skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You don't really want your sister scrolling through the news with you when you're on the train. But you might be totally happy to have her sitting next to you in a flowery meadow in VR while you both catch up on your news feed.

You mean when she's not on the train too? That's not going to happen anytime soon, because mobile networks are far too crappy. On public transport in a major city in germany I regularly get latencies of 60+ seconds (yes, seconds) and a bandwidth of a few kilobytes/s max. There are also spots where you don't get any connection at all or you get a connection but it's so congested that you can't even make a DNS request that doesn't time out. Yes, I'm still talking about the middle of a big city. That's on the Eplus/O2 network.
> What would really be needed to be more space efficient for short and long strings is a size field with a variable length encoding. E.g. 1 byte for string lengths up to 64, 2 bytes for string lengths up to 8k, etc.

It's just decoding that requires pipeline busting branches. Well, I guess it's fine if you take branch mispredict for the large string case.

Maybe 1 byte with highest bit zero, 0-127, 2 bytes for 128-32767, etc?

The irony is of course now we have variable length encoding for the string size...

I think just using size_t instead makes more sense than saving a byte or two per string. Memory is cheap, but CPUs aren't getting much faster.

When size is an issue and nothing else prevents it either, just LZ4 (or similar memcpy order of magnitude speed compression) the string.
Trying to use this to catch subtle bugs is the worst kind of "the implementation is the spec". If you can't document what it does except in executable code, you don't understand what it does, and you need to go back to requirements gathering and then write some tests for the important cases. Or, better still, write the actual code in a way that's readable and expresses the intent.
That 20% was what was left after they sold 80% to the market, though.

The article mentions the fund acquired 100% of the equity in Dick Smith from woolies so at float time, Woolies had nothing to do with it. I think Woolies got a pretty decent price and people buying shares at IPO need to do their homework.
Purely anecdotal I know, but since giving up my job in the city and going freelance I have indeed spent far less time drinking and far more time exercising.

A quick one after work was far too common. I buckled far too easily to peer pressure and conformity. After all it's the done thing to do right? A crap day at work is solved by a pint (or three) after? And a good day at work... well that could be considerably more ;)
What laptop are you using to get such great compatibility match?
Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for
"git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration
variable to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list
of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.

Best change this release. :)
Dolphin Smalltalk 7 released and it's open source, including its VM
Just by skimming the article:

> Serious bugs which impede normal workflow can take years to be resolved. A lot of crucial hardware (e.g. GPUs, Wi-Fi cards) isn't properly supported.

> Both Linux 4.1.9/4.1.10, which are considered "stable" (moreover this kernel series is also LTS(!)), crash under any network load.

> Under Linux many devices and devices features are still poorly supported or not supported at all. Some hardware (e.g. Broadcom Wi-Fi adapters) cannot be used unless you already have a working Internet connection.

> you are constantly bombarded with changes you don't expect or don't want.

> Another show-stopping problem for LTS distros is that LTS kernels often do not support new hardware.

> Neither Adobe Flash, nor Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome use video decoding and output acceleration in Linux, thus youtube clips will drain your laptop battery a lot faster than e.g. in Windows. Adobe says they are fed up with video decoding acceleration bugs under Linux and refuse to re-add support for this feature

> Keyboard shortcuts handling for people using local keyboard layouts is broken

> Keyboard handling in X.org is broken by design - when you have a pop up or an open menu, global keyboard shortcuts/keybindings don't (GTK) work (QT).

> Too many things in Linux require manual configuration using text files: (...) USB 3G/LTE modems, (...) to name a few.
Introducing cron.weekly, a new weekly newsletter for Linux sysadmins
If only that were true. Everytime I go to flash a fresh install, the next few weeks are invariably spent fixing trivial inconsistencies or plain defects in the UX (looking at you x/k/l-ubuntu) or trying to patch up library xyz only to fall into dependency hell. This goes for Arch, Debian...
I'm not complaining about doing these things, mind you, I love tinkering and bricking my install. It's just that somedays you'd like X to behave, your packet manager to understand what you want to do... Without spending the afternoon scouring forums for why the audio jack isn't recognized or the touchscreen [x1.2 y1.5]s your inputs
> Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?

Interesting question. Not necessarily; as a lead developer, I just had an experience of a talented freelancer joining my project for 20 hours per week and helping with issues that we delegated to him so we can fit in the deadline. On one hand, _usually_, 9 women don't make 1 baby in 1 month; on the other hand, in this particular case the freelancer new the technology really well, and we delegated him with special issues that required less knowledge of our whole project and more knowledge of the tech itself.

So — yes, 20h/week limitation creates some problems, when you're working in the 40h/week team, but it's not the end of the world.
I managed to find jobs in my field just by sitting on IRC channels, like those specific to a platform or technology that I'm good at/currently using/can help others with.

I guess it's similar to having a good rep on SO and getting recruitment offers through there.
What are the chances your system will survive the next upgrade?
I appreciate you taking the time to enumerate those examples.

Several of them are certainly plausible. However, after reading through them, the majority seem to be from the perspective of an external attacker.

That is - the issue here isn't if say, Dropbox knows how you use their app, or Twitter knows how you use their own app - but rather if an external party broke in, and used that data maliciously.

I agree that is an issue - but then it becomes more of an InfoSec issue, than one of a company collecting data from its own apps.

Then it boils down to - do you trust that company/services security staff, to keep the data they collect secure?

I think for most people - if you weigh up the chance of a wide-scale break-in at say, Twitter, or Instagram versus their own data-security hygiene, chances are, it's much easier to hack a user, as opposed to break into a large-scale webapp and steal all of their data.

Not impossible - but when was the last time you heard of somebody breaking into say, Github or Instagram, and stealing data?

Even something like 2FA isn't that easy to implement securely - and when a company like Google or Github does it for you, I think that's a net-win for security.
I'm in a hurry right now, but I'll link to it later. It's on a i7-4750HQ, it was about 10% faster as measured with rdtsc and looping it a couple of million times.

Granted, Intel's implementation was for 8x8 (floats), perhaps that makes a difference in the instruction pipelining. I'll see if it does later.
The article linked to this one http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-...

That compares data across the OECD, so fair enough this isn't comparing Papua New Guinea to the UK or similar. However, it mentions in the article the difference between Germany and Greece as examples of higher average hours and lower average productivity. I'd still tend to believe this isn't because the Greeks could get more done by working less but that Germans are tackling different work or using more technology in their work than the Greeks.

> Maybe the reason so many british people drink too much is because they're working too much, and they're (mis)using alcohol to wind down.

Maybe. It seems like we agree on this anyway. I was being slightly tongue in cheek here, not trying to suggest all the freed up hours would be spent in the pub :). I'll leave it at that.
Probably not; I probably should remain open-minded. But I've seen so much written in C, and so rarely has C been a good choice, that I don't feel like wasting any more of my time.
Show HN: Stark – Improve Your Home Instantly (Beta Testers Wanted)
Battlecode 2016
I am not arguing in support of OLED screens. I'm firmly in the camp that OLED doesn't belong in laptops (just yet?).

From the parent:
> New gen OLEDs like the one in Samsung S6 do not have any significant burn-in.

My point is that phones are not a good measure of the ability for an oled screen to be used on a laptop since phones have lower expected longevity.
You mean GoogleAnalytics-tracking on the server side? Please expand on that, I'm not very versed in all that marketing spy-modules. Do you mean that some internet-shop (or blog or whatever) makes a request to GA or some similar service to share that I was at their website? If so, what information do they share? My IP, cookies or what? I always assumed that very point of GA was outsourcing tracking users to some other service (Google) which could try somehow guess who I am based on flash-cookies and me appearing on other websites with GA. But how would that work server-side?
Deep Learning in Action – How to Learn an Algorithm
New Year Weight Loss Guide – Alphega Pharmacy
Show HN: Apache Spark 1.6 Release Notes with Examples
What is the cause of the reduced drinking? Reduced hours worked meaning you're happier? Or no work colleagues to lead you astray?
It looks like "organic" resubmissions from independent users, not some kind of net of spammers.

I like the article. It has an unexpected result, is well explained, and provides enough evidence to be very convincing.

I think it's a good resubmission according to the FAQ [1].

I think that it has little discussions because it's not a polemic topic. Many articles with a lot of comments are borderline politics, so each one has an opinion and want to state it. Many interesting technical articles have a high upvotes/comments ratio.

--

I actually would prefer another mechanism to ensure that all the upvotes and comments are hold together in a single submission. But for now the official method is to wait until one of the resubmissions gets lucky and goes to the front page.

[1] From the FAQ:

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
Good mate of mine works there. Been telling me dodgy shit for ages now. Both had a good laugh today about it :P (except for the whole loosing his job thing)
Any OS is good for a "basic internet station". Today, a school-age hacker can probably hack together a rudimentary desktop OS for running Chrome and Firefox with no advanced audio/video codecs. But Linux is no school project, in fact as an OS it's almost as mature as Windows in terms of their age. And we all know Linux is quite good, almost unbeatable on the server side.

But for the desktop side, there is no excuse for not having your video, audio and networking sorted and polished to death. Improving your battery life or saving internet traffic while on cellular data is not "professional video/audio", it has become pretty much standard computer experience today.
FYI, Facebook buys CC purchase info about you from these companies as well in order to be able to sell more targeted ads.
This is what React does if you don't use Flux/Redux/something similar and it don't scale very well to medium sized or larger codebases.

Web Components hasn't been supported by all browsers (and probably still isn't) and has had some problems with grouping components and loading them. I can use React today but Web Components is something I might want to use in 2-3 years.
In that case, f that and f them. Do not track me.
http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.th...
Don't you think nginx is better for serving static files? I first served directly croon node with express and did a test with chrome with a simulated modem connection speed. A simultaneous fast client was blocked because the number of connection nodejs/express was exhausted by the slow modem connection getting a lot of js files...

I think I also read many other blogs suggesting serving static files with nginx in front of nodejs. Are you sure that this does not make sense?
Check out the books i read in 2015 (16 books or 5309 pages or 14 pages/day)
https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015/9692204
Video Content Marketing Roundup Dec 28 – Jan 04, 2016
1) Hopefully memory-safety without GC will be mainstream soon. Rust is showing the way.

2) I agree that time and space complexity should be part of the contract.

3) I agree that escape hatches are needed, but they shouldn't be the default. Most code isn't performance sensitive, but all code is bug sensitive.

4) The best internal representation is probably UTF-8, but I don't feel strongly about that. What matters is that the available string operations are specified in terms of Unicode, not bytes.

I grew up in Russia and I remember very well the "fun" of programming with Cyrillic strings in a mixture of Win-1251, KOI8-R, and Unicode. Working with strings as untagged bytes is a disaster everywhere except English speaking countries.
You've heard?
Debian is not using LibreSSL, I just checked. Sid currently ships OpenSSL 1.0.2e, and Jessie currently ships 1.01k.
I noticed that pushing down too hard with the Pencil causes distortion in one spot of my iPad's screen, presumably where a chip is just a little too close to the surface. So it's probably not a good idea to press (nearly) as hard as you could a Wacom stylus.

As an aside, what kinds of visual synths have you worked on? I just added (basic) Pencil support to my iPad sequencer[1] and it works quite well! (With a few caveats[2]...)

[1]: http://composerssketchpad.com

[2]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2015/12/05/ipad-pro-plus-penci...
Is using GDB and Electric Fence to find a normal buffer overflow bug really interesting enough to warrant a blog post these days, let alone a HN story?

I guess it might be interesting for all the people who, like the author, are Java and PHP programmers and have no experience with C?
>"People are generally so focused on lowering their taxes that they forget what they pay for."

I disagree quite a bit on taxation. But, what I will say is that by making taxes a mandatory (and often-argued about thing), we have put ourselves in a position where people will probably never come to see that with no "money", nothing that they want will get done/bought.
Responsive, Fresh and Ready to Go. Review of DhtmlxSuite 4.5, Js UI Library
Baking Soda Shampoo Will Save Your Hair
Yes – but if we do want to talk about other bases, we use this format. Implicit default for a number x is obviously (x)_10, as mathematicians are lazy.
The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.

Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Compare OHSA, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .
Surveillance is not generally a right/left thing and seems to be more an establishment thing.
It's satirical
What do you mean by that last sentence?
I'm not sure it's even "ready for the server".

I have a server without a monitor I'd like to VNC to. Unfortunately X doesn't start without a physical monitor plugged in because it uses it for autodetection. It's such a silly problem that you can even buy fake "monitor" dongles to plug in to trick X into thinking that there is one.

I don't feel like spending money on a software problem so I followed the standard workaround - create a static xorg.conf file. This is very suboptimal because what happens if I later plug in a real monitor?

Ok so now X starts. Sort of. Actually lightdm starts and I still can't get X11vnc to connect to the `:0` display. Apparently there is a workaround involving the MIT magic cookie but at this point I've given up.

In fact does X even support monitor hot-plugging?

Oh and also, if the wifi connection goes down and X isn't running it doesn't automatically reconnect! Wtf? I assume this is because the thing that does the reconnecting is a GUI tool of some sort.

Madness.
If you have to have your bum in the seat for 40+ hours/week to get paid, why would you bother? The "bullshit" gives you something to do when you're too tired to be actually productive.
Talking about Dick Smith, when I was in Oz a few weeks ago I stayed in an Airbnb'd house that had 'Dick Smiths fun way into electronics' in a bookshelf. Apart from some funny 1980's anachronisms ('Moore's law will be irrelevant by the early 1990's because who needs that many transistors'), I loved it. I'm trying to learn some basic electronics and the descriptions of the circuits provide the right 'bridge' between 'this is Ohm's law' and 'here is a fully functional schematic'.

So my question - is there a place I can get all 3 volumes? Or does anyone have pdfs of them?
Show HN: Hiring via the browser console
Given my experiences with Debian (and I believe crncosta has the same), the
chances are very, very high. I've never had any problems at all on my
desktops, and just once or twice on my servers.
I've a HP Windows 8.1 machine, added an Intel wireless card with Bluetooth. Bluetooth pretty much disappears after a suspend. And networking can sometimes die and only recover after a reboot. The control panels/diagnostics for both networking and bluetooth are also really sucky (and admin in general on 8.1 is pretty horrible). So don't be under the illusion that Windows is any better.

Bluetooth, how it works, how to use it on Linux is also an Enigma. And that's been patchy on my Thinkpad, but I haven't had that much of a joyous experience using Bluetooth on any device.

In short: 'they' could all try harder.
No, they were already there in Windows 3.x
The reduction in hours has allowed me to do activities which overall make me happier and less inclined to drink.

I now do a lot of running and bodyweight fitness. Drinking decreases my performance in those two activities and so I tend not to drink as I get far greater happiness from dropping a second in my minutes per mile than I do from having three pints during the week.
https://www.lily.camera/
Freelancers often work part-time because they are more expensive, so they are not hired full-time, but they generally have many clients in the same week when they can. Moreover, they most often have some expertise in their field, which means they still devote quite a bit of time keeping up to date--they don't just spend their time with the kids. What they can do, though, is taking several months off, either between contracts or when it is ok with their long-time clients.

Anyway, that's a kind of special situation, essentially unrelated to the employee working 20h/wk to take care of their family.
Its same as YO! but you can also send a message of one word of your choice.
Please complain to them [1]. They are required to publish that document as ODF, not DOCX. Alternatively PDF or HTML could be used.
Using DOCX in Dutch government is against the standard [2], which is ODF 1.2.

[1] http://www.tweedekamer.nl/contact/contact#webform-client-for...
[2] https://lijsten.forumstandaardisatie.nl/open-standaard/odf12
BLUE+SEA+HOTEL+-+Golden+Diamond+Escort
Net neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with trademark infringement. The lesson you should have learned is not that the Internet should be free, but that you cannot earn money by using someone else's name in a similar context (which in trademark law is their legal property), especially after they find out and ask you to stop using legal methods.
> The Low Road is not a function of fear, it is a function of reflexes. The Low Road is what jerks your hand away from a hot stove; Fear is what drives you to not touch a hot stove again.

No. The "low road" was a phrase coined by Mr. LeDoux during his fear-conditioning research: [quote]The low road is a pathway which is able to transmit a signal from a stimulus to the thalamus, and then to the amygdala, which then activates a fear-response in the body. [endquote]. And a reflex [quote]is an involuntary and nearly instantaneous movement in response to a stimulus[endquote]. A reflex doesn't necessarily involve fear.

Altering the meaning of words -- "rational" (per above comment) and now "low road" -- is not a mark of rational discourse.
"Android contains the only Linux component - the kernel"

Well, only the kernel IS actually Linux. A Linux-kernel based *nix OS in itself, which is usually wrongly assumed as Linux, is not in fact Linux (or not quite). In this regard Android is just like a lot of other Linux-kernel based distributions, no mater that it runs on an older/modified kernel.
We're doing something similar here in Rio de Janeiro: the Perimetral (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevado_da_Perimetral) was demolished, and will be replaced by a new 3 km tunnel pair (http://www.portomaravilha.com.br/viaexpressa).

One major difference would be that the Perimetral was demolished before finishing the tunnel. We'll see how well it works when it's opened this year.
Show HN: Hypertextual – a blogging framework to fight chickenshit minimalism
Interesting. Didn't know about that
What PTSD teaches us about both human frailty and resilience
> So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?

It would seem to me that 2 people working 20h/wk offers some significant advantages over one person working 40h/wk.

Firstly, it allows for fail-over; when one person is unable to work (due to holiday or illness, for example) the other might be able to handle 40h/wk for a short period to cover. If one person leaves the company suddenly, it allows for continuity of knowledge while a third person is hired and trained.

Secondly, it allows for variable output; two people can "burst" up to 80h/wk in response to workload, whereas one person would find that very stressful.

Thirdly, multiple people bring multiple points of view, increasing the chances of serendipitous ideas and solutions, and increasing the potential benefit of using people's special skills or experience. Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.

There are some downsides too: The management overhead is higher (equipment, legal, payroll, etc...) and things that were simple when done by a single person are now more complex since there needs to be coordination between multiple people.

To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.

The problems aren't insoluble and don't limit 20h/wk employees to low-importance tasks: Many open source and volunteer projects function perfectly well with many, small, variable inputs from their contributors, many of which will be high-importance.