skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I understand the impulse, IMO these people have learned the wrong lesson. The correct takeaway is not some anarchic version of "maximalist liberty above all else," but rather "correct" rule of law.

In many of the examples you list, there is either an absence of liberal constitutional authority, or corruption of it. The path to the holocaust was paved by the dismantlement of liberal democracy and democratic safeguards. Slavery and subsequent civil rights abuses in the US were made possible by either punching holes in the legal order (3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, etc), ignoring it entirely, or perpetrating the abuses in secret.

To me, then, tyranny and injustice can be forestalled not by tearing down the power of the state and creating chaotic power vacuums, but by vigorously defending transparency, an independent judiciary, an independent press, and all the other legs on which the liberal order stands.
But even if they did all the look the same, how would that be negative?

How terrible would it be if all your desktop apps had completely different UI components? Indeed, people seem to greatly prefer desktop apps that follow the style and UI conventions of their OS.

So if the Internet were largely made of pages powered by a few popular UI frameworks, I really think it would be a huge boon to users everywhere. UIs would be more familiar and consistent. Seems like a great step forward.
So-o-o...comfort women?
It's a bit sad (and an indictment to "modern" languages) that option 5 "Conditions" (resumable/non-unwinding exceptions) is not mentioned.
Original is here: https://www.facebook.com/trendinginchina/posts/6034617964239...
> what articles about the Virtual Boy never seem to mention is that the games were dull and boring.

This article does mention that though. There's quite a few paragraphs dedicated to discussing how Virtual Boy games were rushed; how Nintendo's IP wasn't fully utilised; and how this console was designed in contrast to the evolving arms race of the colourful high resolution graphics of that era.
I've been doing this since Dropbox 1.0. Haven't had any serious issues since 2.x, and the benefits of having my complete working state available everywhere far outweigh the risks.
The Star Wars API
People are quick to point out the sexism here, but NFL and NBA cheerleaders are totally cool? Those girls literally dance around in mini-skirts and shake their asses. At least these 'cheerleaders' are chatting, serving, and playing games with people. You know, being human.

On another note, this is probably being highly editorialized. Maybe cheerleader isn't the right word and "extra-curricular activity manager" got lost in translation. Throw in a couple of pictures of scantily clad women and hey! look how many clicks we got!
Ok, I'll open the question: What is the effect of a website with 50% cute females on a male programmer? I've always assumed it was supposed to have an effect on me (male), which is has.
Isn't that one of the purposes of an assistant (in addition to offloading tasks that can be offloaded)?
Amazon Releases DynamoDB Storage Back End for Titan
In 2006 I was off work for 6 weeks recovering from an injury. Just before my surgery I learned about the Atari 2600 homebrew scene - and was fascinated by the tricks you had to do to get something game-looking on the screen (I mean, the scanlines on the TV directly map to code cycles: so if you use too many instructions while the beam is in the visible section of the television, the whole game goes skewed!)

My recovery time was completely lost in following the AtariAge forums and tutorials, and I ended up with this "game": https://github.com/mrspeaker/plops - you can test it out by grabbing the .bin file and dropping in the online emulator.

Not the most polished game ever, but was such a learning experience!
Innovating in a Highly Regulated Industry
I think the most significant gain made here is not speed but power consumption. On http://www.dwavesys.com/d-wave-two-system they compare a supercomputer using almost 2 gW while 2X uses 27 kW when you factor in "the fridge". I don't know if that's an apples-2-apples comparison, hoping the supercomputer is set up to solve comparable problems. If I am understanding this properly they have a great product on their hands and a great deal of units to make.
Imagine it's an Instagram link in a tweet or something like that.
I tend to think that the real advantage of big nets is that they're simply compositions of matrix-vector operations (with some component-wise non-linearity tossed in), which allows them to scale more naturally to massive problems on the GPU ... Don't get me wrong - the universal approximation theorem is important - but I think this is just the first property an approximator must have. I would be interested to see if the network model could be shown to be remarkable in some other way.
Very interesting! Nihongo does use spaced repetition, and it looks like there are some similarities and some differences with JLDrill. Here's the overview:

- When you select a deck, you study words 10 at a time in "learn" mode.

-- In "learn" mode, you have to get the flashcard correct 3 times in a row, at which point they are "learned".

- Every day, you'll be given a set of cards you've learned to "review".

- These cards use a form of spaced repetition. In order to make spaced repetition more approachable, I don't use time intervals in the same way apps like Anki do. Instead, each card has a level, and as you progress through the levels, the interval at which they appear increases. Each level takes three steps to get through, each of which has its own interval.

-- Level 1: 1 day, 2 days, 3 days.

-- Level 2: 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks

-- Level 3: 1 month, 2 months, 3 months

-- Level 4: 6 months, 9 months, 1 year

-- Level 5: Never show again

- If you mark a word wrong at Level 1, it drops down to Level 0, where it will keep showing up in that same session periodically until you've marked it correct enough to move it back to Level 1.

- Getting through your daily set of review cards is encouraged as being the most important thing, adding new cards is secondary.

- We don't want to discourage people from coming back, even if they got lazy and stopped studying for a month. So we never build up a huge pile of flashcards for people to review.

Give it a try if you have a chance, and if you have any thoughts/suggestions I'd love to hear them!
Right, my argument is that energy is not the most important difference. It may well be that the recent energy price moves are the thing that finally tipped the scales, but better wages in China as the economy there has expanded (along with soft wage growth in the US) have had a much bigger impact when you look at the last couple of decades.
There are companies that do the legwork for you.
And Not just sine waves.
If combining using harmonics and different amplitudes is allowed, any base shape would suffice.
I've concluded that the best art is free, done by passionate amateurs rather than people looking to make a buck.
You're likening women employed to chat and play games with lonely programmers to women forced into sexual slavery in wartime?
How to Spray Paint 3D Models
It's almost crazy that a seemingly conservative country is embracing human nature and being progressive with it while western companies are struggling to balance diversity and being politically correct at the same time.
Why I cannot say FRP but I just did
1. Fair point, though in actual code at a top level (which the example shown was intended to be - as I'm not advocating one must use exceptions everywhere) there would be a catch( const std::exception& ) so it is not an issue.

2. Indeed you can

what about using other people’s libraries you can’t or don’t want to compile? I do want to compile them, or if I can't then either it is not a problem (at least I never had problems with OS provided APIs and CRTs which would give such problems because they are designed to circumvent it) or I might not want to use the libraries (never occurred to me, maybe I'm lacking experience or the particular applications I wrote just never gave me the chance of having to be in such situation).

Also, what happens with your project code style not really an argument, same can be said for switching to a library which does use exceptions

regarding PS: most of my/our applications have so much logging the lack of execution context is usually not a problem. In addition to that in those rare cases where things go completely berserk on Windows we'd use full minidumps. Not sure if that is what you mean with execution context though as I don't see how logging/sending error details/other things you mention would be handled differently when using exceptions vs error codes.
He cannot go back. Competition will immediately portray him in local press as a clown.
The biggest error the author makes isn't even stated explicitly. It's the underlying assumption that there's no reason not to have the language do this resource management for you. As we all know, however, automatic garbage collection does involve significant performance and predictability tradeoffs. Often, these tradeoffs need to be made differently for different kinds of code. A critique of C's design within its own problem domain (like stonewhite's in this thread) might be valuable, but a whine that treats all programming as the same is almost completely worthless.
Templating is one of the strongest features of D IMO, and the only reason I would ever consider using it over C#.

No decent IDE/debugging story though, so overall C# still wins for me at the moment. Especially for large projects.
I know there was the developer agent idea (agent like an entertainment agent) floating around several years back. But this area really seems like an industry ripe for innovation. Starfighters.io has a take on the security world, but anyone out there looking for a business idea: there seems to be a large group of talented engineers out there who are being passed over by HR systems today.
What if exactly 14 zombies were coming from both sides?
Food for thought:

Why is it OK for female cheerleaders to be used in male sports events whether amateur or pro (It's worth mentioning that this is chiefly a North American phenomenon) and all hell breaks loose when they're employed in other professional workplaces to perform the same duties?

It's disappointing to see a lot of smart and good people who are tolerant and open-minded in general engaging in moral absolutism when the issue at hand involves people of different cultural or linguistic backgrounds that are different from the prevalent mores and code of ethics in the Anglophone world.

It just shows how culture is so ingrained in people's brains even the smartest ones to the point that it blinds them to take note of similar 'faults' resting within.
It looks like a weekend project but isn't. Scaling it up took Twitter a long time. Showing your feed is a very expensive operation (there are users with a large number of followers and users who follow many others) and syndication and clients amplify the number of operations.

Source: I was one of the developers of Jaiku, which had a very similar model.
It may be isomorphic to exception handling, but it promotes a meaningfully-different human style. The exception-based isomorphism to the usual returned-error handling style would look something like:

try:
a_single_statement_here()
except:
if exception.type == "A":
#yada yada
elsif exception.type == "B":
#yada yada
else:
raise

Exceptions by contrast encourage putting a lot of statements together, and much less frequently checking for what the exception may be, and capturing fewer of them. The code snippet above is bad exception style because you shouldn't be putting a try around every statement like that.

Exceptions expressed in the error handling modality probably look something more like:

val, err = func()
goto EXCEPTION if err
nextval, err = func2(val)
goto EXCEPTION if err
# etc etc, for the whole "try" block

return goodval

EXCEPTION: {
if err.type == "A" { ... }
if err.type == "B" { ... }
return err
}

which is, intriguingly, also very bad style for an error-returning language; the EXCEPTION block must be written excessively generically, when in fact the error handling may in fact care about the difference between whether the error came from func or func2, and may even want to take different actions (especially w.r.t. retrying). You can of course write those different actions into an exception block, but the style discourages that... your code starts to look messier (as nice as exceptions can be, they're syntactically pretty heavy, and also difficult to factor out the way that error-return handling can be factored out with monads and such (albeit not in Go so much)), it takes more work, so you're less inclined to do it.

It remains unclear to me what "the best" is. Error-returning code is, both in theory and in my practice, more correct, in terms of the programming style it affords; it turns out that in ways you won't see if you've only ever done exceptions-based code that your exception handlers are often incorrect, overly generic, and missing opportunities to intelligently handle bugs. The flip side is that all that extra handling is of course expensive, and it's not 100% clear that it's worth the expense, and exception code, while IMHO clearly generally less correct in both theory and practice, is equally clearly often "good enough".

I find myself wondering if some of the divisions of opinion come from different environments. In a conventional GUI program, I favor the exceptions; frankly so much stuff can go wrong that an enumeration of all possible failures is very difficult to produce, and your answer to almost all of them is likely to be identical ("scream an error to the user and hope they can fix it"). In a network server, I heavily favor the error returning paradigm; in my mature Go codebases that are network servers, I took a survey once and about 1/3rd of the lines that received an error immediately did something with them, other than simply passing them up the stack. Converting that to exceptions would actually lengthen the program and be a royal pain to deal with going forward.
They should try to ban it, just so they can really see how much stuff depends on it and how vague 'Banned Encryption' is.
Yeah, unfortunately it's all built very iOS-specific. And since this is a side-project for me, I'm not sure I'll find the time to make an Android version anytime soon. If I ever have the time/resources, it's something I'd love to do!
Docker is the opposite of reproducible. The idea is that you (as a user) have a known tested good image you can re-use it easily without having to worry about reproducibility (which is the responsibility of the other side - whoever is producing the images).

If you could reproduce that environment easily and instantly, you wouldn't need Docker since you'd just reproduce it every time.
Along those lines: http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigsli...
Out of interest, how many people here actually use async methods? Excluding being forced to by a library.

They haven't revolutionized my code at all. I can't decide if I'm too stupid to realize when to use them, or if they're really just a bit useless for most normal code. I can see the point to it, it's just that most of the time I'd consider using it, it just isn't worth the extra effort. Usually seems to be a premature optimization.

Lambda expressions, now they revolutionized my code completely.
I think it could be better worded as "Please stop being so bloody stupid"
A more human mode of rubber-duck debugging. Might have a detrimental effect on office politics if these cheerleaders are not changed out regularly.

They might even become programmers themselves, after absorbing a lot of experience with many programmers' trains of thought.
Nerds, You're challenged (10sec. Video)
Guile: Types and the Web
More AWS specifics here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

...and GitHub hosted backends:
https://github.com/awslabs/dynamodb-titan-storage-backend
ESCAPE TO THE WOODS
To be fair, mild sexism would seems pretty low on the priority list of employee treatment issues in China.
By the time Alex leaves for space he is not unwitting, he has accepted that the bad guys that followed the good guy recruiter will try to kill him and his family regardless of the choice he makes.
Looks promising, thanks. I initially tried with iCloud syncing, and it was a mess.
Urinal protocol vulnerability
The Robot Kids Are All Right
PovRay allows you to do animation too.
How the F.B.I. Made 'Winners Don't Use Drugs' the Arcade Motto of the '90s
Here's another implementation of a table that can handle a large amount of rows: http://jarwol.com/aTable. I created it a few years ago as a need for another side project I was doing.
The "The Next Generation Query Planner" (NGQP) document https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner-ng.html linked to from this document makes for very interesting reading.

In some cases upgrading from the pre-3.8.0 legacy query planner and to the NGQP in 3.8.0 may cause a serious performance regression. Running ANALYSE on your DB should fix that.

Apart from that the Stability Guarantee sounds, I don't know, obvious? Repeatability and predictability under more or less the same conditions should be a given I would have thought. In the DB world this must not necessarily be the case?
Something Deep Inside Pluto Is Replenishing Its Atmosphere
That is not true. People who are for drug prohibition simply aren't as loud as those against.
So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a problem with.

What people are missing is that average and below average students are challenged in school from day one. And, in being challenged, they learn to stretch and to work harder to learn the material.

So often, gifted programs do not exist in very early elementary school. Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. They learn that tests and homework are a joke. So, when the day comes that things aren't quite as easy, they don't have the necessary skills to help them level up.

Every kid deserves to be challenged and to be taught to do their very best. Sadly, in the United States, that didn't happen - even before the stupid No Child Left Behind rules kicked in.
I listen to podcasts or lectures. If I want to stay awake to hear the whole thing, I almost certainly won't.
Anyone know of new, 201*, awesome examples of PovRay usage out on the Internet?
Apart Netherlands I don't know any other country that legalized drugs.

The Netherlands hasn't legalized anything. They haven't even decriminalized anything, AFAIK. They just voluntarily choose not to enforce against cannabis being traded and consumed, provided coffeeshops and the like remain discreet.

Portugal decriminalized plenty of drugs with set possession limits. Oddly, possessing cannabis seeds remains illegal.

Spain also tolerates private drug consumption and even lets grow shops which sell cannabis seeds to exist.

Several other European countries either have decriminalization of private consumption, as well. I think Sweden is in there, too.
The Future of Developing Firefox Add-Ons
Show HN: Star Crazy for Android
as if 35 is old or something?
Honestly. I'd like to see them try to ban it. They'll see their entire internet economy crash and hell will break loose. People getting pissed why they can't login to gmail or facebook or paypal or do any online shopping. It's such an entirely ridiculous idea that i can't even describe it in words.

Okay to be honest I haven't really read into the material. but is their actual plan to "ban" encryption? Or do they want to license it to certain parties? Or have a weakened "export" encryption scheme like the US government tried? What's the plan?
GCC is moving to git
Most users don't use on-page find though. Facebook use this "lazy-load, eager-unload" for their news feed. It's a bit annoying, but obviously the alternative is your browser screeching to a halt.
Hi HN! This is my first Android game and I am very keen to get some feedback from you guys. It is an early release, but I have found that early releases are great for gathering feedback and progressing the product for the better.

I appreciate this game will not be for everyone, but constructive criticism is highly welcomed.

Thanks!
I agree with you. But I would say that if a client is cancelling, it is fair to try and ask them why they didn't want to use the app. This helps improve the product and for a small SAAS, this kind of feedback is golden.

Here is what we do usually. If a client asks to cancel, we will send them a confirmation email saying that account is cancelled but if there is any feedback they can give to help us improve, we will appreciate that. Almost 90% of the time, clients do give feedback when we do this. But thats all. No more second email or a barrage of newsletter emails.
>you have a test plan (and comprehensive test suite) that guarantees correctness and performance.

I value the work you do, but please don't imply that tests can guarantee correctness. Tests can never prove the absence of bugs! To guarantee correctness we need to treat programs as mathematical objects.
Financial trading applications often need big grids of data - take a look at openfin...
Not sure if that petition will be valid, because it is encrypted... ;)
Google establishes umbrella company Alphabet
As the author of a Scheme "FRP" system for a game engine, I'm sympathetic to Conal's desires to stick to the original definition, but at the same time I think Elm, Rx, Bacon, etc. are all FRP systems.

How about we distinguish between continuous vs. discrete systems? Conal uses Continuous Functional Reactive Programming, and the rest of us use Discrete Functional Reactive Programming. I have a feeling that this distinction won't be enough for some.
I don't think anyone is dumb enough to actually prevent the electorate logging into facebook.

I expect the language to be broad and the enforcement narrow.
Well, I think it probably depends on the demographic and/or how many friends you have. I would imagine the younger ones hate it but older professional types who don't log on as much appreciate it. And likewise the larger the size of your network the more you might appreciate it, but who knows...
C++: Deleting destructors and virtual operator delete
> getting the plan wrong can be the difference between the query finishing and the query not finishing

But that's exactly the point. If the SQLite got the plan right at first, you know it will always "get it right" in the future, i.e. the query will finish. Maybe it'll go from being optimal to somewhat less optimal, but it'll still be fine -- or at worst you'll see a very, very gradual slowdown (as your tables grow) that you'll have time to investigate later.

With MySQL or Postgres, that can suddenly change and go from, in your example, the query finishing, to the query not finishing, because the database suddenly chooses to use a different plan. That can be a catastrophic production failure, when a query that used to run in 10ms now takes 10s.