skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Civilian maps were intentionally distorted. In various places the details were completely wrong - for example, smaller roads near some Baltic coast beaches (e.g. "potential conflict/landing sites") were simply drawn with no relation to reality to fill in the space with something superficially resembling the density of roads but with different angles/locations/everything; the locals knew to not rely on this and for construction/planning purposes you used different maps than the civilians.
How radio kicked ass streaming?
..and the circle is complete.

If you're a fan of this workflow then I can recommend using Visual Source Safe. It even has exclusive locks which completely eliminate merge conflicts.

I've been building software professionally for almost 20 years, I've seen (and experimented) with almost every VCS/SCM strategy imaginable.

My conclusions:

This only really works for tiny teams - 2-3 people who work very well together. It needs high bandwidth communication.

For teams of 3-10 short lived feature branches are effective with a little bit of planning to minimize merge conflicts.

For larger teams you really have to split the system into self-contained modules or microservices, each module having clear owner. These modules are then shared as source, library or service depending on the actual needs.

I've never had good experiences with longly lived branches. They can work whilst adding experimental modules which require only a couple of tiny API changes to the main system; but then splitting the module into a separate project/repository and making the API changes (behind an #IFDEF) makes more sense.
> the worst quality in the history of broadcasting

because his stuff was never transmitted by FM radio, let alone AM radio. What.

Seriously, Neil Young is 69 and has played feedback-drenched noise for the past forty years. If he can tell compressed stream quality from source CD in A/B/X testing, I'll give you and him a lollipop. Two lollipops.
I have never heard any stereo remotely duplicate the sound of hearing, say, a violin acoustically live. I don't think the difference is a higher effective bit rate. There's something else going on. Maybe it's the shape of our ears.

If someone wants to revolutionize music reproduction, how about solving this problem?
Branching/merging in DVCS is only easy if there are no merge conflicts.

Checking in code to the VCS that makes the tree NOT build will get you screamed at (at least within the OpenBSD project). This requires proper planning for big changes, and to break them down into small, easy to review, patches.

OpenBSD uses CVS as main repo because it fits their development style.
Bevore you knock down CVS look at AnonCVS and cvsync.
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_enginee...
Well, if you don't care about portability, I suppose.
Analytics dashboard design critique
That looks interesting, thanks for the link!
Branching or not is somewhat of a red herring. If you are working on a commit then while you haven't pushed that commit, you're effectively working on a branch. If somebody else works on the same code at the same time, then those changes need to be merged. Whether your VCS does or doesn't call that a branch is immaterial. What matters is that two developers can work on the same code at the same time, and that you need to solve concurrent editing conflicts (logical ones, not just the textual ones that your VCS will find).

The pertinent question is how often you merge. On one end of the scale you merge on every keystroke. Every time Joe types a character it gets put into Anna's files. Clearly this doesn't work. On the other end of the scale every developer works on their own copy, and all the work gets merged just before a release. Clearly this doesn't work either. There is a scale from maximal disruption minimal effort merging to minimal disruption maximal effort merging. You want to find a point on that scale that minimizes the total amount of work.
Yes, I am from India, And it was my first question on Hacker News.
Apologies if i offended you with my language, I should not have used those combination of words.
Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong
Will the White House disappoint on H-1B displacements?
Opinions come from passion. You don't care for opinions because you are not passionate about programming. You just want to get a job done. To you, these opinions are noise.

The obvious counterexample: Linus Torvalds.
Well, copyright would protect only making new copies and redistributing them, but it definitely is legal to resell the physical maps that were made by, e.g., 5th Cartography Enterprise in 1980ies, distributed throughout USSR in rather large quantities (the access was controlled, but there were many of those maps made) and then inherited by various ex-USSR countries and enterprises.

No royalty or permission is required when [re]selling existing copies of copyrighted works, copyright protects only making copies.
New, free Bitcoin faucet – no ads, no nonsense, no strings attached
I pulled back from the community around some of the stuff I use for much the same reason, it's the same people telling other people they are "doing it wrong" and yet almost without fail those people aren't doing anything interesting.

The ones I still respect don't say a real lot but either have amazing blogs full of interesting stuff or repo's full of interesting and useful projects.

As my grandfather used to say "don't tell me I'm wrong, show me".
Jail guard that must be interesting
do people thro poo at you?
There is no way "United States" can change its mind during an international negotiation independently of any of its representatives.

This is provably false unless you are adding hidden assumptions. It is easily shown in the case of some bureaucracies that a person will have a hard time getting something out of them, even though no single person will claim to be the one stalling the request. From the outside, the bureaucracy behaves as if it has a different goal than the (stated) goal of each individual.
9:15 : Think this is all a bit bizarre so phone colleague on mobile, she answers to say that she’s having lots of problems too.

Mobiles are encrypted too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A5/1
I don't do any of those things.

I just progressively and evenly tighten up the nipples and then true the wheel on the stand.
Copyright of USSR-made works is not public domain; tracing the owner is tricky at times, but [obviously] works where the copyright inheritor is hard to trace are pretty much the opposite of public domain - you're not allowed to copy w/o permission, even if that permission is tricky to obtain.

The "made by gov't -> public domain" is an USA-specific detail that doesn't apply in most other places.

If specific people owned the copyright, then it's as usual for any other works; if a specific USSR institution owned the copyright, then the ownership will be determined by the early 1990ies transition/reorganization laws and contracts; if 'USSR' owned it, then it's owned by Russia afterwards, not public domain.
I have been in the business for 15 years now.I started as the guy that did the table-and-frameset static websites, and if I look back now there's a myriad of things that I had to learn and 75% of that I have probably forgotten again.
The myriad of protocols, languages, frameworks, toolkits that you have to keep up to date with. Fashions in what the devs think is cool and what the customers ask for.

The most amazing thing to me however is what the browser and web technology now allow you to do. The way I see it, browsers are not document viewers anymore, they are akin to operating systems, and the web dev skills you have let you make awesome stuff you'd never dream of 10 years ago.

I have been tinkering with packaged chrome apps and UPNP, and in my mind it's nuts that I can do this, me, the humble web developer.

So to echo one of the sibling posts here: Just go and build something. Doesn't matter what. In the end what matters is whether people use your software or not. If you blogged and it made a difference, don't let anybody rubbish that for you. You're already a cut above the rest.
How to IMPROVE LOW SELF ESTEEM
I've been affected by this recently. I used to focus on the outcome, on real problems solved; on value created, to help people - not impress them. An outcome/engineering approach focusing on ends, not means (maintainability etc is a result, though logically secondary to the thing itself).

Helping people is way more satisfying than impressing them.

For example, youtube and facebook have helped many people, even though they use PHP. And PHP has helped a lot of people, by being simple and effective (I've always thought templates are a simple but brilliant idea).

As a learning method, it's not about getting a comprehensive, deep understanding, but actually doing something useful, and just learning what you need for that. You get satisfaction along the way, and the pieces come together, giving you a lead for comprehensive understanding - if needed.

[ PS Personally I got turned off webdev years ago by tedious browser-compatibility - though I understand that's long been solved by platforms like jquery etc. Also, it needs more visual design aptitude than I have... ]
I see where he was coming from but I initially learnt BASIC (on a ZX-81) then moved to Pascal (Turbo Pascal on DOS) then Delphi with side branches into C and a some other languages.

These days I'm a web dev mostly using PHP and a lot of Python, I feel no need to justify my choices anymore, I could write a HTTP stack in C if I wanted to but I choose not to.

Ruby looks interesting, Go looks interesting, all this stuff is good stuff, I hate the attitude of "because X exists I must defend my choice of Y to the death", nothing is lost personally when someone else uses another language.
You can also view the source on the cvs web mirror: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/
Note that the RLS implementation in postgres does not require that different database users are being used.

That's one of several possible ways to use it.

You e.g. alternatively can define a function that sets up a connection's user, where user refers to a concept of your schema. That's then stored somewhere in the session's state (trivially e.g. in a temporary table). All the row level restrictions can then refer to that user.
what was @amyhoy's advice?
Yeah. Thank god it's not in Syria or Iraq, both of which also have a lot of amazing but now looted/destroyed ancient sites.
"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

- Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel
Umm, in pretty much every country except Russia it is completely legal to violate Russian state secrets, and in pretty much any country other than USA it's legal to violate USA state secrets. The international buyer should be completely in the clear.

Furthermore, it's very likely that the seller also is completly legal - as long as it's outside of Russia but one of ex-USSR republics, their new legal systems generally don't prohibit distributing USSR state secrets, only documents that are classified by their own new authorities.
This is an awesome post & I'm excited to see the support from HN.

I like how you're giving yourself a solid goal and plenty of time to achieve it.

Quick question - you mention that you'd like to build an MVP yourself, do you know what product you'd like to build or what market you're interested in serving?
Great story expect the last part. Where you're sort of implying that all smart people are coders and others that do other types of jobs aren't.

I met a lot of people that were a lot smarter than most "startup developers" and it didn't require them to sit in front of a computer most of the day.
Yes but A5/1 is utterly brocken.
Besides thanks to numerous attacks possible through SS7 you probably do not even need to break the encryption.
Awesome man!!
Your humility just inspires me. Ping me (@vjdhama) if you need any kind of help with coding or any aspect of learning for that matter.

I'd be more than happy to lend out a hand.
Big changes (mostly) need to be split into small and easy to review patches. There are almost no commits without at least one OK from another main developer.
How Traveling Abroad in Your Twenties Will Ruin Your Life
I'm a very happy customer of mythic-beasts. They do insist on sftp/ssh/tls &c for all connections which is probably wise.

I hope this gets the idea across to influential civilians (i.e. non-techs). Humour can work quite well in the UK. The HGTTG references may be lost on the younger ones though.
"My name is Mohamed, and I am a jail guard!"

G'day, Mohamed don't make the mistake of defining yourself by your job. You are much, much more than that. You work (and survive) in a Jail? That now makes you 10x better than most nerds on HN in understanding and handling people. Scan HN and the general press and you can see how badly Startups and their users are hurt by this and you'll realise this is a desirable skill. Start from there.
Sounds to me that we work for the same company :)

I bought into feature branches and all that stuff right after uni and tried to apply it at my first job without all the success I was expecting. Then when I moved to my current job in which we do TDD, Pair programming and single branch development I was a bit reluctant. After almost 2 years I haven't come up with a single scenario in which this approach has given us any troubles and in hindsight I think is what I should have proposed at my first job.
Ask HN: Should I opt for a paid certificate on Coursera?
Hi HN,

I'd like to enroll in the R Programming course by John Hopkins university on Coursera and thought I'd ask around before parting with $49 for what the perceived value of opting for paid certificate of accomplishment is, rather than just saying I completed the course for free... I mean value in terms of both educational institutions (i.e. universities that might view this as more favourable with a certificate) and companies for job prospects.

Thanks!
Analog transmission artifacts make sound quality worse. Digital transmission errors make playback choppy and intermittent, which completely ruins the rhythm and flow of the music.
Referral growth theme – word of mouth marketing theme
Xiaomi building war-chest of patents for US launch
The article agrees with you: "Although consumers are not the customers of television companies, they ... have substantial influence over the transaction, and the quid pro quo for them is transparent"

BTW, both the article and the HN comment section make me realize that as someone not living in the US, I lead a sheltered life. The level of advertising to "captured audiences" in the US seems to have reached truly mind-killing proportions.

FTA: "Advertising to children in America has increased more than 150 fold since the early 1980s, especially inside schools where the audience is captive."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike
If use of encryption were banned, I wouldn't even be able to unlock my Android.
Not news. They also have, famously, tartan-like fabrics.
I think the paper should be titled: Why isn't hardware as fast as advertised?

If memory bandwidth forms the bottleneck, then a faster processor is of little use.
You might well be able to implement tame() entirely in userspace using seccomp-bpf.
Developer changes code and create a diff. This diff is sent to the mailing list or other developers to test and review. The patch only gets committed when other developers have ok'd it.
The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer".

I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit.

Also modern PHP really isn't like old PHP, composer, PSR's, The FIG folks, decent frameworks (Symfony in particular along with Laravel), huge numbers of usable libraries.

Yeah the language has issues but then a) what language doesn't b) with experience you can avoid them.

When you get down to it I only care about providing value whether that is to myself or my customers and they really don't care what language was used as long as it works.
"Can a drone actually hurt a helicopter. And did the drone controllers know they were causing an issue, I doubt it."

Drones in a restricted flight zone, in a fire situation will ground fire-fighting helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. That stops essential fire suppression operations which allows fires to get out of control. In turn, this hurts people. Is that clear enough?
It's not easy to tell how smart someone is by meeting them. That tends to bias you towards social abilities. IQ tests help to level the field by testing abilities that we can't easily observe just by knowing someone. Not that IQ tests are accurate at all either. But I just mean to say that feeling that someone is smart can just mean they're smart at appearing smart and may not have the same abilities at a broad range of thinking skills as someone with a high IQ.
It's pretty clear that the UK government doesn't have the power to ban encryption. This is just a distraction so that we are happy to accept whatever "less bad" proposals they come up with to increase their surveillance powers. I can't help but feel that peoples dislike of Cameron is a pointless distraction too. This is not Cameron. This is government. We will still be having this same discussion in 50 years, unless some miracle technical advancement makes it moot.
Honestly, it sounds kind of relaxing. Good excuse to get some sunshine.

On a more serious note, I can't help but think David Cameron is employing the technique of attempting something extreme so that he can do something less extreme (but still really bad) later with less oversight. Of course you can't ban strong encryption. His advisers know that, he knows that, _everyone_ knows that.

It will be very interesting to see what actually gets put (or attempted to be put) into law. Right now it's just a whole lot of unrealistic noise.
Navigate to Photo with Any Navigation App – iOS Action Extension
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The idea for creating of this app came up from my own needs. Sometimes it happened to me that after visiting a cool place I could not remember how to get there after some amount of time, but very often I had a photo from that exact place. It seemed logical to start the navigation to that place from Photos.app with only one tap. Being surprised that there is no such built-in functionality in an iPhone, I decided to create this Action Extension app, adding a necessary option of customizing the list of navigation apps for quick access. Additionally, the list of available navigation apps is server-side, which means it can be quickly expanded with new apps support according to user requests, without a need to wait for the whole app update on the App Store.

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Project fb page: fb.com/pages/Navigate-to-Photo-iOS-Action-Extension/1591243044490085
I didn't downvote you, but I'd guess the reason was that you brought an irrelevant fact to a discussion about run-flat vs regular tires - it doesn't really matter if a BMW with run-flat still has better handling than an Audi with regulars.
Absolutely. When you listen to a violin live, you're of course not just getting the violin, but you're getting all the reverb of the environment, the spatial cues created by sound bouncing off your body and around your ears, etc.

So taking a violin sound and then playing it out of a speaker, you're playing into a totally different environment and it's going to sound different. If you've also captured the sound of the environment in which the violin was played, you're then also playing THOSE sounds into a different environment. The reverb still gets affected by the environment your speakers are in.

I think the closest you can get is binaural recordings done with mics worn on your own ears and then played back using suitable headphones.

Even that still doesn't cover the tactile dimension of sound (think about the feeling you get when bass goes through large stage monitors). There are products that try and reproduce this - I haven't tried any of them but would be eager to, as I primarily listen to music with headphones.

Nor does it cover spatialization properly either - without some form of processing, the sound source won't stay in position when you move your head.

A bit off-topic, but the more I think along these lines, the more I imagine the ideal music delivery medium being dry multitrack recordings with mixing and reverb supplied as metadata that's then applied with real-time audio processing. That'd be pretty wild!
Big fan of your work, as it's currently hammering it down with rain here (I'm in the North of England, it's the default state) rain.today is particularly ironic.
This is cool and simple. :)
Plain Text Confusing Scam Attempt – MailShark
So are you happy getting a blob of minified JS you have no control of?
Nothing really changed since the times mocked by http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers
No attack is necessary, operators has taps for listening in. See "lawful interception".
I'm in the North of England, it rains here all the time and I disagree, this sounds exactly like what is going on outside at the moment :).
For back catalog that's often cheaper than buying the tracks online. Why pay $9.99 for an album I can get used for $6?
I trained mine from kittens to sleep in the living room, when it gets to bed time they run in and jump onto their favourite sleeping spots and bed down for the night.

I think if you don't do this early getting them to accept it later will result in them singing you the song of their people at 3am.
Ulterior States Documentary
Activism, code, alternative currency, decentralisation, Bitcoin, supply chains, futurism, state-in-a-box
I might have to take you up on that offer myself. ;-)
Amiga Ranger (what should of been the Amiga 2000)
To focus on being "crispy", i.e. short and to the point. Can't find a blog about it, but she wrote about it in "Just Fucking Ship": https://unicornfree.com/just-fucking-ship
Dispel Your Team’s Fear of Data
It's not really the elected government, it's the security services asking for an expanded remit and being granted one by uncritical politicians and an apathetic media.
So just fly the damn helicopters and forget the drones. The chance of a drone taking out a helicopter almost certainly so low as to be not worth worrying about.
How we store 400M phone numbers with fast lookup
Earlier submission tanked on HN and the link didn't work, resubmitting with lookup timings added. Hopefully, readers will find it interesting this time.
Would it be possible to hit them with flak cannons, or are they too low?
I had a cab driver a couple of weeks ago. We got talking, and I said I am a developer. He said he knew some c#. He seemed slow but I humoured him - asked how he got into it. He then started talking about machine code programming on the c64 and showed an encyclopedic knowledge of the sprite system, the way to build event loops and different approaches to laying out large programs.
I read it as, one can be smart, but the drive and perseverance to pursue your dreams and desires are really a major key to achieving one's goals.
Amiga Reloaded – A new Amiga motherboard using original MOS/CSG chips