skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has been asserted that a reason for Friendster's demise was in part internal technical problems that manifested themselves in high page response times, often to the point of being unusable.

Though, much of this was exacerbated my management's insistence on implementing a myriad of side jobs to bring revenue while deliberately ignoring the main part of the website being unresponsive.
The thing is I had not been downvoted on either a submitted article or comment! In fact right before the 80 points drop, I was actually being upvoted for a comment I had just posted.

So the strange thing is I can't understand where this drop came from, thus the "no apparent reason" in the title.
The tech industry overall is rapidly becoming more professional. In many places, looking and sounding "right" can outweigh superior technical skill. I wouldn't be entirely shocked if some day, most of the industry renders those "outcasts" as unwelcome.
Said book - Annals of the Former World - is only $5.99 in Kindle form at Amazon. It's far from my favorite work of McPhee's, but $5.99 is quite a bargain.

http://www.amazon.com/Annals-Former-World-John-McPhee-ebook/...
There are actually several vastly higher res weather broadcasts that are in the clear - they are just more work to receive. Search for LRPT and HRPT.
Can anybody explain what this sentence on MDN means?

Normally, scripts on different pages are allowed to access each other if and only if the pages that executed them are at locations with the same protocol (usually both https), port number (443 being the default for https), and host (modulo document.domain being set by both pages to the same value).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/post...

What access is it talking about? I get the feeling they are talking about parent-child windows.
He has a screenshot of this in the article.
> The exact ad in question: https://twitter.com/michaelluo/status/625082960547610626

Would it really have killed them to post an image with legible text? How is this supposed to help anyone?
I was thinking about some kind of user-owned Database service to ensure the data is forever free. Imagine a discussion board run by any company where you authenticate with your external Bring-Your-Own-Data credentials. Through some SQL-like interface, that site is able to create tables and add data to the database but associating ownership of each piece of data with your identity.

At any time you can revoke your permission for their access to this data, or share it with others. Any modification to that data is version controlled so a hostile site cannot just modify/delete the data you created on it -- you'd still be able to gain access to any old version.

From a developer POV I think the key would be a SQL-like interface with appropriate caching/conflict resolution so you essentially just connect to a locally running proxy. Perhaps the advantage for the developer is some kind of tiered storage (e.g. your 100 GB database of posts is mostly stored in this external database with a 5% hot data cache local).

From a user's POV, you know noone can take your data and hoard it. Transformation of the data from one service to another similar seems like it would be easier compared to hoping someone writes a good API for export/import. E.g. consider if you could write:

INSERT INTO feedly.reader (SELECT feedname, feed_url FROM google.reader);

to migrate YOUR data from Google Reader to Feedly -- not just in a 3-month sunset period while Reader shuts down, but forever and ever.

If you want to be paranoid, the database could be federated, so rather than it being central, multiple providers can complete for your data.

All this could certainly make compliance with the European data protection act easier.
It seems like you did miss the main point of the Iraq angle.

The author was drawing an explicit parallel with the failed tactics and attitudes used early on in Iraq with the same tactics and attitudes now being copied by police in the US. The US military learnt it's lesson and changed its approach - he's wanting police to learn the same lesson.

He thought it worth mentioning not for bragging rights but because he'd personally experienced being both sides of a raid, as well as experiencing the relevant long term effectiveness of both sets of tactics.

I felt it was a useful insightful contrast for someone like me who lives somewhere far removed from the US, Iraq, armed police, veteran worship culture, or anything military at all.
Right, and some of that makes sense to me. It makes sense in some cases (Maybe was the example I gave, a Promised value another) to tie such things directly to a single typed value. But what I was querying was, is this implicitness a good move in general.

In particular the issue I was addressing was the encapsulation of an arbitrary state with a single typed value. It's been remarked elsewhere that 'mixing' monads is a problem: I guess that's always been the thing I've felt haven't made them work replicating as a coding pattern. I tend to prefer explicit over implicit state.
Of course. How do you expect them to tweet?
One other point is in a cashless society it becomes easier to institute a negative interest rate policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate#Negative_interes...
Since you are starting out, I highly recommend Javascript into your learning stack and it might be great to get to know Meteor install: https://www.meteor.com/install
Tutorial: https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/blaze/creating-an-app

and there are hundreds of places you can learn to code for free online. Before you think about recreating the next google use the current version and you'll find thousands of ways to learn things without parting with a Dollar.
Altman is clearly referring to the internal software used to run YC the organization, not just HN. In other words, the internal dashboards, CRM-like software, CRUD apps for organizing events and appointsments, etc. Stuff that other companies would probably just use Google Apps, Salesforce, Atlassian, etc. for (YC might even use some of those).

I seriously doubt they are running this stuff on Arc and flat files.
The cellphone provider was sprint. My friend is a paid customer of Google Apps. In part of the process he called called Google Apps, and they immediately disabled his Apps account but -- but they couldn't or wouldn't do anything else including helping him escalate to the right people -- They said they did not know who to contact. Eventually after he called back several times, he got a manager/supervisor who was able to create a ticket. He called back the next day and the ticket was deleted!

Meanwhile the scammer is making threats to his family and pretending to be him send out emergency BTC loan requests and resetting bank passwords. He could be SWAT'd at any moment.

Apparently Google executives are in the mindset that it isn't cost effective for them to provide even the most minimalist crisis support -- a trivial 5 minute look at the account and seeing the ransom artist texting him (through his own gmail) would at least justify an account hold. Google couldn't be bothered-- even at a record 66 billion dollar profit to help him. Why? Because they can't make a profit helping him. Or maybe its that and they are still in the 2003 "beta" mindset. It truly is a real life THX 1138 nightmare for him.
Here's a short-list of some very simple things you can easily do in assembler which are either hard for a compiler to do, or which requires all kinds of extra optimization "magic". A lot of it boils down to having more information available:

* Allocate registers globally or across large substs. Especially when targeting architectures (like x86_64, but unlike i386) with decent numbers of available registers, this has lots of potential for typical applications that e.g. frequently needs to access common data structures. Compilers for many languages (e.g. C) have a hard time doing this if doing separate compilation per module (since you need to be able to link to code that hasn't been optimized the same way). You need whole-program optimization for this typically, but when programming assembler, it's the natural thing to do if you have enough registers to treat some of them as assigned to specific variables that you know will be frequently accessed.

* Omit stack frames entirely or selectively. Many compilers have options for doing this, but often still ends up pushing/popping more stuff than necessary for things like local variable frames and arguments, where a programmer will often see that a function is not going to use much space and decide to put in extra effort to shuffle things around to keep things in registers only.

* Selectively violate the "normal" calling conventions. E.g. if you have a utility function you often need to use in settings where it's convenient not to clobber certain registers, then you can opt to pass arguments in different registers easily. This again takes whole-program optimization for a compiler to do.

* Avoid saving/restoring certain registers based on the functions you're calling. Again requires whome-program optimization for the compiler to know that the function you're calling won't clobber specific registers.

* Specifically adjust what registers you're using based on what registers may be clobbered by other code you're calling to avoid having to save/restore.

Other things include similarities/patterns in code that are non-obvious in a higher level language because it depends on how the code is translated, which often can allow you to re-write things to eliminate common sub-expressions that are not actually visible/present in the high level code.

It's not that compilers can't do all of these if given sufficient freedom and information, but it often violates expectations of the higher level environment (e.g. separate compilation in C)
Technical debt isn't usually directly responsible for the failure of a startup. However, it can lead to problems that can cause a startup to fail. For example, technical debt can cause products to ship late, new features being harder to build out without refactoring, poor test/QA systems in place, new engineers taking longer to become familiar with the codebase, etc.

Anything that delays shipping is going to contribute to the failure of a startup.
At one startup I worked at, most of the developers were very young and had their first job, nevermind first job with stock options as part of compensation.

When it came time for a round of financing, I was leading a team meeting when the subject of dilution came up: "Are we being screwed?" And I had to explain that a smaller percentage of a company with a higher valuation isn't "being screwed." and attendant to that we discussed cost of capital, classes of shares, preferences, ratchets, etc. You could see the light bulbs coming on as I explained.

Engineers are smart. If you explain to them that "good enough with the money we've got" will make them more money later, they are usually OK with deferring both money and correctness gratification.

Think of it as building empathy for "product owners" who might otherwise be dismissed as beancounters.
> I don't believe that Iraq was a 'Good Idea™' and I have zero respect for someone that was there.

It isn't like members of the armed forces get a vote or a choice on the matter of whether they got to go to Iraq. I have coworkers that went into the National Guard to help out their home state in cases of natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, etc), but unwillingly wound up in Iraq. Blindly holding such a large group of people with zero respect because of a reason out of their control seems to toe a moral line that would make even racism seem reasonable (hence why you may draw extremely negative responses for saying this).

> For me, these analogies were, while probably important for the author, utterly distracting, annoying and disgusting. If you want to talk about the police in the USA, do that. The time served in Iraq is not relevant [...]

Then you are honestly missing the entire point of the article:

1) That the domestic police force's mode of operation is just as bad as the military force's mode of operation at its worst, and

2) The military force wizened up and changed tactics to better succeed in its larger strategy; so while the domestic police force is not currently changing, it should not be impossible for the police force to follow suit.

It seems entirely reasonable that a group of people allowed to use force on their own community would do so with more caution than a group of people using force on other/external communities. I would argue that drawing comparisons between the two is relevant and not distracting. Having someone like Alex Horton do so is insightful even if not a statistically representative sample size.
So in my case, I will share that we screwed up last year by addressing things that didn't benefit our clients. We had probably 20 features that should have been developed that would have benefitted our clients. Instead I allowed our team to focus on scalability (which wasn't really an issue at the time), plus we migrated databases, added ElasticSearch for full text search (which wasn't an issue yet), reengineered a number of features, all of which were working, although maybe not ideally.

Also, almost everything you mentioned is on my list of WTF was I thinking. We wasted time adjusting code to meet new standards, adding tests to things we knew we were changing, adding scalability to places we had no scalability issues with (yet), adding new interfaces/code in places where something "might" happen etc. None of these changes benefitted a client directly, so IMO we lost money on every one of those initiatives. The reality is a lot of the code we "brought up to standards" was rewritten anyway when we started adding features and refactoring the old code to interface these features. I also allowed the team to create their own modules instead of extending some existing node.js modules that existed in the community, which to me was a waste when I saw what we did. We would have done better to extend the community modules and open source them back to the community.

As for documentation, honestly, we have pretty good documentation, although I wouldn't say it is without issues.

Overall I considered last year, the year of the "it might happen" screw ups. What really pissed me off is I spend a huge amount of time advising clients not to touch old code unless they know it is causing them a problem now or can be proven to cause an issue when testing against a new requirement. Yet, I still failed to follow my own rules, shit happens.
This is a neat project, but if you need the full 120 words you're probably not writing as concisely as you should.
Correct, and that doesn't even consider that "That ethical principle applies just as much to websites as coffee shops" analogy is flawed because in this case the product (content) is provided by the visitors, entirely different from any typical retail store for which this legislation was originally drafted.

This difference definitely justifies amendments or entirely new legislation.
On the reporter's twitter, it is claimed that the ad says $75/day for a worker with experience, and $10 for one without. However, you'd have to take their word for it, because despite saying very aggrieved things about how the ad Bernstein doubted DOES REALLY EXIST, and HERE'S A PICTURE OF IT... nobody has posted a picture with legible text.

I find it personally disturbing that so many people want to view that image as evidence of anything at all. :/

The character 學 ("study") is visible before an occurrence of $10 in the text, so it's reasonably likely that they're telling the truth about what it says. It's left as an exercise to say why paying your untrained interns $10 / day is so much worse for them than the conventional US practice of paying them nothing.
There's nothing wrong with the headline, and the article doesn't mention kidnapping. The comparison it does make is a reasonable one: "a modern day version of a mob shakedown".
That's the trend, eg Borland.

But Jetbrains is making money. There's also a bunch of static analysis tool vendors.

We can model open source as cheap copycat inports: you can't make money at the low end, but must go up market. You have to keep improving to stay ahead of the tide, but eventually there's no up market left and you are sunk. So you have to jump across to the next island.
Very carefully worded. The original article never said anything about Special Weapons and Tactics, which is what the chief denied using. In fact, the whole point is that this procedure is decidedly normal.
Why would they sent an assault team to look into a report of a squatter?
Exploring Your Investment Choices
This comment here is a perfect representation of the problem. Most people do fit into the worldview of "girl or guy". But plenty of people don't fit into the gender binary at all,, which means there's no way to find out if they're "a girl or a guy", because the answer is "neither". And there's plenty of people who do self-identify as one of those 2 genders, but it's a different gender than most of the world insists they should identify as (I'm talking about transgender people here, if that's not immediately obvious), and they may not necessarily be open about it yet, or open to everyone, and being forced to pick "guy or girl" may therefore be problematic because either they have to give an answer that they may not be comfortable with everyone knowing, or else they have to give an answer that doesn't match their personal identity (the ideal solution in this particular case is to allow them to give no answer).

> Not every question needs to become a forum for minorities to express themselves.

This is perhaps the most problematic part of your comment. If a question allows the majority to express themselves, but denies that same right to minorities, or in fact refuses to acknowledge that the minorities even exist, that's absolutely discrimination. And perhaps even worse, when you have questions like "what gender are you?" that are asked often and where most questioners only accept male / female, that reinforces the incorrect idea that gender is binary and that there are only 2 answers, and effectively tacitly condones other forms of discrimination centered around the same question of personal identity. Which comes right back to your question. The reason you think it's perfectly ok to say "Sometimes, you just want to find out if someone is a girl or a guy" is because you're part of a culture in which the majority of people either refuse to acknowledge that there are more possible answers to that question or think it's perfectly acceptable to pretend that the minorities don't even exist.
To nitpick, it's the "National Hockey League" (NHL) and has seven Canadian teams and 23 American teams (likely increasing to 8 and 24 soon).

Publishing of salaries has really created another fun side of the games for fans. Numbers junkies now have the luxury of advanced on-ice analytics as well as some cool financial info in the salary cap era.
$20 is way too expensive for these. Here's the same thing for half the price: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Newsky-TV28T-v2-USB-DVB-T-RTL-SDR-Re...
It was posted with legible text, but twitter likes to resize things. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CKy9o8kWUAEluKa.jpg:orig
He is a paying customer... wow unbelievable.

Why can the police/FBI help in this case, given all the threads and demands? Were they contacted and informed of the situation?
Leader of China’s genomics powerhouse steps down to pursue AI research
Another Systemantics person! I profoundly wish that I had been exposed to this book during my education. Most traditional engineering education deals with predictable, small, compartmentalized systems. But the real world is none of these things, and engineering is the struggle to bring some semblance of order to chaos. Systemantics really outlines just what you can and can't expect out of any engineered system, and it stays in my head like a little crystal of knowledge that I draw from time and time again.
Its interesting how his attitude as stated at the bottom of the piece is that they (the economists) were 'right'. Its so interesting because you would think that brilliant people would realize that their claims aren't falsifiable. There was no AB test for the recession and there are a ton of reasons that their decision could have had relatively little to do with anything.
About [1]:

"Second, contrary to the implication from the first Times story, Clinton’s emails sent in her role as secretary of state were automatically saved into a secure data system under the control of the department. In fact, where does the Times think the FOIA offices for the State Department and the intelligence community are finding the 55,000 emails now under review that it cites in its new story? Are officials breaking into Clinton’s house in the middle of the night to examine them by flashlight? Nope. They are pulling them off of the system under the department’s control."

The 55,000 emails were exported from the system by her staff, IIRC. I've never read another story that said that her emails were ever under the control of the State Department, which would of course make the email story completely insensible. If this is a false claim, Newsweek is just as confused as the NYT about Clinton's emails, if not more.

At some point the NYT and other media outlets decided the Clinton email story was about "classified emails" rather than an official conducting state business over their own private email. Newsweek is reducing it in this article to an insignificant technicality about FOIA. It's not about FOIA, it's about having a record of state business. FOIA is the only tool that the public has to force release of such records, but FOIA is not the reason we keep them. That's like saying that the reason you have a lock is so you have a place to use the key.

By making the story about the possible release of classified information, it just gives Clinton something that is easy to deny. I wouldn't be surprised if the Clinton team were intentionally steering the coverage in that direction, because when her denials of emailing classified information are proved true, the story will evaporate.
See this is what I suggest most of the time!

My first startup that I built and sold had 0 test written, but I knew on spot what I'm giving up for what. I always say that last line of yours:

Making "the chance to do it right with cheaper money." rather than a whole team to re-do everything from scratch or break down already running product.

Sort of goes back to your point with cost of capital, indeed.

Thanks, good points :)!
That seems to be a holding that Craigslist won from the court, which helped assure the settlement.

That's a better standard than the originally-argued "violates terms of use". But it's still problematic given how draconian CFAA penalties can be, and given that the 'unauthorized access' in question penalizes access to information that's freely available to any other anonymous member of the public.

Maybe the EFF will be able to use the $1MM that fell their way to further circumscribe such CFAA application.
Most kinds of unpaid internships are illegal, and it's become a louder issue in the last year or so. http://www.businessinsider.com/is-my-unpaid-internship-illeg...
> It's my understanding that random padding doesn't in fact make the attacker's job "much more" difficult. Only a little more, or not at all?

The BREACH attack verbage at http://breachattack.com spells it out fairly clearly, by adding random bytes to all of the HTTP responses, it makes small compressed HTTP payloads impossible to determine whether guessed bytes were correct or not (well, depending of course on the size variable of the random bytes added).

> Could you comment on how integrated the TLS stack is with the webserver?

The TLS layer is entirely separate from the webserver layer. I built the epoll, TLS, SSH, webserver and client as "IO layers", such that they can be stacked together arbitrarily (imagine epoll/IPv4 listener -> TLS -> SSH -> TLS -> Webserver, perfectly doable, albeit a little nutty).
The horrors of China’s financial system, charted