skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go read one of Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++" books. Okay, just read the first one. If you don't close the book and reflect, "I am never writing this shit," Herb didn't do his job.

Writing exception-safe code in C++ is very hard.

Depending on another module's authors to get their C++ exception handling right is the road to madness.

In the example above, the FAILED clauses clearly handle all the failures. In the exception handling example it is not clear if all the failures are caught, or if they are more that are meant to be caught at higher levels, or perhaps exceptions were forgotten. It becomes very difficult to reason about control flow because exceptions distribute it across the program and over time. Someone might add another exception: Oops, you didn't handle FileNotFoundException and your program bombs. You add a new exception that seems reasonable, but you wind up changing a hundred places in your source code (... and your callers! hope you have good customer support).

Exceptions are exceptional, they should not be used to return indications of failure. Exceptions should be used when it's lights-out important that something Really Bad be handled or the program will be killed. Most C++ systems I've worked with catch an exception near the top, do some diagnostics, and either tell the use "wups" or attempt to restart.

A "FileNotFound" exception from an open() function is just colossally stupid. I don't have a nicer way of saying that. If I saw code with this pattern in a project that I was on, I would remove it and make sure it didn't happen again.
Debian wasn't built with reproducibility in mind, whilst NixOS was. "Backporting" features to existing systems is monotonically harder than building a new system with that feature, since we have more constraints.

Even if, hypothetically, it were trivial for NixOS to obtain perfect reproducibility, that doesn't necessarily help with making Debian reproducible in a backwards-compatible way.
That's pretty cool, and I especially like the name!
Is hands-free cell phone use really safer for driving? We asked MythBusters
No, it's typically not. I was thinking more along the lines of the comment mentioning the periodic slapping.
Neat. Anyone else at HN did something like this? Mine is at https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster (configs and some utilities included)
Yeah, it's definitely a weakness in Nihongo. I'd love to have a really well-integrated Japanese-Japanese dictionary, but I've never been able to find a J-J open-source database like JMDict/EDict. My solution for now is that you can tap on the menu button in the top-right of any entry, and open it in the built-in iPhone dictionary, which includes a J-J dictionary. But that's not a very satisfying answer.
Some people in Britain will always be more equal than the others.
They're not going to ban encryption. Seriously. Stop wasting time on misquotes taken out of context blown up by The Guardian. There's more important things to worry about.
I'm not sure we've really got enough info to decide whether this really is demeaning. It certainly could be, and the short skirt and high heels do give that impression, but I can also see how this could be positive and respectful, and the skirt and heels might just be her personal dress choice in an environment that doesn't stick to a formal office dress code.

I'm not saying it's not demeaning and gross; it certainly could be. But all we have is a handful of photos and we really don't know much. I like focusing on the positive and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Too often we judge each other on incomplete information.

But there's absolutely reason for caution here; it could get really creepy.
ok, now we need spotify to make a move
Spotify's new privacy policy angers users
Narzędzia dla webdesignerów
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't reproducible builds eventually cut down on the work of package maintainers for Linux distros? Looking from my outside perspective, once you get the packages building reproducibly the work to maintain them is reduced (especially if you can pass the responsibility for packaging to the developer). Couple that with a build-time test suite and the work becomes even less of a burden.

I hope this is the case, as I believe that one thing that holds Linux/BSD back from further refinement is the workload involved to maintain packages.
Benefits of Buying Buddhist Arts
New Spotify privacy policy wants access to your photos
I wish they would just go ahead and ban it outright today, and in my naive imagination the whole country would plunge into disaster. Airliner crashes, car crashes, market crashes, the whole lot.

Unfortunately, selective enforcement of this ban will quickly turn it into a tool of tyranny, same as any other.

(Yeah I have a site that doesn't display that stupid cookie notice, but it doesn't matter because I haven't pissed off anybody powerful yet.)
Cool. Now if only Amazon would eat its own dogfood. Their Prime Music/Cloud library music player still requires Flash in order to use.
ext4 has it's place - and deservedly so. But picking the right file system really depends on your requirements. For example if you're building a storage server then ZFS would be a better fit.

XFS is also worth taking notice of since the benchmarks I've read rate it for having faster read and write speeds than ext4. However I don't have extensive first hand experience running XFS (something which I'm currently addressing).
Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the...
I have no children, but those studies always seem to focus on parents who are, at that moment, raising small children. They are asked at the most stressful point in the process if they are happy, of course they'll say no. These studies need to amortize happiness levels over a number of points in the childs life: birth, a few intervals likke 2/5/10/15, and once the child has moved on and left their house.
An architecture for complex Node.js applications
With IBM's developers no longer working on OpenOffice, the contention by many is that AOO development is all but dead due to the fact that there aren't enough active development hours going into the project to even maintain the existing codebase (fix high-level crash bugs and critical security issues) let alone make progress on any new features or standard bug fixes. The extremely low volume of commits in AOO seems to match up with that contention. The comparison to LibreOffice is relevant as it is a comparison of a healthy open source project with multiple contributors to one which is said to be dying. LibreOffice has more commits on an average weekday than AOO has had in all of 2015.
The point of this petition, even though it looks at first blush to be taking down a straw man, is to send a shot across the bow.
Less Liking, More Doing
Go lock-free values with atomic.Value
Sorry, it's all closed source right now. There are pieces of it I might release as open-source at some point though.

As for Android and Windows, I just don't have the time unfortunately. This is a solo side-project for me. But if I ever find the time/resources, I'd love to port it to other platforms.
I never said you had to deeply understand your tool-chain ... the use of Photoshop isn't at all relevant (though understanding the produced image format might be). PostgreSQL on the other hand becomes a lot more powerful the more you learn about how it works "beneath the covers". Of course there are limits ... I knew the timing of my microcontroller's signals but ignored details of the physics behind the microcontroller's implementation.

The first computer I built was a COSMAC Elf (based on an RCA 1802 microprocessor) - I didn't have billions of cycles so there was a limit to the work I could do. Now I do have billions of cycles and do my best to make sure there's a linear increase in the amount of work I can do.

<old-guy-voice>In the old days, we spent large amounts of time reading data-sheets, specifications and application notes - probably more than we spent writing software. What you're implying is that you're too impatient to do engineering but you're willing to be a programmer (or hacker).</old-guy-voice>

So I agree with the premise that we should be producing smaller, faster and less buggy software than we are. I don't think we need everything related to our systems - I certainly used ICE when available to avoid the code/burn/test cycle required using EPROMs.

There is (of course) a finite limit to what we can learn, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't want to know everything. One important skill is being able to discern what you need to know, what you need to understand and what you can safely ignore - this is hard. Knowing is also a choice. I can learn more than most because I don't watch TV or spend inordinate amounts of time wasting elsewhere (I have a few vices like HN).
First off, China has been getting more and more expensive over the years as their labor costs rose and other developing countries started playing the same game. Even Chinese companies outsource to Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc.

Second, China's bigger problem is that they lack sex, and that's not just a dig at the one child policy. Sure, they have some lovely trains and airports, but nobody says "I buy Vietnamese so someday I can buy Chinese." They say "I buy Chinese so someday I can buy German."

China is simply not an aspirational brand. They have plenty of businesses that mirror the West (Weibo for Twitter, Renren for Facebook, etc) which are highly popular among Chinese (because the government often gives them no other choice), but are little more than an eye-roll outside the Middle Kingdom.

Classic middle income trap scenario: too rich to compete by making things cheap, too lame to compete on the high end. I would be interested in hearing a rebuttal, but so far I have been unable to find one, on HN or otherwise.

Edit: Downvoting without giving an explanation doesn't count as a rebuttal. In fact I'm not entirely sure what effect it is supposed to have, aside from making you feel less insecure about your own opinions ;)
It isn't the end of the world in .Net but it will be the difference between a server handling fewer than 10K simultaneous requests and over 100K on modern hardware.

In general, as much as possible service could should be async... That said, a lot of code isn't. The breakup of the request pipeline and thread pooling in ASP.Net make it slightly less necessary, as it's still very efficient.

That said, you should probably introduce it using Parallel Linq as much as possible, and/or when you need to consume multiple resources in a given request.

If you're writing stand alone applications, and already using threads/thread pools, then it's probably less of an impact. If you're writing server/service applications then it does make a difference in terms of scalability.
It's much more effective to let readers draw their own conclusions than to spell it out.
An important fact to keep in mind whenever PISA scores come up is that the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf (over 20%, versus under 5% for Finland or under 10% for Germany). If we adjusted PISA scores to reflect those demographics, the U.S. would come out about the same as France, Germany, or the U.K., though still a step behind Finland: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin....

Also:

> Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal.

Ultimately, if that's the case, there is very little hope for improving American education. It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.
Yep, I'm working on it right now! That's going to be the next big update. I'm aiming to release shortly after iOS 9 comes out, so September/October probably.
It really worries me that the leader of our nation does not appear to have all the information required in order to make a decision on a topic as important as this. I would have thought that a domain expert within government would have be consulted before Cameron goes off half cocked in debates and discussions.

With technology a key and growing industry within the UK, shouldn't we expect our leaders to at least attempt to understand the issues around governance?
C++11 and 64-bit Issues
> I expect the language to be broad and the enforcement narrow.

That's the worst kind of law - you can be locked up at a prosecutors whim.

In the UK, it's already illegal not to disclose the key to an encrypted file.
Matthew Saunders also designed a very nice cluster stack.

https://learnaddict.com/2015/08/03/raspberry-pi-stack-a-plat...
It's pretty staggering that the FBI and gov.uk should choose now — a time of daily, massive security breaches dominating the headlines — to have the "your security is too good" conversation with tech companies. And, compared to the last time we went through this idiocy, they now refuse to put any specific proposals on the table. The whole enterprise is an embarrassment, and not going to happen in a million years.
HelloKittyMusicalPiano헬로키티뮤지컬피아노ハローキティミュージカルピアノ37건반전자피아노TOYИГРУШКИJUGUETEおもちゃ遊び
For the record Cameron was not suggesting on banning everything that uses encryption. Primary seeking a ban on end-to-end encryption messaging applications (ie, textsecure/signal, whatsapp, snapchat) that does no provide the UK government with a backdoor.

Its still a terrifying idea, and shouldn't be allowed to happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the...
The Shack is closed, as is the shed. (info disclosure)
Urgh. This should be better phrased. From the BoingBoing article:

David Cameron says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read"

It's very specific to communication, and reading between the lines, messaging, as opposed to something like HTTP communication between a bank and a customer. Don't get me wrong, it's still incredibly stupid, but the government will be able to reply to this petition with "we do not intend to ban encryption" and close it.
If we want to speed up the demise of flash, there are several roots that need to be whacked simultaneously:

1. Tons of existing flash content people want to access

2. Give current flash devs a reasonable alternative

The first one is a thorny problem and is somewhat solved by things like Shumway but still needs more work.

As for the second, things like Unity and HTML5 have not covered all of flash dev's use cases, so only some of them have switched over.

I think OpenFL (a Haxe-based reimplementation of the Flash API -- not the flash PLAYER) is our best hope for that:

http://www.openfl.org

http://www.haxe.org

Devs can keep their current flash workflows but export to non-flash targets, specifically native C++ (supports mac/win/linux, iOS/Android) and HTML5 (with canvas, DOM, or WebGL rendering). They can also use SWF-based vector animation assets, and even integrate with the Flash CC player. And it's all open source.

Flash has been "dying" for years, but if we really want it to bite the dust, we need to give people a better way to make their content that doesn't depend on a plugin.

EDIT: Video of OpenFL integrating with the Flash CC editor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU
Cameron doesn't want to ban encryption. he wants encrypted end to end messaging services to have backdoor keys for the security services use. which is stupid, but very different to banning encryption.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of this, but the distinction is clear and false misinformation isn't going to help prevent this.
Kind of silly to leave this amount of info up - and the breadcrumb to http://shedcloud.com is similarly underwhelming.
I doubt it, Patrick properly profiled and optimised it. Later on I got the D version to within 3% of Java's performance in pingtest.
How Grace Hopper’s Career Cracked the Code for Women in Science
What sort of cost to performance do these give? Is it actually more cost effective to purchase and run 6 RPis compared to commodity x86 hardware? How about compared to the cost of computing your job on one of the numerous cloud based offerings? I've never really been faced with a compute job that takes long enough to be worth investigating parallelisation, so I'm fairly ignorant in that regard.

This is certainly a neat project (and perhaps provides a nice talking point), but is it more than that?
I can't think of a perfect example for using async other than imagining your application is pulling in stock ticker quote on demand. Some of those quotes will be old so you have some logic that removes them so to keep the ticker marquee fresh. While the method responsible for culling ticker quotes need not be asynchronous the method responsible for getting the ticker quotes themselves may be best suited for an asynchronous call if the data source is remote (like a web service). This way the rest of your application can still do whatever tasks that are essential while the ticker quotes trickle in from the async method. You just have to deal with the possibility that when it times out you'll have a gap in the data being displayed which is trivial by comparison to writing the entire application synchronously where any minor delay can stop its operation.
Last year I got back into GBA dev except this time I had a degree in computer science so I knew a bit more this time. It was fascinating to play around at such a low level. Directly referencing registers and setting bytes of memory to get them on the screen. I used a old gba link cable soldered to a parralel port to send my demos to the GBA. It was a fun learning tool. I didn't make a game though. Maybe one day :)
Very similar reasons for why you're not allowed to publish benchmarks for Oracle products as well. It's just plain bad PR at a point if someone does a terrible job. On the other hand, it also means that if you're an unscrupulous vendor, you can just squash benchmarks that do not make you look better than your competition. The lack of information available in general is what is frustrating for many folks though even if it's completely anecdotal evidence.
To play devil's/HR's advocate:

Couldn't this be better at producing the attitude and behavioral change that we aim for with "sensitivity training"?

Training might ask two of these men to have a mock encounter with a woman...and play act the legally approved way to deal with it.

But with cheerleaders you get the actual thing, and a tight feedback loop - "Oh, by speaking in that tone, I offended her. Now I'll learn to monitor my tone."
>It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers.

An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that if you take high school students from some US minority group, say, American Scandinavians, they'll turn out to be doing better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia, and the same goes for most other minority groups (apparently including American Chinese), as well as for white Americans vs the population of most other countries. What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries.

I have not fact-checked this, but it is an interesting perspective.
I don't understand why this is still an issue. Didn't Android fix this problem? Can't iOS adopt a similar system?
Sir, the serfs are using HTTPS again!
Seconded, I want to escape the low-level ghetto as well; my mind desperately needs to think in higher level abstractions, too many years down near the metal is enough.
I also gave a talk at my uni to young kids learning to program about homebrewing on the gba. Which they surprisingly found quite cool for a game console they had never even heard of :3
> "Throughout, the privacy and security of our customers' data is - and will remain - Spotify's highest priority.

Okay, this sort of line is really starting to piss me off - especially when companies do the exact opposite of what that line says, yet they still use it to somehow trick users into thinking everything is fine.

Can we push companies to have a "Privacy policy" where they talk all about how they protect your data, and then a "Privacy intrusion policy" or let's say a tamer "Data usage policy" where they tell you exactly how much access they have to your data and how they are using it for their own purposes?
It Is Done
https://readability.com/
Banksy Unveils a Magical Kingdom of His Own Called Dismaland
I don't hate China, but it's hardly a free market. The adjective "motherfucking" in this case was not meant as a pejorative.
Actually, I should give some proper credit here. My husband Justin wrote this component, which turned out awesome. He's really into Japanese linguistics. =)
I haven't read the Privacy Policy, but I pulled up the Spotify settings on my iPhone, and the only permission it has is Background App Refresh, (although I'm not sure if movement sensors would appear in the Settings app).

Is this some still-unreleased version of the app the article is about, or has the privacy policy changed with no changes to the data that Spotify actually accesses?
If you want to be pedantic about getting rid of unpredictability in your time measurement, use TAI.
What an idea: businesses as collectibles.

A baseball in the gift shop for $5 versus identical baseball that happened to be Alex Rodriguez's 500th home run fetching $105,000.

It's not the nature of art, it's purchasing the story around it.

idlewords had a name for this: investor storytime. [1] All these examples have less to do with whether something is or isn't "art" and more about whether the mystique around the story appeals to someone who is willing to part with cash to be part of that a story. A plate with shit is a plate with shit, but a plate of shit with a story? Now you're talking.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm
(For a blog post) You can declare whatever you like as the main result. I think that the % of the reduction of the bike use by the rain is good candidate. Choose a nice small fact that you can tell to your friend during lunch. Think about the linkbait version: "You can't believe how much the bike use is reduced by rain ..." but please use a non linkbait title, because I hate them.

Usually the biggest change is a good candidate. For example "Moon phase reduce the bike use a 0.027% with p<.99" is a very bad selection.

When you have more time, I think that classifying the rainy days as "small drizzle" and "heavy thunderstorm" will make the changes bigger. I've never been there, but London if not famous for being sunny, so I guess people just ignore the drizzle.
Apparently our politicians should understand infosec to demand policy, but the people don't have to understand their goverment to demand policy.
But that's kinda my point, I don't use it because it makes the code more complicated, it's a premature optimization. C# is already blazingly fast.

To put it in context, 10K simultaneous requests is 10 billion page views per day (10000 * 10 * 60 * 60 * 24, assuming 100ms processing time, which is actually pretty high for .Net, mine are usually 60ms even on crap hardware. Yes it's a silly calculation, but it gives you an idea about the scale we're talking about). If you're at that scale, you can afford to hire John Skeet to go back over your code and add a few `async`s into it where appropiate.

From what you just said it seems that anyone using it all the time is unnecessarily cluttering their code.
This seems like very poor timing given the most recent gorilla entering their room.
Body Language Trainer (63 cards)
FBI Wants Better Automated Image Analysis for Tattoos
In terms of performance per cost, the cluster isn't on par with x86 system. Probably, not even close. Nonetheless, the network cost is real, and you get to have a first hand experience of how your algorithm performs.