skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a former Arq user, I'm happy to pay BackBlaze $5/month for not ever thinking about the backup problem again, on a bunch of family machines (mostly Macs but a couple of Windows machines as well).

No thinking about installing software (e.g., Arq, and finding something equivalent for Windows), keeping that software up to date, checking that it's up and running properly, etc. (BackBlaze tells me when it hasn't been able to reach a given machine after some period.)

So, no, I think the SaaS backup industry has nothing to fear from cheap online storage, at least for ordinary folk. (Hackers are a vanishingly small segment of that market.)
I noticed this issue early this morning (late last night), about 0130 EDT, so as of now, 10.5 hours...
Cats Prefer Species-Appropriate Music – Applied Animal Behaviour Science
iTunes authentication is just a DRM thing, making sure you've paid for apps before you can run them. Security is handled by code signing, and more importantly by sandboxing. The only people who would scream at Apple for not authenticating against iTunes are those who don't understand this, or those who think Apple needs to enforce strong DRM for third-party apps.
Would guess "concise" or "efficient".
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Ask HN: What makes you a “weird nerd”?
I believe weirdness should be celebrated. What qualities or interests do you have that makes you a "weird nerd"?

Inspired by and somewhat in tangent to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9180795

I'll post mine below so not everybody has to read it ;)

EDIT: Please read the thread I linked above before you decry the label "weird nerd". Thanks :3
Google handles some constructs with punctuation as atomic tokens as special cases. C# and C++ are examples. A# through G# also return appropriate results, for the musical notes. H# and onward through the alphabet do not.

.NET is another example. Google will ignore a prepended dot on most words, but .NET is handled specially as an atomic token. I would bet this is a product of human curation, not of algorithms that have somehow identified .NET as a semantic token.

Searching for punctuation in a general case is hard, though. You wouldn't want a search for Lisp to fail to match pages with (Lisp). We often forget that the pages are tokenized and indexed, that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte scan across the entire web.

I was recently trying to understand the difference between the <%# and <%= server tags in ASP.NET. Google couldn't even interpret those as tokens to search for. It took me a long time to figure out the former's true name as the data-bind operator in order to search for that and find the MS docs.
Optimizing the research.microsoft.com blog for heavy traffic is probably low on their priority list.
Minimal-flux – A very lightweight implementation of Flux
Diversity is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

Equality is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

See what I did there? You've got to explain why you think it's a bullshit term--because as an ideal, it's a damned sight more useful than whatever else people are pushing.
If you're willing to pay more for faster retrieval I guess you could store e.g. 5TB of random data to get a fast "base speed"- cutting those 3 days down to 12 hours.
Google Cloud Storage is cheaper than Amazon S3:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing
Not too much, the difficulty comes more from fewer problem choices. ICPC at the regional level has many questions to select from and usually has at least 2 problems that can be solved in under 5-10 minutes (we had a badass on our team with under 1 minute submissions). I rarely anticipate solving the most difficult GCJ problem, even the small input case. In the beginning rounds the first 2-3 GCJ problems are usually on par with easy-medium difficulty ICPC problems. As you get higher up in the rounds they get more challenging.

Edit: Should also point out that since you're not in a controlled environment, you have full internet and library access unlike ICPC where you have to rely on memorization and standard libraries.
Arq would be exactly what I wanted if it wasn't Mac-only, and preferably open source.
That assumes that failed sales during an outage are lost forever, not merely delayed.

I've heard from various third-party developers that store downtimes (of reasonable lengths) tend to be followed by corresponding sales spikes, so that ultimately nothing is lost. I have no idea if that applies here, but it's reasonable to think it would at least partially.
I agree on powershell. But I am less enthusiastic about their "metro" style which look extremely oversimplified from the samples I have seen (and all full screen, which replaces the frustration of the non-resizable grey boxes with another!).
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Reading the comments, is anyone else bothered by this reply from a Blackblaze representative:

"Right now, Backblaze has only one datacenter, so the short answer is "no". :-)

The longer answer is that for online backup, there is one copy of your data on your laptop, and another copy in the Backblaze datacenter in Sacramento. If a meteor hits our datacenter in Sacramento pulverizing it into atoms, you STILL would not lose one single file, not one - because your laptop is still running just fine where ever you are with your copy of the data. In the case that occurs, we will alert our users they should make another backup of their data."

There are a million one things other than a comet strike that can go wrong in a data centre. I would not trust a backup provider that does not replicate my data across at least two data centers.
Power is also well defined (I have provided a definition which is not "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes") and in cases like this -- easy to measure. You may assert the last forty years of research are pointless. That it's definition applies in many cases (though not all -- an earthquake leveling a city isn't directly related to power) does not make it any less useful (just like energy is always involved in any interaction of particles). If you apply the definition, you will see that influencing college admissions officers << influencing police in this case.

The fact that intractable interactions lend themselves less easily to formulations (let alone closed expressions) does not take away their reality or invalidate the model. Much of the work in applied mathematics (non-linear equations) is qualitative, as well. I think it is you who are resisting to admit that the past decades of research have taught us a lot about how society works.
In less than a year OS X will be called something else, too.
Just for Laughs Gags Best → “Women, Wigs and Clothes Open”
Netflix figures out how to stream on an 8-bit Nintendo
No Delightful Scotsman: Does “Delightful” Interaction Design Need to Die?
Be aware that process substitution (and named pipes) can bite you in the arse in some situations --- for example, if the program expects to be able to seek in the file. Pipes don't support this and the program will see it as an I/O error. This'd be fine if programs just errored out cleanly but they frequently don't check that seeking succeeds. unzip treats a named pipe as a corrupt zipfile, for example:

$ unzip <(cat z)
Archive: /dev/fd/63
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of /dev/fd/63 or
/dev/fd/63.zip, and cannot find /dev/fd/63.ZIP, period.
Yes, he was harassed and blacklisted by the insiders, the mainstream. Not by the hacker culture, which didn't really exist back then anyway.
"we noticed that we recorded the password you chose during signup for WordPress.com in plain text"

agreed, the wording is 'recorded' not stored which makes me lean(naively?) towards something like inadvertent logging for example?

ie. plaintext over https through a loadbalancer, with http communication internally, and an internal app logging all its traffic for debugging purposes?

then sometime later: oops, we found some log files with plaintext passwords on our servers.

IDK, just one scenario that might fall under this description
I don't think it's reasonable. The way they implemented strtonum might match their particular use case in OpenSSH/LibreSSL. But if they want to make it a libc function and popularise it then they should concern themselves with other use cases and opinions, especially when they pick a bold name as strtonum. It's not a surprising outcome that others are reluctant to follow them and they have clashes in behaviour or naming.
>which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them.

I know that you didn't mean for your comment to be taken literally but there is literally zero chance of enemy airplanes invading US skies and dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them. It is a silly thing to say and it does nothing to justify the current situation vis a vis the NSA et al. Try not to hyperventilate.
Apple pledges $50M toward diversity
I'm a weird nerd because:

- I love furry conventions
- I love Renaissance Fairs
- I used to (and still would enjoy) D&D and LARPing
- I spent more time learning about programming and application security than I
spent doing anything else
- I spent more time in high school learning how to wield a katana than I spent
thinking about boys
- Despite being a 25 year-old gay furry, I've never been in a relationship. This
might not seem that weird, but when you spend a lot of time in a fandom where
polyamory and sex is rather pronounced, it makes me somewhat of an outsider to
the outsiders

If a lot of people (including prospective employers) knew this side of me, I'd probably be homeless X3
Shrug. Consider JTRIG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

They're very blatantly using astroturfing and shilling to silence people who go against their idea of the way things should be. I doubt HN is going to have an astroturf quotient as high as someplace like reddit, though.
Seems like #1 would be a symptom of having the policy without the culture to back it up. Was that your experience?

For #2, I've worked for several companies, only one of which had a compensation package for unused vacation. All the rest have been use-it-or-lose-it by the end of each year. Getting paid for unused time sounds like a luxury.

But I also recommend negotiating for more time off when you sign on, especially if you have several years of experience in the industry. Even if a company says first-year employees get X days of vacation you can still negotiate. Especially for cash-strapped companies, vacation may be the only part that can change.
The Internet’s Top Social Media Tutorials – All in One Place
>... what problem exactly are you trying to solve?

Look at what happened in the US, net neutrality was not an issue, just like it isn't really in the EU at this time, then services like Hulu/Netflix/Youtube appeared.
In the US like in Europe most ISPs are either Cable companies or Telecoms which offer their own IPTV.
Now you as a ISP have a competing service using your network, why would you just tolerate that if you don't have to?

Well they didn't, Netflix is now paying off AT&T, Comcast and Verizon so they won't throttle its service.
Now in order for your service to compete with Netflix you'll have to pay up too.

How does that further competition?

>And even if you are having problems, why do they must be solved at the EU level?

Why not? How is the EU's common market supposed to work if we just keep implementing things like this on a country by country basis.

> Services don't appear and are suddenly recognized as of great importance. They start small and unimportant until they gain enough momentum to be recognized by the public at large. And they'll never will if you enshrine into law the privilege of existing ones.

Again I don't think this will be an issue, even if you allow for special cases, Netflix should never be special, and neither should probably 99% of services available today. VoIP is special (and I guess is already treated as such by ISPs) because it is a replacement for PSTN which was special and you can't have voice communication be degraded because people are watching the World Cup final or whatever.

Let's put it this way, what would be the harm of having a common net neutrality law in Europe?

Wouldn't that just mean that if you want to do business inside the EU you won't have to worry about being blackmailed by ISPs in 28 different countries?

And yes I live in Europe.
Apple Swift provides a disruptive App opportunity for early adopters
[what it does]app.[extension]

noteapp.js
companyapp.org

easy!
It's hard to judge whether what is on this page indicates anything without some reference or historical data.
Maybe something similar to how apple have "application packages" now?

each program is confined to it's own directory by default and has everything it needs to run.. if it depends on something in the OS, it's aware it's there because of the release version and distro..

this could be done easily in a manifest file (you can ask yum for instance what's installed).

maybe I'm overthinking it, maybe it's a horrible idea.
John Carmack comments at the bottom of that article: "I had almost nothing to do with the PC Oculus SDK — Michael Antanov was the primary architect."
The overhead of safe typescript is only in the parts of your code that interact with untyped code. For those parts the default typescript was actually unsafe.
safari 8 supports it: http://caniuse.com/#feat=nav-timing
And this, Amy, is why you're my hero.
The drive operations (including waiting for the head to seek, etc) could take place in parallel. There's also the chance the data needed was in cache. So it might not be horribly bad.
This seems like something where "when it works, it works great", but when it doesn't...

I can easily see just a couple rotten apples spooling that who could damage that whole system very quickly.
No I'm not bothered by it as I wouldn't expect replication across multiple data centers at a "$5/mo for unlimited" price point.

I routinely recommend BackBlaze as a quick and easy cloud backup solution to family and friends. I view the risk of partial or complete data loss with BackBlaze extremely low compared to the local backup solutions that some people rely on (i.e. periodic backups to an external USB drive)

For myself and my own work files, I don't put complete trust in any single backup provider, regardless of what their replication policy is.
How are any of these activities improved by an abrasive culture?

The only thing it creates, ultimately, is the endgame of the Geek Social Fallacies: a place where the only people left all have nasty personalities and no social connections to any other kinds of people.

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

If you haven't been in an environment where everybody is tolerated -- you're really missing out. I've been lucky enough to work on projects where programming nerds mingle with visual artists, mechanics, hardware hackers, fashionistas, musicians, and more, and it's amazing. And furthermore, it's not like we're watching what we say all day. In my experience, if you have a baseline where everyone knows they are accepted and have recourse to call someone out, then there's lots of "inappropriate" humor.
We recently had a article from Schneier that made a similar observation comparing electronic attack to airplanes dropping munitions from great heights, which is why the conclusion was that electronic attacks should be under the control of the military and not by NSA. We expect the military to strike other nations civil infrastructure (or at least the subject can be debated), but we also expect them to take responsibility for it.
We disagree on verb tenses of to be. :)

Anyways, all that other stuff doesn't matter, because he did great things.

The reason it's so important to us that we base our respect on his work and not his suffering is that, frankly, you can't argue with his work. Time may pass, and it may be fashionable/scientifically proven/theologically required to hate gays again and so we'll lose sight of his other issues--but the man's contributions will survive on their own merit. That is far better.
To be clear, according to the supreme court, "It grants only the right to exclude others". So it's a misunderstanding to say "The entire point of a patent is to make it publicly available while funneling money to the patent holder". Sure, patents are often used to release details about an invention while making money off it, but that's just one use case. For example, it can just as well be used as an obstacle to slow down competitors.
I'm conflating them because, in my experience, they're not independent. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, but those characteristics tend to go hand-in-hand.

It's also often the case that what superficially looks like "ugly reliable code" actually means code that was, at one point, very simple and tidy but has been battle-hardened by years of maintenance. It's ugly because code that implements a lot of complexity tends to look scary as hell.

Finally, it's ultimately a truism: truly unreadable code is also code that's hard to modify, and very few systems will go through their lifetime without changes. Even if it works fine today, it'll not meet business requirements tomorrow, and its unmaintainability is a liability.
email me(email in profile) if you want to see what I did for a landing page.
How Video Game Breasts Are Made (And Why They Can Go Wrong)
the trends at play here:

- ability to prove worth outside an education credential

- access to educational materials outside a couple elite schools

- ability to find the relevent people to network with

suggests that a software engineer today has it easier, not harder to overcome non elite credential than the people measured in the qouted study

-------------------------------------------------------

that said, the MIT average numbers qouted above seem fine, if someone where to tell me they could attend MIT for less than 50K for the whole 4 years, I would say that sounds like a pretty good deal

its encouraging to me that the top couple universities seem compelled to compete on value, even if that happens in what appears to me to be a fairly price discriminatory manner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination )

hopefully the trend spreads and many many more college compete on value as well
I wonder what the typescript community thinks of this. For a long time, one of the big things about typescript was that they didn't value soundness very highly and had a bit of a "we are a pragmatic language willing to cut corners" vibe. But now with Safe Typescript and Soundscript we see a bit of a return to traditional type systems that care a lot about soundness...
6 Lessons I Learned Starting a Company in College
Yev from Backblaze here -> It's true, we just have the one. Backblaze was bootstrapped, so we cannot over-expand and maintain profitability, which allows us to stay in business. We're pretty up-front about having the one datacenter. We'd LOVE to add more in the future, but truthfully, it would at least double our costs, and we'd need to raise prices. We're thinking of ways of avoiding that while maintaining our current business-model. If you are looking for something more geo-redundant, take a look at services like Amazon S3, they are great, but the downside there is they charge per GB to make up for the extra costs, so depending on the amount of data, it can get pricey. Either way, we recommend a 3-2-1 backup policy (3 copies of your data, 2 onsite but on different mediums and 1 offsite) as a good start to a backup strat. We're just one solution of many, though, we like to think we're the easiest one!
> They were doing exactly what NSA was supposed to do.

It's fairly unclear what the NSA is supposed to be doing. They appear to be attempting to destabilize the internet in a way that is advantageous to them and them only.
Most well-designed applications will separate the administrative interface (configuration) from a programming interface (the API), even if the same langauge is used for each one. If you do this properly, most administrators are not going to care what language your configuration is in so long as it's clear and consistent.

In my experience, the main annoyance using programming languages for configuration is the need to use explicit string literals for every string in your file. List separators are another major source of clutter in configuration files, though this is theoretically not a problem in clojure. The second problem is the tendency to be undisciplined and allow too much program logic in configuration files resulting in complex and unclear relationships between options and behavior.

Personally I do all my configuration in yaml now. Even if I was using lisp I would use yaml whenever possible for configuration and static resource definitions, because yaml is very portable.
Meet Volt, a Promising Ruby Framework for Dynamic Applications
Pickles – Open-Source Living Documentation Generator
C didn't had any big meaning in the MS-DOS days.

By the time Windows was starting to be developed, UNIX was already established in the industry and was only natural to take ideas from it.

But yeah, eventually it also helped disseminate C. It was by then that I moved from Turbo Pascal into C++.
Keeping Intercom Up
I think I get what you're saying with "maximum entropy", but it's the wrong term for what you're trying to express. Really unreadable, terse code is highly entropic, but it's not good code. If you use descriptive variable names, that decreases from the entropy of the code.
From the article:

"saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project."

Hmmmmmm, you mean like Russia or China?

"malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the "BACKSNARF" artifact isn't conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems infinitesimally small."

Ironic considering this is almost the same scenario people were using in the Sony hack. Saying the code was similar in other attacks used by North Korea while most of the Info Sec community was saying it didn't believe their findings since malware can be reused, shared and distributed - but apparently all that goes out the window in this case?

I'm starting to have NSA fatigue for this stuff.

Kaspersky seems to be the only player actively trying to tie EVERYTHING they find to the NSA. While most of the stuff (flame, stuxnet) have been confirmed by other companies, I'm starting to wonder if Kaspersky has an axe to grind here as well - his ties to the FSB and the Russian government are well documented.

I'm not dismissing this out of hand, but I'm starting to take a lot of their claims with a few grains of salt.
I'm a weird nerd because I never cared about social grouping, only about intelligence and personality. Everything else is just details.