skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if global mutable state is the same as the problem you point out though -- they do share a similar nature in the framing of dependencies, but they cause problems for different reasons.

I agree, there are (at least) two distinct problems here.

One is the existence of any implicit dependency because of global (or other broad) scope. This can create surprising spacial interactions in the code, making it harder to maintain.

Another is the existence of mutable state. This can create surprising temporal interactions in the code, also making it harder to maintain.

Loosely speaking, the danger from these effects multiplies.
APIs and Platforms: How interfaces and access enable the networked economy
Thank you for posting that doc. My Dad worked on TSR-2 avionics (at Ferranti) and I grew up entertained by tales of TFR and moving map displays. Interesting reading.
Socratic method is the typical way of teaching classes in law school, and I personally found it a lot more engaging than lecturing. It's easy to think you understand a concept by reading it, then realize when the professor prods you to think about the corner cases that your original understanding was superficial.

That said, you need small class sizes for it to work. It's impossible for the professor to have a proper dialogue with 60 people in a room, much less the 100+ you might see in an introductory undergraduate course. Which is unfortunate because it's those introductory courses, where students are learning how to think in a new field, where Socratic dialogue is the most helpful. In my opinion, class sizes trends in higher education are backwards--massive lecture halls for freshman and small collegial classrooms for seniors.
Articles Titled Considered Harmful Considered Harmful
The Moral Bucket List
Your Brain's API: Giving and Getting Technical Help
Have you worked extensively with the "unconnected"?

Sometimes, people might not be as unconnected as you think. To give you an example from the urban environment, I've seen download kiosks where somebody with a computer will download music videos and songs and then install them on memory cards for squatters, street vendors (living next to/in their stalls) and others that might nominally be seen as unconnected.

In other instances, "connection to the Internet" might look very different than one would assume. For many of the rural residents of the 4.3 bn you mention, the Internet is meaningless unless there are the types of applications that these people are interested in and/or in need of. They are not blessed with the potential for leisurely media consumption nor are they skilled to access information and / or modalities of use provided primarily for literate audiences.

I hope when you speak of connecting the unconnected you are not thinking of providing pipes of bandwidth or even new consumer devices? That has been tried and is clearly not the way forward. Rather building services that specifically target the needs as well as limitations faced by "the unconnected" seem a much more viable proposition - perhaps working with (and not reinventing or innovating around) the modalities already being developed, such as the "download kiosks" mentioned above.

First and foremost, though, I hope you are spending plenty of time with the unconnected when developing this idea.
I've seen the exact opposite. Startup, pivoted 3x in 3 years. The younger devs have a much harder time accepting he pivot and figuring out how to adapt. So without any more substantive evidence, my experience definitely refutes this silly argument that youth is more flexible.
The 5 most socially destructive aspects of Silicon Valley
Fair enough on the point about zero rating and net neutrality.

However, I have a hard time thinking of a scheme where allowing zero rating does not discriminate.

To not put too fine a point on it, what makes Wikipedia so special that only they should get zero rated? There are lots of other useful and educational sites out there that should also be zero rated by any criteria that Wikipedia meets.

Sure, you can try to minimize the discrimination, but you can never remove it totally. Zero rating is by definition discriminatory. There is allowed content and here is banned content and the ISP as the gatekeeper gets to decide which is which.
Greece couldn't have asked in 1980. There was a debt conference in the early 1950s -by the world war winning superpowers of the time- that postponed compensation questions until the reunification of Germany (then thought to be coming soon). In 1990, after the reunification, the same superpowers convened again, and decided _instead of all countries and without consulting_ to drop the debt.

A mandatory loan from the Greek government to finance the German war effort would be at around 11 billion euros now. It is a multiple of that for many other EU countries.

I'm not saying that this "repay the war debt" is a good idea, but there certainly are a lot of hard to contest historical arguments for the validity of a small part of their claim.
I'm conflicted as a whole in regards to Everest. Being a climber who's paid for expedition services on Denali, I can see where it is often necessary. However, adding luxury items and allowing inexperienced climbers on the mountain is dangerous.
There's other advantages to separating it, like:

1) if you make your api public then you dogfooding ensures it's robust and functional and full-featured

2) if your front end is static, you can throw it up on amazon s3 or I'm playing with a static site hosting service I found here on hn called http://netlify.com, you never have to worry about how much traffic that part will get.

3) you can bundle your html interface for mobile apps
I want to like KaTeX so much, but without `\begin{cases}` or `\begin{align}`, it just can't typeset some of the equations I use. I'll keep an eye on it though. Maybe they'll implement those things some day.
I can't recommend Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) enough for personal backups for hacker-types. Everything is encrypted client-side, so don't lose you key or thee is literally nothing you can do to get at your data again. It's also deduplicated and compressed so you can do snapshots often (on my machines I have a cron that runs every six hours) without going broke since (similar to git) you're only storing changes.
I am not sure these companies don't actually already know "open solutions have greater reach than closed solutions". They are run by extremely smart and capable people - but they are more concerned with pleasing the shareholders and hence short term profits than creating truly open systems (with some exceptions here and there) and we can't blame them for it. A more effective approach would be to create/support open systems and educate consumers instead.
Why will you succeed where App.net, tent.io, etc hasn't?
... but this would eliminate huge amounts of internet discussions. We better leave it as it is.
I teach high school students introductory HTML, CSS, & JS on behalf of a non-profit so I'm somewhat familiar with the problem space.

What makes languages such as these and Scratch beneficial is that they decouple logic from the syntax. I can't tell you how frustrating it is for high schoolers to hit the syntax wall and lose interest altogether. At this age (14-18) when you haven't necessarily built up the grit and persistence you have as an adult, tools such as these keep the student progressing and motivated.

Eventually you take the training wheels off and have them engage in real coding. Languages such as these and tools such as Scratch serve as a crucial bridge to that end state.
As far as I know you can start with the pre-trained models for the Apache OpenNLP library. And from there on use a translator or something similar?
حظك اليوم الاثنين 13-4-2015
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

Tier 1 means you're so central (at least in most of the world -- countries with local telco monopolies might be exceptions) that there is nobody upstream of you; everyone else is either a customer (who pays you) or a peer.

None of the companies you mention are Tier 1, so they're all paying someone upstream for at least some of their traffic. Every big company has people working to reduce that cost. For example, Apple and Microsoft might decide to peer with each other in some areas, and carry each other's traffic for free rather than paying someone else to carry it. And we know Google has invested significantly in their own fiber.
Servers Having Standardized Test Information Hacked by a 14-year-old Student
I was quite sure this would culminate in a plea for better UX and user testing.
Interestingly, NYC has the largest unfiltered water supply in the country, because it aggressively manages its source in the Catskills: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/NYC_.... Saved the city from having to build a $6-10 billion filtration plant.
Agreed. If the corps use the government to do their bidding that is bad. In the case of this candidate I think the pitch is that he won't allow that either (or at least that' me general understanding of the libertarian position).
How does dedupe work with client-side encryption -- are the snapshots and diffs done on the client before encryption and upload?
Interesting experiment. I have a couple of questions though:

Why use a naive bayes? Is there a personal preference? Have you ever tried to use a SVM with a linear kernel, which is perfectly suitable for large text corpora?

Have you considered removing words with a too low IDF? As far as I see the words with the highest discriminative power are having a positive count of "1", which is not really surprising, that they are highly influencing your results - IMHO, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Other than that, interesting read, definitely.
Noted. forgive me. I was attempting to see how far the systemd apologists would go to defend their project (a call to arms was made on #systemd on IRC to post on this thread). They usually flood the thread with people (one new account was made for this HN thread specifically), and I was curious to see how many people it would take to defend a propaganda blitz. I counted three pro-systemd people in the thread, and you'll note from my past posting history, this is the longest back-and-forth I've participated in. there is a definite pattern of systemd sockpuppetry on HN, and I figured you should at least see how far they'll go.

Thank you for keeping HN civil.
I feel bad for DataSift. I always understood that their business was really risky. More when Twitter acquired Gnip.
"low level" CSS? It's a sad day when a collection of CSS classes is referred to as "low level". Lower level than bootstrap, I assume?
Israel (obv a different scale than china) has recently also experienced a big push toward desal. What's interesting is there's a moore's law type of effect at play here, desal keeps getting cheaper and cheaper to the point where it's actually a practical alternative to ground water, filtering etc.

I think water will be another great Malthusian disappointment, ocean water is basically unlimited (correct me if I'm mistaken), and on a 20-50 year time horizon it seems that the world should be able to alleviate all water scarcity by tapping it.
On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
You've nailed it, especially when DI is used as good coding practice fairy dust sprinkled on projects staffed by inexperienced coders. It makes "effectively procedural code split into method-per-class classes" even harder to follow.
I was always taught that Descartes "I think therefor I am" quote is often misunderstood or at least misrepresented. What I was taught might be a better way to understand it is very close to what you stated. If a person can doubt the existence of everything then certainly they could doubt even the existence of themselves. Once one starts down a path of doubting then certainly everything is subject to scrutiny. What one cannot doubt is the fact they are doubting. So perhaps the quote should be better paraphrased as "I doubt therefor I am". Ive always found that helpful and while it seems you understand that point very well I just thought Id mention it because prior to such an explanation the process by which one affirms there existence because they think never made much sense to me.
What I believe you're missing is that the government is not an isolated entity in a vacuum. Its made of people and groups that make their case and express their interests.

In this case the interests of the private company prevailed. Notice that the proposal of not banning CFCs in medicinal applications was also a decision to be made by the government, but the pressure from the other side was simply not enough.
Me, too. And I've been here twice as long!
You're stuck in a loop.
This was amusing. I like imagining new attackers taking over the infected machines and running their own VPS service on top of the hacked VPS accounts. You could have poorly secured turtles all the way down.
Help me understand this better. It seems like being blacklisted by a big company or even entire industry is bad, even life altering. But people get serious PTSD or sometimes even die from one single 5-minute fight with a cop.

Furthermore, I think shunning and blacklisting should be a protected form of individual choice. For example, I'm just not going to hang out with someone that's a racist. That is and should be 100% my choice. But I don't have a right to physically harm them. I'll argue that this arrangement of making violence special and different from harsh-words or shunning will make for a more functional society because we don't always all have to agree but we can still live in one place together.
Yes, I'd wager that regular Vim users employ a variety of plugins. Vim is a powerful editor out of the box, but it falls short of many IDE capabilities without leveraging plugins.

There are many packages on GitHub that will install and configure Vim for you with a variety of useful plugins and keyboard shortcuts out of the box--so after the installation is complete, you'll have a fully fledged Vim IDE ready to use.

One of my favorites is Joe Nelson's setup [0]. It's specific to Haskell development, but even if that's not relevant to your use-case, it's a very sleek demonstration of what Vim can do as an IDE--and a good starting point for customizing your setup (i.e. a very clean .vimrc file for inspiration). I use it basically as-is for my default Vim config and as a full IDE. Check out the keyboard shortcuts for quickly switching buffers, Git integration, and the shortcuts for visualizing project structure & quickly navigating files.

[0] https://github.com/begriffs/haskell-vim-now
How to change the caller id while calling
People will take any opportunity to stop thinking:

Most people would sooner die than
think; in fact, they do so.
-- Bertrand Russell

In short, if it's a "thought-terminating cliche" then the problem may not be in the way it's expressed, but in the way it's interpreted.

If someone chooses to terminate their thoughts based on something someone says, without considering why they might be saying it, and why there may be value to be extracted from it, then maybe the problem is not with the expression, but with them.

Think of it this way. You may consider it a given that there are times and places where you can and should trust other businesses. This statement about never, ever trusting a another business therefore seems to be at odds with your experience. Do you ignore it, or do you use it as an opportunity to learn why someone might say it?
Care to share some examples of dark energy evidence? If the evidence is a measurement of expansion, then it doesn't necessarily support the existence of dark energy.
Yes, exactly. The client source is available too if you like, though it's not really free software since the license still only allows you to use it with the official Tarsnap service.
Maybe they can export their excess freshwater in giant tankers to CA to solve their drought problem. They already produce most of the electronics we consume.
I suppose it depends on how hard it is to pump it uphill once it's out of the ground given that it starts at sea-level. Some of the more inland places or more uphill places might still be hard to get to with efficient desalination. Eg: Nevada
>I’ve taken testosterone just to see what happens, and I understand the problems of teenage boys

I'm impressed. Reminds me of a female neuroscientist on TED who had to take a hormone cocktail designed for men as she was incapable of making her own and there were no cocktail designed for women. I remember her saying she was angry and sex-obsessed all the time. Probably a slightly exaggerated effect because she's not a man, but still pretty illuminating. Chemistry can change us so much, and there's plenty we can not understand with just empathy.

Similarly about depression I've heard Paul Gilmartin say that "thinking you understand depression because you've experienced sadness is like thinking you understand Italy because you've been to Olive Garden".
Why not look at something like nuclear? Since the need is both electricity and heat, a nuclear reactor seems ideal since you don't have to convert power back in to heat - you can just use it directly.

With modern recycling techniques and reactor designs the chance of meltdown and wastes are limited, but that seems better than more coal.

Not an expert on reactor design vs desal design by any means - would love an opinion on the challenges here outside the standard nuclear ones.
Indeed they hate you and just may treat you like a dog too.

Here you have worked and toiled away for years trying to get your big break. Finally it comes and you get a phone call or invited out to the valley to demo/talk about selling your blood, sweat and tears. You then realize your just getting stomped on and they may have just stolen all your hard work. You think ...huh this is how it goes for the little guy innovator against this huge tech company you held in such high regard.

The tech world is not a extremely friendly place to even a ton of Caucasian guys(it's all about who you know/who is behind you), yet alone to any person who isn't!
Note also that Descartes expresses a fear, which he doesn't explore very much, that if he were to momentarily stop thinking, he might "cease to exist." He has a formulation along the lines of: "I exist, that's certain—but how often?" The answer: as long as he is thinking, he exists. So the Cartesian affirmation of individual existence has an interesting porosity.
Exactly. Thanks for your affirmation. .. And space itself expanding doesn't require 'dark energy' and has nothing to do with momentum, acceleration etc.
I once saw block languages described as "What I could have typed out in twenty characters takes me 100 meters of dragging and dropping instead." Pretty much sums up the one major issue with them, doesn't it?

Having said that, I'm convinced there's a way to design an interface around it that creates an acceptable compromise with (most of) the best of both worlds, although I don't know what that interface would look like. Perhaps introducing a cursor and treating the blocks as we would normally treat glyphs in typed languages[0], using keyboard shortcuts to quickly insert and manipulate blocks.

EDIT: Also, what's notable about all these block lanuages is that they're essentially taking writing, and turning the words into things that can be dragged around and manipulated as objects. Although we do to some degree process language in that way, I wonder if it isn't doing things backwards.

If you look at Bret Victor's recent work you can see interesting alternative takes on this where the problem is approached from a concrete example first and then generalised into abstractions[1][2][3].

[0] Err... not as in typed languages, obviously, but as in languages that we type out.

[1] https://vimeo.com/66085662

[2] https://vimeo.com/64895205

[3] https://worrydream.com/DynamicPicturesMotivation/
The C++ engineers making $500k in HFT are more due to the HFT part of their skills. As was said elsewhere, focus on solving business problems with engineering skills, not so much on the language.
I tnink the Material Design guidelines support interfaces that work very well for keyboard/mouse systems -- better than lots of classical GUIs for most uses. Material Design is still better with touch, but its not a bad choice without it.

Of course, touchscreen laptops are a thing, so even if MD really needed touch, its not unreasonable to see a niche for an MD-centered Linux distro.
Sounds useful, I need to look for FOSS software that can do the same for local storage targets.
So... the attacker accessed the server of a security consultant by "bruteforcing a username and password combination"...

EDIT: Security newb here. It was a honeypot, aka a trap.
It's already biased towards the face that is facing up to start. With practice or by accident, you can toss it so that it wobbles but doesn't actually flip over. A casual observer cannot tell the difference.

Explained in http://www.amazon.com/Heads-Or-Tails-Gary-Kosnitzky/dp/B00FM...
Agreed. Particularly for California which has heavy energy and water needs, nuclear desalination seems like the most future-proof approach, particularly considering the dramatic decrease in aquifer volume as groundwater is extracted to make up for drought-level rainfall.
I wonder if Huthos is offering a SLA for their VPS :)
All of this is outside my experience, so I have to ask - how does the attack, as described, prove HutHos is the perpetrator?

The poster was able to find the HutHos site owner's full information "in a few minutes", due to "poor operational security practices." Doesn't this raise the possibility that the HutHos server was compromised by the malware's true owner?
It appears to be a honeypot server, which is why it is so heavily monitored. It wouldn't do much good if it was really hard to get into.
I think that was left on purpose (he was also logging everything)
Absolutely fascinating. I've been "in and around" the security community (not a part of) for years now, and never heard of a company offering a service like this.

I love how he gives advise to the company at the end. I mean c'mon you get root access via dictionary attack within a quick timeframe and you don't think it is a honeypot?
Are your whole drive snapshots deduplicated?
Not “the server”, the attacker logged into a honeypot, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_%28computing%29
I think what he meant is an application that is serving a lot of requests at low latency which would be the ideal scenario for a api/cache server so not much of crap. And I'm not sure why you are comparing a 6G new gen to a 2MB new gen. Do you mean to say that a 70ms GC for a 6G heap is too low? It is fairly possible to hit those or even lower range for a heap of that size depending on the data. I have even heard of people hitting even lower GC pause though I myself haven't been able to do that personally.
He says in the blog that it was a honeypot
If that were reasonable then we would tank water in from Alaska. Or China would buy AK water.

If you want to dream big, in the 1980s there were pipe dreams of bringing in water from the Copper or the Stikine through a large off-shore pipeline to California.
What will you do with the salts and various impurities?
The server was a honeypot.
unelected officials trying to smack down democratically elected wishes

Greece can immediately get rid of EU and IMF officials if they want. All they need to do if forgot the free money that has been raining down on Greece.