skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't matter what we do. It's the network that counts, and Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter know this. They have my friends, and they don't let me communicate with them unless I use their apps with an identity under their domain.

At least text messaging is still federated with portable identities. Took an act of the Feds to ensure that…
TRATAMENTUL PRIN POST ALIMENTAR
So you think syntactical simplicity is more important to the maintainability of a large system than whether or not it uses immutable data? Ok.

Because immutability is a massive boon to horizontal scaling and maintainability in ways that are simply unattainable in languages where it's not encouraged. It makes concurrency and parallelism observably trivial, it makes your code safer. Assuming you're using a strictly evaluated (AKA eager, greedy, whatever else you know to mean not-lazy) language with immutable data, race conditions are eliminated.

Let's review that again. In a large distributed codebase written in an immutable language, (let's say Elixir, it's fashionable at the moment and good for doing this kind of stuff) concurrency and parallelism are trivial and race conditions are nonexistent. This is even before we get to type safety and stuff like the actor model. That's huge. That's the immutability advantage. I could go on but it's late and I have school tomorrow.
And that's why we love Steve Wozniak more.
I had a similar experience. I ran my own XMPP server for several years, so that my email address also worked as an XMPP/Jabber ID. I talked to people across several different services, including an increasing number of folks on Google Talk.

Then Google Talk stopped federating properly. Only a bit at first: things like presence notification didn't quite work right, and adding people didn't quite work right. And in the meantime, Hangouts popped up, and offered a more seamless audio/video experience too. Most people I know stopped using Google Talk entirely in favor of Hangouts; the few that remained used it only while the gmail web interface more-or-less supported it. Eventually, federation with Google Talk quite deliberately stopped working.

It didn't take long after that before almost everyone else I talked to on it stopped showing up, even those who didn't use Google Talk. People had "last seen" times in the months, and if I wanted to talk to those people in realtime, I sent them text messages, or Twitter DMs, or Hangout calls.

So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago, I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again. Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody to talk to.
Its sad to see the world of text/instant messaging devolving back to the 90s. It felt like the future was so bright not that long ago. I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS). It is the only thing left that can communicate with everybody.
It doesn't matter how many things Perl 6 got right when they got the most important thing completely wrong: the availability of a usable and reliable implementation!
It seems these days everyone wants to be a programmer from all walks of life no matter what subjects they studied or if they are a dropout or something else.

I've worked with people who had PHDs in Computer Science and still didn't know how to program and I often had to debug their programs. They would make beginner mistakes over and over again.

I've also known people who dropped out of college and learned how to program on their own and gained a lot of experience and were better than me. Until the Dotcom age and requiring at least a bachelors to screen out applicants and then they couldn't get a programming job anymore and went to work retail jobs.

If you want to know who should become a programmer, it is a person with an interest in programming. Almost anyone can become a programmer, the hard part is learning how to debug and write quality code. Not many can master that.

You will find many MOOCs about learning programming, but you won't find many about debugging and quality control of code. When you get into a Hacker School or Hackathon most of what you will write is sloppy code because you have a time limit to get something done. Quality code takes a long time to get correct.

Most programmers are faceless, their company owns their IP, and their managers take credit for the code. Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are famous but had programmers work for them that made most of the stuff. Wozniak wrote his own code and designed his own circuits but was phased out when Apple got into the Macintosh era.

Programming is really hard and stressful work, you'll have times when you can't figure out what is wrong with your code and the clock ticks on your deadline for the project. You'll ask for help and even Google search and still not be able to figure stuff out. Then after hours of no solution, you'll figure something out and make the code work. It is not for the faint of heart, managers will treat you like something they scraped off their shoe, end users will cuss at you when something doesn't work right, you can't fight back and expect to hold on to that job. You have to be diplomatic about it. You have to learn how to deal with stress and failures.
That's what happens when two systems follow Unix philosophy and the third one uses its own philosophy.
What language did you have in mind? It has to be suitable for writing an OS, so Java, python and what not are out. The project has been around for more than a decade so the language has to have had a stable v1 release more than 10 years ago. Also the original code you are working with is in C so you will need to translate it. C seems like a perfectly reasonable choice.
Shush now. Intellectual property law is for investors, not workers.
all true, but it is 99% syntax compatible with Matlab. As a student I had saved a lot of money using Octave
Great initiative!

A well rounded person is always better than a person that's really good at one or fewer things.
There are several things you are not getting. One of them is the totally unnecessary barrier to entry that your attitude would create. This is a community that is attempting to make itself more approachable and enterable, not less. There's nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel in your own time, especially if you learn from the experience.
I'm assuming - trying to plug themselves into the acronym to capitalize on the respect (and jobs) STEM has as "the real deal" as opposed to art fields, and framing that as initiative to bring more people into STEM. It's cynical, I know, but I've heard enough art/design people saying "art and design is important too!" and completely missing the point. No one is saying design or art is not important to humans. It's just STEM fields are different because they deal head-on with objective, observable reality as opposed to incredibly complex internal life of humans.
I've been successfully using proXPN on my laptops and tablets for a couple of years now. Used it all over the world, though not in China. They have several exit points, in different countries, to choose from.
Biography of a Face
It's pretty obvious that the name is playing off the movie.
XMPP lacks a fundamental feature: it does not echo your messages back to your other devices. This made it uniquely unsuitable for the mobile world: if you start a conversation with someone on your computer, and then move to your phone, all you see on the phone are the other person's messages, as if they had been talking to themselves. (Yes, someone did eventually write an extension for that, which nobody ended up supporting.)

I can't even say that XMPP failed to adapt to mobile. It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place, and mobile just made the flaw obvious to everyone.
The reason why artists aren't getting tech jobs isn't because there's a letter missing from an acronym...
Behold, the problem net neutrality has searched for: Bell Mobility circa 2013 [1]. For $5, you could buy either 10 hours of Bell Mobile TV™ or ~1.5 hours of Netflix (not including your subscription) [2]. Assumptions below. The story has a happy ending, in that the Canadian equivalent of the FCC wound up forcing them to change their pricing after four or five years [3]. Whoo. What's a few million dollars between friends.

Make up your own mind as to whether you want this to be your future.

Assumptions:

1 Mbit/s video streams

Data purchased in 5GB ($35) chunks. Note that, if purchased in 500 MB chunks, one can watch 15 minutes of Netflix, which is laughable and therefore not presented due to shock value.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121220034331/http://www.bell.c...?

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130102055752/http://www.bell.c...

[3]:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bell-denie...
As one of those few hundred people who actively use FastMail's XMPP, I guess I'm now in the market for an alternative. I need exactly one federated account on my domain, so a standalone service probably isn't going to make sense financially.

From a DIY perspective, what are the options? Are Ignite, Prosody, and ejabberd the only viable options? Are they all being maintained? Is there anything out there that works at a small scale; like a Node server that could run on OpenShift, or something else super lightweight?
The real useful advice behind this is basically "know a lot of random stuff". But people end up focusing on the "calligraphy" aspect and fetishizing focus on the less practical.
Glad you liked it! For the gifs... http://makeagif.com/
Those are assertions, not evidence. Also, we don't know much about the thing you're comparing it to.
I agree with the consensus in the article. I work for a team which is spread out all over the world and i'm one of the two people working from India. I feel isolated and lonely. My other team-mate from India works from home most of the time is planning on quitting soon so it makes it even worse.

The work is great but just feel like having someone to talk about your problems and getting quick help is no where near pinging them on IM tools and asking if they are free or whatever. I envy most of my co-workers here who always have someone to walk the hallway, have lunch together etc.
Not true. Most terrorists do not do it for fame. Do you honestly think these Terrorists in Paris did it for the infamy?

I remember after 911 an interview on the radio with an ex IRA terrorist who served 20 years in prison for what he did. He was asked if Terrorist's generally think what they are doing is right. He said, absolutely not. The more correct description of their state of mind is "there is no other choice but this".

He said that his terror cell had been driven to do what they did because every other avenue to seek redress was systematically closed. He said if you wan't to stop terror attacks you have to keep the dialogue, keep the political solutions open. You have to have political solutions. You have to move towards other solutions. You have to keep all the options open and you have to address the very real injustices that these people are fighting for.

It's when they have absolutely nothing left, but to die... that's when you have a problem. And despite what the government and security apparatus promise, there is NOTHING any government can do EVER to completely protect it's citizens from such attacks.

I'll sum up with another parable. A Buddhist monk explained to his students that the world was covered in sharp stones that could cut our feet at any time. Was it possible to wrap the entire earth in leather, so that we could walk safely apon it? Of course not. So instead we wrap our feet in leather and it protects us from all the sharp stones in the world.

Likewise, in this Universe you will find infinite enemies. It is impossible to wrap all their hearts in kindness to protect us from them. So instead we wrap our own heart in kindness, and that protects us from all enemies.
Except for not retaliating, which I don't think is a solution.

How do you retaliate against a concept? The US has created more terrorists in the last 14 years by attempting to do just that.

Mental game: you're a terrorist. For the sake of the exercise your enemy is daytime television. Teletubbies bomb your house from the sky and in the process your wife and daughters, all innocent, are killed. The only survivor - your son. Your son now hates Teletubbies. He fucking hates them. Consider that he might want to exact revenge. Daytime television now has a new enemy, assuming he has no friends or other family members sympathetic to his plight. If he does, you have more than one new enemy.
Possible ice volcanoes discovered on frozen Pluto
Knobs are awesome. I lament their passing in eg car radio and car aircon UI, and in microwaves.
A strawman argument is a distorted version of someone else's position, formulated to be easy to knock down for the purpose of appearing to win debates. A null hypothesis is just a starting point for reasoning.
From what I heard the problem in China is that they would block VPN servers too.
Someone's trying to make money off their Amazon affilate tag...
> C doesn't hide anything from you.

Yes, it does.

C hides cache, SIMD, registers, the stack (no multiple return values for you!), the details of the heap (malloc() either succeeds or fails, and you can't know what it's going to do until you call it), SMP, instruction-level parallelism, and the details of atomicity, all of which are relevant to OS programming.

C is a nice language. Don't pretend it's how the hardware really works.
I once got one of the senior researchers in my group talking about the harsh task of writing scientific articles before the advent of the personal computer(and LaTeX, of course). Back in those days, he had to do the usual handwriting of a draft of his papers, hand that off to a secretary, who'd, by rule, only type up two drafts of any of the faculty's manuscripts. They had to be very careful, then, what they sent off...that it was polished and ready for submission to a journal.

Then, when someone had a figure to include (again, before the advent of matlab), they had to plot out their data by hand, then send it off to the art department. Journals back in the day had strict requisites on the quality, type (font) of figures, and on their readability, and the artists were careful to follow these rules, turning handwritten figures into quality, readable, and informative figures.

Nowadays, you have no fucking idea how often I have to read a paper with figures that are just plain confusing, un-insightful, and with types and labels that are unreadable, and defeat the whole purpose of a scientific paper: to disseminate and communicate your findings. I get it that STEM'ers happy now that they no longer have to talk to the art department, but so often, they do not realize how important design is and how you need at least a modicum of design sense, especially when the entire point of you writing a paper (after using it when writing for grants) is to communicate with your fellow scientist your findings.

Design is so much more than "color of packaging," design is readability, type, structure of visual elements, and yes color. Moreover, design, as the name implies, is art for a purpose; often for, yes, attention grabbing and customer wooing, but for us scientists, design plays an important role in the communication process. And going back to color, for fuck's sake, some choices colormaps can really hurt the quality of your publication! 10 panes of Jet heatmaps, each with different limits on each pane? Give me a break.

Design is important, just as much as literacy is important, just as much as knowing limits before you memorize the derivative of a sine function is important. Just because you have LaTeX and bootstrap doesn't mean design isn't important anymore, even though it's easier. No one can do everything, but being humble enough to learn from people outside your field (even outside science) can make you a better STEM'er, especially when it comes to sharing your cool ideas.
GeorgetownU to rename buildings that reflect school’s ties to slavery
Thank you, Nest [2014]
Doesn't excuse Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple, from building closed protocols and actively thwarting attempts to make third-party apps.

(Yes, I know they're for-profit companies who have every reason not to want to relinquish any control over their network. Doesn't mean I can't hate on them for not even pretending to support consumer choice.)
Slock.it: Locks controlled by Ethereum smart contracts
I really never understood the divide. They are all just tools in our toolbox. It feels like arguing screwdrivers versus hammers. They may not do the same thing, but both can be useful!
If it isn't based on the Navier Stokes equations, can I actually use this to reliably simulate fluid behavior? Or is this more useful for creating pseudo-realistic water scenes?
Unless I'm missing something clever here, I think it's worth noting that the 68k line was from Motorola.
Apple uses XMPP internally as a way to securely communicate.

Doesn't really change much; just thought that'd be an interesting thing to throw out.
The solution is very simple - support the immigrants, and instead of waging a war outside the country, focus on police/social work inside the country.

I was born in a country that (somewhat) supported terrorism - Czechoslovakia. Eventually we switched sides (and later also somewhat supported terrorism again). Why did we switch sides? Because our emigrants received support from the West (while we were receiving very little terrorism). The West didn't engage the Warsaw pact directly (or semi-directly through terrorism), but through cultural war. That's why (at least I think) the West was successful in the Eastern Europe, but not in the Latin America, or in the Middle East.

In my opinion, immigrants are the key to successful foreign policy. The reason they are coming is because you're doing something better than their home leaders. And they will tell their relatives in their home country that, very passionately.

The terrorism is short-term strategy of states or other groups that are massively losing the cultural war (kinda like firing employees to boost profits). The long-term strategy is outlined above (and as every long-term strategy it entails element of getting better). So don't worry about the culture; if your opponent resorts to terrorism, your culture has already won!
Can and do are not the same. Just because different forms of knowledge are "easier" or "more difficult" to obtain does not mean that the easier knowledge is somehow devalued, except in the context of labor supply.

I would not say that, at this point, many engineers know or are interested much in history or art, regardless of its social value. This is a mild failure on the part of the free market.
I mean if you keep your shell scripts in ~/bin/ (which is where I happen to keep mine)... I use straight bash scripts most of the time, but it's usually easiest for me to use node/js since my environment already has it than it is for me to try to remember perl, learn python or use something else.
What is H.265 Codec and the Advantage of H.265 over H.264?
Cubase 7.5 with crack
Yes, this is a large multiunit multistory multimillion dollar housing development for techworkers. They can handle having a few units for a few families, and they can build/budget with that in mind.
Local calls were unlimited in the 1970s and 1980s, like the are now. I think that this was true everywhere in the US but with different RBOCs perhaps some had different rules.
Ice volcanoe = fountain, right?
Worlds largest fusion reactor is about to turn on
For my use case to display an interactive graph with thousands of connected nodes on smartphones in a web app, no available graph library was fast enough. Sigma.js, VivaGraph, D3 based ones, etc. are all way to slow. WebGL hadn't good support on mobile devices 2 years ago.

I ended up coding a terse JS library (20kb) with a Canvas and SVG renderer and physics simulation that runs on 60fps.
Of course users don't benefit. But the operators of the walled-gardens do! I can't even understand how federated XMPP had any support from the large players in the first place - it's absolutely against their economical interests.

Let's be honest - we live in times when "federated" email communication would also be abandoned (with Facebook becoming the de facto platform for personal communication) if not the business users.
Impact on the scale of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, or Mark Zuckerburg is far more about luck than about skill or choice of field. Sure, you have to be pretty skilled and choose a fast-growing field to achieve that. However, remember that the field of personal computing was tiny - barely existed, even - when Gates & Wozniak got started. The reason we view them as having had a large influence on the world is because computing as we know it largely grew up under their companies.

Instead, ask yourself if you'd be satisfied with the kind of impact and influence that, say, Paul Graham or John Resig or David Heinemeier Hansson or Patrick Mckenzie has achieved. That is eminently doable with hard work, devotion to the craft, and smart choices.

And then ask yourself whether you enjoy the actual process of programming. That's the most important thing. It's very hard to be successful in a field that you don't enjoy, and even if you are successful, what's the point if you're not happy?
Oh, I should have been more explicit:

The decoupling of function calling and IO actions can work in non-statically typed languages, too.

Your question concerns a different topic. To give something like an answer: that problem can only occur with `functions' of zero arguments. Haskell sidesteps the issue by requiring all functions to have exactly one argument.
I ran prosody for a while. I found it lightweight, fairly easy to configure, and it worked quite well. Just don't forget to set up the magic srv records if you go the self host route.
These ideas are not quite "emerging", but now is certainly a great time to implement them! Consider this quote:

"Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
We had a bad experience with ejabberd pre-release version 3 (had an intern spend the entire summer on it, and I put some time in too):

http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/09/26/one-step-forward-two-ste...

Honestly Prosody looks the best. We were planning to switch to it when async login support and scalability to thousands of domains was stable... but that was 2 years ago and it never quite materialised - and now DJabberd is so far behind in support for "standard XMPP" and the interoperability of the remaining servers that we just had to give up. I argued strongly against it, having spent so many bloody years on making this thing work - including tons of patches to DJabberd and some EJabberd hacking as well - but the numbers didn't lie.

Better to spend our time on exciting things like the currently-in-testing cross-domain support for Cyrus IMAPd and reverse ACL lookup that will make the LIST command blindingly fast even on big servers. I'm hoping to be able to say two steps forward, one step back this time instead :)