skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hard problems are great because once you solve them, you get to solve even more challenging things as a result. I (with a small and great group of people) build a lot of physical things that are meant to look deceptively simple through various means, mostly being the disappearance of artefact of support. This leads to a lot of great design, engineering, documentation, and procurement logistic challenges. Past: wrapping a building in custom made chain-mail and need it to a) fit like a glove, b) not fall off, and c) not cause us to go broke. Current: 18,000m2 (196k SF) of entirely custom, double curved aluminium panels. The unique part count is currently hovering around 1,000,000 distinct components that all need to end up on a piece of paper (the building industry is big, slow, and strange).
Who need "developers" of this kind, who are unwilling to learn something as small as a language? And they won't be able to transfer any other knowledge from their realm of web browsers into embedded, besides this thin language layer. So, what's the point, again? I cannot see a single rational reason.
A couple of ideas that don't exactly fit your question but might be relevant to others in a similar position:

- You could buy a more portable laptop that you wouldn't mind carrying around, for example the new Macbook Retina or an MS Surface.

- Even a poor Internet connection might still be good enough for command-line work, and you can get a lot done on the command line. I've had great success keeping all my code and data on a central server, and editing code either directly in command-line Emacs via mosh (https://mosh.mit.edu) or in a local Emacs instance using tramp (http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/) to save changes directly to the server. This has the advantage that I can start long-running jobs that persist on the server even as I'm moving between locations. For data science work, iPython notebook is also very easy to set up for remote web access.
The difference in measure thrust is due to different test articles and testing done in different labs. The 720 mN result was from China and they dumped a ton of energy into it. The smaller 20 μN result was from NASA's testing which used far less power, so the resulting thrust measure was also smaller.
Yes, working smart not hard.

The value of going home on time each night, because there is a wealth of google searches to expose and workaround known bugs should never be underestimates.
This particular field is ages old, with tons of accumulated domain lore.
No it is because the Chinese test dumped kilowatts of energy into the test item but the NASA test used only miniscule power. The guy you replied to presented the facts in a misleading way.
Deploy on CoreOS maybe.
Small Market First Strategy
A "Mysql success specialist"* called me at work last week to see if there was any money to be made of us.
I told her that Oracle had such a bad reputation that I would not touch their products even if they were offered for free (sadly we still have 2 legacy Oracle databases we have to put up with).
This article reinforces my conviction that Oracle should be avoided at all cost.
The worst for them is that it's not the quality of their products that suck, it's their salesmanship tactics !

* I kid you not, that is her title !
The problem with targeting Debian Stable + Backports is that your packages are going to perpetually out of date unless you go to the trouble of packaging up your dependencies as .debs and running your own apt server. Targeting Debian stable is fine if you can get away with using three year old libraries. But for a lot of languages, like Python, 3 year old libraries are at a significant feature disadvantage when compared to their current counterparts.
FYI Steam also has a mobile authenticator as part of the Steam app now; I remember seeing a banner for it pop up in Steam news not too long ago:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8625-WRA...
We were working on a compiler for a language developed in-house.

I agree -- different kinds of programming impose very different demands.
I'm an Israeli with roots in Iraq. I would love to help, but don't know how... How do International donations work?

Also, don't know if its relevant, there are a lot of persian jews here in Israel, I'm sure many of them are suitable candidates.
Half a dozen possibilities in automating asset management
Oh! This is one of my favorite questions about scientific progress.

People seem to regard scientific progress as this kind of wave function, where some theory comes along and then some other theory or discovery disproves the previous one and so on and so forth.

But if you want to think of scientific progress that way, then you have to think of it as a dampened sine wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damped_sine_wave) -- that is, discoveries and theories tend to refine previous discoveries and theories, and scientific progress over the millenia has been rapidly zeroing in on the truths of our reality.

What is left at this point is mostly things at very large scales -- cosmological stuff like dark matter, dark energy -- and very small scales -- stuff like sub-subatomic particles and the Higgs boson and the nature of mass and so on -- and very complex things like biology and climate science.

What isn't left at this point is a revision of the laws of conservation. It is exceedingly unlikely that anything will be discovered at any point in the future which will do anything other than add perhaps the very smallest of exceptions to those laws, and even then, I doubt very much that will happen.

So, essentially, the age of physics discoveries in garages is mostly over. There will be many more discoveries in physics, but they now require the collective efforts of entire nations.
I wonder, how was the "i" cut in lead with the dot being off-center? Wouldn't this cause the letter to be unusually wide? Or was it cut as some kind of ligature, which I find hard to imagine.

Addendum: there is a picture of an "i" at http://www.typespec.co.uk/recovering-the-doves-type/. The "i" is cut with the dot at the right edge of the metal plate that holds it
Maybe a starting point is to consider a hologram to be a "display", like being on television.
This is not the most difficult bug I've ever encountered, but it is definitely one of the most interesting bugs.

I had encountered some seriously incorrect outputs from the application server. The output in question was a function of internal states and current time (rounded to hours, it was kind of "hourly" display). The application server was set to log many input/output pairs so I was able to identify non-trivial amount of such errors, but I was unable to determine the cause. Common causes like memory corruption, time zones (as the business logic heavily depended on the local time), NTP synchronization and even the interpreter bug were considered and then rejected. Finally, after two weeks or some, I tried to simulate the function with varying current time and fixed internal states, and surprisingly a portion (but not all) of output from the past matched to the observed output!

It turned out that glibc `localtime` can misbehave in the way that it ignores the local timezone when it was unable to read `/etc/localtime`, and the Linux box the server was in had some issue on reading that (I never had fully identified it, this read was probably the only disk I/O from that server anyway). In lieu of this finding I have exhaustively and posthumously inspected the past logs; it was determined that the gross error rate was in the order of 10^-4 (!), and the way `localtime` used meant that the error can only alter a portion of the output. Studying the glibc code revealed that setting `TZ` environment variable would disable the UTC fallback, so I did so and the error was gone.

Lesson: Learn your moving parts, even if you don't know them in advance.
A GPU-optimized bruteforce for TrueCrypt volume: https://github.com/lvaccaro/truecrack . I have extract the chiper algorithms and build a parallel version of them on Cuda tecnology. When I started the project in 2011, the gpu world was not so kindly as now.
This means that the latin character width is roughly half of character height, so "full-width" square CJK ideographs fits exactly as the width of two "half-width" latin characters.

(Wider monospace fonts would typically require extra character spacing between CJK ideographs.)

Ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/clreq/#basic_features_of_chinese_script ("squares with the ratio of 1:1, and are seamlessly arranged with one another.")
You're right. But this was in an area where there were no staff. One reason I quit was we couldn't even get someone to repair PCs in so I ended up having to do it.
Conversation of momentum is strongly tied to the conservation of energy through relativity theory. If it actually works (I doubt it) it has really strong implications.
I was listing Javascript interpreters with a small resource footprint; how does Picobit fit in?
They are doing stuff like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9952356
I personally can't wait for 1) OSes that can move seamlessly from phone UI to full desktop UI depending on the size of connected screens, and 2) hardware that can handle heavy dev work (multiple VMs, lots of random I/O) that fits in a smartphone form factor and power envelope.

Then sync would no longer be necessary because all you would ever need to use is that 1 unified device.

Until then, I use network shares on a cloud server through VPN for media, and Git and Vagrant/Docker for dev stuff.
Mine is more a social solution than a tech one. Hope that counts here!

Years ago I came up with a simple equation for determining priority of software engineering bug fixes and small features:

Priority = (Benefit the feature provides to the product) / (Time to complete the feature)

where benefit is defined by the business side using any scale (say 1-100), and time to complete is defined by the assigned software engineer using any unit (perhaps man-hours). Regardless of what range the numbers fall in, 0 to 1 or 0 to 42, you end up with an ordered list of tasks which equally value business value alongside engineering time.

I came up with this while working at a medium sized company. I was frequently tasked with too many things to do. Despite tasks being organized in a Redmine-like tool, the implementation was still done in random order because nobody could define priority. This led to much miscommunication about what I was working on in the recent past and future. I used the equation to better communicate my activity and future plans with the business side. Given an ordered list of tasks from this equation, anyone could see clearly what was being worked on next.

The business side resisted attaching a numeric benefit to the features, presumably because that's hard. But it's equally hard to define the time to complete a software engineering task, and I eventually convinced them we needed to at least try to be scientific about both.

n.b.: I used this while working on a mature system. For a newer project or for tasks with more dependencies, it's probably still complicated to define priority. In the setting I was in, it worked great.

My boss's boss however thought it was condescending and nobody aside from myself ever made use of it. I hope to make use of it again one day, but after one bad experience with a medium sized company, I've stuck with smaller places where this is not as necessary.
Asustek CFO rumor to die of suicide on 7/23
Uber Wins a Battle with New York, Now It’s War
This was a very thoughful article. I agree it is very unlikely (at least up till now) to find another habitable planet like ours. I watched an interesting documentary that stated that another reason earth is habitable due to Jupiter, whose powerful gravitational forces keeps large astroids and comets from reaching earth. And the possibility of having another planet like ours would likely need a planet like Jupiter to protect it.
And inspite of movies/scifi on visions of earthlings colonizing other planets and galaxies, with the current scope of our environment, I highly doubt that it would occur unless we change our current ways ...
> anit-patterns can be learned

a spell checker didn't save you from a typo. not nitpicking, just using this example to illustrate a point: for an app to be secure, developers have to be 100% of the time on ball, while an attacker just has to be lucky once.

the weight is so much in favor of attacker than only few of the biggest can afford to pay for a competitive level of security, it being a race: security is effective not when perfect, but when it costs more to attack a site than what you'd gain of it.
Just to clarify the "gets automatically killed after 30 minutes (and restarted when needed)" that's 30 minutes of inactivity, and gets restarted when a new request comes in.

> First, an Ephemeric application is "paused" after 30 minutes of inactivity. It means that the Pharo Image is stopped and all the associated resources are removed from the memory. Ephemeric Cloud is designed specially for web solutions hence by "inactivity" it is meant no HTTP requests sent to the Ephemeric. The system automatically starts the Epehemric application upon the next request so for the user it looks like it was never off.

https://www.pharocloud.com/kb/tutorial/ephemerics-introducti...
Debian stable includes pip and virtualenv. If you want to manage your python dependencies for yourself that road is definitely open to you.
> The only serious IDE is Windows-specific, starts at $600 for the typical company (with advanced editions costing more than a small car)... and THEN you need to pay $200 more for a JetBrains add-on called ReSharper

This is completely ludicrous to me. Is it really that much better than just using emacs, vim, sublime text etc? I've written thousands upon thousands of lines of code with just a text editor (for which I've paid either nothing or very little) and my code runs just as well. It's just text at the end of the day, after all, and most of these editors can give you syntax highlighting, tab completion, linting, etc. For complex build procedures, there's make or any number of other free options. What exactly does one gain from these IDEs that can justify these kinds of price tags?
I have an X1 Carbon thinkpad. It's not a problem at all to carry around---very light and thin. I have separate mouse+monitor setups in different places (e.g. office, home). So I just plug it in wherever I am. I keep the monitor and mouse plugs right there on the desk(s), so it takes two seconds to plug them in.

I even have mulitple separate power adapters. I have one in my kitchen and another in my bedroom, for instance. They are literally 15 feet away. Totally worth the $70 or whatever since I can easily move back and forth multiple times a day.

Carrying around and dealing with a power adapter is 60 to 70% of the hassle of carrying a laptop and that can mostly be eliminated.

Oh, I also have a separate pair of headphones in each location AND one that always stays in my bookbag.
I'd love to see new physics! Every physicist I know loves new physics.

But if you claim to violate the conversation of momentum, everyone is going to be skeptical and not believe it. We have hundreds of years of experiments and observations that support the law and have looked in many places from small to large and not seen violations. This is what makes people not believe it and thus physicists are going to assume you are wrong and not physics. It's not so much a negative concern, but more of a practical one. But should it be tested in a rigorous manner and reproduced, then physicists will believe it. It's just it hasn't and thus we are going to stick with the established very well understood and tested theory. Like are you sure you have properly counted all the initial momentum? Are you 100% you are not introducing energy to the system? The possible explanations is long and a good experiment will eliminate as many of these as possible.

As an example, look at the OPERA experiment which found to have superluminal signals. New physics? Nope, just a faulty piece of equipment. BICEP showing gravitational waves? Nope, just poor data interpretation and neglecting interstellar dust. So if you want to claim new physics, be damned sure you have ironclad proof.
Desktop Unix has not arrived
There's a service called Detectify that might fit the bill. https://detectify.com
The video is really amazing. But try to remove the HD quality! ehhh.. what?! it becames one of the ugliest video I've never seen.
Setting up an IPSec VPN from a Linux server to Amazon VPC and running data over it. There was a host of documentation on how to do similar things with the appropriate tools, but as always, it was document A with 40% of the puzzle, document B with a non-overlapping 30% of the puzzle, and document C with an overlapping 40% of the puzzle… at which point I realized that all three documents were using different approaches/conventions/etc.

Documentation for the tools available seemed to varyingly assume that you either a) understood IPSec well enough and only needed to know how to use this one tool, or b) knew everything you needed to know, minus a few hints on the syntax of individual files.

Eventually I got everything working, but performance was abysmal. Sometimes. Sometimes SSH sessions opened instantly. Sometimes they opened slowly but then worked fine afterwards. Some tools were awful and others worked okay.

Eventually I realized that the IPSec configuration set up two tunnels to Amazon, but only set up actual routing (defining endpoints) for one of them. Thus Amazon was load-balancing packets over both tunnels and my Linux implementation was dropping 50% of packets. For established TCP connections this was fine because we had basically zero latency to VPC so retransmits (for what we were doing) were almost free since they would be discovered when the next packet arrived successfully, but for SYN/ACK packets a drop would result in an annoying wait.

Unfortunately, the tools don't allow you to define redundant/overlapping routes, so I couldn't set up two tunnels; I had to just configure one tunnel and leave the other one down so AWS wouldn't try to send data over it, and then just hope that that endpoint didn't go down at an inopportune time before I'd either set up some kind of load balancing scenario on my internal network (internal BGP maybe? ugh!) or given up entirely on the project.

After weeks of working on this specific task (the VPN setup) and making literally zero progress some days, googling for literal hours with no useful results, and trying various permutations, when I got it working I felt like I was the only person on the planet who'd ever done this before, since I was pretty sure that no one on the internet had ever written about it at least.

Even though the project was ultimately scrapped, I still feel like I learned a lot, and maybe I should feel like it was wasted time, but it also felt like quite an achievement to succeed.
I like to hope that a couple of the massive companies that have run against these kinds of legal problems have gone ahead and secretly ripped everything anyways, and sent it off to a secret Foundation, to weather the onset of our new intellectual property dark ages...
When you say "out of date", you probably mean feature wise, not security and stability wise? For me that is an acceptable tradeoff for most of the packages. Most of the stuff doesn't evolve at such pace that I should have the latest and greatest (I am talking about core libs and similar). And the packages where I miss some new functionality, I can just upgrade them manually. Take Firefox for instance - if you don't like/trust Iceweasel, you can just install FF to /opt/ and trust Mozilla for upgrades. For me this is win-win situation. You have a stable and secure foundation and you put bleeding edge stuff on it when you need it.
Qualcomm lays off 15% of its workforce, succumbs to cult of shareholder value
We deploy from git via "git archive". Wastes a bit of space, but there's no extra resources on the server.
"...for it to have occurred so long ago in a time that was far less friendly to women, she must have been extremely talented – and persistent – and her father must have been incredibly ahead of his time, or desperate to keep the family tradition alive and lucky she was good at it."

As oppressive ancient society could be to female ambition, I doubt father-daughter relations was subdued to such an extent all fathers would be deliberately unfriendly to his daughter. I don't like how this article make it seem like almost all women are unhappy slaves in ancient Arabia.
Not the most difficult but one of the most interesting in my professional software career: I implemented a consistent eventing model between WebGL and DOM. As a contributor to Famous' 3D engine, I wanted to have a similar eventing system between WebGL and DOM elements (element.on('click', 'scroll', etc.). I decided to use a "picking" model and encode geometry IDs in base 255 (4+ billion IDs) into the color buffer and provide a consistent API for both the DOM and WebGL renderer.
History of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable and Undersea Communications
Not an E/R diagram, but to generate table diagrams that you can navigate (in HTML), SchemaSpy (http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/) is really good.
As opposed to what? Every server between the website's SMTP server and your email provider's SMTP server can see the password reset link?
How do you not bundle in dependencies when coding in, say, Java ? The Java packages on Debian are for the most part outdated. It's way more practical to just use Maven, build a fat jar and be done with it.
I saw the play too. It sounds like the version you saw didn't have the story about Bob in it? That was, like, a tale of instant miraculous redemption through a male-female sexual relationship. And what about the relationship between the coochie-snorcher girl and her father, who shot to death his friend who was raping her? (Maybe you meant "sexual relationship" where you wrote "relationship", which would exclude that one.) And I'm pretty sure in the "If your vagina could talk, what would it say?" part, there were a lot of women speaking positively about male-female sexual relationships.

I didn't think it was too unbalanced, but of course I'm a pretty committed feminist, which is why I saw the play in the first place, back in 2000.
I'm missing something here... How does "user@real.com;attacker@evil.com" validate as "user@real.com"? Is this a regexp vs strcmp() issue or is there something more subtle at play?
CokeSpeak
Did Steam just go down? Maybe from the load that Hacker News is generating?

https://isitup.org/store.steampowered.com

store.steampowered.com seems to be down!
so, the author has a problem with one particular FreeBSD update and thereby condemns Linux and all other desktop UNIX variants/descendants by extension?

Seriously?
I coded the same thing (actually an online magazine with comments on articles, a forum, and a form for signing up for email updates), around the same time. I used classic ASP. I shudder to think of all the security holes I must have had.
Load Data from Database Without Page Refresh Using Ajax and JQuery
I can't fathom how one can drink 2 gallons of water in 24h (provided one doesn't live in a desert area).

The recommended quantity is 2 liters per day which is about half a gallon. many people don't drink that much. OK they are not athletes but still.