skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the author is attacking the wrong problem axes. I don't think expressiveness or power are the problem here. I think the problem is lack of clarity.

Consider the discussion of terseness. What is the best way to explain something in Englush? Long winded or terse? Wrong axis. Explain things clearly. Expressing a concept perfectly with a small number of words the listener doesn't understand is useless. Beating a dead horse is useless.

I have a huge problem with C because the same characters and keywords are reused in multiple different similar but different ways and it adds cognitive load to things that should be simple (eg declarations) -- leaving me less able to devote my limited mental faculties to the problem I am actually trying to solve. (Not singling out C, just picking a well known example.)

Languages that give you lots of redundant ways of doing things -- especially if some ways are better than others but not obviously so -- aren't more powerful, they simply harder to understand. (This is not the same as arguing for newspeak — words that are similar but not the same are useful.)

What we want is clarity. Clarity isn't simple or easy but it is exactly what we want in programming languages.
> The PNG decoder has no access to the file system, network interfaces, user interfaces, or really anything but stdin and stdout and some memory.

So you've rediscovered what UNIX has allowed us to do for decades now.

Things like process isolation, memory isolation, file isolation, and hardware isolation aren't new. UNIX systems offered mature implementations of them in the 1980s, if not before then.

Best of all, this functionality was offered without needing to resort to resource-intensive virtual machines or anything of that sort.

Those who want the level of isolation you propose have been able to get it for a long time now. They just tend not to, because it's inconvenient and impractical for real world systems.
> People who saw what war is didn't want to see it again. But people today are other generation.

I suspect the same thing. Many in the US and elsewhere in the West since 9/11 have been quick to embrace violence, as well as the scourges that brought earlier wars: Nationalism, racial and religious prejudice, etc. What happened to the norms that said these things are dangerous? Is it that the generation who experienced the consequences has died out, and now we are ignorant again? Is that why history repeats? A lesson learned lasts no longer than a generation? How depressing.

I also wonder if I am merely remembering a golden age that never existed. Certainly during the Cold War many bad, hateful things happened.

> I still think words about peaceful living from western countries won't reach people in Middle Asia.

Remember the idea that the generation of WWII knew about war and peace, and our generation has forgotten. Perhaps the current generation in the Mideast is the one that knows, far better than we do, about war and peace.
I think he's only refering to the western world.
Human-in-the-loop computing is the future
Any combination of modifier keys excluding the 'menu' key will combine with PrtScn with one hand under Windows - all the modifier keys are available on the same side of the keyboard as PrtScn on a standard keyboard.
Haskell for fast, concurrent, robust service (Twitter tech talk)
You have a way to contact them?

Believe me, I've tried. For years.

For example, they went to the new shared (desktop and mobile) dumbed-down interface on July 4. Features on the main desktop site were removed to match the features missing on the mobile site, so you could no longer search on Aisle, Disabled seating, exclude piggyback sets, etc. But that's another rant.

Now, in doing this, they made a ridiculous design/coding error. If you were searching on Qty=5+, you'd think it would show you all listings offering 5 or more, right?

Wrong. They showed you the first twenty listings with Qty=5+, and then just showed you everything, starting over from cheapest first. Yup, a hardcoded limit of 20.

If you had a listing of 5+ and didn't show up in the first 20 qualified listings, your listing would never be seen. Given that an event can have well over 10,000 listings, that's a lot of invisibility.

That was reported to them July 4, including through their TopSellers organization. It persisted for four months. (I'm assuming it's fixed; I couldn't reproduce it today but could as recently as last weekend.)
> By way of contrast - not only does the London underground have countdown clocks on platforms (accuracy +/- 1 minute), they also have an API allowing 3rd party developers to integrate tube (and bus) times into transport apps.

The MTA has countdown close, just only on the IRT lines. And the MTA has an API for both subway and bus times.
Yeah, that happens on firefox for me as well.

Firefox has been falling behind of late. Every third website seems to have a huge banner video these days, and firefox chooses to run them automatically, and it can't seem to do so snappily. Makes the entire UI unresponsive, including the chrome outside that tab. Google maps is unusable on firefox as well for several months. Many are the flash videos that my firefox can't run because they changed some default and I can't be arsed to locate it. I just switch to chrome, which seems to handle them without problems using the same supposedly-insecure flash plugin.

(I'm on linux.)
Yes and no... the details are a little different, because we're using subshells and not sourcing scripts directly in the current process (cleanup is easier that way -- you just `exit`). But in effect, yeah, this is minor window dressing around executing an initializing shell script in a sandbox. I find the interface and the doc surfacing useful.

In the nearterm I'm going to be working on supporting imports -- i.e., you `git clone` down a project that has a deskfile at its root, then you're able to import it (maybe as a fancy symlink) into your own deskfiles. That'd give you immediate, programmtic context for working on the project.
Like you a big Apple fan who is horribly confused by the iOS music app — which, functionally is all I could hope for (the play list manager is something I've wanted forever) but seriously wtf?
Ask HN: How to invest in eSports?
eSports is growing as can be seen from the rise in popularity (and revenues) of eSports. Most notably World of Warcraft, League of Legends and the people who play games for a living. There are increasing data points that suggest this, but how do I participate in this new phenomenon?

How can I best cash in on this insight without any special access to startups or private companies?
When you have things like http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/424102/returning-copy-d..., do you defend them?
> It's not disagreement, it's how you express it ("crock").

YOU don't like how I expressed my disagreement. I could copy/paste what I said before about loud people being loud and it would be just as valid.

> As you can see, you were downvoted for that and neither of us is able to downvote the other.

How many people read that post and chose not to downvote?

This goes back to what I said before about loud people who are overly sensitive. Most people read it and passed on by.

> Does this mean you haven't seen the new season 6 champ select yet?

When people realize declaring support will give them a faster queue, they'll start declaring support and then refuse to take the role using the same tactics. The duo's will still attempt to force the roles they want and exhibit the same behavior as they are currently.

People's internet will still crap out and those 4 players will still be forced to play it out.

It will have an effect, but not nearly as large an effect as you're trying to imply. They need to give the group as a whole more power to deal with the bad actors.

> I honestly don't see that many DCs, especially in ranked. People get called on it if they play when their connection cannot support it and when there have been network outages, Riot turns on Loss Prevented.

That must mean it doesn't happen, right?

As for Loss Prevented, it has to get extremely bad before they use that. I've seen too many instances of consistent disconnects in games over hours and days where no Loss Prevented was given. Loss Prevented is, by definition, late to the party and their last resort for the most dire of situations. Any discussion about how to deal with things such as random disconnects by players cannot include Loss Prevention as a possible solution.
Yeah, for sure, in a lot of applications you really don't want people chanting "code is data, data is code" and building impossible shit that nobody can figure out.

A finite state machine can easily be made basically un-debuggable by human beings.

It's just ... maybe it's the crowd I hang out with, but I feel like these ideas have already totally won.
I think Apple's move to San Francisco actually addresses this issue quite well. The move to ultra thin Helvetica weights was a tad too much.
I thought Firefox was facing a similar problem for a while now, with the merging of the back and forward buttons for example. I wonder who is responsible.
ah yes, the _all_ is what i missed. thanks.
Yes, resilience if it is a fringe group. What if they are products of the state sponsorship?

For instance, Pakistan uses terrorism as a state policy; the end result is, terrorists end up blowing the very hands that feed them.

What if the terrorism is a result of the indirect state sponsorship? For instance, Saudi and the US have played a role in Sunni Terrorism. ISIL, Taliban and Al queda are sunni terorism groups. Some or another have sponsored them in the past.

Even Hamas is a sunni group, but their main sponsor is Shiites of Iran.
Saudi clerics declare Isis terrorism a 'heinous crime' under sharia law (2014)
In general UX at the expense of usability is an annoying trend that last was a major issue when Flash became popular. I don't think Apple is giving design a bad name, this is what design is usually about. Apple's (usual) focus on usability actually gave design a good name which designers strive to damage with their over-emphasis on aesthetics.
I love the idea of using a strong and somewhat arbitrary palette which is then tuned with "post-processing" layers. Instead of worrying about the exact shade of every color separately, you can achieve cohesive effects on the whole palette.
React vs. Angular 2
Prior, yes. Superior, how?
Powerful massacres
Banish the Kardashians from the web
Button borders have been replaced by coloured text in iOS, and for the most part I find it pretty easy to use and pretty easy to identify clickable things. The problem is worse on websites which have no such rule regarding whether something is actionable or not (well, they did use to - blue and purple links - but apparently that doesn't look cool enough any more).

Much worse for me is the invention of a bunch of new UI elements which seem to have no known rules about how they work (Apple Music app - the word "songs" is actually a drop down list to change how the list below it is grouped into artist or album? What?!). Or huge numbers of functionality hidden behind a random choice of long press, force touch, context menu, swipe left or right, or double tap. E.g.: Safari on iOS: long press the reload key to load the desktop site, or type a word in the address bar and scroll down to "find in page". How on earth am I supposed to find these things without having read about them online in some frustrated help thread?
> A regular expression describes a computation

So does the flashing light, it also has the cool advantage of being parameterized by time.

> Are you saying that what matters most about a language is its surface syntax? Seriously? Wow.

If that's what you took from that then there's a knowledge gap and it will do us no good to continue this conversation.
> but looking at the language itself to try to identify the reasons for its relative success is doomed to fail.

Is it? People who use Go and people who designed Go both appeal to the language design. It's users write blog posts about that deliberate balance of simplicity and power they encountered in language, which made them productive. And it's creators write posts and give talks on their deliberate approach to language design to achieve this balance. It seems like both, users and creators, are in perfect alignment here.

So why language design can't be the reason of it's success?
Technology moves so fast that everyone has short memory, patience and attention span.

So stuff like this happens [this is a tongue in cheek scenario, treat it as joke, not criticism of particular people or framework]:

Developer1: "Argh, I can't figure out dependencies for this library",

Then someone comes along and "fixes" it:

Developer2: "Look, just static compile it / include all deps in a subdir some place. See, fixed! I even made a language / framework thingie to do this for you. Yeah, those stupid old packagers and OS people made such a mess...".

Developer1: "Oh wow so easy, I'll be using this and tell others to use it too." /goes to twitter...

A few years later, everyone uses the new shiny dependency-bundling library/framework thingie. Then a security vulnerabily hits and everyone realizes why those old boring packagers and OS people set things up the way they did. 6 days later everyone forgets and jump on the next new shiny framework. Cycle repeats...
> Very few new mainstream languages have anything new to say

> these same languages try to position themselves as complete
> ecosystems, rather than simple tools

This is where you answer your own implied question. Tools designed to excel at a singular task to the exclusion of general-purpose tasks will necessarily attract a comparatively niche audience. Tools designed for more general applications will attract people doing more general tasks, which is a more "mainstream" audience by definition.
More about Google's Native Client:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/nacl-and-pnacl
Yes, I think it boils down to popularity. As a language becomes more popular, it may be more acceptable to use more advanced constructs.
> To speak of the true nature of Islam is really to slur an entire religion and over a billion individuals.

No, it has nothing to do with the people who practice Islam and everything to do with the texts that they consider holy. We don't claim that the founding fathers of the United States weren't racist just because we've abolished slavery, removed the 3/5 compromise and allowed all races the right to vote. We similarly can't claim that Islam does not advocate violence just because the (vast) majority of the people who practice it are not violent. The text is preserved in it's initial form and there's no denying the violence that it advocates.

I just don't see how people can be so blinded by political correctness to not realize that so much of the violence that we're seeing comes from a strict adherence to those religious texts.

> What would be the 'true nature' of Christianity - I can't even imagine.

It would include things like not eating pork. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of Christians eat pork. But that's what's written in the book that Christians pay blind allegiance to, so it's part of Christianity's true nature.
For what it's worth, the London Underground has significantly less complicated interlocking patterns (with more transfers between trains instead).

Check out some of these crazy layouts, like the Dekalb area or the 47-63rd St map: http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Map...
I think Go will ultimately be remembered for reaffirming the importance of single binary deployments.

The world of deployments e.g. build scripts, containers, extravagant tools are all unnecessary with Go. And I suspect future languages will learn from this.

The language itself not much. It doesn't offer anything new that Java 1.0 with Quasar doesn't already have.
Isis 'an offence to Islam'-international coalition of Islamic scholars (2014)
> I don't think I've ever, in my life, wondered what the 'founder' of my religion would do. I highly doubt most people do, and I'd like to see some evidence - some research - showing that it influences more than a tiny fraction.

When I was a Buddhist, many of my fellow Buddhists took great pains to emulate the Buddha. It was also important to study the teachings of a particular sect, if one belonged to once, such as Dogen in Soto Zen. In fact, the master-disciple relationship is incredibly important in some forms of Buddhism, with the master ultimately deriving his authority from his lineage, which is rooted in a founder.

I think it would be difficult for Christians, whose name essentially means "Christ-like", to not consider what the founder of their religion would do. Perhaps it's not as big of a movement anymore, but there was a "What Would Jesus Do?" movement in Protestantism that wore bracelets bearing WWJD, to remind themselves to act in a Christ-like manner. As an Orthodox Christian, the goal of theosis is inextricably entwined with behaving like Christ.

I am sorry for downvoting you, but as someone who has seriously practiced multiple religions, and as someone with a degree in religious studies, I think that saying that founders' actions don't influence their followers is quite difficult to swallow (note: I'm making no specific statement about Islam, but rather only trying to clarify this particular point).
You rather live somewhere where this kind of behavior is common:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvFfSGxtNI
self plug: http://direnv.net/ does basically the same but without having to start new sub-shells. Just `cd` into a folder, if it has an .envrc file it's loaded. If you `cd` out of the folder all the changed environment variables are restored.
Best before dates have nothing to do with safety, they are about quality. They are (mostly) voluntary and set by the manufacturer.

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/do-food-expirati...
Intrusion detection with the BRO framework [video]
"Unfortunately, visually simple appearance does not result in ease of use, as the vast literature in academic journals on human-computer interaction and human factors demonstrates."

This lines up with my own anecdotal experience, but isn't something I've read about. Can anyone suggest further reading on this research?
You're projecting your own agenda onto the article. The article's starting point is comparing the Apple products to previous incarnations of Apple products.

> Further, they made a new font that is readable at all sizes AND an OS that lets you dynamically change the size of the fonts in your settings and have it work across applications.

Here's a clear example - in your haste to throw your agenda on top of the article, you've missed that the article talks about this exact feature, and that it doesn't work well: on many app screens, this option made normal fonts so large that the text wouldn’t fit on the screen.

It's a long article, sure, but that comment is only about 10% of the way in.
This is pretty cool! I wonder what specific use cases the author had in mind. I've been through the short video and the first three minutes of the long video, and haven't seen anything mentioned.
> Your claim is fallacious, because a floating-point value denotes a range of the real number line, whereas you're insisting that, no, it stands for its literal value: the absolutely precise rational number that lies at the center of that range

See Misconception #2 of http://lipforge.ens-lyon.fr/www/crlibm/documents/cern.pdf.

Floating point numbers are _not_ intervals. If you read carefully any formal definition of floating point numbers (The IEEE standards, TAoCP Chapter 4, or Higham's _Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms_, to name just three possible references), you will see that floating point numbers by definition form an exact rational subset of the extended real line.

> All numbers in that range alias to the same double, yet differ wildly in their decimal digits beyond the fifteenth. That "long tail" of digits is a meaningless residue arising from the arbitrary difference between the chosen center-of-range point and the actual number it approximates.

See Misconceptions #1 and #2 on Kahan's list (https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf).

You are not being clear about the set of real numbers a user may input and their ultimate representation as a floating point number. While it's true that many real numbers round to the same floating point number _f_, that's not the same as then saying that _f_ carries that interval around with it. The latter is false, since the intervals do _not_ propagate in floating point arithmetic. It's also false that the floating point number _f_ is the midpoint of the set of numbers that round to _f_; the precise set depends on the rounding mode and the granularity of the set of floating point numbers around _f_.
I think something has happened at Apple. I would consider a playlist or dynamic filter (eg. Rock songs or Beatles songs) would be a beginner's desire. It's one step beyond "play". Yet, the new Apple Music app is highly cryptic. It's been engineered to steer you toward the new subscription service. Usability for novices and pros has been crippled.
I could say similar about Apple maps. It just doesn't work properly. Google has really taken the crown here.
It's sad to see Apple lose focus when they've held the benchmark so high for so long.
I can't speak for Windows, but Linux is miles behind OS X in terms of usability in my opinion. The trackpad gestures are fantastic and very intuitive for me to the point where I hate using a crippled trackpad on linux. I can see the appeal of Gnome, which is very simple and intuitive to use. But modern gnome is adopting more and more features of the OS X window management system, like ctrl-tab switching applications rather than windows, the addition of indicator applets, the windows-and-dock overview screen (whatever they call it). From all the complaints I hear I don't think there's anything particularly difficult about OS X file management and window management other than "its different from what I'm used to."
Thanks for providing the link. I didn't read every word on the page, but my thoughts:

1) I see nothing substantive, only nit-picking over wording. In particular, the NR critic often just comes up with a different way of writing the same thing, something anyone can do with any piece of writing. Much is wording that could go either way, and some depends on what the reporter actually saw. For example, maybe the reporter can't identify who threw the rocks and so can't say anything about them. Maybe the reporter saw a scuffle and not a riot; the NR critic doesn't offer evidence that the statement is in error. In general, it's an old propaganda technique: Just keep up a flood of criticism and people will think that some of it - just a little! - must be true. It's not. Professionals in the field of political maniuplation really do pull this stunt on a regular basis. Look how they demonize every Democratic leader, for example (Bill Clinton, Hillary, Obama). (Left-wingers do the same, but they have far less influence than platforms like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, and Rush - all the most popular in their industries.)

2) The National Review has an avowed agenda of pro-conservative, anti-everything else commentary. This isn't the best source; they are going to find a way criticize the NY Times no matter what, true or not. Perhaps something from a study of journalism would be better (not that I realistically expect you to have that at your fingertips).

3) Reading the Israeli papers Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, I find that if the NY Times has any bias on any issue, it's not covering the bad things done by Israelis. The Israeli papers paint a much harsher picture of their own country. But I'm not sure I can make sense of it; of course the New York Times is not going to cover Israel in the same details as Israeli papers, so perhaps that explains the difference.