skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... it feels like a bunch of nosy document-writers pointing down at software engineers saying "you're all shit, and we're going to tell you why".

I was under the impression that SEI has a pretty good reputation among people working on safety-critical systems like aerospace, automotive, and the DoD. Of the two authors with visible profiles, one led "software development projects and software process improvement efforts for the E-2C Hawkeye Program", and the other was "developing and maintaining nuclear engineering and scientific software for 14 years" before coming to SEI. I don't see that there's much basis to say that they are uninformed on software engineering.

> First, I reject the premise that software is poor quality when compared to other engineering disciplines.

If we're talking software on safety-critical systems, that may be true. I think NASA is a great example of software assurance done right. Outside of the SC area, I don't see how you can come to that conclusion: take the perceived decline in Apple's software quality as one example.

> The space shuttle, commonly referred to as the most complex machine ever built, has around 2.5 million parts. The Linux kernel alone has over 16 million source lines of code. It's an order of magnitude more complex than the SPACE SHUTTLE!.

I think this is a nonsensical comparison, but if you want to go with it, consider that each of the Space Shuttle parts has multiple steps going into it's creation. It'd be slightly more fair to say that the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million functions and compare that to the Linux kernel, but it remains a nonsensical comparison.

>Anyone who's ever done software development, will tell you that the order for these is something like: 2b, 2a, 2b, 2d, 2c, oh - someone's asking for sizings, better do some 1 - 2d, 2c, 2d, 2b, 2a, 2d...

Anyone who's done work in a regulated environment will tell you that while your suggested process may happen in the conception stage for preliminary testing, once you're under design control you follow formally documented procedures in the order that they are specified.

> There's got to be a better way to codify what we actually do when we develop good software. Not what we think we do, or wish we did, or claim we do to sound impressive.

Plenty of groups work in this area besides SEI: ASQ, IEEE-CS, ACM, &c. Did you have something specific in mind?

As others are saying, I think you're misjudging the target audience for this document, which I would say is Software Engineers (as in the type that would have PE licensure or work in regulated industries). When you have a defined acceptable defect rate and need to deliver on schedule with proper documentation, then things like PSP, CMMI, &c. do work. It's overkill for a web app. That said, I think adopting some of the rigor and professionalism in Software Engineering as typified by regulated industries would be an overall improvement to software development as it is generally practiced.
I am not a booth babe. Ask me a question
Thanks for your comment.

A problem I have with what you wrote is it's all well and good to answer the availability question honestly if it comes up but that doesn't (for me) address the issue that I don't feel my founder is being 100% transparent when the customer convos begin. We are demoing something to customers and they aren't being told that it's just a prototype up front.

Is there a reason he can't say it's a prototype? I get somebody might not be interested in a prototype but isn't the customer going to lose interest when we say that it's going to be 6 months before the products are available anyway?

Another reason I feel uneasy is that we can't even start to build what we prototyped without the funding. If that falls through we are screwed so how can our founder honestly give a Date X with any certainty without the money in the bank?

Edit: also having been in sales/bizdev for years I think "selling" is the process of offering something for sale. It's not just the moment where you accept the money and provide the product/service. Maybe this is where the problem is. I just can't seem to get comfortable asking somebody to consider buying a product that doesn't exist without telling them up front that it doesn't exist yet. That's bait and switch to me.
I moved from the other way from Mercurial to Git a while back.

I started using Mercurial because the basic interface and operations appeared more natural to me. Also, at least at the time, the Windows support was better in Mercurial.

After working with some repos using Git, I fell in love with the staging area, and the ability to selectively stage parts of files. I am sure Mercurial has something similar, but it was built into Git.

The only thing that bugs me is that the Windows port appears to be stuck at 1.9.5 (yes, I know it's open-source so I should go fix it instead of complaining).
The NSA has been proven to lie to its overseers repeatedly over the course of decades while Snowden has been proven to lie to the NSA in order to expose its lies. Personally, I regard Snowden's behavior to be more trustworthy in this respect.
VCs pay the bills and call the shots. In a not-yet-profitable startup, customers do neither by definition.
A homeless man learned to code and became famous; one year later, he stopped
Amazon Licensed CryEngine for $50-70m
I wonder if BitKeeper owner Larry McVoy has ever regretted not open sourcing his software? Git tools is a whole industry now. The most promiment one, github, recently become one of the 100 most popular websites on the planet.
I put it on github and added a readme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330485
I reject any obligation to help any random person. I tried to explain my thinking earlier, basically if you have an infinite debt then you don't have any right over your own life. I firmly reject that notion.
The only other objectively correct notion is that you have zero debt, as you said 10% is merely a Schelling point. 1% would do as well, so would 5% or 15%.

Does that make sense?

I am willing to help friends, family, etc because I actually care about them, ie making them happy will make me happy.

I am also willing to save the child in this case, because it is a) close b) not especially burdensome and c) will provide me with some measure of happiness. It is a choice I freely make, not a moral obligation (if it was an adult I really hated I might not have rescued him).
So in what way exactly does the Internet as a whole benefit from allowing IPv4 addresses to be traded in a free market?

This is a honest question. I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses (which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at exhorbitant prices.

IPv6 won't render the problem moot - it's likely that IPv4 addresses will remain a necessity for globally reachable services for years to come, regardless of IPv6 adoption.
Why can't you aggregate on non-indexed fields? I know lucene doesn't allow that, but why? It seems to work on normal-rdbms ?
I see these posts as pedagogical, not advocacy. That is, if they were advocacy, it would be relevant to criticize how realistic the C++ code is. But if they are pedagogical, then that matters less, and the C++ code is just a way to teach the reader how something they are unfamiliar with (Rust) maps to something they are familiar with (C++).
Youtube keeps all the original source files so there's no quality loss going from one encoding to another, if that's what you were referring to.
How do you cope with your discomfort? Have you expressed your concerns? Have you thought about quitting?
They should probably snipe the guys who wrote the players for one of the major porn sites then. They seem to have it figured out.
There was a story of a university researcher doing this a few years ago, on a for more modest wage.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11950843

On the one hand I think its far more generous, though as pointed out, the trader will end up donating a lot more cash.

Either way, good on them.

I have too much uncertainly about my future to make such a commitment at this moment (and to be fair I really think that politics should arrange a fairer society so that individuals don't need to do such things). It's in the back of my head that if I get rich I could do so much more for society.
The references to money buying political influence are both brief and relevant. I don't see how you could write a credible article on this topic without observing the existence of powerful economic incentives.

(Edit: I originally wrote 'credible argument' which doesn't make much sense)

The oil business is interesting to economists because the real world market comes quite close to the economic model of perfect competition; it's fast and cheap to set up or shut down a well (relative to the value of the oil one may extract), the commodity is standardized and fungible, there are enough producers in the market that they exist as price-takers, and the price of oil is widely known and tracked throughout the economy - far better then any other single commodity. Why wouldn't you consider the economic factors in a story like this?
The way I see it: the NSA is a necessary evil in many ways, and not all of their activities are unethical. I have no problem with the leaking of documents regarding domestic surveillance or breaches into private companies in allied nations; I think these are clearly unethical activities on the NSA's part. But almost everything was released or is in the process of being released, including a lot of legitimate intelligence activity and research into actual criminals and enemy states (North Korea, Iran, etc.), as well as details about various technology of which there was no evidence of unethical use.

I don't think all of those documents had to be released for the point to be made. A lot of them, sure, but not all of them.
Their point about the image of the bust remains. The fact that they covered the bust with a tarp itself creates an image with a message.

Consider the mentality of obscuring the bust with something that is even uglier. It is not a statement on the aesthetics of the work. It is literally saying "You may not look upon this unsanctioned idea"
I agree completely. None of these examples are going to convince a C++ programmer who's already sunken the cost of learning the language to switch to rust.

Something I realized at some point is that these "language A vs language B" comparisons aren't really there to convince adherents of language B to switch to language A. You'll see lots of comparisons on the web of Haskell/Scheme/Lisp/C#/F#/Ocaml etc put up against really poorly written C/C++ code, with "language A" inevitably coming out of the comparison pretty well.

Thinking back to my days at school, a lot of physicists were telling each other that if they wanted their simulations to run in a reasonable amount of time, they had to code them in C. These comparisons are really aimed at them - the message here is, "yes, a really great C programmer could write machine-optimal FFTs or whatever in C, but the code that you, a beginner, will end up writing could actually end up being not much faster and in some cases perhaps even a lot slower than the equivalent code in Haskell/etc".
Two weeks ago, @thatusertwo posted http://ioscodesamples.com/. The site contained a link to a zip file they had made, which contained a number of sample iOS projects. The samples were collected from a number of sources, mostly found here: https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios and http://cocoapods.org. @thatusertwo took down his site, most likely due to HN traffic, so I reuploaded the file to github.

The repository is useful for new iOS devs. Its a solid code reference.

Feel free to submit PR's or reorganize the readme.
For me, the Objectively Correct Amount To Donate is the maximum I can deduct. I think this is 33% of gross, but someone elsewhere said it may be up to 50%. I'd go research it, but right now I'm working on achieving that 33$ this year--I'm not hitting 50% unless I bump up my income a good bit.

But it's an objective measure externally set for me that is neither 0% or 100% (less the minimum needed to live), so I find it quite helpful.

(I think taxes are great and I think we should all pay more to fund education, research, health care, and social safety nets, but right now a good portion of it goes to arresting people for drug use, killing people in the Middle East, breaking the Internet, and other things I really dislike.)
I reuploaded it and placed it on github. Here is the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330485
One of the key differences between Oklahoma & California earthquakes
is the relative depth of quakes of significant magnitude.

Quakes caused by tectonic plate interaction and
those possibly caused by fluid injection may
not be usefully comparable - but ask a seismologist,
or at least a geologist, not a journalist, or a
random internet commenter.

There's a nice interactive quake map at:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map

edit: Pasting a long (512+ chars) URL did not work well,
but use the settings sprocket and the checkboxes
for US Faults & Hazards.

BTW, the hot spot in the Missouri/Arkansas area is the
"New Madrid" fault, locally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable: "Mad-rid" not "Mu-drid".
It makes emergency preparedness folks nervous because
it had a big quake in the early 1800s, very little since,
and now has lot of brick construction - sigh.
Tech investments show Iran is eager to end isolation
By the way, I relate to the sine as y projection of a unit circle too, far more than the triangle ratio.

But I relate to it by thinking of the y coordinates of the points between x=-1..1 in a unit-circle, without any drawing utensils/pens/etc.

I don't see why it makes anything easier to consider the process here, rather than just the set of y points, I need to ask some people at work to see how others see it.

Can more people chime in here, perhaps?
Pretending to be informed about that which we have little information is indeed the epitome of misinforming others. Added to which the public information we do have surrounding this issue, it is difficult to suggest seriously and truthfully that the dragnet benefits anyone other than those in the NSA itself (I mean as an entity unto itself), seeing that it has practically no sensible oversight for its actions.
> However having looked your argument over I don't think it ads up. Thus I maintain that my burden is 0%, so if you want to fix global poverty you will have to do it without my donations.

Can you explain your reasoning? If you don't think you have any burden, then naturally the whole point of relinquishing the infinite debt and the 10% Schelling Point won't have any relevance. But in your original comment, you seemed to imply that there was some amount we are on the hook for, you just couldn't understand why we settled on 10%. But if I am misunderstanding, please correct me.
I'm not the one turning this into an us vs. them thing, I think reforms need to be made. I think that many of the things released have already far exceeded the scope of constitutional abuses, and there's no reason to believe there aren't more of them in the pipeline.

If you want change, it might be best not to alienate the 45% of Americans who believe that Snowden went too far or the 56% who believe that he should be charged. The NSA and Snowden issues are two separate things that are linked by a common thread.

I believe the NSA is abusing its power and needs to be changed. I also believe Snowden released vast amounts of classified data, not all of it in a legitimate whistleblower role. If that makes me a bad person who is engaging in misinformation somehow, so be it. I'm willing to accept that other people believe differently, and I believe that people should extend that courtesy to others instead of insulting them.
The original page was just a link. I reuploaded the contents to github and linked it on this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330485
We have the establishment clause to deal with that particular kind of abuse - this is completely nonreligious.
The Polytechnic Legacy (1998)
Snowden's a hero and deserves his place on that memorial.

This whole deal with the people putting up a statue of a hero and the government tearing it down? Not what America's supposed to be about.

Combine that with the fact that most of the senators who voted for the Patriot Act probably read 1984, and didn't object to the obvious propaganda in the name Patriot Act? Not what America's supposed to be about either.
I'm disappointed that the dietary interventions did not include a ketogenic diet as there has been recent evidence that such a diet is competitive with caloric restriction in terms of life extension (and would not suck so bad to actually practice).

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42273/...
Everything I know about Startups, I learned from Mad Men
I don't see how you can separate the two. A point on a unit circle describes a triangle formed by the horizontal step along the X axis, and then a vertical step to get to the circle. The sine is the vertical step, for a unit circle. For a non-unit circle, this has the wrong scale, which is normalized by dividing by the circle radius. And that radius happens to be the third side of the triangle, the hypotenuse. You can ignore the triangle aspect when you assume the unit circle, which makes the hypotenuse 1.
Unfortunately "easy to imagine" doesn't imply "particularly plausible", although it's an association we all (including me) tend to make. It's easy to imagine that bloodletting is a useful treatment, or that $SOME_GROUP aren't as $SOME_CHARACTERISTIC as $SOME_OTHER_GROUP, but the number of such easy-to-imagine ideas that stand up to public testing by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference is extremely small.

So while I don't disagree that it's easy to imagine that our ancestors had intermittent access to food--men of the Piraha people in South America, who live pretty Stone Age lives, are apt to go without food for a day or two just because they can, for example--that doesn't go too far toward increasing the plausibility that such circumstances were common enough to have a significant evolutionary influence, particularly as the evidence for positive effects for women is somewhat weaker than for men, and pregnant and nursing women have more continuous caloric requirements than others (random site with some links on women's response to IF: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/women-and-intermittent-fastin...)

In contrast, we are pretty sure humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, able to survive on diets and dietary schedules that were extremely variable, from mostly plants in some places to mostly meat in others, and fairly steady food supply to fairly intermittent, all without there being a vast range of average lifespans between them. This suggests that our dietary optimum is broad and shallow, whereas a great deal of dietary research seems aimed at the belief that our dietary optimum is narrow and deep, so if we could just discover the precisely right diet we would live in good health for substantially longer.

This may be the case, but my personal bet is that in my lifetime a) no such discovery will be made and b) it will continue to be extremely lucrative selling this implausible idea to the public in various guises, from "superfoods" to weird eating patterns.

Of these, intermittent fasting seems at least to be a reasonably effective way of dealing with the caloric overabundance we live in the midst of in the West, and is also well within the (arguably very broad) envelope of our evolutionary adaptations. It is also at the very least benign and quite possibly marginally better than many alternatives.
They don't need special sauce. YouTube retains the original uploaded video to enable reëncoding.
“The park is such a symbol of American liberty; that’s what it’s all about, the founding principals of it,” she said. “It (the bust) is almost appropriate but inappropriate to do it (put up illegally).”

As if the establishment of American liberty didn't involve breaking any laws in the first place.
clang was what I based the current Rust compiler's error messages on. Matching its quality was a design goal from the start, since I think that one of the biggest reasons for clang's success was the quality of its error messages. Diagnostics are the UX of a compiler, and so they're deserving of the exact same care that is put into mobile app or Web design.
It's interesting that they choose to (almost literally) deface it.

They're fully in their right to remove it, but simply making it unrecognizable feels like a political act.
It's this sort of thing that's the reason why Perl will always be my favorite language, no matter how "old" it might be. Being designed to mimic the nuances of natural languages is part of its charm.
I wrote a blog entry about some of these issues. http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/104839763080/are-ip-addr...

IANA specifically states that a free-market of IP addresses would be harmful, instead they argue that IP allocation should be based on need and not treated as property.

>ISPs are required to utilize address space in an efficient manner. To this end, ISPs should have documented justification available for each assignment. The regional registry may, at any time, ask for this information. If the information is not available, future allocations may be impacted. In extreme cases, existing loans may be impacted. RFC 2050

Big companies have fought them on this and won.

>The court held that Nortel had an exclusive right to use the legacy numbers. The court also explicitly sanctioned Nortel’s exclusive right to transfer its exclusive right to use the numbers. In recognizing Nortel’s exclusive right to use legacy IPv4 numbers, the court implicitly found that Nortel had the exclusive right to possess the numbers themselves. Consequently, Nortel could exclude others from possession and use of the same legacy IPv4 numbers. In other words, the court found Nortel possessed the customary “bundle of rights” commonly associated with the ownership of tangible or intangible property. - Property Rights in IPv4 Numbers: Recognizing a New Form of Intellectual Property
Well, not necessarily.

It depends on the definition of raven. If you define 'raven' as a current resident of Earth, that simplifies things for you - it's meaningless to check things off Earth.
Ask HN: Why does the game start at 8:18PM CDT?
Just wondering if anyone knew the reason the NCAA Championship game starts at 8:18pm? Seems like a strange and arbitrary start time.
It's not that hard to design internal controls that prevent a few compromised individuals from stealing too much.

It is that hard to design internal controls that prevent a theft when 100% of the staff are in the same room with their computers and guns to all of their heads.
Correcting the quote is silly, yes, but I think it's constructive to point out uses of the wrong word entirely. That's a far leap away from being ultra-picky about grammar.

Though it might make more sense to use "'ve" when correcting to emphasize that it's not a spoken vs. written speech difference, it's a transcription error.
Duns and Bradstreet DUNS Number Source Code: iUpdate.js
I really love Rust's error messages, but I do wish I could get some more arbitrary code inspection prior to the compilation step.

For example, sometimes you may declare something with some odd syntax and Rust effectively say "I was expecting type `A`, but this is type `B`." Frequently, I want to have a little more insight into what's going on, but the inability to maybe write some code that will print out information about something causing a compile error is problematic.

That's the thing about Rust: because the burden of debugging is so shifted to the compilation step, Rust absolutely HAS to have good error messages because that's all you have to work with.

However, I feel this shift in workflow can be overcome with different tooling, and I suspect this is mostly a symptom of being new to the language.