3ÅÖn";
å
Domino's Pizza to launch smartwatch ordering
They might have signed an agreement restricting "lowest advertised price". They're pretty common.
My blog spends about 10% average request time doing database work. The big WordPress sites I've worked on are generally about the same.

The database is not where raw performance opportunities lie on a sensibly built WordPress site.
My condolences. Sounds like he was a good one and your memories and his lessons will continue on.
Completely misread that title.

Thought that IronSource was buying startups ahead of the startup's IPO, not their own.

My reaction: "Damn. That's both sneaky and a nice idea."
I study at the University of Oulu. The university museum has the machine that hosted the first IRC server :)
The Greenhouse Effect Is Truly at Work, Observations Show
Show HN: Running Sublime Text on a Raspberry Pi 2
Well, you'd want them to try to crawl it. Perhaps there was a bot crawling their site for such links and they wanted to identify specifically that one. It seems most likely that such URL's never existed, but this would be a decent way to identify a bot that's otherwise not distinguishable.
> rent was only about $1400/month

Yeah, but now it's

> The average cost for a 1-bedroom apartment in Mountain View is $2,356, according to myapartmentmap.com

http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2014/10/29/rent-control-off-the...

Granted, if you're a software engineer at Google that's not too horrible, but it sucks that so much of your big salary goes to renting an average little apartment.
I think perhaps starting to build buildings is a sign of a company's maturity, and that separately many companies that achieve this maturity end up struggling to maintain the focus they enjoyed during their growth.

So maybe it is that big successful companies tend to build buildings, and that success sometimes is the downfall of an innovative company.
Satellite data: Tree destruction worse than reported
So we have to firebomb the craters?
YESSSSSS!!! Love this feature change! I'm always on my team about making sure the branding on our presentations and products is correct. It's awesome we can now ensure that branding flows into our tools! Thanks!
Famous last words: A case in point is the lack of space of the Intemet addressing system that emerged in I994 due to an explosive growth of Internet. This may now be solved by replacing IP version 4 (Ipv4) by IPv6, which implementation is underway since about 2000. (p. 173)
'Life and death are seldom logical. — Spock to McCoy, Stardate 2821.7'

I used that quote for my domain name. LLAP.
Have a look at https://github.com/seattlerb/parsetree
Hi!
The robots file is not a text file. I know!
Products blocked due to possible copyright infringement. A lot are disputes over product name or t-shirt slogan.
We were ranking for some terms we did not want to be associated with so we added the offending search result page to the file. Not sure how it ever got indexed in the first place.
Peace!
Ask HN: Is there ever a reason to use ActiveX?
Someone just adamantly suggested that we use ActiveX for a project, and my vitriolic gut feeling was "There is no legitimate reason to use ActiveX. Ever." But that made me curious, is there any situation you would use ActiveX over some other means?
I'm not sure what letters would go on the end of "porn" to make a clothing item, but I'll bet it exists. Or someone misspelt "pony", or... well, you get the idea. No matter what, you really don't want your site to appear in search results for those terms.
I get it... mobile is big, but what is the reason to not invest any time into the look and feel of the regular version?
I don't totally disagree but I watched about 6 mins, until I got the general idea, and I have never considered making a card game before.
Those that install adware are less intelligent--no need to paper over that. Do the writers of educational shows for small children think it ironic that they are more intelligent than their customers?
I'm not as pessimistic as most about the potential for nootropics. The usual argument against them states that if there was a way to significantly improve neural performance, evolution would have found it already.

However, our bodies and brains evolved in an environment of near constant food scarcity, where surplus glucose was the chief constraint on neural development.

Can you imagine the developmental pathways that could be opened if our bodies could leverage the massive amounts of excess energy we consume for more than stuffing it into adipose tissue?
I don't know the answer to your question.

I can say that ethics is a core part of engineering curriculum from day one, and one is repeatedly reminded that one is expected to exercise their "moral agency".
It's still a worthwhile effort even if all he did was aggregate them.
Is there a way I can help?
It should be "...ahead of its own IPO". Please, HN moderator, be nice today.
That's the price of the lean organization. Some must die for the bottom line.
I don't think it's 100% the case in engineering today. My uncle has his own engineering firm, has a PE, and they handle airport runways. I think that is pretty critical infrastructure, so I'm not surprised.

I also think that many firms that design consumer products aren't run by PEs. So it may not be a universal requirement.

In my opinion the most analogous type of engineering to the average web dev shop is HVAC. Every building needs someone to design the HVAC system, but it's pretty routine work. There explicitly is a PE exam for that type of work, which seems like overkill to me, even though I'm very much in favor of PE exams.
I like you already :)
Lists like these are what's useless
> I guess the minus would be its harder to read in the dark.

There is a backlight when you want it. And the plus side is that it's readable always, not just when you activate the screen.
Uber Says Security Breach May Have Compromised Driver Data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF5ROpjRAU

LLAP
What details would you like me to flesh out?

Maybe I can offer an example. I'm sure you will be able to poke technical holes in this, but let's say a company comes up with a new technology (i.e. not cable) that can handle small packets very efficiently in a small locality. It's super cheap to do this, and it's great for networking small communities. But, video traffic really slows down the network so it's filtered out and thus it can't effectively treat all data equally. Instead of being able to quickly start up and offer their services, first they have to register with the FCC. Then they have to pay an inspection fee, and account for yearly audit fees. Plus, even though their prices are cheap, they're not much cheaper than cable because all the cable infrastructure is subsidized by taxpayers so their prices appear to be less competitive. All these extra costs to comply with the regulations add up to the point where the capital needed to even start this business is way too high and way too risky, so this technology just won't even have a chance of existing. It is effectively crowded out by the heavily subsidized and protected cable telecoms.

For a real historical reference, take the railroads for example, where these types of regulations began. The railroad businesses got huge subsidies from the government in the form of land and tax breaks. This allowed the railroad companies to effectively cartelize the industry because it crowded out more decentralized forms of transportation like the small rail and networks of canal systems. Even though these localized, less capital intensive systems could have served people better than railroads, we'll never know it because of the opportunity cost of central planning: the railroads used the state to force the public to pay for and subsidize their infrastructure. These crowding out effects are the unseen consequences of regulation.

Big business has a long history of using the power of the state to impose regulatory barriers on future competitors as a way to preserve their monopoly power. It started with the railroads, continued through the Progressive Era, and continues today with policies like "Net Neutrality". And they always use the same public relations con, too, appealing to the common good and fairness to get public buy in. They say that these policies will protect the consumers, but really in the end these policies will protect big business from competition. This creates artificial scarcity and allows big business to charge consumers higher prices.

See my other post here [1] if you want a little more historical background on how this works.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998958
Oh yes, English is very frustrating in this sense. This poem really puts it your knowledge of English pronunciation to the test: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...

The first verse:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
awesome response!
Has anybody shown that having an adult brain with non-child plasticity is a limitation?

I find that my progress on guitar is a direct function of time, which is something else that children have in abundance but adults do not.
Thank you VLC-coders. VLC is stellar and a role-model foss project.
White House releases draft of consumer privacy bill
Wait, VLC can play protected Blu-ray discs? We don't have to use shady software?
Are those who left staying in finance?
thanks! I have some inside knowledge!
Ok that was, uh, different.
As far as I know, .MOV has only one transformation matrix, so you can't do that.

But this fix will help with mobile vides, where cameras for performance reasons don't actually rotate recorded videos when you're filming in non-default orientation - they just note the rotation in transformation matrix, which was ignored by VLC until now.
Does that mean you could specify an object's location by referring to it in the locative case?
Can neuroscience extend that genius across the lifespan?
Sure, it is usable, though the lack of HW acceleration is 'early phase' for me.
Object Oriented, Test Driven Design in C# and Java: A Practical Example Part #4
VLC does have a web interface where you can query the position in the current track. Polling that may be accurate enough for what you want.
Great picture with both Shatner and Nimoy from the old days, https://imgur.com/gallery/1JGQk78
Seems like this could be summarized into 1 sentence. Think of ideas, prioritize them, and test them. This is too broad to be considered growth hacking.

Real growth hacks are things like AirBnB spamming Craigslist, Reddit creating the illusion of users with fake ones, and Rap Genius giving out tweets for backlinks.
> The consequences of that can include: Russia's economy being broken due to a main export literally vanishing into thin air.

As far as I know, the methane from the permafrost is not commercially exploited. It's left there frozen, so this doesn't affect the Russian economy unless one of this "explosions" hits a building.
The dress is white and gold. Or, why BuzzFeed won
This is impressive, I keep meaning to learn to script Gimp and Inkscape, sometimes I think web apps are the only way I can think anymore...

Great point about thegamecrafter, we had the same problem. We want to try their API though, as Paperize could dump entire prototypes in there at once. Makes it a lot easier on your playtesters, too!
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they did put that url into their robots.txt because it is a search result page generated by a bot and that has been visited and indexed by Google…
impossible to do more research on this at work.
Most standard video decoding code uses CPU feature detection and hand-optimized ASM for important bits, so x86-64 doesn't really add anything worthwhile for most video players and encoders - most of the magic is done in SSE/AVX codepaths anyway.
This going to make the determination of responsibility in the case of an accident much more complicated.
Alternatively, my video introduction to Rust should be live soon: https://www.youtube.com/user/DevFactor
Always great to have a few viewpoints.

I 'kudos'ed your post though - because I thought it was very nicely written!
In Europe, Bond Yields and Interest Rates Go Through the Looking Glass
You mean 2 x $5 VPS won't be enough?
You've gone a long way, putting it on a web page. Doing it 'by hand' doesn't help anybody but us. I've been thinking about doing what you're doing; I'm just glad you're doing it!

Hey, if you could automate 'proofing' cards while you're dumping to thegamecrafter, that would be wonderful.
All I want is a templating language in the WordPress core and I can live with all the other bad parts.