skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compared to the economic cost of bugs, bound checks everywhere are (very very) cheap. Even more so with the CPU and compilers we have today, which are more than sufficiently smart from the point of view of when C was created. Intel is even adding some new instructions in their CPU to make that even less costly than you could imagine in even some crazy C based situation you would not think to be possible in the first place, because of C. But the cost here is extra complexity, for something that should have been built-in in the first place.

More technically to address fears of slowdowns even with simpler architectures, the additional checks will likely be factored most of the time (for example before a loop with linear accesses). When they are not, to have a real impact 1/ it has to be in a really hot code path (like 1% or maybe even 0.1% or even less of a real system) 2/ the cpu should not be able to use empty OOO slots and execution units to execute it without any extra penality 3/ this is quite a deduction from the two preceding points, but if we are talking about a big array being accessed in random order this will be slow because of RAM access anyway, an extra check won't induce any meaningful slowdown maybe even if it were mispredicted (which it will not be - in regard to performance).

Like always if you have any performance issue, first profile. And actually I can't remember having ever heard a single person complaining that some bound checking in a program was the cause of their slowdowns. It often far more macroscopic, and easy to fix anyway when it is that much micro. Considering usual modern systems, they are sometimes so slow that the problem is certainly NOT native bound checking, but very probably architectural madness.
> worse compiler

Last time I checked gcc binaries beat Clang performance wise.
How to Solve Tabs vs. Spaces Forever
How Batman Obsessively Labelled His Gadgets in the 1960s
The first three suggest mathematicians are human and programmers are insane.
Not from scratch, perhaps, but it still takes technical acumen to do anything useful with the source code at all, which implies that a non-technical user can't really exercise the freedoms of free software, beyond simply having access to the source code.
I would like to see someone write a web browser for the Commodore 64 using the Wifi modem or something. It would be limited in colors but it would be good to see what some websites look like on the Commodore 64.
451unavailable.org is trying to make legal blocking of websites more transparent
No not necessarily. If the headline claims something is misunderstood, you set up the expectation that you'll set the record straight. Misunderstood implies that there is some correct point of view, otherwise you'd call it a mystery.

I didn't expect hard data, but a list of traits specific to female autism would have been useful.
Why bother doing anything in life if you can't give yourself a challenge every now and then? White elephant exchanges aren't exactly a win-lose type of game. You are only winning in your mind if you can nab the non-crappiest gift. Everyone gets a prize, some are nice, some are lame. But the whole point is to have fun and enjoy the experience of it.

In reality, it is a net gain. Everyone brings something and everyone comes home with something. There is no loss of gross dollar amount however you might come home with a crap gift when you brought a nice one. The net gain comes from the fun and enjoyment people have in playing these dumb games. Its not really a test of skill, its mostly luck. You can sometimes game the system like in the article but if you open up a real piece of crap, then you're stuck with it. That part isn't as fun but you should be able to laugh at your own misfortune.

My extended family does one of these games every year. Sometimes there are nice things in there like giftcards and booze, sometimes its one of the old knickknacks thats been passed around for years (like this gaudy ceramic high-heel shoe). If you get crap, you just regift it next year and laugh at the person that ends up with it next. Everyone does it and everyone should know what to expect. If you can't contain your emotions for getting "ragged on" for ending up with the crap gift, then you really need to grow up.
False. Miscommunication occurs in most pure english interactions but only occasionally is significant and even more rarely actually kills someone.

There is excellent research on text/email communication.
> regulatory bodies do not tend to support rapid iteration of products

I disagree. 21 CFR 820 is deliberately written such that it does not prescribe any one specific development process; AAMI TIR-45 for example aligns agile methodologies with medical device software development and is an FDA recognized consensus standard.

What regulatory bodies do demand is that one document what one will do, and then, actually do what one has documented. Sounds like Theranos had trouble with that.
A), I think you mean "deprecate", it's been depreciating just fine by itself.

B) If you ever want to make a change to the toolchain, HARD SWERVE on supporting GCC. It's a liability if you need to modify it at all. This may have more to do with what Google wants to support rather than any effect on the end user.
Should that be `long double`?
I see the isomorphism between catalytic converters and animal protein, but there's a pretty big difference between requiring people to pay more for cars and telling them they can't buy chicken at Aldi anymore.

I think shaming people for buying cheap meat is a terrible strategy that will backfire.

What needs to change are the regulations. When antibiotics are banned from the food supply, the market will discover other ways to regain the efficiencies.
Gift Guide: An Introduction to Smart Lighting
Looks good, but no Android version? The wacom sensor on a Samsung tablet is far more precise than the larger "pen" used for iPads.
WordPress in 2016
I still use Winamp too (not Winamp 2, unfortunately), and actually just picked up a z3 compact. I'm looking forward to loading it up with music. Any tips?
It seems that 0 wasn't a usable address on PDP-11 so K&R decided it's fine to use it as null pointer constant.

And of course dereferencing 0 isn't impossible in practice on arches which support this. Compilers for such machines usually can be coerced to generate code which accesses 0, you just have to live with the fact that your code isn't considered "valid, portable C" anymore.
> If you have the cash to pay them off, then they don't get to say no even if it's a short sale.

If you actually pay them off, then they don't get to say no, because paying them off is, essentially, buying out their interest in the property, under the terms of an existing contract. That doesn't negate the fact that they have legally-enforceable rights in the property until and unless you do that.

> Alternatively, you can generally walk away and sell it to them for the value of the loan.

Only if the mortgage is governed by the law of a jurisdiction where pursuit of mortgage deficiency isn't allowed (either in general or for mortgages in the specific conditions yours has.)
If you separate the testing and certification from the education, it isn't quite so important where the knowledge/skill came from, so long as the person has it.

For instance, if you take the rock guitarist certification test, and pass, you should be able to play guitar passably well in a rock band. It doesn't matter if you studied in a music conservatory for a few years, or worked small-time gigs in bars and clubs, or played a guitar-learning video game.

It's not the education that's the bottleneck. It's proving to others that you have the knowledge/skill in an efficient way.

The professional associations for actuaries (SoA, CAS) runs their own testing regime. You can take a university course to prepare for the tests, but you don't have to. That testing and certification process has led to the situation where passing another exam usually triggers a pay increase. And actuaries consistently rate as having very high job satisfaction.

ABMS runs certification tests for specialist physicians.

Lawyers have the bar examinations and board certification for specialists.

The same could happen for other careers. A group with a narrow focus could poach the testing and certification function from the generalist universities. For someone who has no need for external guidance with respect to a general education, and who knows what sort of career they want, they could skip college, and climb the ladder of a testing authority. That would present some risk that the authority itself fails in some way before all the tests are passed, and the career position established.
A number of sources I've found indicate that (see links below for sources):
1) China consumes about 50% of the total global antibiotic production (roughly half for agriculture and half for human use).
2) Per capita human consumption of antibiotics is on the order of 10 times greater in China compared to the US.

Some of these articles are several years old, and from sources I'd classify as more internal than foreign. It is likely that these figures would be conservative.

If this data is approximately correct, I think we could say that 1) China has an outsized effect on the problem of antibiotic resistance (even considering it's large population). 2) The US problem of antibiotic use is mostly an agricultural one (which deserves a lot of attention), and the Chinese overuse of antibiotics is not confined to either human or agricultural use.

I'm sure the chinese leadership is aware of the issue, and given their ability to make changes when something is very important (ie, air pollution during high profile events), the fact that little has been done is telling. It is likely that this simply isn't a high priority issue and thus we are unlikely to see any movement on it anytime soon.

http://china.org.cn/china/2015-07/14/content_36057168.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-07/14/c_134411007.htm
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2103733,00...
Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days
Interesting. I went to Vimeo to check it was still the case just before I posted my comment and I got an error message about my setup.
Kaido Höövelson peab oma esimese MMA lahingu 31.detsembril Jerome Le Banner’iga
> C already has rock-solid string formatting options

Don't troll.
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The tertiary reason is that I have no internet in the subway.
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is something you have to compare, and can combine in interesting ways, then trade off against costs.

There are a bunch of ways in which you can do compute, storage, and networking. You get to pick zero or more of these ways. One of them is "buy a bunch of iron and make a pile of it in your bedroom". Major risk factors here are your house burning down, you getting evicted, or there being a power cut. Another is "rent those services from an infrastructure provider". Risk factors here are much harder for you to visualise, but include things like "governments ban that company from operating in your country".

You can look at the risk of any of these options, and quantify it with an SLO, like "we intend for this compute resource to be available 99.99% of the time in a given quarter". You can then have an SLA that defines what will happen if that objective is not met, and measure how often this is complied with over time. There are lots of ways to analyse this information, but let's suppose that you can reduce it to a single number measuring how safe the resource is for your use case.

If you only look at a single option, and say "this has a safety of X", then the only thing you can get out of this effort is anxiety. This only becomes interesting when you start looking at differences between alternatives, like "the safety of servers in my bedroom is X, but the safety of buying resources on GCE is Y, so I can get this much of an improvement by spending that amount of money", or "by doing both of these things I improve my safety to Z, and I am willing to pay the additional cost of doing so". Or perhaps your position would be "this option is less safe but much cheaper and I'm willing to accept the extra risk".

The problem I have with the "fuck the cloud" article is that it doesn't do any of this. All it says is "the safety of this option is only X, you should experience anxiety". Is X higher or lower than that pile of iron in your bedroom? You still don't know.

(Realistically, unless you have the ability to build a system in your bedroom that has continental diversity for storage, N+2 of everything for hardware failure, etc, your bedroom is likely to be far less safe than the major cloud services - unless you live in a country which regularly bans American companies from doing business with you, which a sixth of the world's population does.)
Good for you. I had to quit working in my second year to be able to have enough time to study as much as I needed.
> These days that's often the cloud.

For plenty of use cases I actually agree with that conclusion. With the caveat that I would add: accompanied by a suitable non-cloud back-up of critical data, code and configuration data held on a medium that is not accessible by the same people that administer the cloud stuff.
I'm actually tired of the "blame the general public" argument. Blame the agricultural industry for this. I'm not going to take the blame for deforestation or lack of fresh water every time I eat a cheesburger, nor am I going to assume blame for pollution when I drive my car. Unless billions of people change within the next few years (which is so unrealistic that I feel comfortable saying it won't happen) then my individual do-gooder actions will only bring self-satisfaction, not real change.

Blaming the every-man for this stuff is a cop out. Corporations are to blame. Real change will only come about through government (semi-likely) or self-regulation within industries (very unlikely).
That's not true. While recent Supreme Court decisions have cut back certain kinds of patents, the U.S. has successfully exported its patent system abroad through treaties and the WTO. Protection of IP in say China is a lot stronger now than a couple of decades ago.
I agree with your points about incentive management, but I think it's not me who thinks about a very specific meaning of "game design". I think about the usual one, which is making games - stuff people do for fun, as opposed to work. I read your comment as extending the meaning of "game" to encompass all the stuff that can be gamified. So for instance, technical debt as carbon credits is an example of gamification, not of creating a game - game as in fun, something you participate in as a choice, not an obligation to an external party (not meeting which you can be punished for).
From a XAML perspective:

The ViewModel just adapts various Models/Services for a particular View. It converts types provided by the Model as needed, formats strings, computes progress, etc.

"UI independent" just means that it should be a logical model of the View, rather than a visual model (e.g., don't expose Color or Brush properties, instead expose properties like IsSelected). So think of the View model like logical code-behind.

> Modern frameworks are moving away from two-way data binding (React, Angular 2.0, Ember, etc.)

On the web, maybe. But Windows apps (UWP) are still based on data binding.
Url changed from http://humanprogress.org/blog/the-best-map-you-will-see-toda..., which appears to copy http://www.cato.org/blog/best-map-you-will-see-today without linking to it, which points to this.
I'm on the bus today and the lady behind me is talking to another about facebook and how she finds it kind of scary that they are suggesting friends to her that she knows and she hasn't given them any information about where she went to school. Then when the wonderment and fear of friends of friends didn't catch, she pivots to I hate facebook. The reason being that its such a time sink.

MySpace was started so the guys could spam users with Viagra ads and diet pills, seriously.

Facebook is keeping closer to its mission which is to let people find and view/share the lives of their dare I say friends.

I strangely would love you to win your five bucks. However Facebook's cash position and willingness to purchase everything that poses a threat isn't changing. It's bizarre to me the number of people I know who are done with facebook. Closed up account. I don't have facebook. I have instagram.
i never understand these kind of questions. why do you need to general taxonomy once you know the specifics?
<strike>antibiotic-free</strike> meat is a luxury item.

Unless you hunt.
It was Microsoft that came and ate public domain software's lunch, not GNU. GNU and the GPL were not needed until aggressive copyright enforcers such as Microsoft came on the scene. Bill Gates wrote a famous rant calling anyone that shares code a thief, essentially. The GPL was a reaction to that attitude and has saved the culture of sharing code.

If most people defaulted to sharing code like was done pre-Microsoft then BSD would be fine. Read RMS's rant that is linked above. He's still at defending against "adversaries" of Freedom. This is war!

OK, so even MS is now open sourcing (some of) their code. Maybe it's not "war" anymore, but you need to understand the history a little.
Top physics predictions for 2016
Studies show that immigration, sadly, is linked to the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases.

Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25418572/

Immigrant hotspots in London now have tuberculosis rates higher than Iraq and Rwanda. 80% of cases are people born abroad, and some are antibiotic-resistant. This is a disease we thought we'd erradicated:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34637968

The U.K. has seen unprecedented inflows in the last year (640K immigrants), and since then the rate has risen further - to the point where the government has refused to publish official immigration figures because it would be "unhelpful" to our negotiation with the EU, and upcoming referendum on EU membership

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/1205...

I know how alarmist this comment sounds, and I fully expect it to be downvoted because it contradicts the politically-correct utopian vision of immigration that we're all expected to hold.

But I hope lefties realise that it's their suppression of debate that frustrates people and leads them supporting reactionary leaders like Trump.

We need to start discussing immigration without the stifling constraints of political correctness.
I agree but other than in major central business districts there's only so many places to house thousands of employees such as Google, Facebook, etc. For that reason, I don't think suburban corporate campuses will entirely disappear. Attracting tenants sub 30K square feet (guessing here) I can see this obviously being a big problem.
A bit sad because I thought Talko had some great ideas. I hope some are picked up by Slack or Telegram as well as getting worked into Skype.
What does DRM support in a compiler tool chain even mean? The ability to develop DRM is available by the nature of the tool, but that is also true of GCC.
> The Clang and LLVM developers reach different conclusions from ours because they do not share our values and goals.

It's hard for me to trust the values of a man who thinks sex with children should be legalized. Not ad hominem'ing here, just saying that if his bigger-picture idea of "freedom" includes freedom to have sex with children, he and I have different ideas of what freedom mean, and I can't really say I trust his judgment to understand "freedom" properly.
I too wonder about the choice of running into a bus of children or driving off a cliff. It presupposes that the car will get into that situation in the first place (which I have heard argued as unlikely) but when it does, what does it do. If it chooses to kill the occupants (drive off the cliff) then the vehicle manufacturer faces a wrongful death suit, if it hits the bus full of kids (and maybe injures/kills some) then its the bus driver's liability (we're assuming that if the bus were driving in a safe, predictable way the car won't have to make this choice).

So the manufacturer decides, take out the bus, we don't want to be liable. But the human occupant might have decided differently. There is at least a twilight zone episode in there. Asimov plowed the conundrum often in his robot series and it was one of the reasons I really enjoyed those books.
Phenomenal book, highly recommended.
tptacek,

It seems to me that, in every thread, you find a way to dream that more "regulations" will solve all of the social ills of the US and beyond.

The agri-industrial complex is perhaps the clearest example that the powerful among the regulated will find a way to be the regulators. What more needs to happen to clarify this for you?
I want to also vote up Cactus despite the lack of attention paid to it lately. IMO it's very well designed and deserves to be worked on by a wider community.

It's open sourced via BSD 3 clause: https://github.com/koenbok/cactus

I especially liked the "deploy to s3" feature, IMO the cheapest way to run a highly scalable static site today.

Alternatively, a "deploy to GitHub page" would be neat as well.

I would work on extending Cactus if it was a bigger problem personally, but so far what's released fits my needs already.
You're forgetting about opportunity cost and the salary plus job advancement that you could achieve in the time you are in college
Actually, English has a fairly high entropy/syllables ratio. [1][2]

Also, given that we can infer with decent accuracy what people are saying even in noisy environments, I would say it's really not too bad.

You could do better of course, but in a good spoke natural language you want a good mix of density (for efficient communication) and redundancy (for dealing with environmental variables). Optimizing for one comes at the expense of the other, and English strikes a pretty decent balance. [citation needed]

1: Pellegrino, et al. University of Lyons, 2011 <http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegri...
2: There has been some valid criticism made to [1].
Related aside: the original author of winamp still writes regularly at 1014.org; I use his licecap* software on a daily basis for making gifs

* https://github.com/lepht/licecap
> > RMS wants user freedom...

> And that's why we have the GNU toolchain, which is some of the most end user-friendly...

Eh? User-friendliness and user freedom aren't the same properties.