skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Small software businesses are, to borrow a metaphor from DHH, a lot like a local Italian restaurant. Nobody at BigCo wakes up in the morning and says "There is a spaghetti joint in East Phili [+] with revenues of $30k a month? NUKE IT FROM ORBIT IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE."

It's not the folks at BigCo you need to worry about as the owner of a small software business. It's other small business owners (or would-be small business owners).

> Similarly, like spaghetti shops, small software companies do not primarily make money because of "features." The notion that software is bought because of features is something that running a software company will quickly disabuse you of.

Feature set is an aspect of "product." The importance of feature set varies from market to market, company to company, but implying that feature set doesn't really influence purchasing decisions is patently silly.

As an example, one of my clients sells software to lending institutions. Evaluation of product, and feature set in particular, is critical to the sales cycle for a variety of reasons. One is that in many cases, my client's software will augment or replace existing software and processes at these institutions, so ensuring that they're not losing capabilities is important. Another is that the market is competitive and potential customers are naturally going to compare the functional footprints of the solutions they're evaluating, even if their needs are relatively limited.

Most markets worth pursuing are highly competitive today, and companies that assume they don't need to pay too much attention to product because they have customers on lock are likely to find themselves vulnerable.
Java doesn't have immutable collections in its standard library. If if a java.util.* collection is declared final, you can still modify its contents.
How did you go about getting customers? For me building a product is the easy part. I'm at a loss for how would I advertise this type of service?
This is cute, but I think (someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that the real idiom is: things that would be singletons in Java are instead servers managing a channel in Golang.
Senator: Crime Victims Should Be Able to Sue Apple, Google for Encrypting Data
100%.

Also, offend an Apple, Amazon, Google or M$ fanboy at your peril.

And, on a personal note: Got a downvote from the sheeple. Just proves the point. Whoo hoo!
I'm as grossed out by HT as the next message board nerd, but they didn't develop these bugs; modern industrial software development did. All HT did was weaponize them. These guys aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, so I think you can safely assume other people weaponized these, or worse bugs, as well.
> sounds awesome

I think that's why people keep on making games like this, but all past attempts have utterly failed at being interesting, except where human construction and ingenuity impinges on the random.
Serious question: why are people still using Flash? I'm surprised by the number of websites that use it.
Oracle Confirms G1 as Default Garbage Collector for Java 9
I'm a big believer in the veriDesk Pro models. Much cheaper and easier entry than most of the dedicated standing desks. It's also really difficult for an employer to tell you no if you provide your own. I have a fairly significant injury to my lower back (1 surgery to correct cauda equina syndrome and another scheduled) and I find a 50% split to be ideal when I can manage it.
The whole parole board transparency and discretion angle at the beginning of the article is a red herring. You have to scroll 2/3 of the way through the article to get to the real culprit: the "touch on crime" movement in the 1980's and 1990's dramatically reduced the discretion of parole boards. See this NYT article from 1999: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/us/eliminating-parole-boar... ("Fifteen states so far have taken the politically popular step of abolishing parole boards, a vestige of what most Americans regard as a failed system of penal rehabilitation, and last week Gov. George E. Pataki of New York proposed to make his state the 16th.")

Before "sentencing reform" in the 1980's and 1990's, the average prisoner served about 40% of their sentence. In the 1990's, states eliminated or greatly limited parole board discretion to release prisoners. For example, in 1988 prisoners in Texas served on average 35% of their sentences: http://www.lbb.state.tx.us/Public_Safety_Criminal_Justice/Re... (page 4). In 1998 it was 75%. In Florida in 1991 it was 31%: http://www.dc.state.fl.us/secretary/press/2001/timeserved.ht.... By 2001 it was 83%.

The factors mentioned in the article: lack of transparency, board discretion, politics, existed just as much in 1988 as in 1998. They can't be the explanation for why so few prisoners are granted parole. Arguably, transparency and the elimination of board discretion is the actual problem. When crime peaked in the 1990's, politicians pointed to those 35% and 31% figures and the ensuing public outrage led to a "war on parole."
Ask HN: Early startup valuation for acquihire?
I've been bootstrapping a company by myself and have gotten some traction but it is still very early. Now another early stage company in the same space is interested in purchasing my company. Their primary interest is in getting me on the team, (and I suspect eliminating future competition) not the product or technology per se.

They're better funded and I'm getting tired of working by myself, so joining up with them sounds appealing. However, I don't know how to come up with or evaluate fair terms.

I'm mostly trying to determine a dollar amount assuming I also get 10-20% of their company and a small salary. They have asked me to suggest a number but I don't know how to come up with one that's fair.

Any advice?
Astrochallenge – Gamify Amateur Astronomy
All I'm saying really is that the language syntax/semantics/etc is a "functional part of the system" that needs testing to various degrees even if that's hard pre-implementation. Having fallen into the trap myself, I think it's easy for someone who's just cooking their own little language to think of the syntax as being just a matter of taste and intuition instead and do virtually no testing of these parts.

Obviously, producing a full implementation and then using that implementation fully is the ideal way to find flaws. But considering that often everyone is too committed to change a language at that point, the result is simply that we right now have mostly languages that many consider flawed.
A video of Sun coronal ejections made of images from STEREO probes: https://vimeo.com/3921306
OK, point taken. But they had them in the lab, did not safeguard them properly (by demonstration), and deserve a shit ton of blame and scorn.
It's a procedural game. By its pedigree, it's bound to attract realistic commentary -- and realistic commentary on proposed procedural games will inevitably be negative.
But Greece didn't need bailing out in the first place, they could have defaulted and let the banks carry the can (after all loans are a risk), but German banks would have gone bust and Merkel et al couldn't stomach that so they transferred the banks debt onto the EU public.

German consistently runs a trade-surplus that's in excess of EU treaties but remains unwilling to raise demand at home, this creates a huge imbalance at the heart of the Euro.|

When the Euro came into being it was obvious to many people (and stated widely) that the interest rates were set to suit Germany and were far to low for many of the other countries.

Germany is at the heart of the problem of the Euro and they can't or won't see it
Sometimes I wonder what kind of operations would actually be useful to do on such data in the real world.

I mean, the way the web currently works is that I trust some server to host my data. I can have this service auth an external consumer site and display data in an iframe, say, which the consumer site can't get at. This is good enough for displaying people their personalized info (name, friends) on various services (eg directions to their house in an iframe, for a user authenticated with my chosen provider).

But to go further, what if I don't want to trust any provider?
Then I could simply encrypt the data and store encrypted data with the provider (or providers for redundancy). The authentication could be replaced with visitors holding a key to decrypt the data (because I gave it to them) and I can switch to using some other key and effectively "unfriend" those who don't get my updated key.

But all this is good enough for displaying data and files I upload. Now, why would I want to do operations on those files "in the cloud" without trusting a provider? I am already trusting my friends with the data, since they can reshare it once it's displayed to them. So why not trust a provider? One of my friends can run the provider.

I guess the only scenario I see it being useful is if all my friends can only have limited access to the data and all manipulations on the data are collaborative, and that's where the homeomorphism comes in. Perhaps no one will be able to see the whole data and it's not really about data at all, but views of some Enigmatic process running on some network (like an autonomous corporation.) is that the use case?
Guns don't make me feel safe. Being properly trained on how to use defensive force makes me feel safe.

The error in your logic is that you're imagining yourself with a weapon, which indeed, is laughable and provably unsafe.

Edit: not going to bother replying and further make this thread a gun debate. Just want to state that YouTube videos of comedic skits and accidents doesn't nullify any argument. Humans will make mistakes; that's a fact of life.
Accordin to http://www.toronto2015.org/about-us/organizing-committee this is the person in charge of "Communications and Media Relations": https://twitter.com/nealabarton

It would be interesting to get her thoughts on this.
A significant portion of the web using community (including myself) stopped using flash 6-12 months ago, when all the zero-days became a monthly occurrence. The plugin is no longer strategic for adobe, they've stopped any forward-looking development on it, and are now in the mode of whack-a-mole reactive security patching.

I have not once every missed having flash on my system. It's not just the case that the web is useable, it's that, with the single exception of the BBC, it doesn't seem to use it anywhere I visit.
> The movement to abolish parole began in the late 1970's after academic studies suggested that rehabilitative efforts in prison and early release on parole for good conduct had no measurable effect on reducing repeat offenses.

What's odd is that for all I read about prison (and having had a friend go through prison), there's basically 0 effort or programs in place at most prisons to do anything remotely resembling actual "rehabilitation". What "rehabilitative efforts" were tried that were deemed failures?
A lot of advertising networks use it to deliver advertisements. Whether it is simple inertia at this point, or because the networks can get a better fingerprint using flash, I don't know.

Also, it used to be the case that Flash had better DRM controls on it, but I'm pretty sure that reason is no longer the case since Encrypted Media Extensions got rolled out.

However, that doesn't explain why Facebook's on-site video player uses Flash.
Your "check-lock-check" code is probably broken (depending on the intricacies of Golang's memory model). If the compiler or CPU reorders any stores to the fields of "instance" after the assignment to "instance" itself, other threads could start working with a partially uninitialized object. Once() uses atomics on the fast path for a reason.
I've been running without Flash for a couple of years now. The only thing I can't do that I would like to be able to do is to watch Facebook videos. Other than that, not having Flash installed is not a problem for me.
Antimatter is also only found on gas giants, it's just less common.
What websites use it? I've not encountered a single incompatible website recently, and haven't had flash installed for a long time now.
I'm pretty sure if you are talking about proofs having to do with a determined, computation system, Godel applies.

I mean, the unsolvability of the halting problem certainly applies and this gives a somewhat similar picture of the world.
But you can wrap that Map with Collections.unmodifiableMap() for an immutable version.
My god those comments are a shitshow
Dreamer and Artist
Making people happy as a way of living for 20 years.
"This video does not exist."
Thanks. Do you think this holds just as true for B2C SaaS? I'm building a product for podcasters. I guess they would be considered B2C since most of them are not making money. Also most of them are sole decision makers.
Do they have a legal leg to stand on with this? It screams frivolous.
BTW, Java now has pluggable type systems. One of them[1] adds true static, compile-time checks for immutability, and allows method to specify that they only receive immutable objects.

There are many others, including tainting types, linear types, physical unit types and more.

[1]: http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/current/che...
You can create immutable classes "by hand". Just make all fields final and either primitive or reference to immutable type.

This framework just makes it a little bit shorter to type as it automatically generates some boilerplate code.
There have been meta-analyses of lead http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent...

They are pretty compelling. Lead wasn't just about crime. Tetraethyl lead was almost a global disaster that might have cost humanity dearly in some very general ways. The hypothesis is very strong, too. Refinery workers went violently insane. There was no question what the effect would be if there was enough cause to cause it.
The screenshot is of my screen. I was using it to attach to an OpenBSD co-located server and develop my million monthly page view PHP website.

I'm also a contributor of werc, the system used to develop the cat-v website (though I am not active any more)

I was also one if the last people to talk to Uriel (cat-v originator) before he suicided.

AMA
Porn sites.
Yeah we'd had contentious issues on the various feature lines (systemd-analogous), absolutely no issues (that I was made aware of) on the -ism lines. The points about various feature items totally hit home though :)
This seems more idiomatic:

func init() {
instance = &singleton{}
}
People saw promise and potential in Spore, but EA decided it wasn't in their best interest to make any extensions to core gameplay after the game's release. There were reportedly plans for true underwater exploration and new sets of parts, but none of those things ever came to be. Spore's modeling was fantastic, though, and allowed making unique creatures and vehicles more easily than any other editing program.

"If only," is all anyone ever says about Spore anymore. So if No Man's sky is the product, I don't care. If it's the beginning of some greater thing, however, I'm interested.
Remoted Reactive Streams and Java 8 streams interop
> Most software buyers buy for reasons which have little do to with features, which after all are generally not perceptible at the point the sale is made.

I have worked for/with a number of Saas companies, including one that was purchased by a major company for a high eight-figure amount, and based on the sales cycles I observed and participated in at each company, the idea that feature set has little to do with purchasing decisions is a ludicrous claim.
You probably mean aug 30th - sep 1st.

I was interested until I saw the price, frugal bootstrappers must not be the target audience.
I guess most people cannot be bothered to remember which features are bash specific and which will work in any /bin/sh. I don't think there is such a thing as a generic "shell script", csh has completely different syntax.
FB is using it a lot. For videos, for uploading pictures.
Good work done, though Python may not be the best choice as it is a bit ancient programming language.
Derp, for whatever reason I was thinking of an object as the data structure in this case. Thanks for clarifying!
ROFL. "Right" language. There is no such thing. There's only technical tradeoffs and personal preferences. Everything else is simply faith and dogma.

But, I'm sure someday we'll all discover your one true God... Err... Programming language, like the lispers and smalltalkers, the rubyists and the haskellers, the C++ fanatics and the C faithful...
Facebook's inline video player uses it. On linux, I get a popup saying that I must install Flash.
On the native desktop side yes (btw qt is underrated) it's very mature, and I think people were just too busy with building stuff for the web (at least from a non .NET developer).

What's even crazier is that you could have a web application in your browser built by some monolithic UI builder tool and wrap it around a thin client and ship it with a six digit price tag for enterprise, they won't know the difference.

If there was a way to generate a react.js app using Visual Studios or maybe even a dumbed down version suited for building front-end web apps, that could be ideal but would it be in their best interest to help their rivals? I know the whole going open source is a new thing for MS but they won't own 'React' and be able to monopolize the new era of 'I taught my grandma how to build Hootsuite with just click & drag'. Unless they create their own front end framework and own the platform that is the web which is constantly being voted on from the capricious developers and new adopters.
There is talk of a federated version of the site: http://cointelegraph.com/news/114785/ryan-x-charles-is-build...

Feels a bit akin to the old usenet idea
I think it's difficult to argue that sexism is a red herring when someone resigns in the wake of a petition that leads off by criticizing them for taking a sexual harassment case to court. It's also difficult to argue that sexism isn't a factor in a resignation preceded by many hundreds of misogynist rants.

So, your responses to my challenge. Thank you! I think the first one is valid, and that reasonable people can disagree; the second one, less so.

Who is Pao a hero to? Not so much me. I think it's fair to argue that she's less a hero than "someone with a cheering section". Is she fighting for gender equality? That depends on the semantics you adopt. Reasonable people will argue that taking a sexual harassment case to court is "fighting for gender equality". Pao's reasonable detractors will say that she's fighting for her own financial interests.

Did Pao resign abruptly? Categorically yes, so much so that I'm a little irritated at Altman and Ohanian to see how it was managed. In an orderly succession, the CEO announces that they're leaving at, say, the end of the month. That didn't happen here. Not only that, but this CEO resigned amidst loud, newsworthy clamor for her ouster. Reddit's choreography leaves open the question of whether Reddit mobs can oust people at Reddit --- certainly, the mob thinks it can! There's no practical reason Pao couldn't have been quietly replaced by Huffman, who could have joined the board, and then a few weeks from now announce her resignation at the end of, I don't know, September. Operationally, Huffman would be doing the same thing he's doing now, but the optics would be clearer.

They didn't do that because Pao resigned abruptly. Not only did she resign abruptly, but both she and the board noted in their announcement that that Reddit mob was a destructive factor in the resignation.

Pao would not have resigned had the last few months of drama --- most of which does not appear to have been her making, and before you settle on "the buck stops with the CEO" please note that in this weird company, the CEO's boss had an operational role, and was himself responsible for the most dramatic misstep the company made. She probably did leave because she genuinely didn't feel she was the right person at this point to grow Reddit's userbase. But that judgement was almost certainly based in part on the fact that anything Reddit did with her name attached would be trolled and harassed by the redpill "chairmin pow" mob.
I thought there was a lot of literature pretty convincingly arguing that singleton is in fact an anti-pattern.
I tried out this extension and found that it slowed down chrome and even crashed within a few minutes of using it. so perhaps amazon didn't get as much useful information as you think.
Not quite. If the original collection is modified, the "immutable" view will reflect that change.

Plus, you can't statically know if the collection you're passed is immutable or not. Trying to modify it will just blow up at runtime.
Dublr, a cool way to dub to a video and share
I'm sure there'll be a mode that makes it take decades or centuries to get from one star to another. For those who need a truly authentic experience.
People level this charge, or charges just like it, at every news story they don't like. Nerds are going to get a rude awakening if they think they're going to cow the Times (or the WSJ editorial board, for that matter) over "bias" in their newsrooms; these publications have been at the center of the real-world culture war for decades.
Is there any Flash security bug recently which makes it outside the Chrome sandbox?
In Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, Canada and Washington, USA at least, I am certain that company that builds a wind farm gets a contract where some government-backed entity guarantees they will buy all of the power the wind farm will produce at a pre-determined rate(s). Otherwise nobody would put up the money to build the wind farm.

So while they could feather the blades they have no incentive to.

In Ontario if they were forced to not generate they would still be paid for the power they weren't allowed to produce ("being constrained off").
2Factor – Two Factor Authentication Platform Crafted for Indian Businesses
His biggest point is that Reddit is (trying) profiting from hosting that speech and thus the downsides of supporting Reddit outweigh the benefits. Not necessarily free speech in general.
Salon is nowhere near the mainstream media. It's a punchline for people who think Slate is mainstream, and those people are themselves not in the mainstream.

The NYT piece you cite is not about vaccination, and notes on that subject only that RFKjr wrote an antivax piece that was challenged.
In Safari on OS X, Facebook does use the native <video> player.

I'm guessing that Facebook encodes video h264 which isn't natively supported in Firefox; rather it relies on support in the operating system. I'm not sure if Chrome on Linux supports h264, however since Chrome also includes its own Flash player I guess that Facebook may be using their own flash player anyway.
This kind of thing has worried me a little in the past (Lombok is a similar, but less focused project). My main concern is that this is not part of the pluggable annotations standard; it's an undocumented API provided by Sun javac. This means that it is prone to breakages, although I don't suppose it will particularly soon.

I know that Lombok had to change their code quite frequently to fit with different javac versions for a while, which means that this project becoming stale could be a problem.
And you can also simulate any Turing-complete language using any other Turing-complete language. That doesn't mean it's practical to do so :)
Well, coal is still subsidized, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
It may not be "no gameplay," but it adheres to a very loose interpretation of "gaming." Whatever rules exist in the game basically only serve to aid the sense of progression as people continue to explore. Losing happens only if you explore in a manner that isn't careful, and winning happens when you've explored (carefully) to the center of the universe. [1]

The game isn't supposed to be a game for game's sake, in other words; it's intended to just be an adventure. "Winning" and "losing" are a means towards that end.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Gameplay