skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever tried to buy a server with only a single core for licensing reasons? It's impossible with modern hardware, the best we were able to do was a double core/single CPU system to run some oracle bits to talk to other oracle stuff. This server processed around half a dozen tiny xml files a day and buying a dedicated physical server saved a few hundred thousand over any other option we could figure out.
In "Thus Spoke Lem" - a several hundred pages interview with Lem - there is a chapter about Lem's likes and dislikes in literature. He is asked about books which influenced his thought and he mentions several of them, read when he was young. When asked about later influences he talks about GEB and Mind's I only. He says that again and again he sees in those books concepts similar to his own, but he is sure that Hofstadter reached them independently. I do not think that an English translation of Thus Spoke Lem exists.

Another connection between Hofstadter and Lem: in Le Ton Beau de Marot there is a chapter where Hofstadter discusses possible ways of translating How the World Was Saved from Cyberiad.
How strange. When I read jepler's comment it actually appeared as a top-level comment instead of a reply, which is why I assumed his terminal commands were intended to represent a rendering error, not a GCC error. But looking at it now, there is indeed a parent comment.

Also, your first line there was quite reasonable, but the footnote is incredibly patronizing. I did not appreciate it in the slightest.
"typical case of customer losing the tab on bar and complaining about paying the fee for lost-tab."

It's more the customer getting a bar tab for a huge number of drinks they could potentially have ordered but claim they didn't while the barkeep doesn't keep track but just assumes the maximum number theoretically conceivable. Oracle's approach of letting customers hang themselves then putting their feet to the fire to prove they didn't use their software the way Oracle fantasizes is seriously ruthless (though this in no way exhausts their approaches to ruthlessly piling fees on customers - I'll never deal with them ever again).
The Fare Inspectors will fine you if you haven't bothered to swipe your card, even if you have a monthly pass. The card stores a record of the last $WAY_TOO_MANY interactions with a Clipper Card reader, so it's trivial for them to check. Those guys have no sense of humor. :(

I'm a huge fan of Caltrain's policy: Monthly pass holders only have to interact with a reader twice at the beginning of the month [0]; once when you board and once when you disembark. For the rest of the month the conductors use their brains to remember the current month, and compare that against the end date on your monthly pass.

[0] And -realistically- you don't even have to do that. I went a couple of months without interacting with the Caltrain readers; the conductors never said a thing.
This ruling is only for backers in Washington so that appears to be exactly the case; other states and countries can still file their own lawsuits if motivated to do so.
If they somehow could turn those books accessible by a "Google All Book Access" type of service, that would in turn enhance your searching to include all their scanned books it would be amazing. They would however have to somehow figure out how to even make such a service affordable while still keeping publishers 'happy'.
Keyword: internet, not web. You should redirect your complaints towards Apple, the W3C and/or the WHATWG.
I assume there's no official hard definition of what it means to be a Lisp. It's like "Pythonic". A warm fuzzy feeling that not everyone will share about the same things. It depends on what they consider important / good about a language.

Is C++ a C? Is Oberon a Pascal? Is F# a ML? Is C# a Java? Is Go a Squeak? Is Objective-C a Smalltalk? Is Javascript a Self?
The Green Party?
SLip – A Lisp System in JavaScript for Browsers
مشاهدة+مسرح+مصر+الحلقة+3+حاجة+صيني+|+سينما+فور+اب
You could have comments in monospace and the rest of the code proportional. As long as you don't start ASCII art in normal code ...
A Breakup Letter from the Internet to You
I'm not a database person, but I wonder what makes Oracle databases so much superior to free alternatives like, say, Postgres, that companies put up with the enormous costs and hostile attitude.

Can somebody explain why it makes sense from a business perspective to use Oracle products?
I think the what's missing from this article is the intransigence of publishers to give up anything, and the politicians will usually side with them too with copyright law. There's a world of information out there which could benefit mankind but it's all locked up for profit.
Yes unanswered, and as you suggest later, even unasked... if even the NYT is this pathetic then that just underscores that journalism is still ripe for disruption.

Also it's bizarre they don't mention the case of Wen-Ho Lee, who earlier became a scapegoat for leaks at US nuclear sites, in part due to shoddy reporting by the NYT itself, which they later unwound in a still misstatement-ridden long article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/us/the-making-of-a-suspect...

/vent
BYOS (Buy Your Own Software)
I've abandoned greenlight/preorder as well. Especially frustrating with greenlight is when friends play to death an unfinished game (normally some sandbox style thing) and get bored of it well before it is done. Then once it is done no one interested in it anymore having moved on to the next unfinished game.

Terraria, Space Engineers, Star Forge, Rust and other have all burnt me in this manner.

Rock Paper Shotgun agree on the pre-order front. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/18/editorial-lets-no...
1. Like SAP or Salesforce, they don't sell to sane IT guys, but to enterprise executives that are far away from ops and just let them deal with it.

2. Ass insurance. You pay enormous amounts of money for the knowledge there's a dependable fix to the database in X hours, should there be a problem.

3. Certifications and tutorials. How do you know a DBA is any good if you don't know about databases yourself?

4. Permissions. Oracle let's you shield the database like no other competitor can. If you need DBA's that can't look into the database or character-level permissions because you don't trust the people you work with, Oracle is an enterprises' wet dream.
Macula: the impossible font
I think this would incentivize people who don't make anywhere close to $500k USD to make themselves appear shady in a gamble to later get off years later with the payout.
Legacy systems hardcoded to Oracle; Bought from 3rd parties that companies cannot change to work with other databases.

The people bribed to buy Oracle are probably long gone from the company.
Gdb-dashboard
For recurring jobs take 1 month of pay in advance or bill weekly or every other week, whatever you can afford to loose.

For small projects double your price before communicating it to the client and take 50% as advance. Most likely client will pay but you'll have two times as much work as you initially estimated. Sometimes client won't pay, but then you don't need to go extra mile to make him happy so you won't work as much and price will be fair anyways. If your client turns out to be awesome offer discounts at the end of the project. Customer will love you for that as much as you came to love him.
QARK – detect Android application vulnerabilities in source code or APK
> They do that with their own stack too (or at least they did).

Nope. If you buy Oracle's virt stacks (either RHEV-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off-and-using-XEN or Solaris), they happily let you sub-capacity license. It's been that way for at least four or five years now.

> To avoid costs, you have to set up the VM such that it is locked to certain cores, and then that avoids the virtualisation portion of the license issues.

Under current licensing, that's a no, unless it's running in an Oracle branded VM, or zVM. No pinning or soft partitioning are recognised otherwise.
Folks might want to see Nancy Pelosi's daughter's documentary San Francisco 2.0 on the impact of inequality on the city, which happened to be plugged on the most recent Real Time.

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/san-francisco-2-0/index.htm...
The best option is usually another DBMS stack if you can support it. DB2 does support much saner licensing, for example.
Which might not be so bad if the copyright owners were actually profiting from it, but for the most part we're talking about books that are out of print and not earning their copyright owners anything -- it's just sheer intransigence.
To make a point, I thought about 'recur' and I haven't written a single line of Clojure in my life. In comparsion, CL's looping constructs were not mentioned, which crop up often enough.
That's like me asking you "what car do you suggest?" without telling you what I want to use it for, how big my family is, or where I live.

I have no idea what your business does or what services you need, but there are plenty of other vendors from simple rented virtual machines up to full co-lo of customer owned hardware. The good ones will rely on good customer satisfaction rather than artificial vendor lock-in to remain profitable and competitive.
Did you read the article?
> Clojure was designed specifically with the intent of being a dialect of Lisp

The result of that design is that Clojure shares literally zero lines of code with other Lisps: Autolisp, ISLisp, Emacs Lisp, Standard Lisp, Common Lisp. Many basic concepts are absent, renamed or redesigned ('Atom', 'Linked List', ...). Clojure is fully incompatible to any other language with Lisp in its name. Programs have to be re-architectured, because the concepts are different: no TCO, but 'functional', different approach about side effects (-> avoid), lazy persistent datastructure at its core, different idea of OOP (-> avoid), Lisp infrastructure (-> avoid), ...

There is no software I know of, which is shared. The number of tools shared is 'one': GNU Emacs. It's a different community with different goals, different software, different applications, different libraries.

Just think of it: zero lines of code is shared.

My problem with that broader idea of 'Lisp': it is fully vague and it has no practical implications. Sometimes it's only a marketing slogan. It has the same vague meaning like 'object-oriented' or 'Functional'. There is no consensus what OOP in a broad sense means and how it should be defined. 'Lisp' is just as useless.

It does not mean that Clojure is useless or worse than Lisp. Totally not. Clojure has new ideas on data structures put to work and enabled some very productive people enjoying their tools. They are doing wonderful stuff.
That's a good point, but I'd assume most guests just compare the nightly rates on the search screen which don't include these fees (and also don't take into account weekly / monthly discounts).
The thing about common carriers is that they're designed to be the carriers of last resort. They have special dispensation from a governing body to operate and -in return- they are obliged to offer their services to all who can afford them.

Common carriers are a long-standing practice that has clear benefits for society as a whole. What's more, back in the 1960s and 1970s we -as a nation- realized that there is value in helping the weak, infirm, disadvantaged, and those subject to discrimination participate as fully as they are able to in the public sphere.

If you want a somewhat less academic reason, remember that you can be afflicted by illness, infirmity, handicap, or -albeit on a longer timescale- discrimination at any time. When you're down, it's good to have services available that help prevent you from hitting rock bottom and allow you to help yourself get back on your feet quicker than you would on your own.
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

A man goes out to buy shoelaces and a cookie during his lunch break, but the story is packed with insane levels of detail about the objects around us and the narrator's imagination about how those details came to be.

One such detail: the way a plastic straw will float in a can of soda until it's horizontal, but sometimes the microscopic burrs in the pull-tab opening will dig into the straw and keep it from doing that.

(Baker is a much more entertaining writer than I am.)
ATS = Apache Traffic Server I assume?

I still wonder why large companies continue to rely on third-party CDN's like this. It's hardly rocket science to operate a global network of reverse proxy cache servers, particularly when you only have to do it for your own network (i.e. no customer issues).
Somewhat related: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...

> Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950.

Additionally, The Walt Disney Company is sure to get legislation passed before 2024 to extend copyright once more.
Exactly this. Also trying to find the "Search this Page" feature in Safari needed me to Google and figure out how to do so from a blog post: http://heresthethingblog.com/2014/11/04/ios-8-tip-search-wor...

Apple's interfaces were really user-friendly until the movement towards flat design. It was more of a step backwards than forwards.
I have been to conferences where presenters from large US companies ask the audience to refrain from videotaping/photographing during their presentations. And I agree the premise is silly, you go to a conference because you have something to share.
True, but that's not TCO (or tail call elimination). That would mean that every single tail call is optimized to eliminate that stack overhead.

(defun foo () (foo)) ;<- tail call

(defun bar () (bar)) ;<- tail call

(defun baz (a b) (+ ;<- tail call
(* a 2)
(* b 3)))
The Danger of Managing Drug Prices
"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work."

I think Google might win over some critics if they resumed the project; set it up as a non-profit, but not some slick non-profit that really doesn't help anyone other than Google?
The bylaws would be lawyer proof, and BOD proof. The out of print(out of copyright) books would be available to anyone for free.

I was very excited about this project, and it did seem to just die?

I used to like and defend Google. As of the last few years, with the tracking, plethora of Ads, and the way they ruined YouTube, at least for me.(Yea, I didn't like the way they took it over. I don't like all the advertisements. Plus, I still have embarrassing videos up there that I literally can't get off. Some kind of password screwup that is beyond the helpful customers at the "Help Boards". See Google employees can't be bothered with trivial stuff like my videos. (I asked, and was told to figure it out.)

So Google, if you are listening, go back to your roots. Some people, including myself, hold no loyality to your company anymore. My sister uses Bing. I used to tell her, you might like Google better. Those days are long gone. I'd tell her about Duckduckgo, but it's just not quite their yet.
Late to the party ... but this is really one of the things that makes the little things in life a little easier.
Found Ians site about a year ago and spend some time after that convincing people that they have been tying their shoes wrong their whole lifes.
Was met with much skepticism, but ultimately most of them tried and never looked back. There is still one guy who "praises" me for showing him how to tie his shoes because before he had to retie his shoes several times a day.

I followed Ians suggestions and use the "fastest knot" on a daily basis. For hiking and sometimes also for running I use the secure knot, mostly because the fast one actually can become undone on very slippy laces.

TL;DR: Knots are great, rethink your habits from time to time
This is about individuals (ex-IBM employees), not companies.

This might be an example: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26551.wss
>At this point you're arguing against a lot of things I've never said.

Yeah, didn't say you said those.

But since I started this subthread, I'm merely expanding and explaining further the thigs I said initially.

>The point is simply that, if you want to write a SQLite alternative, Rust is a reasonable language to write it in.

Oh, on that I agree.

I was mainly questioning the need to rewrite in the first place (and especially for this particular software, being an embedded db et al), not whether Rust as a language is a good choice to do so.

That said, the less mature ecosystem/toolchain etc, is still an issue for some projects that would still benefit from Rust -- e.g. for somebody used to work with VS C++, etc.
In this case there was no faking of the vendor installed. HID is a generic input class, you're not making any promise about who manufactured a device when you make it represent as HID.

A lot of people seem to think that this was a device with hacked or other illegitimate firmware. It was not. It was a device called a WebKey, which is available from a number of vendors and is intended to do exactly what the author is describing.

Is it a dumb product? Yes. But this is not any kind of firmware exploit. It's just a keyboard that doesn't look like a keyboard, some as a YubiKey or one of several other sorts of non-keyboard devices that present as keyboards.
Using Blackfire for debugging production environments
Hot Soup Processor Programming Language
European Broadcasting Union Simplifies MySQL with Severalnines
Can anyone name a startup (let alone a YC startup) running Oracle software? Why would anyone open themselves up to these kinds of issues in a greenfield deployment?

And, if not, how much longer can Oracle keep up their growth by selling only to established companies? (Yes, they can sell maintenance forever, but how about growth?)
>Rust isn't making breaking changes anymore. I think people are getting hung up on "theoretically breaking" changes that don't break anybody in practice and are equivalent to the "theoretically breaking" changes that C and C++ (and every other actively developed language) continue to make all the time.

That's good to know. In the language OK, not even in the standard lib?

>Because a replacement might have more features/better performance/improved security? These are the same reasons you might look for alternatives for any piece of software!

Most of that (more features, better performance) are orthogonal to Rust. Features obviously (if anything a port will probably have even LESS features initially, as Sqlite got most of its features piecemeal too).

And how is better speed assured with the Rust rewrite considering that Sqlite is pretty fast C already?

At best it might be the same speed (and if it's an algorithmic issue that slows down Sqlite, then of course they can also fix their C code and overcome that).

Which leaves us with "better security". Is it compelling enough to change software? Depends, I say.
Performance Audit: Materialup.com
Elastic tabstops would solve this: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
The reminds me of people's attitudes towards reCAPTCHA - started by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. "Stop spam, read books."

Everyone was supportive of it when it was used towards the non profit digitization of out of copyright books. So, started externally, Google ran with it and continued and expanded the range of books. It remained good. Apparently loads of books were digitized.

Then, possibly along with the change in this article - or along with the perceptible change within Google where everything had to be business accountable a few years back, reCAPTCHA started being used to digitize address numbers from StreetView to improve Googles online mapping, geocoding offering. Nothing to do with books, nothing to do with improving the world.

Now reCAPTCHA is being used for image recognition and training (identify the images with salads). Nothing to do with books, information or improving the world - everything to do with Googles own offerings.

What's even sadder is that http://captcha.net/ still states that it is being used to "help digitize books" but all the links go to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html which have all but removed any public benefit wording. " "Stop spam, read books." was removed from Googles site in 2014.
Different story here, but being strongarmed into using IBM I can tell there are some advantages that under a certain light and told in certain ways omitting specific details do resonate well to higher ups.
Maybe they are talking about using the HTML AppCache/manifest and a script or something that downloads all of the resources in the manifest and background-preloads them in the Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. page/app. Maybe you don't need a script, just a frame. Maybe a special 'article.html' resource or something that is not allowed to have ads/popups/JS etc.

As long as they don't limit that to certain favored organizations.
You do benefit. When typing the time, you have to tap at least four times. With Androids visualization, you can enter the time with two taps. I'd call that a benefit...
Why is the article about Ben but the pictures of Voldemort?

edit: Ben, if you're reading this, my startup Brodlist.com is looking for funding and we too hate Harry Potter.
Oh, they finally got that LNG terminal turned around from import to export. I'd heard that was in the works, but hadn't followed up.

This is way better than flaring off natural gas, which is happening in North Dakota on a scale so large it lights up the area like a major city and can be seen easily from orbit.[1] About 27% of North Dakota natural gas is being flared off, which is embarrassing.

[1] http://www.ceres.org/industry-initiatives/oil-and-gas/gas-fl...
Welcome+to+Latin+Percussion
Type-Safe Microservices in Haskell with Servant
Charles Darwin as the Father of Economics: A Conversation with Robert Frank
A small change I would make would be to allow appellate courts to ban prosecutors and police officers. A ban meaning they can't bring cases before the court or testify. Bans could be temporary or permanent.
I suppose it has something to do with the g factor...
Hm. I know the guy who ran the Master of Software Engineering department at CMU West (in Mountain View.) And he didn't make the "average full professor" amount you're claiming. And one would assume he'd be making at least average for a professor.

That would be crazy money in Pittsburgh. Are you sure that figure is accurate?
I am not talking about any "cool features" in particular. My point is that for the large systems you need a decent module system and namespaces, not the OOP.

The fact that most of the statically typed OO languages also provide these features does not mean that OO is suitable for scalability - this is totally orthogonal to OOP.

This is a fallacy similar to attributing pattern matching and ADTs to the functional programming, while these features are not inherently functional in any way.

Try to build a large system in a dynamically typed OO language to see why OO per se is of no use for a large scale architecture at all.
How is reliable Google Maps and Street View not improving the world? I'm using them daily and they're improving my life a lot.
I would recommend something that seems weird but isn't: start with Joy of Clojure just to get a sample of what the language really is about, and if you like what you see go back to one of the introductory books and learn it.