skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Insomnia: a book in the darkness
Server Discovery and Monitoring in Next Generation MongoDB Drivers
Thank you for the link.
Its almost unbelievable.

Ever since Brian Williams,I've been feeling like journalism in america is dead.

but this just hammers the point home.
Cool look at Git's major milestones for Git's 10th birthday
Latency also depends on the methods used to route the packets around among the satellites, to decide which satellite (or satellites, plural) to send the packet(s) to, whether there are any or will be any close to the intended destination, how many satellite hops it needs to make[0], and more.

In short, it's complicated, much more complicated than I can see any of the articles discussing, which is why I raise the question. All the articles ever talk about is speeds, which is worrying.

[0] You need LEO to get low surface-to-satellite latency, but then each satellite can only see a comparatively small part of the Earth's surface, so you need more hops to get the packet(s) to the right satellite. I remember working on a system where the engineers helpfully(?) doubled our radio range, effectively halving our system-wide throughput. It's experiences like that that make me worry about these things.
Our compiler/codegen [1] is all written in Haskell. That's a very significant part of Bond, but I wouldn't say that "everything else is just client libraries". All currently supported languages (C++, C# and Python) heavily rely on meta-programming [2] so the libraries for them are quite sophisticated.

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/bond/manual/compiler.html

[2] https://microsoft.github.io/bond/manual/bond_cpp.html#transf...
I think the thing that you have to remember is that there are a lot of different types of learners out there. From the sound of it, the hackathon environment is not conducive to your particular learning style (which is totally fine). Hackathons are great for the kinds of people who learn by doing or who need lots of real-world practice to master skills.

The other thing I'll point out is that a lot of "hard skills" that you need to be successful at those things are not necessarily technical. Examples: learning to work on a team, learning to deal with things going wrong on a deadline, learning to explain your work to other people. So, don't forget about those benefits too!
Anything could be argued. Doesn't mean there's any actual basis for the argument.
John Oliver Interviews Edward Snowden Explaining Surveillance with Dick-Pics
The whole point about where the mutation happens and how the language remains pure in spite of it is not awfully relevant. The point is that Haskell does support real, bona-fide mutation in its standard library (see for example its support for stateful IO arrays). So obviously mutation is useful, regardless of whether you're doing that mutation behind a pure interface.
We have company sponsored hackathons for internal projects. At first I dug it, but beginning to think this mainly serves to squeeze a weekend of work out of devs and to get something done fast, sometimes fast != good/sustainable/performant/well tested.
But hey, free tshirt and unlimited diet coke, so that is something :-/
It kills me that the default JSON module is so slow, if you're working with large JSON objects you really have no choice but to use a 3rd party module because the default won't cut it.
At Success Academy Charter Schools, Polarizing Methods and Superior Results
Any IT department I've worked with would just throw the mouse away...not worth diagnosing a cheap item like a mouse
People don't like to work either, and yet they do it.
Ask HN: Which developers/programmers do you closely follow?
More than any books, my motivation and drive to excel comes from the activities of people I consider as masters.

In case of programming, which developers do you closely follow to boost yourself?
Include blog/github/website links.
Introducing SexiLog – an ELK-based ESXi syslog appliance
its still alive?!?!?!
Depends on the app. My previous job required processing thousands of address book contact records uploaded to the server in a massive list. It was not unsual for some of these objects to exceed 10mb (when serialized to disk).

The default json module took close to 5 seconds to deserialize the payload once it hit the server, while ujson could do the same work in a fraction of the time (less than a second). 5 seconds might not seem like a whole lot when the import process as a whole could take 30 seconds or so, but when the user is stuck staring at their device it makes sense to cut down the response time any way you can.
> The verdict seems clear (based solely on the data in the post) that ultrajson is the winner.

ultrajson isn't a drop-in replacement, though, because it doesn't support sort_keys.
If the app would otherwise make sense to be web facing, one option that I've seen work quite well is to develop the "app" as a local, packaged web stack. Users point the browser at "http://localhost:10000/"

This has the advantage of removing the native UI toolkit question. This might make it easier to develop a native executable that's easy to package and distribute.
It sounds like you think I'm a web developer who thinks the web is everything. I'm not, and I don't. I work on safety critical systems doing hard-real-time and soft-real-time image analysis, object tracking, data correlation, and tactical overlays for widely distributed systems consisting of a mix of servers, embedded, and customer facing systems. More than one customer has come to me and said - "This is easy - just send it via satellite!"

I have dealt with and feel I have some understanding of the issues here.

Earlier you said[0]:

"Latency is really not that big of a deal,
as there are already protocols that deal
with it quite successfully."

I'd be interested to know of which protocols you speak, and your experience in working with them. I'd be very happy to benefit from your experiences in this regard, as there's always a chance that you know things I don't.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327656
It's not so much about duck typing, as it is about private/public variables and how they relate to a module's interface. `require`d modules are essentially private in Javascript. Consider the following:

// foo.js

var request = require('request');

module.exports = function (url) {
request.get(url, function (err, body) {
// ... business logic here.
});
}

Here, if one wanted to test the actual business logic (without implicitly testing the request module as well), one would have to refactor the code such that the callback is somehow exposed to the test suite. Additionally, one would not be able to run such tests in isolation (i.e. without an internet connection), and the test speed would depend on network latency.

Now consider another example:

// injected.js

module.exports = function (request) {
return function (url) {
request.get(url, callback);
}
}

In this version, the request library is taken as an argument to the module and thus can have a mocked version injected for testing purposes.
Shame they're getting rid of the 'view' synonym for 'vim -R', though I guess it's easy enough to replicate with a shell alias or trivial shell-script.
Your title is fine, SwellJoe. I was being petty and pointing out a case where a descriptive title that didn't match the HTML <TITLE> dramatically improved the submission. I have long felt HN's title renaming policies were a bit too aggressive and I'd like to see 'em go away.

This wasn't the right venue for me to bring that up though - things have improved a good bit under dang's tenure already.

As a reference for my outdated and inappropriate axe grinding see this 2013 thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5142851

Mea culpa.
What you said makes no sense whatsoever.
Calaveras-Hayward fault link means potentially larger quakes
I think those quotes were a bit snotty, especially considering your stature and knowledge on this. I don't think I was trying to rebut you, as much as I was simply trying my luck at advocating that user's view. Sorry for that.
awesome, exactly what I was looking for

edit: Actually, I spoke too soon, having trouble getting this to build. It seems the Homebrew build package has some issues at the moment.
OK I am gonna ask the obvious question here: How does Ansible compare to Saltstack?
I realize there's a philosophy that it's best to start from the lowest levels and work one's way up. It's one I can empathize with, in spirit, though I disagree.

The same logic means that people shouldn't use static code analysis tools, or valgrind, or even debuggers, until they acquire deep technical knowledge. While I think all of these tools help reinforce the principles.

If someone starts with the fixed and unwavering goal of security analysis in mind, then perhaps I can agree with you. If however someone is only curious about security analysis, and finds that spending a year to "grok the theory" is a high barrier, then even clumsy use of semi-automated tools may provide more concrete incentive to learn the underlying skills.

While I don't believe you are correct, another question is, how many white hats do we end up with? Even if it takes 2 years to learn security skills by using automation, and only 1 year without automation, if after 10 years there are 500 following your path, while 10,000 following my path, then that's a net gain for the good side, yes? (I assume that there is such a thing as "good enough", and that it's relatively stable. Obviously if there is only a market for 500, and your 500 are always better than my 10,000 then that changes the dynamics.)

Finally, it's also good to have even the script kiddies on the side of good than the side of lolz.
All trades have 2 sides. Getting in and getting out. If your predictions include "I have a high degree of confidence that this instrument is about to go down" the way you enter that trade is by shorting it.

Shorting has no true floor to the amount of money you can lose. This isn't true of going long, as an instrument can only go to zero. There is a natural imbalance between the max risk associated with shorting vs going long (and there are lots of other risks associated with trading, this is very simplistic) that means that no one who has done this sort of thing before uses a predictive ability without risk as a serious basis for a trade.

In fact, predictive ability is not that special. There are trivial algorithms that can predict movements with high levels of accuracy (much higher than 60% for instance), but don't perform well on a risk adjusted basis in modelling or in reality.
One thing that the author missed, but might shed some light on your point, is that many of the top student hackers in this movement actually do specialize in a single tool or technique across many events. Great example: Shariq Hashme (the first person mentioned in the article) has a long, successful track record of making amazing Oculus Rift and constructed hardware hacks. So while the projects themselves might be different, the students do often demonstrate that commitment to mastery that you're looking for.
> The other thing that should be noted is that ansible feels like (shell scripting)++. Other competitors I've used needed a much heavier cognitive load to get started.

Having used Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, this is exactly why I prefer Ansible for all my projects now.

If you can write a shell script, you can write an Ansible playbook. It won't be a great playbook, and you get benefits from using their modules instead of shell commands (like idempotency). But you don't have to worry about learning a new DSL just to do write a basic playbook or tweak an existing one.

As a functional programmer, I understand the benefits and appeal of declarative syntax. Unfortunately, systems programming is the one place where it's really hard to be 100% declarative, because systems are inherently all about state[0].

[0] At least in 2015 - perhaps things will change as we move toward better containerization models
Company run hackathons != student hackathons. http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/10/25/dont-throw-that-hackat...
Their target market is unlikely to stay still, and once people have some internet access they will start to ask for more. Worse, suppliers will take it for granted that they have internet access, require that they use it, remove other methods of accessing information, and still ignore the question of latency.

See also my comment[0] about trade-offs between LEO and MEO, number of satellites versus number of hops, and other issues. I am aware of (some of) the issues, and it concerns me that many people seem to be less so and just assume that all will be well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9328145
It would be nice if the secondhand market was better for sure. Right now for almost all goods under a few hundred dollars it's cheaper for me to buy a new one on Amazon vs the full cost of finding purchasing and transporting a second hand version.

Moveloot is trying to do this with furniture, which I think is a good starting point.
For some really large JSONs out there in the wild, yes, it's a big bottleneck.

We ended up using ijson.
ZenPayroll raises a $60M series B round from Google Capital
I will not sign the CLA for less than $100, payable in Bitcoins in advance
> He's certainly the most knowledgeable person about bitcoin.

That's false. There are several persons who are way more knowledgeable than him now (assuming he hasn't been following the developments since he disappeared).
Are you also a co-founder or just an employee that didn't get taken along. Only matters in terms of standing nothing else, e.g. an employee wouldn't have standing to go after a co-founder for doing this AFAIK, but a fellow co-founder or investor could likely. If you are an employee with vested shares, then technically you might have grounds to go after him for causing a devaluation of your stock. But that only counts if it actually has/had real value at the time he left.

In the end, all this depends, and IANAL but if the IP was developed before the company was legally formed and never properly assigned to the company then it might be a little tougher to go after him if he originally created it. At the same time, if the company paid to develop features etc and was formed legally, then there could be a claim, again it is likely messy.

You can absolutely find some good attorneys to at least sit with you in consultation and figure out where you stand. Honestly, even if it costs you 2-4 hours of their time that would be worth it.
The Rise of the ‘Unicorns’
Obligatory plug with select examples from the Hackathon culture:

https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said

Relevant discussion:
"Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205177
And it's also not that it's just a /new/ DSL - every so often I find the DSLs annoyingly limited compared to having a full fledged programming language.
Promoting Health and Longevity Through Diet
There are a 10's of thousands of innocent people in prison making the punishment argument morally questionable .
How China Is Screwing Over Its Poisoned Factory Workers
False. It's a store of value, that even central banks use.
I skimmed the page and honestly wasn't getting what this did. So I looked up Thrift since it is supposedly similar, skimmed and still didn't understand. Same goes for Avro. Finally I looked into Protocol Buffers and bam, I pretty quickly understood what the hell this thing does for me and why I should care. Please, please, please, if you have an open source project give some examples of usage along with the corresponding code, it'll speed up adoption five fold.

Here is ultimately what helped me understand the problem space:

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview
100 things people who never reach their dreams say
10 Steps to Finding the Right Startup Co-Founder
Doesn't (Desktop) Firefox use it for history and bookmarks and various things as well[1]?

I wonder if 'delete my history' GUI action actually removes the file (securely) or just deletes entries from it, exposing it to this sort of recovery?

[1] The file location and sample query against places.sqlite from http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#History works for me on OSX 10.9/FF37
Show HN: RichEditorView – Customizable UIView for Rich Text Editing in Swift
Get Lost in the Mazes of London’s Half-Finished Skyscrapers
A Project a Month – March Update
Ultimately, that argument doesn't work.

The people who can see your dick pics don't know you. You're just a nameless, faceless penis to them, and the people who might be looking at your dick picks are a nameless, faceless mass you don't know and never will know. Your dick pics are a statistic in a database. In fact, "people" probably don't even see your dick pics. A computer takes them and stashes them in a database, and the amount of data stored is so huge that the chance of any specific NSA employee running into your dick while querying the database is infinitesimal. Besides, even if the NSA wasn't involved, your ISP could see your dick pics anyway, and if you used any kind of image host to send your dick pics, so can they.

I would be much more concerned if the NSA was handing the information to people I know, but they're not. People only care about privacy when it personally affects them. For example, I'm transgender. While I'm out and proud now, that wasn't the case back when I was still living as a guy. It didn't worry me that the NSA had this information on me in a database somewhere, but I would have been very, very worried if somebody I knew personally were to discover that I'm trans (before I was ready to tell them, anyway).

Nobody cares that the NSA can see their dick pics. People might care if their friends and family can see their dick pics.

Oh, but then you might say "but... but the NSA is going to blackmail politicians by threatening to reveal their dick pics if they don't do what the NSA says". That's possible, but you don't need mass electronic surveillance to do that. J. Edgar Hoover did it back in the '60s, and he didn't use either the Internet or mass surveillance to do that. No, he targeted people he wanted to blackmail, and he had his team do some good old-fashioned detective work to dig up blackmail material on them. That the NSA can hypothetically do the same thing with mass Internet surveillance doesn't change anything one iota.
That's because most hackathans can't decide whether they want to be hackathons or pitchathons. As you have picked up, they really can't be both. Hacking is experimental, and it's fun, and it definitely is not optimized around impressing a VC or a journalist in 3 minutes or less. If you wanted to be a true hackathon, you would ban the investors and journalists and really ban judging altogether and just have everyone show everyone else their projects. Even the idea of "fun" is different between the two crowds, with the hacker crowd expecting the "fun" part to be the cool hacks themselves, and the journalist/finance crowd expecting the fun part to be the boozing up and making plans for how you spend your millions after you focused on optimizing a commercial product (ususally with more emphasis on marketability and monetization potential than cool tech). If you want to "win" a hackathon i.e. impress a VC/Angel/CEO/Journalist, of course you should prepare beforehand, it's extremely difficult to verify cheating and very little real technology can be built in that timespan and that environment (party wooo!). You should also focus way more on the design and pitch then on the functionality, since the judges only have the time to evaluate the design/pitch. The good news is you can also treat the pitchatons like a hackathon and just ignore the judging/prizes, they can still be nice networking events regardless and times to learn some new things/APIs. Or you can try to game the prizes, but either way I wouldn't take them too seriously. How many hackathon projects turn into anything real anyway?

The current Hackathon culture is indicative of a general tech and investing culture of picking "hot" ideas made by charismatic teams over people doing true technological innovation which takes sustained, serious effort. The real innovation is what ends up making an impact, but the little prototype parties can be a good stepping stone into the industry.
The "half second" was as an example that's not too far off the right value when you add problems like congestion, retries, and similar, it wasn't intended to be exact. Even so, it's only off by a factor of two.

See also my comment[0] about trade-offs between LEO and MEO, number of satellites versus number of hops, and other issues.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9328145
> The problem with a flat tax on land is that it provides no incentive to allocate land to the most productive uses.

What?! It provides a direct incentive in the form of $/hectare-year. If your use of the land does not earn at least that amount, you lose money by owning it. If it does, the relative burden of the tax decreases as you make your use of the land more efficient.

A dense urban business district is incontestably a more efficient use of land than an agricultural field. If any land is removed from cultivation because the crop yields cannot support the tax, then the land with the lowest yields, and therefore least suited for agriculture, will be abandoned first. Those lands might be better suited for other purposes. In that sense, the tax is working exactly as expected.

And that farm-use consideration is vital for keeping the tax low. The government cannot use that tax to squeeze any particular type of person without devastating agriculture. If you try to use a tax as a sledgehammer rather than a speed bump, you end up with all sorts of nasty unintended consequences.

If you need a sledgehammer, you can simply write a zoning law that effectively abolishes new low-density residential neighborhoods. Or you could use eminent domain to take vacant urban lots. But those are going to cost a lot more money and public goodwill than a uniform tax on land surface area.
> They also don't realize Dropbox is unencrypted.

This set off my alarm bells at the broad statement - I checked, and Dropbox is encrypted, in that any uploads to and from the server are via SSL. This is probably 80 of what anyone cares about.

It's like saying your online banking isn't encrypted because the bank can still read your balance.
Only tangentially related, but, provided the founders know what they are doing, is there any kind of bitcoin startup that can eventually become cash flow positive on its own today? Because I've been thinking a lot about bitcoin startups and it seems to me that barring a massive stroke of luck, with the adoption that there is today, one could only survive if backed by hopeful investors. Namely I can't picture bootstrapping an exchange, a payment processor or an ATM provider. Then again you could argue than "get lucky or go home" applies to any kind of startup, but to me it looks like it's specially harder in the case of bitcoin.
How Often Do Tech Blogs Post? FYI: TechCrunch Published 1,076 Articles in Jan
I always find this curious... In order to live minimally, your interests need to be minimal as well.

I'm a musician and woodworker that also enjoys electronics. It's very difficult to engage in these hobbies without having 'things' unless I'm lucky enough to pass along the burden of having these things to someone else who will let me have unrestricted access to them.

So this popular idea of 'living minimal' is unaccessible to me unless I wish to burden someone else with my hobbies, or to simply ignore my interests.

I still operate minimally in the constraints of that which I enjoy. Despite that, it requires a minimum of ~1200 sq/ft of space and 'things'. So it makes me wonder how minimally you need to live to be minimal enough to be considered minimal?
Hadn't realized Kubernetes was written in Go. Cool.