skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first programming language I used was WATFIV, a Waterloo FORTRAN implementation. It seemed straightforward, and if that’s all there was to programming, I probably would have dropped it in 1974 to play more D&D. FORTRAN felt like the same arithmetic I already knew how to use. It was obviously way more powerful to use a program to do calculations, but it was all stuff I could have done by hand or with a calculator.

But one day, as I waited for a keypunch to make some changes to some program or other I was writing, my eye fell upon a copy of the Green Book left behind by some other programmer. I started reading it, and my little mind was completely blown.

SNOBOL was something else, it forced me to think about programs in a completely different way. It wasn’t about specifying steps to be taken one by one, it was about designing a way to pattern match.

And more than in the obvious, RegExp way, but you could do things as the pattern was matching, and thus you were writing a kind of program where the control flow was determined my backtracking and success or failure of matches.

To this day, my programming is highly influenced by one feature of SNOBOL, I guess it “imprinted” on me: Patterns are first-class values (like regular expressions in other languages), but they are also composable, there is an arithmetic of patterns. To this day I favour designs where things can be composed and decomposed at will rather than used as opaque, monolithic entities.

I’m not saying SNOBOL was better than the FP and OOP and multi-paradigm languages that dominate today, but the experience of learning a new way to think was intoxicating, and once a year or so I re-read the Green Book and think about thinking differently.

If you are interested, I highly recommend you read the whole book. If you see “pattern matching” and think “Regular Expressions,” you will miss the forest for the trees. I’m not sure that anybody needs to know SNOBOL (or its descendants), but I think that it’s a valuable exercise to learn it once.

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”

--Alan Perlis
Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
Driving for Uber won't be an option too long either, why do you think they've hired over a dozen robotic engineers from Carnegie Mellon?
The fact that A is updated in-place is an optimization that happens only if you pass a variable and assign the output to the same variable.

It is not a characteristic of the function `plus_diag`. The function itself is completely pure.
Not to mention the largest incarcerated population in the world. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...
But you have to send a packet every time the remote screen changes. It is much more demanding on network resources than a VPN and thus will be more difficult to use on a daily basis.
Couldn't there be an intermediate step with speed limiter sensors. When in crowded places or approaching slow objects too fast, reduce speed to say 20mph.
Show HN: CoreSync – An iOS Diff/Patch Framework for JSON and NSDictionary
Israel Hayom is indeed the largest paper daily in Israel. There's really no other paper that's even close at this point. Yediot Ahronot was a long-time incumbent, but they simply can't compete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/opinion/rosner-how-to-sile...

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take steps to take money out of politics. My argument is yes, let's do this, but let's be realistic about what it will achieve. At the same time, if we really care about eliminating the role money plays in politics, then we need to work towards a system with an equitable distribution of wealth.
as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers

I don't doubt you about the dispatch issues. The article itself mentioned that the driver of the truck that caused a fatal accident had spent 12 hours driving from his home to pick up the truck before then spending 13.5 of the permitted 14 hours driving the truck at the time of the accident, and had been awake for 28 hours straight.

But isn't the idea that anyone can safely handle that kind of vehicle for 82 hours per week also a bit crazy? That's roughly working 14 hours/day for 6 days/week. That's almost double what we'd allow here in the UK, for example.
I know this is about Modafinil, but since many of you are commenting on Adderall and the various amphetamine salt mixes out there, I wanted to comment:

20mg of instant release Adderall daily (or worse, twice daily) is not a trivial amount to be taking. The long-term effects of the increased heart-rate and sudden spikes you will get from Adderall are not yet well studied or well understood in the medical community.

Stress, arterial stress, vasoconstriction[1], increased heart rate, and high blood pressure are all just a few of the things that happen when you take amphetamine salts. It's not just the jitters.

While these side-effects are okay from time to time, the body is not used to being treated this way on a daily basis, for years and years.

If you are in a place in your life where you don't think you need to be taking it, consider not taking it. Take a break on weekends, or a week at a time.

1: This is part of why many of you get "short" or "agitated" on these drugs... drink more water to at least help.
The author makes several good points, but never mentions fault. From a 1998 study on car-truck collisions:

> the car driver's behavior was more than three times as likely to contribute to the fatal crash than was the truck driver's behavior. In addition, the car driver was solely responsible for 70 percent of the fatal crashes, compared to 16 percent for the truck driver.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...
OTOH believers in Eastern Europe tend to be more fervent, for the same reason. So it doesn't seem that implausible.
It's been a while, I'll follow up anyway...

I don't use cast iron pans because I believe they're less toxic, but because they make a damn fine crusty steak or fried potatoes.

And I use teflon pans to stir-fry or steam veggies and chicken, or to make fried eggs, just because they're more convenient.

To be honest, I don't really care all that much about potential toxiticity in cooking equipment. That wasn't really my hypothesis to begin with, I was just sharing my love for cast iron pans :-)
I love SNOBOL4/SPITBOL. It was a completely bizarre and original language that was quite powerful.

In the late 70s, I took two compiler courses with RBK Dewar, one of the creators of SPITBOL. Those courses were wonderful. He mentioned SPITBOL occasionally, and I remember one story in particular. The implementation was done in assembler, (if I'm remembering correctly), and it took 20 runs to get a working system, (I guess that means a basic suite of tests running successfully). That style of working is completely alien today, and arguably less effective.

Dewar also spent some time talking about his work on the SETL language (for processing sets). Flow analysis for global optimization could be expressed extremely concisely, and was of course applied to SETL itself.
> Because in the real world of web development applications are hardly ever written directly on top of the server. They are written on a framework, that sits on top of an HTTP server abstraction (like Clack), that has pluggable servers.

This is only true if you're writing Web 2.0 media websites that are only nominally not static websites. If you are solving an actual hard problem instead of just driving ad traffic, a framework is going to get in your way.
Hyphenation is nice, but the Knuth/Plass line breaking really helps too, even with left justified text. The 'first fit' algorithms browsers tend to use can leave some ugly and confusing artefacts.
Do you want to stay in the US? Bay Area?

The south bay is more "family friendly" than SF is, as are some of the cities in both Marin county and the East bay. There are micro climates and there are great variations between city cultures.

That said, if you are intentional about how you want to raise your children, what do you intend? Self reliance? Well connected socially? Depth of understanding about the world? Self motivated?

Something we thought about alot when we had our children was what kind of values we wanted our children to share, what sort of things they would experience to help cement those values in practice, and give them tools for evaluating their impact (positive and negative) on the world around them. Its a lot of work but in our case it worked out well.

The thing about kids is that they don't know anything but what they have experienced so no matter where you go or how they are raised they will consider that normal. Which is a long way of saying they aren't going to come back later and say "Gee, these choices really ruined my life."
Like "they", "them" and "their"? English is a wonderfully flexible language, it's such a shame that ridiculous and faddish political correctness is so utterly blind to it.
unpopular amongst hackers, but really it takes a couple years of business school to learn real accounting, finance
If this is true, then this explains why all the "modern" websites are crappy media websites that don't solve any problem except "How do I drive traffic to ads".
This is why element rules exist. Of course the probable outcome, more paid "articles" at the service of advertisers, may be worse than the banners ever were.
I'll second this. I can actually enjoy drinking water when it comes from my RO system.
Yep, that, and the regression seems to be forced through the origin, which is stupid. And the dependent variable is on the X-axis. All pretty weird choices.
Can online gifting be meaningful?
You are exaggerating, I understand there are concerns about the "privacy" part but I would not call Windows 10 worst of anything.
http://www.honeydewmazes.co.za
Why Internet Marketing Is about Quality Over Quantity
What if you are also against adhering to license terms?
Saudi Arabia?
But "them", "their" and "they" are perfectly serviceable and have been used for a long time.
Nice. You might want to work a bit on the chord voicings. If you add a bass voice and make each chord go to the nearest inversion, it'll sound a lot nicer.

For example, if you play a 'D minor' in root position, and the next chord is an 'F', it would sound better by playing it in second inversion. It makes everything sound a bit more coherent. :)
Eastern Europe seems pretty religious, according to this map:
http://i.imgur.com/1mQ7njH.jpg
Technically, it is not that the parliament as an organisation asks to prohibit Windows 10.

It is only coming from a representative of one minority fraction «Just Russia» (generally considered fully and completely loyal to government (as opposed to mostly loyal Liberal-Democrats, who are not liberal democrats in any Western meaning, and Communists), but even more populist than the government pseudo-party United Russia). He is a deputy speaker (deputy chairman) for parliament; each minority fraction has got a deputy speaker position. So this plea may be ignored. Or it could be used as a trigger to issue arbitrary regulations on arbitrary possibly unrelated topic.

If there is a political decision to move to open-source tools (this is a big if), it will be actually not that hard to implement (if we are speaking about office use). Sensible options for use in government organisations include ALT Linux (an RPM-based independent distribution developed mostly in Russia which managed to obtain a few Russia-specific certifications) and MSVS (Mobile System Of Armed Forces; think CentOS with some special access control tools).

Threats of forbidding Microsoft Windows use in some settings (previous attempts, for example, promoted allowing training and support expenses but forbidding licensing expenses in school budgets) apparently were previously used as bargaining tools in Russia.

(Russian is my native language and I live in Russia)
My fiance and I moved from the Bay Area to Asheville, North Carolina last year and could not be happier. The only checkmark missing is decent transportation outside of cars.

* https://www.google.com/search?q=asheville+downtown&tbm=isch
* https://www.google.com/search?q=asheville+autumn+leaves&tbm=isch
> Woo is many times faster than Hunchentoot.

"Hello World" on the local machine...

https://github.com/fukamachi/woo/blob/master/benchmark.md

is that what you mean by 'faster'?

Personally I'd prefer a more representative benchmark, which actually uses the network... Really measuring the qualities of a Web server is a bit more work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvl6TBGEoO0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjdbbnWsdis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF25Lwt73fg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtK6FdTg9HU

A long time ago, I've downloaded and upscaled those videos. Enjoy.
Is it possible that some of this overwork is being driven by general existential malaise? Having a lot of free time without purpose (and especially without meaningful relationships to occupy it) is actually pretty boring and depressing after a few days.

I've found myself working many more hours / weekends during points of my life when I didn't have many friends around just so I didn't have to sit at my apartment by myself and feel bored or feel like drinking. The work wasn't incredibly productive, but at least it was interesting and filled me with some sense of meaning.
This is not new, whether it is RedFlag Linux in China and Munich bending over backwards trying to accommodate Linux etc. There is a dose of envy about US corporations around the world. Remember China did some kind of quasi ban on Windows 8 ? Time to time, there is a bureaucratic circle jerk, which becomes headline news but just the reality of the world hits.. every one forgets and moves on.
Thats because you usually only hear about the burnouts. "Moviestar does drugs and has an early night" doesnt sell papers or pageviews.
And a horrible climate in winter. If you're used to California weather, I wouldn't move to Sweden. It's like -20 in winter (celcius), plus it gets dark around 4 if you're lucky.

Move to Spain. Probably the best place on earth life/quality wise. Easy to find a tech job (in e.g. Barcelona). Pay is lower of course.
Oh I hear Jane/Finch and Scarborough are veritable paradises these days
The Pyra is crying
That's definitely a real phenomenon, but more sustainably less work time / more free time is more time to develop meaningful relationships & hobbies, in turn reducing existential malaise. All of that is much easier said than done of course.
Context: http://www.pyra-handheld.com/
I'm having a hard time understanding the parenthetical. If you grok it, and could take a moment to explain it in your own words -- or give an example of its use -- I'd very much appreciate it. Thanks!
> If we assume that there is, to a certain degree, a fixed amount of work necessary for society to function...

That is a terrible assumption. The scope of work that is both physically possible and economically feasible is constantly shifting.

To believe that we're "out of work to do" you have to believe every human need is already being met.
Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?
Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results? They come up frequently for me. I can't help but wonder who's behind these. It can't be hurting Stack Overflow's SEO.

So far I have saved 5 different domains, and it looks like 2 have vanished.

- [dead] http://www.codeitive.com/0izVUjjXVP/selective-foreign-key-usage-in-django-maybe-with-limitchoicesto-argument.html

- [dead] http://www.codedisqus.com/0QmqWVgjgg/hide-label-in-django-admin-fieldset-readonly-field.html

- http://w3facility.org/question/image-servingurl-and-google-storage-blobkey-not-working-on-development-server/

- http://goobbe.com/questions/3109325/how-can-i-disable-a-third-party-api-when-executing-django-unit-tests

- http://www.ciiycode.com/0HyN6eQxgjXP/django-admin-inline-popups

I actually wrote Stack Overflow support about this in April 2015, but so far nothing has changed. Here's the thread:

Me: "Hello,
There a lots of spam results on Google. As a web developer, I am frequently googling for how to resolve some programming issue. Often, I get these spoofing sites that link to stack overflow.

I would suggest adding a stricter robots.txt or perhaps blocking some of these bots that are scraping your site.

Here is an example.
http://www.ciiycode.com/0HyN6eQxgjXP/django-admin-inline-popups

Thank you."

Response: "Hello,

Thank you for reporting this content. I've passed the information along to the person at our company who handles such issues. It's the diligence of users like you that helps us stay valuable!

Please note, bringing these sites into compliance (or getting them to no longer serve our content) is often a long and arduous process. You may not see immediate results. However, rest assured that we're working on it.

Thank you again,
Stack Exchange Team"

Thoughts?
Smalltalk/V (not 286) was perfectly usable on a PC of the day, I ran it on an Olivetti M24 with a paper white display.

The Smalltalk-80 flyer states that an 8MHz 286 was faster than a Xerox Dolphin and 20% of the speed of a Xerox Dorado. The painful part would have been the display, they were just using EGA (640x350) so you couldn't see much at one time. I saw a demo of this and don't remember thinking that it was too slow.
Kind of a bizarre side question, would constraint solving be the right tool to use to "solve" things like the kittens/catnip game (a civclicker variant)? Like, at any given moment, given a goal and available resources, tell you the "best" way to allocate your resources.
Take a look at Blockly:
https://developers.google.com/blockly/
Been waiting a long time for this!
>is that what you mean by 'faster'?

Yes.
What a bunch of whining you do. If you're downvoted us not because am hypothetical HN conspiracy, is because you write a lot of stupidity against what you hate.
Yup but they practice Orthodox Christianity which has no issue with taking an allegorical view of some of the details of the creation story (Catholics are like this too, to a degree).

Fundamentalists/evangelicals are a minority in the Christian world, and are to Christianity what the Salafists/Wahhabists are to Islam...
A more powerful language won't help much in getting things done if there is lack of libs in a domain you are not an expert on.

For example: implementing authentication and authorization.

So I agree with everything you said but I'm mostly talking about getting shit done.
At Lantern (https://www.getlantern.org) we make censorship circumvention software that shares some similarities with Shadowsocks but that also uses p2p. Since the @clowwindy announcement we're the #3 trending repository on GitHub basically because a ton of Chinese coders have been starring it - https://github.com/trending
As does Python.
I disabled everything but Ghostery, since in reality I don't use Firebug much. We'll see what happens with that as the only add-on. Otherwise, I'm jumping ship. I don't mind some inconveniences, but when I can't get anything done...
?

All of these statements are easily checked out by googling. Listing sources is a pointless formality.

(not stating that I think they're all accurate, but I do agree with the overall point, and I am very equipped to investigate and adjust the details.)
The Green Book you mention is available for download on the Google Code page for SPITBOL:

https://code.google.com/p/spitbol/downloads/list
This is a slipper slope if I've ever seen one. Aid to Syrian rebels is already known, one of the parties to which a proxy war might be a somewhat reasonable assumption. However, given the long involvement of the US in Iraq, this is a very far-fetched conspiracy theory to say the least.
I can't agree more. The drug that had the biggest impact on my productivity is http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin, more than modafinil or anything else.

And yes besides melatonin I follow the recommendations for improved sleep.
We're looking to leave the state of California, not relocate within it. Staying in the US is not a requirement.

We feel like we can be intentional about how we raise our kids regardless of where we are. Moving is as much about us, as it is about our future kids. That said, places with entrenched or legalized discrimination and human rights violations are off the table.
I suspect that for free content, we can look forward to ever more product placement and sponsored material, i.e., ads you can’t conveniently skip/ignore instead of standalone ads that are more easily blocked. It's been working (for sufficiently generous values of “working”) that way with TV and films for a while.

Personally, I’d rather see more effective forms of paying directly and not compromise the integrity of the content, but then I’m the guy who still buys box sets of spinning discs to enjoy my favourite shows uninterrupted and legally instead of either watching the ad-ridden ones on TV or pirating them on-line, so I guess I’m probably in a minority these days.

Given that we’ve yet to solve the micropayments problem, and even if we did it’s not entirely clear how well it would work, I wonder whether the most promising avenue might be some sort of collective subscription scheme. Smaller (or not) sites could join a collective programme that includes a lot of different sites aimed at similar audiences, there would effectively be a paywall but paid through a single centralised subscription rather than every individual site so much of the time users wouldn’t actually see it, and then some sort of simple marker that indicates you’re a subscriber and gets you in would also let the scheme track which sites were getting the most views and adjust payments in some reasonable way proportionate to value.

Some of the most successful on-line business models of recent times, other than ad-based and direct payment, seem to have been the library-style services like Netflix and Spotify, so I could believe this sort of collective subscription scheme could work if anyone had enough resources to get it up to a useful number of publishers and subscribers to be credible quickly enough. It feels like a balance of convenience and commercial viability that might actually work to me.

A significant problem might be that the umbrella schemes wind up taking a huge chunk of the revenue for themselves instead of passing it on to the real content providers, since the whole model depends on having a small enough number of schemes to be manageable for customers and that implies a degree of consolidation. Then again, we have a similar problem with big ad networks and with other types of middleman site today, so I’m not sure it would necessarily be any worse and at least very successful sites could still go their own way if they were valuable enough to their users so there would always be some inherent competition for any umbrella scheme.
Another huge chemical explosion Shandong province
Genetic Programming for Finite Algebras [pdf]
Maybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks?

There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around.

So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?
Worth noting that there are claims that Chinese exchanges inflate their volume via bogus trades

http://www.coindesk.com/reality-chinese-trading-volumes/

http://www.coindesk.com/former-exec-hits-back-at-okcoin-amid...