skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have to be organized and thorough. You are going to do a lot of stuff no one appreciates or cares about unless you don't do it. (such as backups)

Organized and thorough and don't forget backups. You can never have too many backups.

cd /bin and cd /sbin and cd /usr/sbin. Do you know what every command in those directories do? No? Learn them. On some systems /sbin and /usr/sbin have different files in them. Why? Try to figure that out on your own.

cd $MANPATH, do you see more man pages that you didn't know existed? Read them.

Signs of a poor administrator: System clocks are all different; not sure if the backups work; don't know who every one who has an account on the system is; don't know what the system does; system way out of date on patches; large garbage files floating around; inconsistent and incomplete monitoring; don't know where the server is; etc...

You don't have to be a top notched system ENGINEER to be a good system ADMINISTRATOR. It helps (a lot), but I think attention to detail, thoroughness, and organization are core skills. Also, you are the interface between the machine and the human world. You. Be prepared to deal with people. Developers can get away with living with their heads buried in code. A System Administrator cannot. 90% of the problems a System Administrator faces in their job is not the technology, but the people trying to use it and manage it and mess with it and own it.
Author here. I guess so, but there are plenty of software companies with products to "increase office productivity".

But at the same time, there are a lot of times where you need a very specific, one-off, 30 line script to do something for your particular job/company. This is where knowing a general (and easy to use) programming language like Python comes in handy.

Hence why I wanted to write a programming book for office workers who wanted to skip the computer sciencey and software engineering aspects. Who cares if a throwaway script is O(N^3) if N is going to be a few hundred? Most of the time these things don't matter, because it's still faster than doing this stuff by hand.
>The peephole optimiser will pretty certainly run first and remove the whole expression though.

Which is pretty dangerous.

RunCriticalCodeA();
if (x) {
y = 3;
RunCriticalCodeB();
} else {
y = 4;
RunCriticalCodeB();
}
OtherCriticalCodeC();

Fail to initialize x and suddenly all that code is replaced with a return. Even the part outside the if, even the part before the if. Compilers already exist that are this aggressive.
This article is a trip back in time to the pre-torrent days of IRC. It's crazy to be able to put so much real life detail to online personas so many years later. Long form pieces like this are great.
Hi, author here. My email is al@inventwithpython.com and Twitter is @AlSweigart. Please do send me feedback/questions.

I'm currently working on the HTML version of the book to be posted online, which will be at http://automatetheboringstuff.com
Immigration Startup Ideas
I feel we don't actually disagree.

I didn't have the sort of 'ski trip' nonsense. I mean it existed but didn't really affect me.

The subtle things do though. I had never met a middle class person in my age group before going to University. It's not just wealth. It's dinner, it's Radio 4, it's video games, it's national parks not Butlins. These things aren't really categorically 'superior', that's the thing. But they are kind of assumed in a way that doesn't happen for, say, immigrants.

(I grew up in a council house, not ex. but the african dude above has us both beat. :D)
It's not part of Go-the-language. It's part of the distribution of the most popular (ok, only) implementation of that language.
Interactive Coloring Concept: A fun drag and drop experiment
OK, found a library with the subscription, and the key sentence in the paper seems to be:

We observed that the combination of a bulky basic anion (that is, Ot-Bu, trimethylsilanolate or bis(trimethylsilyl)amide) and, importantly, a potassium countercation led to the desired C–Si bond formation.

But I don't understand it at all. Lay speak translation needed.
I don't - offhand. Back when I was taking classes in it, the industry was collapsing in China because of water pollution. I have been reading about blue-green algae tides and chemical spills and other issues affecting the industry these days, but I don't have a specific source detailing its impact. Sorry. (Good one for calling me out on that!)
That's an incredibly optimistic way of looking at what's going on.

Power corrupts...
Absolutely agree. There's a place for both pragmatism and the artistic nature of unconstrained hacking in both the work you do for people and and side-project hacking.

There's a balance that every hacker has to find. Sometimes it's good to just get something out the door, sometimes you've invented an excuse to learn technology X. :)
They are quoting from http://hentenaar.com/dont-learn-c-the-wrong-way
Change to copyright law in federal budget
All of his books are great - especially the one on STL. Herb Sutter wrote some great C++ books also. On a side note, based on that picture of him sitting at this desk, he is still using iPod V1
The injustice is wealth inequality in general.

UK elite universities are constantly railed on for not admitting more poor students, but part of the issue is that we simply have lower levels of attainment. Equality there is not possible without negative discrimination.

How do we fix wealth inequality? Well, we probably can't. But I do think we could go further towards providing necessities to all, which would solve a lot of the issues.

Simplified, some people have to worry about making the rent. Others own property outright. That's a massive gulf.
I thought HDMI was encrypted to prevent this sort of thing? If you can do this with an FPGA what stops you from designing one that will copy a Blu ray?
Drop-In Coworking Spaces in Tokyo
There's also a similar community on freenode at ##reddit-hockey we're a pretty reliable data source as well.
USBCreator D-Bus service
Awesome. It perceptually extends the image on the screen. Some companies have products based on it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=philips+ambilight&tbm=isch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambilight
The article completely buried the lede for me: very excited to here more about this company on the StartUp podcast.
Fun fact: DirecTV HD DVR's contain GPL code. (Maybe Linux, but I can't remember, really.) It was amusing coming across the phrase "Ty Coon, President of Vice" in my parent's printed owner's manual a couple years ago.

Not so fun fact: When I saw that, I checked online to see what sources DirecTV is offering, and I came across claims that DirecTV is yet another corporation shirking their responsibility wrt their use of GPL code.
Yep. Optimization by C compilers has gotten to the point of "your worst enemy is the compiler". (My favorite: I had UB in my debug function, but inside an ifdef debug block for speed purposes. So I was getting the most absurd magic errors, that only happened when I was trying to debug)

As I've said, I want reads from uninitialized variables to be at least consistent.

if (x) {
foo();
} else {
foo();
}

should always run foo(). Ditto:

foo();
if (x)
bar();
baz();

should always run baz() (assuming everything before it is "normal" - not going to get into jumps or system exit here), should always run foo() if it runs baz(), and should always run foo().
Would love to know from those with experience if a bug/exploit is worth more when declared through official
channels or 'unofficial' channels?
> There are two types of technology: ones that everyone wants and no one knows how to do (think SpaceX) and ones that everyone knows how to do but nobody knows anyone wants (think Facebook).

Facebook does not fall into latter. Online social communication was in trend much before/during Facebook's inception and will always do so future. The essential core of internet is communication.

But on a larger point, instead of broadly classifying company failure around the their initial idea, it may be more related to their execution strategy. Which means a combination of idea,team, focus and necessary pivots.
Not arguing. Just clarifying. The answers were odd to me, perhaps because I'm used to cities in the Northeast.

While I was in LA, back home it was 40 degrees colder. We had come out of a Winter with temperatures in the low single-digits and, at times, negatives. I couldn't wait to walk in the sunshine and warmth. To me, wanting to drive when the weather was beautiful was odd.
Took a little longer than I'd hoped but GCC explorer now has support for GCC 5.1 : https://gcc.godbolt.org

It doesn't support LTO as yet due to the way it works so some of the juicier optimisations aren't visible. But you still get a chance to play about with the quality of the code generator.
It's a must have book.
Sprint and T-Mobile already have thriving businesses in reselling their bandwidth through mobile virtual network operators (MVNO's, see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operat...). You've probably heard of some of them, like Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile. This is because they have excess capacity that they can't sell through their own sales channels.
> SmallTalk was designed to BE the computer

Yes! This is why comparing Smalltalk to programming languages misses the whole point. I just wrote a blog post about this: "Programmers: You Probably Don’t Know What a Computer Is" http://seandenigris.com/blog/?p=1092
There is some evidence that Anadamide reduces working memory(similiar to marajuana). I wonder how the working memory of FAAH mutation possessors compares to the people who lack the mutation.
I think it does not come from your address book. Rather, it builds the database from each one of us who register with truecaller with thier numbers. So for example: I register with my phone number 123456789, and you register with your phone number 987654321. Both these numbers would be stored on Truecaller's servers and when you get a call from my number 123456789, and even if you don't have my phone number in your phonebook, you still get to see that I am calling you with my name (the details come from the server). You need Wifi/data connection to get truecaller working. That's my understanding , unless I am utterly wrong.
Very slick! Love seeing Python built games like this. Well done, sir.
Do you have any figures about iOS vs Android data usage? That's a perspective I had not heard.
Is it something similar like..

When one of my friend calls from UAE ( to India) using internet, I got call from a local indian number.

Not sure what system is that.
Sounds awesome. I think a lot of people like me who cannot do that from scratch would love a DIY version with plans.
From the same speech about how a citizen should be, a page down or so[1], a passage that gives a slightly different flavour to the above quote.

"There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; [...] But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision."

further down[2] the nuance is again changed:

"The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things."

[1] Page 5, http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republi...
[2] Page 8, ibid
To answer the previous comment, there is no special preparation of the potassium t-butoxide necessary. The reaction itself is indeed quite simple to carry out. (In fact, this is one of the things that makes the research significant.) The achievement of the researchers was simply to find this reaction, which they did in part by paying attention to some early results that others may have not noticed or chosen to ignore.

Right now, the "key new idea" is simply that this is possible. But because the reaction is so general (i.e. it works on a wide variety of substrates) and so unexpected, it's clear that some new unifying ideas are just around the corner.
- Candidate could not form coherent answers to my questions

- Candidate was lacking in fundamentals in his/her domain

- Candidate could not demonstrate a good critical thinking ability

The first was a total dealbreaker on a phone screen.

I prefer strong critical thinkers, and am willing to eschew complete knowledge of a domain from a candidate and mentor him/her up to speed, but weak critical thinking is nearly a dealbreaker for me as a manager.

I have been extraordinarily happy with all the people I have hired so far.
I guess, but "hit this target", "demonstrate operating a safety, and bring a picture of your gun safe", or "show us how you clean your gun" are things that can be done quickly and can be measured objectively - it wouldn't be like those racist literacy tests for voting.

You'd still get the occasional crazy or evil person jumping through it, but at least you'd avoid idiots who shoot themselves in the nuts because they walk around with a loaded pistol carried in the seam of their trousers.
Join the Dropbox Notes beta
Technically, the pizza idea won't work, because more people will enter the market and compete on price. Doesn't apply for telecom since it's all monopolized and new competitors can't enter.
No, HDMI offers encryption, called HDCP. Note that HDCP also existed on DVI before HDMI rolled around.

The article specifically notes that he skipped HDCP support among other features.
Thank you!

The article is so much better I'm stunned that both are located on the same website.

It's like finding kindergarten stories and college age stores in the same book.
how does that end up working for typechecking? does the Map module end up having all the properties of the intersection of these elements?

The Map example seems pretty easily solvable via Haskell through typeclasses or the more standard OOP-y languages through interfaces, but am I missing something? Does SML not have the tools for this right now?
I found a bug on that page: a sentence that says "Microsoft has sole discretion etc" is repeated twice. (Search on discretion.) How much does that go for?
There's this thing called the home button...
The thing is, we see the depressed head-bangers because head-bangers are visible. We do not know if there are people depressed because they never try, or they gave up.
Maybe my advises are more abstract than what you are hoping for, but this is what I learnt after 15 years being a sysadmin.

- The good sysadmin is not the one who makes difficult things, is the one who makes the things easy. If one you find yourself wanting to recompile a Linux Kernel, probably you are taking a really bad approach for the problem.

- Document, document, document. Think about the bus factor. If a junior sysadmin is able to rebuild and manage your infrastructure using your documentation, you are doing the things in the right way.

- Never make an step forward without a backup plan. If you are going to make changes in the production servers, always have a plan B in case something goes wrong. Doing an `apt-get update` and hope that everything will be ok, is not a good policy.

- Always remember that your job is to serve the other departments, so they can do awesome things. If too many people in the company knows your name, you are doing something wrong.
I find it strange that it's apparently desirable both to eliminate any sort of light glow/bleed on the panel itself, and manually add glow bleeding out the sides. :-P
Through several "next" links from that one, this is a much better set of examples http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/doc/html/slang-3.html
I believe their system works by employing a man to push a button, which is then routed to your light.

They note in their fine print that they may end the service at any point, which renders it fairly useless.

As you said, you may be able to find a way of spoofing the goal signal. But now, you are just the man pushing the button.
I wonder how much marijuana is grown indoors in the US? Perhaps there are some parallels not so much with cost of land but cost of transport with that one.
in my editor, I press "tab" anywhere on the line with print('world') and it cycles between the three options.

If I want to move a whole block in one level, I select the block, then press control-C and '>'.

That's what I mean.
Depends on many things... but realistically if you're at a point with which you can ask that question, you'll already know your answer.
I will say that I don't worry too much when the rationality of my viewpoints is called into question by a wildly hypothetical corner case. (I don't see a clear analogy between your hypothetical and my original question).

Why would there be an analogy between my hypothetical and your original question? The role of the hypothetical is not to be a corner case, it's to urge you to consider a scenario that's different from our current corner-case. Being a member of the only high-intelligence species on the planet is a corner-case -- for us the "all other species" set and the "all non-intelligent species" set are equivalent. It's worth asking how your viewpoint holds up when that's not the case.

Would you consider the fact that a human fetus can grow up to write a play, learn to sing, discover electricity, debate ethics, and express incredibly deep emotion to be qualitative or quantitative differences from chimps or dolphins?
Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge

Huge by some reckoning I guess. Would you consider the fact that other apes can use tools, raise young, mourn death, form complex social relationships, and teach skills quantitative differences or qualitative differences compared to other mammals? You can do it at every level all the way until you reach single-cell organisms. Do you not see that you're just special-casing your own species because you happen to be a member of it and because it happens to be at the top? I know you don't like hypotheticals, but let's say we weren't at the top, and the species at the top could describe all the skills they have that we don't. I don't suppose you'd say "okay, they are worthy of rights, but I'm not." You'd continue arbitrary suggesting that only those at your level and above are worthy of rights.

But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care?

We're not like them, that's why we care. We're much more intelligent than them, so much so that we have the capacity to treat them with compassion. It is your viewpoint -- to eat anything you can kill that's not of your species and that tastes good -- that is similar to the ape's. If you extrapolate from the way humanity is progressing, you'll come to the conclusion that one day, long after both you and I are dead, your viewpoint will be considered barbaric.
Why not let a bunch of third party HTTP libraries pop up. Eventually things will converge on the "best" library for doing http in rust. Open a discussion and start adding great third part libraries to the std lib. The challenge then would be keeping this coherent throughout the std lib.
Nah, nothing quite that bad. Most of it could be done with standard optimization techniques that the compiler's already doing.

Though you could use a CAS for this, I suppose. Mind you, if you've got a CAS you may as well start using it for more than just this part of the compiler - and that way lies madness.

It's relatively easy. For example:

int foo(int a) {
int x;
if (bar())
x = 0;
return a*(x - x) + x;
}

You start with a first pass by just treating variables that may not being defined as though they are parameters to the function. (I'm doing this all in c-ish syntax, just imagine it's actually in the compiler's IR.) So, the above gets mangled into:

int foo(int a, int x) {
if (bar())
x = 0;
return a*(x - x) + x;
}

And optimized at this stage as normal into

int foo(int a, int x) {
if (bar())
x = 0;
return x;
}

And... Here's where a CAS comes in handy. Though for most cases you should be able to do pretty well by just choosing any potentially undefined variables to be the first conditional assignment to it. (Or, more likely, searching among "all" (with a limit) possible first assignments to the variable. This gets complex if you've got many variables that are potentially undefined, but that shouldn't happen often. And again, standard optimization techniques.) Which in this case turns into:

int foo(int a) {
x = 0;
if (bar())
x = 0;
return x;
}

And then into

int foo(int a) {
return 0;
}

as expected.
I like it, but really depends on what you're looking for. It is not a Big City in the sense that London, Paris, NYC, etc. are big cities. But it is a very nice, compact, medium-sized city. Small enough that you can easily bike everywhere, but large enough to have lots of cultural events, academic talks [1], places to go out, etc. I also like having a well-connected airport so nearby (15 minute metro ride from the city center). It has a fairly large international population as well. But I don't know Stockholm at all, so it's hard to compare. Alcohol is definitely cheaper and less regulated compared to Sweden!

[1] http://www.cphtalks.org/
Is this guy actually writing C++ programs in the wild? He often presents himself as an apostle in the C++ church, but, I am always surprised that he does not seem to apply his guidelines into any practical project of his.

As a programmer, I'm suspicious when people have opinions and give advice but never showed me more than snippets of code. Like a master tailor that wouldn't sew. How come he gets that much recognition and respect?

I would be much more inclined into accepting advice from someone like, say, Carmack, that has successful projects in C++ under his belt. (Many people consider Doom 3's code beautiful C++, yet, the choices made there are very controversial, and far from "modern".)

I also put Bjarne Stroustrup in the same category.

What do you think?
May be somewhat confusing as there is already an "Alloy" language from MIT for modeling:

http://alloy.mit.edu/alloy/
Starfighter: We're better at hiring than any tech firm
I wonder how long it took Kernighan and Ritchie to write 'The C Programming Language'? Amazon says the 2nd edition (1988) is 272 pages long but looking back, it felt like it was 80 pages :) Going by the OP's math (of the language creator being twice as productive) prolly 4 months?
Everything Will Flow: A Talk on Applied Queueing Theory
I made mine using a line laser and a webcam. Its slow, but I can scan decently well, and in color. Of course, the more lasers and cameras, the faster I can scan.
On top of all this, what I'd really like at this point is (a) a "hide items I've already seen" toggle, and (b) a "hide mockbusters" toggle.

In particular, the prevalence of shitty copycat mockbuster films and TV series I'd never actually want to watch feels like an awful attempt to inflate the size of listings, as does the lack of any way to just get an alphabetical list of series or movies that fit into certain criteria.
Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9424108
well, XSS and SQL injection comes from my experience from "devops" kind of developer, claiming to code without wishing to learn the basics (complexity, DB, ....).

So well, tried, but troll does not work.

And startup are made by "devops" kind of business men that don't care about computing correctly cost vs price because it is so XXth century.