skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stross also composes in Scrivener. He explains the workflow in the comments. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/02/24/utterly_u...
As someone who's met Chris and knows a mentor for The Last Mile, I can't say enough good things about this. In my opinion, we desperately need more of these kinds of out-of-the-box solutions to social problems. This is what progress looks like.
The hyperloop is fast as a plane and cheaper than a train
I don't have much faith in future processors if it really is impractical to make optimizing compilers for them.
This is a "street drugs are contaminated" argument and you are correct in that "street" drugs are often contaminated or are of inferior quality. It is an argument against prohibition. I'm not sure where you got the idea that "Crystal meth is a lot more addictive", I'd be interested to learn more if that is in fact the case. Again, no argument that illicit contaminated drugs can harm people, so can contaminated food or water. It is interesting OTOH to consider oxycodone which is abused widely and is available often paired with what would only be considered a contaminant (paracetamol or acetaminophen) if it were a street drug; the contaminant being responsible for most of the acute harm attributable to prescription opiate abuse.
There are a lot of things about which I'll get up over, and there are plenty of companies feted around here that I think are moral crimes in progress, but this isn't one and I think you've got the arrow of responsibility backwards. You're using websites and applications that have opted into using Facebook's infrastructure for the ends that benefit them, and as a side effect they are sharing the details of their traffic and users with Facebook. If that worries you--and I'm not saying you're wrong to be worried, though I personally don't care--you should not be using those websites. There are people who don't. I think their online lives must suck, but it's their prerogative.

I'm sure it's hard. But doing the right thing often is.
This post is almost comically ridiculous if you try and apply any of it outside of the context of (I imagine) a small team that doesn't really do anything externally.

How do I tell my clients that I only do meetings on Thursdays? If they happen to be unavailable one Thursday, do they have to wait a fortnight before I deign to speak to them again?

Is this guy seriously suggesting that the way to stop being overwhelmed by inbox zero is by using Slack?

And honestly, doing one thing a day - really? How in the world does that work? Sure, doing one thing well is better than doing nothing or half-doing a bunch of things, but surely your goal should be actually doing a reasonable amount of things that reflect a solid day's work - and figuring out a strategy for reliably making that happen.

Perhaps I'm just a grouch today, but it feels like this post is either satire or written from a completely different universe, utterly unrelated to the one I inhabit and work in.
I especially like that this conversation went full circle and back into tau.
I'm a somewhat older programmer, and fwiw, I've met as many genuinely unhireable fossils as I've heard this complaint.

I've heard it from people who've been programming for 30+ years, whose idea of code versioning is the 'Save As' button. I've heard it from people whose entry to technology development was coding websites in HTML 1.0, who've learned very little else since.

Many people, at least from the previous generations of programmers, either don't appreciate or aren't able to manage the lifelong learning required by this profession.
Anyone here who has not read "The Power of a Positive No" really should get to it. It's about how to say No constantly without being an ass. It's practically tailored around devs negotiating with customers.

I the whole world read Ury's "Getting to Yes" trilogy, the whole world would be a much nicer place to be.
No. Just look at the number of projects they dump to the trash can, compared to number of successful ones. Litarally... hit and miss.
I think the US system of salaried employees and no overtime restrictions (or even pay) encourages exploitation in the first place, so that is my background for making this statement. I live and work in Europe, and I will never work for any US-based company that does not place firm restrictions on how overtime is managed. Most US companies simply have the wrong incentives in place.

But yes, having the legal right to take 4 hours a week out of your schedule to stay up-to-date would go a long way towards alleviating the problem.
And as a bonus, this would make sin and cos library functions easier to implement on computers. Typically, to compute sin or cos, one has approximation functions like Taylor series which work for small values, and then one reduces the input down to that small range by doing a modulus, since sin and cos are periodic. This modulus is very complex to get right in practice, and can be very slow, especially for large values. But, if we switched from radians to turns, it would be as trivial and fast as just taking the fractional part of the input, and dividing by 4 if needed.

And as a further bonus, working in turns would mean that many more common quantities can be represented exactly, rather than requiring rounding as most multiples of Pi or Tau do.
Was Howard Hughes addicted to opiates when he was building/developing most of his things? I was under the impression that addiction only really set in once he became a recluse.
Presumably, they don't want to spend the money on maintaining lots of public bathrooms, but instead want to see if putting enough constraints on people's solution-space will somehow incentivize someone else (e.g. businesses) to do so.
Dbus was created by freedesktop.org and was based on KDE's DCOP. I don't think it's fair to call it a Gnome invention.
6 Amazing Seeds with Incredible Health Benefits
Or maybe they could come up with an efficient way to clean the public urinals instead.
There is also the locate command. When combined with grep, they make a fast way to find files and search within them. For example, to find a Java class anywhere on the system:

sudo updatedb

for i in $(locate "*.jar");
do echo $i; jar -tvf $i | grep -Hsi classname;
done

The best you can do with vanilla Windows is search from the root directory, but it could take a while:

for /R %G in (*.jar) do @jar -tvf %G | find "ClassName" > NUL && echo %G
Fwiw, don't take it as cannon, and expect exceptions to every rule.
> Also, all of that stuff is free (or has free alternatives), so I don't know where the author came up with the "couple of hundred bucks" figure.

I only counted Photoshop + MS Office. The reason for that is because I wrote this article as a response to the latest "Why Linux is not ready for desktop" article I came across (you'll find the link to it in the first paragraph of my article). They have mentioned these programs as Windows advantages, not mentioning their disadvantages at all. I agree with you, most of the regular users don't need them anymore.

> You also get what many consider to be the best IDE available. For free. Yay!

I also consider it to be the best IDE there is, but since I'm not using most of its features (I'm just building some simple Visual Basic apps as a part of my college curriculum), 20 GB is kind of a lot for me.
I'd be interested to see this talk, because as far as i know, it's pretty far off base.

1. He says" As computation has become cheaper, users have correspondingly expanded the volume of data that they are handling, and optimization remains a critical challenge for the occasional "hot spots" in the code.""

Except, uh, a lot of people have applications whose profiles are mostly flat, because they've spent a lot of time optimizing them. We build optimizing compilers that can speed up these apps anyway.

2."Have compilers become so smart that they automatically turn clean high-level code for these hot spots into optimized code, removing the need for humans to be optimization experts? The reality, unfortunately, is very much the opposite: general-purpose "optimizing" compilers are falling farther and farther behind the actual capabilities of modern processors."

This is just flat out wrong.

That said, Daniel is a very smart (and obviously pretty opinionated :P) guy, so i'm really interested to see what he has to say.
There is plenty of obvious hatred and mocking under the guise of sarcasm in that sub.

This is 100% the case for newcomers to the subreddit, which is already enough of a reason for it to be considered toxic. But it is also true if you are not new to the concept. There is plenty of hatred and anger in the SRS network of subreddits - read the other SRS* subreddits to see - and shitredditsays is where they are allowed to vent it, under the guise of sarcasm.

Sarcasm and satire can be valid and honest. But when an entire community like shitredditsays does nothing but that all day, every day, then it's an convenient place for actual hatred to be expressed.

Sometimes - rarely - there is something egregious enough that it makes sense to mock it and be sarcastic about it, even harshly so. But if that's all you do all the time, like shitredditsays - and tumblrinaction, and others - then you quickly become toxic. A community dedicated to hatred of other groups can't avoid becoming toxic.
In Canada, the cheapest iPhone plan you can find is $200 upfront + $80/month.

If you bring your own device, expect to pay $65/month for unlimited talking, unlimited messaging, and 1GB of data. Additional data usually costs around $5/250MB.

That's in 2015.
Reverse proxying isn't the same. Information that's critical to some apps, like client certs or socket info, isn't available without hacking up custom headers and mixing that trusted data in with the untrusted client message. Due to HTTP's supremely obtuse parsing rules, this can be exploitable even when being defensive. I've personally seen this in SIP proxing (ganked the parsing from HTTP) leading to simply unparseable messages due to irreconcilable differences in deployed software.

Yeah, FastCGI introduces a whole other attack surface, but it's on a trusted boundary, at least. Mixing trust levels within content seems like one of the primary classes of security problems.
I stopped using a cellphone when I moved to US --it was way more expensive than what I used to have in my home country (so I just simply said "nope."). Now when people ask my phone number, I just give my Google voice (which is free text/talk within US). If I am traveling to a conference, for the sake of emergency, I just use a potato phone with prepaid credit -- which I connect its number to Google Voice, so everyone who calls my Google voice number are automatically being redirected to my temporary phone. So I get that going for me.
I dislike Facebook because social networking is a natural monopoly and they have managed to grab ahold of it.. they have replaced some of the open and decentralized nature of the internet with the centralized and closed service they control. Competing with or replacing facebook will be very difficult because everyone's friends are already on facebook.

Wouldn't it be great if someone at harvard had come up with an open social networking protocol instead?
I don't see how that visualization is in any way useful at all. In fact, it's full of a bunch of visual noise that has nothing to do with any salient point: counties where drilling is no longer active. That number grows even as the total number of rigs grows, and it continues to grow as the number of rigs declines. It's not correlated with anything. It's just a bunch of jittery, jumpy, distracting noise.
Drugs don't have to have positive value to argue for them being legal.

For example, cheap distilled spirits have little or no redeeming value. But it would be more harmful to make that illegal than otherwise. Methamphetamine (Desoxyn) is used to treat obesety and ADHD, and similar treatments for ADHD have similar potential for recreational use/abuse. But the whole Drug War is so harmful, it doesn't matter if there are therapeutic or harmless recreational uses of a drug. It would be less expensive, more effective, and more compassionate to treat addicts than to continue the Drug War, even if more people became addicted.
The obsession with experience in Technology X always reminds me of the story recruiter who turned down someone for not having 10+ years of Rails experience (http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/you-cant-have-more-...).
Well, for writing a novel isn't markdown more than enough? I usually use LaTeX and I don't know much about the tools around markdown, however I wouldn't suggest LaTeX to a SciFi author right away. I assume it's kind of easy to handle with pandoc.

Change tracking is quite easy this way: use your favorite diff utility. You can even version control your documents if you want.

Also, what publishers do with the resulting .doc or .odf files anyway? I assume they throw away all formatting the author did and they do the typesetting in some more professional tool. If this is the case the author shouldn't care about typesetting at all and just pour the contents of his/hor novel in a text file. Markdown is suitable for this.
There is android fo PC, consoleos, etc.
aand there are phone apps on PC, be it VoIP or interfacing with the phone network (Asterix).

So it is perfectly possible to integrate the system of your dreams.
Wirelessly charge over 55-metres away, scientists crack proper wireless power
FTP is dead.
Fran is right in the sense that C is a very very hard language to do these things for.
But she's wrong in the sense that it caused massive amounts of funding to be poured into trying to make it happen anyway.

It's like saying Itanium was a complete failure for compiler optimization.

It is in the sense that they couldn't get compilers that produced good enough code for it (well, the could, just not compilers that ran fast).

But the amount of research and funding used to try to make it happen actually did advance the state of the art in compilers. The techniques we learned weren't all useless, and we discovered a lot about the limits of what can be done.

Fran, btw, is one of the smartest people you'll ever meet.
Just last year I discovered, through some IBM Research colleagues, a really great algorithm that she came up with for region analysis, that solves a lot of the problems of common ones, cleanly, and nobody has rediscovered it in 35 years yet.
(Sadly, this falls into the "i wish they had published more papers on stuff" area)
RMS is a strange duality. On the one hand he's a freedom advocate and has put considerable effort forward to make our world a better place; it's hard to not have a great deal of respect for him. On the other hand he's brilliant but quite frankly a lunatic, benign freedom extremist... and I don't even have a Facebook account! I can only imagine how he might come off to people who're hardcore social media consumers.
On 2.: Maybe he is talking about branch prediction vs lack of this feature in compilers. What do I mean by that is that optimizing compilers( at least in c ) don't optimize based on measurements from actual programs. A compiler that would run the program for a certain amount of time, to profile, could find the weak spots and optimize.
If one of your goals is to cripple the thriving black market and all of its accompanying ills (mainly violence) then you can't continue with prohibition because it allows the black market to continue to thrive by generating scarcity.

Drug prohibition has been poisonous to social harmony, civil rights, and the rule of law since its inception. It was never a good idea; and it is time to admit that and move forward.
This reminds me of a type of professional that I see far too often. The professional who specializes in not doing their job. It happens with programmers, as well as many other specialties. You've probably seen them:

- Software developers who as soon as you tell them what you need, they tell you why it's impossible.

- Network administrators who apparently specialize in making machines not talk to each other, because things worked better before their first day

- DBA's whose first priority is keeping you from accessing the data

- Engineers who think it's their job to make things more difficult

Saying NO to all the things is better than getting nothing done, sure. But having the skill to say yes to the things that are needed is better.
Actually yeah, I really would like to see how a whole street of hydrophobic buildings would look in pouring rain. Would there seem to be almost a lumpy force-shield around them from the radius of all the deflected raindrops? Where would they all go after hitting the buildings? Etc. (Good use for a physics simulation; a "rain-tracer", so to speak.)

Now I'm wondering, though, whether you could mix hydrophobic oils into tarmac in a way where all the water on a road would "slick off" toward the nearest ditch, without impacting car tire grippage.
You can probably do it with a bundle, the same way it's done for nginx; append the CA cert to yours:

cat your_cert.crt CA_cert.crt >> cert_bundle.crt
TiADiscussion can be a reasonable place, at times (so can SRSDiscussion). But tumblrinaction itself spends 100% of its time mocking people, often hatefully. That's toxic.
My apologies, I didn't see that. Now the article makes a lot more sense.
Milliondollarhomepage with media queries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_door_operation

The real, less trivial problem is only opening the doors of train cars that actually fit on the platform.

GPS was just a poor choice of positioning system. There are already widely deployed systems where what is essentially an RFID tag sits at a fixed point on the track between the rails and, when scanned, tells the train exactly where it is.
Having meetings every Thursday is exactly "periodically come out of our hidey-holes and talk to people".
The #1 reason not to use FB is you cannot bitch about FB. I have little patience or sympathy for people who use FB and constantly complain about it. They should stop using it.

I don't use FB, which means I have little reason to bitch about it, and if I do want to bitch about it I don't sound like a hypocrit.
They don't hate the abstract concepts, they clearly hate actual people. And worse, specific groups of people.
You'd risk being arrested if you treated cattle the way passengers are treated on some British commuter routes.
Bundler Audit: easy OSVDB checker for Ruby applications
asm.js does not require Firefox and runs just fine in browsers like Chrome.

It just performs better in Firefox at the moment due to better support.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
Ask HN: Depressed. Find my dream job, or do a startup?
Hi HN, I am a recent college grad who's been working as a web developer for about 2 years.

For the past two years, I've been working at a deadend job as a frontend developer. The work itself is extremely tedious because all we do is inherit badly written websites and we are forced to add changes to it - That's all I do. There is also no prospect for a promotion or anything like that.

Why did I stick with this job for 2 years? Because of its excellent benefits. I can work from home nearly any time I want, and I also get 4 weeks of paid vacation (not including holidays).

Although the work itself makes me feel depressed and neurotic, I feel like it gives me the time to pursue my real passion - creating my own SaaS company. I was depressed in college and my dream is what got me through.

But working with horrendous codebases for so long gave me this hunger for writing clean code. Now I fantasize about working with other smart and PASSIONATE people. I want to be around other programmers that are into programming as much as me.

I read engineering blogs from other companies, and can't help but feel envious of what they have. But I feel like in order for me to pursue my original goals, I need to have all the free time that I can get.

I'm starting to get really depressed and anxious at my job. I wake up dreading to fix yet another stupid bug.

I do get job offers here and there because I contribute to open source and regularly attend meetups. But my coworkers tell me that "a job is a job" and that I will hate it no matter where I go.

Is this true? Are all software jobs bad? Should I just stick with my current job with the flexible hours?
EU votes for credit card fee cap
My take is different:

For "Web development as a career", the OP
seems mostly to mean as an employee. Then
I'd say, go down that road if you have to,
but ASAP learn the business side, get
your own software development environment
(likely you already have it) in your own
room at home, and then just be a sole
proprietor in business much as a guy
who owns and runs, say, a pizza shop,
is a CPA, mows grass and plows snow,
is a plumber or electrician, a
car repair guy, an auto body guy, etc.

Then you get some big advantages:

(1) You are the one who gets the
revenue and, thus, keeps the
earnings.

(2) Likely for each dollar of revenue,
you have lower overhead than
any employer and, thus, get more money.
In particular, you get to cut out
the fraction of the revenue going
to the owners, managers, marketing guys,
lawyers, HR,
landlords, business insurance
agencies, etc.

(3) You have some tax advantages,
often well known to sole proprietors.

(4) For your technical qualifications, you
only have to learn and use what
you actually need and find useful.
So, you don't have to play buzz word
ice hockey with some HR clown who
doesn't know fixed from float
but has a checklist of C++, Python,
Ruby, MongoDB, Jason, HTML5, ....

Point (4) is crucial: Likely
your customers just want their
Web site developed, running, and
occasionally revised. Okay,
that's what you need to be able to
do. But, you get to select the
framework, languages, libraries,
development environment, etc.
If you need a new tool, then, sure
get, learn, and use it. But you
don't have to spend a lot of time
learning, say, HTML5 or
SVG if you don't need to use them
yet.

"The business of America is business",
and in practice from crossroads up
to the largest cities a lot
of sole proprietor small businesses.
Your last point is exactly right: You can't choose not to use the vast majority of sites on the Internet.

Facebook isn't the only company doing stuff like this by any stretch of the imagination, but claiming that you can just "not use Facebook" if you want to avoid them is complete nonsense, hence my original comment.
as jessaustin remarked, "[RMS] is complaining about the specific implementation of mobile tech with which we're currently saddled."

Listening to RMS would mean that if you do carry a mobile device, that it would use entirely free software including all drivers and bootloaders, that it only communicates with other hardware running entirely free software (i.e. only basetowers or wifi routers running free software), and that all the internet services accessed ran entirely free software (e.g. private email servers instead of gmail, pump.io & GNU social instead of twitter & facebook, mediagoblin instead of youtube, wikipedia, yacy or some other free software for search, etc.
I like the idea of holding personal email and then bulk delivering to my inbox at specific times during the day. However, the tool recommended by the linked post, "Inbox Pause", seems to just use a toggle button and doesn't have a scheduling mechanism. Anyone know of a tool that does? Maybe the folks over at SaneBox should add this.
Rethinking the Classic ‘Obedience’ Studies (2012)
Does such a thing like this exist for npm? Where it feels like things are updated, like daily.