skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The metro buses I ride in to St. Louis do not have seat belts, do not have soft seats, and are not high but they drive on the freeway at 65+ MPH. It's even legit just to stand which I've done when the bus is crowded. None of this has ever felt safe to me but I assumed someone had determined that it was. For instance, I had not known how effective school busses' high, padded seats were at protecting its passengers until reading this thread and had assumed similarly that they didn't seem safe but must be.
Someone got a Linux image that could run `ls` down to 6.12MB by intercepting file accesses and deleting anything unused... See "How I shrunk a Docker image by 98.8%" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438323)
We have superpowers we don't usually properly understand until the shit hits the fan and something goes horribly wrong.

Software isn't engineering unless you're in aerospace, most software is so fragile if you look under the hood it should properly scare you. Some code you look at and you wonder how on earth it made it this long in production without breaking or anybody stumbling into it.

So we should take much more care about how software systems are developed to get out of this lack of robustness and predictability in the presence of unexpected inputs.

But that's not how we deal with software at all. The big trick is to read a couple of tutorials and one of those learn 'x' in 24 days books and you're off to the races, the money is good and never mind the ethics or the basic principles of good design.

So we get a very large amount of crap code (more so on the web than elsewhere, though every segment has it's horrors (embedded, banking, telco)), and the reviewers typically either don't have time or don't care as long as it checks off the feature set boxes. Or they downright don't understand what they are taking delivery of themselves.

Most software is ugly, most of it works (but barely so) and very little of it is actually understood completely. If we want to change that we're going to have to SLOW DOWN considerably, but that would leave the field wide open to the competition that doesn't give a damn. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

If anybody has a real solution to the economic problem then I'm all ears but until we make it expensive to produce junk I see no way out of this. See also: ethics come at a price.
Inner Mongolia is a region in China.
Thank you for this - git-gutter looks awesome. I wasn't aware of staging hunks too so I've learned about 2 things :)
I am not convinced that long term space flight will be really interesting, at least before we radically extend our lifespan (you mean interstellar, right?). The space is just too big.
The author means well but most grey area business decisions are not in the control of software engineers who have day jobs.

For example, everyone loathes the example of banks re-sequencing customers' deposits and checks such that it's more likely to overdraft and net the bank a lucrative penalty fee. The business exec or MBA who dreamed up that scheme isn't the one who coded that in COBOL or whatever; it's the the software engineers who wrote that despised piece of code. But like 99% of the rest of us, software engineers have families to feed and they can't go on a moral crusade.

On the other hand, a software engineer who is making their mark in the world as an entrepreneur definitely has some choices. I suppose many of us can make an easy buck developing clever (and legal) sex/porn websites but many of us choose not to. We want to do something we wouldn't be embarrassed to show our mothers.

The Hippocratic Oath is more applicable to doctors because they have more professional independence administering medical care. Software engineers with day jobs do not have that type of autonomy.

EDIT to the replies:

I wasn't contending porn and naked bodies was unethical. Possibly awkward to explain to your parents yes, but certainly not unethical. Unfortunately, porn websites and the porn businesses are often a very shady (malware, fake singles ads, etc) and many of us choose not to get into that area.

As for the power for low-level software engineers to enact change in the world...

I would LOVE to lecture software engineers on morality. The "Fountainhead" Howard Roarke architect who blows up his building to remain true to himself is an incredibly appealing narrative. Howard did it and got the girl in the end, can't you do it too?!?

However, my standard for telling a software engineer what is right or wrong (that has serious personal consequences) is to back it up with a $100,000 check in my hand. This way, I can soften the blow of any consequences (e.g. his unemployment.) Since I can't do that, my words are just armchair lectures and empty platitudes. Besides, my words of wisdom are not really necessary. The software engineers are already morally troubled by it; they're just not in an easy position to override their managers.

Personally, I don't have to write questionable software but it's because I have the economic ability not to. My finances allows me to avoid writing software I don't agree with so it seems very wrong to use that as a pulpit for moral superiority over others.

I think many of the replies are being unfair to the life situation the typical software engineer faces. The rhetoric comparing the writing of code to optimize bank transactions to gassing the Jews" or "experimenting on babies" is unwarranted. Yes, writing code to engineer financials is distasteful but let's not get carried away with the counter arguments. The software engineers want to do good but they often feel powerless to do so. The harsh criticism levied by posters here does not change that at all.
Been running Hackintosh for 5 years and have always used Gigabyte Motherboards. They generally work out of the box using tonymacx86 installation tools including upgrades.

Get an Nvidia Card (Any current model will work) if you want to avoid installation issues and get the best performance (Nvidia have native drivers for OS X) and make sure to enable TRIM on SSD's.
i don't understand the fascination with these ghost cities. they're just giant failed businesses.

imagine if they built vegas and nobody came. that's it, in a nutshell. it's not that weird.
Administrative costs aren't all that high:

http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federa...

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

Making the spending a couple percent more effective doesn't really even start to pay for spending 10x.

So administrative savings aren't actually all that important a consideration when it comes to a basic income (Put it this way: the programs at the first link could have 100x their current administrative costs and still cost considerably less than a basic income).

Replacing contingent benefits with a basic income should be a positive, it's just that the expected change can't be all that large compared to the numbers required for even a small basic income.
Would you be assembling a desktop machine or buying a laptop?
Depending on why exactly you want a Hackintosh you might want to check out Elementary OS [1]. It's a Linux distro that has the same sort of feel as Mac OS (and it's free).

If you're looking to do development for Apple products though you're probably better off just buying a Mac.

[1] https://elementary.io/
Convert cURL Syntax to Python or Node.js Requests
> I have been pondering how we can _really_ take what we have seen with MOOCs and transform education.

You're focusing on a solution, but you haven't said what problem that solution solves, or whether that problem is what should be focused on.
This threw me off as well, I think you are suppose to use the first chart if your password was generated randomly and the second chart if you used words. I am not 100 percent sure though.
Show HN: Domain availability and price checker for Android
Looks pretty weird to me
If it's a hobby machine go for it. They can be a lot of fun and a good way to learn more about OS X, but if it is a work machine I wouldn't recommend it. Things break all the time, updates will Bork your system. Sometimes the App Store won't work. Power use issues, it's just a lot of work.

If it's a work machine I recommend buying a base Mac mini, then adding an ssd as a second drive and maxing the ram yourself. You will get a screaming fast machine for anything that isn't too graphics intensive like hardcore gaming. And it will probably cost you about the same or less as building your own hackintosh.
That would make an excellent decal for a "buckle up" campaign.
That XKCD comic is good advice. But use a long enough passphrase.

Also, he's being (very) conservative. In other words, he's assuming a very fast password cracker. Roughly speaking, he has a wordlist of ~8070 words, which works out to ~13 bits of entropy / word. Which implies at 3My to crack 7 words he's assuming ~26 trillion (!) password hashes per second.

That's potentially realistic if you're using a fast hash - but you should be using something that's slow (and memory-constrained) for a password hash.
For an ad network, why not set up niche websites in-house to serve on first? This involves time developing good content and ranking in search engines but could solve one side of the chicken-egg problem. You could help yourself by making a niche site specific to website owners, using it as both a seed ad server and a way to build your ad server-base.

Convincing business owners to invest in advertising that is not being served anywhere would be difficult, even if CPC-only.
If, as software engineers, we all held ourselves to even minimal ethical standards, we wouldn't have Sony Rootkits and Superfish, etc. It requires self-discipline though, since there is no ethics board to answer to like other professions. It might be time for such an organization, since it's evident that there are plenty of unscrupulous programmers out there willing to implement this crap, and nobody is holding them accountable.
This is the double bind. You can't go looking because you're penalized.

Yet the PTO and patent community refers to patents as "teachings". I continually heard that. "This patent 456 teaches that yadda yadda bing-bap-boom" and your very soul (well, professional career) is pillar-of-salt material if you even go look.

And yet, none of the really hard stuff seems to be patented. Or I could just be bitter. Or both :-)

"Let's see if someone's got prior art on (super whiz-bang technology)." Click, page, click . . .

"Wait, no--"

"Oh crap, I just read someone's hash table patent. Pass me another mind-wipe pill, would you?"

"Sigh. I'll have them hire another lawyer downstairs."

Which is what it's really about these days. Ka-ching, baby.
Who pays for the content? Noone, ads make it free!

Who pays for the ads? Companies.

Who pays the companies? The customers.

When I check out at the grocery store, I pay for all the ads of the store, the suppliers, the factories and all the tools and services they use.

If I could deduct all these fees for all my purchases, I would gladly distribute that money directly among content providers of my choice. It would likely be shocking to learn how many google searches that would pay for.
Out of curiosity, is this Oculus VR related?
Show HN: JourneyMonitor regularly runs your Selenium tests and notifies on error
> Your remedial assignment is to drive from Denver to Chicago.

And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka to Tokyo.

Cherry picking a route through the breadbasket of America as an example of typical land distribution between urban and agricultural doesn't make for a convincing argument.

> why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some nonsense like that?

Because any such location would be more valuable as a spot to pack more humans. Proximity (particularly when you start working on a planetary scale) to urban centers is worth a lot of money.
This started as side-project to learn Android. The app ended up being quite polished and so I might as well share with the world. Some of you guys might find it useful.

I currently use it to quickly check whether a domain is taken, when a good name pops into my head. The app also displays full price and coupon details as well.

The backend is based on my main project, domcomp.com, which more or less does the same thing. However, I think now that the native app does indeed provide a better experience (which is a whole separate interesting discussion).

For now, the app has a basic set of features. If you guys like it and start using it then I'd be happy to add more. Comments welcome!
There are a few interesting answers in the 'Startup Traction' topic on Quora [1].

Lots of them mention having a great product that solves a real problem, having a content-rich blog to drive traffic, inviting friends and some PR. (Maybe the friends one isn't so applicable to an ad network!)

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Startup-Traction
Administration moves to end bulk data collection
Few weeks ago I saw a TED video about extracting sound from video through vibrations and figuring out their movement abilities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNYP2vzaPo

And now sound from paper/pictures.
Related: Mike Monteiro's talk, "How Designers Destroyed the World":

https://vimeo.com/68470326
> But like 99% of the rest of us, software engineers have families to feed and they can't go on a moral crusade.

That's such a crap excuse.
preserving information is key...if plastination preserves memory, it is worthwhile.
"In 2008, the world turned against bankers, because many profited by exploiting their expertise in a rapidly accelerating field (financial instruments) over others’ ignorance of even basic concepts (adjustable-rate mortgages). How long before we software engineers find our profession in a similar position? "

Never. Software developers as a group are nothing like bankers as a group. Developers are far more ethical and have an incredibly low aptitude for opportunism (look how underpaid we are as a whole, not to mention half of us suffer from imposter syndrome. Ever meet a banker with imposter syndrome? Ha! ).

Being a predatory, unethical banker requires a certain kind of personality that would never find itself slaving away writing code for 12 hours a day (except to write software to assist in your task of being a predatory, unethical banker).
If Medical Watson works for and is paid by cancer hospitals, does that affect Chef Watson's recommendations (either in a positive way, to keep us healthy, or in a negative way due to the profit incentive)? In other words, do the various Watson implementations have any shared data or code base that could influence the other? I assume not, but how cool would that be?
> But like 99% of the rest of us, software engineers have families to feed and they can't go on a moral crusade.

I don't think "can't" is the right word. "Choose not to" is more appropriate. Are you willing to make a personal sacrifice for the greater good? There's always a choice.
Meet the American Nomads of Walmart's Plentiful Parking Lots (2013)
Shouldn't that be 'bursts'?

And does this mean that TC feels that we are in a bubble?

And if so why?
If at a dinner gathering, I ran into the COBOL programmer who happened to write that code, in my opinion, it would be highly inappropriate to back him into a corner and lecture him about morals. I'm sure he's quite aware that customers don't like it and I don't need to insult his intelligence. It's likely he's morally troubled by it -- he's just not in a position of power to change it.

That type of discussion about banking practices & fees is totally above his pay grade. Likewise, I'd be called out as a social justice warrior to berate that software engineer on something he doesn't control.

I guess we just have to disagree. I'm not sure what action or solution you're proposing? Should the software engineer quit his job?
yes, culture does evolve.

The question is to what degree has the overclass evolved our culture in ways that best suits the financial interests of the overclass (e.g., plutocrats, large corporations etc)?

Has our culture been domesticated by the overclass through overclass influence on educational curricula?

If so, this would seem to be a strong argument against common core.
35,000 is about the capacity of a medium sized football stadium.
From back when text screens were 40 characters wide!
I think it's because people tend to associate the cabs with the slow speeds involved in the city.
I typically don't buckle up in Manhattan, except on the FDR or the West Side Highway, or if we're going above 30 mph.

For those unfamiliar with the NJ turnpike, where the accident happened, the speed limit is 65 mph and people drive like maniacs. Definitely a place where you want your seatbelt one.
Buses are bigger so in the event of a crash (unless it's into a mountain) the change in momentum isn't as big.
but back then it was called "mass hysteria."
I like that feature, but I hate how the alarm goes off as soon as the car turns on. That just annoys me, and is the wrong time to give the warning, since you'd have to put the seatbelt on before turning on the engine, which it's much faster to do the latter first.

They should hold off on the warning until you've shifted the car out of park.
Agreed - that was just my ramblings in HN as I x-posted from Reddit. If you'll see the original Reddit post, I'm interested in trying to define what the purpose of education is, as well as clarify what others perceive it as being.

If we could all come to an agreement on its objectives, then a service / system / product / whatever could be shaped towards this.
Pretty Japanee Girl Creampied « RedTube Video – Free Porn Videos
Python 2.7.10 Released
As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks. Strawman, I know, but there it is.

I think part of the issue is that software engineering is abstracted from the immediate problem the person in the world is trying to solve, and one engineer may cross many industries in their career. In some sense, that abstract transience inhibits the feeling of duty that, say, a small town cardiologist feels toward his patients. My grandmother's doctor quit medicine after she died of a heart attack. He couldn't stand seeing all his friends die.

Conversely, there's an opportunity here to think about methods to pierce the abstraction. Perhaps that is the first order issue for software ethics: pierce the abstraction. Know the user's ethical problems. Know the customer's ethical problems (the therapist may be the user, but the hospital is the customer).

I hypothesize that the ethical issues are more obvious at the user's level. Hospital business offices, for instance, are famous for claiming the ethical high ground while ignoring the strain productivity requirements place on their staff. How much of software ethics in healthcare could be boiled down to "making healthcare easier, one less click at a time"?

That's where money and abstraction prevents the development of a coherent ethics: why develop ethics when I'm getting paid and will never get sued. No one is going to sue the software house for the hours of delay that accrete 1/2 second at a time. No one is going to sue the IT guy for the hours of delay that accrete on slow networks. No one is going to sue the developer that doesn't bother to anticipate that the PACS system will eventually be called upon to store digital pathology images also (at 10x the storage per image and 10x the number of images).

In fact, no one's going to sue the hospital for those things. And the hospital is the customer. So there's definitely no path from the nurse or doctor to the software house. Who cares about the intern wearing running shoes at 2 am trying to keep patients alive in 10 different units on 7 different floors in the 3 different wings of 2 hospitals? Nobody.

Similar issues could probably apply to roughnecks in the oil industry watching oil blow into the ocean because there's no button to override power on the valve, home buyers who are just trying to get their kids into a good school district, etc, etc.
That is just bizarre to me. Being raised in Australia in the 90s, the idea that you would ever not wear a seatbelt in a car is just completely foreign to me...

Some busses don't have seatbelts, but for everything else it's just a subconscious thing that I always do (and as far as I know it's the same for almost everyone here because the penalties are quite severe - in some states, the driver can get demerit points if one of their passengers is not wearing one. For example, at certain times (usually holidays) in New South Wales when they have double demerit points, if you have two passengers unrestrained you get 12 points (at 13 points you lose your license for 3 months).
I've noticed a lot of sites exhibiting these faulty semantics recently. For instance, twitter.com seems to have different content almost any time I refresh. Me and a colleague did a quick test, submitting a GET to Twitter at the same exact time. Her screen showed a completely different set of content. Strange and troubling.
The "hey, I've got a family to feed" argument is pretty weak. A lot of people have families to feed. A doctor is not going to behave unethically just because some "business exec or MBA" told him to experiment on babies. They take their oath seriously. We ought to have a "do no harm" oath also, and we should take it seriously, too. At the very least, we should apply the "Would we want our name and face all over national newspapers associated with this code?" test.
This is completely missing the point of containerisation.

If you're dumping a server or a large bunch of applications inside a container you're doing it wrong.

I can't believe the number of people I've seen running practically whole operating systems inside a container.
I was asked a few years ago (when money was in fact still quite tight) to program a system that took the data from an insurance company and subsequently use that to launch a new product without the customers of the insurance company being the wiser that their data had been 'mined' by the newly formed company. It seemed totally un-ethical to me to do this, and it crossed some privacy laws as well regarding the creation of databases with privacy sensitive information on individuals.

Someone else stepped up and built it for them, I couldn't care less about that at least it wasn't my work that went to screw over a bunch of unsuspecting consumers.

At the same time I've had the porn industry as my customer for over two decades. I guess we all draw our lines in different places such that for every problem there is always going to be someone who will take up the slack.

Feel free to berate me for having sold to the porn industry, I have absolutely no excuse.

A guideline that would make stuff like this more clear would be appreciated, right now the only one I have is the law: if it's legal: I'll build it, if I feel that it is illegal or gray then I will refuse.
We could then talk about the ethics of the engineers working for the NSA whom are engaging in massive surveillance of the country and world. They may not be opportunistic like bankers, but they definitely have moral failings grounded in their delusion that they are making the world a safer place.
Wow they totally robbed you of that sweet, sweet karma.
I think it would be worth sharing that on a blog post submitted to HN. Sounds like a lot of work, maybe there are ways to automate that with a shell script or a Haskell program. 400KB is absolutely okay I think.
The problem is knowing when enough is enough. When doing work for a client, asking myself "would a client be happy to see this?" helps. I produce good work but do so in good time. This might work well with side-projects, where there's a greater danger in over-doing it.