skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't hate djb, but I won't run his code.

If you should happen to get involved in IETF discussions, I believe you will still occasionally find him there discussing how to fix various protocols. Back in 2002 I was witness/participant to one discussion involving djb that made me think twice.

Because a great deal of software will not be able to handle Unicode (even now) there was some discussion back then about how to handle domain names in older software once domains with non-ASCII characters were allowed. If your software is assuming all ASCII characters, how do you display/handle a domain with greek or cyrillic characters? This obviously affects DNS and Mail software, so djb's contribution should have been valuable.

The consensus from everybody else was a temporary hack: Punycode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

djb did not like this. He suggested all software should instead represent the actual characters rather than changing them because humans should be able to read them. He proposed this should be done through ASCII art. So if you were to register ααα.com (that's three greek alphas if your browser can't render them), all software should display this as:

_
/\/ /\/ /\/ / /\ /\/\
\/\ \/\ \/\ o \_ \/ | |

We has very serious, and got very upset when we pointed out this would require re-writing all software deployed to date, and if we were going to do that we'd just make it support Unicode properly.

My problem was that this idea was so batshit crazy I had to then question how crazy his actual implementations were. I dug into the source code of several of his tools.

I came away feeling that the reason bugs had not been found in his code were not because his code was bug-free, but because it is impenetrable noise.

As others have suggested here, it is uncommented, he uses a lot of pointer arithmetic, some parts don't make sense. Making a contribution to improve it is difficult. Identifying if the code is correct or not is near impossible.

DJB's code might be bug free, but it is also quite likely to be bug-ridden but nobody has been brave or bored enough to figure out where those bugs are.

I expect it does not have the same holes as BIND or sendmail (both of which are awful), but it will have holes.

The wonderful beauty of open standards and the work that the IETF has done of course, is that it means we have choices and if you want to run djb's code, you can go and do that. If you don't - and I do not - you have choices of other software that will inter-operate with it as expected.

I don't hate djb, but I don't trust the claims made about his code being watertight, and I do not believe somebody who writes code that is hard for others to understand is worthy of the title "greatest programmer who has ever lived".

Good luck to him and all who use his code, but no thanks, not for me.

P.S. - if you want to see what good code does look like in an MTA, take a glance at the source for exim one day. It is very clear and well structured, I think.
Perfect Ecommerce Script – Wanelo Clone  $280
Why does the headline say "Bitcoin mining offer during install" when the posts in the forum talks about silent install of crapware?
Interesting, did anybody have any success with Craigslist here? Especially, non-US based persons who look for remote jobs.
There were a lot of ALGOL variants around in the 1960s & 70s if you look at the Wikipedia page for ALGOL, including one called GOGOL for the PDP-1. My first guess would be that POGOL was an ALGOL-a-like for the IBM-360, perhaps developed internally by the NSA?
the bittorrent suffers from the same problem? I can not tell if they are different programs, after all they are the same company and are visually identical.
It's ironic given that µTorrent was always supposed to be this ultra-compact and lightweight client (it's in the name!). And it has been, but BitTorrent, Inc. have been slowly ruining it.
bittorrent bought utorrent and started bundling crap with it
The crapware in question is a bitcoin miner.
You're making this "loophole" up.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156539
BitTorrent (the client) is based on uTorrent's codebase as they are owned by the same company. Both can install malware if you're not careful.
Over the years I came to the conclusion that mortality may be the only thing that ensures the necessary flexibility for changes and advancements in society by breaking up power structures.
Otherwise the flaws which are genetically and socially woven into our existence would rise with the elites into structures that would be optimized over centuries to quell all possible changes.

A look at the history of long standing lines of sovereignity shows us what to expect.
Abuses and vices, capital and resource concentrations that would squeeze the life blood out of the masses.
Ask yourself if you would like to be a de facto slave forever. That would likely be your place if you are granted postponement of mortality as a normal worker.

For all the hopes for the better in a state without mortality, even now we have a lot of advancements that barely benefit the masses.
Even within our mortal societies we have legal constructs like laws of succession, increasing abolition of inheritance taxes, benefits of funds and foundations that have non-mortality like effects on society as a whole. Namely concentration of capital.
The results can be seen in the cities of the western world-quality of products, average living spaces, medical treatment efforts are all on decline.
Despite all productivity advancements we have generally rising prices.

So in short, because of our nature we maybe need mortality to exist as advancing societies.
A plug for GPL/MIT Transmission (windows version http://trqtw.sf.net/ )

If you want to avoid ads and bundled spyware, better to use up-to-date FOSS instead of years-old unsupported versions of uTorrent.
I've always wondered if there was a way to monetize uTorrent. The userbase is predominantly people who don't want to pay for digital goods. So they're not going to pay for your software, and it's a pretty hard space to sell to advertisers. You're essentially left with companies whose reputation is so bad, that being associated with illegal downloads doesn't negatively affect their brand.
It's a terrible client. The only reason it's survived so long despite the owner shamelessly milking it of every penny they can is name recognition. The brand isn't being tarnished - it's being sacrificed wholesale for dollars, with the singular goal of extracting as many dollars as possible before it dies.

I suggest Deluge, or maybe Transmission.

http://deluge-torrent.org/

edit: retracting Transmission recommendation because I'm unfamiliar with it's state on Windows. Looks like there are builds, but I've never used them.
The article presents some great 'explorable explanations' by (or inspired by) Bret Victor.

This really does seem like the future of communicating hard concepts.

At high school I would often write BBC Basic simulations of the dull problems we had been given as homework. I was so much more passionate when I was exploring and learning myself.
Really impressive sample. Takes advantage of the screen, instead of just mimicking print.

I especially like the possibility of animation.

This also opens up for some interesting peer-review structures. Like if you "publish" in a journal, a representative gets power to include bug-fixes and a set of formal peers are asked to submit actual fixes, along with everybody else who reads the article.
You can get amazon delivery, not healthcare, in rural america
> who runs their own email server? :)

Hilary Clinton
Sort of agree. Running own mail servers myself. But it wasn't without hassle. Imagine non-technical family members setting up a VPS, postfix+dovecot+spam/av solution and then getting that to work securely on their mobile devices. Not to mention the spam and surveillance issues.

There is room for improvement, no?
My point was, why does the headline say "offer" when it is not offered but silently installed. Sorry for the poor articulation.
Seems like potential gains aren't as motivating as actual costs.
Doubly Linked Lists in C
KernType – A kerning game
Newsletter is a transaction that occurs every once in a while.

:)
I have been using qBittorrent (http://www.qbittorrent.org/) for a while and don't have anything to complain about.
Perfect for my simple needs (RSS feeds, launch a program on completion).
I recommended it because it seems to cover the history well. It also seems to have less of an agenda than either <http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isi... or the Intercept's counter <https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/20/atlantic-defin....

What's modern about ISIS, she argues, is mass killing. And then there's the GTA vibe, and the glamorization of mass killing. But destruction of idols is hardly unique.

I do fear that the Wahhabis have gamed the Infidels well. They used their petrodollars to proselytize the ummah. Then they incited fear and loathing through terrorist attacks. They sucked the Neocons into invading Iraq, and creating the chaos needed for expansion. Time will tell.
Chocolatey, https://chocolatey.org/, "Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind". This will be the package manager bundled with Powershell in Windows 10, I think.

Still, I prefer standalone installers. Neither Ninite nor Chocolatey offer choice of a location for installing a package, and I prefer to keep large/IO intensive apps installed on my HDD, not on a tiny SSD.
Heat: Part I
Fair point. Last time I searched for a job was 11 months ago. I asked for an interview at 5 companies, interviewed at all 5 of them, and all of them wanted to offer me a contract (only one of them declined, because they couldn't afford it). Except for the one who declined, I didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops. Maybe 2 short interviews, that was it.
An eloquent, objective, and thoroughly researched opinion.
Oh sure, it's an offer -- you just can't refuse it.
That's because it's the default in HTTP 1.1. The server would need to send "Connection: close" to disable keep-alive.
When FB went public at that "insane market cap," the IPO kerfuffle and all that followed, I had a few interesting conversations. I had been working for a while in online advertising, a lot of adwords and other ad platforms so I had a fairly good understanding of the forthcoming advertising product that was supposedly going to determine FB's actual value.

Anyway, my take on it was this: FB stock (at the time) is mostly a bet on two questions. (1) Can they remain the major social network where everyone has a profile and logs in regularly? (2) Can they build an ad platform that makes money off that position. Most people were curious about #2, I think because FB delayed really finding out the answer until after the IPO.

For the second question, I thought 'yes' was most likely. I had (and still have) a lot of confidence in the power of scale to add value to an ad network. The bigger the userbase, the more targeting opportunities you have. If you can limit your audience to people in their 30s, with kids, within 5 miles^ and still end up with enough people to bother I think you have a valuable ad platform.^^ Anyway, the answer is yes. FB advertising is one of the world's blue ribbon cash cows.

That's the difference between millions and billions.

The first question though, I was (and am) less confident about. For FB to be a good investment it needs to last decades. Google has maintained its search position for a decade, but who knows if Facebook can in social. A lot of the forces at work are more cultural than economic or technological and unpredictable. Will it become uncool, unpopular. Will popular focus shift to some new shiny thing. It's a much harder question. Maybe a reason to think that it can is if you think FB-size and network effects locks a service into position in ways that Myspace-size doesn't. Maybe FB's deep pockets will let them acquire, innovate, advertise and otherwise spend their way to long term survival. I don't really have and educate way of guessing at this question.

^Add in "who are within 2 degrees of people that have visited your site" and you're really cookin.

^^tangent: if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10 second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's.
That sounds very interesting, food-related geekery is fun in my world.

I loved this quote:

For example, in my fourth year—so well into the research phase—I took a digital cartography course because I had the address book of a man I was studying and I wanted to understand his spatial relationships with the people in the book. The course on ArcGIS, a digital cartography software, allowed me to make maps that shaped my close-readings of this man’s letters.

I wonder how large a fraction of the worlds' historians run ArcGIS? No disrespect intended if it's a household name of course, I was just impressed by the application of tools to her field of research. Neat.
The Swedish/Nordic Model just means that women in the industry aren't directly criminalised for having sex for money (so long as they have the legal right to work in the country). It still makes it illegal for women to take safety measures like hiring a bouncer or driver to protect them from violent clients, or working together with another woman for the same reason. It also makes it a criminal offence to knowingly rent a flat to a prostitute. It's almost exactly the opposite of harm reduction - it makes it legal to sell sex, but only in ways that are high risk. Hell, I've seen activists in the UK who see this as a positive, because the added danger will encourage women to leave the industry.
Absolutely. It's crucial for a founder to be able to take a step back and think strategically. Being always under water and completing task after task prevents you from seeing the big picture and taking the big decisions.
Better yet, Transmission allows you to run the torrent client/daemon on a server and only GUI on your computer (there's even an Android app somewhere). Or you can just go with rTorrent, and control it over ssh.

That way you use bandwidth where it's cheap and don't tax your, often battery-bound, local device.
I highly doubt it really mines bitcoin because with the current difficulty a typical modern graphics card can expect to mine less than $0.01 worth of bitcoin a week if left running 24/7 on full load.

Edit: what I meant is that EpicScale in all likelihood mines another cryptocurrency, not bitcoin. Especially that it seems to use CPU which is utterly useless for bitcoin mining (you won't even get $0.01 in a year with the latest i7!)
So what happens if VMWare downloads a new copy of the software from some third party (Redhat or whatever)?
I can't see any captcha ?
This is more than "explorable explanations". There's no reason why the whole concept of user facing application couldn't disappear on behalf of this style of interaction, where commentary is interleaved with active documents.

The first generation of software for non-scientists was based on a metaphor of office paperwork, where information workers created static collections of data ("files"). But computers now are powerful enough to support dynamic content deployed through the web on the fly ("web apps"), without requiring a long previous installation of supporting software , and there are much better compatibility standards than in the 60s, so the original constraints on software distribution no longer apply.

System-level software benefits from a traditional write-compile-execute cycle, where the result is a monolithic binary distribution that is then run over different data sets. But this model is not necessarily the best or the only valid one for user-facing software. Business workflows often work best by combining several small tools, à la Unix pipes.

A platform like the one described by Bret Victor which allowed end users to build active documents without requiring programming knowledge, using PowerPoint-like composition tools, could easily replace many pre-built generic applications, in the same way that Excel is used in offices around the world to replace small "database&CRUD front-end" combinations for small, specific, non generalizable workflows.
s/silly/cynical
A good windows strategy to avoid bundled crapware is to look for portable software that needs no installation.

I always try to install a new program as a limited user (sadly, most programs that come with an installer require administrative rights).

Recently i moved over to tixati as my preferred torrent client.
use of closed source without payment invites litigation? the same with open source then?
What does that have to do with the social obligation to point out when someone isn't?
"...so, curiously, not only is water necessary for life, but life may well help retain water on planets."

An interesting thought. So perhaps old planets that still have water are more likely to contain life. We can detect water in some forms on exoplanets already [1] so soon we may be able to predict how common life is in the galaxy?

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-telescopes-fin...
It's not terrible.

It does it's job well enough, ads can be easily disabled via advanced settings, it works in portable mode without even having a chance to install bundled crapware, the UI does not make my eyes bleed.
A good time to link to the Unix Security Holes Course djb gave in 2004: http://cr.yp.to/2004-494.html
downvotes for not playing nice
While this [the ASCII art story] is an amusing anecdote, it seems highly unlikely that the reason qmail and djbdns don't have any bugs is because "nobody has been brave or bored enough" to look.

Could there perhaps be some other interpretation of his stance in that debate? For example, maybe it was an elaborate joke about the SNAFU that is maintaining compatibility between ASCII and Unicode?
Is there a way to look at girl in a cute pink dress and tell whether she is there to just present a tech topic or she is also open to potential dating?

No.

You're asking too much to be reliable able to look at someone and know if they're open to dating. Given that your target demographic is about 50% of the world's population, the variation is just too large for you to be able to do this. You're going to have to try something else.

Perhaps a polite, friendly conversation and a sustained programme of getting to know them will help you know if they're open to dating.
At last! Office for Mac 2016 hands-on: a vital upgrade, with some kinks to work
Is that "FLUID" written in ascii in the beginning of the video the source code of this fluid mechanism?

Because he starts with a "cat endoh1.c" to show it's content and it's a valid C program.
Yes, of course. The core tenants though, shouldn't be evicted, ever.

I honestly cried when alt.* on usenet was lost. We lost so much.
And this is why property tax should be charged as a percentage of sale price when selling and a percentage of asked rental price when rented.
Could you explain your comment with more detail? It would be greatly appreciated.
They have few hundreds millions users.
While Ruby and Elixir have quite similar syntax, their underlying run time models are fundamentally very different.
Perhaps it could mine whatever someone wants to have calculated, instead of garbage, in exchange for that amount of money :)
I understood (arguably too much) The Cube as an allegory for the intelligence machine we have built/are building. That was a really hard realization.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
From the Epic Scale website (http://www.epicscale.com/):

How is money earned?

Solving math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more has real world value. We solve these problems on behalf of our trusted partners, and donate proceeds to your favorite charities.

The key words there being including cryptocurrency mining.
Perhaps one could pay for the content that he/she downloads with cpu time and RAM temporal storage, something akin to a distributed dropbox.
torrent clients haven't changed much over the years, the old version still works just as well for me. Private torrent sites require specific clients, and the old version of utorrent is usually on the list.
>For purposes of the thought experiment, I certainly don't care if the p-zombie has a slightly different brain-wave.

Yes, you do. Because if the p-zombie has a slightly different brain-wave, it remains logically possible that p-zombies and a naturalistic consciousness can both exist. The goal of the thought-experiment is to prove that consciousness must be non-natural -- that there is a Hard Problem of Consciousness rather than a Pretty Hard Problem. Make the p-zombie physically different from the conscious human being and the whole thing fails to go through.

Of course, Chalmers' argument starts by assuming that consciousness is epiphenomenal, which is nonsense from a naturalistic, scientific point of view -- we can clearly observe it, which means it interacts causally, which renders epiphenomenalism a non-predictive, unfalsifiable hypothesis.
It's almost certainly not SQL parsing that is introducing a serial component and an upper bound on parallelism. Actually, that is a task that is almost perfectly parallelizable. Parsing has no serial component, planning may have one if you somehow need locks on shared data structures needed for plan optimization.

MySQL and Postgresql are insanely different. To a point that it's uninteresting to compare them. MySQL is a keystore with an SQL frontend, which eventually got ACID features bolted on. Postgresql is a full-fledged RDBMS that eventually got refactored with performance in mind. While the end goal seems the same, the results are really different.

All of this text to say something which I think is common knowledge and is found interspersed in the comments here. For any kind of moderately complex query, Postgresql will eat Mysql's lunch. For any kind of concurrent locking, highly parallel, use case, Postgresql is much faster and/or safer. For any kind of very simple query, Mysql will eat Postgresql's lunch. It's a result of different upbringings.

If your use case can be satisfied with memcache, you aren't using a relational database and, yes, Mysql is the best choice, out of these two. Anyhow, in this scenario, today, there is a vast choice of good persistent keystores that are better than mysql.
The bitter irony is, when talking about authoritarian states, as Americans, we didn't used to reflexively include our own country.
Not just corporations, NSA, too:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/nsa-employee-will-co...
Yes, it compiles in to the solver and then can use its own source as the initial state. The guy who writes these (this is one of his many entries to IOCCC) is a genius!
Testing Race Conditions in Python
The IOCCC page: http://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html

There is also a colour version. Very cool stuff.
Ok.

What do you think was the reason C took off while Algol use diminished? Was the growth of Unix a significant reason? Do you think C's adoption was misguided?

I think C's took off because C fit the sweet spot of ability to produce fast code while still being cross-platform and human-readable.
To Explain Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight ‘Rogue Pilot’ Seems Likeliest Theory
I don't remember anything even remotely shocking on MySpace, but the mere presence of people like Tila Tequila was a 'important' factor in MySpace fame at that point. Wasn't it the first breach between remote celebrities and you on the web ? Before that all you had was tiny bits of medias, and all of a sudden, you get to comment on their page. Not even an official website, but the same website you have a profile on.
The time has come to stand up for the GPL
Similar utility for Python - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/retry