skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current serialisation code needs to die, and be replaced with something usable and already existing, e.g. zeromq + msgpack.

There are currently horrible bugs in the very foundation of ROS, the spec of the serialisation format and its hashing, that are in `wontfix` status because the maintainers are idiots.

The arity of a field (value, array [and its arity], list) is not part of the hash of a message definition. Thus it is possible to change a message definition breaking existing protocols without the clients noticing. This is a hard to detect bug, that I've seen several times in the wild.
But it won't be fixed because it would break old precompiled packages (yes one would have to recompile things gasp).
So instead everything is left broken.

But hey I heard they want to change the messaging protocol to CORBA for 2.0, what could go wrong with that...
Perhaps, but how many hiring managers are able to scrutinize commits in that great of detail? I'd figure anyone that could, would be in a more technical role and likely a developer/developer manager versus HR.
The Florida land boom was in the 1920s. The Marx Brothers made a comedy about it: The Cocoanuts (1929), their first full-length film.
Question for web-devs: What types of websites do you normally deploy?
I'm a programmer amateur with hopes of becoming professional. I have dabbled with website since 2000 or so. First I used Microsoft FrontPage but eventually learned HTML, CSS, Wordpress etc.

About 14 months ago I started learning my first programming language - Python. Just recently I managed to create single-page website with contact form at the bottom in Flask (and flask-mail plus flask-wtf). Successfully I deployed the website (or is it an app?) via pythonanywhere.com.

This got me thinking. What kind of websites do professionals in real life? I still find easier to just use HTML directly or perhaps something like Jekyll.
On the other hand, once you master something like Django or Flask, I can imagine the creation of websites becomes a thing of habit, plus it seems more expendable without using too much cruft.

Me personally, I was really impressed with the speed. Perhaps pythonanywhere.com just has really good hosting... I'm using the free account. Whereas my shared hosting is sometimes sluggish.

The questions:

1. are frameworks like these actually used for smaller websites?
2. Or are they used only if you need some kind of programmable component/processing done at the web site?
3. Or do you use it for huge projects like wikis, e-commerce etc.?

Also what are your hosting costs like? I believe these "web apps" cannot be run on regular shared hosting, I guess I'd need VPS? (I host just 2-3 websites on 2-3 domains).
Also, Apple hasn't called their product line "Macintosh" for over fifteen years. It's an anachronism as blatant as replacing Windows with "IBM PC".
I read something a while back where a rental company trialled renting cars with the emergency stop option - to stop, as you say 'people going to sleep and plowing into the back of cars'.

The results were surprising even to them I think - the crash rate went way, way down. Seems that a ton of accidents are of the 'I wasn't paying attention in traffic' type.

As the driver of a sports car and a luxo barge, I totally agree with you about the different levels of alertness required. It's not until you get out of a sports car do you realise how much you were concentrating. I think it's mainly the bumpier ride and the twitchy steering that forces focus. You're essentially never, ever driving with two fingers on the wheel.
You can't reach goals you never set. That's how we went to the moon.
> Assessment needs to become more accurate

Doesn't the market already provide reasonably accurate assessment, via insurance companies?
Same thing happens in smaller companies too... My solution is to do it anyways. The people who say no? Fuck em, build it and if no one comes at least you KNOW that this company has too much bureaucracy to change and you should dump them. Programmers are modern day gods and we should start acting like it.
Being timely is pretty important in the satellite business, there are things like communication licenses which expire.

It may not seem like it, but launch costs are still only a fraction of the total system cost. Ground for example infrastructure is more expansive by a large factor. Even the sat manufacturing costs overshadow launch costs for most systems. That's why customers might prefer safety until reliability is proven. Cutting corners on launch can jeopardize the whole system.
> After reading this article, I wonder why these kinds of differences between countries exist.

The US has high per-capita income (lower than Norway, but not by much), but that average hides a lot of income disparity. This percolates to other disciplines as well; lots of highly educated people but also a large disinterested population; plenty of artistic talent but also a majority which is not able to fully appreciate aesthetics.

Some level of homogeneity (which is the true form of equality) is perhaps a characteristic of sophisticated future societies.

Add: Among wealthy nations, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Japan sit at the bottom of income disparity indexes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ....
Very cool. But quoting the article:

> The light coming from EL Wire has varying intensities depending on the type and thickness you buy. They do not compete with traditional neons in terms of intensity though. But you're getting a compromise for an easy do-it-at-home alternative. All EL wires naturally slowly degrade in UV light, but they're just fine for most purposes. If you need extra UV protecion, coolneon.com's "Phat" wire have extra UV protection, so they could work indoors or out (but you probably should keep it away from bright sun anyway).

I did, while reading the original post, had to wonder: why don't more signs use LEDs to light up coloured plastic from behind? It might look nicer... But it might also end up costing more, so perhaps I have my answer. And of course, this is all assuming you want a tacky open sign instead of something more useful, or redesigning a storefront to more clearly indicate if you're open or not. I hate when people forget to turn off the open signs.
MB have been working on this stuff for decades.

Often they develop these things in conjunction with a supplier like Bosch. They then get a period of exclusivity and then Bosch/whoever are free to sell the systems to other companies.

That's why you can look at an S-Class and figure out what's going to be in an ordinary car in 10 years time. ABS, Airbags, pre-tensioners, stability control, adaptive cruise-control - not all were MB inventions or even debuted on an S-Class, but all have been features of an S-Class long before everything else.
Master Boot Record and Recovery Partition Fix for Yosemite
Bottles can be held by disinterested third parties.

Boobs rarely can.
With an unconscious and unresponsive driver? Are you nuts?

EDIT: I have seen cars stopped on shoulders all the time. It may be dangerous compared to a parking lot, but this is an emergency situation. The driver is incapacitated and may need medical attention. I'll add that it should do more then run the hazard lights, it should dial 911. To keep driving means the car will run unattended for 200+ miles until the battery runs out.
Las Vegas as a city wasn't really feasible until after the completion of the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead in 1936 about 30 miles away. You can't have a city without water.
The standard arguments for free trade apply as much to individual states as to countries. Just as the US enjoys a net benefit from buying goods from China instead of making them, so does New Jersey enjoy a net gain from its residents buying California cars without any New Jersey middleman.
A serious question; did developers in the 90's simply not know things that we know to be good and true today (mutability can induce bugs, consistent naming is good, global state is almost always bad, huge switch statements bad, various code smells, etc), or were doing some of these things not efficient enough for the computers of the day for various reasons?

Like, there's definitely some smart thinking in this code, but there are also several things that just floor me. A 3000 line switch?

I also see this in JavaScript from the 90's. Everything global. No patterns. Its just weird.
Portland’s New Car-Free Bridge
Lessons learned from implementing Paxos (2012)
Would you mind explaining why that bothers you? It seems innocuous to me.
I don't know, I'm looking at the other side of my room right now and I can definitively see a lot of difference (additional blur) by trying to extend my depth of field. Maybe I'm focusing past infinity though.
the biggest change would come from carpool adoption
Thanks. I really appreciate you taking the time to write so much. Honestly, this seems to be the best description of potential careers that I have ever gotten and I feel so much more assured about my choice to study Maths now. It is also really interesting to hear about how colourful such a career could be! You sound like, despite the politics, you have had a really interesting career and have done the kind of things that I would exactly like to do!

Again, thanks so much. One last question, what are you doing with your life right now? It seems like you have had a pretty broad career and I am interested in the end game. If you are retired, what is your lifestyle like and in particular how has your career impacted your life as a retiree.
He was a product manager [1]. Before that, he worked as a finance guy [2].

He was not an engineer.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/person/patrick-breitenbach

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/pbreitenbach
What are you trying to accomplish with this line of questioning. Yes, people fail. What's your point?
Neat little project. I have a similar small theming-related side project at http://haunter.io/

I'll shoot you a PR with my Slack theme.
Myanmar is nothing like North Korea. For a start, you can backpack around most of the cities unrestricted. Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, is just like any other South East Asian capital, and again, nothing like Pyongyang.
What is the resolution of the human eye?
I think you got immutability and single side assignment mixed up.

If foo is immutable there is no harm if something else tries to manipulate it because it will just derive a new data-structure.
Computer Eye Strain Has You in Its Cross-Hairs
All the residential houses are quite expensive and only bought by rich people who don't really live there, making it more empty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Understanding media is enormously worth reading if you haven't already. It's short but dense with insight.
I will have you know that my boss thinks I am a rockstar.
Just do

public foo(Bar bar) {
bar = baz(bar);
//Lots (10+ lines) of code
return finishProcess(bar); //Note, this should have been updatedBar.
}

nothing prevents you from reusing the variable name.
The point about immutability is that the objects themselves don't change.
“Doctor Panurgus” (2006)
http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ is excellent, and you can read it online or buy a paper version.
Please call me in Arizona @ 602-418-4542 anytime Friday, March 20th to discuss Pre-IPO Stock sales info. Thanks Victor..
You should've just linked directly to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I5Q3UXkGd0
> A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university.

A voluntary agreement that the scientist and Pfizer both believe is in their own interest. The scientist presumably believes that Pfizer's funding and research equipment etc. is worth the shared ownership or whatever arrangement results.

> The scientist (or team) in question who creates the drug is almost never the one collecting the rents.

Can you clarify what you mean? If Pfizer conducts the research then they collect the rent. If an independent scientist conducts the research, then they will own the IP and will collect the rent instead.
A simple and robust tool for base conversions
What Ive seen in the tight knit IoT communities is the ESP8266 going like wildfire. Its a crazy little chip, cheap and easy to use with LUA.

And when it finishes FCC tests, will be legal to implement in designs here :)
Interesting. From the perspective of a total outsider far away from the United States, I always thought the Valley's tech scene was strangely sort of cult-like, in a way. It seems that there's really no limit to commercialisation, and spirituality is next in line to be 'designed' into a product and either sold to people, or will sell users' spirituality to advertisers, insurers and political parties.
GWhois.org
Attracting Potential Co-Founders
The fact that payloads are so expensive is partially caused by the launches being so expensive, so reducing the launch price tag will cause reduction in payload costs.
The artificially built capital is kind of creepy. But other cities are not like that at all. It is authentic, culture-rich and very safe to travel.
There was an article about crash statistics on roads that used to be surrounded by tree lanes [1]. There were as many accidents with or without the trees. Removing the trees avoids the opportunities to crash into them, so now people drive faster and carelessly.

I also think stress, in healthy dose, is necessary. I'd bet heavy on decay as a result of removing it. Until the potential self-driving car future where people won't even have to think about driving and will find other ways to be proactive.

[1] http://a395.idata.over-blog.com/1/74/49/41/SPECIALITES-GOURM...
Erlang and OTP in action is my favorite, as it cuts to the parts that I as a distributed systems engineer really wanted to learn. http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ is one of the most commonly recommended guides/books.
Norway is homogenous in part because it's small. Its population is a touch larger than Alabama's.

I imagine it's easy to be homogenous when you're small with a low immigrant population. I'm not sure it's because they are more sophisticated than other countries.
Didn't know stop and go was already deployed. I wonder how many people use such a system and thus how trusty it feels. I mean, it's kind of a large field-testing of self-driving car logic subset.
Bravo to this post. Whether or not you agree with Aubrey de Grey, you have to admit that he is a true radical, whereas the man portrayed in this article strikes me as little more than a conceited tinkerer--one of our contemporary capitalist hippies who seem to combine the worst of both those worlds. Death cannot be "redesigned" because it is the end of a dynamic human life, with all the possibilities entailed by that life. It is intrinsically "a downer." Let's do something about that.
EasyPost (YC S13) hiring back end devs
Wow, Amazing
>A voluntary agreement

No job contract is truly voluntary in the absence of a guaranteed livable income. Period.

Take the implicit threat of poverty out of the salary/job negotiation process (e.g. with a basic income) and then we can talk about "voluntary" contracts.

>Can you clarify what you mean? If Pfizer conducts the research then they collect the rent.

Legal entities do not conduct research, people do. Legal entities do collect rents, though (which are then distributed).

Ostensibly, the patent system is there to spur innovation by people.
Here is an example of how inspection could be done by professionals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dWCI4S4fGg
Interesting when your product can be spiked, and make significant increases in profit. This looks like numbers that could potentially knock a business out of business. Reminds me of old phone bills.
While I understand where the skepticism comes from, I think it's overly pessimistic to think nothing's changed since your time in the government, or that Recordon won't be able to enact positive change.

I've been really impressed with the quality of talent that USDS and 18F have been drawing, and with the quality of their output. While I'm sure there's still more friction than you'd see at a super-tiny private sector startup, I think everyone's aware that software/IT delievery needs to radically change, and there's a lot of smart, driven people who seem to be helping enact that change.
Wosulin and Zinulin are just two of the generic insulins that are available.
They are "regular" zinc protophane insulins.
Larry King has a special way of tweeting
maybe not 85k a week, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to amass close to that amount of money in the span of 2-3 weeks
Can't wait to see!
> and verify which git commit it is pointing to

You'd need to go a step even further. The "application" code is only one thing - what about other applications, processes, DB logic, HTTP front-ends?

All of those can modify requests, data, copy data, etc - even if you could "100% prove" that the server is running that particular git revision, there's so many side-channels as to make it useless.
Cypress PSoC without PSoC Creator, using only free/open toolchain
Figured so, but thought the brief article can serve as a TL;DR; for the 9min video.
Couldn't something like that be blocked at a firewall level with AWS though, i.e. drop everything except TCP port 80?
Looks like you are already at 700 subscribers, nice!
Thank you for making this, this is exactly what I wanted.
It is, which is why the same people also do:

http://gobot.io/

I agree, I don't know if Ruby is the greatest choice for a language so close to low-level. But, I am glad it (artoo) exists
Why do all the considerations point the same way?
I honestly wasn't trying to profile for or against Tesla or Ultra-High End luxury. They both may face the same problems.
It is not FUD. libdrizzle as you mentioned still lacking of MySQL 5.6 support. (libdrizzle 5.1 stable version was released two years ago)
I used to work at AWS too. Where were you? Seattle / support?
Well, if Lantern were a customer, then China could just block them like they do for any CF customer they want to block. The reason the bug was allowing people to get around the firewall was because they were pretending to access a site that wasn't blocked, but actually receiving content that was blocked.
You know why in the UK drugs cost 20-25% on average of the US price, not because of subsidies but because the NHS provides healthcare for 60M people and they say we are paying X for the drug now bid.

That's not why drugs are cheaper in the UK. The largest US health insurance company is United and it covers almost 40M people. More than in all of Canada. Yet United pays more for drugs than Canada.

Also, drugs in the UK don't cost 20-25% of the US price. Maybe you meant 75-80%?
How could it possible know about all of that room geometry. Also, how is this better than playing a game using VR without AR? Why would I want to play in my office or home when the game could make its own level...
Tesla performance is astounding - better than many cars that are $250k and more.

Tesla interior/luxury/comfort is astonishingly low. All mid-ranged luxury cars (A6, 5-Series, E-class, etc.) are much, much nicer cars to drive in, and many of the lower end (3 series, C class) have nicer interiors as well.
"Reminds me a lot of Pyongyang"

Or Brasilia. Three cities built on the communist central planning principles of the post-war American suburb reflect, each in its own way, the oppression and alienation that motorcar-oriented planning imposes on humans. [0]

There is an alternative to suburban hell. The traditional city humans have loved for thousands of years is still possible. [1] There are even great accessible, affordable examples in Burma and Brazil. In places like North Korea and the USA, the destruction of traditional free ways of life has been more complete.

Though if you belong to the powerful and monied elite you might be able to afford to live in the few remaining neighborhoods in Pyongyang or San Francisco where traditional city design from decades ago is grandfathered in.

[0] http://kunstler.com/books/the-geography-of-nowhere/
[1] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html
I would agree. (I already do, but) I wish more people who understood the importance of testing what you build would contribute to projects like this!
The issue is your comment doesn't really add any value. Anyone can paste a random link saying "you should use this" but it takes effort to explain why it would be useful to them. HN comments are about fostering discussion, so say something to be discussed :-)
Straight up Propaganda.
For many years Myanmar was the sole country on the planet you couldn't drive your own vehicle into.. preventing a trans-europe->se asia trip without shipping your vehicle.

That has all changed in the last 12-24 months, and multiple groups have reported it's now possible.

http://wikioverland.org/Myanmar

(The details are still a little short, but we're getting there)

I'm planning my trip now :)
Blocking the high: one man’s quixotic quest to cure addiction
Depending on how deep you want to go:

http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-erlang-does-...

BTW, this is the author of the program and the article!

Heck checkout out all his posts, they are fantastic.

Here is my quick try at it:

Try to think of Erlang VM as a mini operating system. Erlang processes are then OS processes.

If your operating system is modern it lets you launch more processes than you have CPUs.

Also if one process crashes it doesn't affect others. This is pretty cool and useful. Anyone remember how much fun it was to run Windows 3.1 or Windows 95? Your game crashes and your word processor got screwed as well as a side effect. That is pretty primitive. We got better tools than that (Linux, Windows, etc). So this takes you a long way as far as the analogy works. Erlang processes have the same properties.

The only difference is that while you can probably have hundreds or maybe thousands OS processes on a large system, you can have many hundreds of thousands or even millions of Erlang processes. They are really lightweight (a couple of KB of memory only when they start up). The VM is a really awesome piece of engineering because it makes it all possible while also preserving isolated heaps (memory).
Well Deserved
The word "website" is not correct in
that statement.
I just set up my new VPS, which included getting Apache/Wordpress/Postfix/Dovecot set up and secured, along with integration of StartSSL free cert.

site: https://crankylinuxuser.net

And I secured it down appropriately whilst also using multitude of external scanners to verify what I thought I did. It was somewhat problematic, mainly with the AUTH between dovecot and postfix.

And then I do a RBL search. Some idiot spammer did the dirty deed back in September. 3 RBLs, all lesser known ones. So, I responded as they requested, with a justification of why I should be removed. I did that today around noon.

I'm now on none of them. So the whole "shakedown" issue, at least for me, seems not to be the case.
The problem is, it isn't easy to distinguish between "playful homage" and someone cynically trading on your goodwill with products designed to trick customers.

Especially if you have to convince a court to stop that company from doing something which seems identical to what you've already allowed three other companies to do.

These things are always so easy to see, so obvious, when you're one person; the moment you have to convince others, things so obvious as to not require elaboration become serious points of contention.
The FTC report exposes the bullying of content providers, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Amazon, who were told that if they didn't want their content scraped they would be blocked from search results.[1]

And Jason Calacanis is all upset because the report says that Google tweaked their algorithm to hurt competitors, which he claims killed his human-powered search engine, Mahalo [2]

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-...

[2]https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1
It contains stevia, but it also contains a whole lot of cane sugar. Still loaded with calories.