skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Consensus is a problem that has plagued computer science phd’s for literally decades"

No, not really. The Paxos paper was in 1989. One might reasonably argue that Raft is an improvement, but if so it's only an incremental one - not a cure for a "plague" as the author suggests.

The same obliviousness to actual history and reality plagues (heh) the rest of the article as well. Saying that package managers were invented because "compiling code from source became cumbersome" is way off base. Tell it to Gentoo, which has long had a package manager to manage dependencies but still compiles locally. Also, the "ubiquitous overlay network that comes attached to all virtualized platforms" seems conspicuously non-ubiquitous except in the VMware universe.

I don't want to seem gratuitously negative, but the author's argument is incoherent. The conclusion that we need something like CoreOS might be correct, but counterfactual axioms do not support that (or any) conclusion. Containerization is not the solution to configuration-management problems. In fact, technologies such as Docker rely heavily on tools and lessons from the configuration-management space. Where they have abandoned that heritage, they have often left huge gaps (e.g. security). The evolution we're seeing has less to do with previous approaches not working than with combining and applying those approaches in new ways precisely because they have become robust/mature enough to do so.
First line, "Marc Andreesen, who created World wide Web... ". This aside article seems to be pretty shallow.
72% of Europeans are Christians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_European_Union

I can't believe you actually believe this. Different languages in most European countries. Different customs and traditions. Vastly different tastes in cuisine. Vastly varying levels of wealth/poverty. etc.

Languages, yes. They are different. Cuisine? Not so much. Mediterranean diet is more or less the same across southern Europe. Italians, Greeks and Spanish for example have a diet based on olive oil.

Other similarities. Legislation. Most laws passed from the EU are sooner or later adopted by member states. Sports. Football is prevalent all over Europe. Architecture. Neoclassic movement is all over the place. Music, see how many similarities exist between composers of classical music during centuries. Science, CERN is the largest collaboration of scientists in the world. And the list goes on.

In US if you go from New York to Texas you're in a different universe altogether.
Presumably they've measured latency with images and webfonts and found images load faster. There's nothing more frustrating than a webfont that takes 10 seconds to load.
Maybe there's a segment of the population which will prefer to fly in healthier planes ?
> When I visit the hair cutting place, they refuse to serve you without a phone number

There is no way I'd not walk out the door and get my hair cut at one of the other 12 places within a 2 mile radius...
What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is a mind-melting experience.
Concerns that was brought up on another forum was the distribution of user information to third-parties ie. insurance, auto manufactures, etc. I was able to test the first iteration of the product a year ago and noticed it worked fine for basic needs (seamless UI experience, useful information) but it wasn't useful after a week of use.
Any word if the director is moving on with the second one? I had heard that he wanted to do it anime-style, like Akira.
How to Get Started with Software Testing
Workpop is a large production app running on Meteor. They also raised $7.9m http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/
I used to use this at the grocery store/kmart/wherever and just tell them to pick the top name off the list of 50 or so that came up per area code, (woohoo key constraints!) but eventually they caught on.

Poor Jenny can't get a rewards card anywhere these days.
> I'm at the biggest "software" company in the city, and we can't find quality talent...

> the average pay at IBM was $46,000

I think I can solve your talent problem, and I won't even charge you for the insight: Pay more.

Presumably you're in a high-margin (software!) industry. If revenues are reasonable, then you can afford to pay higher salaries. Given the untethered lifestyle of younger generations, you're effectively competing with the entire nation. Even SFBA, with its absurd cost of living, offers a better pay-to-living situation than $46k in Iowa.

But there's good news! With housing in Mountain View at all time highs (yes, a 2 bdrm home runs ~$800k)... there's lots of good software engineers who spend a few years here and then look to the MidWest. The classic relocations are to Austin TX and Boulder CO. Pay up, and you might have an easier time recruiting people heading back to the MidWest. (BTW: I'm from Nebraska.)
Cool!

But no sign up and login feature?(support Multi-user)
Introduction to Building Apps with Packages in PHP
85W wireless charging? I don't even want to imagine the losses on that...
2/3 of humanity isn't connected to the internet they say, but the problem here is that 2/3 of the population probably isn't having their basic needs met on a day to day basis. Just take for example the bathroom situation in India, let alone Africa. I don't think these people give much of a damn about getting on the internet to update their status.
probably try to sell you one (with a $14.99 insurance policy)
AWS Pop-up Lofts
> Netflix is a great product that falls down only in terms of content

...and app UI. Have you ever tried to drive your chromecast with the netflix app? It's buggy as hell, doesn't display comments, doesn't display related content, and has a horrible search experience. I half believe that it's bad deliberately as a way to cover up holes in their content.
https://github.com/poole/poole

http://jekyllrb.com/
"data" is a valuable asset, however, in many jurisdictions 'user' data is considered property of the user, not the agency that collected it.

Think of it like software, your data is not the property of Facebook, but rather, they have a license to use it.
MDN has about a quarter million pages according to a quick google search, almost none of those would warrant individual articles on wikipedia or favor monolithic ones.
> Goofy image formats? Please. DXT1-6, BC1-7, crunched assets, raw DDS, etc. We deal with tons of different formats, lossy and otherwise. Texture arrays, cubemaps, etc too. Malformed XML documents are trivial with a good lexer and we need tons of validation too on our side. Many games patch themselves.

This is the crux of why you're wrong. You get to /choose/ which formats you use and support. You can completely avoid any and all of those, if you like, just by limited your asset support. The web? It has to support all of it's cruft, at all times. It's not optional.
Go back 10+ years and they're always changing GPU vendors back and forth.
Yeah, I'm in the same neighborhood situation and it's pretty much a random dice roll whether they'll actually come or not. Meanwhile, an alternative that consistently arrives? What great bare minimum standards-meeting!

I can't believe "arrives when called" is apparently a problem.

Especially for things like flights, there's really nothing like them saying they'll come and then not showing up, which makes meeting flight times extremely fun.
Ask HN: Looking to expand my knowledge of distributed systems
Ask HN: After reading the interview of Eric Brewer on here I got a little inspired. As a developer I am looking to expand my knowledge of distributed systems and the databases that run best on them. What are some of the best books, videos, and blogs that would help me accomplish this?
Robocar roundup: Google deploys nextgen cars on city streets
>COBOL was created 1959. Singly it out as an example of a DSL in this context is a bit like arguing against cars by pointing out the faults of the Model T Ford compared with a Tesla.

It doesn't stack up well compared to FORTRAN or LISP, which were both its contemporaries, neither of which were actually really designed with readability in mind, whereas COBOL was.

>DSL's may or may not be a good thing

This wasn't about DSLs in general. It is about the anti-pattern (dating back to 1959) of using as much pseudo-English as possible in a language in a vain attempt to make it readable, and actually making it more unreadable.
As do I, for semantic clarity reasons. One example is SQL, which is written in a different order than it is executed. Humans can reason quite well about many things that are expressed out of order, but instructions have never been one of those things. Ideally it shouldn't matter, as SQL is supposed to be declarative, but each step transforms the data in some way such that you need to know the order.

Datalog is interesting because there is no statement order...it is pure declarative. Every transformation has an output that is bound to a unique identifier, which makes reasoning about order sequential even if the words on the screen are not. As great as SQL is, it would be better if we could go back to the foundings of relational databases and make Datalog the default query engine.
Your second point definitely strikes a nerve, because I keep thinking about that. They came up with mockups. I'm not sure if that's where their work stops - aside from making phone calls and throwing around ideas. I have their best interest in mind as well as mine, but I don't know if they're splitting up the equity in proportion with how much work I'd have to do to make their idea a reality.

Great points.
I've engaged specifically on the image formats--consider both GIF and XBM, for example, or WebM or whatever else. Do those show up frequently in games? Nope. Games have other things, like DDS and whatnot, but those are actually kind of designed for their use case (storing mipmaps, cubemaps, etc.), and game engine developers have the luxury of saying "We use this blessed format and anything else runs through our tools pipeline first to become this blessed format". Web browsers have no such luck.

The XML/HTML stuff I mentioned elsewhere is still the same: it's not just simple missing character stuff, it's dealing with old pages that are semantically (not syntactically) malformed and still rendering them properly. See also quirks mode.

By contrast, game engines have level and script formats that they support, with simpler document models, and they get to deprecate things whenever it suits the developers.

As for scripting, just look at some docs for the Morrowing stuff you bring up: http://www.quicenter.com/morrowind/files/Morrowind_Scripting.... That's hardly on the same class of utility as Javascript--it's basically a procedural wrapper for stepping through basic scripted sequences. And that's fine--it's built to do that and only that.

Every single game that permits custom levels that can include scripted elements fits this bill.

"Scripted elements" is very, very different from, say, loading an arbitrary IDE into the browser: http://repl.it/languages

On the average, most game scripting languages don't support running Ruby, Python, or Erlang interpreters.
You keep saying the word "should", but you're making a jump from what is (descriptive), to what ought to be (prescriptive).

This is the is-ought problem, or hume's guillotine.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Is-Ought_Explained
There's no easy answer. You just gotta talk with close friends about it.

Taking care of more children would be difficult for my wife and I but I would strongly consider it if we were approached by one of our friends or family members about it.

Our life with 5 kids is already full but we are stable, love each other and have the resources, both emotional and financial to provide for more.

We would have to change our life and make sacrifices but that's what love is all about.

This doesn't really answer your question, it's more about taking care of someone else's children than finding someone to take care of your own. But if you are thinking about these things the other side is that you need to ask yourself if you could make the sacrifice to take in more kids yourself.

My criteria for choosing who would take care of my children are simple:

1. their family is emotionally capable.
2. the family is willing - including both parents and any children they already have.

We're talking about an already incredibly bad situation. My goal wouldn't be to give my kids everything they would have if they still had their parents. It would be to minimize the risk of more horrible things happening to them - abuse, abject poverty etc.
I worked on software for the C-130J military cargo plane. It was before my time, but an earlier model aircraft crashed during a test flight. The crash occurred shortly after take off, and the entire crew was lost.

There is a critical time period during a take off when the aircraft is at maximum risk. If an engine fails before rotation (i.e. before the wheels leave the ground) an alert crew can stand on the brakes and use thrust reversers. The aircraft may get dinged up, but there is a reasonable chance the crew (and passengers) will survive.

If there is an engine failure after rotation but before the aircraft has gained sufficient altitude, unless there's a big, flat field next to the runway a crash is almost inevitable.

When an aircraft turns, it will lose altitude unless the crew compensates by adding power. An aircraft without power and sufficient altitude cannot make the turns necessary to go all the way around to land on the runway they just left.
Huntsman – Node.js Super configurable async web spider
You trust the government to do that? You're braver than I am. I would expect the government would have a great time knowing about everyone's end of life plans. The IRS would certainly love it. I don't trust the government to wash my car let alone ensure my family is protected if I were to die.
The whole "jumping on the trending app sector" thing is definitely one of the big yellow flags to me.
This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person. It's not possible for someone to be 40% blue party and 60% red party, because there's only one of them. So, in Ireland votes for the president, and for by-elections to replace a single member use AV.

STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.
New pixel has 2 USB Type-C's as well as 2 USB Type-A's. Slapped on Ubuntu and now I have a full blown ultra portable development machine with probably the best laptop screen you can find at the moment and running Broadwell core i7.
Thanks. I have no expectation that anyone will be able to fully explain what her specific behaviors mean (other than for her to tell me, hopefully, at some point). I can appreciate how someone might be happy to connect or get a reaction, even if the reaction is negative.
Author here.

Asides from the 'Introduction to SSL' page mentioned in the article, there's a few other places Symantec mention SGC/IE5 support, including http://www.symantec.com/ssl-certificates/ - the 1st and 3rd products include SGC/IE5 support and are more expensive than the equivalent (non 'Pro') products without SGC/IE5 support.

Hopefully this results in Symantec (and the resellers who use their marketing materials) making it clear that SGC technology only applies to very old browsers, rather than Symantec sending a nastygram to my office.
Retina quality 27" displays need to wait for the next Thunderbolt or similar speed bump. The display requires > 20Gbps to feed. That means waiting for Intel to pop out ThunderBolt 3 with the newly announced DisplayPort 1.3 38Gbps connection.

Too many pixels, too little time.

As far as GPU processing power, I wonder how much more GPU it takes for two displays. I use two, but I don't do heavy updates on both at once. I suppose you could imagine some video game wanting to use both, but for professional work it seems mostly about real estate, peripheral awareness, and context switching with a head turn. It probably wants more RAM for compositing, but that seems ample already.
And whoever wrote it out took the time to follow syntax. Although I think this is actually Scheme? Defining a function in Lisp is slightly different if I recall.
>We still support some older browsers that don't implement the Navigation Timing API

This is legitimately surprising to me. I would think the overwhelmingly vast majority of github's customers use an evergreen browser.
> I know hiring is not an easy task but why do companies use recruitment agencies where these guys have no idea about programming/IT?

Because most view the time of people who do know something about programming/IT as too valuable to use on the early phase of hiring, so if they weren't doing that, they'd be using in-house HR staff that also have no idea about programming/IT for the role for which they use recruiting companies.

Also, because the recruiters know enough about management of programming/IT companies to be able to sell themselves as knowledgeable about the industry to management.
My take on this is that Meteor (and mongo) is perfectly sized platform for individuals and SMBs. If you make a consumer thing meteor will work too as an MVP, but you'd almost certainly rewrite the backend to use more bespoke code (e.g. in Java REST SOA over Postgres etc.)
I'm going to assume ESL and a typo when typing "code". That or autocorrect gone wrong.
You might also see the great short introduction to the conservative scientific view on aging here:

http://senescence.info/aging_theories.html

You'll also find a good introduction to the modern "aging is damage" viewpoint in the SENS distillation of consensus positions from various per-disease research fields:

http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

That is one synthesis of which damage is primary and important. Another is the Hallmarks of Aging:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/
'Through the ages'? More like 'through the recent past'
>> "Basically a lot of this work is master's or PhD-level research."

Without taking out from this big accomplishment, there's no way for this to be true. In general, when they teach simulation to university students , they tell them to use all the math/physics they've learn to validate their simulation model(to avoid the known garbage-in garbage-out problem - GIGO).

I'm sure he didn't learn all those tools just to validate the simulation - it takes a really long time to acquire them, and it's really hard.

So he probably used conceptual understanding of fluid dynamics +learning the simulation tool + a bit of guessing/forums to build his simulation model in order to design his invention.

And maybe ,educationally that's a good way to go ? maybe we should ,at high school, teach people the conceptual skills, and the use of simulation tools(the higher level simulation tools they find useful) and let them play ? could generate lots of excitement for the sciences and probably good ideas.

Same goes for creating easier simulation tools.
Uber Battles Locals for Future of African Taxis
The last thing we wanted to do was build hardware! But, we could not deliver the experience we wanted to without building it. This blog post describes some of the reasons we built hardware - http://blog.automatic.com/why-we-built-the-link/

If you want to learn more about the latest generation hardware - https://www.automatic.com/adapter/
upgrade my Mid-2014 15" Retina diff
* Nvidia GT 750M -> AMD R9 M370X
* PICe SSD 2x -> 4x
* Battery 95Wh -> 99.5Wh
* force touch trackpad

No major upgrade
How does disability insurance work for students?

I am going to be entering medical school. You typically get disability after you graduate, but if something happened in those four years, I could be a hundred thousand in debt with no viable career option as an MD.
That's my feeling with the current generation of Android devices which got rid of the 3 buttons below the screen.
BINGO!!! You da man. That's seems to work for all my examples.

Thanks!
> I only see FOSS-only shops using OpenVPN, which is OpenSSL based (which, of course, suffered from heartbleed).

Exactly. I'd love to see a simple, auditable and secure open source VPN software. (not OpenVPN)
I'm have a Masters in Aeroacoustics (acoustics + fluid dynamics) and work mostly on numerical simulations, so while I can see that for someone outside the field this can look like black magic, I am certainly not impressed.

I mean, what he did is he used a commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software, created a model of the cabin and iterated through different air outlet geometries until he found one that improved the situation. It's a brute-force approach, which could be done even by someone without Masters/PhD level CFD knowledge (we have 1st year undergrad students working on that kind of thing in the university...).

It's cool that he used that for a problem that apparently is not getting the deserved attention, and he is 17 (!) but, at least in my opinion, other inventions competing for the price look much more impacting/life-changing. For instance:

> Two runners-up each received $50,000. They included Wang’s fellow Canadian, Nicole Ticea, 16, who developed an inexpensive, disposable and electricity-free HIV-testing device for use in low-income communities.
I have worked a company where this has happened, and it wasn't even the company themselves really.

They went into administration, and the administrators came in and wanted to see if they had anything of value.

Data is of value, so they sold it to a rival company. Not a lot you can do about it really, apart from not store the data in the first place.
You've got to root for a local competitor here. African entrepreneurs have shown they can provide solutions in banking and mobile - hope they can do something here!
With all due respect, I think the author has to be careful not to be jaded. While burnout and echo chambers are a real problem in the valley, an engineer who genuinely enjoys short sprints and hackathons, or staying up all night occasionally to prototype something they're excited about is not necessarily a bad hire.

Some of my fondest memories are of building something alone, or with colleagues, all night because it was time-sensitive or something we were really passionate about. That does not inherently make me bad at thinking strategically, working "normal" hours, or building long-term successful projects.

They are different skill sets, but one person can be great at both. The author seems to imply that's not true, which is a common misconception, IMHO.
Whiteboarding beyond the surface
Announcing our $20m Series B Funding
> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.

Or maybe it's because the site is a useful checklist of what we should do to prevent death from completely destroying our family.

I'm the original poster and I'm not affiliated with the author in any way. The core message is not "we offer 100% legalese-proof papers", the pdfs are described as templates. The core message is:

Get your shit together now and breathe a huge sigh of relief.
That's always been the case, it's a great reason to avoid Chrome on OS X.
Comparison of Internet of Things Platforms for Prototyping
I would think that would put you in a better position to know. To be fair, my report is subjective, but it definitely felt like the negative feedback was helpful.