skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The dam operated just fine even with the vulnerabilities in its software."

IMO the key thing to keep in mind is that twenty years ago, it was very common to have systems that were truly "air-gapped" from everything else. E.g. in the 1980s or 1990s, someone probably had to operate that dam's SCADA system from a particular console in a particular room.

"As we get more connected we require to maintain the software."

Yes. As soon as everyone started networking everything together - and especially after they started putting everything on the internet - those old systems become a dangerous liability. IMO it is effectively impossible to have a truly fixed-design system continue to operate in a reliable way when it exists in a changing environment. Computing systems are too complex for any designer to understand all of the possible conditions in advance.

While it's true that if nothing goes wrong, the dam will probably continue to operate correctly, if it's now attached to a network, then there are all sorts of things that can make those vulnerabilities an issue later:

- Obviously there's the possibility of someone tampering with it for malicious purposes. Maybe they're a foreign government who wants to destabilize the US. Maybe they're a malicious stock trader who wants to short the stock of the dam owner.

- If it's a really poorly-written system from the 1980s, it probably crashes if it receives input beyond a certain length, because of e.g. a buffer overflow. Maybe someone mistypes an IP address in a configuration field and suddenly a database client tries to connect to it and triggers that bug.

- Does it represent time in some way? If so, is it going to enter unexpected territory when whatever counter it uses flips over? If it's old enough that the author is dead, it's probably using a 32-bit integer at most, and so is susceptible to the same kind of problem as legacy Unix systems.

Etc.

IMO, as soon as computing systems start to be networked together, they have to be treated more like plants in a garden than machines in a factory - if there isn't a "gardener" keeping things under control, it will turn into a disaster. It's still a deterministic system, but it's one in which the number of variables is far too high (IMO) to effectively plan out every possible contingency and response in advance. Maintenance can be minimized, but not eliminated.
Admittedly, though, replacing a full OS isn't likely to happen as users reject anything without feature X, app Y, or benchmark Z. The thing is there's a lot of those things in an OS to the point that barrier of entry to building one is insanely high.

Best shortcut to that I've seen are the Rump kernels.

Well, not really. Rump kernels are a godsend shortcut (similar to DDE, but much more advanced) for device drivers, but Blub-loving users wanting their apps means you still need to roll a POSIX userland of some sort (the way GNU Hurd does it over Mach is quite interesting, it supports things like processes with multiple uids with all POSIX calls being RPC that delegates to object servers) or since we're talking about a mainstream improvement here, Darwin/XNU and maybe even Windows NT. No escape.
A New Class of Worker Could Fix the On-Demand Economy
Of course it's expensive! Laptops are high volume, low margin products that carry a lot of inventory risk (such as component price drops.)

Doing anything extra, in low volume, will raise the price a lot.
Data rate to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can be up to 6Mbit/sec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter#Te...
Hopefully mainstream manufacturers will adopt some specs, e.g. Thinkpad Retro, http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-2-displ...
RequestPolicy Continued: https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io/

µMatrix: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
Surely this should be solved in a single place (the browser) rather than asking every site to implement their own plus & minus buttons.

MobileSafari offers text size adjustment when in the article reading mode (via the paragraph icon at the left of the address bar), but that mode is only offered based on some heuristic.
Honestly I'm not even comfortable with my work interactions being stored on Slack. I would never use a service like this for personal info.
Risks to Flying in Asia
For operational software that runs a business you are going to need to change the software because the business changes.

It is true that the visual UI of HN looks stable but behind the scenes they are always making changes to improve the community. Part of it is dealing with attacks & spam, part of it is trying to shape the behavior of users who are in the grey area between positive and negative contribution.

So far as security, that is another force for perpetual change.
Google didn't exist when C and C++ became popular, so naturally it had no effect on their popularity. But you can't say that new languages don't suffer from those problems, because newer languages so rarely reach the level of popularity of C/C++, even when they have easy to search names.
The idea of zero maintenance is appealing but out of reach in a lot of ways. I suppose you mean some kind of software system. From the perspective of the systems world the runtime dependencies are a moving target. Most platforms evolve and their interfaces change over time.

The teams the develop these platforms (Java/Node.js/Ruby) have to balance support for old code branches with the development of new ones. Once the platform team leaves a code branch behind, the problems start to multiply. Zero day exploits are developed for zero day vulnerabilities. The underlying operating systems also evolve and leave the old versions of the platform behind as well.

At some point you have to open your applications code base back up and update it for the updated platforms. If you don’t the application dies with its platform. Sort of like the ship that sinks of rust or building that collapses due to the accumulation of deferred maintenance.
I am pretty sure it was a story on Techmeme and an HN discussion was one of the related links and at the time I was getting back in to following tech news and learning how it had changed with ubiquitous broadband. I just treated HN as a news aggregator for what felt like a long time but isn't relative to how long I've been a member.

I didn't really get the weighting of stories over time and finding stories sort of sticking around on page two and three days after rolling off the front page was a bit confusing coming from the Technmeme front page. I think what got me to sign up to make noise was the story about PG crashing the secret what-do-we-do-about-YC dinner for VC's...though it might have been the flatulence simulation iPhone app wars, since it was in days when HN rewarded snark and there were few higher internet pleasures for me than snarking on Apple to piss off its insufferable adorers. In the long run, HN allowed me to find an audience for writing on less lowest-common-denominator topics and pursue more interesting interests than upsetting apple carts.
H-Files Mobile App for easy H-1B Database access – H1B employers and salary info
I only just joined after finding an option for updates after installing Pushbullet. I came to the site, found it interesting, and decided to create an account.
I miss the first Android browser's ability to reflow text as you zoomed. I hate zooming in to read, but having to scroll left and right as well as down.
The point is not just that the brain halves make inferences, but that they explicitly hide that they are doing so, and seemingly (though proving this is hard) believes they are acting from knowledge rather than inferences they have no basis for.

Whether or not they're right in any given claim is besides the point, as at any point past the split that includes an element of chance and is dependent on the extent of outside interference. E.g. just talking to a person with severed brain stem from one side in sufficiently lowered voice is sufficient to provide different information to each brain half and cause them to diverge - coherence is lost pretty much from the first moment; though the extent of it can remain quite low for some types of information for quite some time.

> You could modify the source code of a distributed database so that the nodes in a cluster were no longer guaranteed to be consistent. That wouldn't show that consistency is an illusion; it would just show that you can break stuff by modifying it.

This is a poor analogy. In this case the brainstem is the replication mechanism, not computation.

Take a multi-master database and sever the replication, but let the nodes most of the time see mostly the same data. Now change the database so that it tries to infer what the results actually should be based on patterns seen in the past, so that it actively lies to you about what the basis for the query responses are (the database tells you it is derived from inserted data, but half the time it's computed based on imperfect assumptions of what the other node will have seen).

This is what is actually observed in experiments on people with severed brain stems: You know you've fed bullshit data in, yet the system responds with providing a result with a confidence it has no justification for. You can argue we can't prove that the motivation is to maintain the illusion of self, but the effect certainly is to maintain an illusion of a coherent self - or at least try to. Unlike the database, you can ask each brain half what it based it's decision on, and the deceived brain half will usually insist it made the decision based on x,y,z, even when researchers made the decision without its knowledge.

The only change is blocking communication.

Yet when one brain half tells you it made a decision and explains to you why, you can't trust a word it's saying, as it will present itself with equivalent certainty whether or not it actually made the decision, as long as it thinks some part of the collective actually did make the decision.

Think of any part of your brain as some government spokesperson who is trying to speak for the whole, and who needs to answer questions about statements they personally never made without letting slip that it's total chaos behind the scenes.
Am I the only one who can't understand what this product offers exactly?
Eigenthread at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8918259

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eigenvalues%20setosia&sort=byP...
What Makes a Developer Truly Professional
Woopsy. Thanks! I switched it off the code of conduct stuff to just be all DWTFYWPL. Will fix today.
So what Linux distro is the OS based on ?
http://www.uhf-satcom.com/amateurdsn/Paper-969.pdf < If you'd actually like to know more about the communications sub-systems of this spacecraft.
Spyfall
Yes, it could be that there was somebody before me that already noticed this issue and decided to exploit it :-/ I saw on Twitter that there actually was a talk in 2013 at DEFCON about these sorts of problems in NoSQL, so in certain circles it's been known for a while just not acted upon.
Well, consider me a user. Is this a side-project for you, or are you going to build a company around it? Naturally, I'd like to know that if I enter my data in here, I'll be able to export a copy of it in the unfortunate event that you have to shut down the service.
I've got plenty smarts, but how about some of that perseverance. I'd love some more of that. I do great work but very sporadically.
Not a pilot or very well-versed in this area, but I do know there is a ton of research on airline pricing/scheduling out there. The only reason I do know is I wrote a short term paper for college years ago and remember that I easily found sources.

Airfare pricing in itself is a fairly complex algorithm that runs each time someone books a flight. Thus the reason one person may get a different price from another person booking at the same time on the same flight. As for schedules there are probably just as many variables that come into play. Time of day, the departing and arrival airport locations, total flight times, overall demand, date, fuel costs, the revenue the airline is able to generate from a flight, etc... are just some of the variables.

I don't have any papers off the top of my head I can recommend, but a quick search of Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) will return plenty of results for you. Hope that helps.
I have a couple "quick fix" excel based solutions that still run, with no maintenance 7 years later. There is nothing more permanent than the temporary.
Hey, sorry about calling you out. My bad.
Exactly. I recently did this with simcity and a Mac emulator. I downloaded all these games and what not, only to pay simcity for a few hour and my nostalgia quotient was filled. No need to boot up an original as fun as that might seem.
Sex Museum is worth a visit.
They're beautiful, certainly. But who do they target? Me? I love Linux so all I want to know is: what is the default OS based on? It seems like the desktop environment is Gnome and they pre-install Libre Office, gimp and inkscape. Nice but what happens if I install Arch or Ubuntu? Does everything work out of the box? Does the SSD work perfectly with the current kernel?

Or do they target privacy curious Mac and Windows users? In which case: What happens when these users want to design and order a photo book? (Here in the Netherlands, nobody offers that on Linux and it is a big thing keeping me from switching my "please remove my browser toolbars once a month" mother in law to Linux.) Even more knowledgeable computer users don't simply switch to Linux, and this page does not even mention its OS, so what can you expect? I think the difference is way to big to just glance over it and say you have mac/windows compatible software. As a Windows user going to a Mac is a big step, many people I know hated it and move back. Imagine them moving to Linux...

I'd buy one, if it would mean I'd get a System76 like machine that just works with in-kernel stuff for sure. The hardware switches, the lack of a windows key and the nice looks are very attractive extra's.
When a small bird can shatter the windscreen of a helicopter temporarily blinding the pilot, I think it's pretty safe to assume a 2kg drone can cause some pretty significant damage;

http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2015/03/after-bird-blinds...
I like the marketed focus of these laptops. However, because I dislike deceptive marketing I don't like Purism. They present their laptops as extraordinaly open when they are in fact no different than a lot of other laptops on the market regarding openness. All I see in them is the addition of a hardware switch and the installation and configuration of trisquel.

The only company I know of which sells considerably more open laptops than the competition is Minifree Ltd[1]. They have the RYF certification from the FSF. Still, there is non-free code running in the devices as a system — think hdd firmware — but the advances they’ve made are substantial.

[1] http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/
The irony of promoting a "Privacy-Respecting Laptop" with a website that uses Google Analytics...
Not parent, but I'd argue generally Yes. Moreover it's an excellent dynamic to keep in mind when you're encountering strong resistance from someone. Often there's either a conflict of interest or cognitive dissonance at play.
Lately the major issue I've seen is font size being too big on landscape orientation, when portrait looks fine. That when the content is not already covered by stupid top/bottom fixed bars that were only designed for portrait mode.
How does it work?

If I create a game and join it in another browser window using the access code, one of the players is told they are the spy and the other a sniper. There's a list of locations below, but clicking on anything does nothing.
Yes, but "modern" OS'es have heavy processes, in other words they save registers, stack pointers, other process related things and restore them on every process switch.

I'm not sure what makes real difference to Erlang's processes here, I hope someone can explain this with more details.
Best websites that will make you a genius
10 everyday things invented in Germany
Cool stuff. Would love to have "memorable urls" or wiki like [[Title becomes link]] syntax so I can build out a lightweight, personal faqtiki - Currently one needs to get the share link and do a [page](share url) to accomplish it (a multi-step non-memorable way)
I see beautifully rendered clouds through which you're moving, and it responds to the mouse. Both before and after allowing Flash. But for the rest nothing happens? Could it be broken in my browser? Using Firefox.

EDIT: Never mind, there's a scrollbar... proof that the recent trend in webdesign of non-obvious scrollability is confusing :)
To be clear, instead of passing laws shirking the debt we could also "solve" the problem by inflating the currency (printing money to pay the pensioners).
> What I also expect is that the content provider understands the value of preserving previous versions and makes those available. Wikipedia does this well. The entire software suite is designed around this principle.

Wikipedia does it well for text. Not so well for images. There are many articles with important information in images where viewing an older version of the article shows images incorrect for that version.

For instance, the article on same-sex marriage in the US [1] has for quite a while included a map showing the status of same-sex marriage in each state. When the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, the map was updated to reflect this--by overwriting the image file.

If you go back and view that page from a several months ago, well before the Supreme Court's ruling, the map will show same-sex marriage as legal in all states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Unite...
The Magazine of the Southwest
Define unlikely? I mean just as easily the opposite could be assumed.
The battery has a lifespan and eventually needs replacing as well. Not sure if that falls within the scope of physical damage, its subjective I guess. Even routine charging could count as maintenance. What about cleaning the screen (to get fingerprints off the screen)? Surely that counts as maintenance too? New wifi & cell protocols could be invented that also render it obsolete. If you run out of space on it, old files aren't automatically pruned... going through my photos deleting stuff counts as maintenance I'd say. I've also had it become frozen / sluggish and had to reboot (even with iPhone 6)
Test post – please ignore
I hope so. I like the game you are developing too. I'd like to support both, but it is the None language that I am interested in most right now. I'll at least buy the game, since it has intrigued me beyond anything in quite a while. Plus you both have infectious personalities :)
Those specs have probably been written assuming max. 2 memory slots, max. 8GB in each, rather than stating some kind of absolute engineering limit in the CPU itself. 16GB SO-DIMMs are very recent and only available from a single vendor, but I have seen reports of them working at least on Broadwell CPUs with just a single memory slot.
Thanks, sometimes it's hard to see who's trolling who.
VnStat – A network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD
> it can easily happen to a smaller company like Atlassian or GH.

I work for Atlassian and I agree with the other posters that you're right to be skeptical, but it's worth pointing out that Atlassian has many product offerings other than Bitbucket.
Another case of presentation interferes with story.
Yes, of course, understood and accepted - this is cool too.
> I figured since we need to learn it for the build system

Most gradle build scripts are fairly short (e.g. 30 lines) and only use a minute subset of the Groovy grammar, so you don't really need to learn it. Any problems with the build script are far likely to be with the Gradle vocab than the Groovy grammar, e.g. the names of variables you're assigning to, or whether you've included them all.
from the crowdsourced page:

> Bundled with the fully free/libre, no mystery software Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, with free/libre professional quality web browser, email, graphics, drawing, word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, and media software, users can easily replace their existing computer. Since it is a GNU-based distribution, users can add hundreds of thousands of free/libre and open source applications easily.
Are you sure you (or your kid, for that matter) would want them to be that accessible on a Google search? Seems that could come back to bite them.

I say that because my name is pretty unique -- most hits on my name are relevant to me -- and I have to be very careful about anything I make public. Even more so than most probably have to be.

Fortunately, I'm a pretty boring person and it's not been much a problem.
> often going to be tons cheaper than doing the manual memory management.

And on top of that, manual memory management is not free. I maintain a simple but high-throughput C++ server at Google, and tcmalloc is never less than 10-15% of our profiles.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Go is faster than C++ or ever will be. I'm just trying to counter the notion that "GC is expensive, manual memory management is near zero runtime cost."
Really now. Open HN in a mobile browser and tell me you don't have to squint to read at the default zoom level.
The Go 1.5 GC guarantees that the GC stops the program for a maximum of 10ms within a 50ms timeframe.
Low quality listicle with clickbait title.
Working Remotely
A while back I saw a list of top cities to live in when working remotely. I'm really curious about working remotely but a not sure what the best jobs in tech. (skills needed) to work remotely and still make a decent living.
> Groovy seems to have an answer if the performance of dynamic typing ends up being an issue

What answer is this? Groovy's statically type compilation mode? You're better off from a QA perspective just using Java code.
HN is a bad example seeing as the maintainers refuse to put in the small amount of effort it would take to make it work decently on mobile.
Web development is the intersection of art and programming.
This author wrote, "PHP was a terrible language, and PHP developers were terrible programmers. JavaScript was a terrible language, and JS developers couldn't perform asymptotic analysis to save their life. Web developers don't have degrees and it shows in their code. Drupal/Wordpress developers are an absolute joke."

What a crock! What a good reason to stay away from online forums like reddit! The userface of any software, done well, is painstaking and valuable work. It's a poor craftsman who blames his own tools. It's a freakin' troll who blames other peoples' tools.

This has been going on since the beginning of the computer industry. Real mean program in machine language: assemblers are for wimps. COBOL? feh.

This is nonsense. By this reasoning, Michaelangelo was incompetent because of his choice of painting materials.

I hope Joel's article will be seen by lots of people, and that our trade can mature.
How to Install VnStat and VnStati to Monitor Network Traffic in RHEL/CentOS 7
Sounds interesting ! And quite funny since I was looking for something similar last week (and didn't find anything really fitting what I want).

A couple of questions :

- do you have any kind of versioning/revision history ? Especially on the individuals "facts"

- do you have a search function ? How does it work ?

- Any kind of tagging system apart from the color code ?

- any way to export the raw data ?

- any plan of an API otherwise ?

- like other have mentioned, it's a bit of a touchy area, I'm fine with hosting it if it means I can access it from anywhere and I know my data is not sold some way or some other, but my 3nd point would be at least one thing to worry less if it would ever go down. Which leads me on my last point : What's your business model ?

PS: Anyone else @HN that knows of something similar ? (apart from evernote)

Edited for styling