skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I first became aware of computers as a thing with the launch of 8-bit home computers in the early 80s. As a result, I seem to have a hard time imagining the computing scene before then, as in the 80s it seemed so nascent - so the fact that computers were a big enough of a thing in 1959 for there to be a Danish Institute of Computing blows my mind. Everything before the 80s seems so abstract. Any recommended reading / viewing to try to rebate by historical perspective?
HTML version:
http://www.dc.uba.ar/materias/plp/cursos/material/programmin...
Thanks for that. I do appreciate the comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832055
I feel like I've been seeing more celebrity type stuff on here lately. I guess I would've been more impressed if the comments were about an actual project instead of a personality. If this project is interesting enough to be on the front page, why not talk about that?
SMuFL: Standard Music Font Layout
> If a billionaire is taxed 80% on the year he or she earns that billion, they will still be worth $200 million.

I have never been a billionaire, so I don't know how this works. How do you earn a billion dollars? I'm guessing in most cases this would be paper wealth (ownership of businesses) and you would pay taxes on that wealth when you cash out. I'm also guessing that there are loads of loopholes here and that almost nobody would subject themselves to an 80% capital gains tax.

Edit: And of course, rich people can lobby to create more loopholes. Poor people just have to pay their taxes.
There are quite a few North American BSD conferences now (BSDCan, NYCBSDCon, MeetBSD, vBSDcon) but BSDCan has been around for the longest and is the largest of them -- last year we had 40 main talks, plus 6 BoFs, 5 short public talks from the FreeBSD vendor summit, and 4 tutorials. vBSDCon had somewhere around a dozen talks in total, I think.

Also, Ottawa is a great place to visit in June. I wouldn't want to visit in the winter, but the May/June weather is very pleasant.
I think you're very wrong in your reasoning, on both counts.

> they believe they can aim the redistributing horde at their enemies

I can understand why you say that, and it may be hard to understand, but actually, most people on the left don't really have "enemies". They want equality, not to conquer someone rich.

> Note how it's always the income inequality and never wealth?

First, wealth inequality is almost always discussed too (Piketty, if you want a trite example) and is often mentioned as being worse. But in any case, I think the focus on income is given by the fact that societies try hard to avoid ex post facto laws. So we say, OK, what you got now is fine but the rules are going to change from now on. That's why you focus on future change (income) rather than existing assets (wealth).
Anyone that has taken a compiler class has written something in BNF. RIP.
>Well, my impression is that what you really want is security and a constant flow of high income. However what I want is to make the impact I decided to make on the world and become rich by doing so. I'd 100 times prefer to have 50$ left after paying my bills by developing my ventures, than 6000$ left by having 50 hours a week corporate job.

I don't know where you're getting a need for security... I'll almost always take what I perceive to be the higher total expected return option, modulo emotional attachments and ethical baggage. My point is just that if you have the skills to get a big corporate programming job, that's probably going to be your highest total expected return option, even if you don't value security.

when I started going into business for myself ten years ago? I could have been you, only, you know, less slick. (And "slick" is interesting, because rhetoric that plays well with one group plays poorly with another. I would have used "plain language" and I wouldn't have quoted an entertainer, but even if the words we used had different connotations, the denotations would be similar) I spent many of those years living as you suggest (having $50 left over after paying my bills... I exaggerate some... but not that much.) Sure, it was pretty exciting, but... it's also exhausting after a few years. I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't try it for yourself, it's just that you shouldn't fool yourself into the idea that it makes any kind of financial sense at all.
It is the same thing as .format without all the noise.
"With lowRISC, we hope to discuss at the upcoming RISC-V workshop (this Tuesday and Wednesday) the status of BOOM, and whether it will make sense to use it as our application cores."

Hi Alex, I look forward to chatting with you guys about BOOM. =)
AT&T Developer Summit & Hackathon 2016 is happening right now at Las Vegas, Nevada https://devsummit.att.com/
Don't forget the college payments.
> Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.

Exactly... Is that difficult to imagine that he just enjoys the process of learning/building as many of us do? I've also been looking to start a new pet project with simple AI just for the sake of grasping a better understanding of NNs...
That could be a fun programming exercise for one of these devices you can hook into Alexa, see if you can catch unauthorised voices quickly and effectively without badly impacting response times.

e.g. you could do it by buffering the request, checking and submitting once you're confident about authenticity, but then you'd be delaying submission and response, depending on how much you'd need to buffer to gain sufficient confidence that the individual is authorised.
Get used to it, the whole world is becoming East Germany.

I still remember the Boston underground, back in 2011 (so before the bombing), where the voice of a friendly firefighter came on the speakers, encouraging the travelers to be vigilant and to say something if they see something. I gave up on the idea of taking out the camera and taking some photos.
Any recommendations for microphones that are (a) high-quality, (b) cheap (under US$5.00), (c) small (under a cubic centimeter), and (d) with analog output (such as a 1/8-inch plug)?

Note that high-quality and cheap are not contradictory requirements. iPhones and other smartphones have extremely high-quality microphones (and they are tiny) and must certainly cost much less than $5 as a part, but they seem impossible to find. Every off-the-shelf mic under $5 that I've tried has been garbage in terms of sound quality, and even much more expensive ones have not been great.

Good mics certainly exist. Here's a compact analog microphone I own that has fantastic sound quality:

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Electret-Condenser-Microphone-ECM...

But it's ridiculous that this microphone costs 6x as much as the CHIP and 10x as the RPi Zero. You can't build a product around the CHIP or the RPi if an essential part is that expensive.
Right DRM is not copy protection. DRM is about keeping legitimate buyers from exercising free trade. You can't buy up a dozen games on steam, for example, and resell the games on. Of course people still do, but that's what steam's drm is intended to quell. You can't take a bluray, make a copy, upload it to somebody's email for a price, and destroy the original. This is a perfectly honest thing to do, it's super easy to do, but it's incredibly risky in the US to do it.
You seem to believe the rich have the ability to somehow buy up all the supply of some good (land, water) and then arbitrarily raise the price.

As they buy up premium estates in major cities around the world, supply gets constrained, more people gets priced out of home ownership and must agree to pay ever increasing rents to those investors.

You are deeply confused. Buying up housing does not reduce the supply of living space; similarly, a rich person investing in a copper mine does not reduce the supply of copper. If the rich person makes improvements (e.g., buying land and building flats on it, buying a copper mine and expanding it) then they increase the supply.

Again, where in Piketty's book do you believe he shows that the rich buy up and artificially limit the supply of a scarce resource? Please cite a page #.
My memory (heh) fails me somewhat. But I think the only Flash available in 1995 was NOR Flash. So very slow, expensive, unavailable in reasonable sizes, only limited numbers of writes. When I said very slow I mean glacially slow. I have worked on systems with battery backed RAM. Works fairly well, however a naive reliance on it will result in data corruption and tears. (Hint reset or a program crash can come at any moment)
Prior to Facebook, among other things, Zuckerberg made a music player which learned your tastes using machine learning to produce better matches. Pretty sure that even though he hasn't coded in awhile, his coding abilities just need to be reawoken.
The carrying capacity (of hunter gatherer humans) of the Earth is 100 million at peak biodiversity (which it is not). The human population is 7.3 billion. That means that any notion of "surviving without modern technology" is absolutely 100% predicated on you having the privilege to do it while the rest of the population continues to live in cities. It is a self deception much comparable to Marie Antoinette's "rustic" retreat at Versailles.
Finished a lot of stuff:

- First blog post, benchmarking AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure storage, http://blog.zachbjornson.com/2015/12/29/cloud-storage-perfor...

- MongoDB driver for Mathematica, https://github.com/zbjornson/MongoDBLink

- Started packaging bioinformatics tools for Mathematica (a la Bioconductor), https://github.com/zbjornson/BioTools
Not to mention that he had built several other things prior to starting Facebook.

There's also a lot of libs/services he can use

And if he needs help in understanding or implementing something, he can always ask for some help from someone @ FB...
Minimum Wages: Making the Economy Safe for Bigots
Why? If I had to guess, it's because there's more than a little C code out in the wild that relies on "typical" signed overflow behavior.
The ideas are still useful today, surprisingly often, despite Pike's quote.
HIV infections in Africa fell by almost 40 percent over the past 15 years [pdf]
A couple of Twitter bots:

* https://twitter.com/hn_frontpage displays Hacker News top 30 (to deal with ranking volatility, an article is tweeted once a day) and has both article link and discussion link. Haven't found an existing one that is both the front page and the discussion link.

* https://twitter.com/tic_tweet_toe for people to play games of TTT. It remembers each person's W/L/D record.

Working on a web version of cribbage that isn't a Java applet.

Researching idea for my next bootstrapped company.
If I remember correctly, this option wasn't always there, but Apple eventually learned their lesson. What puzzles me is that the feature is missing in iBooks, which didn't even exist until well after iTunes got the feature; there is no way (that I can find) to convince it that you can manage your own ePUBs, leaving me still looking for a good reader on the Mac.
I don't know why Python re match objects don't support indexing; a __getitem__ method would allow m[1] and m[2] instead (or m['name'] for named groups).

That aside, though, I don't consider brevity alone the most critical criteria for a programming language; that way lies APL. Expressiveness, yes, but not at the expense of clarity.
I don't agree with your tldr at all.

It's not that the unit AI doesn't "win the game for me", it's that it does very stupid things. It's not that it requires player input, it's that it requires lots of player input. It's tedious.

I didn't say the campaigns were boring. Many of the missions are very slow paced though. The end game is what is boring. A game can go on for hours even after I've basically won.

I have been playing a lot more then a day and a half. I played a ton of it when I was growing up. As well as all the other games in the series. And I have 113 hours on the new steam version. Anyway all I said is that the multiplayer was intimidating to get into, which is true.

>RTS games were not made to play against the computer.

Um yes they were. These games come from an era when not everyone even had internet, let alone fast internet. There was extensive work put into the single player AI, as I mentioned above.

Anyway, I'm not saying the game is bad. Just some specific problems I had with it. Especially coming back to it after many years, it's not really as fun as I remember it being. I prefer Age of Mythology.
I think what's cool is that Zuck has actually replied to a good chunk of top-level comments on his post. Most bigwigs on social-media don't really engage with their "fans".
Meanwhile, some couple of years ago I learned that ISBN are significantly more simple to get a hold of than I had believed my entire life up until then.
Why all the nay-sayers?

He's got a lofty goal. Better yet, it's lofty goal where you can get 70-80% of the way quickly, and if passion serves, you can slog through the next 5-10% throughout the year.

But, why all the negativity?

I, for one, am jealous of the resources (time + money) he has at his disposal to make an actual go at this. But, that jealousy doesn't extend to me hoping he fails.
Finished big milestones for couple of projects and on going development:

- Snub: Manage .gitignore files from the terminal or from the status menu bar. Free and open source: https://github.com/ashokgelal/Snub

- LightPaper: Finished rebranding, just released 1.2 alpha and continuing the development: http://lightpaper.42squares.in/
If you could just raise your rent tomorrow, why don't you? Will the market bear the new price or won't it? Taxes should have no effect on what renters will bear.
Linode's Atlanta DC recovers after 4 days of DDOS
Snapchat is monetizing video.
Some people deride string interpolation as not explicit enough, but I think it's extremely readable and adds clarity. Plus, with the `f` prefix, it's plenty explicit IMO.
DomainTally
Preferably one. Unfortunately they put in `format`, and can't remove it now. I think moving towards f-strings is a lot better and should be embraced.
Thank you for the correction, I was thinking OpenRISC (which is LGPL), vs. RISC-V (which is BSD).
App installs which is like yahoo banner ads of dotcom 1.0. Re targeting is effective though.
Definitely, looking forward to catching up with you and everyone else this week. With areas we're currently estimating, it seems we would have the area budget for 4x 2-wide BOOM cores (of course it's all quite rough at the minute). I'm keen to hear more on Tim Newsome's debug work and whether BOOM will also reap the rewards of it. See you Tuesday!
In all of history, the elite have never been more secure. They've never had anything close to the level of surveillance and policing as today. The police today are literally thousands of times more effective at their job than the time of the French Revolution.

No one with a clue is worried about anything "abrupt". Rebellion is literally impossible.
>I can understand why you say that, and it may be hard to understand, but actually, most people on the left don't really have "enemies". They want equality, not to conquer someone rich.

Same as Russian bourgeois, who did not have personal vendetta against the "rich" (who had been the major capitalists and/or royal dynasty) they just thought it's unfair and those should not have as much wealth and influence. Is not it the sentiment of today's left against bankers/wall street/Koch brothers?

As for your theory why wealth is not targeted - so? Okay you do that for reasons you described, yet the effect is the same, is not it? I am pretty sure the 99% of the left do not care about this effect since they are not wealthy enough but it does not make it to disappear. The 1% who cares is, by definition, wealthy enough to instigate such a movement.
Silicon Valley Lies and Those Who Tell Them
I certainly agree about your last statement, I have no clue what that would do without reading the spec. I'd guess an error, but apparently not.
To be fair, replying on the platform he owns is a fairly significant value-add process.
There are a couple of warts for sure, but Python is remarkably wart free. Compare it to something wart ridden like PHP or JavaScript.
Machine Learning for artists
There's a lot of neat libraries out there and papers to read. There's a lot of hero worship, and a lot of disparaging comments as well between here and the facebook post but a year is a serious amount of time, and with a little dedication I'm sure he can expect to see some decent results out of his pet project.

Similar to that hacker who built a "self driving car" in his garage, which, in the end, although not being a polished finished project did self drive a decent bit, I'm sure we can expect similar if not better results from Zuckerberg here.

Anyone who's claiming differently may not have fooled around with some of the libraries out there (I built something for named entity recognition with Stanford's library in a few days once I found it), and might also be overlooking the fact that we're talking about a person with a serious resume of impressive accomplishments. I'm not sure how his Chinese is and to be fair I was a little less than impressed with the two books a month goal (I do that on the train it seems like anyways, but I don't have a huge company to be CEO of or a family to spend time with), but we are certainly talking about someone who qualified for entry into Harvard (based on merit I presume), and has the drive to sit down and create websites (one of which eventually ballooned into facebook, which he then steered through a public ipo). And let's be fair, getting started is generally the hardest part.

I'd have to be hardpressed to discredit the guy, think ill of his challenge, or feel he couldn't accomplish much regardless of my personal feelings about his attitude and to that I say "Good on you Zuck! Here's to hoping I hear more about this interesting project you've got going."

In the end, lord knows I always enjoy reading about cool projects.
This class looks amazing!
An interesting discussion of the concept can be found here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2358744
> special secure operation mode might be needed for this sort of use case, one which can't be subverted by normally installed software

Now people will complain that "the app doesn't run on their rooted, bootloader unlocked, jailbroken phones"
PHP has had it forever. Given PHP's reputation, I'm not sure if that is a good argument for this feature. Rather than '%s' and '%d', why not just use '{}' and '.format'? That way, each argument is converted to a string appropriately. If it becomes confusing with many arguments, it is easy to name the parameters '{myparam}'
I have no idea. the game paused and then suddenly i was on the main menu and confused.
A pushd / popd like utility except that it works globally. You aren't restricted to having each terminal with its own stack; it's a global stack. I found this to be a much quicker way to navigate the terminal.

It uses shared memory to store the stack, thus making it "global". Still needs some polishing.

Check it out. feel free to give feedback, pull request, whatever.

https://github.com/christarazi/global-pushd-popd
I've successfully: cloned the repo, installed the deps, compile, loaded the assets, and run python run.py... How do I play??

The game generates a map, but there's a very different HUD, with vim-like modes and lots of keyboard shortcuts on the RHS. Is there a tutorial or short introduction in how to get started?

Edit: it's somewhat explained here: https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/usage.md
This is my favorite cheap microphone. It does need to be fairly close, I'd say within 5 feet:

http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Acoustics-100Hz-Microphone-ACM-1...
String interpolation is only being added for string literals, not for generic strings. This means that you still wouldn't be able to read a template from a file, then format text in.

with open('template.txt') as f:
template = f.read()
formatted = template.format(**values)
Oh, interesting. Because VISA and MasterCard prohibit doing that with CCs. The CC price has to be the cash price, or you can’t take CCs.
4th way is with templates:

>>> from string import Template
>>> s = Template('$who likes $what')
>>> s.substitute(who='tim', what='kung pao')

This will probably be TIL for many people. It is a surprisingly hidden feature.

I for one, still like the "%s" % x instead of "{0}".format(x). It is simply shorter and I already know or use printf for C in other parts of the project. But with the new f"..." interpolation, I can see liking that more. I am all for being as concise as possible while still being explicit (if that makes any sense at all ;-) ).
False. Technology can proceed with privacy in mind. The Echo didn't have to push things to the cloud. It was, however, constructed to do so both for Amazon's benefit (data) and the consumer's benefit (ease of setup and use).

The trend you cite will happen because of ignorance, not progress.
That's a good thing due to security reasons as arbitrary expressions are allowed. There are plenty of templating solutions available.
This abstract and for-sale page loads for me just fine, in case people want to spend the $40 retail for the article.

The Discover blog link is a good backgrounder, and the comments are as interesting as the article. ;)
It's important to keep Intel on their toes.
Don't worry, there's plenty of money for sports and administration. The Assistant Vice Principal doesn't have money problems.
Speaking of prominent Danish programmers... :)
Umm, can you cite something supporting your assertation that Earth's carrying capacity is 100 million humans?
I agree. I was pointing out that the f'{a} {b}' syntax can't accomplish everything. Since it isn't intended as a complete replacement, the way `.format` is intended as a complete replacement for `%`, it will just add another string formatting technique without ever deprecating the old way.
Nothing wrong with this, because it's explicit. You could't be mo terse in this case, could you?
That's innovative? Ok, for some loose def of innovation.
Here's the followup essay, for those interested:
http://tinyletter.com/programming-beyond-practices/letters/b...
Apple is producing content? All I see in the iTunes store is a bunch of crummy network TV reruns and stuff I can get on a dozen other platforms.
That's how I felt when using Siri and Cortana the first time. "Wow! Voice recognition actually works now??"
I'm in the "wish it was more explicit" camp. Would a fmt function be that terrible?

fmt("{a} {b} {c}", a=a, b=b, c=c)

If you want to save typing, maybe use :a instead of {a}. Or ?a would have made plain old ? a nice positional variant:

fmt("?a ? ?", a=a, b, c)

The main benefit of the fmt function is that it requires no syntax changes to the language and is trivially provided by a third party library for all past versions of Python.

That being said this ship has sailed. I guess I just take a more conservative approach to syntax changes than most.

Update: a bit sad to see my votes fluctuating wildly on this post. Please don't use votes to support or disagree with me: that's not what they're for. Please vote only based on whether you find this relevant.
WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for
Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy

Sure, but I'm guessing that most of the tens of millions who died from starvation under Stalin were illiterate. That skews the counters a bit.
Engraving HDPE with the Shapeoko
Can anyone recommend (a) good resource(s) for learning about BNF?
No, I don't know.

If 99% water solution just has to satisfy thirst, then a 1% zyankali solution doesn't kill, is it? It's a bad comparison, because I really don't know what else coffee brew consists of exactly, but you probably don't either, so ... that pretty much wraps it up.
Format is still needed for non-literals and user objects, this is just an extension of it.