skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We just don't know. Maybe it will be bad, maybe it will be good, or both. It seems the surveillance is already more scary than it was in 1989 in the Eastern Europe - I know because I have lived through both - but now there is much more diversity of entertainment and access to the world.

Maybe we don't need that kind of terror any more to stabilize a country. With gentle nudges most people would fall in line and we'd never feel it. Even if we turn back to the totalitarian regime that was in Eastern Europe, we'll still have our games and shows with us. LOL.

The upside of machine intuition is that we could probably improve the world economy and reduce losses through incompetence and corruption from the government. The government has a chance to become much more efficient.
It's more like a conflict between inner cities and outer ring suburbs. Something tells me that in the suburbs the tax base and consequently the budget is healthy. The suburban pension fund may be intentionally mismanaged, though, and the fact wouldn't surprise anyone.
I think this greatly speaks for a welfare state. If people have a certain safety net they are able to spend their time on things that advance the status quo.

It also reminds me of another study showing that poverty appears to result in mental capacity being constantly used up for what could be described as "worrying for money".

This makes sense, because you can be more focused as you have fewer distractions.
Some people with high IQ are smart enough to say "I want to be a cab driver", and do it. They probably are happier in their jobs, than many others who just do whatever "is expected" of them.
Most of the issues with firefox, drupal, whatever are coming from plugins anyway.

Protocol based interactions (that requires clear API) do a better job at isolation than modules.

In a certain way linux too the obligation for drivers to be runned kernel space and thus the adaptation made for drivers to access resources have made some part of the kernel internal API klugish. On the other way, it is true that the use of modules without API enables linux to present an external API that does not change while you can modify the behaviour of the kernel and its internal.

(I guess there is a price to pay for everything, but not everybody is a genius like Torvalds)
Disk storage and real transactions under Redis compatible protocol
I started at WSI about seven months before System 7 was introduced. At the time the documented limit was 32 kB. Yes applications could call SetApplLimit but Desk Accessories could not, QuickLetter's stack was on top of the application's stack. We had no control over that.

I expect the System always ensured that DAs could have 8 kB of stack on top of whatever the application had; that is, app+DA defaulted to 40 kB.

MacCLint was such a skanky program I don't think it would have done it a whole lot of good to increase the stack.
A friend pointed out to me that his stance is even funnier when you consider this:

http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/03/neil-young-confirms-ne...

The sad part is that his PR has probably achieved what they wanted to. I mean, I'm on here writing a comment about the Pono Player and talking about it with friends. So yeah....
What if the constitution made sense? It isn't that pension funds become underfunded one day to the next, these are crises that are long time in the making, they are political crises. In essence, they need to fall back on all the electorate.

rayiner, I have seen you make this same argument about police misconduct. The police are citizens representatives, if they are out of control, the same citizens need to pay. Why should pension funds, especially the kind that isn't town-sized be treated different?
Human thinking and reasoning gets short-circuited by too much vividness. The difference between those previous eras and now is that our fiction may have become dangerously vivid.
A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
If technology is going to outgrow the existing manchild oligarchy, it has to leave Silicon Valley. It's impossible (for a critical mass of people, if not necessarily the individual) to be anything but The Man's bitch in a place where starter apartments top $3,500 per month and houses cost over $1 million.

Silicon Valley's a joke at this point. So where will the technologist's positive-sum impulse reconstitute itself? I have no fucking idea. It could be in Seattle, it could be in the Upper Midwest, and it could be in another part of the world. And who will fund the new way of doing things, one which will be more profitable (in the long term) and much more socially responsible, but less controllable by the people holding the pursestrings? Again, I honestly don't know.
In light of this situation, I'm betting California will pass a law this year to deal with this. The penalties will be severe (Felony).
Why do you call dark matter a buzz word / not "real" physics?
It was just like these, but you got to draw the vehicles instead of having them be generated.
I like web development but have to admit I do look down a little on people who are able only to click some buttons and get WordPress running and then people consider them "programmers".

Likewise, people who are able to drag some stuff around in MS Access and are considered "programers".

It's not necessarily the amount of skill and effort involved (although admittedly that is part of it), it's the fact that, in my experience, soon enough these "click and drag" type systems usually break. When they do, the button clickers often don't have the skills to fix them. This is, in my opinion, the refining fire that separates "programmers" from "Next" clicking hacks. And often it would have been, in total, more efficient just to learn a bit of real programming in the first place rather than to fix the messes created by "easy" systems. I'm not complaining because I've made money fixing problems button clicking "programmers" created but couldn't fix. In MS Access, in WordPress, in Sharepoint, in Lotus Approach, etc.

It's better to take the time to learn how to code. PHP isn't my preference, there are better languages, but it's probably OK. Oh, and I don't worry about what people think of web developers. Their opinion doesn't really matter. But button clickers as opposed to coders... there is a real difference and it shows up soon enough.

Last point, OP messed up by ordering a bunch of books. He should have ordered just one. Don't try to drink from a fire hose. You will get knocked on your ass and all wet, and you won't even get your drink. Also, besides learning, you have to keep producing. Even if it's boring and some people don't respect you. A certain level of income take precedence to learning. If you don't have it then the learning is done because you can't fund it. So... priorities.
So if I'm understanding correctly, this terribly written article (he tries to make a point about merging but doesn't actually make it amongst other points he fails to even state) suggests using feature branches inside the code instead of feature branches within source control. It also requires mini code reviews and merging at every single commit. You cannot get rid of merging. Instead of doing it once when merging a branch, however, you're now doing it every commit. Since you're merging smaller chunks, it's impossible to see the bigger picture of the whole feature as you merge/review, and it removes the ability to do meaningful code reviews on features before they actually get into the main code base. Not only that, sometimes you end up in a race with your teammates, knowing that you're working on the same piece of code and that whomever checks it in last will have to merge. Stupid, but it can happen.

To me, the ability to have logical separation of the features being built and do meaningful code reviews far outweighs any proposed speed benefits of not branching, benefits that I assume show up only in larger groups as they certainly don't show up in small groups. Which bring me to my last point, the "slow is fast" section, which doesn't provide any evidence that slow is fast. Other than users not having to decide which branch to run (which takes all of two seconds, BTW), development is much faster with feature branches and the other negatives do not show up in my experience. What I'm trying to say is that "fast is fast." Slow is not fast and the author doesn't make his point there either.

tl;dr: All in all, he points to no actual pros to branch-less development.
Sounds like he has been got at by some new "friends" - of course the oldest stories (The Illiad The Odyssey Gigamesh) feature super heroes.

If its good enough for Homer its good enough for me!
Very important point here, and often overlooked. Real world runs on shitty code, people like Zuckerberg didn't spend his early facebook days discussing on message boards what is the best javascript framework or the best way to build testable code; he shipped, put it out there and attracted people. It was most likely spaghetti code as Zuckerberg did not have any prior professional experience as an engineer, but it worked.
well said not sure why you got a dv
Yeah, I'm being unfair in naming Go & Java specifically. But these stories of 'fixing' garbage collection come up all too often.

I wonder when we'll see a further GC update that trades latency for throughput...

The problem seems to be that no matter how you tweak GC, you will always have a class of program that it performs terribly for (and it seems to impact a large group of programs, never just some obscure corner case). So I suspect that this latest GC tweak will have unexpected results on some other class of program, leading to another tweak, and so on...
If you have business skills, you can always find/team up with people that have a compelling product, or team up with others others to bring your compelling product to life through code while you build the business. In this case, it appears that OP has an idea and wants to build the product himself, starting from scratch with no coding knowledge. I am saying that he should team up with someone to accomplish the actual coding, and he should focus on the business.

BTW, I am saying all of this as a fairly accomplished software engineer that has grown to understand that business skills are far more important than the programming skills I have spent nearly 20 years working on. I find myself agreeing more and more with this statement from Chris Sacca, who is a billionaire that knows a thing or two about successful tech startups [1]:

"...most of the value is created by the execution, not the idea itself."

[1] http://lowercasecapital.com/prospecting/
Because democracy.
So... how close are we to tech that will make encryption universal and surveillance impossible, if so desired?
I don't click them but many people do. This is easily demonstrated through A/B testing.

Dave Johnson, President of Working Software told me the reason that so many advertisements say "BUY NOW! DON'T DELAY" is "because it works".

"Ask my mother why she likes advertising." -- Karen Salzman

"Why do you like advertising?" -- Me

"It tells me what to buy."

I swear I'm not making this up.

For me, just about the most effective call to action I've ever seen is a developer blog linked from here at HN. At the end of each article it said "Read This Next" then linked another technical article.

I read every article on that guy's site.

I find it helpful that someone notes the "Reading Time" at the top of each of his developer blogs; I plan to add that.
Congratulations! The journey is long and challenging but totally worth it. Approach the startup world with the intellectual curiosity of a visitor in a foreign country. There are some great ways to learn how to code. Instead, I've found it beneficial to Learn How to Do X to Accomplish Y. There are numerous programming languages, APIs, platforms, devices, technologies, methodologies, etc. Focus on the X that helps you do Y. Udacity, Khan Academy, Coursera, and W3Schools.com offer a great start (some are free) for programming. A good start is learning front end development: HTML, Bootsrap. CSS, Javascript.

Find some like-minded individuals. You can join tech meetups, Google Developer groups, etc. Good luck on your journey my friend! Keep building!
One of the links from my page:

"MySpace v. Facebook: It's Not a Decision. It's an IQ Test"

Yeah, I joined a while ago.
This plan is very similar to my current path. I ended up taking a couple extra years on "Year 2" to really hone my skills.
> lot of people who can only do CSS

I appreciate people "who can only do CSS".

CSS is underrated skill but experienced CSS developer has to know about:

- every browser quirk possible.

- various standard hacks to workaround these quirks

- preprocessors like Sass or Less

- tons of completely non-logical CSS rules (eg: `margin:
auto` will center only horizontally but not vertically )

- methodologies like BEM, OCSS or SMACSS

- CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation

- CSS specifity, z-index stacking rules etc.

- responsive web development

- basic JavaScript also can be helpful

etc.

And he/she has to be good at communication with graphic/ux designers and be super patient (`2px left, please`, `change color for 3% brighter, please`, `slow down this transition and insert 2px border` etc.) And good eye for details also is needed.

So I don't think that someone "who can only do CSS" is worse than programmer. I think the opposite is true: programming is pretty damn easy comparing to sitting all day and trying to randomly tweak CSSes to make website look as it was designed by graphic/ux designers.

This is the reason I hate writing CSS. I like programming though. Because programming it's a looot easier.

Programming is logical. You tell computer what to do and computer does it. If it does not, you debug and eventually you win. CSS is not logical so IMHO it's harder.
While more new rendering engines are good too, having more flexible and customisable UIs is something that mainstream browsers seem to be actively moving away from, so a new UI on an existing rendering engine isn't such a bad idea.
Firefox has the code that secretly sends a hash of every file you download, with your IP and computer fingerprint, to Google for "verification". I only found out after a post about it here on HN.

But I'm interested, what Firefox extensions are good for privacy?
By doing and creating value. The premise of starting a company is simple, solve a problem that ideally you and others have which in return creates value enough that they'll pay for it. It's a million times easier said than done, and execution is the most valuable part of any idea because it's also the riskiest and most difficult part. Social apps have slightly different economics but the premise is the same.
>It rests on the idea that a generally human-level of intelligence necessarily leads to a super-human explosion of intelligence.

Why must it be necessary? If there's a large chance, that's still a problem. Besides, the claim is generally that a human-created intelligence is unlikely to be in the same range as humans (because there's no reason to think that the human range on the spectrum is unique), so if it's not dumber, then it's most likely going to significantly smarter. There's also the point that if you have a human-level AI, simply throwing more computing power at it makes it strictly faster than humans.

See http://intelligenceexplosion.com/en/2011/plenty-of-room-abov... and http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html for some examples of these arguments.
How to Build Confidence to Charge More
Sadly money appears to matter though:

http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-...

However, doesn't mean you can't simply ignore that and just go for it.
I have no idea who he is on a "personal" basis. I am attacking the quality of one contribution, which is demonstrably low. He (or she) could be a great person and I'd have no idea, and frankly, it doesn't matter to this thread of discussion.

To be frank, you are trying way too hard to impose Bay Area Passive-Aggressive Culture on the rest of us. It's not a "personal attack" to acknowledge the low quality and demonstrated immaturity in someone's message-board post. It's necessary. It keeps all of us in check (and, yes, even I need to be kept in check from time to time). It's also not "negativity" to point out that there's a lot of moral rot and frank stupidity going on (and that will hurt all of us, when the chickens come home to roost) in the Bay Area tech scene. The best way to keep Clinkles rare is to bash them mercilessly when they happen. One of the reasons why the Bay Area is such a horrible place right now (and it wasn't always that way) is that the leading venture capitalists are people with absolutely no sense of shame about anything, because they've warped the "anything goes" California culture of the 1960s into this idea that they can fund Clinkles and not be mocked for it. Bring in a few proper Northerners wielding Hammers of Judgment, and it will change.

There are times when ridicule is the most potent moral force, and we are in one such era. To block it, under the supposition that it's "negative", is to foster a world in which no one knows right from wrong, quality from garbage, up from down or left from right. It's to create a world in which grown men and women wearing unicorn costumes on Youtube to promote their businesses, is tolerated. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJIBxtDUHc ). Fuck that shit.

I don't attack anonymous Internet identities "personally". I attack stupidity, and it's a necessary function.
How about very focused and fast (high energy) water cannons, from the ground and from helicopters, as one among many anti-drone weapons?

EDIT: A drone-clearing drone, carrying the water cannon. It would be sent into an airspace where a problem drone has been reported, and either water down the offending drones, or report that they're gone. After clearing the airspace, firefighting aircraft are allowed in.
How many helicopters crash because of birds, and how many more birds are there than drones?
Front end vs. back end.
Still slowish. Far far from "solved." The charts they zoom in on only go to about 500MB in heap, showing 2 ms pause times. It makes me suspicious that the nice linear trend he's showing doesn't hold up under more reasonable values -- my IDE takes up 500 MB and my web browser over a GB.

So if by his possibly rosy calculations, a basic 3GB heap is still pausing 6 ms. God forbid I use a 500 GB heap and now we're into the one second range again. This is assuming the linear relationship holds up, but given his choice of graph domain, I have a suspicion that there are issues to the right.

This seems typical of Google technology. They say they care about performance, but I have yet to see a piece of Google tech that is actually useful if you care about performance. People automatically assume Google is synonymous with performance, but it definitely isn't.

Remember, he says this improved GC pause time is going to come at the expense of Go top-line speed. You Go will get slower, and you sill will have second pauses with any serious work.
It would be nice to have some kind of monitoring system that warns me when another user is editing (or has edited) the same file(s) as me. Then we could talk, or one of us could wait, to prevent merge conflicts in the first place.

Of course, this would be even more useful if it only alarms the users whenever they have created a merge conflict.
Lately I've been checking out the real time reporting page for the DSN (http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html), and frequently one of the three big dishes at Goldstone, Arizona, USA, Madrid, or Canberra is allocated to a satellite, but is not right then doing any communicating, presumably because it's waiting for the earth to turn enough to get line of sight.

Right now New Horizons is downloading at 2.11 kbs to Canberra, the max with both amplifiers transmitting with opposite circular polarizations. For a bit of comparison, Rosetta is talking to Goldstone right now at 104.86 kbs, with a received power 3 orders of magnitude stronger. And Voyager 2, which doesn't have much to say, is still plugging away with a smaller Canberra antenna at 159 b/s, and a received power about that of New Horizons.
A starting startup, an address repository
Hello folks, myself and few colleagues of mine are embarking on a journey of building our very first startup. I thought there would be no better place to get an initial feed back on the essence of the idea and whether or not people might think that it would be something useful.

In short, we are attempting to build a service that would serve as a central repository of addresses, allowing goods/gifts/posts to reach someone by merely knowing their name/email/phone number (or any other unique identification mechanism that we end up deciding on) without necessarily exposing where do these people live to the initial sender.

This will also help addressing the problem whereby we constantly having our home/office addresses entered into various different websites/entities and the lack of a central place where these information can be held.

More about it here http://www.hoozad.com/

Appreciate any feedback about what you think about the whole idea?
Direct quote from patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/01/inaugural-kalzumeus-podc...

> People make fun of me. I’ve been saying this stuff about A/B testing and whatnot for years. I make buttons bigger and it almost always works better. One of the English as a second language folks in one of my forums was talking one day and he’s like, “I know Patrick loves his big, orange, pancake buttons.” Big, orange, pancake button is my keyword for this now because big, orange, pancake buttons really effing work. Go ahead.
I'm sure it's not true of all public employees, but many of those I am familiar with richly deserve vilifying.

There is no shortage of people who did very little during their working career and expect to retire after 20-25 years with full health benefits and a livable pension paid for the rest of their lives. In my opinion, this is a form of freeloading and it certainly isn't sustainable.

I don't know what the solution is. I'd like to see better pension schemes for private sector workers.. particularly those who don't stay at a company for 20 years. I suppose maybe a national scheme similar to Social Security. I don't know...