skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the biggest problems I have is the number of things I need to install at $EMPLOYER to make it all work. Typescript I can get approved because it's "Microsoft", but Node/NPM and Ruby? (for SASS) Not a chance - even if it could make it out of the NTLM-auth proxy.
Eh, the code is not that bad but it's weird that they don't scan from the right instead of the left to find 'xxx//yyy//zzz' (which means ignore 'xxx/' because you began a new path with '/yyy', but ignore '/yyy' also because you began a new path with '/zzz').

Here is the same code in JOE (which has no VMS support and which treats foo/../bar and bar as different files - the original emacs code was written before symlinks!). JOE has a variable length string library, so you see 'vsncpy' instead of the alloca / strcpy / strcat / make_string.

http://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tre...

Edit: Holy Cow! The new version in emacs is much more involved: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/fileio...

"For technical reasons, this function can return correct but
non-intuitive results for the root directory; for instance,
(expand-file-name ".." "/") returns "/.."... " :-)
If you work in ops, you will get paged sometimes, and you'll handle maintenance windows/unplanned emergencies during off hours. It's the cost of doing business. I don't see this as "flexible work", necessarily - we don't say that a nurse on a 14-hour shift has flexible hours. That said, if you handle a midnight outage, your boss had better be ok with you coming in late the next morning.
Modern version control systems (Git, Hg, etc.) do a great job of storing file commits. They're very "flat," however. A file is a file is a file, and there's no good mechanism for storing tightly-linked documentation about the evolution of a project. Commented-out code is just one ad hoc way developers try to tack on that kind of information (often in clumsy, likely-to-be-obsoleted-or-forgotten ways).
I worked at a particular BigCo in Nagoya. You know how Silicon Valley is a small town where everyone knows everyone? Nagoya is a much smaller town. I would prefer employees at BigCo in Nagoya continue to remember me as "fine chap, despite the obvious issue" and not as "that #^#{%^ing American backstabber", partly because there may yet come a day when the Ministry of Justice calls around for a character reference and partly because I'm modestly invested in the values system of BigCo despite having left it.
Say This Not That: Carl Alasko
Amazon provides an incredibly valuable 3 month return policy during the holidays (buy on Nov 1, return window ends on Jan 31). This is particularly useful when buying a bunch of computer parts that might exhibit failures after more than a month.
Artificial Raspberry Pi Pancreas
Facebook is prepping for an Android doomsday
Meh, depends on the situation. Some problems are easily solved in a functional way, some problems aren't, and then there are problems that are best solved using a mixed approach. Sometimes a good old-fashioned for loop (or the equivalent) and stateful I/O is "tremendously easier" to work with than layers of tail recursion and I/O monads. Professional developers are expected to know which tool to use when, rather than religiously sticking to one approach in all circumstances.
I was just thinking the same thing... We have lines of commented out code from 1988 (yes. that is a correct date) that people flat out refuse to delete. I am so glad I got out of that mess...
Yep.

If you want meaningful names then do it explicitly:

def shuffle(*args):
cards = args

Much less likely to catch someone out.
Robocar news roundup: Lyft and GM, the end of Sidecar and more
But still creating domnodes on each invocation. React is shielding the dom
It seems like you're saying you can write off any medical expenses which doesn't seem to be true according to the internet

> The IRS allows you to deduct qualified medical expenses that exceed 10% of your adjusted gross income for the year.
900MHz seems a curious choice to me as an Australian, because I know my mobile phone uses 850 and 900MHz to talk to the mobile towers. Attempting to use 900MHz for wifi wouldn't get you very far due to all the interference.
You want to maximise the density of information that is visible on the screen.

The limiting factor is human working memory: the more that is visible at any one time, the less I have to remember.

So it makes sense to divide the screen into a matrix of little boxes, and put a symbol in each. That maximises information.

Most programming languages fill those little boxes with ASCII glyphs because those are what's available on a US keyboard. We certainly could use Unicode or something else, but we'd need different input devices.

How could we improve things? At the moment any space after a newline is wasted, unless there's a line comment. I like Chrome web inspector's approach of putting debug evals in there.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/04/parrots-newest-drone-has-wi...
I think working with the sites listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837009 or even GitHub itself could help expand this idea out even further.

I really wanted openhatch to take off, but it seems it never did.
Note: article is 4 months old.
My experience in New Zealand differs, we learned the 12x tables at primary school and there was nothing vaguely imperial about it. This was around about a decade ago.
Great job, Lenovo! To me there are only two laptop manufacturers in this world: thinkpad and macbook.
> I've been using emacs for about 20yrs as my main coding editor and vi regularly as a fast command line editor.

It was not made for you. If you want to change or automate something, you have the option of either getting Emacs or Vim to do that for you, but only whatever you need.
Failures should be covered under warranty, for any case that warrants a return.
Expired T-Mobile US data-plan allows to route traffic on port 53
If the city isn't designed for shared transit, even a small trip is going to be awful. SuperShuttle, which picks up 4-5 groups at a time from airports and doesn't use a fixed route, can still add hours to your trip home in LA.

On the other hand, I've used airport busses between transit hubs in cities where everyone takes the subway and it was really quite nice. Better if I ever figure out luggage delivery, of course.
> eliminate the restrictions on buying across state lines

What's the law that prevents that? (honestly wondering)

> It would have been about a 10 page bill.
It would never pass in the current gov't.
Their return policy is really great during the holidays, which might contribute to it.

As a (late) holiday shopper and Prime member, their shipping guarantees are top notch though. No praying that it arrives in time.

(Whereas Amazon says, order within x hours for delivery tomorrow, a lot of other shops here just feel like "Usually shipped within 1-2 days, if your hair is green, Tom is working in the office and your order number ends with 4")
> If you haven't tried it, you just don't know what you're talking about. You have nothing in your life from which to draw a conclusion.

I wonder why people are circlejerking so hard about "You have to try it to understand it". After watching Carmack show his doom port on his prototype back then told me exactly what to expect. Sure, I didn't know what it would "feel" like, but I knew to expect immersion and when I bought a DK2, I got nothing unexpected. Well, the shitty linux support after they were bought for 2 billion dollars was unexpected, but the technology? No.

> VR is going to fulfill the promise of teleconferencing. If VR was a "flop" in the 90s, then teleconferencing definitely was, too. Talking to people face-to-face in VR is night-and-day better than using Skype or FaceTime. There is barely any comparison to be made. You forget you're using technology when having a f2f with a person in VR. And this isn't a prediction. This is available today.

But isn't "social" VR more of a charade when it is restricted to proprietary platforms and operating systems? Wake me up, when everyone can be connected by it.
People usually would only be paid minimum wage for the hours they work in a day (~8). So just pretend you gift wrap after those hours, where you are paid $0/hr.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Paul%20Graham%20is%20still%20a...
Here are a bunch of them: https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame-rs/tree/master/src

Here's a grep for unsafe: https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame-rs/search?utf8=%E2...

3/14 benchmarks use unsafe. pidigits just uses unsafe to bind to GMP. reverse-complement is weird and I'm not sure what's going on there at first glance. spectralnorm looks like it's just using it to divide up an array in parallel; in the past couple of months there have a been several Rust libraries to enable this from safe code, so that may be able to be removed now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826838
530+ comments
I think it's kinda simple. If I told you I was watching you right now, it would be creepy. People don't like being watched when they can't control it. Some people don't like being watched at all. It's a pretty normal human response. I know that I for one get all weird and vain and uncomfortable when someone is taking a picture. At least then I know I can relax when they put their phone down. I'd guess the reaction is some variant of that reflex.
Firefox silently installs adb helper and valence plugins (remote access to pc)
Full article about it all is here: http://techdows.com/2015/08/shocking-firefox-silently-installs-adb-helper-and-valence-add-ons.html

Other than that, webide can have access as well, will be better to shutdown it in about:config

few usefull for it all commands:

devtools.webide.enabled - false;

devtools.webide.autoinstallADBHelper -false;

devtools.webide.autoinstallFxdtAdapters -false;

devtools.webide.autoConnectRuntime -false;
Poor copying from the source http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/04/parrots-newest-drone-has-wi... I'm guessing:

> The Disco also features a pitot tube, which is typically used on planes to measure airspeed.
Afaik this is the only thing he's tested that has actually achieved that, despite nearly every system claiming that.
Once you know you can accurately represent (1/y) in a given base, you've established do not need an infinite number of digits to the right of the radix-point no matter how many times you multiply it by an integer.

In fact, I think it exemplifies the upper bound for the number of digits you'd need for "related fractions". For example, we know "one eighth" is expressible in decimal as 0.125. Even if you pick a really big N value, N * (1/8) should never need more than three digits to the right of the decimal point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826836

430+ comments
I'm not saying income inequality can be a good thing. Not everything in this world has to be either bad or good. I think that income inequality in the abstract is not intrinsically bad. I don't know whether it's good. Maybe it is good to have some income inequality, at least in today's society (in a future post-scarcity society things might be different). Maybe it's not. I don't really know, and I don't care to debate that because it doesn't matter in the slightest since nobody is actually advocating for zero income inequality.

But it should be pretty obvious that extreme income inequality is bad for everyone (or at least, for everyone who doesn't actually possess the extreme wealth that is causing the problem, although even there they might benefit more from having a healthy society than they do from possessing such extreme wealth). How exactly you define "extreme" is debatable, but it's simply absurd to take the position that any argument in favor of reducing income inequality is equivalent to an argument in favor of having zero income inequality across the board.
You don't need to update the comment. You just need to make sure that when you change repositories you preserve the mapping of old commit IDs to new commit IDs. git-svn does this by including the SVN revision in the git commit message.
I think a big goal was not just the HUD, but having augmented reality. You can't do AR without a camera. But I'm with you. A HUD simple HUD product would alleviate much of the backlash.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826836
430+ comments
hn pages are pretty easy to archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20160105012618/https://news.ycomb...

Rhizome is working on more difficult sites.
Can I please point out this is the point where many people get turned off from math, never to return?

I HATED memorization. I was able to do the math in my head up through 10, but 11x11, 11x12 and the rest of the 12s eluded me, and I just really, really was not able to sit still and just do flashcards.

I ended up only chancing back on math through programming and a course in logic in undergrad. Everything else was mostly self taught as needed.
When Drones Fill City Skies, They Could Use This System to Avoid Crashing
Unfortunately it's not so cool now that their GitHub API limit has been reached. That docs page is completely blank for me.
The ‘hollowing’ of the middle class?
Why does Achmed have to represent his entire race while Eddie can just represent himself? It seems like the default is 'white' == 'safe', which really doesn't help minorities.
If that method only accepted Cards, that's more confusing and not something visible to a code hinter that will supply the method signature. `*cards` is more explicit when the expected parameter is a variable number of card parameters.
Firefox Silently Installs ADB Helper and Valence Add-Ons
The lingering health effects of the Civil War
I wish there were something like this for audio engineering. Start with stems, and then declaratively create your mix with text that can be tracked in version control. Even if coming up with the proper mix would be easier in an IDE, I'd love to have the source for cleanup and tweaks.
Thanks -- we are actually discussing this possible change in a Pull Request here: https://github.com/amontalenti/elements-of-python-style/pull...
Explains a lot about why React & React Native is a high priority for Facebook. It makes me wonder if they have any plans to do anything that would particularly piss off Google (like, say, enter the search market), but then again, large companies do defensive moves all the time.
Yeah, it's pretty crappy in NC. First year of ACA we only had one company even offering any insurance in my county. And yeah, it's county-based for some reason - if I lived 2 miles in another direction I'd have had multiple options about 10-15% cheaper than what I had available.

Second year we had another option in our county which was about 15% higher than BCBS (which had gone up about 25% from the year before).

Apparently some/much of this has to do with our state choosing to opt out of dealing with increased medicaid funding, so... yay... I guess they get to show obama how bad ACA is by... digging in their heels while we all just pay insanely increasing pricing?

We are > 100% from where we were wrt premiums from 2012. I expect some increase every year. I don't expect > 100%.

Colleague of mine is now facing > $1800/month health insurance pricing. He's... early 50s, married, 3 kids. This is with a $10k deductible. Another colleague with just one spouse and a child was facing going from $1300->$1650 this year, again with a fairly hefty deductible.

Given that this is effectively only something you'll get any benefit from if you're in a horrific accident of have a massive illness, this is now just really expensive catastrophic insurance.

I might feel slightly better about some of this if I actually knew anyone personally (beyond Frondo now!) who's benefitted. In my social circles, this has not even been close to a win for anyone. Either insurance has gone way up for people who can afford it, or it's still too expensive for some of my friends who are still unable to afford it (because they don't make enough money to qualify for the 'subsidized' pricing).

Bring on single payer...
Indeed, it does sound like that's the case. Thanks for the clarification.
It supports IP, which is a nice benefit for interoperability and standalone usage (it doesn't require a "smart" hub that understands all of the protocols).
Here's a good example I just came across of why it's useful to be able to do approximate multiplication in your head (perhaps even while intoxicated): http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback-sorry...
Depending on your needs, LXC might fit the bill. Otherwise, KVM.
Slightly off-topic. I'm looking for a tutorial/article/project to create a toy (or even feature-full) emacs-like text editor from the ground up.

Using two languages: C and scheme (preferably R7RS-small).

I have quite a few resources to create a vi/vim like editor from scratch (vis, some python projects, etc) but non in the scheme+C arena along emacs lines.

Emacs project itself is a bad example of studying the architecture of such an editor because of its humongous codebase (~250 kloc C, ~1.2 Mloc e-lisp) unless someone has done a good write-up about how to get familiar with architecture and extensibility infrastructure.
I think it's valid to use a more specific parameter for vararg to indicate the type of parameters.

for example:

def ping(*servers):

But please don't deviate from args and kwargs for the generic case (like kw or kargs), it ruins more finely tuned muscle memory.
Nah, that's a few years in the future. Typically it takes about 5-10 years for programming trends to reverse themselves.
How to Survive Late Capitalism as a Worker
What'd you have before the ACA?
penalized for not buying a non-tangible good from a private corporation. FUCK THIS COUNTRY.
I found BNW surprisingly juvenile. It started off really cool and detailed, talking about how factories worked and the helicopters and real vivid imagery. Then then rest of the book was basically teen paperback story.
Cocoa and Cocoa Touch were designed with imperative programming in mind though, so this is what the creators of Swift had to work with. I think the main use case for mutable captured values is mutable self, in particular the following, extremely common pattern:

dispatch_async(my_background_queue) {
do_some_io()
let result = do_expensive_computation()
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
self.value = result
update_ui()
}
}
This is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. If the paywall has a standard workaround, then it's ok for HN. It's not a great situation but it's better than the alternative.

Subthreads like this one, which are always the same, are off topic.

Flagging WSJ, NYT, etc. articles merely for being behind paywalls is an abuse of flagging.
Intrinsic wrongness of inequality is basically argument #4 from your link. It's the idea that the split of wealth is just inherently unfair, not because of any bad consequence, but because of something being wrong with having wealth too unevenly distributed whether or not it actually has any bad effects.

Claims 1-3 from your link are claims of instrumental wrongness of inequality claims 1-3 from your link. They point at bad consequences (rich people will control the media, rich people will corrupt the government, rich people will have unfair advantages for their children).

As the author of the article you links points out: "In principle, these effects could avoided, without reducing economic inequality, through such means as the public financing of political campaigns and making high-quality public education available to all children". It's not that inequality necessarily must cause these consequences, it's that it will tend to under some (most?) given policy regimes.

I think I misunderstood your original comment...when you said that "Inequality is not per se bad" was incorrect, I assumed you were making argument #4, which I did not see debated hardly at all. Most people were making some variant on arguments #1-#3.

In which case, I would respond to you: Paul does talk about the bad consequences and bad causes of inequality, and claims that you should address those causes and consequences directly rather than attempt to limit inequality in itself. The argument against this has to come in some form of "well yes, in theory it's possible to limit the bad consequences of inequality, but in practice it's too hard because X and thus we should directly attack inequality".

I didn't see anyone really saying that, everyone seemed to believe Paul thinks inequality doesn't have bad consequences or that he thinks we shouldn't address those bad consequences.
British English locale is sometimes used by people with anti-American political views.
The 19th & 20th centuries were quite tumultuous for Chinese. I think it was also comparably tumultuous for Korea and Japan.

In the past 150 years in China there were 6 major wars.

1. 1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion (My grandmother's great-grandparents lived this.)

2. 1894-1895 First Sino-Japanese war (My grandmother's grandparents lived this.)

3. 1911-1912 Xinhai Revolution (My grandmother's parents)

4. 1926-1928 Northern Expedition

5. 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese war (My grandmother)

6. 1946-1950 Chinese Civil War

Four social upheaval movements:

1. 1919 May fourth Movement

2. 1958 Great Leap Forward

3. 1966 Cultural Revolution

4. 1978 Chinese economic reform

There were also 9 famines during this period with total deaths of 120 million people during this period.

I think these events have contributed to a certain set of attitudes in Asians in the two generations after 1970, i.e Hungry and humble, as our ancestors were during those times, literally; the ones who survived, anyway.
Busy is not productive
The Big Kahuna is going to be standalone mobile VR headsets. Expect to see a self-contained headset from Oculus for the price of a mobile phone within 5 years.

Zuck knows he failed with Facebook Home. He has surveyed the landscape and he knows he'll never be more than the most-used app on someone else's phone. But he's still salivating to own a platform, so he's looking to the future.

Think about this: if you're sitting on the train, or waiting in the Doctor's office, would you rather wait in VR, or in a waiting room with your nose in a mobile phone?

And if you remove all of the bored killing-time-in-spaces-you'd-rather-not-be uses of mobile phones, how much use is really left in them?

Think too, how many phone calls will you make when you can run around a virtual dinosaur park, or sit under a virtual night sky with your friends and family?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but it does seem like VR could put quite a lot of pressure on what is now the dominant category of computing devices. And Zuck is better positioned than anyone to be the pack leader.

Also consider that phones are fundamentally disconnected from remote friends. 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. Or maybe she is on the surface of Mars and you are in a flowery meadow but you both feel like you are together. Maybe she's fighting aliens in a forest while you are collecting mushrooms, bantering back and forth about what happened at work.

VR is fundamentally more amenable to social than flat screens are. Look no further than social console gaming to see the start of this. I think the merger of Facebook and Oculus is fascinating.
I went with BestBuy this year, and was pleasantly surprised. I've noticed Amazon is slowly raising prices. I'm not knocking it; just like the competition.

Plus--I've always liked Bestbuy. I bought a iPad mini ($under 350.00) at 12:59 p.m. Pacific time, on the 23rd of December. For $12.00 it was delivered to my door at 11 a.m. the next day.
My son received the game Operation for Christmas from his grandparents. That game came from Amazon in a blue felt bag.
What is the advantage of using degrees (e.g. "30 degrees") versus radians (π/6)?

Regardless, your observations seem to come down to "12 is highly composite and we use highly composite numbers for time"—valid, but interesting?