skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent news! The last release was in 2010!

http://modula3.org/
Interestingly, the first "extreme programming" project was a Smalltalk project (internal at Chrysler)
I enjoyed your rant. I think that some of it resonates with what Chomsky has written about the "disciplinarian culture".
There is a common misconception that elite schools want "well rounded" students. In fact they want well rounded student bodies, composed of extremely lopsided students who excel in individual domains. It is far better for your child to be a world-class swimmer, for example, than for her to be a participant in swimming, tennis, student government, the school newspaper, etc. Parents urge their kids to take up as many extracurriculars as possible in the hopes of creating the impression of well-roundedness. Students resent it, but they bear the burden because they believe their parents know what they're talking about.

Add to this the unfortunate reality that not everyone gets to be world-class at something. What do you do if you don't excel at any one thing? Work your ass off to create the impression of excelling at as many things as possible. It's a shitty treadmill to run.

But what's the alternative? Excellent grades are a given; they are basically table stakes. So above and beyond great grades, you need some sort of extracurricular presence to burnish your college applications. But your chances of admission are basically a crapshoot at that point, so you pile on the extracurriculars in an attempt to get more darts to throw at the board.
What's wrong with the GNU license?
Yes, they trigger a panic. No, there's no ASan.

There isn't as strong a need for ASan in Rust because so little code is unsafe. Most of the time, the only reason you drop down to unsafe code is because you're trying to do something compilers are bad at tracking (or that is a pain in the neck to encode to a compiler). It's usually quite well-contained, as well.

You can work with uninit memory, allocating and freeing memory, and index into arrays in Safe Rust without concern already (with everything but indexing statically validated).

IMHO the kind of stuff `unsafe` is used for is very conducive to aggressive automated testing.
It isn't for the most part, the GP is incorrect, except for the confusion.
It's an interesting idea and one that I find to be true, but also complicated.

We're also trained as programmers not to reinvent wheels poorly. Or not install a library to do something that is already supported by an existing library you're already using. When you need to do something like, say, open a new browser window, it's not that surprising to find a lot of posts about how to do it with jquery.

I don't find it always bad. As long as you understand that you are using a library, it's ok to go searching for its edges.
WTF Is Happening in the Oregon Militia Standoff, Explained – Rolling Stone
Ask HN: What Measures Do You Use the First 90 Days After Launch?
Drone gets piloted using an Apple Watch
I would try it.
The other day I spent some time tracking down a bug where someone forgot a trailing comma in a multi-line parameter list.

That was annoying.
Um, it depends on what exactly you mean by "reference implementation" or "running". If you mean one of the silicon test chips, that might be hard to swing. I don't have them at my desk and they take a lot of setup to actually use (a setup process which I am unfamiliar with). I'd have to ask the grad student who worked on the bring-up to help me. But if you'd be satisfied with seeing the reference RTL run on an FPGA, that would certainly be possible.
1. Lawyers and justice systems generally lag societal opinion, not lead it.

2. s/societal opinion/technology/ as well.

3. As a result of the above, the most effective and expedient way to get policy changes is almost never going to be through court, no matter how right one may be. In this case, the numbers are not really heavily on their side, and they have trouble doing anything but challenging it in court (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-america... vs http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nsa-snooping/survey-america... vs ... ).

3. While I love them, the EFF has often been wrong over the years about how far they will get with various lawsuits. They are an advocacy organization, and so one should take their predictions with a grain of salt.

(This is the part where the article says "Experts felt a shift was equally imminent. .... "I think it's impossible to tell which case will be the one that does it, but I believe that, ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to step in and decide the constitutionality of some of the NSA's practices," Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars last year.")

The vast majority of non-advocacy experts i'm aware of did not think most of these lawsuits would get as far as the EFF did, simply because the odds are highly against them.

In short, none of this is either surprising, nor is it likely to change anytime soon.
:facepalm:

I swear, some days I wonder how I made it out of bed and into the shower without tripping and killing myself.

Thanks! :)
Steam Store Was the Target of a DoS Attack
If you never cook, you never wash pots.
FUD: applies to literals only. There is nothing that could happen in the string that couldn't happen in your code already. No new security concerns.
Caption says:"Marissa Mayer has reportedly been spending Yahoo! money like water."

Which in California could mean, very carefully.
Tesla Hits Low End of Goal, Shipping 17,400 Autos in Quarter
Roda Viva: Steve Ballmer Interview in Brazil, 2001 [video]
> Thing is, * * locals() "feels dirty" but does exactly the same thing as f''

That's false, it does not do that. It converts the string into the equivalent format call at compile-time. RTFP ;)
FREE PDF: Swift 2 Cheat Sheet and Quick Reference
If you're into this stuff, come join up on Playa - http://getplaya.com/ or hit me up on twitter @dpg
"Practicality beats purity."
> That actually looks pretty nice but as Python 3.6 is slated for release in another 12 months you will have to wait a little longer.

...Or just do it in 28 lines of Lua:

http://hisham.hm/2016/01/04/string-interpolation-in-lua/

This is a nice showcase of how Lua's metamechanisms can be applied to do things that often require new features in other languages.
I'm building a new controller board for Apple Wireless Keyboard (A1314) so that I could have complete control on what each button does and add new functionality (e.g. switch b/w devices quickly, fast blutooth connect/reconnect, longer battery life, mouse control).
Example given:

myquery = sql(i"SELECT {column} FROM {table};")

What could possibly go wrong?
Let's not forget scummvm for Lucas Arts adventure games (with support for other adventure games data added later)
I've been building a fun concept that I've had to deal with as a product manager.

A product update timeline (change log) that you can quickly add to your website: http://productmap.co/

Will be ready for a beta launch at the end of this week!
I like to watch the talks on CPPCon on youtube (never attended it though); seems to be a very interesting conference.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon/videos
It's easier to fix those than extract a dependency or remove bloat.
I've never understood the concept of something like this. Isn't the energy generated canceled out with power expended to pump it through? I feel like friction would never make something like this useful.

Can someone explain how this kind of generation is beneficial?
Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9835650 (different source)
Graph library for Go
You could stick Postscript code in a NeXTMail and do some pretty funky things. Not sure how sandboxes it was.

I'm not sure running agents is all that more a problem than the JavaScript in a web browser. The agent folks were definitely thinking about security and even CPU usage.
WhatsApp Bandwidth
How much bandwidth WhatsApp uses?
The Unifi software is simply awesome. It is as if someone finally figured out how to write an application in Java properly. I've installed eight APs in our office and three at my brothers house and it is as easy as one two three.

1. Plug into the network w/power over ethernet
2. Fire up the UniFi controller
3. Press the 'Adopt' button on the newly listed AP

I used to use routers that could run Tomato and other variants of DDWRT, now it's just Ubiquiti equipment.

I've also used their 5GHz point to point equipment and outdoor AP equipment with great success.

If you have any questions at all, check out their forums. The participants will help you design your system and pick out the equipment that will do the job.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/Forums

Edit: The AP install at my brothers house has a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).
This is an amazing insight into the nature of programming. It feels right to me, and will help me explain what I do to others.

I feel privileged to live in an era where many pioneers of our field are still with us. I feel the passing of that era, and their loss, keenly.
A good story. Pity it is marred by a number of uncorrected OCR errors: many "h" scanned as "b", 1/0/5 scanned as I/O/S.
Asked the same thing the last time this was posted. There's a good answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9835804 (in short, you already have too much pressure being relieved using valves along the way with the extra energy wasted)
I talk with a lot of programmers that think that abstracting everything is super important. Everything must be a black box and the programmer should have no idea what's happening inside of it. Their code is an over engineered mess of interfaces, dependency injection, and code so deep and isolated you have no idea how anything ever works (I mean like even if you had the source code it's so convoluted you could never make any use of it.)
How about storing plain text files on a cloud server with Syncthing? https://syncthing.net/ (I'm not affiliated with them.) I think it works on mobile and looks like it exposes a rest api too.

So you can have local scripts that affect the files and the changes will be synced for your other devices to see.
I'd argue that it's not a good thing that you can just disregard block scoping willy-nilly from within unprivileged code.
Sycophantry Masquerading as Bargains
I really want to write a long winded post on why I completely disagree with the way you think, but nah. Your post has a complete air of self-masturbation. It's annoying, sad and reduces complexity to something more than it is. Get over yourself, seriously.

Yes, this is a complicated issue and yes, this post reeks of ad hominens, but fuck it. Find the fucking "Gordian Knot", you twat.
Create with the online photo editor, or browse a photo gallery
Rails is not a porgramming language, for various pedantic reasons. That doesn't make your idea bad. Rails is a defined pattern of expressing a program, conceptually similar to a language. You could call it a dialect.
This comment explains it pretty well I think.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838012

It's the same idea behind regenerative braking.
Saudi Arabia Cuts Its Diplomatic Ties with Iran
I'm not sure I'm following this comment. What editorializing did the HN staff do? I didn't see any.

If anything, I may have inadvertently got it caught up in some sort of flame filter because of a comment I wrote about asking for help if you feel suicidal, then (seemingly, but not actually) contradicting myself later by saying that medical help may not be the best solution.

Flame filters, AFAIK, kick in automatically. Mental health is a hot button issue, and flame fests and controversial discussions are really not good or appropriate for HN. I should know, I've been part of a few and have to remember when to take a step back.
Flash was later and bubble memory had faded. Magic Cap, Newton, and Palm Did the battery backed RAM. The Newton had two batteries to keep RAM alive (one main battery and a watch battery to handle longer term / main battery switch). The OS was on an EPROM.
This is a reasonable article about how people are inclined to use the political method to secure their interests at the expense of others, and how as such more naive deregulatory policies without institutional changes will quickly reswitch back into a different pathological state as other rent-seeking opportunities are discovered.

Good comment. I also wrote a longer response to the original article, "Why did cities freeze in the 1970s?" (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t...) It's also a genuine question and I haven't seen a good answer to it, though two people on Twitter pointed me to William Fischel’s book Zoning Rules!
Assuming your question arises from a state of ignorance, rather than from rhetorical flourish:

What distinguishes GNU licenses from more permissive licenses is that the GNU licenses require derived works be released under an appropriate GNU license as well.

This is not quite anti-commercial, but does put the kibosh on some otherwise viable business models. If you wish you could incorporate some of this code in a proprietary product that you can sell licenses to, then what's wrong with the GNU license - from that stand point - is that it forbids that.

That's the intended purpose of the GNU licenses - to promote software that respects user freedoms by making it easier to write such software (because of access to existing GPL/AGPL code) relative to the ease of writing software that infringes on those freedoms.

As a necessary side effect, it is also the case that you cannot move GNU-licensed code into a non-GNU-licensed-but-compatible codebase without changing the license to an appropriate GNU license. Code can move the other way, from compatible permissive license to GPL.

Sort of the worst case, in terms of unintended consequences, is code under an incompatible-but-otherwise-free license, where code can't move either way for not really any good reason.

Fortunately, people seem to have generally settled on GPL-compatible licenses, whether permissive or copyleft.
Pharmacyclics' "miracle cure": A cancer drug
i think it is supposed to calculate the effect of a blast - given such parameters as height of detonation and charge, it estimates the fallout and how it is spread out by prevailing winds. They used to have a paper-wheel calculator for that https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/ ; this is the online graphical version for the 21st century.
I do most of my weekend and past working hours browsing via my iPhone(5S). I only use 3G (LTE is just too damn expensive), working hours I use wifi(4mbps / 8mpbs) with my MBP

> ...who would consider something like free basic?

I can't put a number on it but from what I've observed it's SCARY to see the consequences if Free Basics took off. All internet cafes already have Facebook as the default page (most people don't even know how to logout, they just close the tab).

One thing that gives me hope is that people also know Google (I personally use DDG).
Good documentation! :)
Hey, awesome idea. Can't wait to try it out. Unfortunately I'm getting a 504 when I try to register. If you could let me know when things are back up and running that would be great.
I don't know about that. Many competitors trying out often conflicting ideas probably makes things go a lot faster than one company could ever go.
Planck units
Urinating dogs won't annoy a mailbox. They will, however, annoy the postman.
Keep inventing and love innovation.
That's the reason why he can be successful. Some say you need to become a billionaire so that you can have free time to invent. However, he could become a billionaire because he used all his time on inventing. This is the fundamental difference between ordinary people and billionaires.
Jack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" [1], starting from Part 2.

[1]: http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/
It was about par for the course for applications at that time (a couple of crashes when connecting), but it didn't really do a whole lot either. I used it for two months then they announced the shutdown.
"The pipes can't generate power in every location; they only work in places where water is naturally flowing downward with gravity (if water is being pumped, the system would waste energy)."
I don't think they need to compete with Intel.

The numbers I've seen suggests Intel ships around 300-400 Million processors per year[1]. In 2014, 12 Billon (with a B) devices with ARM cores shipped[2]. In 2011, around 500 Million MIPS based cores shipped[3].

These are obviously very different businesses. But it's clear there is an enormous market for licensable low-end IP cores that are used in everything from cars, cable boxes, TVs, cellphones (many phones have multiple cores internally to operate functions like the cellular baseband), etc. Most of the licensees are just gluing together licensed cores and contracting foundries like TSMC or Global Foundries to build them. The margins tend to be pretty thin (we're talking chips that are in the single digits for cost), so saving a little money on IP licensing is attractive. Since these are often custom applications, binary compatibility is less of an issue.

That seems like a more interesting market for an open ISA and open core processors.

[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/beff6e56-53ed-11e4-80db-00144feab7...
[2] https://atlas.qz.com/charts/Ek18VmbP
[3] http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/technology-mips-sande...
I like it. Very much in the spirit of nvALT [1], TaskPaper [2] and to some extent quiver [3].

I prefer human readable formats since it avoids lock in and allows me to edit my content on any platform. The downside of course is lack of media support. Quiver is doing some interesting stuff in that area, but at the cost of losing some human readability.

1: nvALT http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

2: TaskPaper http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

3: Quiver http://happenapps.com/#quiver
Except that they went and made .format() useless for bytes... which made everyone have to hang on to % for both 2/3 compatibility cases, and for all the cases where bytes templates were actually needed (all kinda of lowlevel wire protocols and file storage formats).
The BBC report the OP mentions is highly interesting:

"One reporter for the BBC even taught himself basic climbing skills and familiarized himself with a specific make of concrete drill in order to reenact the heist."

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32431557

Particularly interesting is the video in which he drills in 2 hours and 20 minutes the exact same hole that the thieves drilled -- a hole that police and other reporters claimed to have taken all night and possibly a second day.

I wish more reporters were this enterprising with their fact checking and in doing a bit of their own original research.
Ask HN: Would you love to do simple tasks for charity
I was thinking of an idea "Helping people give".
A for-profit idea in the social sector.

For every simple online task a user completes, a donation would be made to a needy child. The tasks are sourced from brands. A part of the fees from the brand are directed towards charity.

Would love to get a feedback on the idea
They have no dog and don't want the postman to miss out.
CQ Roll Call and The Hill have a lot to lose if Medium gets traction in this way. It's a smart strategy on Medium's part.

One thing I noticed recently when using Medium, though, is they really kneecapped formatting options. It makes no sense that they offer such a small subset of basic formatting options. Text on photos, H3s, and centering? Those were advantages for Medium. Now they've thrown them out. You might as well use Facebook now.
Sounds like a really chill life. What more do any of us really need?

Even the founders of Google won't be remembered in 200 years. This isn't to be negative about their accomplishments but just trying to put their massive, incredible accomplishments into perspective.

I work hard at the things I care about. I make sure I'm experiencing the things in life that I'm fascinated by. I explore. And I will die. And it will all be pretty great because on a long enough time scale, your position on the socioeconomic ladder is worthless, and at the very least unrecognized so why bother obsessing like so many seem to do? Perhaps scaling back the obsession is healthy for us as a community. We can hold it as an important value to work hard and create good things in the world that will have impact, but too often this turns into an intense obsession for some explicit outcomes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZLa4AnN5k for a more humourous application.
Reducing VR Sickness in First Person Navigation
Even a flat tax on consumption (like the sales tax) is regressive in effect, because the poor spend a greater fraction of their income on consumption. Now, if you suggested a high tax on luxury goods and services, and no tax on necessities like unprepared food, basic clothes, etc. I might be able to get behind that.
Speaking from experience in having built a custom ERP system:

It's often easier to convince people to change software to suit existing business operations than to change business operations to suit existing software. Usually, the person in need of convincing to change the software is an employee who will get fired if they don't. On the other hand, it's often the president of the company you have to convince to change business practices. And he might not even be entirely on-board for "that software shit" anyway. Also, programmers make a living out of learning new things, so it comes naturally to us and we don't think twice about it. Everyone else in the company is set in their ways and had hoped "all that learnin'" ended in high school.
"People that thrive on bombast and vitriol, well, Medium might not be for them," says Higginson. "But for members of Congress who bemoan that their position has to be boiled down to 15-second soundbites — those are the people we're trying to cultivate."

That's some salesmanship. Bombast and vitriol rally the voter base. Have you seen how politicians are on Twitter?
Woz, Jay Miner, and Seymour Cray were my first computer heroes. It still is amazing reading stories like this to get a feel for their abilities and determination.

// ok Apple WTF are we doing trying to autocorrect Woz to Wiz?
The grandparent was right, in a sense, because while Rails definitely is not a standalone language on its own, it is an embedded DSL since you are working at a much higher level of abstraction than what Ruby offers out-of-the-box.
That would be my bet.
I'm building a website and API which presents stats and data for millions of domains: http://domainstats.io/
I'm currently refactoring LibreOffice code around font handling, and I have to say text is complicated. I've had to do a lot of reading about Windows, Unix and OS X font and text handling, and to be honest I really think so far that Apple has the cleanest platform for handling text.

I could be wrong about this, and happy to be challenged (actually, I welcome it with some reasoning because I'm still getting my head around all the systems fully). Anyway, just an aside.
Addicted to Distraction (2015)
> And products that respond to their owner’s tastes — something already seen in smartphone upgrades, connected cars from BMW or Tesla, or entertainment devices like the Amazon Echo — could change product design.

I don't want my computers to try to predict my intentions. Google tries to do it with things like Google Maps on Android, and it doesn't work. It makes user interfaces inconsistent, removes the ability to do things quickly with muscle memory, and adds to cognitive load as I have to find the buttons that are required to override the one bad option that the "AI" has decided to offer me. Changing interfaces based on user behavior goes in my list of "worst trends of 2015".
Thanks for this. So you are native on both platforms - the screenshots look really nice :)