skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The irony is that a digital information is theoretically lossless, but in practice software and hardware changes so fast that it is one of the most ephemeral things humanity has ever created.

So if you got into programming because you wanted to create something lasting, I think you are destined to be disappointed. But then again, all human endeavor, and indeed everything in our human experience, even the seas and the mountains and the stars are all ephemeral on some time scale. As the Buddhists say, the temporary nature of things is unavoidable and neutral, it's ones desire for permanence that causes a problem.
Tell HN: Downmodding needs to die
Dear HN,

I have always considered HN, as a community, to be a place of great insight, interesting viewpoints, and otherwise extremely relevant information. I have enjoyed many conversations, and had even more educational moments, thanks to its users.

But we seriously need to talk about the downmods.

Downmodding, on its own, is harmless. Allowing users to downmod each other, as a means of curbing abuse, is an invaluable tool: self-policing of users has obvious merits which should be rightly acknowledged. However, downmodding as a means of pure disagreement should be unconditionally banned on Hacker News. The fact that downmodding is an acceptable means of expressing disagreement is a disservice to public commentary. If a comment is relevant and non-abusive, there is no reason it should ever be downmodded.

In other words: If you are downmodding out of disagreement, you should not have downmod privileges. If you don't agree with a message, use your words. Don't try to prevent others from reading it.

Downmodding only serves to promote resentment among users with unique viewpoints. The ability to express relevant but controversial opinions is fatally hindered when those opinions are suppressed due to unpopularity. Downmodding is a form of communal censorship, and it should be treated as such. For a community which bills itself as for hackers, and by hackers, "popular opinion" should be the least of all factors -- it should be scoffed at by any self-respecting hacker. Dissenting opinions, especially unpopular ones, should be championed -- not downmodded.
What are the Vaastu Elements?
Important Vaastu Tips for Better Health
Ebb and flow.
No, I'm pretty sure karma doesn't matter. If the content is really good, original & never posted before then it usually gets some sort of bump upwards. Whether it can make it to the front though isn't certain.
Given the English language fluency displayed so far, I'm pretty sure exasperation is exactly the word they think should be used.
Yes. Trying to fix myopia by getting children exposed to more sunlight is a bit of a "let them eat single-source organic asparagus" response: it makes would-be social reformers feel good, but it's not a realistic way to reliably give all children the (apparently) minimum three daily hours of 10,000 lux. Getting all children outside for three hours every day is not realistically possible, and wouldn't be pleasant or even desirable for all of them: bad weather, unsafe neighbourhoods, air pollution. In areas with often-overcast conditions and/or short winter[ days](EDIT) it wouldn't even be sufficient. Classrooms that admit more natural light would be great, but they're not a realistic means of getting to 3h × 10,000 lux across the board, if only because replacing almost the entire stock of primary-school classrooms would be a slow and expensive process. The most obvious solution is to rig up classrooms with multiple SAD lights, light-meter them to ensure that every desk gets at least 10,000 lux when the system is on, then run the system for maybe four hours every classroom day.

(Speaking of which, if I was in charge of a minor child I'd go ahead and stick a SAD lamp in its bedroom and leave it on for most of the day.)
An of course plain C does not have 'objects' and a _lot_ of architectures have stuff mapped at address 0x0
If you add a throttle it might be ok even if there's a delay between the move and the re-render.
I have no direct experience of how cowboy, etc. is used, outside of going to the rodeo.

The research I did earlier was based on the Wikipedia entry for "cowboy" and verification that it's used globally. It seems to be common in NZ/AU. I can demonstrate that it's used by people west of the Mississippi, such as:

> "Two nationally recognized cattle handling experts, Tom Noffsinger and Curt Pate, will be in Moses Lake[, Washington] ... Day one will feature Noffsinger, a veterinarian and low-stress cattle handling consultant, from Benkelman, Neb.." - http://farmprogress.com/story-nationally-known-cattle-handle...

> Born on April 1, 1883, in Waxahachie, Texas, Allen began working as a cattle handler at the age of ten in Jack County, Texas. - https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/falnq

> Cattle handler Temple Grandin to speak at workshop - http://www.farmandranchguide.com/news/livestock/cattle-handl...

(FWIW, I've heard Temple Grandin speak.) It may be that in the US "cattle handler" is more associated with her style of low-stress cattle management; perhaps to place the emphasis on the cattle than the cowboy. I can think of other reasons as well.

However, there's an entry for it in the "Classified Index of Occupations and Industries: 1960 [US] Census of Population" at https://books.google.com/books?id=8W7E7S9UTKEC&pg=PR3&lpg=PR... so it is not a new term. ("Cowboy -- Stockyards" is another category, as is cowpuncher; perhaps I should include 'cowpuncher' as another non-gender-specific alternative to cowhand?)

This suggests that you and I have different styles; why did you not attempt to verify your beliefs before writing them? I have two uncles who are/were pilots, but that does not give me special knowledge of aviation vocabulary.

Regarding your question - I do not like your rhetorical approach. It comes across like a change of topic to place me on the defensive. No matter how I respond, you can say that it's not enough, or you can attempt to second-guess my failures, or say that what I have done has "gone off the rails". I do not believe you spent much time on what I wrote previously, so don't think you would spend time in understanding anything else I write.
Hmm, I think I would make mine referential. "Baby shoes"

Let 2 words imply 6.
> An external service will be legally subject to subpoenas, so pawning it off doesn't solve the problem either.

How about a distributed onion route of external corporations, such that N subpoena hops must be followed to get to an unhashed IP? Serious investigations would do the legwork required and catch a serious bad guy, but nuisance clowns would be stopped from going too far. Kind of like a legal scrypt().

Instead of services, it could just be a reciprocal arrangement where everybody participating holds some of everybody else's data.
Better would be Augeas.

http://augeas.net/docs/references/lenses/files/ssh-aug.html
LiteIDE was probably using gdb as a backend. gdb is not a very reliable debugger as of the last few Go releases. Here's a demo of a common failure mode of gdb on Go: occasionally running the entire program when you try to take a single step https://youtu.be/qo4RAPxCTa0?t=351

This failure mode is a large part of why I decided to write godebug.
This is true. But even if just 5-10% of the population is DIFM, that's enough to fund a lot of companies and take the growth away from a lot of mature companies.

With interest rates low, a mature company can get away with 3-4% profit growth. Drop their topline revenue 5-10%, and their profit drops much more than that.
Can someone explain Figure 2 from this paper? (If you didn't catch the link, it's inlined at http://www.wfnmc.org/mc20101.pdf .)

Figure 1 makes sense to me: it's (n-1)² unit equilateral triangles, plus a row at the bottom with (2n-1) + 2 equilateral triangles that causes coverage of a slightly larger triangle. (I assume the question posed is "for at least some tiny but nonzero ε".)

I don't know how to start interpreting figure 2. Where are the n²+2 triangles (or are they supposed to be there?)? What's the big empty space? Why 1 - ε, not 1 + ε?
To learn which rapper is the most prolific weed enthusiast, we turned to science
WAMP and SignalR also come to my mind
Thanks for sharing!

Part 1 -> http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/04/15/a-look-at-stanford-c...
I think his point is that we have no idea how long people will enjoy any of the music created today, nor can we really say how much people will be listening to classical music 100 years from now. Music from the 14th century is certainly more battle-tested, but there's nothing objectively "least ephemeral" about it that means it can't, or shouldn't, be bested.
Courseeplus – Learning Makes Your Life Perfect
Quite agreed. Suggesting that downvotes were appropriate for signalling disagreement instead of civility is one of the few mistakes pg has made on an otherwise excellent site.

In the meantime, though, post fearlessly, argue soundly, and hope for the best.
For the cli, my muscle memory got used to Ctrl+A/Ctrl-E long before I heard of `set -o vi` and that made using the vi-mode in bash cumbersome, so I switched back. YMMV thought. That said, I learned about the `Ctrl+X+Ctrl-E` keybinding and the `fc` command and that has proved to be quite useful.
Which would actually be somewhat helpful, come to think of it...
I hear you. There is a distinctly different skill set between "Pushing the boundary of human knowledge" and "Teaching an intro class well." Universities and tenure have historically been built on this being a high correlation. Reality is that sometimes it happens, sometimes not. Universities need to decouple the teaching from the research. Some of that is leveraging the best pure teachers available.

At my grad school, the joke was that Nobels were more important for admissions than academics.
Can you find the "programming and layout specs docs," online or physical copies? I can't find any mention of them anywhere. I'm very curious to see them.
C absolutely does have objects.
Definitely not surprised that the author is John Conway (and his coauthor). I took his course on Linear Algebra back in the day -- the man is a veritable real life troll (in a good way)
I've had problems getting that module to work properly with AWS ELB (though I'd kind of assumed the problem was with ELB), so I'm not sure how solid the support is even for that. It'd be nice to test it against nginx itself as a baseline.
>Getting all children outside for three hours every day is not realistically possible, and wouldn't be pleasant or even desirable for all of them: bad weather, unsafe neighbourhoods, air pollution.

i don't understand that. Where do children are supposed to get daily multi-hour physical activity? On the treadmill in the basement? And if children aren't getting such amount of physical activity - that would border on neglect toward their health, physical and emotional. (of course my POV is affected by the fact that i'm a child of 197x-198x when we were "free-range" children back in USSR and from what i heard it was about the same in USA back then)
My latest ten months working on G'MIC
I disagree. It's easy today to think of the consoles of yesteryear as simple self contained systems (A 6502-based CPU? How quaint!). However, Consider the unholy trinity that was the Sega Genesis/Master System/CD/32X. Though no longer modern, that absolutely is a tower of complexity, especially when it was brand new.

The emulators of the game consoles of the past exist today because some hacker got curious and interested. Complexity certainly isn't stopping emulator devs. The Wii was more complex than the Gamecube, which was more complex than the N64, which was more complex than the SNES, which was more complex than the NES. And yet there are emulators available for all of those systems.

What is different today that would prevent an enterprising hacker tomorrow from making emulators of today's consoles?
I wonder, then, if the levels of myopia and SAD/circadian disruption are correlated. The calibration of one's circadian rhythm depends, basically, on getting the same sort of levels of sunlight that cause dopaminergic response.
Or splitting it into several files
Call me HTML
> since I use pine, and my engineers at rsync.net also use pine, not one single intra-company email has ever traversed the Internet. Ever.

What does the mail client have to do with this? I use Thunderbird with Gmail, and, since all of my contacts use Gmail, not one single email has ever traversed the Internet, ever.

With TLS-enabled mail servers, this isn't very relevant a metric.
This is literal cancer on the tech industry.
> It's not about configuration; it's about security. Fewer products in your stack means fewer things to patch.

Kind of the reverse of the defense-in-depth principle eh? ;-)
While C is not an "object-oriented" language, it does have a concept of an object: http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c99/n1256.html#3.14p1
There is a world of difference between layer-3/4 style load balancers and layer-7 load balancers. If you want to do it right, you often employ both.
Report Xenophobic Incidents in South Africa Online
That's a pretty ridiculous stance to take. By posting here, he clearly thinks his thoughts are worth our time to read, but by going "write-only", he clearly thinks other peoples' thoughts aren't worth his time to read.

The whole exercise seems very conceited.
That what I was hoping ;)...
Yep, something like gdb's threads interface.
for sure, pat hallahan rocks. jim james is one of the great frontmen, though. not sure what they'd be without him. we have similar tastes!
This is why modern parents are so in love with structured extra-curricular activities like team sports: they're effectively isolated corrals in which "multi-hour physical activity" is encouraged, rather than discouraged.
I love the in-browser demo of this Go program via GopherJS. So easy to try and become familiar. Well done!
Imagine for a moment you want to load balance more traffic than a single core can handle.

Now use HAproxy.

Now you see one example where nginx is kind of nice.
Browser Rendering Optimization: Building 60 FPS Web Apps
Rock!

I get the feeling there is some weird backlash against all things Agile lately. I've noticed it particularly in reddit comments.

I suspect it's young people who just weren't around before Agile.
So why aren't these targets for OpenOCD instead of a new system?
Google.com is still SHA-1 but they green-light their domains
internet: srs bsns
Even shorter: proofs without words http://mathoverflow.net/questions/8846/proofs-without-words
Downvotes for disagreement and downvotes for non-constructiveness are sometimes hard to distinguish. At the most obvious, a comment saying justt "I think you're wrong" clearly expresses a position that at least one person disagrees with, but is also almost certainly non-constructive, and potentially abusive in the form of being disrespectful. If you have arguments, make them. If the person you're arguing with made an argument, give the phrasing of the argument the benefit of the doubt, and engage with it as if it is a serious argument. (And if there's no way to do that, then their comment should be downvoted, because it's non-constructive.) To do otherwise is disrespectful of the person you're replying to, as well as to the community of people reading comments.

A lot of times I see people making repetitive and poorly-informed comments that also happen to be disagreeable on the merits. They're relevant, they toe the line of "non-abusive", but they don't belong. For instance, a recent comment thread had someone asking about whether Microsoft accepts pull requests on GitHub. It got two replies: one person explaining that they were aiming to, and one person saying that, of course MS would never do such a thing. The latter comment got downvoted a fair bit. I'd imagine most of the people downvoting disagreed on the facts, since the comment happened to be wrong. But it also did not contribute to the discussion, since it was made out of ignorance and assumption, and rightly got downvoted on those grounds.
Defense-in-depth doesn't work very well for infrastructure software packages: many projects share the same libraries with the same vulnerabilities (e.g. OpenSSL) but still have to be updated with independent package updates.

A shared-library vulnerability means both Nginx and HAProxy get broken in their own ways, which is worse, I think, than just having your whole stack rely on one or the other, and having that one break—it's more similar to having two independent vulnerabilities arise simultaneously.
He's soft. You think a softie like that could handle the intense pressures of Bell Labs or really push the dynamic?

If you want to be a whiner and work to end a paycheck, fine. But if you want to help change the world, you really gotta dig in and work x10 as hard as everyone.

What most of tech don't realize is that the whole world is looking up to us, to deliver a solution, and while guys like that, are sitting, and whining about fairness, every day we're letting people out there down.
I'd try this continuous deployment thing in the finance or maybe in the automotive industry. Let's see how the clients enjoy it.
Analogies. Fail me every time :)

With less shiny I mean that it's old. Not that it is crummy qualitywise. Old code is not like wine. If it was crap then it will be crap now. Old code is like an old house. If it's well made and tended to, and built on solid principles it can last generations.

Extensible domain logic is something that generally does not age well. Old utility libraries with well defined interfaces, on the other hand, are invaluable in technical computing.
Medical marijuana activist in Kansas could face charges
Awesome news for nginx users. But why should the first reaction should be about criticizing the other option? Some HAProxy users may or may not switch to this new product in the coming years. I probably won’t. Even today there is a big overlap between what HAProxy, nginx, and some other tools do and yet everybody works with what they prefer. Adding another feature that until now HAProxy had and nginx didn’t have doesn’t mean a dramatic time for this “competition” (even if such a thing exists).
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat (CenturyLink Acquires Orchestrate)
ZDNet Russian hackers exploit Flash, Windows flaws to spy on diplomats
That's typical for mathematicians - even more so with extroverted ones. They approach rules as a game one can use at will as long as the rules remain true. Thus, playing pranks with rules can become enjoyable. Coincidentally, surprise is the quintessence of humour, some say.

The original meaning of the word "hacker" is related to this thinking. However, the focus is different. The hackers tend to achieve their goal in whatever "hacky" way possible while mathematicians see the rules itself as the game.
Hofmann's views on LSD[1] in 1976 interview.

https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/hofmann_albert/hof...
That's a full MasterCard brand accepted globally.
You realize that Extreme Programming pre-dates Agile?

XP was one of those things that prompted the creators to get together and formulate what they all had in common compared to traditional methods. This is what resulted in the Agile Manifesto.

The backlash if mostly against the consultants and pointy-haired-bosses that cherry picked from various Agile practices the things they could grok, and implemented that as a cargo cult solution.

In wider IT world, that cargo cult method has become known as "Agile", just like "hacker" now equals "cybercriminal" for the rest of the world.
Jeremy Schlatter, godebug creator, did an interesting talk introducing the project March 18th at GoSF. The slides are available here: https://github.com/jeremyschlatter/godebug-talk
It's optional. It does not give credits/point/xp whatever if you do it. So they don't go on it. Sometimes they may not know the existence of this thing.
we refer you www.courseeplus.com. We have group and forum for learners.
In this circumstance, downmodding may indeed have been the proper course of action -- although a simple link to the source would have been just as effective, and much more informative.
The article differentiates between deployment and release.
Us old people hate Agile too.
These guys in Israel have been developing something very similar for a while now: http://www.newco2fuels.co.il/

"NewCO2Fuels innovative technology converts CO2 and H2O into syngas and from it synthetic transportation fuels or chemicals using present available technologies. The end products are competitive with current market prices with no incentives thanks to the very high efficiency rate of the NCF system."

I stumbled on them while Googling just last week.

Great to see this kind of R&D being done. I'd love to read a comparison of the various CO2 sequestration technologies out there.
I'm the developer of this app. I made this app to basically meet some of my searching needs. Please let me know if you have any interesting features/suggestions.
Do you think brazilians, argentinians, ..., mexicans are cognitively underqualified?
For background on the Nicaraguan 'Contras':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras

Benjamin Linder seems to have been a genuinely nice guy working to put his skills at use to really move the needle, it's a real pity he was murdered for trying to do good.
Ask HN: Wearables geek, anyone want to meet up in Amsterdam on April 22nd?
Hi there!

I'm a wearables geek, the guy behind www.ProgrammerFitness.com. I'll be in Amsterdam for TheNextWeb 2015. Anyone want to grab a coffee tomorrow?

You can use my e-mail address in the profile. Thanks!
Thanks, I was thinking as I wrote that, that seems very small for a platoon of Infantry, but it's about right for tanks.

Anyway, my point is that McKinsey are selling "knowledge" that they didn't create...
... and this is how I discovered the nice Waterfox browser [1]

[1] https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
Yes, seconded. I read the article really interested in learning what level of capacity Rethink is capable of in the wild, but didn't get a great feel for that. It's not very helpful to frame database performance in operations per week. Peak load would be a better starting point.
Clients probably will enjoy it provided you have a comprehensive suite of automated tests that you ran before deploying.
anyone have any insight into the perl anomaly in q3 of 2012? What was released then? Or, perhaps, what perl program really sucked at around that time?
Thirded. Another thing that sets it apart from other superhero shows is that how, after a while, the series spends time showing the main villain, who gains a human dimension.
I see myself as a bonsai artist. Bonsai trees need to be cared for, trimmed, styled, wired, etc. They grow over time. You can change things, but you can't realistically change everything without starting again. A bonsai tree is not "done" until it is dead.

I think this is the same as software.
Lead Tech Developer Melbourne NEEDED ASAP
Maybe it should be 2002 words, if a picture is worth 1000 words.
Thanks for the mob programming concept. I always disliked pair programming, but I actually think that mob programming is a great idea! It sounds like a meeting where you actually get confronted with the reality of the code, and so you know where you have to make decisions both in terms of code design and product design. I'll definitely give it a shot
Are you sure it was the xc3000 that was documented and not the xc6200 series (e.g. xc6264)? I remember the xc3000 being documented the usual amount for their parts (pinout, architectural description, call for info about licensing the software you need to have to use the thing), but the xc6200 datasheet definitely included details about the bits and is still floating around: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xc6200.pdf
Dojo 2 Roadmap
>With TLS-enabled mail servers, this isn't very relevant a metric.

They still have the meta-data, the actually interesting stuff.
I'd be surprised if anyone here didn't consider monster brand equipment a ripoff. Thought that was pretty well known, even for non tech people.
Open or Trivial? [pdf]
I can't tell if this is a spoof or not.