skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lion in the room is that the DOE National Laboratories have a huge amount of code tied up in MPI and they continue to spend millions of dollars both on hardware and software to support this infrastructure. If you look at the top 500 list:

http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/11/

Four out the ten computers are owned by DOE. That's a pretty significant investment, so they're going to be reluctant to change over to a different system. And, to be clear, a different software setup could be used on these systems, but they were almost certainly purchased with the idea that their existing MPI codes would work well on them. Hell, MPICH was partially authored by Argonne:

http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/mpich-high-performance-portab...

so they've a vested interest in seeing this community stay consistent.

Now, on the technical merits, is it possible to do better? Of course. That being said, part of the reason that DOE invested so heavily in this infrastructure is that they often solve physics based problems based on PDE formulations. Here, we're basically using either a finite element, finite difference, or finite volume based method and it turns out that there's quite a bit of experience writing these codes with MPI. Certainly, GPUs have made a big impact on things like finite difference codes, but you still have to distribute data for these problems across a cluster of computers because they require too much memory to store locally. Right now, this can be done in a moderately straight forward way with MPI. Well, more specifically, people end up using DOE libraries like PETSc or Trilinos to do this for them and they're based on MPI. It's not perfect, but it works and scales well. Thus far, I've not seen anything that improves upon this enough to convince these teams to abandon their MPI infrastructure.

Again, this is not to say that this setup is perfect. I also believe that this setup has caused a certain amount of stagnation (read huge amount) in the HPC community and that's bad. However, in order to convince DOE that there's something better than MPI, someone has to put together some scalable codes that vastly outperform (or are vastly easier to use, code, or maintain) the problems that they care about. Very specifically, these are PDE discretizations of continuum mechanics based problems using either finite different, finite element, or finite volume methods in 3D. The 1-D diffusion problem in the article is nice, but 3-D is a pain in the ass, everyone knows it, and you can not get even a casual glance shy of 3-D problems. That sucks and is not fair, but that's the reality of the community.

By the way, the oil industry basically mirrors the sentiment of DOE as well. They're huge consumers of the same technology and the same sort of problems. If someone is curious, check out reverse time migration or full wave inversion. There are billions of dollars tied up in these two problems and they have a huge amount of MPI code. If someone can solve these problems better using a new technology, there's a huge amount of money in it. So far, no one has done it because that's a huge investment and hard.
It's the job of the manager to reign in the bores and braggards. Other can help too, of course.
I think you're reinforcing my point.

Fortran might be used more widely, like C++ is, if it wasn't so awful for doing things other than shitting out numbers at insane speeds.
The Register still carries them[1]. I don't know their exact relation to the original but I think they're official.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/
Oof - I'm really sorry to hear that! I hope he is doing well now. Thank you for passing this along.
Nurse salaries are a vanishingly small portion of health care costs. They're largely a function of the difficulty in finding qualified nurses. It's unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Was this your experience? I just went through an SDE loop last week (still waiting to hear the results), but I got no "aha" questions. 2 strictly coding questions and 1 open-ended design question (with pseudo-code). It was very straight forward.
It's not always as simple as that. Besides it's far simpler from a personal perspective for me to set my clocks forward/back twice a year that move my entire daily schedule forward and back twice a year.

It's maybe a selfish reason, just to get a little more daylight in the evening, but I'm not the only person who thinks this way.
It's a bit trickier than the title says. By a "false" finding, they mean "a finding fails to yield the same result in at least one other study." But there's nothing wrong with failing a replication. See cancer risk factors research papers: they regularly yield results with opposite signs.

Rather, we should talk about "more research is needed to get a representative sample of studies of a phenomena."
Having a team member create production code in a language nobody else on the team understands is a risky decision. That applies for anything, software, systems, infrastructure... if one developer is allowed to sit on something, what happens when the dev leaves? Or dies? And the thing he or she worked on had a non-trivial learning curve?

Choosing something like Haskell or anything else niche should be a group decision. Even when it comes to prototyping! "Guys, I'm going to prototype this .NET code in F#. Who wants to join?", instead of a developer sitting in a corner applicating his functors while others around him do something arguably simpler. It's incredibly short-sighted!

This is not aimed at you though, since I'm not sure if this was your case, I'm only guessing based on your post.
Wow, so many memories you've just unearthed. I haven't played a nomic-based game since I was a teenager.

My online friends and I had a series of mostly text-based nomic instances where we would creatively write and world build, but there was this one crazy performance art piece where we hacked a phpBB instance to grant every user admin privileges. The experiment was in relative harmony for a few days before the first rounds of deletes and IP bans. After one or two attempts to regain equilibrium, there were rampant impersonations, terrible javascript popup spam and redirect loops, and disappearing server files (the joys of using PHP prior to formal CS education and any form of engineering discipline...). Finally we acknowledged that the experiment had been a great success when all HTTP requests returned 500s--testament, at least in our minds, of the ultimate fate of mankind if ever given absolute and unlimited power.

Then there was that time we piped say yes to each other's terminals, somehow creating a pospositive feedback loop. Or those dotfiles that brought down the whole server... none of that stuff was very nomic related, but ah... teenage years.

The hosting company certainly loved us. :') I hope every one of them got a raise for having to deal with our endless support tickets as a result of our own foolish and stupid games.

Anyhow, very astute parallel to draw.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

I appreciate the memories / feels.
> And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf [...]

Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy.

> ... that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5

Good system administrators stick to conservative, portable subsets of configuration and scripting languages, rather than bleeding edge stuff.

When they deviate, they have a clear plan. They document their choice to use something new and shiny, and they keep it separated from the default system configuration.

Since SunOS came with Sendmail 5, the upgraded Sendmail 8 should have been installed in some custom location with its own path so that it coexists with the stock Sendmail, and is not perturbed if the OS happens to upgrade that.

A good syadmin would stick that in some /usr/local/bin type local directory, and not overwrite /usr/bin/sendmail.

The consultant was not wrong to update the OS. People have reasons to do that. The consultant should have consulted with the sysadmin, of course. But even in that event, it might not have immediately occurred to the sysadmin what the implication would be to the sendmail setup.
I heard a similar story in the past but with the culprit being a janitor turning on their vacuum every morning at 6am causing power spikes.
Indian Payments Startup MobiKwik Nabs $25M from Tree Line, Cisco, AmEx
The process of answering matters far more than the answer. It's not a graded multiple-choice test.
There is a couple of other places where this fails pretty hard. If you compare to URL's on the same shared host, they will be considered equal and equality of URI's can change as the network goes up and down. I would imagine at some point (if it hasn't already) become deprecated.

Joshua Bloch used this as an example in one of the brilliant Java Puzzler video series with the net advise of don't depend on non-local state for equality.
Ironically, removing it now would only add to the complexity.
Would you mind linking the SR-71 story? Somehow I never saw that.
Frequensea: an open source EM spectrum visualizer
"The Ultimate Ground Speed Check": http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912...
The Founder’s Schedule
The intro video [1] is somewhat long (~33 minutes), but shows some cool examples.

[1] https://youtu.be/u6H1DatxLAc
They could make things a bit easier and allow anyone to catch them. Roll on the python restaurants and handbag emporia.

At the moment:

"Qualified applicants may apply for an interim permit that allows for removal of Burmese pythons and other conditional reptiles from three WMAs: Everglades and Francis S. Taylor WMA, Holey Land WMA, and Rotenberger WMA. This permit does not allow access to properties managed by the South Florida Water Management District."
Because if we knew the government spies on us we would take steps to not be spied on and that would help the terrorists which are us.
This might gets downvoted into oblivion, but my thinking on editor choice is that I either use the lower level pure text editor such as Vim, Sublime Text, Nodepad++ for their speed, or if needed I go all the way with the big ones, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA/Netbeans, for all their bells and whistles.

Should I spend time and effort on the middle ones? I admit my feeling comes from standing on the outside lurking. Emacs masters of course know that this 'middle one' feeling is non-sense.

But from the perspective of a newbie who sets out to master an editor/IDE, considering the ratio of effort spent on learning/customization/configuration vs. productivity gain (in a certain time span, let's say 20 years), I am trying to decide to take the plunge and learn emacs seriously, in the midst of big IDEs, Atom/Bracket, Neovim (let's hope it delivers).

Now please tell me I am so wrong.
"I shouldn't have to babysit and micromanage what they're doing each day." Sorry, you call 15 minutes a day micromanaging?

Anyways, I agree with some of the complaints. The tools can help out a lot. I disagree about the firefighting comment though. The whole point of scrum is not to firefight and leave that up to the scrum master so you don't lose focus.
If you understand it, go out and get gf now, developer
I avoid Safari. There are many iOS browsers on the App Store; I use Mercury. The only downside is that iOS still won't open links in other browsers so you have to copy/paste from E-mails, etc.
I worked at a place that did a stand-up once a week, and that worked pretty well. The communication between everyone was pretty good, so maybe other places that don't communicate well could not get away with that.
The EFA needs to become a much stronger lobby group - with the fall of iiNet there's no commercial entity who will stand up for our digital rights.
Allergies are awful. Throughout my twenties I "suffered" what I thought was chronic fatigue syndrome, only to discover later this year it was actually just an Allium allergy (Onions, Garlic etc). I'd estimate that this was at least a 50% drop in my overall productivity during what could have been some of my most productive years. If anyone is suffering from allergies I highly suggest experimenting with your diet.
Completely agree. Tainter's definition of society is deeply biased to the one he currently inhabits as being perforce "better" (the title having the word "complex" in it is a dead giveaway). This is a superstition.

I'd argue that a society that is actually better is not necessarily at all a more complex one. It is the one that reacts more favorably to change.
Never feel embarrassed for asking a great question!
When I used to interview at Google (non-Eng interviewing), I found the "Tell me about a time when..." questions hugely helpful. The initial answer is just the start of a conversation where I as an interviewer could go deeper and deeper into the skills they exhibited, their thinking processes, how similar these situations were, etc.

If you just take their initial response and move on to the next question, you fail as an interviewer. You've got to go deeper... that's also the way that you can quickly spot a bullshitter or someone making a proverbial mountain out of a molehill project.
This is an interesting idea. Have a system where a community can mark something as important, and to have it automatically reposted at preset intervals. Community members could be allowed to additionally repost, or the system can politely say it's already archived and will be shared again on such & such date. Use it as a way to reinforce community history.
I think it's actually the opposite: everybody is invited to the daily standup, even the janitor if she/he so pleases... but only developers can talk.

I sell the daily standup to the developers as a tradeoff: we do a quick daily meeting in exchange for keeping stakeholders off your backs the rest of the day/iteration.

EDIT: phrasing
Gratuitous negativity is a given when it is possible for users to downvote others anonymously for no good reason. My recent posts are a testament to that; thus, a call to avoiding it would necessitate the abolition of downvoting, which will never happen.
Spidey is an Android-based stingray (IMSI
catcher) detector that uses machine learning
to detect the presence of stingray devices
which can be used to eavesdrop on cellular
communication.

http://signup.spideyapp.com/

Also see http://codesign.mit.edu/category/macluguardian-project/
> Those 5 managers are violating the "process".

Only if they speak
Internally Microsoft largely uses a fork of Perforce called SourceDepot. Branching in P4 is about as easy and lightweight as any centralized version control system has ever managed, though still quite a bit heavier than git obviously.
The real "best interview technique" is not so much black-and-white structures-vs-unstructured. It depends a lot on the type of job you are interviewing for. Structured interviews work really really well for engineering jobs, particularly software engineering. However for marketing, sales, finance, assistant, etc. jobs, the unstructured interview questions work quite well. These are the jobs for which "Tell me the time when..." actually works.
I have tried a few times in the last year to find someone who something crazier than Yi: a Haskell program that is text editor, IDE, and integrated Webkit browser, all in Haskell. The dev was a former Emacs enthusiast. It looked really cool, but I forgot to bookmark.

It is not Yi, but does anyone know what I am talking about?
It's been a while since I've done work in this area but you might want to lookup Lanzcos Algorithm [1].

[1]:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_algorithm
+1 Chat is awesome for standups and generally does all the required things. Wish everyone did it this way. The one thing I'd like to see is more scheduling of breakouts (conf calls) though. An ideal standup for me schedules at least 2 conf calls per day to work through issues. This is very rough estimate, fewer is fine only if everyone is chugging along great and knocking off tasks quickly and cleanly.

I'd also like to say standup works great for remote teams.
>Now when a cop shoots you while you are trying to rob a bank, it's suicide?

The euphemism is "suicide by cop", yeah.

>This seems like a perfect example of felony murder.

When the deceased was committing a felony themselves, why can't they take 100% of their own felony murder charge? We don't need multiple people to face full consequences for a single act.
8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
Rider on the Storm (2011)
> I think it's actually the opposite: everybody is invited to the daily standup, even the janitor if she/he so pleases... but only developers can talk.

You're right; a better phrasing would be that the manager is not an active participant in the meeting. It's a developer coordination meeting, not a status reporting meeting. So the manager is welcome to listen in, but they're not supposed to be managing during that meeting, and in particular they should not be asking questions, because that'll very quickly turn the standup into a daily status report instead.
How to write more effective copy
Thanks for this. I'm on this path right now but with only a week out of the hospital it's still pretty fresh. I fully understand that feeling of mortality though. I think letting go of the things I can't control is one thing I need to work on. I need to let go.

And thanks to the other two posters as well. Any perspective is welcome right now.
Are Drones the Future of Medical Air Transport?
I think the point of the article was to point out that while tech companies supposedly have perks for people with families, those are rarely enjoyed to their full extent due to diverse factors. And also that those tech companies might say they offer a family friendly environment, but depending on your team, the culture will not reflect that.

I've experienced a bit of that. It's hard not to feel bad for going home at 5pm to be with your family when all the driven single 20-somethings around you will continue to work late into the night and produce a lot more than you.
Wow, I must have bad timing. I've had an account here for almost all of those, and I think I was probably lurking for the 1 or 2 occurrences when I did not have an account, but don't remember seeing it before.

Or perhaps senility is setting in early. :-D
46 times too many. This is totally illegal.
Different form of "stickies" I guess. Except no one reads stickies.
Billy was just a regular ol' schmuck in Anytown, USA who wouldn't read anything technical unless there was a human element in the story that he could relate to.

Not sure if there's a name for that literary mechanism, but pretty much every NYT article and every other TED talk starts out with that kind of human element. A thesis and a technical defense of the thesis is what journal submissions do... other mediums find their engagement through the human struggle (eg the immigrant who escaped the crumbling soviet university system and became the nobel-slighted yale academic with a promising rogue theory).
I have a couple of old laptops. So when I saw your post, I thought about pulling out the old motherboard, etc and installing a Raspberry Pi 2 in its place. Might be tricky to get the old LCD to work correctly.

Has anybody successfully got this sort of re-engineering working?
ISIS name to grab headlines but FBI says its not the terror group
I helped a friend cheat.

Originally he'd simply asked if I could be there whilst he did the test so that he could talk aloud and bounce ideas off of me as it was timed and he gets nervous in tests and was afraid he'd not think clearly.

He froze. Totally.

I took over and did the test for him, and he aced it and was offered the job at the top salary band.

He is a perfectly good engineer and the company were very satisfied with their hire, but he never did that test. The test in it's entirety was completed by myself.

I cannot imagine this is such a rare thing with remote technical tests.
The new stories are okay, but ... eh, its not the same thing. Its more brute force dickery between management and IT instead of the subtle interaction it used to be.
The part about the stand up that's "what did you do yesterday? what will you do today?" is the part that is the anti-pattern. In a well functioning team, the only thing that needs to be communicated is "Heads up: you need to know this now..." That's the part of the stand up that really matters.

Many of my best stand ups go like

Mary: "Nothing to report."

Jon: "Nothing to report."

Dyneshwari: "Nothing to report."

Shruthi: "Nothing to report."

Su: "Nothing to report."

Grant: "Oh, we moved all the test databases. You need to get the latest base data in your environment or you won't be able to work."

Joe: "Nothing to report."

It's over in 1 minute.
Ask HN: How to mail a PDF?
What service would you recommend to print and mail a PDF? My particular use case is to post a US tax return - am currently overseas.
We had a tech support customer who called every few Mondays at 9am because their keyboard wasn't working.

The cleaner's vacuum cleaner would occasionally pull out the PS2 cord.
Standups do provide a useful habit of synchronizing regularly. More mature teams can probably do this without a scheduled meeting.

In an Extreme Programming team provide a good opportunity to swap around pair-programming partners.

It's also a good opportunity to decide how many tasks the team has capacity to take on today, which isn't entirely straightforward. There may be someone off sick which means we can run fewer pairs. There might be an urgent production issue from overnight which requires a pair's attention. It might be that one of the next tasks needs some research and doesn't warrant a pair. It might be that one of the next tasks is a bit challenging/contentious and could benefit from mob-programming[0].

They are also useful to update team members who have been away or stuck in meetings, and for them to update the rest of the team. Not everyone can be in all conversations all the time.

As with most agile practices the mantra of "If it hurts, do it more often" applies well to standups. Synchronization is useful when working in this way but it shouldn't need to be long and painful. Having multiple focused sub-5 minute standups is better than one that drags on.

e.g. break along functional lines. Limit morning chat to what are we doing today, who is working with whom?. Have separate sessions for updates on progress, discussing impediments, or product planning updates.

Informal "huddles" work quite well too. Convene everyone ad-hoc when there's a decision to be made or as soon as an impediment arises.

When mob-programming most of the reasons for standups disappear. The whole team stays synchronized all the time.

[0] http://mobprogramming.org/
It does depend whether the particles are drawn using shaders or the simpler canvas drawing commands. Without shaders, it would be very CPU intensive. However this site has definitely taken the shader approach.
I honestly wish there were a job track for people who want to work part time for a while. I'd be more than happy being a bugfix monkey, not given any of the sexy projects, at 25h/wk and half the average tech salary because it'd let me pursue school or other hobbies
It was time to splash out on a VPN (something between 1/20th and 1/20th of the average Strine citizen's ISP outlay per year) about 5 years ago.

It's a trivial cost compared to the protection it provides against government [sponsored] monitoring, totally regardless of, and aside from, any legality questions surrounding your specific on-line actions.
> Is it possible that the company collapses, while too many employees quit so they can do their own thing, or retire?

The excruciating burden of going to work is almost non existent if you can say fuck off at any moment. A lot of folks there do lots of interesting and fun stuff.

While you could see some run away I would suppose that the numbers will be small if you have good corporate culture and policies.
Or don't adjust your clock, then you'll just think you're coming in earlier.

Works for everybody.