skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The software industry, and indeed every industry that relies on software, has thrived for decades without the encumbrances of proprietary claims over APIs. Because the Federal Circuit's decision destroys the balance between copyrightable expression and uncopyrightable ideas in software, it threatens competition and innovation. The Ninth Circuit should repudiate it at the earliest opportunity."

BAM!
It'd be a smart move to leave. If Uber and Lyft left Seattle, local politicians would feel a tremendous amount of heat to change their positions. Cabbies in Seattle are in general not well regarded.

I'm not commenting about the ethics of doing so, of course, but it reminds me of Walmart closing stores (apparently) because of labor unions. It's brutal, but effective.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over...
I can literally manufacture an unregistered firearm in my garage, but now anyone with a flying toy heavier than eight ounces must register with the federal government?

The over-regulation here is insane.
I wish HN would implement some width controls on comments to help with horizontal eye scan...
Can you share some of the arguments in favor of involuntary unions? (I'm even willing to invest some time digging if anyone has some pointers to potential sources of literature, I am genuinely interested.)

My personal experience has been that when I've been the so-called "beneficiary" of one, it has not actually benefited me and has often made for awkward scenarios where there is me and the counterparty ("employer") and this weird semi-interested third-party regulating how we can interact, regardless of what is actually in my self-interest.

Just to be clear, I am all for collective bargaining in the sense of a bunch of (small) actors choosing to work together against an adversary. I would do this myself if I deemed it beneficial. I don't understand why we would mandate that individuals had to be bound by the agreement whether they want to participate or not. I recognize that this is a common structure though.
Communication and problem solving in software development
Password Guidance: Simplifying your approach
English is relatively unusual in merging its second-person pronouns, although the use of the second-person plural in more formal or polite situations (aka the T-V distinction) is extremely widespread.

However, the matter of personal pronouns is such a fundamental aspect of grammar (at least in Indo-European languages) that it was literally the first piece of grammar introduced when we studied French. (It may not have been the first chapter, since the first chapter may have been limited to stock phrases and some pronunciation guides; it's been way too long). I find it highly implausible that any foreign speaker that has a working proficiency of English could somehow think that "you" is not used for both individuals and groups.
New Measurements Confirm That Electrons Will Outlive God
Challenge accepted. Seriously.
Guns also have uses other than a weapon. They shoot, but that doesn't mean they are inherently shooting living things. Just like knives stab and cut, but do not always target living things.
A “Lightning Network” for regular money
Definitely.

Wine too ;)
Is there a "law" about people mentioning self-driving cars in anything even tangentially related to autos?
Have you tried -o to specify the output file?

As for -a it doesn't look like -a is actually handled in parseopt, through process of elimination it looks like -E sets cpponly, -c sets dontlink, and -S sets dumpasm. So from main.c:143 if you don't set any of those, dumpast needs to be true, and the only way I see that getting set to true is by using this flag '-fdump-ast'

From this commit[0] it looks like -a was removed, but usage docs and error messages weren't updated.

[0]https://github.com/rui314/8cc/commit/614f6e7b643333b9baaf8fb...

Edit: adding link to relevant commit.
Not really. I sometimes send chat messages when the users are offline knowing they will be read later. Likewise I have email chats where we respond more or less instantly (when my friend doesn't have a chat client). Its a bit clunkier to use, but works.
We're planning on it! We'll both have some free time in January to work on this some more, and Safari is a high priority.
So, that solution is to keep the pricing hidden, and then give you a "Surprise" bill after the fact.

Sure flies against the idea of "Informed Consent".

"Else I'd not have done that procedure...."

Edit: From the downvotes, I assume that people have issues with knowing medical pricing? That seems really backwards.
When they are the ones whose business model is being disrupted...
Well. It looks like OUR slack bot was posted way too early even before the early crowd gets on board. :)
Anyways we have got the feedback we need to get. Will work to improve the product soon. Especially to role out the enterprise version.
I'm still waiting for them to stop making 3D movies so I can watch a normal movie like a normal person. Avatar was 6 years ago. The joke stopped being funny back when AirBnB was still about blow-up mattresses.
Has anyone tried Littlebits?

http://littlebits.cc/
I'm not clear on how these are more dangerous to aircraft than large birds are. The latter probably outnumber drones by a million to one.
Yeah, H class requires level 1 certification from Tripoli or NAR. And for good reason I'd say. I just happened to launch an F-class yesterday - definitely not your kid-friendly little model rocket that you could launch from the baseball field nearby; that things goes far and carries quite a bit of mass. If something goes wrong and it shoots into a person, it could do some damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_rocket_motor_classificat...
British English word for "boss", traditionally in blue-collar jobs (building sites, factories, that kind of thing) but used informally everywhere.
For me, eye fatigue. E-ink feels like reading paper. TN & IPS make my eyes hurt eventually. (I can't comment on AMOLED, never had a device fancy enough to have it)
Can you rephrase that? I'm not making sense of that question.
Texas plumber sues dealer after his pickup turns up in Syria
Is motor failure that frequent of a failure mode? I feel like complete electric failure (out of range) is much more likely in which case it will still fall like a rock?
> We're building a shitty internet, not an internet of shitty things

I think we're building a shitty internet of shitty things.
It also used to be a requirement that you knew how to fly the aircraft, which wasn't much easier than flying a real airplane, and in the case of R/C helicopters was actual harder than flying a full-sized manned helicopter. With the latest multicopters and even some of the electric fixed-wing craft, any moron can keep the thing in the air. Hence the current wave of trouble.
Plan to throw one away
>Cops, bodyguards and civilians defending themselves generally only need guns because their adversaries have guns.

Not at all the case. Guns allow for the physically weak to still have a chance to defend themselves. On NPR I remember calling for the police to help as her ex was breaking into the home. They didn't have anyone anywhere near by and the woman had no weapons on her. The boyfriend ended up breaking in and attacking her quite badly. He didn't need a weapon and a weapon wouldn't have made what he did any worse, but it might have given her the chance for the victim to defend herself or scare him off.
Half credit. There are companies that don't act in sociopathic ways attempting to maximize profits at worker expense (Costco comes to mind). At the same time, yes, its the government's fault for not increasing the minimum wage and strengthening social safety nets, which can unfortunately be influenced by corporate interests using lobbying after the Citizen's United supreme court ruling.
Also the placebo effect is powerful, so maybe we shouldn't dismiss it as just marketing.
I always wondered about smart bulbs... How much, per year, do they cost to run idle? Since they appear to use wireless to operate, so there must be at least the draw for that.
We have social security, unemployment insurance, medicare/medicaid, and on and on.

You want part-time workers to be paid full time. How is that fair for the employer? There is no good answer to the part-time work problem. If the supply of workers outpaces the demand for work, the employer will hire part time. It's simple economics.
Java is used in the back end of several high performance web applications as well. Twitter uses JVM and so does The Guardian, for example. Not sure what your point is.

Your criticism of Java for being slow is 1) very 2006 and 2) incorrectly based on desktop apps which require JVM restart and warmup time before they get going.

Put Java on the server and see the speeds. Using spark as your web framework, it's possible to achieve rates of over 40k requests per second ( I've seen claims of 160k requests per second after sufficient JVM warmup).
Wrong title. Cart before horse. Should be: "Why Smartphone screens still look like 18th century books."

When it comes to how to combine graphics and text, smartphones offer little new compared to thousands and thousands of years worth of artists and authors seeking to catch the eye of viewers.
Samsung employs tens of thousands of software engineers, all working in small isolated groups. One hand has no clue what the other is doing. Hardcoded, outdated, proprietary and broken are just a few selling points!

TV that lets your neighbour remotely enable buildin webcam in the middle of the night? Wifi enabled digital camera running ancient linux emailing pictures in the clear? Thats Samsung.
Whether you earn your sole income from an activity or not has no bearing on whether you are an employee or a contractor. It's a tax decision based on the employer's relationship to you.
Fixed-wing models have been idiot-proof for a long time. You can buy a beginner's kit at any hobby store, and they're much easier to fly than a multirotor. I don't think accessibility is responsible for the recent popularity of multirotors, I think they're just more interesting because they're unlike anything full-sized.
Guys. A lot of successful companies are getting created in Australia. Cliniko is one among them.
Time and again, it's proven that 'perseverance' is the key.
This is a completely layman's analysis, but I think that science funding has gone down because we are less and less able to understand what it is that is being studied and how it can benefit humanity. Go back 40 or 50 years and the things scientists were discovering were tangible and real. They produced things that people could touch, consume, and understand.

The biggest science project we have going, the LHC, is impossible for the lay man to understand. "A big circle which smashes tiny things together? You're just watching it? I don't get it!". Compare that to the discovery of penicillin; "You're growing fungus under your fridge and it's going to cure my sick child? Take all my money!".
>But heh, fuck social safety nets ya know? If they existed, both Walmart and Uber would have to pay real wages.

Safety nets do exist, that's why Uber and Wal-Mart don't have to pay real wages. The tax payers subsidize Wal-Mart and McDonalds for $153b a year [0].

We ought to account for the government benefits required by employees of large corporations and tack that on to their yearly bill -- no deductions -- and see what that does to their wages.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...
Birds are not made of metal and drones absolutely can be vastly more dangerous to aircraft than a bird. Besides which, bird strikes absolutely can be devastating to aircraft and they've caused numerous crashes and many fatalities. Millions of dollars a year is spent keeping birds away from airports.
Scientists Hope to Bring a Galápagos Tortoise Species Back to Life
> We have social security, unemployment, medicare/medicaid, and on and on.

None of which are sufficient compared to proper first world countries (ie anywhere developed outside of the US).

> You want part-time workers to be paid full time. How is that fair for the employer? There is no good answer to the part-time work problem.

A government doesn't exist for your business interests; it exists to take care of its citizens. If you can operate your business in such an environment, great. If you can't, tough.

Quality of life is a more important measure than your exit strategy or next quarter results.
I'm Creating a Remote Worker Starter Kit – Please Help
So, assuming you are a safe flier of quadcopters, you are NOT flying over people to start with. Quadcopters fail fairly straight down when they fall. RC Airplanes can continue flying after engine failure and possibly cross over people. Of course, both are a danger for fly-aways which would concern me a whole lot more than an engine failure.
Sure, makes sense.

My point is more about price-fixing though. Obviously a union that represents 100% of Seattle cabbies will have a lot more power to set prices than 5% of truck drivers.

I suppose it will come down to the language of the Seattle law -- the article isn't clear if this is an optional-membership union or not. I presume it's not optional, because otherwise it would be very easy for Uber and Lyft to sidestep.
Check out FIRST. If you're lucky a local high school or organization will already have a team that you could have them join.

http://www.firstinspires.org/

It's a yearly competition and teams build a robot to compete. That robot is usually pretty big (3x3 ft. at the base, usually?). There's a kit of parts that includes a board, and the programming environment is mostly pre-configured for you.

Next year's build season kicks off early January. The stuff these kids can build in a month is pretty amazing.
When Google lets the press write about their machines and facilities, they only show the obsolete stuff. It makes me wonder if this is Baidu's current generation, or an older one.
What is the name of the company you work for?
Even more relevant is the ESP8266 at $2. The Pi Zero doesn't have WiFi, and has _way_ more computing power than you would need to run a few RGB LEDs.
> What good can come of posting something like this, even if you've noticed a pattern or think you have?

Drawing attention to the idea that maybe Windows really isn't the right choice.

>Sam once asked me if HN should have a guideline about not attacking entire classes of people (in this case Windows users). He wasn't arguing for it, just wondering, and I thought it sounded too restrictive. Yet every time I notice a comment doing it, it's such a low-value comment that I get a little keener on the idea.

Consider this - there's several kinds of cars. Most of them have four wheels and doors and can drive at highway speeds. But a substantial portion of the population drives three wheeled cars with doors on all but the driver's side that max out at 40 MPH, and they are ignorant of the fact that their cars are objectively worse. This is the state of Windows in hacker communities.

This isn't really a "class of people". It's a bunch of hackers like us that are ignorant of the fact that they're driving crappy cars, and struggle with things that most of us have no trouble with because we drive proper cars.
ComputerCraft turtles on modded minecraft.

If you must spend money on hardware, buy them desktop upgrades, more memory or the fastest processor that'll fit in the socket (may need to upgrade BIOS first...) or a top of the line graphics card.

I think turtles are easy to program, they're in LUA and are a step above blockly type stuff. I kinda like the LUA APIs, they're not ridiculous or anything. They're simple enough that you'll get a chance to build useful larger functions / subroutines.

At least its cheap. If they throw up their hands in frustration at programming their own tunnel mining program, at least you'll find out soon and it'll be cheap. Start with building a robot smart enough to build stairs all the way down to bedrock. Extend to have it place actual stair steps and torches for light, etc.

Note that there's a subtle difference between a future-EE-teen who thinks programming robots is cool and a future-EE-teen who thinks robot hardware is cool (like motor H-bridges and gray code position encoders and sensors and generally melting solder). Obviously the latter is not going to find modded minecraft amusing. There is also the "competition robot" set which usually isn't programmable but amounts to homemade RC cars, you specifically don't want that, just mentioning it as something to look out for and avoid in the market.
> We ought to account for the government benefits required by employees of large corporations and tack that on to their yearly bill -- no deductions -- and see what that does to their wages.

Agree 100%. You either bill them directly, or you create a basic income, raise taxes to support it, thereby forcing companies to pay more to bring labor into the labor force.
You (well, the spec writer) forgot the semicolons (it's errata'd). :-)

And now I'm stuck trying to remember off the top of my head whether or not the first few lines are permitted to use quoted-strings in the first place.

With regards to RFC 2047, the worst header I've seen to date is this:
Re: [Kitchen Nightmares] Meow! Gordon Ramsay Is =?ISO-8859-1?B?UEgR lqZ VuIEhlYWQgVH rbGeOIFNob BJc RP2JzZXNzZW?= With My =?ISO-8859-1?B?SHVzYmFuZ JzX0JhbGxzL JfU2F5c19BbXiScw==?= Baking Company Owner

I've been unable to find any possible decoding of those encoded-words that make sense.

... I can't wait until everyone decides to just use UTF-8 for all the headers. Except then I get to yell at everyone who uses Windows-1252 headers right now. >:(
This is absolutely amazing. Jaw dropping if it's not a clever case of photoshop!

Recently they had started to ask serious questions to Toyota as to why IS had so many brand new pickup trucks...
I saw Lonely George in the Galapagos in 2003 and then saw his preserved remains at the American Museum of Natural History in New York last year, which made me feel very old.

How great if they're able to bring back his species.
Apple Music - yeah, and they/he/she didn't even't get to actually start using that weird app.
As I mentioned, I prefer early returns as well, and I wasn't recommending the if/else structure as an alternative to early returns.

My only point in showing that code was to illustrate what I see as the bigger problem in the example: the use of nested if and else statements when non-nested ones could be used instead. Personally I would get rid of the nesting by using early returns, but for someone who objects to that for any reason, the non-nested if/else chain is a nice alternative.

Also, the series of returns you show here could easily be written as a chain of if/else for those who prefer that style. I'm not sure why you said it requires a complex boolean expression; this code is equivalent to the series of returns:

string result;
if( x == null ) {
result = "x is required";
} else if( x.length < 3 ) {
result = "too few elements in x";
} else if( x[0] == null ) {
result = "first element missing";
} else {
result = "the real result";
}
return result;

Again, I don't particularly like this style, although it is better than the deeply nested if/else. I prefer the series of returns that you listed in your comment.
Because Samsung, like all hardware companies except Apple, suck at software.
Please don't comment like this here, but rather express your view substantively.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733394 and marked it off-topic.
While I agree, those are all built-in functions. I suppose that's why there's the doc-on-highlight feature. I'd need to wrap them if I wanted just to rename them.
Thank you for the questions. I think it's likely multi-factorial and to be honest there are many features we haven't yet built that Anki has and are in our backlog... there's still much work to be done. It's likely some combination of expert content, multiple learning modes, gamification, friendly UI, and collaborative features. Give or take the importance of one or the other depending on the person. Some struggle with time management, others study fatigue, and others just don't like or trust user-generated content. For my own studying, I'm not a big fan of pure flashcards and prefer other methods of active recall.
So the disrupter is to be disrupted?

Really. I cannot help but laugh when the upstart flashing new company finds itself as the new oppressor fighting to protect their employees from the evil that is collective bargaining.

Congratulations Uber. You're now Macdonalds.
That is because this generation has lot of diversions. Focus is the key for research.
Getting a Drone for Xmas? You'll Have to Tell the Feds
Firewatch
It would be nice to list tear downs in the order in which they were reviewed - so I can read new ones quickly when I visit. Looks like current list is alphabetically sorted.
I got some family members some $25 dollar quadcopters for Christmas. Nobody in my family is especially interested in RC's of any kind, but for $25 bucks I thought it would be a fun and unexpected gift, and it was a quick impulse buy by me from Amazon.

My Christmas morning just went from "here's a fun little gift, lets try it out" to "first we have to figure out the government bureaucracy and register this thing or face $300,000 in fines and 3 years in jail, merry Christmas everyone!" Honestly, I'll probably just return them and get something else.
I believe, really, its more about being indie and such. Its the same reason many people can just run gmail - or google apps for your domain - as opposed to the heavy-lifting of running your own email server, etc. Not like I'm an expert, but running one's email - and ensuring high degree of deliverability nowadays - is quite difficult. There are those who choose to run something on their own, maybe to learn, maybe for privacy's sake, etc. I'm sure those who do so, dive in with their eyes wide open. ;-)
Have you tried http://www.gnoosic.com ? It is run by a HN user who does a whole lot of discovery research over at http://www.gnod.com
Oh, yes, that's a good list, and I agree almost entirely. I wrote the post you're responding to, and I'm basically a digital convert. Just this year I got rid of thousands of physical books that I'd accumulated over last 30 years, and which were huge drag on my life, both from space requirements and from weight (made moving residences more difficult).

Having said that, I would generally prefer to read a physical book. If I had a physical book and and a nice tablet with the same (but digital) book in front of me, I would likely be reaching for the physical book. Ink on paper in good lighting is preferable to any screen I've seen. And there's an ease to paging through a physical book that none of the devices I've read ebooks on can match. So, yes, I agree ebooks on are on the whole preferable. But I would never go so far as to say they always provide a better reading experience. So far my ebook reading experiences are not quite as satisfying as physical books, but any deficiencies are outweighed by other advantages of digital medium.