skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good catch. Its interesting that the gender-neutrality comes only in the "Sex" and "Relationships" sections, and that the only female "I am <famous person>" comes in "Sex" for "I am Madonna."
A brief history of /proc (2004)
It's pointless to talk about what 'many businesses' do; we're having a discussion about some specific businesses. I also fail to see what the kerfuffle is because when I installed these anti-tracking plugins it was made quite clear to me, in plain English, that they would download updates from time to time.

The whole thing has an air of 'locksmiths - do they know too much about how we keep our doors closed?!'
Here is one of my favourites: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v402/n6761/full/402465a...

(Despite the domain name, it is a science fiction piece. Nature publishes short science fiction under their 'Futures' column.)
Facebook's Messenger adds video chat
No, the claim is not that they get more trees; it is that they get them cheaper.

I did not claim dropping pods at random would give the same success rate; the thing I question is whether the investment needed to use these drones is more effective than, say, buying five times the number of pods and throwing them out of a plane (or even deploying them with a modified minefield thrower.)

Also, looking at the picture at http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article10160598.ece/al..., those germinated seeds aren't large. In my (limited) experience handling such things, they are more fragile than seeds, but dropping them is just fine.

For the rightmost two ones, it would help to plant them right side up, but you aren't going to do that dropping it from a drone, either (hm, looking at it, that picture probably isn't worth much as evidence; there's no way you are going to have a relatively small pod burrow into the ground like that from any height, let alone a few meters)
I got some insight from a beggar in Moscow who I met outside a food stall who complained of hunger. I told him to order what he wanted. He refused and wanted cash instead.

Not all are like this. I started offering to buy food and some seem grateful and accept, others become belligerent.

You can make a lot of money in a day standing at a busy traffic signal getting dollars from people, more than you can make working for minimum wage for a day.

So I mostly quit giving cash, except in cases where I have been travelling and the person I've met provided a useful service or local knowledge to me as a tourist/foreigner.
Tesla's home batteries may be leased, rather than sold
That seems pretty impressive, actually. Are these machines being marketed outside of Belarus?
Is the Universe a Hologram?
I give cash to people selling "The Big Issue".
What's wrong with using jenkins to invoke the local tooling?
Love, love jq...after awhile, I realized I was twisting my brain too much to get bash to do what it wasn't meant to do, but I got a lot of mileage of just playing with APIs because of how jq made it so easy. I came up with some fun lessons on how to use jq and other CLI-tools to tour the Spotify API [1] and to mash up images from Instagram [2]

[1] http://www.compciv.org/recipes/data/touring-the-spotify-api/

[2] http://www.compciv.org/recipes/data/api-exploration-with-gma...

(note: while I say that I like the command-line, I'm not die-hard enough to have stopped to learn awk, so take that fwiw)
>I've never heard about the visa process being particularly racially biased (at least US visa process)

I just dont even know where to begin. The only way I can understand this statement is if you never heard anything about the process, period.
The source?
This seems to be the original article: http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/27/apple-doesnt-care-why-one-...
Yes, of course. Top law offices hire heavily from top-tier schools, and they're largely responsible for the upper mode.

> "Peter Thiel once said that a diploma is a dunce hat if you don't go to a top school."

This is the perfect example of someone who lives in separate reality from most people, and extrapolates his rare experiences to the world at large.

Are there entrepreneurial wunderkinds who can extract more value from real world experience than classroom experience? Some, not many (though most of Thiel's cohorts probably fall in this category). And are there majors and degrees and programs that are more likely to result in underemployment or a poor debt-to-earnings ratio? Sure, some.

But the vast majority of people earn significantly more and enjoy a higher standard of living simply by virtue of having a degree. In addition to the financial benefit, many people value the experience of their time spent in college.

Thiel seems entirely disconnected from the reality of most people. That's ok, it's understandable. But calling people dunces for making rational choices given their personal circumstances makes him come off like a total asshat.
Thanks for your comment. Having your startup dissolve and splitting with your cofounder is rough. "Burning bridges" may not be the correct phrase - maybe "parting on bad terms?" I posted the question because, depending on the situation, it works out differently for people, and the effects aren't always immediate.
(Ozgun from Citus Data)

Yes, that's a great question. The reason we didn't respond earlier was that we don't have a firm answer yet.

Open sourcing CitusDB is a big decision for us, and we're still learning about (the business side of) open source through our open pg_shard and cstore extensions.

Once we have a good reply to this question, the HN audience will among the first to know. :)
How the Guardian is approaching a hypermedia-based API infrastructure
Once upon a time (about 7 years ago) Beej's guides saved my life at work when trying to implement network stuff in C for a project at work I was in over my head on.

If there was more stuff like this in C-land I probably wouldn't have been clambering to get away from C and into more nurturing, sharing communities at the first opportunity.

Really cool to see he's keeping it up to date.
Stb_voxel_render.h
Indeed, no one with half a clue what they're doing uses PHP.
The lesson of the story? Don't have kids.
iPhone Sales Clock
I really like how when you click "how it works" on AirBNB's home page it scrolls up.

https://www.airbnb.com/
Small request : Deployment and disk space is cool, but could people benchmark speed and RAM too ( vs regular VM and vs no VM at all as well) ?

I'm asking because IIUC, unikernel remove the need to switch from kernel mode to user mode, and thus should provide a tremendous speed in everything memory-related. Yet, the only thing i see mentionned so far are security, disk space and boot time.
Fair enough, I haven't had to deal with complex multi-server application logging.
Strange supernova is 'missing link' in gamma-ray burst connection
This is an extended story of what was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390665.

As far as I can tell this story only confirms what was inferred from the earlier article in the earlier thread.
"these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality."

I feel that part of why these books seem so alien is that most people are taught programming as if it were two different disciplines: "low level" algorithms, with fixed data types, and big-O complexity theory; and "high level" systems design, with type abstraction and object patterns. While a truly skilled programmer must understand both worlds, this sort of model has them separated in the same manner physicists seem to separate general relativity and quantum chromodynamics (or oil and water).

Books on Smalltalk and Forth, like those listed in the article, frequently reveal a mode of programming which is neither purely "high" or "low" level. Yet despite their non-conformity, neither language is haphazard or capricious in design. Instead, the both seem to embody the unofficial motto of the US Army Engineers: "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer."
No problems with overheating, so far it's never even gotten uncomfortably warm. Battery life is good enough relative to my old laptop that I haven't bothered checking power usage carefully yet, but here's powertop's output:

https://jds.objects.dreamhost.com/powertop.html
Exactly, I've chosen Python for its simplicity, although I feel that boto3 somehow lacks that pythonic style we all love.

Anyways, I'd love to see how other developers are using AWS ML on Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, etc, and I hope that my explanation of basic ML concepts will help them as well.
Yes, it is possible to match a phone number to a hash. (We are also looking at ways to make it more secure. If you have any suggestion, please let us know.)
However, hushes are not connected with the phone number, we created unique token for our user when the hush is created.
We needed phone numbers for our upcoming features. The newer version which won't need phone number to login is on its way.
They're mostly the hobbyists. They're also the people you encounter in other languages (e.g. Scala) telling you how much better this all would be if you just understood Haskell. Unfortunately, due to the relative lack of success of Haskell in industry this is the majority of the people who consider themselves Haskell programmers, and certainly the majority I encounter on the internet.
I understand XML has namespaces, but I'm not sure what "edit by hand" means in this context. The tools I found previously were xqilla and xmlstarlet, but they seem pretty old and just not as convienient as Jq.

I still think there is space for an XML cli tool that is more convenient for the majority of common tasks working with XML, at simply treating the data as a hierarchical structure, without requiring an interface that is full fully-qualified/needs XSLT/etc..
Same boat with most of you guys, Beej's site is really interesting, not just this one. Glad that it is still up and running. +1
> Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.

Wrong! The Ophthalmologist, and Priest were also trying to solve the problem. That joke, which is old because it is so good, has a deeper message.
Sendgrid recently added MFA to their logins. Also, they recently added 'multiuser' logins (different than subusers) which allow for a separate login/password for api, smtp and web under a single account. This is a nice addition to be able to rotate credentials without downtimes, though as they state in the blog, even better 'api keys' should be coming soon.

That being said, is it odd that the blog says "(salted and iteratively hashed)" passwords? Does that indicate a homegrown scheme that has unknown properties?
The blogpost linked (http://klikki.fi/adv/wordpress2.html) in the article is rather worrying to read - especially the "Solution" section which suggests Klikki Oy had a lot of trouble communicating with WordPress and getting the bug fixed.

Interestingly, the WordPress blog states "A few hours ago, the WordPress team was made aware of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, which could enable commenters to compromise a site. The vulnerability was discovered by Jouko Pynnönen."

I'm not very familiar with WordPress or its plugins, but does it make use of Content-Security-Policy headers? Those might've helped to minimise the risk (at least for users with modern browsers) to users browsing WordPress sites.
Docker has its own issues, and in the end is remarkably similar to Vagrant when it comes to development. Docker's biggest win on the development (not deploy) front is that docker containers are faster to set up and tear down; though with a decent Vagrant setup and a package cache, you can build a brand new Vagrant image in under a minute.

Since I'm on a Mac, and thus going to be running VirtualBox anyways, I prefer to just work with the VMs directly.
G7PXR here. I used 2M and 70cms back in the early 90s mostly through repeaters. Also did a lot of packet radio work and satellite stuff. Great fun all replaced by the Internet. I have recently bought a baofeng but it's quite quiet here in SW England as most people have gone digital. Would love to have the cash to do some EME work!
> hard to write, hard to debug (no stack traces), have weird historical artifacts

Only slightly being sarcy, but this perfectly describes my experience of Salt, Ansible and Chef, but instead of a handful of 'ps' commands to figure out what's going on, you have Python/Ruby interpreters on both sides of the SSH connection, giant gumps of weird SSH command lines, a big C++ library and multitudes of TCP ports and home-grown crypto (Salt+ZeroMQ), perfectly descriptionless error messages like "Timed out", "command failed", or even worse, something you never had to deal with in shell: "template syntax error".

I have a personal axe to grind in this department (been thinking about this style of system since the mid 2000s, but never dared start yet another project), so it's entirely possible my expectations are higher than normal here. Still.. processing YAML with Jinja2? Seriously, bash or the most arcane old Makefile syntax was better than this.
Are most analogies valid if you replace one party with nazis?

Murder isn't an economic action bordering on indistinguishable from normal interactions. Publishing some bids you don't really want accepted is.
Nice. I made jipe[0] a while back to handle common troubleshooting tasks with streams of json objects. I still use it quite a bit. I didn't see anything about streaming in the jq docs.

[0] https://github.com/dokipen/jipe
Please consider it - we'd love to use CitusDB but until it's open sourced we will not / can not in some cases do so.
Nice reference. It's interesting how intuitive the examples are even though I've never learned a functional programming language before.
If you want to see another approach, jshon is much more unixy. (disclaimer, I am the author)

homepage: http://kmkeen.com/jshon/

Jshon is also a year older. I've never been able to figure out why/how Jq got so much larger so much faster.
Working in the TV industry myself, the uninevitable question on DRM springs to mind. Was these streams encrypted as well somewhere along the described process?
I got autostart video and audio ads that you can't pause :(
And they repeat.
The text doesn't mention any satellite-dependent technology that can provide the data. They just mention "geodetic data."

Here's one technology and the limiting aspects:

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

"Difficulties: A variety of factors govern the choice of images which can be used for interferometry. The simplest is data availability – radar instruments used for interferometry commonly don't operate continuously, acquiring data only when programmed to do so. For future requirements it may be possible to request acquisition of data, but for many areas of the world archived data may be sparse."
Speed and automation of planting is one thing, and awesome to see!

The second part is to optimize for the speed of tree growth. I can't locate the post, but a man/company had learned of a way to regrow trees faster, significantly reducing the number of years needed. It definitely had something to do with supplying nutrients, but placement may also have been involved.

I hope this startup communicates and investigates speed of growth, rather than simply planting, so they can have an even bigger impact; however, it's great to see, either way.
Most homeless people can get food, at least in the United States. It's possible that he had other needs that he didn't have easy access to otherwise.
Back in college I wrote this address on the board and told fellow students that this was a good site to learn some C basics and learn network programming. Most people just laughed at the name, but I like to think Beej helped some people who decided to check it out.
To some degree, "begging" has become a business model of finding the easiest way to make money. However, there are many who truly need the help. It's up to you to decide who receives your help. Yep, YOU decide who gets your donations. It's hard, but make sure the help you give goes to those who actually need it.

As to the "system", if your definition of the system is people volunteering to help people in need, then your choice to donate is a choice to be part of that system. It's not hurting it, it's part of it. You are volunteering to give, not forced.

Side note: I don't consider people doing something as entertainment "begging". It's an attempt to exchange time for money. I find it similar to going to a theatre. Of course I won't pay the same prices, but it's entertainment nonetheless. I feel busking is work, where they put in energy and time hoping to receive compensation, just like most people who have "regular" jobs.
PowerShell cmdlets can be written in PowerShell. PowerShell modules (the unit of distribution) can be written in entirely in PowerShell. You can also write them in a .NET language, like C#, F# or VB.NET.

I disagree that it is painful to write cmdlets in C#. A cmdlet is just a class, the parameters are just properties annotated with the [Parameter] attribute. The shell does all of the parameter parsing, matching and type conversion/coercion. If I wrote a traditional commandline tool I'd have to do that parsing myself. Yes, I could use a library function like getopt for that - but the code and complexity would still be there.

But my point was not to get anyone to use PowerShell on Unix/Linux. PowerShell draws much of it strength on Windows from the fact that there are already well-established object models on that platform (COM, .NET and WMI/CIM).

The point was that the age-old text-only view in command shells is beginning to show some shortcomings. XML and JSON (among other formats) challenge the tabular view of the world. Sometimes you have to experience the alternative to realize that you have been living in a restricted world. Like swallowing the red pill. Who know, maybe an object-oriented shell that mixes well with the Unix tradition will emerge.
> Not trying to be too snarky, but why can't people just use shell scripts for automation?

This is why I love Ansible.

Unlike many of the alternatives, Ansible doesn't try to invent a radically different DSL. Instead, ansible uses YAML playbooks that degrade very nicely to shell commands[0]. You can literally take almost any shell script and turn it into an Ansible playbook with a series of Vim regexes - or heck, write a simple sed script to translate it automatically.

Of course, if you use Ansible modules instead of the `command` directive, you get a lot of performance benefits and guarantees of idempotency. But it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel; it just builds on top of it.

It makes it really easy to hack together an Ansible script that is immediately understood by anyone who's used bash/sh and it makes it possible to improve upon it incrementally by replacing shell commands with the relevant Ansible modules.

I've used other automation tools, and the thing that I really disliked about them was that it was so difficult to migrate an existing workflow to a new paradigm. In 2015, systems work is still very imperative, so while declarative syntax is philosophically attractive, I still find it way more practical to use the tools that require smaller mental leaps.

[0] e.g., this thing was hacked together from a shell script, and I never bothered to clean it up, but it's still already more readable than the equivalent shell script: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/znc-kibana-playbooks/blob/ma...
Hi Al, I looked for a way to send feedback on the site, but couldn't find anything. So, posting it here. On the menu of chapters (displayed when you click on the floating menu button on every page), the sorting is broken; lexical order instead of numerical order is being used.

Thanks for writing this book and making it available under the Creative Commons License.
Thanks for all the replies. I will get a personal computer ASAP.

It wasn't that I couldn't afford it, but its just more convenient to have everything on one computer. Yes, looks dumb now looking back at it...
So is this like some sort of Secretly and Tinder mix?

So then it's not anonymous, only pseudonymous.
It is worth noting that the first two issues were settled via Constitutional Amendments, whereas the second two were decided by the Supreme Court. If I were a betting man, I would bet that the SSM issue will also be settled by the Supreme Court, not by Constitutional Amendment.

It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy: rule by judges.
> Bad supervisors often say things like, "don't give me complaints without also giving me a solution."

This is true, but bad employees often say "Hey this sucks" without providing any constructive reasoning, and expecting someone else to fix a problem that you've seen but they haven't usually results in a lousy fix.

Sure, it's not their job to fix it, but if you come to me and say 'our art pipeline sucks, it's too inefficient' and then walk away, I literally have nothing at all to work on.
IPSO Challenge 2015
It's not as prestigious, but a college without a graduate program will have teachers that are there just to teach. You get taught by professors not not teaching assistants.
I would be interested to know if you think there is any particular subject that everyone needs to know, if you don't think the liberal arts are one of those things.

And I didn't phrase my idea well in the original comment, I don't think everyone needs to study the liberal arts at a college level, but everyone should be familiar with them as a whole by adulthood, no matter how you come across them (autodidactically, etc)
Capturing the Stars That Light Pollution Has Taken from Us
Good idea, it's also useful to catch UI/UX bugs much early.
I'm going to use that first sentence as my stock rebuttal to everything from now on.
6 tabs later and a $4 copy of Permuation City on its way to me from Amazon, I had to go back and find what started me on that rabbit hole. Thanks for the recommendation, that sounds fascinating.
For the same reason we don't write all of our backend tools in C: there are better languages for this domain, and better libraries which we can leverage.

For example, when running Puppet or Salt, I don't have to worry about which package manager is installed, or mucking about with checksums to see if a file needs to be replaced, or templating, or variables, or...

If I'm being honest, just the thought of writing dozens of sed and awk commands to mimic the templating offered by Jinja gives me hives.

That said, after fighting for a few years with Puppet, then Ansible, then Salt, I'm thinking that bash and make files are sorely underestimated for some of the simpler provisioning tasks. Bootstrapping a Salt Minion or a salt master is a lot more straightforward in bash than it is in Salt itself.
The state I live in is pretty harsh, if you are not working you cannot get SNAP unless a doctor signs off that you are disabled, so that leaves the foodbank (requires resources to travel) and religious operations.
Some people run conferences as cold-blooded businesses while other people run conferences from the (partial or total) goodness of their heart.

This is what Calacanis wanted to say but ended up resorting to the "scam" word. He claims he's the latter and WebSummit is the former.

The comparison to the government's warnings for the modeling industry is not a good one. The government warning is about bait-and-switch, where you go in for a modeling interview but instead it's a sales pitch for products. The conference thing doesn't sound like a bait-and-switch, but rather just a bad deal.