skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is a little unfair to expect that PG should have acted 17 years ago in a way that he might do today. Today he has 17 years worth of extra experience to call upon. If I look at code I wrote 17 years ago I do not judge it by the fact that today I could do it better. At the time it was the best I could.

Besides, there are more reasons for selling your company than simply maximising the financial return. Maybe his partners wanted to sell, maybe he was exhausted, maybe he lost his passion for the project, maybe he valued never having to work again by selling for a certain payoff now.
You mean like Facebook's Hack language?
You know, we have to do a lot of educating about things like SOPA and other laws that we as programmers generally aren't fond of. And we get upset because we know these things affect everyone in an important way. People use computers and technology every day of their lives -- some are even programmers, and have been their entire careers -- and sometimes even after they have been educated about this issue, they still don't care. But there are still we who care about these issues, and the small number of people (in comparison to users of technology across the whole US) who respond to us.

As you can guess, my point is that this situation occurs in many other areas too, including that of religion. And here I will speak from my experience as an Orthodox Christian: this is an extremely dangerous view. The temptation to label your brother as "not a true Christian," to see yourself as superior because you've read more books, attend more services, pray more often, etc. is very great. I'm not trying to veer into proselytization here, but rather am trying to explain at least the Orthodox response to the general argument of why all Christians aren't obviously great people. :)

When it comes down to it, every person -- Christian or not, Orthodox or not -- is engaged in a very great struggle in their hearts. They have been wounded deeply by this world, even if they live in relative comfort and ease compared to another human in a worse situation. Some have chosen a particular hospital to recover in, but unfortunately struggle greatly with their illness.

I know that my own case, of having experienced multiple religions and chosen an education in religious studies, is rare. But what I am trying to say is that people being sincere about their religion takes many forms, and is more complex than a one-dimensional scale. There are indeed beacons in the Church: the saints, such as Saints Porphryrios and Paisios, who are not far from us but reposed in the 90s. But as Saint Porphyrios said, there are untold numbers of "hidden saints," who lived lives of obscurity and humility and love, not writing tracts of theology, but who lived theology, who lived communion with God.

I think that perhaps we expect a saint to be a certain kind of mythical person and we hold religious people to that kind of standard. I know that it must be disappointing when you meet a Christian and do not encounter faith, hope, and love. But the story of each Christian's life is not over until death -- and even at that point there is mercy.
I've read through the paper, and while I understand how the operating system achieves memory protection (by using W^X flags and memory segmentation), I don't understand how the scheduler would work in a kernel-less OS. What prevents my program from hogging all of the system resources, and preventing other programs from executing?
I think it makes sense that Saddam's own generals and military leaders had something to do with the rise of ISIS. They were thrown out of power in Iraq and denied pensions and everything. Had to find a way to make a living and get back in power at any cost.

Iraq had caches of suicide vests and other stuff that Saddam was planning on using. We discovered those things after the invasion.
Pick the most expressive language that you can get. Constrain it with a coding standard. As people chafe against the coding standard, alter it as needed.

There is no benefit to restricting yourself arbitrarily based on what someone who isn't even involved in your project thinks. I think that most people have difficulty enforcing a coding standard. This is because they don't have a cohesive team. This is a people problem, not a technical problem. If you try to fix the people problem with technical solution, the problem will just pop up some place else.
Where are these magically difficult to maintain containers? I regularly deploy stuff via containers and moving my github repo to a container to being deployed is very simple.
Then we'll hopefully have peace, perhaps.

> By the same logic that a wound heals when you stop poking the scab.

Except that our governments see themselves as providing first aid to an infected wound. Infected wounds only get worse without treatment.

> If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period.

Their intention was (probably) good, execution on the other hand was less then stellar.

> You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.

1940's France would beg to disagree. The Allies in WW2 clearly stopped the Axis powers and controlled their aggression.

> Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world.

Agreed.
Yeah, that's what we need for writing the same bored boilerplate CRUD all over again, though note that those less powerful languages end up being so painful to use that we eventually end up machine-generating most of the code (see: Java, HTML, CSS).

Sometimes we also need languages for exploratory work...

But anyway:

> In my years of software development, I've found that clients and users often ask for “free text” fields. A free text field is maximally powerfully as far as the end user is concerned — they can put whatever they like in. In this sense, this is the “most useful” field — you can use it for anything.

> But precisely because of this, it is also the least useful, because it is the least structured. (...) The longer I do software development involving databases, the more I want to tightly constrain everything as much as possible.

And that's precisely why they want that free-form text field. That's why people still use Excel instead of whatever database solution their IT department bought/prepared - because it doesn't limit them to particular poorly understood interpretation of their workflow that was outdated last week. Real world changes, requirements of the job change, and there's nothing more annoying than be stopped dead in tracks because some smartass from IT thought that this particular field should always be a number...

Use text fields unless you're absolutely, positively sure the constraints you want to impose are valid and will never change.
> Paradox answered.

I've heard Go being advocated twice for development teams and both times the "Google" part was at the top. Second was "binary deployment and static compilation" one time, the other time it was "faster than Python and concurrency". So yeah, I believe it.

Even people who could not articulate why Go would be appropriate for a project/task were jumping on the bandwaggon because of "Google does it so it must be good". Which, well, is not a terrible heuristic for some.
Not from my experience, it may even have gotten worse and spread. I wasn't alerted to these problems during any phase of training, and recently got a PhD in biomed. In fact I was encouraged to make these same mistakes. Maybe others can give a different perspective.
His incoherent rant is only motivated by a threat to his career
What's the point of declaring war on the basis of their promise to defend Poland, if they never actually did anything to help Poland?

It's not nearly so simple as that. For example, the French had better tanks, as well as more tank. There were plusses and minuses on both sides, but the result is far from clear and certainly not an overwhelming advantage in either direction. Combine this with the German army being busy in Poland for several weeks, and the French and British had a great opportunity to start their part of the conflict on their own terms. Some highly-placed Germans stated after the war that they would have been totally screwed if the Allies had invaded then.

The Battle of France revealed that the Germans were capable of completely smashing the Allied forces. This was partly because the places where the Germans had the advantage (aircraft, communications, doctrine) were key. But it was also just that the leadership was so afraid of getting drawn into a repeat of WWI that they let themselves be overrun. It's interesting to note that nobody expected the Germans to have that level of success, not even the Germans. Even Hitler, who was the optimistic one, thought they'd lose a million soldiers in that fight. I don't know if you're basing things off this experience, but it can't be used to show that the Allies thought they couldn't beat the Germans, nor probably even to show the Allies couldn't actually beat the Germans if they had struck first.
"the ultimate aim is to turn bitcoin into something that anyone can use to more easily store, send, and receive money"

Please, tell how you do that with a currency whose value fluctuates so wildly. The problem with bitcoin, to put it simply, is that as soon as people start using it, its value soars, making it unusable again. That's why it will never work in its current form.
> I'd be more interested in a poll asking "can violence specifically targeted against civilians be justified"

The survey we're discussing asked "can suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets to defend Islam be justified". Note "against civilian targets".

> The same line states "although 99 per cent thought the bombers were wrong to carry out the atrocity", which is a pretty important thing to omit.

That was from a different survey, done a year prior to the one I quoted. I don't debate that moods shift in the muslim population, hence the link to all the surveys I'm aware of.
Don’t Listen to Those Who Think Coding Is the Only Way to Go
>> One of the main theoretical results in the paper is that they propose a differentiable .. technique to optimize the parameters of the trees.

Yay! Now Decision Trees too can get stuck in local optima! :D

(totally tongue in cheek)
I'm reminded of an excellent quote from Bertrand Russell:

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
I think this is a reasonable interpretation, but those who disagree with you might point to a large number of instances where extremists' political grievances are only intelligible in the context of religious beliefs derived from the Quran.

For example, the Tsarnaev brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan and raised and educated in the West, yet they committed acts of violence against the United States in retaliation for its foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What would have motivated them to commit these acts on behalf of Afghanistan and Iraq, countries to which they had no personal attachment, except for their religious belief that jihad was justified after the invasion of Muslim lands? In other words, what renders a person susceptible to "being sold" Islamic demagoguery other than the content of Islam itself?
The more fair-minded outlets do seem to try, but even then, they seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-is-...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/17/saudi-clerics-f...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-isl...
There has always been a degree of promotional fiction to the ‘nothing hidden’ story. The Macintosh brought us the now-ubiquitous Cut/Copy/Paste paradigm using an fragile invisible clipboard. (Fragile because Undo has never restored clipboard data lost to an accidental Cut or Copy.) The Xerox Star didn't do it that way; it had Move and Copy to an explicit destination, with no hidden state.
Sorry; not to comment upon that which must not be commented upon, but I'd love to hear what people disagree with my post about, as opposed to not getting to know anything other than its popularity.
Why do think anyone gives a shit what programs you use?

> As a final result of the process, my iCloud account has all the checkboxes unchecked.

Flippin' fascinating. Why are you telling anyone this?
It's worth distinguishing between manipulating a function as an "external" value and making "internal" changes to a function. The first case is completely unproblematic. The second is potentially extremely complex and so far intractable in all but "duh" cases.
> The survey we're discussing was "can suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets to defend Islam could be justified". Note "against civilian targets".

I'd reiterate that Americans believe that themselves.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/04/70-years-aft...

> [T]he share of Americans who believe the use of nuclear weapons was justified is now 56%, with 34% saying it was not.
I'm not sure Go will have a legacy in 50 years. If you gave me even odds I'd go with none.
> I never got on the iphone bandwagon

i-Holes and g-Holes are just different kinds of a-holes. Nobody cares which you are or why.
Reading and trying to understand this:

1. The address space for each process has an unprivileged "user-level" segment (DSAPP), and a privileged "OS" segment (DSOS) where the data traditionally associated with the kernel is stored.

2. Traditional "system calls" are implemented as ordinary procedures. These procedures switch to the privileged segment, do their stuff, and then switch back to the user segment.

3. Since these are ordinary procedures, what's to prevent application code from switching to the privileged segment and mucking with the OS guts? Well, the app doesn't know which segment is privileged! It can try to read it out of the "system call" procedures, but that memory is execute-only, so that won't work.

4. Maybe the app determines the privileged segment via guess-and-check! To prevent that, the OS plays shell games, switching which segment is privileged around every time the app guesses wrong.

5. Ok, so there aren't that many segments: the probability of guessing right is still ~.01% per try. That's very unlikely, assuming the app only guesses once. (We hope attackers haven't thought of guessing more than once.)

This guess-and-check attack would seem to be a deal-breaker, no? This seems like a terribly insecure design.
Computerized trading uses more than just historical price for input.
That's just not true. A program needs to be started root to execute setuid(2): there is no way for a program started by an unprivileged user to drop privileges. Nor can it drop network privileges. That's why tools like pledge(2) and seccomp had to be added, but they have their own problems. To get the level of isolation GP described, you need some fairly esoteric solutions.
Run containers on bare metal already [video]
By comparison, Salesforce within this last year disabled a bunch of cipher options on it's HTTPS connections, and communicated it to their developers pretty well, even though most shouldn't/wouldn't have been affected except for edge cases...

Compared to this mess with a much larger impact.
> I never got on the iphone bandwagon…

you got on the google bandwagon. i-Hole, g-Hole: different kinds of a-holes. Nobody cares which you are or why.
Meh. Depends who your client is. WidgetCo needs a CRUD app? Sure, their "serial #" field ought to be TEXT; their definition of "number" probably already includes "0001234-45-X" and is going to change in a month.

EmbeddedNetworkApplianceInc needs a database to manage their mission-critical data path? That IPv4 mask length field is going to be INTEGER NOT NULL CHECK (masklen BETWEEN 0 AND 32) and they can ALTER TABLE when they need to support IPv6 and the rest of their software is ready to support a masklen of 128 without crashing. There's no reason to let extraneous half-baked crap get into that field.
Would you consider replacing Ruby with Rust instead of Go?
I'd love to see comments that don't consider the amount of libraries but the languages themselves since eventually more open source will exist in Rust. This is mostly a question of someone doubting go because of this http://yager.io/programming/go.html
I think there's a 0% chance of Russia using nukes against Ukraine. The Russians aren't stupid, and they know how that would end. They also have no reason to do so, since they would have no trouble winning conventionally. Russia has been going out of their way to keep that war low-key to avoid provoking outside intervention, which is the only reason they don't already own the place completely.
This reminds me of the article about Apple's internal iPhone UI, and how I thought it actually looked better than the release version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414149

A heavy, very readable font, along with buttons that actually look like buttons.
Just speculating here, maybe they don't like seeing sarcastic criticism of somebody's choice to give up a DRM-enabled distribution channel, or derailing the conversation by nitpicking little bits of wording.

Nah, can't be, it must be the fanboys who follow me around downvoting you.
Naturally, if you give up Turing completeness, you can have excellent 100% verified results.

Sometimes yeah, it's easier to prove things about simpler systems.
Please note: "Happy Birthday" is well out of copyright in a number of countries that aren't the USA. Including Australia, and any other country that applied the rule that copyright expired 50 years after the death of the author. According to Wikipedia, the copyright expires in the EU at the end of next year (70 years after the death of the last author).

The fact that copyright extends for so long is a travesty and is something that we all should be fighting against (along with all the myriad of other injustices around...).
The wonderful world of Disney hypocrisy (2012)
CodinGame – Games for Programmers
Yes, technically any set of consecutive lookup tables can be combined into a single LUT.

However, it's often easier to stack them and just makes sense. Plus, 16-bit color makes it technically possible.

Let's say that you're working with a color-sensitive piece in a color-correct pipeline. First adjustment layer should be to bring your pantone color card to look right. Then, the next adjustment right after that would be your overall grading pass, e.g "cold" or "vintage". Then, the next pass could be to "get those skin tones a little pinker". Much easier than working on a single global correction layer.
> It's his server. He gets to decide how it responds when people send it requests.

I don't understand why you think this contradicts anything I said.
That's called a gated community and you don't get to fund them with taxpayer money. If you don't want to deal with plebeians on your roads, then you need to pay a developer to build private roads.

LA streets do not belong to the neighborhoods, they belong to the city. If neighbors are concerned about congestion, perhaps they should support policy that promotes density and mass transit.
Herold of a dystopian future where individuals isolate themselves, and become increasingly radical in a bubble formed by their personal bias. Is there anything I can use to block Republicans? :-)
The Google name surely gets a lot of people's attention. But if the language actually sucked, it's not going to matter. This is a tool that you have to use EVERY DAY. The Google name is far from a guaranteed hit maker. See Google Plus, Google Wave, etc.

That's like saying Dale Earnhardt could recommend driving a Gremlin... sure, it would get a lot of people to go for a test drive, and a lot of those people would then run away.

I fully admit I clinked on the link to the Go website purely because it was from a big name... the exact same thing I did for Hack and Swift and Rust. But I don't write code in Hack or Swift or Rust. I write code in Go.

Sure, I may have missed some really great language put out by an obscure name that never made it to Hacker News. But then again, evidently so did everyone else.

So why do I write code in Go? Because the language and the ecosystem around it are really good. Because I feel like I can understand any piece of code written in it without needing a PhD from Stanford. Because I feel like it pushes people towards simple, straightforward solutions.

Past that first click, the only thing Google means to me is a guaranteed check to pay the bills of all the great people working on the project.
I wonder what FB and Google think about this filtering API. If one day Apple blocks all ads by default, it would be very interesting.
What do you mean by "removal of the thread?" Go is multithreaded and is vulnerable to classic thread-safety issues, like races and reentrancy.
You make a really good point and have caused me to think about this more deeply!

I think to answer the question I need to start by researching why Christians stopped being animated by the violent passages of the Bible, and only subscribe to the (relatively) more benign ones (generally).

I think the point I was actually making (albeit inadvertently) is that as long as Muslims believe the full text of the Quran is actually true, they will be motivated to violence (yes it may require some charismatic person to push them, or some sort of social encouragement, but that person or group also generally believes in the text of the Quran).

In contrast, someone who subscribes to Jainism could never be animated to commit a violent act rationalized by their religious text, because Jainism is against all forms of violence.

TL;DR - The content of the religious text matters, even if other factors are also at play.
The biggest change to my coding style in the past few years has been to opt out of the most expressive solution if it will fall apart in a cut-and-paste situation.

Many new features are variations on old features. The incremental cost of implementing one so that I can cut and paste the next half dozen is small. The cost of refactoring to a generalization after that is also small. But the cost of poorly generalizing early and having to reimplement feature one and everything it touches in order to make feature two possible is quite painful.

This becomes more obvious when you have different codebases with similar features that might want to share from time to time. A formally generalized solution becomes a big dependency, as it relies on a heavily specified problem. A slightly too primitive solution flows between codebases freely - plug in new primitives and it runs.
herald
Does this work with procedural geometry games like Minecraft?
I agree with that. 16-bit color helps a lot (but doesn't completely eliminate the risk of throwing away data), and the approach you mentioned (correction vs grading) is a valid exception to my point - though if you're doing that, you likely understand what you're doing and the potential gotchas.

My point was more targeted toward the numerous tutorials I see where people use many such adjustment layers without real purpose other than to "play around" with the color, turning the image into a posterized mess (especially by stretching things too far one way, then essentially negating that adjustment with something else).
how about a sample "dangerous" png image?