skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Users wanting to install custom software can always root/jailbreak their devices and "get their freedom back", including the freedom of screwing their device if they don't know what they're doing.

But what about users who exclusively care about USING the software? This group of users is broader by a great margin.

The ability to use MIT Software is a better option for this kind of users than telling them "sorry guy, no software for you because of <legal yadda yadda>".

There are several reasons why a distribution channel would prefer to deprive users from certain types of rights (ex. their right to install malware), and the chances of a company to change their policies to comply with the GPL's requirements is effectively zero.

The root of this issue is merely ideological and both sides of the coin (the FSF and the companies who control distribution channels) are known for NOT ceding, so this issue is effectively unsolvable.
Somehow I doubt something like that would come to pass. Just look at the ineffectual polarization on eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthy.
What alternatives to DNSSEC do you advocate?
Basically FreeBSD and NetBSD are better as long as you don't connect them to Internet.

In particular FreeBSD security is so abysmal, once you plug it to the internet you can't really say is your computer anymore.

Edit: Downvote this: Windows Vista had ASLR and latest FreeBSD 10 does not.
Actually, I think that's a great way to think about it: NoSQL is the "dynamic typing" of the database world.

Put another way, it's like "what? you couldn't spend 10 minutes declaring types everywhere?" - yeah, it's less robust, yet dynamically typed languages remain popular.

My excuse: When I'm just past the mock stage, and still playing with what UI functionality should be, sometimes I just want to get some JSON persisted. I'm changing the shape of the data a lot, discovering the schema as I build. The persistence is frankly a technical nuisance I wish I didn't have to think about.

Sometimes, the result is "good enough" and I don't need to go through the ceremony of glueing in an ORM.
The whole of modern civilization is a way to power down the engine of evolution - for instance, short-sighted people or someone who catches a nasty infection surviving to have children. If you take moral cues from natural selection, you're going to face the creation of a very bleak world.
> In fairness, you don't know what would have happened if you took the other path.

I think my mental health was greatly improved, though of course I can't know the alternative :)
The author's assertion that "Another problem with MySQL is that any table modification (e.g. adding a column) will result in the table being locked for both reading and writing. This means that any operation using such a table will have to wait until the modification has completed." is no longer correct as of Mysql 5.6:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/innodb-create-index-o...

If you specify ALGORITHM=INPLACE,LOCK=NONE you can alter table without blocking reads and writes. We have used this method successfully in Amazon RDS when updating schemas.
Having once been a close follower of OpenBSD, I eventually just kind of lost interest because Linux (and other BSDs) were just moving so much faster on features that mattered more to me. Multiprocessor support was the big one for me at the time; I have no idea where that currently stands.

My recollection was that OpenBSD code was actually quite polished, and even elegant in lots of places. They also produced what I think were easily the best and most complete manpages out there. It was actually enjoyable to read both the code and manpages, and pretty easy to understand (assuming proficiency in C and basic machine architecture, of course).

What was not enjoyable, for me, was the constant hostility on the mailing list and frequent lashing out at others in various OSS communities (...as demonstrated in the OP). I know there there were others for whom that played no small part in their loss of interest in the project.
"My next phone is going to be an Android that enables me to completely replace its firmware binary."

Component firmware and device drivers will still be binary blobs. You need to go a level deeper than that.
I had a particularly bad school switch between the 3rd and 4th grade. Going from a strict private catholic school to the nearby public cool, I was teased a lot. It sucked. At some point "weirdness" just became part of my identity, I embraced it as a shield.

Having grown up, I've moved past some of it. I still recognize that I've got an essential core of weirdness. In college I learned about the myers-briggs and, while you can criticize the test all you want, the iNtuitive / Sensing divide is real thing. I'm just an iNtuitive living in a sensor world.

I definitely budget my weirdness. I don't care about my clothes, but I recognize that it's good social engineering to look good. I try to be open and friendly to all types of people, especially people who remind me of being an outcast in grade school.

But at times I see people who just seem to be... pointlessly wasting their weirdness. They're talented, bright, energetic, and you're spending time praying to crystals? There's so much more you could be doing!

I'm really worried about becoming the society that ostracized my past self.
> We have American agencies attacking American companies "because terrorism"

Wrong, and selfish.

We have American agencies attacking innocent people everywhere in the world "because terrorism".
Hardware Trends 2015
Great points. Reminds me of this reddit response on what wealthy people buy and their perspective:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_in...

I thought 10k is insane too, I'm not their customer. Yes, the article sounds crass, fine by me. He'll lose readers that care more about how it's delivered that the actual message.
With DNSSEC combined with HTTPS it is very reasonable to say that both you're connecting to the party you're expecting to connect to and in addition, no third party listening on the line either knows what host name or page you're visiting (only the IP address of the box).

No, because clients don't validate DNSSEC responses. You'd need to be running a full resolver in your machine, which OSs usually don't.

Also, with SNI¹ they'll know the hostname anyway.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
The section, "The Problem with Schemaless," blames the technology instead of whoever put the data in there in the first place.

If the code has to handle both page.title and page_title, this is a feature of using a schemaless technology.

Also, lots of the issues the author had with MongoDB are also to be found in MySQL, e.g. taking hours to recover from a corrupt database/datastore.
Also worth noting that NetBSD can run Xen dom0.
This doesn't sound targeted:

by manipulating Xcode, the spies could compromise the devices and private data of anyone with apps made by a poisoned developer — potentially millions of people ...

The focus of the security researchers, as described at the CIA conferences, was to target the GID key, which Apple implants on all devices that use the same processors. [...] So, if intelligence agencies extract the GID key, it means they have information useful to compromising any device containing that key.
Arel is just a syntax tree for SQL. It doesn't strictly give you any more power than SQL - I think your question is a little bit disingenuous, as you knew this already - but code manipulating syntax trees is better for query dynamism than code manipulating strings that don't have further typing.
Why I'm having -negative karma?
Hello,

Can anyone tell me, why I'm having negative karma on my HN account?

Thanks
I use FreeBSD for two reasons:

1. The documentation is unmatched.

2. The community is very nice.

I don't know if 1 applies to OpenBSD or not, but 2 doesn't.
Normality is weird. Normally, normal people only have a few normal characteristics, so being completely normal isn't.
Migrating from EC2-Classic to VPC with zero downtime
Heh. Thanks for the compliment. I have actually never sat for a valley interview, so I didn't want to judge based on second-hand data. But I'd believe it entirely.
Wait... does preferring to write SQL (and knowing how) make me old now?

Dang.
Pick any emerging tech in history and you'll find plenty of hits about how it will only be available to the wealthy.

Air travel, cell phones, computers, air conditioners, and so on.
How does this work with other noises and interference?
Speaking as someone who writes go code every day right now, I like the language for a number of reasons, including the fact that it can be compiled and deployed without anything like the sort of build/deploy insanity that a modern java installation comes with.

So, I'd rather hit my head against the wall on GC problems while smart people improve it than hit my head against the wall with a MASSIVE deploy/build headache that definitely won't go away for a bunch of technical, political and historical reasons.
Too many downvotes. You have 2 comments and they're both greyed out, so, downvoted.
This is jumping into the realm of bioethics. Google or a billionaire would be ethically obligated to share any beneficial solution for immortality, but they're not technically obligated to do so.
I'm waiting for AR googles that give me 360 vision: balancing a highly detailed point of focus with wrap around peripheral awareness. Never accidentally cut someone off on the sidewalk again.
Anyone have difficulties setting up back-office ops?
We just went through the process of setting up our back-office operations and it was an incredible pain. It got us wondering about how other startups and small businesses have dealt with this process.

This survey should take less than 5 minutes if you'd like to offer your thoughts.

https://gathering.typeform.com/to/c9WzX8
> In a sane design, a transient policy failure should produce a warning light or a browser popup; something that applications can use to sensibly convey what happened, in some form, to users.

Thomas, I agree that having the DNS resolver only return a regular SERVFAIL without a hint of WHY there was the failure is a challenge. I wasn't around the DNS part of the IETF when this design decision was made. It seems to me that a separate error message would have been preferable... but I don't know the discussions that were had at that time.

There have been several suggestions about ways to include additional diagnostic information with the SERVFAIL so that browsers and applications could take better action. One such proposal was from Evan Hunt at ISC (makers of BIND):

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hunt-dns-server-diagnostics...

The draft expired back in 2014 but he indicated recently on the DNSOP mailing list that he would be open to reviving that draft if people thought it would be useful.
Ah, cool. I haven’t yet seen the movie. Only a few weeks left till the video release :)
The joyless world of data-driven startups
I'm currently using it in a project and I'm overall pretty impressed. I started using it with the 2.0 release candidates, and have no experience with earlier versions. With that exposure I've been very happy and I'm looking forward to the work the team's doing to make the DB available as a turnkey on various cloud services.
Email just sent. Let's talk.
Yeah, I agree that profit motive is a motive I can work with. I guess libertarianism can be appealing when the government acts like a tumor.

The government's monopoly on legitimate use of force is more relevant in less developed countries. Here, you can do more damage more easily by attacking computer-controlled infrastructure. (Imagine if the NRA was pointed at the real threat? Maybe they'd look a little like Anonymous.)
Europe reverses course on net neutrality legislation
You point out to very important questions I don't know good answer for. I'd happily read more on the topic. There are certainly many dystopian scenarios that could play out (one hope would be if the progress was gradual enough that the curer will spread worldwide - say, there would be little incentive to withold the +250years drug from Ethiopians when the Americans already have +350years drug, etc.).

In my previous comment, however, I objected to the use of word "hubris". It sounds a bit like "how dare you play God, you mere mortal!" which isn't a very healthy attitude for actually solving the problems of humanity.
If he’s interviewing, then that is his actual job. If he’s hitting on people while representing the company in any context, e.g. at conferences, that is his actual job.

The way you framed this as a “PR liability” suggests you don’t think there’s anything wrong here, it’s just a question of dollars and cents to the company’s bottom line. That’s exactly the kind of sociopathy that is the problem.

You have to stop and decide that there is a moral and values problem, and that these things matter more than a few bucks. If the company has values around this, it will make sure people have training around what is not acceptable behaviour. It will not pass out cards, 10x engineers get a green card, 5x engineers get a yellow card, 1x engineers get a red card.

Everyone will get the same message about what the company values, and steps--I will not say what those steps are, maybe training should have happened before this incident, maybe coaching should happen afterwards, maybe firing is not necessary--and steps will be taken to ensure that everyone in the company acts in accordance with the company’s values.
Is Linus euphemistically referring to someone specific there that everyone taking part in the conversation knows the real name of very well and who probably read that comment and recognized themselves, or is the idea of whomsoever decided that that thing should work "one byte at a time" a more diffuse fact that's obscured in history? That makes a difference in that particular situation, I feel.
Diving in a cesspit makes one appreciate clean air.
Hi, I understand and agree with what you say and like the functional language suggestion perhaps augmented as in functional-reactive (a hunch), but I can't help pointing at a post from the Xilinx blog yesterday praising a workflow that leaves out HDL in favour of C++, so the world is getting more complex.

"Now, although you don’t see any Verilog or VHDL in the above tool flow,..."

http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/SDSoC-developme...

Though Zynq is ARM+FPGA, in principle one should be able to do the same with a soft processor cum custom coprocessing logic in a fpga-only thing.
What's misleading? It's an article about primitive operations and types in GHC Haskell.
This uses Simplfied Payment Verification (SPV).

SPV helps with some scalability issues, but doesn't solve them all.

From http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-s...:

> SPV: A Bitcoin implementation that does not verify everything, but instead relies on either connecting to a trusted node, or puts its faith in high difficulty as a proxy for proof of validity. BitCoinJ is an implementation of this mode.

See also:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11054/understandi...
70$ is not much money if you use it 8 hours a day. Also, you can use it without paying — it'll show a popup window now and again telling you to buy it; just a minor annoyance.
Believe me, that has crossed my mind. This is where the segue into training comes. We've discussed it. As a woman, my one experience of being allowed to play outside and beyond the hiring process is pretty consistent with the anecdotal evidence given by my peers. But correlation is not causation. For every one candidate, there are an uncounted number of pivots to consider, and mapping them all out is impossible.

I agree that bias is overrated as a contributing factor to this so-called problem. But it is one we focus on because we also believe that behaviors can be controlled for and habits can be rehabilitated. There are a lot of narratives where the circumstances are very different but the dynamic is the same. Someone whose parents want them to be a doctor or lawyer who aggressively derail them from pursuing the arts. Some very intelligent kid growing up in poverty with no access to resources who starts acting out and ends up with a criminal record. A woman who is forced to take HomeEc in high school instead of trigonometry (me).

Taken in isolation, these narratives can be explained away. As examples of a larger pattern, they become flaws in a system that can be engineered away. There's a meta-bias, and I'm still searching for a way to describe it that doesn't trigger an emotional response. It seems that until we can have that rational, engineering-focused discourse to identify the not level playing fields of the world, cataloging their characteristics, finding what things can be controlled for and/or eliminated,... sigh I don't know how to finish that sentence.

You say it's a nice thought. I believe it's a nice thought. More people hope for it than do not. What exactly is keeping all of us who genuinely believe that it's at least worth a try to apply a dialectic method to the problem from banding together and attempting it?

I don't know.
Demo: http://airbnb.github.io/airpal/
‘Rowhammer’ Allows Attackers to Gain Kernel Privileges by Exploiting DRAM
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#keepcool
Yes. 2 of them. My wife and I run a startup and are trying to raise a young family at the same time. Because of this our phones are often playing white noise (to help a baby get to sleep) or are on silent in a bag (whilst the child is a sleep) and we often miss important messages. I'm hoping this will fix the problem. We've had pebbles in the past, but they are no good at forming replies to messages.
Flow Hive raises $5M on Indiegogo
It's worth noting that most of these bugs are right in the innards of the x86 emulation. Xen/ARM is a breath of fresh air, since they took the decision to only support the new ARMv7 virtualization extensions. This eliminate the need for qemu running in dom0 per VM and the instruction emulation plumbing.

We've got a distribution of Xen 4.4/ARMv7/ubuntu for anyone curious to try it out on a cheapo Cubieboard2 or Cubietruck over at https://github.com/mirage/xen-arm-builder (with prebuilt SDcard images at http://blobs.openmirage.org)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Where is yours?
The bookmarks in Cat Explorer are priceless. Especially the Pr()n list... tickled my immature parts immensely. (Self-deprecating pun intended.)
Wonder if they evaluated rethinkdb?
Vvvv: A hybrid visual/textual live-programming environment for easy prototyping
One hope is that finding effective solution for aging and death will require so much time and manpower that partial solutions will end up being known and shared, even if heads of the program would want things to be secret for some reason. So I don't think we should fear Google turning into Ilaria.
But the next generation of fgpa obsoletes the reverse engineered insights.
I like them both and go back and forth between them. Right now, i have NetBSD installed and I am playing with Veriexec.
I would say that the 'economy of weirdness' is closer to simple supply and demand. Too much weirdness lowers the demand of more weirdness, and thus the 'value' in a given scenario.

Weirdness is 'different', and as such requires a certain level of cognitive load to process. Too much weirdness can be overwhelming bordering on abrasive.

Looking at it from another point of view, if you have an action movie where it is 2 hours of explosions, you will eventually get bored of all of the explosions. 'weirdness' works similarly. There needs to be some pacing to your weirdness.
It's interesting that if you search for MongoDB vs Postgres, you won't find any articles suggesting you should go from P to M.

Supposedly WiredTiger for M 3.0 will be more everything, including faster and better.

We'll see.
1) Ports are difficult to come by. Furthermore, installing ports kind of destroys the black security box an openssl install implies.
2) Non-security updates are slow.
3) The mailing list is hostile.

Furthermore, netbsd and freebsd offer substantial improvements: netbsd will run on anything, freebsd will offer you some pretty ridiculous tools and a huge base of ports and support.
Yeah - my reaction to the idea of "spreadsheets for big data" is that it kind of misses the point of why spreadsheets are so popular, namely that most data is small data and a sheet of rows and columns is a super easy way to wrap your mind around a set of small data. So the big challenge is coming up with a way to work with small data that gives you the benefits a database brings over a spreadsheet (relations, querying, etc.) without losing that immediate "oh, I get this" feeling.
I already acknowledged that I'm a virtual nobody to them. I just don't want to be a virtual somebody to them, even if it's just a raised XKeyScore rating.
Ending the open office epidemic
The actual title is "Primitive Haskell" which certainly confused me when I first saw it (some weeks ago).
A statement about Gigaom
Also related: Kevin Simler's take on the concept of Personhood as a sort of contract to encapsulate your own weirdness to function well with the weirdnesses of others.

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...
I compile the builds. And just giving you a heads up, watch the video. Many of our team members have been there from the start. Original team.
It's not so much about not wanting to write/understand SQL (both are still very
much required), but about composability. If you want to re-use bits of a SQL
query written as a string literal your only option is string concatention or
using some kind of string builder/template system. In both cases there's little
validation of the query's correctness (syntax wise) until you actually run it.

While I agree that many ORMs go too far or even worse, not implement certain
powerful features, Sequel (and similar tools I imagine) strikes a nice balance.
The particular examples I gave on their own are not super useful, but we already
have quite a few queries that are composed/re-used without having to concat
strings.

So tl;dr: it's about composability, not being "lazy" or "ignorant" to SQL.
I couldn't agree more with you. I love SQL for when I have a concrete data model, when I don't I love NoSQL. I could use both if I really wanted to, but you need to know when to force a square peg into a circle. Mongo has a good how to on it here. http://blog.mongodb.org/post/72874267152/transitioning-from-...
I just wish they fixed their Gmail app for iOS.
I'm not sure what your supposition about the root cause might mean.

NetBSD very recently imported these functions (reallocarray and strtonum) to libc after much objection (over several years actually) to their poor APIs, yet finding that they crop up time and again in code used in base (and then multiple copies exist, in out of the way places). So, as a pragmatic solution they are now available from libc if _OPENBSD_SOURCE is defined. Cleaner API functions were proposed, with wrappers which would provide equivalent functionality for the OpenBSD functions. Some difference was noted, and recently fixed in these wrappers.

The root cause for the NetBSD changes then, seems to be that these functions keep cropping up, and the job of libc is to provide commonly used functions.

I believe the intention is, that the cleaner API is proposed to replace the original OpenBSD ones, which are not properly portable (strtonum for instance, returns hard coded english error strings in ASCII)

The root cause for the blog entry by Ted Unangst is probably that he is an OpenBSD developer and was involved in creating these functions, which are now being criticised.

These root causes don't seem the same to me.