skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the market at large, participants certainly don't need to understand the global ramifications of their actions, only the local ones. I don't see why that isn't the case here as well.

The primary reason why that does not apply here is because nobody is selling "the market at large" to you as a cryptographically-secure decentralized consensus system. And besides, those ledgers are edited all the time by Authorities; it's irrelevant to this topic.

Edit: you are attempting to reason by analogy about a pricing system, and then trying to apply it to proof-of-work consensus? May I ask why?
Really? If the person isn't performing, you have to let them go. In what world is a startup being so generous as to give new employees options that they "grow into"?

Essentially what you are saying is that the company has every right to act generous until it actually matters (you know when people finally get paid). Very classy /s
When there are other big differentiators, and the CS issue in question is not serious, then yes, the non-CS factors are likely to dominate decisions.

But often this is not the case. I find that while good CS can make customers happy in normal circumstances, CS really makes or breaks a customer relationship when something goes wrong. Good CS and you have a brand advocate. Bad CS and you may have a nemesis that will go to irrational lengths to tarnish your brand out of pure spite.

I left my old cable operator for two reasons: 1) they were unable to fix my cable internet for two weeks, 2) their customer service kept giving me the wrong information.

Of those two, the latter was by far the most important factor. The former was just the trigger that put me at the mercy of their abysmal CS processes. Before that, if you'd asked me, I'd have recommended the company, and been totally neutral about their customer service, as I'd not had to deal with them for anything of substance.

Leaving did not get me internet back faster. It did not get me better service - just different. But it gave me the satisfaction of telling them to f-off, very publicly, after I'd suffered through multiple days of regular calls to their customer service team.

The downtime made me annoyed to start with, but their CS team who could have defused the situation just with some basic courtesy - others have - massively escalated things by being unsympathetic, not passing on the right information, not calling back when there were changes to the situation, and the final straw: after I'd decided to cancel, and had waited in line 45 minutes, I was told the computer systems were down and when I asked if they could take my details and arrange it later, they said no - ok, but could they call me back? No. I was expected to call back, wait in the same queue again for who knows how long, without knowing if they'd manage to cancel for me then.

So just by attitude and a few process issues that would not have made a material difference to their cost, first they lost me as a customer, then they pushed me into publishing a scathing complaint on my blog and tweet about it. I "only" have a direct reach of a few hundred people, but apparently that worried them enough that I had a call from someone claiming to be an assistant to the CEO the following (Saturday) morning, asking how he could help.

While that calmed me somewhat, had they just had better processes in place, they'd have had several thousands pounds in additional revenue from me by now, and not wasted a dozen or so CS reps time with all the repeated calls that arose from their poor internal communications.

That's why good CS matters.

It's those cases where long term previously satisfied customers decides to blacklist you for life and starts to badmouth you to every friend, co-worker and relative just because your CS processes made them angry by unnecessarily escalating some minor problem.
This probably isn't a popular view for the HN crowd but at this point I'm convinced that for 90% of users, browser extensions are an anti-feature doing way more harm than good.
No, the market economy is sold as a surplus-maximizing decentralized price system. I was attempting to reason by analogy. You've pointed to a difference between the two, but haven't given an explanation of why that difference is sufficient reason for the analogy to break. I'm happy to believe that it is, but am as yet uneducated as to why.

Edit in response to your edit: It just occurred to me that most of the critiques that nullc was making were in very direct correspondence to critiques one could make of the price system. I have no idea if this analogy is useful, but it seemed awfully coincidental.
Plus, since the day they added journaling to HFS+, I haven't lost a single byte of data due to corruption of any kind.

I've had drives failed, where I lost a day's data (Was traveling and away from my time machine drive) and that sucked.

But near as I can tell, beyond losing short periods of work due to catastrophic failures of drives (early SSDs were problematic!) I haven't lost any data since Journalling was added (of course, Time Machine has saved my bacon from drive failures.)

I think Apple has done a really great job in this regard. Yes, HFS+ is based on filesystem work going back to the original Macintosh, but in use it's working fine.
I wonder if it would be possible to configure this gem with "environments" in the same way that Rails applications have environments. Then, in development/test/CI-like environments, very strict checking could be applied based on the specified types. Otherwise, in production-like environments where "performance" may be more important, the type-checking could be looser or simply pass-through.

Disclosure: this may be a Bad Idea (TM)
Hacking company culture
Here's an overview that attempts to explain it in a less CS/math way and a more general and approachable way: https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...
> Apple used to be a lot less awful in this respect, but their design and usability was still great (arguably better than today).

It's interesting that you say that because from everything I've heard talking to people I work with and in other departments who have been here a while, the opposite is true.

The conventional thought is at least over the past 2 years or so, the stress has gotten lower. Most of this is from the departure of a particular executive (no, not Steve) who was known to crack the whip really hard on people. I also hear those same people talk about how quality has suffered as a result of his departure, and they actually long for the higher-stress days when they had to work longer hours but were happier with the finished product.
And why isn't he giving more details? He's being kinda broad without being specific enough.

At this point my guess is he's been running HFS+ without journaling turned on (you can format drives this way) and experienced data loss as a result because the filesystems ability to correct itself was disabled.

This would look like what he's describing.
If you really want to lose weight, there are lots of things that work. As a class, they're called anorectics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorectic).

Unsurprisingly, they're almost universally prescription drugs, because bypassing your metabolism, by definition, has side-effects(!), and people tend to abuse these drugs—hitting all the side-effects and then some—if they're not being carefully prescribed.

There are a few exceptions, though. Pseudoephedrine (the OTC decongestant) is an anorectic. For that matter, ephedrine (that stuff locked behind the counter in the nutrition shops) is a better one. You can't legally put either of them in a "supplement", but you can just buy them on their own, just like you can buy plain TSP washing powder.

---

ETA: as a fun aside, there are non-anorectic weight-loss drugs that work (i.e. drugs that make you lose weight through some other mechanism than making you less hungry.) They tend to be even worse, though. DNP[1], for example: "slips the chain" on your mitochondria so they spin through the Krebs cycle uselessly without any work products. The result? Your body (including your brain!) gets as hot as an overclocked CPU.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol
It's got Journalling, and since that point I've seen no evidence of it corrupting any data, despite several catastrophic drive failures (early SSDs) and the need to restore from Time Machine.
>had to dig through the documentation and set up a compile environment

Make sure to check the AUR first, I've found that 90% of the time, someone else also needed that feature, and built a package for it in the AUR. For example nginx: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&C=0&SeB=nd&K=nginx&o...

Also I've found PKGBUILDs very simple to tweak if you need something extra. If you do start using the AUR, I recommend getting yaourt and letting it take care of that for you. I rarely use pacman directly, as yaourt takes the same flags and works for the arch repos as well as the AUR, plus it allows you to search for packages by omitting -S.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of Gentoo, I used it on my desktop years ago and ended up breaking things weekly when portage got cranky. Currently I manage a few thousand gentoo servers, and find it tedious and frustrating at the best of times. Clients refuse to upgrade for too long, so upgrades generally mean a reinstall. And as customizable as it is, if you wanna do something outside portage, everything will inevitably break.
I think this attitude is perfect for Linux, where many developers will not expend effort to maintain their software.

On the other hand, developers for OS X and iOS are often willing to expend enormous amounts of effort to keep their apps working.
22 Stunning Free Stock Photos Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
Probabilistic Data Structures and Breaking Down Big Sequence Data
We've had the same experience. It adds just enough convention on top of Backbone to prevent your application from turning into a ball of mud, while at the same time remaining small enough where you can hold the whole framework (Backbone + Marionette) in your head. I find Backbone + Marionette much simpler, and much easier to reason about than Angular, but keeping it this way still requires developer discipline. Avoid hacks, avoid event soup (which Marionette maybe makes a bit too easy), and follow general object oriented design patterns, and it's not that hard to build a maintainable, scalable Backbone/Marionette app.
I've been seeing a lot of edits to the article. It seems that for now, one global network of feedback and peer review ( Apple ) is being exchanged for another ( HN ). Not good or bad, just "is" --

As with any "break up" this phase of WOOHOO+rage will crest, then the community dynamic ( refactored/lost ) will echo as loudly in the mind if not louder than the perceived freedom gained... to go work with other people, but still always people.

Draconian tendencies aside, no one will ultimately satisfy as a peer or network. So, OP, enjoy the rush. High-profile exits from large names is thrilling, but then you're without a scapegoat, if there is one at all. Tomorrow will be a reality check unless self critique is harsher than pointing fingers.

The whole "tell the entire world how much X company sucks" trend is pretty much played out, even/especially if the company left does suck. It's a form of therapy to do it, probably, but a lot of it feels like marketing for the next leg of a career regardless.
Also anecdotally, but some of them also will cause a false-positive (or maybe not a true false-positive...but a false-positive in the sense that the soldier didn't intentionally ingest a banned substance) for amphetamines from urinalysis, which is a nightmare for the soldier and their leadership. Jack3d and C4 come to mind right off the bat, and those have since been removed from the GNC on post - or they removed whatever blend that had the compounds causing the false-positive. Every couple of months something new comes on the market that causes the same damn thing and the on-post GNC goes back under the microscope.

It's one of those problems where you know that soldiers are going to buy this stuff no matter how many times you tell them "don't, you don't know what's in it", and they'll get it either online or off-post from places where the command has less influence on what's available.
I haven't read what you're referring to, but one Apple employee I know uses Digital Touch pretty often (he says he uses it to silently attract the attention of other people at meetings, and I've seen him use it to send doodles to his friends). Why do you think it sounds painful to use?
Organic chemistry is a incomplete description. The entire field of biochemistry is an incomplete description. Until we can create life from nothing in a petri dish we don't know whether it is an inevitable outcome or a lucky one.

You can argue that the entire earth is a petri dish for a boeing 747. We have all the necessary materials, all we need is a hurricane to throw all the materials together in the right configuration and boom! 747. With billions of planets in the universe it's bound to happen on another one! It's inevitable.

Perhaps this would be more clear: We don't have Enough context to talk about the probability of life on other planets. Perhaps the chemical reaction needed to create life was mind boggling complex, billions of steps needed to happen in the exact order, under conditions that are equally exacting . Or maybe it's devastatingly simple. We just don't know...
I prefer the more verbose, approach. Less magic = less errors. Don't let people show you some snippet that is "less characters = must be better"mentality
To mikeash and vacri,

A sample size of 100 is equally meaningless for 500 or 5 billion if the sample is skewed--which it definitely is in this case.
Such a twisted forewarning about the importance of net neutrality...
The ESA also seems to be off-the-mark in their longer response. They claim, for instance, that no one uses "authentication" servers. Which is just, blatantly false. They try to cover it up saying there is more than just "authentication", but that's really just trying to hide the primary motivation.
Crush the castle wasn't even the original version of the game. It's actually inspired by another flash game called Castle Clout which almost nobody has heard of. (The developer of Crush the Castle listed the attribution in the first game's description on Armorgame's)
I agree with you that there's no escaping the fundamental way the DOM/JavaScript was setup in the first place - it's too late unfortunately, that ship sailed in the 90s apparently :). I can write at least an article about this stuff, but if you're interested in how core.async specifically helps at least mitigate some of the callback spaghetti hell here's a good starting video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhxcGGeh5ho
Why wouldn't this be plausible? Let's say one day China had enough of Bitcoin, and used their essentially limitless resources to gain enough hashing power at will, to block transactions or rewrite them or what have you. Entirely plausible with Bitcoin (in this case, China doesn't care about the coin reward and therefore is not a "rational attacker" as the popular game theoretic model of Bitcoin security presupposes).

Now let's look at the Stellar model in this same situation. We've got a bunch of large company nodes that are probably Gateways (for the sake of argument say JCB, Wells Fargo, Barclays, and Bank of Brazil). We've got a ton of other nodes that belong to research universities, and then we have a bunch of "non-profit" or hobbyist or whistle blower nodes. There's a nice graph topology between all of these. Then one day China comes along and decides its had enough. How does it attack the network in this case? By hacking enough organizations to take control of their nodes? Seems a bit more unlikely than it gaining 51% of hashing power on the Bitcoin network...
Andrew isn't comfortable posting Detour's threshold, and i respect that, but for anyone actually thinking about using this in another company, a threshold must be chosen -- so what are other people's thoughts on what a good threshold might be?

I'll start with an estimate. i think i saw a retirement savings calculator somewhere suggest that one should try to save ~$2 million by retirement per person(!) (sounds a little high to me at first but i guess that's only $75k/yr for 26 years of retirement, assuming you dont make any money on investments). So if one wants to provide for themselves and a spouse, that's $4 million. Moderately fancy homes in very expensive areas can be around $5 million. So $10 million would provide for two people and a nice house in an expensive area (we havent accounted for children yet but somehow i bet you could get by on $10 million, after all, most people do). We havent yet accounted for taxes (income taxes on the initial payment (~50% including federal and state?), and also ongoing property tax on the house), so lets say $25 million, which is the threshold used by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337915 . This sounds like a lot but
my sense is that for the threshold number youd rather overshoot than undershoot, and some people may have more expensive tastes than others; in fact it may even be too low.

$25 million is not that far off from the $50 million threshold used by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337837 .

So, what do others (not Andrew) think; would $25 million or so be a good threshold to use if one were actually doing this?
I'm not sure I'd call Java for systems programming is a "sane" choice, but ok!

I think with a very modern C++ approach and very careful coding you can rock out. Yeah not everyone has this, but the losses from using Java is just so huge!
> So, one flaw in the approach they displayed is the mediator is kicking off two asynchronous processes

hmm, seems like the diagram wasn't very clear on that point. there's only one asynchronous action there: making a network request back to the server for fresh data, which by its nature has to be an async op. everything else is synchronous (including Backbone's event handlers).

> The "Orchestrator" should hire some subordinates and delegate work to them in an effective manner.

this is precisely what's happening: the orchestrator basically does nothing but delegate between subviews and the model layer, ensuring that messages are passed around as appropriate. the text probably didn't make clear enough that this is supposed to happen at any sufficiently complex portion of the UI ("This pattern is repeatable: any sufficiently large or complex area of an app (such as a single route) may hold its own mediator to encapsulate the details of its UI interactions and communicate with the Model layer with a small, well-defined API"). we don't really consider interactions between UI components to be "business logic;" if the 'mediator' started turning into an uber-object with many responsibilities we would probably look at breaking it into services (or putting the right bits back into the model layer), but we try pretty rigorously to avoid premature abstractions...
The stock app working well is a good thing.

Not being able to have another app fix issues in the stock app is a problem.
If dropbox were able to express an intent to be notified of all photos taken, they could have solved this problem long ago and roughly as well, but they couldn't and so didn't. The problem is not that Apple solved this problem, but that no one else could have due to how apple treats all non-apple apps as second class citizens.
It's quite amusing when you complain over unsubstantiated and anecdotal data points when you don't even try to offer up anything at all yourself.

We probably don't know what 99th-percentile health is. But we do know that e.g. a variety of indicators of physical fitness affects a long list of lifestyle related illnesses. As does diet.

While narrowing down "99th-percentile" health precisely would be hard, it is clear that for a number of these indicators, for someone to even reach 95th-percentile or even 90th-percentile is going to involve more effort than they will consider worthwhile.

Perhaps they can achieve 99th-percentile health through some other combination of more moderate effort, but it seems reasonable to question your flippant rhetorical question of why someone would settle for 85th-percentile health on this basis:

Because it's hard.

That's what my argument boiled down to, with some examples as to why I believe it is hard. You've not given any counter arguments of any substance.

My "unsubstantiated and anecdotal data points" are not evidence, but it beats "nothing" when it comes to providing a starting point for discussing what 99th-percentile health is, and why it may (or may not) be hard any day.
Oh, for sure. There are plenty of attack vectors for this sort of thing, I just find the SSL behaviour interesting.
I'm not a fan of what I've seen of Apple Watch, or wearables in general, but the UI innovations that Apple has made for a tiny screen feel clear to me. The manner of navigating apps with the crown (and using a crown to navigate, period), is the one that jumps out the most. The casual sketching and heartbeat communication modes are a bit contrived, but novel. Their approach to haptic alerts sounds distinctive and thought-through.

To be clear, I am not a believer in this product, and I really like Apple stuff. But if you're not seeing ideas and improvements, I think a closer look is warranted.
Have you never seen or heard of the Wii virtual console or any of the Sega\Actvision\whoever classics collections? Just because they don't sell them right now or expect to make money on them in the next 20 mins doesn't mean there is no money expected from them in the future. With the current copyright law the future is for fucking ever, and who knows when the next round of nostalgic resurgence is?

Just like the Disney vault BS, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Le film Good Kill passe les drones au décryptage
The TCP URG flag and the OOB data described here are the same thing.
Hm, let's take a look at Vosteran. From Wikipedia[1]: "Vosteran is a browser hijacker that changes a browser's home page and default search provider to vosteran.com. This infection is essentially distributed bundled with other third-party applications. Vosteran carries the PUP virus. The identity of Vosteran is protected by privacyprotect.org from Australia."

Okay, so it's malware. Let's check out their webpage[2]! Hm, they give a physical address at 28 Lilienbulm St. in Tel Aviv... as an image, to avoid search engines. Let's look at their "how-to-get-rid-of-this-crap-I-don't-want" process[3], which "shouldn't take more than 10 minutes": so they basically put their tentacles into any crevice they can find, and make it annoying to pry them out.

Let's see if it's easy to see who runs this bit of evil... nope. They're amoral scum.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking#Vosteran

[2] http://www.vosteransearch.com/contact-us/

[3] http://www.vosteransearch.com/how-to-remove/
It's not Mark's or the executive team's fault! zTrack, the analytics engine, told them that screwing over the early employees would be the most profitable thing to do, and they always follow zTrack's instructions precisely and without question.
The very notion of "cost centres" vs "profit centres" is incoherent. If a function is necessary for the longevity of the business, it is a profit centre. If it is not, it shouldn't be part of the business.

Treating business units that book revenue as "profit centres" only makes sense if the revenue they book is entirely due to goods and services supplied by magic elves. Otherwise, <em>the work done to enable that revenue to be booked is part of the profit-generating business</em>. Letting internal cost accounting say otherwise is a recipe for bad business.

So the first part of the solution is to drop the cost/profit dichotomy, and actually have CEOs focus on understanding their business. This is an unrealistic suggestion, I know, but I can dream.