skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Webhook: create HTTP endpoints (hooks) to execute configured commands
A quick glance at the COBOL page on Wikipedia it seems to "suffer" from the kind of verbosity that has also sunk ADA (as i understand it at least).

Frankly i find myself wondering if it is high time that computer education is split between computer science and computer engineering.

It seems to me that much of the ailments of the computing world is that people keep bringing stuff from computer science into the larger world virtually untested.
It's not a huge, long-term business, for sure. There are only n doctors still running the DOS app in the entire market, and that number will only ever shrink.

The lock-in is provided by the extreme niche-ness of the market the conservatism of these doctors. These floppy-guys have a unique position in the market, they know exactly what to do -- they are basically the only ones who can credibly pitch these doctors at all. Once they've bought a solution that actually works, is stable and compliant etc., these doctors are not going to shop around to save maybe $1-2000/year (or whatever you can charge in maintenance), it's simply not worth their while and the risk. Remember, these are not scrappy little outfits, they have cash to spend, and they will spend it if you can supply stability and continuity.
Chris Sacca’s Advice to Founders: Become the Best Storytellers
I'm pretty sure x265 is just not mature enough. Same thing happened with x264, where it had many issues and bugs. We all know how these fared in the long run.
that was my same feeling. I'm a C# developer, and even though I consider myself a decent dev, I never thought of C# as a toy language. I guess I'm not that good.
The scale and reliability is the challenge. You could probably hack out a client and server on the weekend, but simulate 10 million concurrent users and every single part of your stack will break.

Also, I suspect that their strategic plan is not about minimising the number of engineers. They may want to be able to set up non-public projects which iterate for years or months before becoming visible: frameworks, app ideas, you name it. Their Fabric platform gives them excellent insights into what people are doing on mobile apps, for example. The kind of insights and understanding they have into personal and aggregate app usage is quite frightening when you realise just how much they have instrumented.
This must be related to how Pluralistic Ignorance [1] arises?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
Valve developer Chet Faliszek looks ahead to the year in VR [video]
Cool, it looks just like Flic!
Blackphone 2 'privacy' Android handset revamped
> The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless.

It's based on the correct observation that after decades of use, we know how good and and how bad it is.
In all the section related to OCaml, replace "concurrency" by "parallelism". OCaml has an excellent concurrency story (through libraries like Lwt and Async) and a decent story for message-passing parallelism. The issue appears with (GC-managed) shared memory.

Incidentally, the work on the GC is on its way.
On the matrix algebra side I use breeze, i.e. backed by netlib-java and ultimately by the native LAPACK (probably FORTRAN), but with a nice Scala interface on top. It reads very nicely, and performs well.
HEVC is not an open standard. It has, arguably, even worse/strict license model.
As someone who participated in an earlier iteration of this, I can answer that there was no "prize" (I don't think there was even a leaderboard on the first iteration of this). I can't speak for everyone, but I participated mainly for two reasons, 1) to make sure a crappy compression didn't eventually effect my images I posted there 2) the geek challenge of finding which image was compressed
Until a few years ago, EU had a regulation that stated "all bananas and cucumbers must be free of abnormal curvature and at least 14 cm in length. "

Not sure if I want to know what legislators did with the fruits...
The same source as any other forecast-related websites. For wind, temperature, waves, etc there is just THE ONE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Forecast_System

There is a very big industry build on it. All are happy this data is complex, but very complete and very free :-)
GK Chesterton applies here;

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

The point being that unless you understand something you're very much better off not changing with it, because you can't possibly understand the consequences of that action.

Mars might be devoid of life, and contaminating it might have no negative impact, but unless you know that's the situation it's better not to introduce potentially negative changes.
Cloud and mobility services for the enterprises
Wrong.

No FB app, adaway + ublock + pale moon.
> It is confusing to me, too, why a Ruby or Python user would look at Rust (for the same use cases).

Perhaps it is because they are not looking at it for the same use cases, and more as something to augment their toolkit. Rust makes it possible to be a decent systems programmer without having to spend a decade of acquiring the war wounds to become a great C or C++ dev. In the past, the only real option for those devs if they wanted decent performance was Java, and it's really hard to get Java to talk to Ruby or Python, and it's also hard to understand what the JVM is doing under the hood. Rust is now a possible alternative.
Here's what Armin Ronacher, the creator of Flask, thinks of Rust and how it compares with Python: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/tags/rust/

Note the articles aren't listed in order. Rust for Python Programmers is the latest, written four months ago.
The page you linked technically has all the information I need, but it's hidden among emacs-style movement commands and is a bit cumbersome to read. Consider something like:

* F8 - Upload current session to pastebin.
* F6 - Reimport everything.
* F5 - Watch imports and re-run entire session if one of the imports changes.

That would both showcase these fantastic features (I didn't know about them until right now when I tried to write this comment), and allow me to try them right away in the bpython interpreter I have just installed.

I had spotted a very nice hotkey that takes you to the source of the function that was being autocompleted but I can't find it again on that page. That's how bad the current page is :P
Markdown is fine, but I can't understand why you would want to render it in the browser. Why get the client to do the work with every request? Just render it once on the backend and deliver the html.
I'd already looked through the slides for that talk but I'll check out the video. Thanks!

I think C++ has a lot of awesome stuff coming out but I find Rust more pleasant to code in. Also having package/dependency management has been great compared to using the old versions of libraries that come with distros or tracking down all the transitive dependencies of software. Rust is just a more delightful experience out of the box.

> Though if you're a SysAdmin and you write your codebase in Rust.. that's some nice job security. ;)

I definitely understand this but I don't think it's true and will be less and less true over time. It is becoming very common in the SRE/SysAdmin industry that strong coding skills is a requirement. When I started 10 years ago that was very different but it's becoming harder and harder to find jobs as a Linux grunt. The SREs I work with care about software engineering best practices, code review, testing, continuous integration, etc.

Also, even if that were true, I'd much rather have people with a weaker understanding contribute to Rust where the compiler has your back. If you haven't used Rust you might be surprised how good the error messages are. Once you spend a bit of time understanding the basics the compiler is super helpful.
I completely agree, which is why S-expressions rather than JSON, YAML or XML make so much sense.

("Anyone can learn S-expressions.")

Imagine:

$ ls -l
((foo 2015-06-09 6 bar baz (rw rw r))
(file2 2012-03-04 18789 bar baz (rwx rwx rwx)))

Heck, imagine a world where the shell was a full-featured, fully-typed programming language…
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe formal American English is meant to be rigorous in treating organisations as singular rather than plural. Hence if the title was meant to refer to the present, it should have read "How the FBI Pre-reads African American Writing".

This is in distinction to British English, where it's often a matter of house style, or even dependent on context.
I don't really understand how that's a paradox. It's a natural result of the mathematical properties of the average, if outliers are a problem, we use median.
Why adaway + ublock? Are those not redundant if you don't have the FB app?
What would you consider definitive proof of no life on Mars?
This actually looks like it could be quite useful, and seems relatively true to the unix philosophy (does one thing well).

I'm not a Go expert but a quick look through the source makes me think it'd be ok (as in, no errors) running multiple invocations of this, as different users (with different config files, on different interface/port combinations obviously), rather than running as a SUDO-able user?
Heck, imagine a world where the shell was a full-featured, fully-typed programming language…

Isn't that what PowerShell is?
I am extremely sensitive in privacy issues, but between the NSA that could abuse some part of the data and a private corp. who will try to EXPLOIT the data in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, I'd go with the NSA any day of the week.

From the answer, we can rest assured that this guy WILL exploit the data he gets in every possible way, no matter the consequences.
No always, unfortunately. Adaway is ip based while ublock is regex based, achieving different end results.
Agreed; this feels antithetical to Reddit's principles on some level.

When the next snapshot is released, it will be possible to just perform a diff to discover all deletions and edits since.
Five Parameters That Influence Customer Experience
Great post! I own www.diabetry.com
Learning to learn, or the advent of augmented data scientists
7 focus areas for customer experience management
It also works in another way.

I for example, have a rather alternative love life, but it doesn't seem alternative to me most of the time. Because social networks are prefiltered and I feel like I'm surrounded by people like me.

So I get the feelong to do 'normal' things, only when I meet people outside my filterbubble I'm reminded That the majority is different.

It is much easier to do what you want, if you think it's nothing exceptional.
I wonder how difficult it would be for FloppyDisk.com to actually manufacture their own floppies.
There are more Firefox users on Win XP than Linux. It would make more sense for FF to drop Linux support before WinXP.
4 Challenges Most People Face When Managing an Online Business
Icebergs.io Brings Linux Desktop to the Browser
Author prediction win for Douglas Bagnall
This is actually the quadratic sieve, not the number field sieve, for that you want http://www.math.ttu.edu/~cmonico/software/ggnfs/
> This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these people skew the average.

> Here’s an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends. you’ll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical notion of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data.

> But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you—say, one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

Based on the wikipedia article of the friendship paradox[1], the power law distribution really has nothing to do with it, and the paradox would exist even if the distribution of number of friends were completely uniform. It's instead related to the fact that people with a high number of friends are overrepresented in the lists of other peoples' friends. The rest of the author's analysis describing the new "paradox" passes the smell test, however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
I agree and disagree with you at the same time. IoT, especially with things like the Photon and ESP8266 are major game changers. However, the idea of a baked-in WiFi stack with little/no way to update protocol bugs is rather scary proposition. And I'm also against giving IoT devices a directly routable IP address, even if they are behind a NAT.

I'm looking more at things like the nRF24L01+ board combined with MySensors, which seems to be rather mature. It is a self-healing mesh network with encryption and signing support. And I can get all the data from the net mesh with a serial gateway (inputs/outputs via USB serial). I can connect that gateway to a Linux machine running Node-red and use the MySensors encoder/decoder.

Hook up a relay and you can toggle electronics on and off, or you can make a manual high voltage switch using a servo and 4 contact switches. I'm also using PIR for occupancy along with temp sensors for zone acquisition. I'm looking at developing my own thermostat as well to see if I have the chops..
As a Python developer interested in Rust, for me it's the logic is this: Rust allows me to learn a systems language to complement high level/scripting language without having to learn C/C++ which I find ugly and full of legacy cruft. This is important since Python encourages you to build native libraries for performance or low-level interfaces. The Rust programming style is also more familiar than "true" functional languages.

Languages like Go are tricky for Python extensions because they include their own runtimes, which means you have 2 runtimes with garbage collectors to deal with.

In a more "fuzzy" sense, I think there's also a philosophical appeal in the way Rust promotes human-friendliness over theoretical purity. Python promotes one correct and logical (to humans) way of doing things and I feel Rust is designed with the same ambition, even if the requirements of low-level memory management necessarily make it more complicated.
Now it's Audi
With VPN all the traffic is encrypted, not just https... Plus , https might work for you, but your DNS requests are still plain text. You could use DNSCrypt and DNSSEC (combined).

A VPN though, makes your life so much easier, you just open the connection and router everything through it.
Netflix Chaos Engineering: The uncertainty of distributed systems at scale
That's not true, they define the "class" of banana/similar. It's there so that when one supplier in a country says "we'll deliver X tons of Class 1 bananas" there's some definition around what they're actually delivering. This gets more important as you start dealing with different items that have the same name in different countries.
Hacked Amazon Dash button is the fastest way to get pizza delivered
Something similar has been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

Problem is that FlashPath doesn't work like a normal floppy.
I find that most of the time the word paradox is used when a description of a situation is done badly.
Just browse FB in safari with an ad blocker ?
Music for Programming
Show HN: Kibo App. It hides your secret messages in any messenger on your iPhone
Efficient and useful product
"An array is a sequence of values. Each value is given an ordinal number.

Blah."

Why the "blah"?
Show HN: Generate a unique working environment for productive working
Not to mention -when last I checked- multiple, competing patent pools, each with its own licensing terms! >:D
Cyber-security, a town called Wassenaar and the software ostriches
As an American who up and moved to China on a whim and more recently started a tech company split between Boston and Shanghai, I can only greet this news with jubilation. Life here over the last two years has become simply impossible. Good luck to you China.
Is it it possible to directly use it with Spark? (I.e. without downloading it from AWS.) I mean, if the file is public, does it mean that there is a s3n:// address and it is accessible?
It's important to note that F# doesn't really have many operators at all. The one most people see, |> which "pipes" an argument, is defined in an F# library, not in the compiler or part of the core language. You can define it yourself to be anything you like, or not use it at all. The language is unaware of it and treats it like anything else. The definition is just:

let (|>) x f = f x

That's literally function application, in reverse. That's all. It comes in handy for type inference and to make things look nice, but isn't special in any way. I mention this as one comment as to why Rust doesn't have such an operator was that "Rust uses channels for data flow" which is a non-sequiter. Rust just doesn't value conciseness as much, and I'm guessing the safety/perf restrictions might complicate matters.

In fact, even the + and - operators are implemented in F# and shouldn't count as part of the language (just very commonly used bits of the stdlib). I fear that perhaps not enough intros to F# focus on the relatively simple underlying language, and that everything else on top is just an application of said language.

With the type system, it's actually easy to figure out the operators, based on the type alone. Looking at |> for instance, we see a type of:

'a -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'b

This makes it entirely obvious. There's only one implementation for such a type definition. This holds true for so much of the stdlib that the "noise" quickly fades away. This is relevant as magic cannot hide, and misuse will quickly be identified by the compiler.

But it's a valuable comment as it illustrates that the simplicity is not being marketed correctly and turning away potential users.
One word comment:

F$c$book
What people don't seem to have considered is whether or not unblockable ads in FB's app would be enough to make users who install ad blocking abandon FB. There's a tacit assumption that FB is more important to users than blocking ads, but until that's been tested I think we ought to remain skeptical whether such an assumption is correct.

I think it's reasonable to think that someone who pays money not to see ads would be willing to leave FB if their app fails to respect that wish, and FB might well allow blocking to avoid any sort of cascading network effect a core group of users leaving might have.
Easy to use tool. Job referrals just got smarter.
One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner ;))

So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all, which I find a little odd)
These are the definitions of the Drake Equation:

R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space[8][9]

I think the most interesting thing is as a sort of a map of human knowledge. Fill in the blanks with your best answer at this point.

We know some stuff about some of these, but very little about others. I think we can make sensible guesses at the first three, and the last two and Drake's Equation allows us a large margin of error. The likelihood of life developing and the likelihood of intelligence developing however… we don't have much. A weird thing about both these things is that we are the only example we know of. Even earth, which has demonstrated an ability to develop both, seems to have done both only once. All life on earth shares an ancestry. Intelligence is debatable, but by a definition that carries the potential to build technology proving its intelligence to extra terrestrials we are the only example.

We can be reasonably certain that if we start from Eukaryotic life, eyes will evolve. Technology building and intergenerational knowledge accumulation is less certain. Even if you start with humans, it's not obvious that technology will evolve. Homo existed for quite a while, even with individuals very similar to us before getting on this technology curve. Thousands of generations (or tends of thousands, depending on your definitions) of being smart, social bipedal apes anatomically similar to us with no apparent evidence that the invention of pornography-capable smartphones are forthcoming.

We have similarly little evidence about life's chances of emerging. Some sort of replication process that has evolutionary potential would be a decent definition in this context. How likely is that? Do we actually need the "ingredients" common to Europa and Earth? Is Earth's "ingredient list" even ideal? Is organic chemistry the only way to do things? I think our ongoing invention of complex machines is, perhaps, a counterexample.

Back to the Drake equation, I think any time we can fill in one of the variables, tighten up our margins of error or otherwise add knowledge to this knowledge map, we are making interesting progress.

TLDR: At this point in time the existence of both life and intelligence must be assumed to involve ancient, god-like extraterrestrials.
I 110% understand the appeal of 60+fps encoding, and the requirement to do so for certain applications.

However, I'm reminded of all of the very useful work I and my colleagues were able to do while using Remote Desktop or VNC over a 56kbit/s or 128kbit/s connection. Choppy remoting is far from a dealbreaker for folks who need to get things done. :)
Worth mentioning that footnote [2] also applies to Haskell, but not to the same extent.