skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can use the NetBSD drivers for other operating systems pretty easily - see http://rumpkernel.org/ - you can get filesystems, IP stack, network card drivers, etc. Several new OSs are using them.
Ask HN: Good hands on Books for CTOs?
I'm currently looking for good CTO / Tech Management / Tech CEO books. While I have read quite a bit of conceptual pieces about managing teams / splitting up and measuring tasks and have some experience with agile development I would like to read some real world hands on reports. On the business side I learned a lot from books like "Getting to Plan B" and "The hard thing about hard things" which allowed me to put some theoretical knowledge into perspective.

TL;DR: Is there a "The hard thing about hard things" for CTOs?
Well as the article points out, the beats didn't require much "energy" to produce either.
I find it amazing that there is a guarantee of 90% occupancy or higher for these prisons, and if it falls below the taxpayers foot the bill. Of course, I find it amazing that "private prisons" are a thing at all.
with executions?
He was wrong, but about 21,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger related causes.

That's 7.6m per year, about 115m in the 21st century.

Nearly one in five children under the age of five dies from diarrhea related illnesses. And that's easilly and cheaply treated (50 US cents of oral rehydration salts).
It's way worse--or funnier--than that. From Wikipedia:

"""On the first Earth Day in 1970, he warned that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."[5] In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people." "If I were a gambler" Professor Ehrlich concluded before boarding his plane, " I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."[5] When this scenario did not come to pass, he responded that "When you predict the future, you get things wrong. How wrong is another question. I would have lost if I had had taken the bet. However, if you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems, just like everybody else."""

That last bit is all he should have said: that people and places will be having problems, just like everyone else, just like has always been the case, just like always will be.

Why are people still paying attention to anything he says?

"...understand something...salary...depends on it...", you know how it goes.
Well, he was right on the second part, and theer were quite some famines in the second half of 20th century - though not in such a scale.
> That doesn't make all these countries undemocratic.

A few examples do show a blatant lack of democracy, though. In France, we had a referendum regarding the new European constitution. We refused it at 60% (not counting abstention, which by the way was relatively low). Then a dozen months later, the same constitution came back (sections were shuffled around, but it was mostly a copy-paste job). No referendum this time. It was submitted to the parliament instead. They said yes, despite indisputable evidence that the people did not want this. This is as undemocratic as it gets.

Elections don't make a country democratic. We need much stronger guarantees.
You should maybe drive to the Nordic countries...
Because I had a specific vision of how I could make things better for a well-defined group of people and because I am driven to create stuff. If all you are is vaguely interested you probably aren't ready yet.
I think I get what you're saying, but even in Star Trek this doesn't work without a source of essentially-perpetual energy.
What does any of that have to do with the fact that he was wrong? That's the point: he was completely and absurdly wrong. "Chicken Little" doesn't begin to describe it.

Yes, people suffer from hunger. That's been a problem for all of human history. Hopefully someday it will be "solved," but that's not likely to happen as long as some people are evil and want to control other people. If we can't stop shooting each other and beheading each other and blowing up each other, what makes us think we can stop each other from starving?
Beware the Listening Machines
I'm asking a genuine question!

Do you want to know why people are downvoting you, or are you just ranting about pro-communists trying to squash your opinion?

I mean, don't you think the downvotes are because you say ridiculous nonsense like HN is heavily left leaning and has enough pro-communists to down vote your posts? (Because that requires not just enough Reds to down vote but a lack of non-Reds to supply corrective upvotes).
Convinced? You're committed a magestic logical fallacy. Sorry you don't understand the mistake you've made and you're going to continue sneering at good people.

Don't switch from volunteering to disaster tourism. There are millions of people who volunteer, and only a handful of people who travel overseas to help.

What have you done recently? Do you actually donate? And did you read about the money the Red Cross can't explain? Is it really better donating money?
I wish I was allowed to donate blood. This is a great idea, I hope other countries adopt it.
When you come up with the idea for a feature in component B, or a bug to fix, rather than implementing it, make a note of it, and carry on with what you were doing. Once that's done and committed, you can go back to the other thing. That way, you end up with coherent separate commits, that you can test individually as you make them, without having to rewrite history. Not only that, but you can give each commit your full attention as you work on it, rather than spreading your attention over however many things.

Again, this is the traditional way of doing things (as an aside, in pair programming, one of the roles of the navigator is to maintain these notes of what to do next, so the pair can focus on one thing at a time). Seen from this perspective, history rewriting is again a way to cover up poor, undisciplined programming practice.
Lander Control Center in contact with Philae once again
In NL you pay VAT on the special taxes added to fuel and there are a couple of other cases like this. Tax on tax is unfortunately not just a French thing.
"Everyone's going to starve!"

"Well, some people starved. But he was right about people starving."

Is there any time in history in which no one in the world suffered from hunger?
Building SVG Icons with React
In all honesty, the only time we should care about is the one in front of us. Is it possible there are "natural forces and cycles at work"? Sure, but throw your hands up and say "oh, it's possibly beyond our comprehension"? Good grief, no. We should try to comprehend everything, and human induced global warming is the best hypothesis fitting the available evidence.

Of course there are other possibilities, but this is such an important question. Should we sit and wait for even more extensive proof that we're causing the problem? I guess we could go to our graves in the certain knowledge that we were right; I'd prefer the scenario where we try our best to avert the extinction of the species, even if it means being wrong a few times.
Bingo. For-profit prisons exist, but they are a tiny minority. But even the state prisons come with a financial motive attached. And, because people are conditioned to see unions as good guys, this obvious lobbying bias is never checked.
It's nice to see someone who is reasonable, who admits we can't prove it scientifically.

But I am curious: since you admit we can't know that humans are the cause, why do you think humans are the cause? That doesn't seem rational.
Stealing keys from PCs using a radio: cheap electromagnetic attacks
http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-...

"The West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China and Iran support the regime."

"If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the shia expanison (Iraq and Iran)."

Released during a FOIA lawsuit (on special forces work in Syria). ["JW v Defense State 00812 court order"].

http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judic...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Judicial_Watch

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/01/exclusive-dozens-of-...

Won't quote because its worth reading the whole thing for context. Associated facts (e.g. Turkey, US's equal partner, was caught running guns, Manning had [admittedly old] docs with CIA running guns to Syria) lend weight to the what was thought on Capitol Hill at the time.

But broadly the US and allies support Salafist elements as they are, and can be encouraged to be, opposed to Assad.
Cost savings? Really? I don't know about other rich countries, but the country where I live spends about €1 per vote cast. All votes are counted twice, once on the night of the election and then a slow recount during office hours, both times manually, and it costs €1.
It is pretty lucky that we are only 93 million miles away from exactly that :)

I actually did the calculations back in the early 1990s of how many dollars you could generate by capturing all the solar output combined with synthetic labor. It is something on the order of 10^24 times the entire world GDP. When you have that level of resources then scarcity ceases to be a concern.
> no one is talking about

Is there some way to actually determine what is in the public consciousness? Because I definitely see this brought up pretty frequently. I'm also pretty sure that folks know and talk about the internment of the Japanese as well as the prevalence of domestic violence.
Electronic voting has been discussed in Denmark and both experts and most politicians are against it. I suspect there's some correlation between how eager countries are to introduce electronic voting and how likely it is to be abused.
Besides bio-diversity being 'nice' it is also a source of stability. The fewer species there are and the more of those few species we have the more susceptible those few species are to pathogens that wipe out those species. Monocultures are a risk.

Of course there are some counter-balancing effects as well, such as that if you really only have those few species plenty of diseases will lose their reservoir hosts.

Eco-systems are fragile, any attempt so far to create a stand-alone biosphere that I know about has failed.

I also miss the oceans in your little table and I think those + all the oxygen generating plants and trees are really rather important for life on Earth. And those plants rely on insects for their pollination. And those insects in turn are kept in check by all the predators on insects which are missing from your list as well. And so on...
If you want to tell me why you think my comment was downvoted, go ahead. If you don't, don't. I'm not going to play some kind of "If you ask me, I will tell you. Please ask me so I can tell you!" game.

My impression is that HN's readership is mostly left-leaning. Not necessarily pro-communist, but the left does also lean toward communist and socialist ideas. If you disagree with one of those assertions, feel free to say why. I might be wrong about HN's readership, but that is my impression.
You can use the Go plugin for almost any IDE based on the IntelliJ Platform, that includes CLion and Android Studio. And the best of all, it's free. Give it a try by installing it: https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin
Why aren't you allowed ?
I wonder how many of the critics of ineffective altruists actually give more to society than the overqualified soup kitchen volunteers...
http://pando.com/2015/06/19/pierre-omidyars-corporate-spying...

"""

Pierre Omidyar’s corporate spying scandal buried for good as eBay sells Craigslist stake

BY MARK AMES

ON JUNE 19, 2015

It didn’t get much attention, but eBay just quietly unloaded its 28.4 percent stake in Craigslist, putting to rest one of the most sordid episodes in Silicon Valley, in which eBay executives — including First Look Media publisher Pierre Omidyar and HP chief Meg Whitman — were directly implicated in corporate spying, stealing secrets, and exploiting Craigslist’s anti-capitalist idealism.

[...]

"""
If your guess and data differ, wouldn't it be advisable to double check your data, collection mechanisms and your assumptions that led to your guess/estimate.

After a few goes your data needs to take precedence and one's guess dumped.
I think you're pretty close to the truth here, and ultimately this is what all enterprise deals are about. It's why most "software" companies doing enterprise sales will have far bigger budgets on "sales" than on "research and development". Although the current trend is to push a lot of these "leveraging knowledge" and "finding truth and value" parts of the sales process into "Research" anyway.

It works very well for all parties though - the "sucker" executives on the other side come out very well from this: they can use the marketing materiel and buzzword lingo verbatim from the products they are purchasing in their next few meetings to make themselves look on-the-ball even when they've been doing very little. I'd go as far as to say they're actively looking for products they can buy that they can talk to that do as little as possible to minimize the risk of actually having an effect on their business if they don't work. Security products are a big thing here too.

Ultimately though, something is worth whatever you can sell it for. If you can sell your marketing buzzword lingo and "mutually beneficial enterprise deals" for $100 million, maybe it really is worth that much if it's adding value to someone somewhere.
Is it any different than private hospitals or electric companies?
credism: the belief in value
Humans derive value from many sources, such as perception, sensation, and intuition. This process iterates, and constantly gives rise to new beliefs. Inherently, this process is neither good nor bad and by extension, beliefs are neither good nor bad. But beliefs reflect value in such a way that beliefs considered “good” or “bad” are better characterized as having “lots of value” or “little value” respectively. There is a tendency upon arriving at a particular belief to cease deriving value that could alter the belief - doing so is often perceived as a weakness. The belief in value, credism, mandates that for progress to occur, humans must constantly engage in the process of deriving value. Without it, the fabric of society deteriorates as beliefs become hollow with rhetoric, and progress stands still.
> Eco-systems are fragile, any attempt so far to create a stand-alone biosphere that I know about has failed.

From another perspective, the earth's ecosystems are robust. Life on this planet has yet to become extinct, despite the universe's "trying" several times. When one species declines, another takes its place. One ecosystem declines, another increases.

Isn't this just the Lion King, the Circle of Life and all that?
Why do you think small things can't have large effects?

I expect you were asked about your knowledge of biology (although it could have been pretty much any other science) because small things have large effects all the time and even a basic knowledge of any of those fields would provide you with plenty of examples of small things having large effects. It's quite bizarre to see somebody accusing others of logical fallacies while making such a basic logical error.
A button on GitHub to ignore whitespace changes
Reliance JioChat App transmits user data in unsecured form to servers in China
Like Omegle but with a more noble goal - less creepiness.
> Only 19 of the 240 individuals were physicians.

Only?

How does that number compare to the %age of physicians in the total population of medical professionals?

And why does it matter that GPs in Canada earn more than a surgeon in the US?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2937641/ISIS-fighter...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/us-airdrops-ant...

Search "Syria propaganda", "Syria video game propaganda" and if you want technical stuff "strategic communication video game". The past ten years or so of DoD propaganda planning has involved elements of and investments in video games (they already match Hollywood for industry size and are projected to grow; they are also great for propaganda - one NSA assessment was leaked by the journalists working with Snowden).

This one is a speculation. All of the pieces are there. The technology and tactics are right, PSYOPs is now mainstream with conventional warfare (it's included in an umbrella term called 'hybrid warfare': IO and Conventional that includes the gambit of information warfare including electronic, espionage and psychological), Psychological Operations work in Syria has been disclosed by many channels - it's not really a secret. Jordan and Egypt are on that list but the document I saw was only about Twitter campaigns.

Anyway I've ranted. It's speculative. It's just not absurd or a leap at all.
Large, badly managed companies have "budgets" per department that have to be spent or it looks like the department head wasn't working well enough. If they don't spend the budget, someone else gets it for the next cycle. It also gives the (utterly idiotic) impression that the department head wasn't doing a good job because they could have used that money to "grow the business" in some nebulous way. So when you're close to the end of the budget cycle and have 100k left, and a spiffy salesman comes along asking for 35k for his "concept" it looks like a great solution for everyone.

Who knows, maybe it will work out really well and now you've shown incredible "vision". If it doesn't work, you're well within budget and have shown "a great appetite for risk" or something like that.
The simple Twitter hack that sends 3k+ targeted (monthly) visitors to my blog
> he regards the notion that mathematics does not permit division by zero as demonstrating that mathematics is faulty

It’s very oversimplified to say that “mathematics does not permit division by zero”. Mathematics (at least in the modern sense, descending from Euclid) is just the logical extension of whatever set of axioms you want to set up. It’s entirely possible to operate on a concept of numbers which allows division by zero. For example using the extended complex numbers (the complex plane plus a point at infinity). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

Anyhow, what does your friend have to do with Hestenes’s paper?
He spent six years crocheting Super Mario
You bet you could turn a tobacco company into something that's a net positive for society in 8-10 years? I'd like to see you try.

No, really, I actually would. I'm pretty sure it would do more good for humanity than working in computer science and donating your spare income to a cause you believe is an efficient use of your disposable income, even if you're particularly well paid or hit the startup jackpot...
>But I am curious: since you admit we can't know that humans are the cause, why do you think humans are the cause? That doesn't seem rational.

Give me an example of something that is knowable with absolute certainty.
It's a very reliable method and it is surprising that with the amount of publicity mentioning this either in passing or as a direct cause for a further investigation that it remains effective. After all, you'd imagine that wanna-be fraudsters would 'Benford-Proof' their numbers.
Unions are in general a force for good for their members - the problem is there is no countervailing unions to oppose the interests of the prison guard union. If we had more union members in other industries then the interest of these other union members would act as a check on the power of the guards.
USA: 25% of the worlds prison population with 4.5% of worlds total population.
Respectfully, I think you are exaggerating the risks. This is probably not the place to debate AGW and climate change, but not only are there many reasons to doubt AGW, there are also points to be made in favor of global warming, such as increased crop yields and arable lands, more habitable land, etc.

As usual, the question is one of balancing risks. It does not seem likely that, even if AGW occurs, it will prove harmful--the opposite may be the case. It also does not seem likely that we could reverse AGW, if it were occurring.

But what does seem likely is that, by attempting to reverse it, we would cause real harm to real people, right now. People are talking about people starving and living in poverty--well if we deny the developing world the use of fossil fuels, they are going to keep starving and living in poverty. It seems hypocritical to me for someone to advocate helping the poor and hungry while at the same time advocate trying to stop global warming. Absent free energy, both can't happen.

The only other alternative is population control: that would solve both the starving-people problem and the global warming problem.

And, if you notice, that's exactly what people like Ehrlich have advocated: population control.
We operate on beliefs all the time. For example, the belief that science is good.

We've destroyed a lot of natural habitats, and we know that these habitats contain a great deal of biodiversity. We just don't know what would have happened if we hadn't destroyed those habitats. My guess is that we wouldn't be facing a mass extinction event, but there's no way to check.

Even if there was only a 10% chance humans were responsible, I would still rather play it safe than ignore the issue.
Alternative title: the true danger of conflating regular expressions and backtracking pattern matchers. I wonder if it would be possible to reintroduce that distinction.
Well, if you ignore general trends and the availability of people for a specific stack, I suppose you could go ahead and write your app in a language like Haskell, or even languages like Rust. But if you want to choose a language that is "meant" for the web and it's something everybody knows, I'd blindly pick Javascript if I were you. Of course, it's not the best language for mobile, but frameworks like Ionic are changing that.
Many places already do that... counting the number of times a person has donated (not actually used) and giving them some status accordingly.
You mis-read that sentence and the one before it I think. That was related to all the other oxygen generating plants and trees that rely on insects for their pollination.
Suckers are the ones not selling it which would be majority of the programming populace..

I have seen top guys code up a entire solution at $X per hr. People who support that solution are able to charge 2X or 3X and who know only 1/10 of it... All cause they know how to speak the language or the sales guy who spoke the language sold it at that level.

People who have access to money are always paying for convenience.. programmers feel guilty charging for such stuff as we are aware of all the free options and generally do it for free.
"I personally also experience the feeling of thirst if I haven't cleaned my teeth yet in the morning, while afterwards it's completely okay."

you should still drink water when you wake up, the body is likely a bit dehydrated from the ~ 8 hrs of sleep
How Gov and Private Sector Can Overcome Technical Challenges, Risks and Regulations
The definition of charity seems to be giving money to those in need, but I prefer a less specific definition: Helping those in need. To do this, you can give money to 'charities', or you could perhaps try to help with systemic problems by attempting to effect wider change: If you're able to influence your country's government, isn't this more likely to have more effect, especially in the long run?