skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article illustrates a key problem with our city infrastructure. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the first few floors of buildings should be "public infrastructure". Much in the way that farmer's markets, sidewalks, and small streets are governed, building bases could be controlled by local institutions.

In this approach, new construction would build a standard base structure of several levels. This base would have an open layout and the owners would only control enough space necessary to provide access to parking and the upper levels.

The building base would then assume the same ecological role as a set of small, traditional buildings having store fronts.

If this were to come into effect, community institutions could then govern how the base of a building structurally and aesthetically interfaces with the public. I don't think a central city government should take on this role though. Legally, the governing institution might simply lease the space out to management companies over very long terms, periodically upgrading or changing the allocation of commercial and public space as the needs emerge.

Or we could just continue to leave it up to faraway owners and builders to comply with code during construction and improvements. But it is actually quite obtuse to let law govern issues of human use in shorter time frames. Needs arise faster than concrete sets.

For example, in the current setup, what if a need arises that requires major reconstruction? An example: reducing crime by adding smaller shops with later hours to a building front that is not used at all after "work hours". That change would require prodding the owner to modify the base of their building, and that could take a very long time. Meanwhile, the community suffers economic damage (and the building owner may not care because they make their money off of tenants high up in the building).

Imagine how hard it would be to add pedestrian and bike infrastructure if every block of street were owned by a different corporation?

Another benefit to a community-run building base is that locals can be empowered to define the street level, mitigating the ill social and economic effects (perceived or actual) of larger-scale building development. If the neighborhood folks see that there will be several levels of familiar, local shops and community space, and these amenities have traditional architecture, they might not so strongly oppose that the upper levels are dense and modern.
> Magnetic Secure Transmission
They dare to call this secure...
I didn't downvote, but I don't like the syntax for a couple of reasons:

1. Instead of being more like C-style function declarations, they look a lot more like C-style type conversions.

2. However closer it may be to C (type before identifier I guess?) it's pretty far from any other mainstream language. For instance, C++ has support for -> syntax for function types (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22514855/arrow-operator-i...) and some other languages (I can think of Scala) use name: Type declarations.

As a personal preference, I find the python type hinting more familiar than your example, despite (myself) being most familiar with C-like syntax.
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So the Mexicans are opposed to dolphin safe practices? Perhaps a Mexican Tuna boycott would be useful from the Sierra Club. US tuna companies that are dolphin safe could label their Tuna "not Mexican tuna" and consumers could sort this out quickly (assuming Dolphin safe labeling actually made a difference in consumer behavior.)

I am not sure why there just can't be a rule to make all tuna dolphin safe. The animal industry practices in many countries around the world are just horrific. Shark fin soup for instance, Halal butchering practices, tuna fishing. Dog farming in Korea (where they often blowtorch the fur and kill the animal by dipping it, alive and conscious into vats of boiling water; the fear and adrenaline, they say, positively favors the meat.)

Yet we have a big conference in Paris about human CO2 emissions (which have a negligible effect on the climate, but a huge effect on the world economy), but never seem to have any international cooperation on environmental issues that can actually be solved: the treatment of animals within industrial processes. It's almost as if countries don't actually care about the actual environment but instead want to enact "environmental" policies that actually serve to redistribute wealth instead of making a quantifiable difference in the ecosystem.

Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S undersecretary of state for global issues, addressing the Rio Climate Summit audience, agreed: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy.."

I say we should be aggressively campaigning for things like dolphin safe, cage free, etc, instead of trying to advance the religion of global warming. I mention this because te Sierra Club used to actually be on the leading edge about these sorts of issues but around the early 1990s started getting infiltrated by the climate warrior crowd.
While diversity is certainly good, the major difference here is that Google has an intrisic reason to constantly improve and innovate in Chrome, while Microsoft back then clearly didn't: the whole IE development was driven by trying to get rid of the competition (in particular Netscape), and when that was done, development stopped for a long time.
I agree with you that from the perspective of the article Functional Programming is still a "maybe" as it doesn't have the same sort of following or use in large-scale projects as OO, but I suppose it might be the perspective of the article that is incorrect.

Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang, and other programming languages like Elixir are starting to gain traction as they improve on the older Frameworks and make development more "comfortable".

Whether they will get enough traction and garner enough of a following to become a "Yes" from this articles perspective is difficult to say but I am confident people will see the light of FP sooner than they think, and I feel like it won't be long till FP is the new cool kid on the block, I'm just not sure who will be responsible for leading that.
> 3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."

This person was a genius, or was bitten by this far too many times.
Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.
I'll probably get downvoted but I'm honestly interested in some thoughts on my dumb thinking.

This is an amazing presentation and I've loved Bret Victor's other presentations but, and I'm making an assumption here, I kind of assume he's rich or at least financially independent given where he's worked and when he worked there. Assuming I'm right I find it a little hard to listen to the advice which sometimes sounds like "Consider saving the planet but with a high possibility of a financially challenged life. I've already made my money so I'm free to give you this advice in comfort and security".

Of course that doesn't mean you can't get rich following one of these solutions. It also doesn't mean that money = happiness or anything like that. It's only this nagging feeling that the reader is being asked to sacrifice something the author themselves has not and that the author has forgotten where they are in their lives relative to most of the people they are asking.

If I knew all my financial needs (health care, retirement, family) were already well met I'd have less trouble dedicating my time to worthy causes like say Bill Gates apparently is. But, I'm not there yet. I do have to worry how I will retire, how much I'll need to spent on healthcare as I age, etc... Sure I can still make the decision to chase financial independence or chase worthy causes but it's just, I guess maybe the word is frustrating, to be asked to make that choice but someone who I assume doesn't need to choose. They've already achieved financial Independence and therefore the choice is far easier. (maybe one more reason for basic income).

I'm also aware it sounds stupid to even bring this topic up. There's all kinds of ways to frame this and ignore the part of it I just mentioned. But, for whatever reason I can't ignore it. I guess because I've seen my father too old to get an engineering job he's qualified for and too poor to retire.
It's easy. Make card number ranges that must have chip and pin.
The only domains python and C# really overlap is web with ASP.NET and Python web frameworks - and here portability used to be the determining factor.

Python use cases are completely different from C# - Python is all about fast iteration and prototyping, REPL, interfacing to native libraries etc.

C# is about static typing and all that it implies.

F# is slightly closer to Python with REPL and type inference but still on the C# side of spectrum.
Thanks for the write-up, this is really helpful to get the big picture. Looking forward to your next posts.
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Unless Jerry Yang wants to and can pull a Steve Jobs...
Brontosaurus dino name is revived
Let's skip on tuna in general then. It's not as if we had lack of choice for food in our supermarkets.
Unikernels : hypervisor :: processes : traditional operating system

Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill gave a great talk at Velocity NYC 2015 about the history of containers (going back to March 18, 1982 when Bill Joy added the chroot system call) and the problems of running containers on operating systems in VMs on hypervisors:

"Stop killing kittens and melthing the ice caps: Run containers on bare metal already!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw
South Korea has(or had, they may have changed it in the last few months) a law that enforces the usage of ActiveX for everything which needs security (e. g. online banking, online shopping)
Would you trade Star Wars cards on the blockchain?
I was replying to the issue that this being two separate tools:

"This is the job of the compiler and the run time system, not the IDE."

Making this optional will mean the majority won't bother to run the checker.

How many do bother to run lint, jslint, core.typed or dialyzer?
We're creating a marketplace that lets you collect and trade real items, with ownership recorded and secured by the bitcoin blockchain. I'd love some feedback!
Kafka can be used if you want to treat data as streams for some processing (think producer-consumer kind of scenarios). You can point to the stream from any point in time to read it 'as and when things happened'. Kafka's own nodes have replication enabled, and the data that it produces can be consumed in a distributed setting as well (meaning multiple consumers acting as a single high level consumer). But it is not a traditional database as MongoDB or MySQL.
who cares? it's already fast enough
Musk is bold and not afraid to invest aggressively. but he goes for easy pickings that are encumbered in conflicting laws, which he mostly ignore. He would curl up and cry at yahoo.
I can't claim to spend a ton of time in a huge variety of countries, but in the past year I've been to Iceland, England, Wales, Scotland, Italy, France, and New Zealand, and I can't remember anywhere I had to use the EMV chip in my credit cards except places like parking garages that didn't have the physical facility for a mag stripe swipe. Every retailer terminal could read a magstripe.

More annoyingly, whether I swiped or dipped, a signature was required. Except, again, where there was no way to sign (parking garages). Then, magically, my PIN was "good enough".

I went out of my way to get EMV cards last year due to upcoming trips, because I had only been overseas sporadically over the past decade and assumed that the magstripe was gone. It was not. If anything, merchants seemed more able to deal with them than 10 years ago, where I occasionally had a clerk who couldn't figure out whether to swipe extremely slowly, or quickly enough to set fire to the equipment.
I was involved in a similar discussion and the logic was hilarious. "Browser standards change too often." (!?) "So we're only to support an old buggy implementation of the specs that is sorta emulated in one modern browser." They sounded like they were afraid of having their security blanket ripped away.

If you still have some IE5 stuff, my guess is that you have to bring it up to the HTML5 table layout zone. And then you need to back polyfill a bunch of stuff to deal with the "IE7 mode" requirement.
I pretty sure halting problem reduces to figuring out code reordering and optimization like that. We cannot solve it exhaustively, so instead we do the next best thing, approximate and provide a common case. I agree that it's not optimal, but it's the best we can do.
How Lisp Broke My Heart
C'mon, basically the first paragraph:

> PostCSS, libsass and Less are already fast enough for any real-world task. Running benchmarks like these is like listening to audiophiles comparing gold-plated cables for their hobby systems. Don’t use these benchmarks as the main criteria for decision making when you are choosing a tool.
In this case Apple does not agree. They force everybody to use their rendering engine on iOS. To be clear, I do not condone this practice.
It is evident from the observations of Sohn et al. (2008) & Reves-Sohn et al. (2008) that the Northwest Passage was opened up by powerful volcanic activity under the Arctic Ice along the Gakkel Ridge, while West Antarctic melting (as opposed to thickening of ice throughout the rest of Antarctica) can be explained by recent volcanic activity beneath the ice (Corr & Vaughan, 2008). Moreover, there are simply too many volcanoes to deny that the atmospheric concentration of the most erupted gas next to water is predominantly controlled by the balance or lack thereof between volcanic activity and photosynthesis. Furthermore, there is simply no established volcanic CO2 fingerprint by which we may distinguish atmospheric proportions of anthropogenic and volcanogenic contributions. This leaves us with no empirical method by which we may attribute the 20th century rise in CO2 to human energy consumption.
> Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang

Whatsapp demonstrated the power of actors and lightweight threads with Erlang. FP had little to do with that.
Man says he invented 'Phuc Dat Bich' hoax to fool news media and Facebook
Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2015/11/22/activist-tricked-into-6-yea..., which points to this.
Here is a detailed report about the room for more funding in several standout charities:

http://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/18/our-updated-top-charitie...

They are all significantly under funded.

The best of them distributes long lasting insecticide treated nets which protect against malaria.

Below is an estimate (via google doc) that pegs the cost per life saved via nets at around $2,800. The estimate only considers the nets' mortality effect on children under 5 years old.

http://files.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/Gi...

And below is more general information on this charity:

http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF
Well, it is information, it's just not a lot of information. And the point doesn't really have anything to do with whether dolphin-safe tuna is actually a good idea (side note: I read your big comment already), because the WTO decision would be identical even if dolphin-safe tuna was unarguably amazing for everyone (except the tuna fisheries) and had no alleged bycatch issues whatsoever.
So they are happy that they will get more from their Support partners
Making a good investor pitch
I would expect humans to protect humans. There aren't any hippos out their attempting to preserve humanity. Hippos look after hippos at the expense of all other species. I can't see how we 'overprotect'
The high cost is part of the service. "We spared no expense planning this failed initiative and hired the best consultants. What more could we have done?"
This is also how most embedded applications utilizing an OS also works these days. The OS is a library, you link in whatever you need from the OS + compile time configuration of OS features etc. + link in whatever you need for your application.
I'm surprised magstripe readers still exist. I don't think I've used one in years. They are often there.. but I don't see their purpose. Last non-chip card I've seen was maybe 12 years ago.
It would be worthwhile to read Paul Graham's essay now, if you haven't already done so: "what happened to Yahoo"[1]

The thing that jumps out at me is the lack of "hacker" culture at Yahoo. Sure, they have a few really smart people there; but the culture is missing. As long as this is the case, Yahoo will continue to wander aimlessly.

Marissa (or the next CEO) would do well to work on putting together a hacker culture, and get rid of most of the PMs, Directors and VPs. Yahoo is too management-heavy, and hacker-light.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Python is not C so why should it suddenly "pretend to be" when doing type hinting? Also, I personally find that the type declaration format of C is one of my least favorite things about C.
Prestige is part of what you're paying for, though.
I can certainly see a lot of benefits with this. We host for some of our customers, and this would allow us to isolate each customer completely from each other. That is worth a lot when they store sensetive data in the application.

Seperate VMs would as well, but it's not really feasible to run a full Windows Server for each customer.
Blink and WebKit don't have much overlap.
Read this too. http://deforestation.geologist-1011.net
No doubt you need to be excellent to create a monopoly (maintenance mode is much easier). But you also need the ingredients for it to exist in the first place (network effect, high value/exclusive/monetize-able data, high competitive barriers). Did Yahoo ever have a market like that, except with search early on? (They might have been able to do something interesting with messaging or mail early on to lock in those users, but they didn't.) They had a lot of eyeballs, a lot of ad salespeople, a lot of ad dollars, (later) a lot of ad network tech, a lot of great content, a lot of great niche sites (flickr). But nothing that competitors couldn't enter and replicate fairly quickly. If you were Yahoo today, and you could execute flawlessly on a single area of your current business or something closely adjacent to one of your current businesses (excluding search, which they continue to exit), what would you pick?
Sprite_tm is a good friend, that project has been brewing for a little while, all because of that xkcd cartoon!
Next step is to have multiple servers running multiple Tama, and create a REAL singularity! :-)
It is not just cities. Inequality growth means that a few people/companies accumulates a biggest share of all assets. Once you get so much money getting the rest of assets is usually just a matter of time. "Monopoly" game was created to illustrate this point.
Archimedes, Da Vinci, I. Newton are just a few that came to mind.
Jerry Yang already pulled a Steve Jobs with his Alibaba investment. He just never gets the credit for it.
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Shouldn't the yahoo.com servers already log when they return error responses? :)
if you are a bank

1. refinance risk houses more than once
2. sell that for profit
3. send dividends to head quarters overseas
4. crash national branches, foreclose homes
5. get money from govt to fix things
6. buy those homes
Url changed from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/23/mit_covert_apps/, which points to this.
All? They say "some of our corporate funding has been pulled because we tackle important but controversial issues"
[UPDATE] Added samples not obfuscated and protected by DexProtect
I believe those are closed systems not connected to the internet. It still would be better to upgrade them (for easier access to spare parts, knowledge, etc).

Otherwise they end up like this French airport which was shut down just few weeks ago because their Windows 3.1 failed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687
Wow, that's pretty messed up. But do you know what's the worst thing here?

How someone got fired simply because people were talking crap about them/in a feud with a member of their family. How exactly is that legal? Why are we seeing employees firing people just because people insult them online? That Ingalls would do this is utterly pathetic.

Oh, and the whole utility companies thing. Why? Do they not train their staff about this sort of thing nowadays? Is it really so hard to ask for the password first, and then simply cut off the call if it isn't provided? It's like they trust people far too much nowadays.

If those things were resolved, events like this would be far less damaging in the future.
Samsung pay uses tokenization so is considered EMV. However you cannot tell a samsung pay transaction from magstripe relay.
This is so important:

Do not even try to write what you think is effective code before
benchmarking. The VM has many clever optimizations. And even if
you will somehow learn of all of them, in the next release they
still can be changed. Instead, write a simple and clean piece of
code, make a benchmark, find the real bottleneck and rewrite code
in small parts.

Every now and then I see some strange code at a client I work with, and the justification is "Performance". Because somebody thought it might be faster - But they didn't check it back then. And they don't have an automated performance test that continuosly validates if their "dirty but fast" code is still faster than the clean version...

Don't even ask how many hours of developer time I saw wasted because of "dirty but fast" code. Where the code often was not much faster then the clean version. Or it was faster, but speed was not crucial in the area where the code operated.

Also, I guess a lot of the optimizations from old blog posts or the first "Effective Java" will not yield amazing results anymore, as compilers and runtimes are getting better.

I also like this one:

Do not think that programming in C++ or any other lower-level language
is a must for having good performance. Good architecture, benchmarking
and profiling are far more important.

But I don't think it is as clear-cut as the author writes it. For some problems, having total control over your memory layout and what gets exectued when (i.e. C or C++ or ...) can lead to huge benefits. And sometimes, the runtime is just more clever optimizing the code than you are.
8 Myths That Can Inhibit Innovation in Your Business 2015
Obviously it's impossible to perfectly optimize every time. I would just like some more diagnostics from the compiler that help me debug issues with wrong of missing optimizations.
Good point... I suppose that is also what Elixir is bringing to the party.
It is because it uses a token not the PAN
Why do I feel like the next line probably is:

Client: "Oh, no. We can't do that. That would violate policies ABC, XYZ and 123. Team FOO would never sign off and ...".
If Yahoo cares about search, they should acquire DuckDuckGo. Both search engines use Bing on the backend, but the scrappy team at DuckDuckGo has built a much smarter search experience and UI than the entire Yahoo search team. What would be a fair valuation of DuckDuckGo?
The shitty thing is that because of Samsung Pay it's impossible for a merchant to distinguish a cloned magstripe from a legitimate samsung pay transaction using MST. I wrote a bit about this a few months ago: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2015/8/31/the-thing-about-samsung-pa...