skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very much so. Small but repeated or continuous annoyances have a cumulative effect on general sense of happiness.

I myself use fetchmail, notmuch[1], and emacs (with w3m for HTML messages) for my email. Gmail-like search and filter capabilities (I think better, actually) and the comfort of using emacs.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/
I think there's gonna be alot of teenage pranks and destruction. People setting the landing spot in the water or people stealing them with nets. Not sure if much recourse unless there camera footage or gps locator.
I wonder what would happen if somebody does something similar with a piece of software (open or closed source).

I mean, I wonder what the legal consequences would be.
Here's what I think is more likely:

A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite.

It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mothership flies near the target swath, the drones are released one by one and glide to the target zone efficiently before doing a vertical landing.

Empty, they return autonomously to a small recovery facility in a vacant lot somewhere within ~5km. They're packed into a pickup or a semi and returned to the airfield in stacks.

------

Why?

Because VTOL flight is not easy to do at long ranges; Batteries generally limit that to 10-30 minutes since vehicle mass fraction is large. Because very small planes are only a small multiple (2-5x) more efficient than VTOL flight. Because high speeds are something vehicles like this are not great at.

A drone like this doesn't have a great straight-line range when you sling a heavy load under it; Amazon is not going to erect sizable warehouses within ~5km of every plausible delivery. Their stock is too large, and too sparsely ordered.

--------

Or, even more likely?

Replace the flying mothership with a box truck dispenser. The driver stops at his target neighborhood, sends the drones out, they deliver autonomously, takes the drones back in 10 minutes later, and returns to regional warehouse in the next 20-50 minutes of driving, for 30 to 60 minute delivery.

Amazon gets to deliver to a neighborhood rather than to a house.
While I find the technology impressive, it makes me wonder if "Black Friday" is going to look like the Blitz, a low hum and looking up, wave after wave of aircraft coming over the city looking for the right place to drop their payload ...
Good as a quick reference for the cross-browser state of HTML5 in mobile devices, but highly misleading for building mobile apps with web technologies, because if you plan to build an APP for mobile, chances are you'll end using Crosswalk/Chromium.

https://crosswalk-project.org/
I'm Australian and I would really recommend you go to uni and get the piece of paper. You are still young and as more and more time passes, it becomes harder to be able to go back and study full-time.

I've personally found that working in the US is such a fulfilling experience (particularly in SF/SV) and having a degree will make the visa process much easier.

You can still work part-time or freelance and uni will be a great way to meet like-minded people (AKA potential cofounders) if you're interested in founding something in the future.
You can't be serious.
> the actual problems that actually need discussion

That's some mouthful you've come up with to avoid involving "the article", which is the blindingly obvious context for top-level comments on a link aggregator.

> It's important to call out [...] problems like this

The HN admin seems to disagree.
Ok, we reordered those words and added a date.
An Immersive Voyage into Germany’s Energy Revolution
Go to the university, try to become top of your class and learn everything the University has to offer (parties and girls included).

You have time for the rest. Nothing stops you from working part time or as a contractor while studying.
This seems less of an issue when your JS codebase is more "FP" and less "OOP". Or, using more composition and less inheritance. (it's funny that even Go-lang manages just fine w/out inheritance)

Thankfully, I've been doing more JS, and less Java, in the last year. Despite the curly braces, it feels like going back to the golden age of the 80s sometimes, before the original sin of C/++/Java. I remember using dynamic languages and (in very small part at school) Lisp (as well as better static languages) before C and its spawn were shoved down our throats for the better part of 20 years.

(Unix is a great OS, but C is just a portable assembler, not a good high level language model)

It's a shame JS had to be dressed up to even look like Java/C++. We got functions, we got dynamic size arrays/lists, we got property lists with atoms, lists and functions as values. Hoo-boy!
Jetbrains IDE is great. I use Eclipse for Java.
But emacs is my go to editor.

It has his weak points but I find myself always keeping it fired up and using it for any text editing that doesn't require a large IDE.

I just wish there was a site to setup Emacs as the ideal IDE for say:

- Javascript
- Python
- Django
...
But is that a convincing argument? His argument seems to be that he can come up with a integer M that is so unimaginably large that we can surely solve any n bit problem in NP space in n^M steps. Knuth himself prefaces his argument by saying that it is naive!

His main point, which is more about the practical effects of P=NP is much more convincing, and actually very common I believe.
Brain connections predict how well you can pay attention
Url changed from https://medium.com/scientifically-quite-smarter/americapox-t..., which points to this.
Honestly if you're going to take a step back and consider those things, why not also consider that we already have so many programming languages that it's almost impossible to get to a deep level of understanding of all of them.

Obviously if you enjoy making languages then you should do so - and in that case, noticing that your dynamic un-toolable language won't get wide scale adoption shouldn't matter. It's already a guarantee it won't get that wide scale adoption. Either make your un-toolable language because you enjoy making them, or contribute your efforts to an already popular language that you enjoy. There are tons of interesting problems and huge areas for improvements in every single language.

Don't make a new language for the goal of gaining widescale adoption.
For folks right at the edge the decision may come down to "which is higher, the late fee or the overdraft fee?"

A few years back there was a case against one of the big banks over structuring transactions on the same day - the bank was doing them largest to smallest, with the end result that people were being hit with multiple overdraft fees in one day. If you had enough for 3 of 4 bills but would be $100 short on the largest, the bank would pay the big one, then the second largest, then either cover or bounce the last two while charging an overdraft fee for each. At the end of the day instead of being $100 short you were $200 sorry with extra fees.
It's amazing how something that is in the end just a computer company can be so uniformly loved (contrast with apple with equal parts of love & hate). I've never heard anyone rag on Amiga (other than to criticize its mismanagement). And I was an Atari owner and I still wish I hadn't missed out on what turned out to be such a landmark system.
The codebase must be pretty horrible when switching members all 3 months.
Those same private loans are still available though - their interest rates are just higher. Either people aren't taking the time to research their options, or they desire the lower interest rate in exchange for lack of bankruptcy protection. Interest rates are lower on the non-dischargable loans, so I'm not sure why you think they're the same when both types currently exist so you can see the difference without the need for guesswork.

Additionally, private loans always have and still do take into account the credit history of the borrowers. If you don't have a credit history or someone willing to cosign you're basically out of luck.

I don't think opportunistic bankruptcy filings are an issue at all, but I do think it would be an issue for banks to lend significant amounts of money to people with no way to quantify the risk associated with it.

I don't have the perfect answer, but I do think it's better to have loans accessible by lower income people than to have the ability to discharge the loans in bankruptcy which by your admission only a small number of people do.
How does this "mess with your neighbor's life"? I wouldn't see this being a huge concern unless you happened to place 4 or 5 orders a day.
We (Red Hat) have one for testing, but I can only say limited things about it[1]. So I guess call Cavium and have a very solid business case for it :-) It seems they may be available for sale, but I have no idea how much they cost or what their availability is.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/48-core-arm-64-bit-ser...
Cloudrino.net offers you a free VPS for life
News features drive sales. So it's pretty much inevitable.

With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing. The flow to our bottom line from new versions with new features is absolutely undeniable. It's like gravity.

From: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html
I've been imagining a website lately that displays progress in a similar way for all kinds of things. Sort of like a global to-do list. Should be fun to build.
It often slips my mind that Electronic Arts was once one of the premier Amiga software publishers, specifically developing Deluxe Paint. It's weird to think of any of the old Amiga-related companies surviving and thriving decades later, because most didn't. The ones who have succeeded the most have long since lost any resemblance to the original company; EA is one of those.

I remember studying IFF, and specifically the AIFF audio format, for some software ideas I had back in the late 80s or early 90s, but never actually made into something useful. AIFF, in an extended form, is still used in Apple audio products (like GarageBand and Logic). So, IFF is still around, to some extent.
That's a bit pedantic, don't you think?
there is: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

There is a Django layer in it, you can start runserver witha keystroke, open settings.py with another keystroke, run all tests, etc..
Still, people think the web is going to die and native apps are going to rule.
IFF is a "standard format", or was at the time.
That may be, but the docs for NumCPU are still just wrong. NumCPU does not return the number of logical processors in the machine. It returns the population count of the cpu mask, at the moment the runtime was initialized.
Use a snapshot instead of trying to compile -current yourself.
Spacemacs is a better Emacs with Vi keybinding and preconfigured programming modes for major languages.
Direct links to the videos:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/d...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/d...
I'm not familiar with REVSYS. I don't know if this is a one man shop making $80k gross or a 100 person consulting company throwing off $5M/year profit.
Chinese Pull Back From U.S. Property Investments: http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-pull-back-from-u-s-prope...
I can probably guess they ran into several issues with their desire to make their erasable/writable CDs compatible with normal disc players as one of the principal reasons that they didn't make it to market. I'm more curious about the specifics, though.

I found this: http://www.hughsnews.ca/cd-e-call-it-erasable-call-it-rewrit...

Considering I purchased my first CD burner around 1995 for the hefty price of $1,000 (A Plextor external SCSI drive if memory serves), the $500 price tag for a burner that could also use erasable discs and be compatible with normal CD players was a lofty goal, particularly in 1988! At the time, my burner could only use CD-R discs at 2x speed that generally played back in everything, but were Write Once (with $30 discs, no less, don't underrun that buffer when burning!). By the time I got my first re-writable, I found that rewritable discs were far less reliable (a problem that plagued DVD burners from Day #1 as well with their +R -R +RW -RW nonsense -- you'd think that would have been something figured out before the release of the first player since CD burners were popular by then).
Coming from a background creating C++ GUI programs, the web's GUI creation process feels like cake. What is hard for me is all the options, best practices, and new JavaScript frameworks coming out every year. Settle down I say. Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is easy. No need to add endless layers on top, IMO.

Next, you have to choose a backend. Okay, again, lots of options. All of this, combined, does feel like unnecessary mental anguish to get really simple things done. I think we got to this point because everyone started making their own "frameworks" and languages. With a single OS vendor there was a commonality. With the web, it is every tom, dick, and harry trying to lead the way.

The web is open. Open means lots of shouting.
I remember when Amazon first announced the idea two years ago there was a lot of brainstorming in the hn comments and that idea was pretty popular. No idea if it influenced Amazon but would be cool if so.

*found the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833223

"This is just one idea. Perhaps Amazon provides you with a beacon for the drone, or you get a big QR code for the drone to target your house & they don't need pilots at all. Who knows!" -owenmarshall
I love working on the same codebase for years!
Probably to ensure it's one that's well supported in FreeBSD, as much as anything.
Yes, auto-drafting of bills.

There are two major benefits.

- more control. You can choose to delay paying a specific bill to make sure more important bills get paid on time.

- safety. You'll never find yourself trying to get money back from a company that you're having a dispute with.

I used to allow it, and I ran into the second issue. It's the reason why I made that decision years ago, and I don't regret it one bit. It takes all of 1-2 hours/month to get all my bills paid.

The first point (control) is more for the post I was responding to, however.
One of the things the web can do, apparently, is animated transitions with very poor frame rates :-/
How can a web browser or even native OS determine if a user's wifi network is metered? I agree it would be nice in theory if there was some kind of "dollars per MB" API, but I don't see how web browsers could implement that in practice.

I work on a podcast app. When people are downloading hundreds of MB or more daily, they emphatically want control over when downloading takes place. In practice, almost all of them are satisfied with a binary choice between cellular or not. Those who do sometimes use expensive or slow wifi networks can blacklist them, which is also what network info APIs support.

There are also other applications such as metering apps, utilities that trigger actions upon network changes. Some very popular Android apps (e.g. Tasker, IFTTT) rely on network info for that; web falls further behind if web apps can't access that data.
I think it's likely that most people would prefer the "light" version.
Seriously, people should stop over customizing their .emacs.d . I use mostly default (community) config from Spacemacs and it works just fine. You can use both vi keybinding and emacs keybinding at the sametime in Spacemacs. I reduced 2k+ lines init.el config to about 200 lines in Spacemacs.
The first time I hired a really well-known, expensive attorney, I felt the same way you do about the Wolf. I thought "There's no magic to what he is doing, he is having the same conversations and doing the same things that I would". It was the same when I took on a very wealthy business partner - he did many of the same things that I would do.

In most cases, the work these kinds of people perform is neither magical nor brilliant. It's that because of their reputation, resources, and influence, when they do the same things that you would do, it has an entirely different result. This is just one of the many unfair aspects of life - knowing exactly what to do and working hard on it isn't even close to enough to make you successful. If no one listens to you, it doesn't matter what you say or how brilliant it is.
Yeah, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of drone hunting going on, until Amazon figures out a way to secure these things.
that referal link right there.
I used Emacs and Git for years before hearing about Magit, never occurred to me that I needed something like that. I was wrong.
The real problem isn't dynamic vs. static and how it affects tools. The problem is that programming languages are made by language designers, when what we would really need are programming experience designers.

We need people that look at the experience of programming as a whole, writing, editing, debugging, profiling, testing, analysis and packaging. People that take all of that into consideration and design languages within that context and under the constraints that imposes.

If you only see yourself as a language designer and ignore the wider context, your language will fail.
Imagine the recall for this.
^ exactly. I believe it's now illegal to do transactions in that manner, but there was a time when it was SOP.
> Redhat with their own flavor of Linux

I wonder what you have in mind here (and for god's sake, please don't let it be systemd). The Red Hat ecosystem has become incredibly good in the last few years (and let's not talk about how their contributions pushed the whole Linux ecosystem ahead). Fedora is an amazing distro and GNOME has never been better for me.
LIO 4REAL – Need a Reason [Dance] [LIO_4REAL]
Network type can be used for more than just serving higher-resolution assets. It can also be used for doing aggressive pre-fetching of assets that may not be needed when on wifi. For example, my native RSS client will pre-fetch images from blog posts when it refreshes on wifi, but won't do that on cell. It's not unreasonable to think that various web apps might want to do the same sort of thing.
I'd be more inclined to name it ServerOptions instead of ServerContext.
RIFF lives on as part of the webp format. https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/riff_container...
I agree with the last one, but ground delivery robots would make way more sense. I don't know about 30-60 minutes, however.

The soccer shoe emergency can't really be that big of a market. Emergency medicine by drone delivery I get, but the reason people go shopping nowadays is either grocery or an excuse to get out of the house.

Drones are never going to eliminate the excuse to get out of the house factor.
Start a bit earlier: with FDR and The New Deal.
It seems that over the last 5 years the number of exit nodes has remained relatively constant [1], I assume to the risks associated with running an exit node. What is Tor doing the increase number of exit nodes?

[1]https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html
Terms & Conditions Apply. "For Life" should not be interpreted as meaning "for the duration of your life". Cloudrino reserve the right to go bust or change the terms of this offer, without notice. [Like every other company making such ridiculous offers].
Ex-Barclays CEO: Banks are about to have an 'Uber moment'
I worked with him for a while. The most frustrating part is that he wants Xanadu to be a closed-source, for-profit, 1988 style piece of capitalist software with potentially, maybe, open standards.

The content he wants to be DRM'd through micropayments and all for-profit with fine-tuned rights and fees for attributions etc.

Also things like multi-phasic design where you do 80% and then the other 20% is a non-starter. He wants a waterfall-model cathedral or nothing at all.

So I really wanted to work more with him but he couldn't get that no matter how awesome (it involves a file that maintains binary offset pointers to another file WITHOUT a source file that generates both so yes, you append to byte 1 and then you need to ROLL YOUR OWN tool to change the offsets in the offsets file - oh yeah, they're also in a binary format), because of it's systemic structure, he was effectually just proposing another proprietary locked-down format that won't go anywhere and was imposing a structure that will ONLY lead to one-off proof-of-concepts and prototypes.

Which is exactly what we've seen. For 50 years. I have a VM with demos in Java, TCL, and many other bygone languages written by people like myself. I remember saying:

"There's a deeper structural reason why the web uses HTML and not Microsoft DOC as its language."
How Eric Schmidt Helped You Save $55 on the New Raspberry Pi
This symphony thing comes up again and again but it seems pretty silly to me. Enjoying and composing a symphony requires understanding what makes a piece of music sound good to humans, undoubtedly a nontrivial problem, but is it really hard to imagine that once that got formalized one can use this information to search the space of all possible pieces of music for beautiful symphonies in a not terrible inefficient way? I don't think so.
An obsessive review of Outlier’s “Slim Dungarees:” a jean alternative
If we're programmers and "devops" why does anyone bother with this sort of thing ? If ops team can, and does, recompile everything regularly then why not just have them as constants in the code, or in some cases just directly in the code ?

There is no excuse for added complexity and this is a bad one.
That's the same issue though. Your RSS client is assuming that all cellular connections are metered and all WiFi connections are unmetered, so it intentionally uses less data when you are on a cellular connection.
From 2013
I assume this is for bigger cities though. In Chicago you can get to over 2 million people within 6 miles as the crow flies. If you can dodge powerless and buildings it seems reasonable...
Don't compile to C. It's very difficult to avoid undefined behavior, you won't be able to modify the compiler backend (and you will want to as you start optimizing), you can't add new language intrinsics, good GC is pretty much incompatible with that, and precise control over debug info is impossible. Compile to LLVM IR and/or GCC IR instead.
Packaging? Will Intel let you graft in parts from your partners or do you have to get it all from them?
There's potential to destroy the fabric of a society when the residential real estate is sold off to foreign buyers.

The dream of most ordinary people is to own their own home. When prices are pushed out of the range of ordinary people then the citizens have just sold their home overseas and can only rent it back. That can't lead anywhere good.

It's the end game of greed in which we have sold everything including our homes.

Countries no longer need to invade other countries - they just buy everything. It's a strange thing that there is an obsession with the risk of terrorism but selling real estate to other countries is not seen as a threat to national security.

If the government cared about its citizens then selling residential real estate to non-citizens/permanent residents would be outlawed. But instead what we get is a clear illustration that in our society the only thing that matters is money - our country is no governed for the people, its governed for the dollar.

The disaster can't be undone because governments will see the flood of cash and tax it, becoming addicted to the revenue and if anything, try to make more of it happen.

This will end badly one day, when ordinary people realise that the rich sold their dreams and ambitions to other countries.
Article dated 2013, not news.