skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that some elderly neckbeard would, decades after the fall, still be painfully hacking away at Hurd amid the decaying remnants of a dead civilization is a vision easy to see.
Yes it is. One of the many reasons I've migrated away from the Java world. (There are no non-spring/non-hibernate jobs left!)

Years ago I wrote a "get me the hell out of spring" tool:
https://code.google.com/p/unsprung/
As I got it, parent comment wasn't about having stable (tested) packages, but automated measures to recover one's ass when a bug slips through (or when you just want to risk or whatever) and update leaves you with unuseably broken system.

This sort of situation has happened to me on various distros, and Ubuntu wasn't an exception.
YMMV, but what one perceives as 'unreasonable political games' is highly personality-dependent. Most people have some set of behaviors that they find appropriate in some situations but not in others. For instance, wearing sweatpants to a wedding is generally frowned upon, for reasons that have little to do with their ability to maintain the body at a reasonable operating temperature. You can wear them anyway, but then you get to face the social consequences of doing so.

It's true that workplaces would be a lot more efficient under the regime you describe. It's also true that if my aunt had a dick she'd be my uncle. I'm suggesting that it might be a good idea for engineers to do the same thing as everybody else in the world and try to figure out when to wear sweatpants.
Blaming the victim.
Thanks removed.
Seperate the big companies into two groups. Those that provide content & those that don't.

The companies who provide content are more appealing to the end user and so Tier 1 IP providers will be interested in allowing them to host CDN platforms on the edge and connect into their networks so even if they do pay, it will be a very competitive rate. Then peering agreements will reduce the requirement for purchasing IP even more.

Companies who don't provide content but are huge, will have a department specifically for negotiating competitive rates & will again take advantage of peering in a big way.

Dark fibre is a different product to IP transit but again, negotiation teams will work to get huge discount.
Some companies will set up their own internal MPLS network, and it starts making sense when you grow to a certain size.
I know several older programmers 55+ who run rings around younger programms. They don't just write better code they also pick up new systems, languages, and techniques faster.

I suspect part of this simple selection bias where the best stick with programming for longer periods, but there is huge bennifits to really wide ranging backgrounds. Sure, many things become outdated, but the 4th time you see the same idea presented in a new way your just picking up syntax not a new way to think.
Another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886114
It's a great read. The one thing that concerns me is the assumption that your investments will earn 5% after inflation.

That has been very difficult (at least for me) since 2008.
> Some people saw an image: big deal.

This is called not seeing the forest for the trees.

The image is (mostly) irrelevant. The unauthorised access is serious. A rational adult, knowing that their career and livelihood could be
put in jeopardy by a malicious student (this one or another) wouldn't allow this incident to slide as just a "harmless prank". To do so would be highly reckless and could put your own family's livelihood at risk. If you were a teacher you would be acutely aware of the risks posed by being soft on this kind of infringement. It sets a precedent and opens one up to repeat "attacks". The word would quickly spread that "Don't worry, Mr.X is cool he doesn't care if you use another person's account without their knowledge". This runs contrary to the basic principles of computer ethics which is a cornerstone of what we teach, at my school at least!

> If the adults had treated the potential downside serious then there would have been better access control

This is a poor argument. If the passwords were stronger then what would stop the student from using a keylogger? If the school treats logging in as a teacher as a "harmless prank" what harm is there in using a keylogger to obtain the pw? After all, shoulder surfing wasn't punished, hahaha isn't school a laugh!

The point is that the punishment should be severe enough that other students who would contemplate using a teacher's account without their permission would think twice.
wow, way to put more pressure on an incredibly pressurised industry. my thoughts are if you are a programmer you'll excel in most office roles, you can probably automate a lot of your workload so, why doesnt everyone relax, stop worrying about the field and enjoy what they do once again. As for learning new technologies - I havent seen a new technology in ages , many are just rehashes or earlier frameworks, MVC with a twist , or clever ways around messenging any programmer who has continually adapted for 20+ years will be able to continue to do so. however if the goal is to take in a couple of young programmers indoctrinate them with the company's thinking and style of programming, then burn them out in 5 years squeezing every last hour of productivity out of them, then I agree young is the way to go
Thus, if you have a program that has an immutable global constant it is likely in the same situation.

I don't accept your premise.

Firstly, constants are used for all kinds of things, from hard mathematical data as in your example to configuring connectivity with external services via particular database details or URLs.

Secondly, while some programs really do only have one main purpose and so some of the background/context data really is almost globally applicable, this is certainly not always the case. In particular, the larger a software system becomes, the less likely this is to be true.

How do you ever change that value in any way without retesting everything to see what the effect was?

If the value doesn't have global scope, you don't have to retest everything, only parts of the system that can be affected by the change.
The existence of any copyright law means there are limits to free speech.
I guess the thing to consider is that at some point the European left adopted the idea that educating society was the way to the leftist dream of a egalitarian society.

Problem is that most of the leftist parties at that time were run by people that had little to no actual worker background, and the situation has since become ever more solidified.

End result is a quiet disdain for people that choose industry or service work over a university degree.
Companies that own their own infrastructure; e.g. literally the fiber across town, may only need to pay the peering fees. Some of the peering sites in the US are non profit, and as such these companies that own their own infrastructure are able to connect at-cost, or even at no cost [1].

I have no doubt that large companies take advantage of the above fact to get their internet "free" [2].

Now, there are still very significant costs in getting fiber to the peering sites, whether they trench it or lease it, and there are also the costs of the higher end routers, engineers to maintain them, etc. So, probably it is more cost effective to buy "regular" internet services for many small to medium office locations.

There is a decent article in Wired [2009] that explains how Google likely leverages all this to significantly reduce their bandwidth costs for YouTube [2].

[1] - http://www.phoenix-ix.net/aboutus.html

[2] - http://www.wired.com/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/
Why Nobel-Winning Scientists Are Getting Older
DI is a good and useful thing, but like a lot of fads in software development it is being overused in some places...

Actually what DI brings to mind for me is functional programming. By injecting your dependencies (as opposed to simply constructing them) you are moving your code just slightly in the functional direction. This brings many well known benefits, but also its own costs.
"Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation."
Yeah, Gnip founders ignored this "very sound business advice" and raked in ~$130M.

Startups are risky, startups that are growing in the ecosystem of one large megacorp are even riskier but they are prime acquisition targets. You decrease success chance for higher yields. This is like business 101.

The advice "do not base your business model on another company" evaluates to "do not increase your risks" which would be an absolutely absurd advice.

If one qualifies the original statement with several conditions for different contexts, it may become a solid advice. As it stands this model of understanding business strategies is useless.
Why not? Remora survive by not getting too close to the shark's mouth. Same applies to business.
Being a programmer, and having used both, neither exclusively, I think I offer an unbiased viewpoint.

LaTeX makes me feel like I'm in control of my document. I've had word processors do really weird things that I could never explain. In LaTeX, I can always get an explanation.

Thanks to programs like LyX, http://www.lyx.org/, one can have the power of both understanding the underlying and the high level startup speed of WYSIWYG{M}, and one doesn't need to make a billion trips to TeX StackExchange.

If you need a quick throwaway document that doesn't need to be maintained, and you don't care if it looks professionally typeset, Word is ideal, just type (although arguably LyX offers the same).

If you need a document that will receive a lot of scrutiny, and you're going to maintain it again and again (like a resume, CV, business card (yeah, I did it), academic paper, etc...) you should go with LaTeX. Get the look right, and don't worry about it any more.

We use HTML for web, which is very public and maintained. We need a markup language for printed text that has the same expectations. LaTeX is that.
Neat, I did a similar thing in Ruby using continuations. http://www.sitepoint.com/clojure-loops-ruby/
There are a couple of alternatives that I find quite useful.

For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.

For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.

Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.
> problems are hard not due to language, but due to algorithms, data structuring, design patters and general architecting et al.

This is where I think we do get some legitimacy to this discrimination though. Most places you go, people are implementing functionality that is not terribly unlike that which has been done for the last 20 years (I'm talking the generic business "enterprise" shop). However, there seems to be about a ~~20% turnover in tools, styles, patterns, etc every year, and in my opinion at least on some platforms, the implementation style is tending towards the most complicated possible over-architected solutions possible.

When you're young and single, you have all the time in the world to keep up to date on all this, but once you're married, not so much. So, while I could easily out-implement the more "current" people, I'm not up tp speed on everything in their toolbox, so I lose.

As you say, "intelligent employers" should realize this, but how are they to know the technology flavor or style du jour is a waste of time, when the industry itself can't figure it out? ("everything XML" as just one example)
FYI you haven't edited the dupe post (if you can), I assume it's the same as the original here.
CERT Oracle Coding Standard for Java
GCC and it's ecosystem is a killer app. Without it, you likely wouldn't have had the others[1], including Linux itself.

[1] X existed in the before time, but it was distinctly different than XFree86.
Why do you keep bringing up stuff that didn't happen?

The student did not do anything more harmful than replace a background image, he did not put someones career and livelihood at risk, did not put my family's livelihood at risk (where did that come from anyway?), the student did not use a keylogger (which would arguably require physical access first, at which point it is game over anyway) and so on.

My point is that all the stuff that you bring up did not happen and making an example out of someone just because he could have done worse sends the wrong message entirely, it says: you're going to get the book thrown at you anyway so once you cross that particular line you might as well go all in and do real harm because you will be punished as if you had anyway.
I'm not a physicist or anything, but the idea I'm getting from that is that the event horizon of such a micro-black hole would be much smaller than a subatomic particle. It's too small to actually draw anything into it from a distance, so it would only be able to absorb something by running into it. The rate of consumption can't increase until the mass gets large enough to actually draw matter in from a greater distance than something like the size of an atomic nucleus.

The article author calculated how big that would be, and the black hole would reportedly need to accumulate about a billion tons of mass before it could start to grow exponentially.
JavaLite – This project deserve more love
Decide in advance what the 3 most important facts are you want them to remember about you.

Then make sure to work this into your answers, even if the question they ask you seemingly isn't related to it.

I learned this from one of the co-founders of a SwipeGood (YC W11), they wrote about it in much detail here:

http://blog.close.io/tough-interview-questions

(Now of course - do this mindfully, not robotically, but if you've been invited to an interview, I probably don't need to say this).

And congratulations! Wishing you success :)
How to build a brain with Python
“Startup NY” Initiative Creates 76 Jobs/Year
Unity is very popular for creating 3D mobile games; easy exporting to all the major platforms and a visual editor. If you are a junior programmer, I'd recommend Unity even if you are doing 2D. More advanced developers might find themselves fighting against the design philosophy of components and game objects in Unity, kinda like Entity System, but not quite. The engine design makes debugging harder. Note that all Unity games run in a 3D scene even if it's purely 2D so the raw performance and battery drainage is worse than in pure 2D game engines.

Haxe+OpenFL, Haxe+OpenFL+Flixel and Haxe+OpenFL+HaxePunk combos are all good if you need to do lower level stuff like manipulating video buffer, which is rare but can give you pretty unique visual effects. Multiplatform support is working, but I wouldn't say it's great in these.

Cocos2d-x is good for physic based 2D games. Good performance and a great tool in the hands of more advanced programmers. Multiplatform support is better than in Haxe but worse than in Unity.

I'll also note that development environment setup is a lot more painful in Haxe and Cocos2d-x compared to Unity.

Source: my experience. Consume the information with a grain of salt.
Show HN: A bug in QuizUp android application
Beer Powered Pontiac Firebird Actually Works
The first option could be legitimately said by someone who doesn't want to talk or be subpoenaed. It's the difference in occupy style protesters saying "They'll have to come arrest us." and "Please come arrest us.". Though in both scenarios there may be some that get the desired end result, the first option places the responsibility for the end result on the third party.
I suspect that — late at night, tucked in for a slumber after toiling all day in the processor — injected dependencies dream they are first class functions, their service interfaces dream they are function signatures, and the objects into which they are injected dream of being curried functions to which some dependency arguments have already been partially applied.
Nope. Nope nope. This is the same argument that early OO people used to justify the idea that you should use getter/setters everywhere rather than directly accessing your variables. You never know if the implementations of those ideas will change!!!!!11

That's programming. It is always possible that anything might need to change. That is how it is. This does not justify calcifying your code by adding extra unnecessary structure, because what that in fact does is make the program harder to change later (while requiring you to do more work up front). Also, as the author of the article notes, it requires one to keep more pieces of information clear in one's head in order to work with code of equivalent complexity, something that is almost always a big lose.

In a good language, if a dependency implementation changes, you know this because your program does not compile. (Well, of course because you are not a noob, you are linking things that are versioned in the first place, so this should not ever even be an issue unless you are actively upgrading outside code and are expecting it.) When your program does not compile, you want the compile error to be at the site that uses the dependency, because that tells you exactly where the thing is that you need to fix. Adding excess verbiage around it, and distancing the site that instantiates the dependency from the site that uses it, only causes more work.

If you are using a language/system that doesn't allow you to program this directly and clearly, then maybe that is the problem...
So it's verbosity alone that makes "GNU/Linux" not just acceptable but morally required but "This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors." just beyond the pale. That explains a lot about RMS.
The default download option is $25, the only way to get it "free" is to put in a custom dollar amount. You can do that, but the message they're sending is pretty obvious.

As for the negativity, I think people wonder about the "why" of this. As far as I can tell, it's basically "Ubuntu is ugly so we'll make it look like Mac".
Hacker tries to compromise and resell an internet-facing Linux server
From the article:
> Try to get used to it; the alien children do. What number comes next?
I'd love it if a teacher told me that!
Hurd (by way of Mach) has far more PhD papers.
It is hard for me to imagine exactly what this looked like from behind the wheel. Symbols like "bear left" are still in use today on our no doubt much better roads. Then there is the symbol for "follow telephone wires". It implies a lack of sign posts, and possibly roads altogether. This gives me a glimpse of what driving/navigating was like, but not a complete picture. Anyone have more insight?
You actually create wireframes in (angular- and bootstrap-enhanced) HTML with Shireframe. And yes, you can reuse some of the code when creating actual product.

I'm not really into graphics editors and enjoy writing code much more.
The goal for me was to simplify creating wireframes with code by having a set of predefined "sketchy" styles and several ready-to-use UI widgets and shortcuts for common layout patterns/classes so I don't have to create and type them in from scratch for every new wireframe.

This already saved me a number of hours as I'm creating some wireframes on how a future product at my company will look like.
Hn: A new LINQ clone
Salary data is already available at places like salary.com. You can see what people with your job title in your area are making for free.
Indeed. The LHC collisions aren't special because they're particularly high-powered. They're special because they take place precisely in the center of an enormous particle detector. And have a precisely known energy level and composition.

Far higher energy stuff than anything we can dream of producing in a lab happens all over the world all the time. And the stuff that's documented now is only the things that have happened since we started being able to detect and measure it.
I'm a graduate student in astronomy and I think it's extremely unlikely that dark energy or dark matter will go away. The concern of an "error cascade" was legitimate when these ideas were first proposed and many astronomers were skeptical of both dark matter and dark energy for long while. But over time there have been a number of independent lines of evidence pointing to the existence of both dark matter and dark energy. It's possible some comedy of errors could have lead to the spurious detection of dark matter or energy through one of these measurements, but very unlikely that it would be mimicked in other, independent measurements.
The "why" is likely that the de-tuning creates tension, which amplifies the cinematic quality of the piece.
Super for gnip.

But basing your business model on being allowed access to other companies' data fails far more frequently than that it succeeds, and it fails far more frequently than the already pretty bad chances that you have as a start-up to begin with.

See the thread subject that you're commenting in for how Gnip's competitor fared.
The In my opinion there should have been a proportionate, but serious school-based consequence. in a comment above does not sound like book throwing to me.

I think the argument here is more over how to state things than about what should reasonably happen to the student in these circumstances (I guess there is lots of room to disagree on 'proportionate', but I'm not sure that is what you are doing at the moment).
BrowserHack: NetHack ported to the web
I think many companies call it a watch is because, at the moment, the only things that do not look weird on anybody's wrist in daily life (1) are watches and bracelets, and a watch is the only one of these with a display.

(1) heart rate monitors don't look weird during exercise, but aren't worn all day long by any 'normal' people.
I've been forced to use latex (academia), and I don't really like it. A few reasons:

Automatic figure placement sounds good in theory, but in practice you have to manually fix everything up.

pdflatex && pdflatex && bibtex && pdflatex

Slow buildspeed

Writes a lot to stdout every time you invoke it. Most of it completely irrelevant.

When encountering error, waits for input. Neither ctrl-c nor ctrl-d will immediately kill it.

One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph.

\textit \textbf \mathit \mathbf \emph \it \bf. Bold+italic works in normal mode but not in math mode.

Subfigures. Why? subfigure is deprecated. caption doesn't work with beamer. subfig doesnt work with hyperref. "It's true that subfig doesn't cooperate well with hyperref, but when the alternative is no subfloats at all …" http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144782/subfigure-and-...
Twitter Cards with HTTPS links are disabled
Yeah, i recall poking at basic back in the day and getting that every puzzling "syntax error" back.

Also, there is a mass of bugs out there that come from someone misplacing or forgetting a " or similar.

One thing that is likely needed though is some way to rapidly insert blocks via keyboard, as right now most of these interfaces are overly mouse driven when you want to modify a bunch of blocks quickly.
Empty Ebola Clinics in Liberia Are Seen as Misstep in U.S. Relief Effort
African start ups into YC
Hey sam,
We here in africa really appreciate the work you guys are doing to support start ups.Are there any notable start ups you have funded from africa.?