skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> mental health/depression spiral

> Ultimately, it's his own damn fault.

These seem incongruent. Is it really helpful to just say it was completely a personal failure? If we're going to talk about addiction as a disease and its comorbidity with mental illness surely "well he was a weak person" isn't helpful?
Personally, I find it hard to blame lawyers on the whole for this.

A lawyers job is to represent their client as best as they possibly can (within the rules of the law). The best outcome for Oracle here is copyright is valid for APIs, it's then the lawyers job to try to get that outcome. It is illegal (i.e. disbarred) for a lawyer (in New Zealand at least) to refuse instruction without a good enough reason.

It should be judges/the law which stops these silly verdicts from occurring.
You can already decouple the notion that IP = person if you look at public wifi hotspots, where one IP address will typically correspond to hundreds or even thousands of devices owned by the customers of the hotspot's owner (like a Starbucks or McDonald's location) plus (depending on the setup and whether or not the hotspot is on a separate WAN connection) the company's own machines.

This, come to think of it, sounds like a more ideal approach to creating exit nodes (whether for Tor, a more traditional VPN, etc.). Some low-profile innocuous-looking wall wart - perhaps with USB ports to double as a USB charging station, or some other "clever" disguise - could really be an "exit-node-in-a-box", relaying Tor users through public wifi hotspots in restaurants, hospitals, etc. I reckon this will be more prevalent if any jurisdictions start doing silly things like holding people liable for what their computers emit when they run exit nodes (or - worse - ban Tor, VPNs, etc. outright).
O Ozymandias. Once a titan astride the minicomputer world. What companies of comparable size today could have the same fate?

Dropbox? Github? They are so much smaller than DEC. HP perhaps.
How to Practice Good Design at Startup
Which VC has the coolest website
I was wondering which VC has the best looking and cool website, the ones that you don't know what to expect and enjoy reading.
tunnelbear
Yes, that's how I interpreted it, but I thought I should point it out to avoid confusion. I also thought I remembered this being a fairly recent rules change, so there's that too.
The Edison Cell
Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid [ENGLISH]
Uber Engineers in San Francisco would have tried to remotely encrypt the data in the Uber Canada computers during the search conducted by Revenu Québec in Montreal last week.

This is what is alleged by Revenu Québec in the information that was filed before Judge Jean-Pierre Braun last week, and that La Presse has obtained. Uber sought to challenge this statement before the judge, but has not had the opportunity, we learn in the injunction Uber also presented in court last week.

Search for Uber Canada offices

On May 14, fifteen Revenu Québec investigators conducted searches of computer data to administrative offices Uber Canada Notre Dame. Investigators are looking for evidence to demonstrate qu'Uber Canada is violating the tax law by not collecting GST and QST on behalf of its drivers to UberX.

Around 10:40, one of the investigators found that "mobile devices such as laptops, smart phones and tablets have been restarted remotely" during the seizure. Another investigator, who performed a second term in another office, found exactly the same phenomenon, also at 10:40. "IT systems were handled remotely, we performed an IT asset takeover by putting off considering the urgency and high risk remote data change," reads the information presented to Judge Jean-Pierre Braun.

Also according to the denunciation, the CEO of Uber Montreal, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette said later at one of the investigators "that he discussed with the engineers Technology Uber San Francisco and that they had encrypted the Remote data ".

source:http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-affaires-criminelles/actualites-judiciaires/201505/26/01-4872822-saisie-chez-uber-des-donnees-auraient-ete-modifiees-a-distance.php
I have an original Pebble and love how powerful the vibration is. I never miss an alert and it wakes me up every time.
Your response, colored for me by the downvote I received roughly when you posted it, consists largely of hand waving. Maybe my perception of PL research papers is horribly skewed, but the ones I've read are as I described: conjecture unsupported by evidence. The fact that some researchers are trying to do better is laudable, but it doesn't redeem the field of PL research as a whole.

This bit in particular struck be as absurd:

>Trust me, there is no glory to be had in this game

Humans naturally crave fame, and programmers are no exception. Look at all the developers with Github and Twitter profiles and blogs; are you telling me these people don't want attention?

Inventing a programming languages is one of the few ways that's been shown, on occasion, to make a programmer famous. We all know who Larry Wall, Matz, and Guido are. Frameworks, both front-end and back-end, are another (and I suspect that's part of the reason why we're up to our neck in JS frameworks). Look at DHH, for example. He's a programmer of modest ability who got so famous through Rails that Alan Kay quotes are mis-attributed to him, meanwhile I doubt you know who Daniel Veillard is, despite him being the principal author of LibXML2, one of the most heavily-used pieces of software in the world.
Automating this fix is precisely what I'm showing off. And yes, it's damn useful for web scraping.

https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy
Billionaire Mathematician – Numberphile
Here you can get Comodo Positive SSL for $4 a year: https://www.cheapsslshop.com/

I think that Domain Validation certs (the cheaper ones) may be enough for the personal blog.
More like 50 cents.

This American Life has an episode that dives into the dangers. It's probably still one of the leading causes of overdose in the USA.
I agree with you in principle but as someone with bad habits (not getting enough sleep) I think the watch can help as a guide to change those habits and live a healthier and longer life.

For whatever it's worth, there are some studies that suggest that even if you work out every day, sitting for a consecutive 8 hours a day will still shorten your lifespan. So a watch might remind you that you've been sitting to long and to take a 5 minute stroll.
So, speaking as somebody who went to school for real engineering (mechanical)...the tools haven't changed as much as you'd expect.

We standardized on steel nomenclature ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_steel_grades ), and on airfoil design ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACA_airfoil ), and on formulas for common engineering problems ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark%27s_Formulas_for_Stress_a... ), and so on and so forth.

We've gotten better tools for design (say, CAD via Solidworks or Autocad or ANSYS or what have you), but the implementation stuff has been near-constant for almost a century.

And that has meant that we've been able to routinely build gigantic things with hundreds of people that last for decades and can be repaired--software doesn't have the same track record of quality, safety, or anything else really.

That's not a bad thing, mind you; however, our industry does shoot itself in the foot by either mudballing on existing languages or by creating lots of incompatible new languages to solve similar problems. Again, it's as though the mechanical engineers had to learn a new type of math for the same calculations every five years.
> The vast majority of laws are used positively.

I find that a sensible way to look at it is that laws that are used are bad laws. Because almost everyone follows sensible laws so they only need to be litigated in rare outlier cases. By contrast, bad laws end up in the courts continuously because they're susceptible to abuse by dishonest parties.

So the vast majority of laws are used negatively, because good laws don't have to be used.
> wine (the windows emulator)

Intentional humor?
I'm so glad that you used a screenplay as an example, since Shakespeare created all his works without the benefit of copyright. What do you suppose was his economic incentive?

Other examples of people creating great work without copyright include a vast array of BSD, MIT and Apache licensed software. Business models in creating information exist without the flawed ideas of intellectual property.
A few suggestions now that I've had a chance to play with it:

* Support for rulers
* Custom zoom - or at least more granularity between 50 and 100
* Ability to align a div to the center or right
* Related to the above - it appears that adding alignment css does nothing
* FontAwesome
I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver. So Uber drivers are employees in Canada (or will be soon, at any rate)
One way to find out (not saying this is how it was done) would be to spin up a machine running Hola and see where the traffic goes.
Lol. On what? Sepulveda? Up the freaking hill? No one wants to shower at the work toilet.
> Ultimately, it's his own damn fault. But, mental illness has its own stigma.

Much of that stigma comes from the widespread "it's his own damn fault" attitude.
I tried Ember a few years ago, 2 things, I didn't like:

- the api was changing all the time, so Ember would break often

- Ember wasn't "opt-in", like React or AngularJS. You don't need to write SPAs with either Angular or React, in fact Angular doesn't even ship with a router by default anymore. Which is good.

I just thought that, at the time, while Angular knew where it was heading, Ember just didn't. Finally Angular seemed more pragmatic to me in term of integration with legacy jQuery widgets and stuff like that.
Good to see a fan of Wodehouse :) I like his longer works better. I read ukridge and mulliner nights a while back. They were good but not as good as jeeves and the others.
I see nothing in zodiakzz's comments which suggests that they are 'completely against free speech,' and your personal attacks are completely out of line and against the culture and terms of Hacker News.

It's all well and good to dispute their sources, but at least they brought sources to dispute.
How to promote new software?
As the title suggests, we have developed a new software, how to promote? And to maximize retain customers? There are good suggestions? THX.
A few things:

1. You don't have to round trip to every member before acking a write request, only to a majority of them.

2. If you use the right data structures for your state machine (like persistent data structures), you don't have to fully commit a write before you start the next write. That is, as long as you can quickly revert to a previously committed state (which you can with persistent data structures, it just becomes a CAS on a pointer) you can pipeline requests and batch commits. That lets you start on write n+1 using the state machine results of write n, even though write n hasn't been committed yet. You can then commit a bunch of results (n, n-1, n-2, ...) as a single batch. That does create a dependency that some write j may be rolled-back because a write i < j failed to commit, but you would have had that dependency anyways (you wouldn't have even started write i unless write j had committed). So, although latency of a single request is bounded by the time to replicate a log entry to n/2 + 1 hosts, the throughput is not bounded by the latency of a single write.

The raft paper doesn't actually say you can do this (it says things like "don't apply state machines until a transaction has been committed), but that's because it assumes arbitrary side effecting state machines. However, with some restrictions (like using persistent data structures), you can relax that requirement. Relaxing that requirement can give quite good throughput.

3. You can horizontally scale raft the same way you horizontally scale any other distributed data store: using consistent hashing. You would use a hash ring of raft clusters.

4. You can loose up to n/2 hosts from a raft cluster and it will still work.

5. Raft is "multiple servers with failover and a version clock". In fact it's "multiple servers with failover, a version clock, and strong sequential consistency".
Why do these articles on RNNs and "Deep Learning" never mention Hierarchical Temporal Memory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory#D...
By the way, about Rust error handling. I like the concept that any error is being returned as a function result, but there's is a huge practical problem I don't understand how to solve with this approach. Exceptions (kind of) solve it automatically.

What if the information that "computation failed" is not enough? Say, I wrote a `getItem(User) -> itemId` function, which does a lot of calls and can fail for multiple reasons. Later I will have to admit that my API is not perfect: user isn't quite ok with the fact that operation failed, he wants to know why it failed: maybe there's no items to get at the time, maybe he isn't permitted to get them, maybe that permission is computed in real-time based on how many clicks he made today or anything else. What do I do now?

If getItem was throwing exceptions, I can fix it right away. It's not my favorite solution of that problem, but it works: I catch all exceptions separately at the caller and do something. I can provide user-friendly message as the text, that the exception will carry.

But if I was using something like Maybe monad for the error mechanism, I'm pretty much fucked. Now I have to go through huge getItem function and refactor it using some custom container-type as a return value, which will carry the reason the call failed, as well as the data itself.

From what I understood, Rust's error handling is exactly such Maybe monad with a different name. Is there built-in, idiomatic way to solve that problem?
Pretty brutal dissection/explanation of the poems. Like pulling apart a butterfly to show off its anatomy or something.
Leo Laporte shuts Twit.tv's live stream and chat
Re: Manual Bidding
The trolls apparently have won. By being open and transparent apparently you just give trolls ammunition, which they use to harass and threaten. Not just Leo, not just his employees' but family as well.

To protect his family, and his business, Leo is shutting down the live feed and the chat.

This is why we can't have nice things.
I've really learned a lot from these Confluent posts about building log-based architectures, but I feel like they're rehashing the same high-level architectural ideas again and again.

I'm already sold on this idea, and would really love to see more posts that get into the nitty-gritty details of how to integrate Kafka, how to migrate an existing infrastructure, case studies, sample code, etc. It all seems very handwavy otherwise.
Viscosity is phenomenal. Its extremely inexpensive, and makes working with OpenVPN on the client side much less painful.
* In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. *

This is incorrect. By most reasonable readings of copyright law, API's have always been covered by copyright, unless deny that API design holds any modicum of creative expression. So it's more Google that's trying to reduce the scope of what's protected rather than Oracle trying to expand it.
Oracle finally showing their true colors...
> Walk into a popular restaurant around here and the sights, sounds, and smells will be almost identical to Hong Kong.

Actually, most of the Chinese in LA are Mandarin speakers from places like Beijing and Shanghai. If you want Hong Kong you have to come to the Bay Area or Sacramento. :)
I used Riak for several years and was a big fan (still am of that version) but I migrated to CouchBase because it had some key features that were important to me that Riak lacked (Riak was just a KV store at that point).

I'm very happy with CouchBase and I feel like they are way ahead of everyone else in terms of skating to where there puck is going to be. In fact, at the time I was using Riak they were moving very fast engineering wise and building great stuff- and CouchBase was still figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up (with the merger of Membase and CouchDB/CouchIO). Now the roles are reversed. CouchBase is the one that's moving fast without breaking stuff.

To be honest, I think CouchBase is the secret sauce of what I'm doing. I laugh at all the MongoDB posts on HN especially given so rarely that CouchBase gets mentioned.

I'm not bashing Riak- it's solidly engineered.
This guy had a meltdown, full stop. If alcohol hadn't been there for him, something else would have.

Don't get me wrong, alcohol is a nemesis of my own and I'm happy to point my finger at it when it's warranted but this guy wasn't looking for existential comfort from alcohol, he was shutting himself off (arguably with the intent of doing so permanently). This was suicide-by-booze, the "suicide" being the more relevant part here. The "booze" part could have been anything.
Certainly Paxos is not the be-all-end-all of randomized consensus algorithms. However, what algorithm do you think we should worship?
Prior post here (and countless others):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9611311
A new iOS bug is causing iPhone's Messages app to crash
Do you remember the movie Independence Day? You know the part where <spoiler alert> the aliens are blowing up landmarks in cities. You probably remember the Empire State building and White House. Do you remember LA?

It was the First Interstate tower (now called the US Bank Tower), a fairly unremarkable building downtown, other than the fact that it is the tallest building in California and tallest building west of the Mississippi.

So to answer your question, yes, the landmarks in LA are very generic and non-memorable.
The concepts of intellectual property and physical property are at odds and mutually exclusive.

If physical property rights are respected and I own a pen and paper, or a hard drive, I have the right to arrange ink on the paper, or magnetic fields on the drive in any pattern I please. To say that one pattern is forbidden is to assume ultimate authority of my property and it is no longer exclusively mine.

I don't think that nobody has any methods to protect information. Keeping secrets and securing those secrets with voluntary contracts is perfectly legitimate. But if one party breaches that contract, only the party that agreed to it can be liable. Not a third party who never agreed to it.

The idea of intellectual property as a thing is absurd. Intellectual property is not rivalrous, another having it does not deprive the original owner of its use. It is not subject to the same limits as physical property, so the economics that are part of trading physical property don't apply.
Base 11 and What Might Have Been for the Cake Industry
An nmap for D-Bus
Honestly, I'm having a hard time believing he couldn't have been committed. He obviously wasn't in his right mind (and thus no it wasn't "his own damn fault".)
This writer does nothing but whine in every article I can find from him. Maybe he is the disgrace.
I majored in econ, and could not agree more. Economics is a social science: it's the study of social behavior under constraints. To any reasonable person, that doesn't sound like something you should try solving with an equation.

Of course, you can use statistics to aggrgate past behavior, but all you'll end up with is a model that can describe past behavior, which you'll then misapply when trying to predict future behavior.

If only you could use statistics, or math, or tea leaves, or whatever to predict long tail events; then you might know when people were about to change their behavior...

And don't believe anyone, no matter how smart, who says they can. Look at guys like LTCM that followed their models blindly to financial ruin and almost ruined the economy too.

And even that isn't half as bad as someone trying to use models to draft social policy. Anyone wonder why we're financially overextended after 40+ years of applying Keyenesian policies on the downside and Classical policies on the upside?
See also the discussion of the original French version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9615498
Exactly. The over-consumption of acetaminophen also suggests a slow-motion attempt to kill himself.
Dune quotes
Yeah, I also found weird that he'd check the type of the addend in the adding example, he just talked about protocols, and that negates their use, and instead forces inheritance.
NetUSB leaves routers vulnerable
Born and raised in Los Angeles. Lived in Downtown Los Angeles, Venice Beach, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Marina Del Rey, Playa Del Rey. Lived on a boat, in apartments, in houses. Commuted 2 hours one way, 1 hour the other, and then 10 minutes max each way.

I love L.A. - every facet of it, top to bottom, rich to poor, chilled to stressed. But there are more L.A.'s than two. Los Angeles is a bona fide schizophrenic. If the layers of Los Angeles were onion layers, you'd need a thousand onions to demonstrate the complexity of this county, of this town.

I appreciate the article, but I recommend taking a trip to the library and checking out a book from each decade going back to 1930, written by an Angeleino, preferably a few from different ethnic and social backgrounds (and genders), and then you will closer to unraveling this beautiful mess I call home.
NSLs require that you report delayed data (on the order of a year, I think) and report only in broad ranges such as 0-249.
> and rest were mere reskins of C

...or "Java with minor improvements". But I think you're talking about PL creators/designers, not researchers. Surely PL researchers don't want yet another reskin of C/Java.
Somewhat tangential, but you may be interested in this essay on "HPC is dying and MPI is killing it" http://www.dursi.ca/hpc-is-dying-and-mpi-is-killing-it/ . There were many comments here on HN, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9335441 . The essay also has a couple of followups. It really is an excellent essay.

The author suggests GASNet, Charm++, and several other things that would be comparable to MPI.
New Ubuntu Phone to Be Announced in June: Linux Wrap
Extensive prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612152
> Maybe my perception of PL research papers is horribly skewed, but the ones I've read are as I described: conjecture unsupported by evidence. The fact that some researchers are trying to do better is laudable, but it doesn't redeem the field of PL research as a whole.

I have the totally opposite opinion: the PL academic community has shifted very much in the science direction so much so that innovative and inventive design work no longer really has a place in their conferences (contrast to the 90s, when this work dominated). Science doesn't take you very far in a design discipline, so as a result we have seen the shifts in focus that the article discusses (away from PL design, toward PL-related science topics).

> Humans naturally crave fame, and programmers are no exception. Look at all the developers with Github and Twitter profiles and blogs; are you telling me these people don't want attention?

Is anyone who does anything and puts it out there craving attention? Maybe they just want to, I don't know, share. There aren't a lot of PL groupies worshiping Roberto Ierusalimschy, for example (who is quite a modest guy in real life). I hang around these people, they don't have particularly large egos.

> We all know who Larry Wall, Matz, and Guido are.

But did you know who Roberto was? Would you be able to pick out Gilad Bracha in a grocery store? I also know who Paris Hilton is, yet she (probably) isn't a PL designer.