skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having gone through a pile of old floppy disks, I think magnetic media is pretty reliable for long-term storage if treated well. Keep them clean, away from strong magnets, and at moderate temperature and humidity and the data will remain readable for many years.

Where it fails is on re-writing. The disks I had that were most likely to be bad after sitting in storage were the ones I had erased multiple times. If I had only written to a disk once or twice then I usually had no problem reading it again.
That's in the same ballpark as the 25k number the article comes up with.

For people who don't know, these numbers are very, very small. I wrote an app store dice puzzle game on Android no one here has heard of and it has 20x those numbers.

As a developer, you have to decide if the decreased competition on the platform is worth the smaller user base when you decide if you will write a version for that platform. So platform size numbers like these are important.
Wow, my VP9 vs H.264 takeaways are:

- for encoding: libvpx always matches or surpasses the quality of x264 (at a given bitrate or at a given CPU budget), because the red line (libvpx) is always on or above the blue line (x264) here: https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/files/2015/09/vp9-x264-x265-... (Except there is no libvpx data for CPU budget under ~0.2 SPF —which is a bit annoying, I know for one I do most of my encodings spending around 0.05-0.15 seconds per frame.)

- for single-threaded decoding: ffvp9 is faster than ffh264

- for multi-threaded decoding: ffvp9 is a bit slower than ffh264

On top of that, the VP9 implementations are bound to become faster (whereas not much more improvement can be made to already-mature H.264 implementations), so VP9 is bound to become even more preferable over H.264 over time.

I think the author's first concluding bullet point ("next-gen codecs provide 50% bitrate improvements over x264, but are 10-20x as slow") is poorly worded. Sure, you can make the next-gen codecs ultra slow by using the highest quality settings, but for libvpx you should choose less agressive settings, and you will still beat the quality of x264 at the same CPU cost.

Edit: in addition, these benchmarks show that as of today out of all these implementations, VP9 even matches or beats HEVC on all aspects (encoding at a given bitrate, encoding at a given CPU budget, single- and multi-threaded decoding). But I expect this to change as HEVC implementations are all quite still immature.
It is confusing to me, too, why a Ruby or Python user would look at Rust (for the same use cases). Unless they want it to replace C for native extension libraries: then it makes a lot of sense. But I'd expect a Python user to pick up Go before Rust, simply because Go is more like Python (managed runtime).

Rust comes up a bit short, I think, when looking at some functional styles. Function composition doesn't look very easy in Rust, so a lot of the concise code you might expect in a functional language is much more work to express (no custom operators either). Not that I blame them: having no-overhead (no GC, but also no spurious code/allocations in general) yet fully safe as a core design goal is a huge constraint that no one else has had success under.
Just for the record, I did not ask for upvotes or support. I asked for comments. And love. Considering how nasty HN readers can be, I think it's reasonable to ask for love. Heck, it's an article about how hard it is to survive as a full-time open source developer.
The problem could be that the solution must be "open", so there is no potential for lock in, hence not much money to be made.
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This was published so he can get community help with finishing it: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/encyclopedia/preface.htm...
Eyes down, minds elsewhere, ‘deadwalkers’ are among us
Here in Portugal there's also a project called Refood, founded by an American, which collects food from restaurants, coffeeshops, etc, and provides them to people in need. It's now distributing 24 thousand meals per month.
Audi says 2.1 million cars affected by diesel emission scandal
And why would I pay someone the same for working less?
sounds like a bunch of platitudes with a lot of HR speak (a lot of which I REALLY disagree with)

And for having the "top talent" they have little to show for it on the technical side
But this whole time, if efficiency was your aim, why not use, say OCaml? But good viewpoint: Rust is actually friendly enough that it is viable for the kind of things you mention.
Now I'm wondering what Slack did right. How did they wipe the floor with everyone? Were they the first company to really invest in the problem?
Tanzanian scientist invents low-cost water filter
I don't think it's worth getting more upset about an uneaten carrot or chicken than about an uneaten pine cone or bear.
That's precisely why I find Rust so interesting: you can get the same results as with C++, but without accidental memory unsafety.
HORSE machine turns food waste into energy
History finds a way to repeat itself.
Mobile advertising DDoS JavaScript drip serves site with 4.5B hits
Touch screens in retail till systems (POS) are used because we can rewrite the software from scratch and deliver on the same hardware. We can add a button for 10% discount next to teh 5% discount button and just have it appear on the screen after the next release, and only in stores 1 to 5 & 7, not 6 8, & 9. You can also do stuff like add a button to open the browser and carry out tasks on a completely different service not entirely related to POS. Flexibility is definately the reason.

Having to upgrade keyboards with physical key-caps is a nightmare. You have to send an actual person (a human!) out to do upgrades.

Intersting point about controleld textures, any idea how you can see that being used in a shop POS? With only a minute's thought the first thing I came up with was allowing blind people to work retail ... everything is automated now anyway, you don't even hand cash to a human, you just stick it in a hole.
Another floppy disk hold out are the many musical keyboards/synths manufactured in the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load patches and sequences. Hell, patch, there is another anachronism that has a lot in common with the floppy disk icon :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch
It boils down to "C# is not C++".
I think it's sort of weird how people have latched on to markdown. Minimalist html is hardly any wordier than markdown, and at least that works everywhere, and works the same everywhere (unlike xyz-flavored markdown of the month), and it allows an escape hatch into complex layout when you really need it.
Shell stops Arctic activity after 'disappointing' tests
I wasn't aware the UN actually had a flag for Earth; BTW, it seems they don't regard Antarctica as belonging to our planet...
> They track all of his online time, the specific timeframe he worked on his homework, time spent on questions etc. This information is also made available to his teacher. I plan to discuss related privacy issues with his teacher

I don't have kids but I find this to be insane. I remember when I was a 4th grader (~25 years ago) I used to quickly do my homework early in the morning, just before school and eating breakfast, not all of it, mind you, just the one or two exercises that would show the teacher I cared enough about the stupid homework. I spent my free time as a kid on much more valuable staff, like reading Jules Verne or playing with other kids, which have helped me more in life than those homeworks.
What they did was super impressive, and is a fascinating way to figure out the optimal global compression settings. However, I got my hopes up that perceptual image compression might be about computer vision. At scale, analyzing every image would obviously be prohibitively expensive, but it would be amazing to analyze the detail/edges or color usage (e.g. how much red) in a photo, and tune the q & chroma values accordingly. That, or compress with multiple settings and analyze the resulting images for noise introduced by artifacts.
UnlimitedHand: Touch and Feel the Game World
Before I worked on the product they tried, I am told, to port it to .NET and WIN servers, but it was so slow in comaprison that they quickly gave up. Huge amounts of data in chain store databases and linked services accross the country, all sorts of integration. These are of course things that .NET can handle very well, but apparently not as fast as COBOL binary files and an ODBC database.
Punch cards or tape then, what you lose in rewriteability you gain in reliability.
> 15% fewer bytes per image makes for a much more responsive experience.

I wonder how they measured this. Seems like perceived speed gains would be sub-linear with file sizes to me. Particularly as actual transfer speed is often too once you factor in network latency patterns.
Much nicer visualization than current sites. Will share with my sailing friends.
One of my favorite IOCCC winners (for most functional):

Int L[A],m,b,*D=A,
*c,*a=L,C,*U=L,u;s
(_){u--&&s(a=*a);}
char*B,I,O;S(){b=b
--?b:m|read(0,&I,1
)-1;return~I>>b&1;
}k(l,u){for(;l<=u;
U-L<A?*U++=46^l++[
"-,&,,/.--/,:-,'/"
".-,-,,/.-,*,//..,"
]:exit(5));}p(Int*m){
return!*U?*m=S()?U++,!S
()?m[1]=p(++U),2:3:1,p(U)
:S()?U+=2:p(U[1]++),U-m;}x(
c){k(7*!b,9);*U++=b&&S();c&&x
(b);}d(Int*l){--l[1]||d(l[d(*l),
*l=B,B=l,2]);}main(e){for(k(10,33
),a[4]-=m=e-2&7,a[23]=p(U),b=0;;e-2
?e?e-3?s(D=a),C=a [3],++1[a=a[2]],d(
D):c?D=c,c=*D,*D= a,a=D:exit(L[C+1])
:C--<23?C=u+m&1?O =O+O|C&1,9:write(m
||(O=C+28),&O,1)+ 1:(S(),x(0<b++?k(0,
6),U[-5]=96:0)):( D=B?B:calloc(4,X))
?B=*D,*D=c,c=D,D[ 2]=a,a[++D[1]]++,D
[3]=++C+u:exit(6) )e=L[C++],u=L[C];}

It's Tromp's binary lambda calculus interpreter. Explanation and sample programs: http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html
Given that the former examples take human effort and resources to grow while the latter don't, the two aren't equivalent. If we had perfectly efficient farms we'd save a huge amount of both energy and money providing food.

Arguably we already have perfectly efficient bear production, insofar as we don't spend resources on them because we don't eat them.
We should be seeing completely safe C++ code soon.

Take a look at Herb Sutter's CppCon talk this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx5DNLWGgA

Reinventing the wheel isn't entirely necessary. Though if you're a SysAdmin and you write your codebase in Rust.. that's some nice job security. ;)
How “Big Pharma” speaks with its systems to get players addicted
C++11 aims to make those problems much less severe - but most software with such emergy patches probably started out long before then.

As to how much the newer features help, time will tell...
Topographic prominence
KnowBe4 Got a CEO Fraud Phishing Attack. Wrong Mark
>Besides, there's still zero evidence of life on Mars. There's no ecology to disrupt.

That remains to be seen. The scientific community feels that the absence of evidence so far does not rule out the possibility.

Today's announcement should bring us closer to finding out.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/28/nasa-to-revea...
> I struggle to believe that C or C++ can be written safely

There's plenty of evidence it can, for certain values of "program". redis comes to mind as a product with a specific goal and implementation, and well managed design process that makes that happen.

The problem is when projects grow to have dozens of developers, of varying skill, pumping in features in a continual battle to stay up to date with standards - like a web browser. Then, I think the possibility of secure C is shown to approach 0.
Windows and OS X .NET React Desktop Apps
This ties directly into the comment dataset, made by the same person and via the same method[1]. Working on pulling down the submission data now, will have to spin up another server if I want to do the comment/submission correlation.

>>"This dataset will go nicely with the full Reddit Comment Corpus that I released a couple months ago. The link_id from each comment corresponds to the id key in each of the submission objects in this dataset."
The Way Digital Banking Design Should Work (+video)
Having used both I'd tend to agree with you. Completely safe from EMPs and North Koreas.

It's just mice you have to watch out for.
I don't think it's worth the effort writing another section on regex, just link to https://regex101.com/ or http://www.regexr.com/ a cheatsheet and call it done.
On the desktop: Nvidia added full hardware acceleration support for HEVC and VP9 in their GM206 GPU only this year. Intel has partial hardware acceleration for both codecs since this year as well, as does AMD. But: Only for decoding.

On mobile, there are some SoCs that can do HEVC and VP9 decoding in 4K in hardware (like Nvidia's Tegra X1), but the large majority of smartphones does not yet have this capability. Encoding is a different story altogether.
And iPhones will only do H.264 anyway for the foreseeable future.

I'm a strong proponent of open standards and I'm really looking forward to VP9 and HEVC, but it will be a while before they'll have good hardware acceleration on all platforms.
This is exactly the scenario I found so confusing, and why I wrote this. I can understand not wanting to use F# or Scala for sysadmin work, but OCaml or Haskell would give you the safely and 95% of the performance (i.e. much better than Python) without the need for manual memory management.

Did you consider either of those? Were your reasons for preferring Rust similar to what I put in the article?
Human reactions are hardly freeform. Most human responses are either instinctive or socially scripted/learned - more often, some combination of the two.

The only thing that makes humans truly unique is the fact that we can store, retrieve, and process information outside our bodies. While we can question our responses, as in your example, we don't - unless we live in a social environment that suggests we should. (Not all environments do. Some actively discourage it.)

Everything else we do - solving puzzles, counting, acting socially, teaching in person, showing emotions - appears in simple forms in at least some other animals.

Going up a level, humans are actually an extremely large, planet-spanning colony organism with very limited collective consciousness. We act more like an aimless flock of birds or mound-building insects than a collective with awareness of its own planetary situation.
Attrition.org has done an interesting biography of Oracle CSO Mary Ann Davidson here: http://attrition.org/security/rant/oracle01/

It only goes to 2008, but it really shows nothing has changed! How did this self-admitted "closet-Luddite" become the most important security person within Oracle?
The title is pretty sly in mixing both past and present tense interpretations. Hard to guess whether it was going to be Hoover's infatuation with the civil rights movement or some current day addition to domestic spying shenanigans.
Excellent writeup! I'm amazed people signed up to play their test game. Does anyone know if the points you get translate to any sort of other reward, or is a place on the leaderboard more than enough of an incentive to keep playing?

Personally though, I think the linked article about on-the-fly resizing[0] was a more interesting "technical" read.

[0] http://code.flickr.net/2015/06/25/real-time-resizing-of-flic...
You most definitely don't want infected USB drives in your nuclear facility!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
Another thing is the lack of runtime is really compelling. I can continue to write Python and can drop into Rust for hot code. Right now this is through C which does get me a bit of unsafety but it's much smaller scope. As Rust becomes more mature I'm looking forward to the ABI stabilizing so other languages can build ffi interfaces against it directly.

I'll admit that OCaml is something that I've looked at before but it didn't have the staying power for me. It's likely just because it was too different at the time compared to what I was used to.
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Thanks.
You should buy this talisman of mine that wards away tigers. You know it works since I've had it my entire life and I've yet to be attacked by a tiger!
Or you could roll your own with this npm package I wrote which turns a google sheet into static JSON:

https://github.com/techjacker/google-docs-cms

On my server I have a cron script running which pulls the new JSON if there have been any changes.
That's been trivially falsified by the tremendous leaps in our understanding of the planet from each successive probe we've sent. For example, we only recently got indications of the likely presence of significant quantities of perchlorates in Martian soils, which has dramatic consequences for any possible effort at terraforming.

As for 'no ecology', we're a very long way from being in any position to say that.

Edit: I can't reply to WalterBright's comment, so I'll reply here. I didn't talk about having to prove anything. It's a matter of balance of evidence. What percentage of the possible biomes on Mars have we tested and how thoroughly did we test them? I'd argue less than 10% of the most life-hostile biomes and those only cursorily. That's way too low a fraction to have any confidence that Mars is dead. Sure, we can't test every grain of sand on the whole planet, we have to draw the line somewhere, but for now we've barely scratched a small part of the surface.
I've had to use them up until just recently. To run reverse engineering tests on an SNES console, I've had to use an old copier device. It's a box that plugs into the cartridge port and will load games off of floppy disks. (and of course, it can copy games plugged into the box onto said floppies.)

Usually takes around 5-10 minutes to split an image file into four parts, write them to floppies, and then load them one at a time onto the copier. And it's only that fast because I'd do it in parallel. The disks would usually fail after a few hundred write cycles, so I stocked up on quite a few.

Thankfully, I now have two alternatives. A flash cart that takes an SD card, and soon a boot loader for the expansion port that will let me load my own code through the controller port via serial.

So I'm done with floppies at long last; but now my new fun is sourcing 5V-tolerant components, and card edge connectors for an extremely rare pitch size :D
This makes me think about the swedish startup Flic and thier wireless button.
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I answered a similar question to a sibling comment but I think it boils down to, I didn't come to Rust for functional features but I definitely enjoy them. The languages you mention in the post have a much higher learning curve coming out of Python. I spent a few tries "learning" Haskell and I really didn't enjoy it. In general when I've looked at Scala/Haskell/F# they use so many multi-char operators that it starts to look like line noise. OCaml always felt a bit too niche for me too I think, though that may be bias of the industry I'm in.
I actually have some experience in getting .NET to talk to COBOL flat file databases and I agree it's not something that anyone seems to have managed to get 100% right. CONNX is a pretty good product but still seems to suffer from locking and needing to manually restart the service from time to time, and this was on a project much smaller in scale than anything a group as big as Dixons would need.

As a .NET developer myself I certainly don't envy the guys who had to deal with all our complaints from the shop floor, and of course the ageing SCO system had to be replaced with something. These days it would probably be something lightweight and browser based as opposed to a full-blown WinForms application, pretty much emulating the old terminal-based setup (hardware-wise if not interface-wise). The keyboard navigation and super-low-latency feedback of the old system would still be a huge challenge, though.
I don't see the point of using this. Can you please elaborate?
This article makes me uncomfortable, it's pretty light on information and then reveals the author is a contributor and expects donations - shouldn't such a contributor have more information or at least more to say than "Canonical want to sell x, but x could be anything, so the results could be anything"?
Nice. But the implementation has some subtleties.
I use OCaml.

Fist, `fix f` must explicitly be defined as a function.
If we replace the expression `fun n -> f (fix f) n` by `f (fix f)`
then we got "Stack overflow during evaluation" of fix(f).

let rec fix f = fun n -> f (fix f) n

Then fix can be applied to some generator :

let fibgen(fib) =
fun n -> if n = 0 then 0
else if n = 1 then 1
else fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

let fib = fix(fibgen)
assert (fib 6 = 8)

The compose and trace functions pose no issue.

let (>>) f g x = f(g(x))

let trace f_name f = fun n ->
Format.printf "%s(%d)\n%!" f_name n;
f n

let trace_fib = fix (trace "fib" >> fibgen)

But the memoize function cannot simply be defined as `memoize f = fun n -> ...`,
otherwise a fresh cache will be used for each call !
Indeed, `fix f` is called for each recursive call in the generator.
In the case of `fix (memoize >> fibgen)` memoize is recursively called
with a new function to be cached.

Hence, the use of an extra step to explicitly create once the cache.

let memoize size =
let cache = Hashtbl.create size in
fun f n ->
try Hashtbl.find cache n
with Not_found -> (
let r = f n in
Hashtbl.add cache n r;
r
)

let memoize_fib = fix (memoize 16 >> trace "fib" >> fibgen)

Last subtilty: the order of application of the misc transformers.
When we write `memoize 16 >> trace "fib" >> fibgen`,
the resulting function `f` adds
, in order, memoization, trace and fib recursive computation
to itself in disguise `fix f`.
The latter applied transformation takes the control. Here the fib computation
only calls the chain `fix f` if n is greater than 1.
So, a call to `trace_fib(0)` leads to no trace;
and a call to `memoize_fib(6)` caches the results for 4 and 5 but not for 6.

Hence, to memoize all calls and trace only actual call to fib,
we must reorder the transformations:

let memoize_fib = fix (fibgen >> trace "fib" >> memoize 16)
That line is on Page 1 of the Book of Political Lies that gets rolled out whenever there's a fight over resource allocation.

The reality is that "invest and create more jobs" actually means "fire as many people as you can, cut wages as far as they go, make all hires as at-will as possible, and offshore to save money if you possibly can, even if it hurts the company in the long term."

The rest of the reality is that our political system is an assholeocracy. The people responsible for this kind of idiocy should be nowhere near policy - not just because of some abstract sense of moral wrong, but because it's incredibly toxic to real economic and social development.
EU markets are price-controlled. This is thought to have encouraged drug development to move to the US.

http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v6/n4/full/nrd2293.html

The majority of drug research spending is in the US, and the majority of drug consumption is in the US, both per-capita and in aggregate. Once a drug has been researched and FDA-approved and can be sold in an un-price controlled market to recoup fixed costs, it's cost-effective to go ahead with approval hurdles for marginal profits in controlled markets like EU countries.

In effect, high US drug prices subsidize lower prices elsewhere.
Uhmmmmm, read Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control". The US nuclear missiles had no protection against accidental lunch, you didn't even have to put in a code or a key, and the US government has said, sincerely, that "the US nuclear stockpile is completely safe, based on their observation that there was no accidental lunches yet".

If you have raw electrical cables sticking out of your wall, they are not "safe" just because you haven't electrocuted yourself yet.