skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Courtesy of taliesinb's off-hand comment [0], I learned of this excellent research project which collates many of my recent CS interests, and wish to share.

[0] http://rala.cba.mit.edu/pubs.html
Of course, everybody wants to have an LTS release of every piece of software they depend on, that "just works" for all their use cases [1], and that somebody else maintains for many years, like magic.

The problem is, nobody wants to pay for its maintenance, hence it does not exist [2].

In the FOSS world, nobody is entitled to a pony.

Also it's rather ironic that it's an OpenBSD developer wanting this, considering http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/long-term-support-consid... - how does that reasoning not apply to compilers?

[1] including of course the all-important Motorola 88k back-end!

[2] with very few exceptions: RHEL, SLES
"Earth as garden" is the right metaphor I think. There are no wildernesses on earth that have not been reshaped by humans. It is now thought that even the amazon was mostly replanted by humans for aboreal agriculture. A pristine wilderness is not a well founded concept, nor has it ever existed alongside hominids. The reason to preserve biodiversity is because it makes for a richer better world. The reason for creating biodiversity is the same.
I have a problem with Chrome eating up too many CPU cycles when idle. I'm guessing background Javascript processes hidden on all the pages start getting out of control. (I use lots of tabs.) I've tried script blockers, but I haven't found one that works well for me. I find NoScript for Firefox much better.

I do like that Chrome has Flash built in so I don't have to install it system-wide. So I use Chrome as a secondary browser.

When on Mac, I prefer Safari because it feels lighter than all of them and seems better with not eating CPU cycles for background tabs.
I'm never asked about my education.. Which has been handy as I don't have a college degree. I was fortunate and managed to kick-start my career after getting a foot in at a rather prominent company. Once the work history starts to establish you're pretty free to blaze your own path. That has been my own personal experience.
whatever you do keep your costs as low as possible (roommates, live in a motor home, minimize commute, etc.). Strive to save 80% of your take home pay and live off only 20%. If you do this and invest your savings in low cost index funds, then working will be optional for you in less than 6 years. Meaning you can work on what you want. Don't fall into the debt/slave trap. Most fun/happy times happen because of experiences and the people you hang with, not because you spend a lot of money. Being so young and just starting out, your life will revolve around work anyways (time spent, friends).
It's a search engine, in sense that it lets you search for information on internet(limited to twitter while we are optimizing our web crawler). The UI is unconventional for the search engines we're used to seeing; and thats coz we're trying a different approach to interact with information.

Though i never had a chance to use Blekko, but looking from all the info on the press about Rockzi, the UI might have some resemblance, but there is no manual curation happening at http://crrnt.is/ unlike at Rockzi. Instead its all curated and categorized using NLP techniques for all the content our application stumbles upon.
> It actually makes zero sense to wash the sushi down immediately with sake as it changes the flavor of what you're eating [...]

I got the impression that was the intended purpose here, though; you can enjoy the flavours separately, but in the case of the briny sushi that he was served the addition of the sake created a different flavour that was worth trying.
People keep on saying it's kids(mental age), but I don't buy it. I was reading a book on psychopathy/sociopath(can't remember the name) but one of the theses were just how common they actually are. In times past these people would just be dicks to people around them. Now they can actual fuck with people with far greater reach. I think they are fully aware of what they are doing and only find it funny because they lack empathy.
There’s a $10B Opportunity as Marketing Hits the Big Time
The new frontiers for CMOs in the coming years will be data science, machine learning and behavioral insights, which then drives optimization and personalization. This represents the largest opportunity ever seen for both vendors and CMOs alike. All of which should set the stage for the first $10 billion-plus marketing tech company. http://web.croakun.com/10-billion-dollar-opportunity-as-mark...
Anyone noticed that almost no YC companies are purely B2C software anymore?
Almost all are either B2B (which includes marketplaces) or B2C hardware products. Almost no B2C software:

http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies

Did this shift happen a long time ago and I never noticed?
> I don't like the term "lactose intolerant". It implies that having difficulty digesting lactose is differentiating you from some loosely defined norm

It's a scientific term created purely for succinctness and description, it carries no connotations.
"As a distributed team with no overhead, Helpful has the luxury of being able charge nothing — and if they can get mass distribution it won’t be hard to find channels of monetization."

Haven't they been paying attention to all the venture-funded teams that do reach mass distribution but are shuttered because they can't find a way to be profitable? Even a distributed team has overhead ... the team members are covering it instead of the company. And eventually they'll want (deserve) at least a salary.
> Let's take my compilers class as an example. I go to a 75 minute lecture 2 times a week and I do about 4 hours of homework a week. I do this over 18 weeks.
That's only roughly 120 hours of study over the course of a semester. That's only as many hours as most full time employees work every 3 weeks!

The comparison doesn't seem fair. First, I suppose you have others classes at the same time. And if you don't, you're free to do additional work on your own. In any case, hard concepts take time to sink in. You're better off learning this over a longer period of time.

Besides, don't think full time employees do meaningful intellectual work 8 hours a day. There are always a lot of distraction. And even when coding, it's not the same as writing tons of boilerplate code than understanding new complicated concepts.

> And the sad thing is, I imagine if I spent 3 weeks reading a compiler book, reading though the source of lex and yacc, and implementing some kind of basic compiler using them, I'd be a much better programmer than what we're doing

Are you sure that you'd be able to do that? supervised education helps you to pace yourself, focus on what is important and to keep motivated over the long run. The actual content is maybe the least important.

Besides, going through lex and yacc sources sounds like a huge waste of time for someone who wants to learn about compilation. There may be some value in this, but it should be last on your priority list.
Great place to shamelessly mention my MIT licensed work in progress C compiler (written in Go), https://github.com/andrewchambers/cc/ . Nowhere near the level it needs to be, but would be fun if I could start a community to push it forward.
Yes, this is a possibility as well.
What negativity? I'm extremely serious with my positivity.
If police not identifying themselves is becoming a pattern, it's going to be very confusing and dangerous to ordinary people.

I live in Germany, in a completely safe and virtually crimeless idyllic suburb. A couple of months ago I came home at noon and noticed a small group of what looked like thugs loitering at the front door of my neighbor's house. One of them kept banging the door and shouting "open up, or you don't want to find out what happens next" (or something to that effect) in a thick regional dialect.

All the neighbors were hiding in their houses, but I was already on the street right in front of them, so I walked over and asked "is there something wrong here?". Two of the thugs blocked my way and the shouting guy exclaimed "move along, there is nothing to see here".

This was the point when I was getting out my phone and started dialing the police emergency number, just as two trucks of the fire department and a police van were moving in from opposite ends of the street, coming to a halt in front of the house. Uniformed people swarmed out and joined what I had assumed to be thugs before. Turns out they were plain-clothes officers.

In the end, it came out it was a pot raid, but apparently nothing was found. In slightly different circumstances, this could have escalated quickly. The plain clothes officers were clearly looking for trouble. At the very least they were enjoying their effect on the civilians. It's not a SWAT yet, but it's enough to make me uncomfortable; especially considering the history of the country.

It's not always been like this here. I do have friends who are police officers, and generally they take pride in the fact that (and I quote) "it's not like in the US", but I'm afraid we might be importing this problem now.
If the universe is purely mental, then why does it follow a set of rules so precisely? Why doesn't it just dream up the best possible thoughts it can have?

Also, why are different parts of this mental process disconnected from each other? For example, if you and i are both part of the same mental process, then why do we intuitively believe that we are different, disconnected entities?
- If you are deploying from Visual Studio, there is a built in deployment manager but it has to be enabled on IIS first.

- Other option is to connect trough RDP and copy/paste.
Please don't belittle victims of crime by describing their experience as "just another case of gamers taking their competition offline". People of both gender experience harassment in life, and at times it goes into the realm of becoming victim of crimes. It should not matter what gender you are or your chosen profession in life, by belittle it you are causing direct harm to other human beings.

Please stop.
Nope, I don't get what this is about, either. It's an error page that says

Forbidden

You are not allowed to access this!
> invest your savings in low cost index funds

Could you please elaborate? Any resources about this topic [for foreigners]? Thanks!
>In slightly different circumstances, this could have escalated quickly.

You mean, when people have guns?

Here in the Netherlands most of the people have a healthy dose of respect towards police officers. Especially with their new shiny uniforms.
I'm curious about how large companies manage their status pages. Are they running dedicated servers, internet access lines and DNS etc... for only indicating service status? What happens if status pages go down. Is there a status page of status page?
Please never ever ever implement a Merkle tree as you did in https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/20 . This is vulnerable to the same trivial collision attack as the original Gnutella THEX proposal.

EDIT: also, please implement non-power-of-2 leaf node Merkle trees as power-of-2 lead node trees with the rightmost leaves containing the hashes of the zero length array, that way the final block along with its hash chain to the root provides a cryptographic proof of file length. This prevents denial-of-service mischief where a malicious server claims a given resource is terabytes large and a poorly written client starts allocating TB of disk space on a filesystem that doesn't support sparse files.
Sounds eerily similar to my experience with Comcast over the last decade. I've had collections filed against me for service at addresses I've never lived at, countless service disruptions, weird, rude, and tardy technicians, incomprehensible customer service agents, unreturned equipment fees for items I bought, etc.

Comcast is a blight and the cost on the American economy as a whole is underestimated. They would simply not exist in their present form if there was a diverse, competitive telecom industry.

Perversely, fighting for a healthy telecom industry seems like it might be one of the few things Democrats and Republicans could ideologically agree on, yet the truth is that no progress is even in sight. The relative lack of importance of ideology is highlighted in cases like this, where the excess of lobbyists are the only true source of influence.
Guidelines and rules are not the same thing, and I believe the exact text was to avoid gratuitous negativity. I don't think that comment was gratuitous.
Culture is perhaps a company's biggest legacy
Firefox.

I like a browser to be a web-browser and just that. Without integration with services and apps.
One last question: What inspired the names CHICKEN and SPOCK? Do they mean anything, aside from the bird and the well-known Star Trek character?

That question always comes up, sooner or later. ;-)

I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name.

Also, there is the old philosophical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This applies to CHICKEN, too. The compiler is written in Scheme, so you need CHICKEN in order to compile CHICKEN.

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spock...
Interesting.

A question about the article style: is there a new trend about extra long articles?
> You mean, when people have guns?

I mean when police officers refuse to identify as such, ignorantly or willfully creating a situation where civilians think they're in danger. It's not safe for anybody involved.

> Especially with their new shiny uniforms.

I think they're updating the uniforms all over the EU, making them more alike. They do look snazzy. ;)
div is for the weak
American universities aren't just about education. Or even research, for that matter. They're often about providing a "life experience" for undergraduates. So you have a huge investment in sports, entertainment, and living facilities that are basically unheard of in other countries. Plus, all sort of administrators and advisors who help students in a variety of different ways.

These add up to a great experience, and arguably make the education better. But they also reflect how little the US government provides vs. other countries. And how much students depend on the university to provide services that in other countries would be provided by other agencies. And how an American university is expected to provide much more than just classrooms, lectures, and research.

I graduated from two American universities (MIT and Northwestern). Each of these had an on-site medical facility (unnecessary in countries with nationalized health insurance), financial aid offices (unnecessary in places where the tuition is lower, or handled by centralized government agencies), student-only shuttle services (unnecessary where public transportation is good), sports teams (unheard of outside of the US), and a wide variety of extra-curriculars (again, basically non-existent outside of the US). Each of these requires a bunch of administrators.

The building in which I did my PhD had a huge support staff. In an Israeli or European university, I think that the 15-20 secretaries, planners, and managers would have been replaced by 3-4 people. Overworked and underpaid people, mind you, but that's how you keep costs low. And my office (as a graduate student) in the US was positively opulent compared to what you'll find abroad.

I used to think that student aid in the US was a great thing. But I do believe that American universities have basically decided that they can raise tuition without any penalty, because almost no one pays that sum out of pocket -- and everyone else just takes on crushing debt for many years to follow.

Now, the fact is that I had a blast in my undergrad years, and my experience editing the student newspaper led directly to my current career. But having met many students and graduates in Israel (where I live), where universities are places to learn and do research, rather than have "life experiences," I'm not at all convinced that the added expense and overhead are worthwhile.
Please provide stats.
Google voice + AT&T gives me a few seconds pause with any number I receive or dial. Also, lots of hospitals use blocked numbers when calling you, presumably not to leak patient info if they have the wrong number, and there are restrictions on what they can say in a voicemail message. I always pick up these calls. Better to face the problem, and file a complaint with the FCC if need be.
I am curious, how do these trolls find the addresses of people whom they want to SWAT? Is such information easily available in US?

I tend to keep my private and personal life separate but stories like these scare me.
In most cases, it's not cryptic or strange at all and makes perfect sense. This article ignores history. Back then, names were shortened to save every available byte cause ram and disk usage was so limited. It was also easier to type when you did everything from the command line. In addition, a lot of these were created in some lab somewhere, like Bell Labs, and they had no intention of you using it.

Long ago, when I heard of awk and sed, the first thing I did was ask what they stood for. I would think any seriously interested computer person would do the same thing.
"nginx inside" is just not so funny.
That one is likely relevant too:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protoc...
What's responsible for the constant expansion of university administration?
From what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.
Cool, but why take the burden on having to remember to bookmark locations instead of using something like fasd, z or autojump that will "bookmark" every directory automatically and most of the time will get it right when you type part of a dir name?
It seems to be a general backlash against the buzzfeed style listicles. Ironically even buzzfeed seems to be trying out more longform articles.
"Entrenchment of the bourgeoisie"
For what it's worth, that description was on the site from Oct 1996 [1] to Aug 2001 [2].

1.http://web.archive.org/web/19961028123412/http://www.apache....
2.http://web.archive.org/web/20010803130101/http://www.apache....
This is usually a result of doxxing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
Pushbullet from a yeah ago is a purely B2C software product. I haven't checked the list but this one came pretty much on top of my head since I use the product a lot.
A no knock raid is an initiation and escalation of force.

There needs to be a high bar for using it (maybe even "don't").
React.native isn't
I mean - let's be honest - there is a reason why somebody chooses to become a cop. And more often than not - this very reason isn't about "helping people". It's more likely about enjoying the exertion of power over people. There is a stronger psychological similarity between ordinary hooligans and police men than what is good. It's also always the police who will eagerly suppress people in case a state turns increasingly totalitarian - policemen don't like thinking for themselves - which is why they choose those hierarchical jobs in the first place. They like to have action and the feeling of adrenalin.

Also it's worth thinking about this - the SS in Nazi Germany was made up of about 2% of the population. Now this personality type who would do SS jobs didn't just go away - the root is of psychological nature which is most likely more or less uniformly distributed within any population. Now those guys - in that psychological, statistical sense still exist - what do you think what kind of job they will choose? Elder care? Most likely either military or police.
Yeah this piece certainly did not explain the real reason college tuition costs so much.
My guess is if you have haters willing to expend the energy, it's very likely almost anyone who has a significant online presence can be doxxed. In some cases, it's as simple as making a WHOIS query - for example, they could locate me from just my HN account in about two minutes.
TOML and YAML are nice as human-readable configuration formats; Protocol Buffers/Cap'n Proto are really good if the schema of your data is strongly defined.
He probably means masters degree. I was looking at a few and couldn't find any that were fully funded. This was in stem programs at top schools.
https://github.com/cachethq/Cachet

What Cachet is not

Here is a list of things that Cachet is not or does not do:

1. It does not monitor your services. It works only as a way to display the status of your services. However, Cachet is able to receive updates from third-party services via its API.

2. It does not work on a plugin system. There are no monitoring services to extend.
They usually just host it on a third-party host. It's extremely unlikely that both their systems and the third party will be down at the same time. If only the status page is down but the services are working fine... well, why would you be looking at the status page then?
Hmm. Point taken, but this is more of a WSDL thing than an XML thing, is it?
A Grand Juror Speaks: The inside story of how prosecutors always get their way
I would suspect that, as the article hints, the art of enjoying sushi varies to some extent depending on the chef. For example, I was once taught that you should dip your fish slice (and not the rice underneath) in the soy sauce, put it back, and then be careful about making the fish side landing on your tongue first when you put it to your mouth. A - litteraly- twisted exercise.

But maybe the chef was just having quite a bit of fun watching customers handle three dimensional rotations with chopsticks :)
Last year, Guy Martin set the British cycle speed record of 112mph. Article at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/guy-martins-... and a very brief video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT0eJXtrwHg - the rules are somewhat different to this other attempt though!
I'm not saying it's impossible to predict anything. I'm saying that people whose choose box B are always choosing the inferior of the two options available to them, because the money is already on the table and no one is going to change that configuration based on the person's choice (stated in the problem).

As I have said, the prediction method or accuracy is largely irrelevant to the actual paradox, aside from a means to incentivize people to behave in an obviously irrational way :).

(I don't really think that, the other principle of decision for one-boxers is induction based on prior observations. The whole point of the paradox is neither side has a decisive argument against the other. The important point here is that free will/determinism, possibility of perfect simulation, etc. are not part of the problem this paradox is intended to illuminate.)
Clickable link: http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies

Scroll down past the header section and you'll see the lists.
FWIW, it's about 3090 words. For a feature article from a magazine, that's reasonably typical - it just looks long on the Web.
Traditionally on most Unix systems cc and gcc where two different compilers. Many times people would write code in ways that compiled with gcc, but not cc, so specifying exactly which compiler you want makes sense.
Awesome postmortem for an awesome game. This game has so big place in my memories. For anybody making games, this is worth watching.