skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had many long discussions with a previous boss about estimates. What it boiled down to is this:

* He is on the hook for certain things to be done, and is being asked when they will be done.

* I don't have enough data to tell him in such a way that the organization can plan around it. Anything I tell him is purest moonshine and unicorn hair. Sometimes it relates to reality.

* If I give an estimate, I am essentially passing dishonesty through the organization. I am lying to him.

This did not go over well. We compromised: I gave a order of magnitude WAG. Which, at the least, gives meaningful information and probably isn't wrong.
I remember watching the 60 minute video of the Luxottica interview. That guy was so gangster in his responses. "The perception of choice", just outright said it.

I've been buying my glasses online for the last 2 years now. 39dollar and Coastal. Quality control for the frames aren't as good, but they work. On average I pay ~40 vs 200+.
IBM and Gov't Employees Arrested in Plan to Obtain IT Contract Worth $24M
Yep, they convert it all using a payment processor or keep a small percentage, no risk. State currencies are volatile too. Just look at the Euro.
Keeping an always consistent state in a large distributed you are fighting against the law of physics.

Like it is mentioned, Google did it with their F1/Spanner SQL database. But that also mean GPS receivers with antennas on the roofs of data centers.

Which is yet another thing that can fail and it, either by itself or in a cascade of other failures will lead to unspecified and possibly undesirable behavior.

Recently I see a lot of advocates of dropping NoSQL databases and moving back to Postgress or other SQL databases.

The problem is SQL and schemas is not the only reason NoSQL databases became popular, they became popular because they also started to have a default and more defined behavior in respect to replication and distribution.

Most solutions don't need that and sticking with a solid single database works very well. But those that need distributed operation have a pretty hard task ahead of them.

One heuristic you can look at is if and how is distribution implemented. Is it something that is bolted on top, like you download some proxy or addon, or added as an afterthought, be very careful. Those things should be baked into the core. For example, does it support CRTDs? Does it have master to master replication and so on. If it claims to have consistency instead availability figure out how it is implemented, Paxos, Raft, or something else.

So far I think Riak is probably the database that thought the hardest and did the most reasonable job. The other simpler database is CouchDB, they have well specified conflict resolution behavior and master to master replication. But you have to usually write your own cluster topology. There are probably others but those are the two I know of first hand.
I certainly hope Betteridge's law of headlines does not apply here. Differential privacy is an amazing criterion, and I'd love to hear about anyone who has put it into practice on data they're releasing.
That is also very puzzling. It gives the above quote but it does not say whether these odds were actually displayed on the screen of this particular game, and it does not say which odds were displayed (the ones with using autohold or the ones without).
I don't know, you can buy glasses affordably, say at costco or online and maybe other places(not sure i'm out of the u.s.), and they'll look pretty good.

If people "need" to have branded goods, let them pay.
I use pass: http://www.passwordstore.org/

It's fantastic, free, simple and works across multiple platforms.

I also set up a simple web front-end for it, so I can use it from my phone: https://pw.mkn.io/
How new is it? I was under the impression that Kilauea in Hawaii was the "newest" (or Lōʻihi if you want to get technical)
+1 for lastpass. On it for now 4 years, they've gotten more aggressive on development as the market grew but still simple as the first time I've used it.
Another purpose of autohold is to provide a floor for unskilled players in a game of skill. They don't use it in Las Vegas specifically to allow players to make as many mistakes as possible. Optimal strategy on 9-6 JorB is 99.54% RTP. Reverse-optimal strategy (making the worst selection every time) is something like 3% RTP. Use of autohold puts an absolute worst case on the downside to video poker.
I'm a development manager and so am obviously asked to give estimates all the time. I found many years ago that no-one reads the qualifications that go with estimates, they just want a date or a number of weeks' effort and assume that it's a commitment.

I now play The Quality Game, which works every time. An example from a few weeks ago:

I gave an estimate for a piece of work which has plenty of contingency. For any number of reasons, when I gave the date, I expected a sharp intake of breath from the client --- so I quickly added: "The reason for this is that it's a complex piece of work - I've allocated 2 developers and one DBA for 6 weeks, and then one tester for 4 weeks. It's complex and important, and there is no way that the team wants to compromise on quality. That's why it's taking so long. Obviously, if we can do it faster, we will. How does that sound?" No problem.

I've played the Quality Game when telling clients that they need to upgrade to a later version, despite their having been told they wouldn't have to. Upgrading takes time and effort. Again, when quality is at the center of what you do, the logic is unassailable. ("WE could do it without you upgrading - of course - but our strong recommendation is that you upgrade. We're not saying this to piss you off, we're saying it because we want you to have the best quality product possible.").

Dev teams and clients never want to compromise on quality. Sales people don't care, they have to hit their figures, but it's 2 against 1. We win.

Thing is: it's not a game, it's just the truth.

(Great article BTW, will share with colleagues!)
I can't give you any advice about working in a shitty boring job you hate, because I myself am quite terrible at it, but I think Paul Graham has already answered one of your questions.

If you're serious about making a business out of a side project, PG once talked about how you shouldn't try to think about ideas that are "good startup ideas" Instead he says, work on things that you find profoundly interesting. When you've hit something that users love, the idea according to him his, it will take over your life and you will know that your side project is no longer a side project, but a startup. So I wouldn't worry about if you think your ideas are bad, as long as they are interesting to you, work on them.
We should seek some news from Akamaï
I started using Lastpass when I switched jobs and the company I moved to used it. The ability to share logins with people/groups without actually exposing the password is wonderful in the corporate setting, as it makes revoking a group of passwords (think company-level social media accounts) simple and worryfree.

It works well enough to have convinced me to buy Premium on my personal account.
I use KeePass (and KeyPassx on Mac OS), and use network drive to store the DB files.

For password security, I have different levels of passwords, for less important service, will just use less secure password and will not store in security DB.
A Little Black Book and a Pencil.
I found Baobab to be really helpful by letting me focus on the application logic, rather than implementing 1000 things to conform to a pattern. I'm not saying that Flux is unnecessary, but I think it can be improved and this is a nice direction, which conforms to the basic idea, if I get it right.

A blog post[1] from Christian Alfoni with some examples helped me get started with it. The tree becomes a nice summary of your application which makes it easier for someone new to your project to make sense of it. Also there's another post about going isomorphic with it[2], which is intriguing.

[1]: http://christianalfoni.github.io/javascript/2015/02/06/plant...

[2]: http://christianalfoni.github.io/javascript/2015/03/01/true-...
People want to try on several pairs of glasses and see which ones they look best in.

So if you control the retail chain, you've got the monopoly.

They said their competition was walmart. And that they bought Oakley after refusing to stock their product.
The one is a personal insult that can be brushed off. The other is an accusation of unfairness in the entire system.

Are you surprised that the system (and the people within it) reacts to broad-based accusations about its structure, rather differently from how it reacts to angry beefs between individuals?
He should still go to college or budget his time in such a way that he is able to study the things he would learn in college.

This is coming from someone who has been in the industry for 12 years. I was homeschooled my entire life (until attending and dropping out of a community college). I thought that meant I was using correspondence courses but recently discovered from my mother that she just purchased text books and used those to educate me (save for 1 year during "grade school" and all of high school which was correspondence).

As I said, I've been in the industry for 12 years and to this day I feel like I'm judged harsher in interviews.

Also I'm not bragging about the homeschooling. I'm pretty ashamed of it.
$90k with benefits?
Very good news for open-source software
I prefer MacPass over KeePassX, because it support Keepass2 files by default - KeePassX only does in the non-stable version. That's the only annoyance with Keepass: it has two non-compatible file types and you need to stick with one (and hence the supporting software).
Unfortunately, this doesn't scale, as with the AuthorizedKeysCommand, you are required to output all the keys for that user on stdout. Outputing all of the "git" user's authorized keys lines would be an extremely expensive operation.

From the sshd_config man page: "Specifies a program to be used for lookup of the user's public keys. The program will be invoked with its first argument the name of the user being authorized, and should produce on standard output AuthorizedKeys lines"
The Java plugin was trying to give the ability to use Java, which could control all aspects of your machine, without them being able to control all those aspects of your machine. I can't create a javascript that installs a C&C silently in the background, but Java by default would allow all sorts of issues as it isn't sandboxed.

The Java plugin was the attempt to build a sandbox. The problems occurred because it is vastly easier to build a sandboxed language from the ground up than to sandbox a language with full access.
In zsh, =(cmd) will create a temporary file, <(cmd) will create a named pipe, and $(cmd) creates a subshell. There are also fancy options that use MULTIOS. For example:

paste <(cut -f1 file1) <(cut -f3 file2) | tee >(process1) >(process2) >/dev/null

can be re-written as:

paste <(cut -f1 file1) <(cut -f3 file2) > >(process1) > >(process2)

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Proces...

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Redirection.html#Redi...
And the rotten apples get sacked, according to this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9185110
I use 39dollar, but I think Warby Parker has done the best job at stealing marketshare away from the monopoly. The startups are out there, and they are working. It just takes time to tear away from status quo.
Interesting how we're happy to talk about companies in a Positive light that do good things, but don't want to name names when it comes to the shit-holes we've ejected ourselves from.
Probably backscatter?
Still no linux support?

Any plans for that or even just an API so I can write one?
I use a shell alias:

alias getpass='_getpass() { _g=$(printf "sauce%s" "${*}" | md5sum | openssl enc -base64 | cut -c1-16); printf "%s" "${_g}"|xclip -selection clipboard 2>/dev/null|| printf "%s\\n" "${_g}"; }; _getpass'

like this:

$ getpass mail@domain.lts

$ getpass user@domain.lts #for ssh logins
We're talking about 102TB of data (6TB x 17), so a cache won't dent this figure too much (especially, given that each of those disks is one of 45 drives in the pod, which means the cache is shared across all of them). Then, each of the drives will also be serving files (or storing them), which means disk heads will be seeking around all over the place while rebuilding the failed drive...
One pair I got at zenni for $6.96 is the best pair of prescription glasses I've ever owned... it's inconceivable to me how it can be that cheap.
1Password on all the platforms I use (OSX, iOS, and Windows). Great looking UI and an abundance of features. Great support.
Plain text file encrypted with Vim's Blowfish encryption
I use an internal (in my head) algorithm that bases (in part) on the domain name of the site I log into. For example, ycombinator.com could be z4O9999asdf
Which represents

[1 letter after domain][c is 3rd letter of alphabet][numeric letter representation][last 4 SSN][pseudo counter]
It might not be as high tech as software, but I think it offers a reasonable security / ease of use combo.

Note: This is nowhere near my algorithm and tokens have been made up for the purposes of this example.
I can see Vehicle Stability Assistance systems that also do ABS breaking, but that's not really dynamic resource allocation so much as new solution. Ditto, for sending information over the cars local network.

Can you give an example where something not related to traction is run on the same CPU as the ABS/traction system?
Make School takes 25% of your salary for two years. $45,000 is quite a price tag in my mind.
> We asked for this, whether we like it or not :)

Yes, unfortunately we did. We dreamed for an amazing world, but it's not what we got when the world joined in.
> What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion.

She took his photo and shared it on twitter. That's as good as calling him out by name.

> Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No

That's not how he describes it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

Search the page for "Santa Clara"

> To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion.

And what was he doing, besides expressing an unpopular opinion?

> There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears

Of course she should be allowed to object. She should also be sensible enough to recognize that including the identity of the individual in the objection is the same as asking the public at large to take action against the individual.

Free speech does not mean free from consequences. Both parties learned that in spades.
> None of those are really comparable in effort, cost, or effectiveness

Does it matter? Some defrauded users WILL be persistent and WILL go through the effort of using these recourses, so they do keep merchants in check.

The fraud world is not as simplistic as you think it is ("oh crap customers can issue chargebacks against us, I guess we have to be honest now").

Fraudulent merchants will act fraudulently, regardless if chargebacks exist or not. Honest merchants will act honestly, regardless if chargebacks exist or not.
"""Apple tried to solve the issue with "Numbers" but ymmv on how well."""

Your "tiny subset" is your confusion at not seeing numbers I suspect.

Wikipedia actually does a decent job of trying to describe the philosophy.
The telemark turn is more stable than other methods, particularly in soft snow, when your boots aren't attached at the back, which is necessary for efficient movement on flat and uphill areas. The introduction of lifts opened up exploration of specialized equipment just for descending, leading to the fixed alpine boot and popularity of the parallel turn.
I'd say it depends on what the costs are. If he has to rack up a TON of student loan debt it may not make much sense. You can make friends and social connections outside of school if you create the environment to do that. Its a lot easier in school but to avoid the traps of student loan debt its probably better to continue making/creating software if thats the end goal.
We use RethinkDB
Yep, French Open Source Software community is federating to build a strong alternative to major cloud services. It's getting very interesting.
> logging in repeatedly

Repeatedly? Only at my work do I ever have to retype my password. My home is logged in and my phone has a pin.

What repeatedly is driving you away?

PS Lastpass is best in class for me

EDIT: I never memorize my passwords for sites. After having friends who were penetration testers I never do anything half-way secure. I actually can't wait till I have some kind of rfid of some sort to access lastpass.
Are You Ready for Our Future Robot Utopia? (2013)
Exactly. And I'll add that a private conversation is one thing. A conversation had in the middle of a crowd is another. And it's another still when that crowd is at a convention with a code of conduct and the conversation violates it.
Though gaining better performance through sound type system seems quite unlikely, in the best case there will be small overhead, but 15% they claim now is still large.

from the article:

> we measure a 15% runtime overhead for type safety
I was getting this error when trying to update my apps through the App Store. After entering in my password it shows in red letters under the Apple ID entry field "STATUS_CODE_ERROR". That was a couple hours ago.

I just tried again and it said, in red letters, in the same spot, "plist parsing error". Clicking "sign in" returns these errors apparently interchangably.
In this essay you haven't mentioned what you're passionate about. Yes it's good to know what you don't like, but knowing what you do like is just as important in this world be it finding a job or going on dates.

Something else to keep in mind is that while you'll see a great deal of press about the excitement of tech, the reality is that most of the industry can be dry by nature. And on the flip side the "fun stuff" can be a death march schedule followed by your company going under.

By the way I think if you're unhappy that "sucking it up" won't help you over the long run. My advice is to get some help thinking this out: Don't be afraid to find a mentor outside your company, or even go into therapy. And of course talk to peers who work at other companies. Also be open to the idea that your passion might not even be software.

Last note: You may have several careers in your life time. If you look around it not always the case that a coder in his or her 20s will be a coder by age 50.
You're assuming the laptop has malware installed capable of pretty unrestricted access. At that point, all bets are off.

It can just forward code, relay cookies, etc. 2FA protects against someone peeking at your keyboard, or reused passwords, not malware.
I use a qwertycard, I don't see it as being 'low security', but obviously not as convenient as the software password managers out there.
That number is probably the estimated probability that over the course of a year, a single vault loses every file contained on it (which is what would happen if a single vault had 4 drives simultaneously and irrecoverably fail).

As a consumer, the type of failure you would experience, and the probability of experiencing that failure, given that Backblaze has suffered a vault failure, depends on how they distribute your data amongst their vaults. They don't explicitly say how they do this, so it's impossible to know for sure, but we can consider the two extreme scenarios.

Scenario 1: Each customer is assigned a single vault, and all your files are on it. In this case, if Backblaze lost a vault, you would either luck out and have your files on another vault and be completely unaffected, or get really screwed and have all your files on the bad vault, and lose them all. They've got 150 PB of storage, and each vault stores 3.6 PB of data, so we can estimate that currently you may have something like a 1 in 40 chance of having your data on any given vault. So under this scenario, you would have a 1 in 400 million chance of losing all your files.

Scenario 2: Each customer's files are uniformly distributed across all vaults. In this case, if Backblaze lost a vault, all customers would lose a fraction of their files. Again, using our estimate that they might have 40 vaults, you would have a 1 in 10 million chance of losing 2.5% of your files.

So up to now, we're basically just doing the math without questioning the assumptions of the model. In reality, I think your practical risk is mostly concentrated in things outside of the model: ie, an event that affects all of their vaults simultaneously, like a fire, earthquake, meteor strike, etc. If I had to make a bet about what that number is, I'd put it in the 1/10,000 to 1/100,000 range. In other words, orders of magnitude higher than losing data because some hard drives failed, or a backblaze employee spilled his coffee, or something like that.
Spanner is externally serializable so you do get a 'now'. You just don't know what the agreed now was until after the write.

The idea that there is no 'now' is of course, preposterous, we have very strict laws of physics supporting the concept of now (sans relativity) and eventually our engineering will be able to track that very accurately. Spanner is a step on that journey.

These kinds of 'impossible' articles will appear very dated in 10 years time, as they are really over exaggerating the rules-of-thumb of the previous 10 years.
PasswordSafe (on Windows, Android, and under Wine on Mac), because I want to own my data and not be forced or pressured to use some cloud service. Also, PasswordSafe was the most secure according to some tests.

Currently still using DropBox to sync the password file and backups, but will switch soon to ownCloud with my own server.

The Firefox password manager contains copies of many of the passwords, but I don't sync those between machines.
FWIW it's nominally 4MB/s/TB:

> You should expect 4 MB/s of throughput per TB of data stored as Nearline Storage.

But still, you are correct in that it will take about 1TB / 4MB/s = 2.9d to retrieve all your data.

If you need the ability to do a restore faster than this, then you need to pay more for storage, is all. For many of us, waiting 3d to recover from a catastrophic failure isn't a big deal.
How Betty, Who Is 89, Gets Her News
Since when is there such a thing as "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" ? I've never heard people identify as such. Methinks it an arbitrary distinction invented by the author, to support his argument. I'm still not sure what the argument is.

Also, since when do you have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer? Since when is being a nerd and being a feminist mutually exclusive?

I don't get this article. And I don't get nerds.
I don't understand this US vs THEM mentality. Yes, you were the nerd that might have been excluded from other people's world because they didn't deem you 'cool enough'.

But now you are excluding others from joining your world. Are you not as bad as the people who made you feel displaced?

Why not take the stance that you can be better?
> Optimizing the research.microsoft.com blog for heavy traffic is probably low on their priority list.

You'd imagine it is hosted on azure and would scale with a single click ... it's not a question of priority.
Politician poses nude for campaign poster,
He had to pay 25% of 2 years * $90k for this. This is a terrible trade off. MIT is incredibly generous with grants and work study programs. My girlfriend's family ended up paying ~$10k a year to go to one of the best schools in the world. And when you graduate you're looking at a job well north of six figures.

Edit: It was actually ~6k for her. Class of '05.