skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cleaning up the messes that rockstar developers produce is why I can live such a comfortable life. Until they start trying to present at POPL or ICFP (at which point they'd get laughed straight out of the committee hall of peer reviewers) I really can't hate on them too much.

The PhD's at Microsoft Research-Cambridge, Bart deSmet (MS-guys, I can't believe you pulled him off language development for Cortana) and the rest of the Rx team must be vomiting at what came out of their mathematically sound (often wholly proven within F*[3]) Rx work, but at the same time praising whatever deity that their name isn't attached to it. At least they're adhering to the interface signature of IObserver<T>.

Digression -- but anyone who is interested in the duality (not in the mathematical sense of 'duals) between LINQ operators and monadic operators, watch this talk with de Smet[1]. It's brilliant in it's ability to reduce all of LINQ to 5 [or less, .SelectMany() is to LINQ as NAND is to gate logic; it's later proven that 3 operators are all that are required, no surprise there, Kleisli triple anyone?] and shows with great elegance the isomorphism between monadic Haskell and LINQ. (And why RX falls so naturally out of .NET as a result.)

[1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Bart-De-Smet-MinL...
[2] http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2010/01/0...
[3] https://fstar-lang.org/ - to be formally presented at POPL '16. I'd offer commentary but it wouldn't do justice - any PL nerds should give that a read immediately, assuming they haven't already. MSR is without a doubt the Bell Labs of our generation.
Is this significantly harder than surviving the freezing process for 1 year? Once frozen, I would have thought most chemical reactions slowed to a negligible pace, making the time they spend frozen irrelevant.
Soviet Press Reports Heroic Acts at Chernobyl Reactor (1986)
> That's a pretty big advantage if you're an end-user who doesn't know how to create migrations.

Such a migration should be created by drupal, not by the end-user in a proper design, you know, like everybody else does it.

> The whole point is that you shouldn't be poking around in the DB most of the time (I will admit that this is a principle frequently violated).

DB's tend to become the place to hook into other systems rather than to create yet-another-dependency on whatever framework is currently powering the front end.

Having a brain-dead schema means two thing: there will be no migration path out of the present CMS without a complete overhaul of the DB and it will make interoperating with other software accessing the same DB all but impossible.

> Sure, you or I could make something much more efficient by giving up a lot of this flexibility, but then you'd be looking at a different product with different design goals.

I don't think drupal had any actual design goals, and I think the lack of experience designing such systems is what lead to this mess, not any possible design goals they might have had.

What is sad is that they seem to re-invent several wheels with each new re-incarnation of drupal but they keep their brain-dead db architecture because they've double down on it so many times that to admit this was an error this late in the game would destroy whatever confidence people may still have in drupal. It's just sad.

Anyway, if you're a new user looking for a CMS do your future self a favor and stay as far away from drupal as you can.
That's a very useful pattern, functional languages often call it the maybe monad. I wish more people used it in other languages. This is my version of it: https://github.com/lorenzhs/algen-framework/blob/master/comm...
A 35% chance to recover your customers funds would seem to me to be a chance worth taking, but maybe you're right and that was what drove this decision. Seems terribly incompetent and I'd say they deserve to be personally liable for the loss if that's how it went down.
The World's Leading Startup Cities (2015)
We didn't get an email either. But perhaps they don't notify people who are not selected?
The mass of the "test particle" Cassini will cancel out of orbit equation but will matter for drag, radiation pressure etc. If it's outside the error bars they gave for mass, then this is conceivable.

OTOH this is a pretty conservative bunch.

It may "just" be something in the details (much like the Pioneer anomoly: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/bruce-betts/3459.html?referre... which was solved after 20 years of digging and LOTS of speculative ideas that did not work out).
The relationship of the anomaly with the various variables are still being debated

Note, this is an important anomaly not because of its magnitude, but rather, its relation to the measurement error.

The Pioneer anomaly was solved by precise calculation of the heat radiance of spacecraft.

But of course, it might end up being a trivial explanation (something on the measurement equipment, for example)
Yeah probably and that would be awesome ! But it needs JS... well for another experiment !
The problem is that only tech-savy users have this freedom. Sure, non technical users should not decide on core technical decisions but they should still be able to steer the evolution of the project (e.g. deciding what features to implement next)
I just create a single repo for all issues, cross repo, and manage it with waffle.io. Works well for me, but ymmv
Regardless of the framework jargon, this process is something most successful executives internalize pretty early on in their careers. Besides being common sense, it becomes obvious very quickly that, except in edge cases, making quick decisions transparently based on as much data as is available will lead to the best result. Even if the best result means iterative failure until the actual best outcome is reached. A lot of people don't believe this at first and pretend the "gut feel" method is best. Don't fall into that trap. In the best case you'll have the same decision outcome, but you'll have alienated your organization in the meantime. In the worst case, you'll have made a terrible decision... and also alienated your organization.
Oxidation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezer_burn
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 (891 points, 1 day ago, 407 comments)
What Happened After Zappos Got Rid of Workplace Hierarchy
there is also Machine-Learning-In-The-Browser which attempts to link Emscripten+llvm+lapack in the browser

https://github.com/software-engineering-amsterdam/MLitB

https://github.com/software-engineering-amsterdam/MLitB/issu...
I'm not sure that follows. It's increasingly difficult to hire skilled developers.
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 (891 points, 1 day ago, 407 comments).
Exactly.

I would add that this goes deeper than just coding styles. My current project relies on a number of widely-used C++ libraries (Qt5, OpenCV, ITK, VTK and a homegrown framework) and each one of them redefines basic data types (std::string, QString, cv::String).

I could go on about how none of them even acknowledges the existence of <cstdint>. I'm sure there are good excuses why each individual library decides to do this (lack of common ABI, badly designed std::string), but the end result is a heap of forced runtime - and cognitive - overhead.

This is pretty sad considering that C++ is advertised as a language that doesn't add unnecessary runtime overhead.
How  I Spend My Time as a PM
Hopefully most people will give up on that like most resolutions.
Karl Heinz Rummenigge telah cukup lama
>becomes limited to people that value your data above the value of your phone.

Pretty sure me and some random mugger are the only people who even care about the value of my phone.

>there is a possibility that they have to open up these parts to the consumer as well.

There is a whole lot of precedent that says this isn't going to happen. Even if manufacturers wanted to do this, I'd expect we'd see laws in turn which gag them so that " the terrorists can't break our backdoors".
you better bother to reply to the emails I've sent to you, boy, a few months ago. You replied only to the 1 or 2 ones and turned a blind eyed to others.
NetLicensing is featured on PH – #upvote
Some context: This library was, in addition to my C++ bindings to BLAS [1], written to be able to improve the performance of the linear algebra library Vectorious [2] and will eventually be included there.

These bindings are direct C++ bindings to LAPACK, in contrast to node-lapack [3] which uses the foreign function interface and therefore inherits its call overhead. The bindings also use the TypedArray equivalents to C/Fortran single- and double precision arrays (Float32Array and Float64Array respectively) instead of regular arrays for extra performance.

[1] https://github.com/mateogianolio/nblas

[2] https://github.com/mateogianolio/vectorious

[3] https://github.com/NaturalNode/node-lapack
Actually, they should have done the opposite: get everyone to start walking up and stop treating escalators as rides. (Especially horizontal moving walkways.) Imagine the capacity then!

They're not rides. We have way, way, way, too many out-of-shape people in the world. There should be every encouragement to take at least a few opportunities to exercise.

Yes, some escalators can be long, such as the ones mentioned in this article. Still not a big deal, I've done it. (And they only "feel" long when you stand the whole way.) If you really want a ride, use an elevator.
I think the process described has a flaw -- it has the role of "Approver" and requires the Owner to "Run your decision and the process by the Approver." This is problematic, since, at that point, the Approver becomes the new Owner, and, the Decision will be formed in a way that the Owner thinks the Approver will recognize (and perhaps not the form they believe in). In effect, this statement invites micro-management. Interestingly enough, the author knows this approach is problematic, because they say immediately after, "Again, the default of the Approver should be to monitor the decision process, not result."

Alternatively, a Vision/Retrospective process might work better, where by the Owner's manager (the business structure) provides the higher-level vision and then looks at the Owner's decisions and executions in retrospective. If the poor decisions are consistently being made, it's a problem of vision or staffing. Asking the owner to get approval for each decision removes the owner's necessary authority, and hence undermines their ability to forge consensus and execute with needed autonomy.
Wouldn't the shape of the oceans (tides), or the elevation of the part of the earth passed over be enough to cause this amount of change?
Kivy Android app showcase
Thanks very much - this is exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in.
As a non-UK individual that visits occasionally, I would say that is because they are really useful stores: good selection at good prices in a very convenient location. I've never seen anything remotely equivalent in Canada or the US. In North America, the smaller stores either have nothing I want to buy, high prices, or most often, both. Further, it is rare to find the equivalent convenience of a high street shop.
Should We Allow Bulk Searching of Cloud Archives?
Off-topic, but from the article:

> Huang has a cool thermal imaging device for his phone that he used to make this photo of the Heirloom showing the heat distribution

I'd be really interested if this is an affordable solution. A FLIR camera would be nice to have, but they're really expensive. Does anyone know what model he's talking about?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, looks like they've come down in price significantly. Almost cheap enough to buy one just for kicks.
'Emotional support' pig kicked off US Airways flight
I take your point but actually, for me, at least in the initial stages, I'm just looking to recreate a feeling from my youth: tinkering with ideas and letting one discovery move me onto the next, figuring out how things work and seeing if I can improve on them. But I think you're right, up to a point, if there was an open source game or robot which was created using fairly low-level programming, so I could enjoy just tinkering with the code without having to learn lots of tools etc., it would be more inspirational than just trying to learn "for the sake of it" with a textbook, so thanks for your perspective.
A lot of it is simply age.

Qt and VTK predates C++98 significantly. OpenCV is slightly newer, but it took a long time for people to get comfortable relying on it, and I don't know whether or not it was based on older, pre-existing code.

But it's probably going to remain a drag on C++ for another couple of decades...
FLIR do an entry level smartphone attachment, "Flir One". It's not particularly precise or high-resolution, but it's a lot cheaper. (Still not cheap-cheap.)
Exactly. Democracy does not imply that all members of the project (including non-technical users) have to vote every single decision.

We could have elections and let elected experts to act unsupervised for a period of time, use liquid democracy (where you delegate your vote when you're not involved in a certain decision),...
Pranks Gone Wrong TOP 10 Ultimate Compilation 2016
This isn't really related to your main point, but it's disingenuous to describe the freezing of Landbanki's assets as a use of the "terrorism act" just because the legislation had "anti-terrorism" in the title. The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act is pretty wide-ranging, and as well as whatever anti-terror legislation it contains, also contains some legislation around economic security - which is what was used in the case of Icesave.
Fair point. What I mean by "hacker" may well be different from what other people mean. I just mean a mindset which some people may think reckless but that others may find exhilarating: tinkering with something, trying to figure out empirically how it works and how you can improve on it, while ignoring learning all the theory and sensible basics until/unless you find you need to understand it to get past a particular obstacle. Probably not a good way to build a career, but great fun to a certain kind of person (like me). It's what I used to do as a kid, and I had great success with it. I'm hoping it's possible to replicate in some aspect of modern computing, but I'm put off by the layers of systems and tools and SDKs that I get the impression are involved in most programming these days. So I'm looking for a context in which this kind of "hacker" (to me) mindset might still be alive and well.
I look at it and think "That must be really heavy."

I don't care about heirloom technology. But I would love to see very much better recyclability.

I suppose at some point we'll have waste-free nano-replication, and the idea that things are built and stay built will seem as quaint as comparing a wattle and daub hut to modern architecture.
You may know this, but that's really not how accounting law or bankruptcy law works, at least in the US.

> Imagine a SaaS company which takes out a loan for $100k to acquire customers and has $10k in bank at any time. That company is insolvent.

That's simply wrong. Many companies have more assets than liabilities; Revlon, for example has around $2 billion in assets and $2.5 billion in liabilities last I looked, but they're not insolvent or in any particular danger of becoming so; the market values them as being worth around $1.5 billion.

At least in the US, insolvency is a question of cash flow. Your example SaaS company is able to service its debts and make payroll, thus it is solvent. The fact that it might have negative shareholder equity is quirk of accounting that nobody really worries about.

(If you already knew that, my apologies.)
Wal-Mart to shutter 269 stores, lay off 16,000 workers
Waitrose couldn't make it pay and closed them. But yeah, it is a trend across Europe, not just the UK. The buzzword phrase in logistics is Massification to Atomisation.

It is a knock on from the daily delivery movement to larger stores.

I think the problem Morrisons had was that they do all their own logistics, whereas the others use a mix of internal and external suppliers.
Printing Floating-Point Numbers: A Faster, Always Correct Method [pdf]
Some context: http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2011/06/29/here-be-dragons-ad...

It probably marks the end of the quest to find the unconditionally correct and fast algorithm to print floating point numbers. The prior state of the art, Grisu3 (2010), is great but is only fast for 99.5% of inputs; it was nevertheless so useful that there are now several language implementations with Grisu3 (IIRC, including V8, SpiderMonkey, Go, Julia and Rust). The new algorithm, Errol3, improves Grisu3 by using double-double floating point format (instead of 64-bit custom FP) and applying more precise error analysis.

Quoting the highlight of the paper: (emphases original)

> After removing the narrowing and widening steps, we used the enumeration algorithm to generate a list of possibly incorrect or suboptimal inputs. Each input was run using Errol2 to enumerate a complete list of inputs that do not generate correct and optimal outputs. In total, we found that only 45 inputs (of the nearly 2^64 inputs) generate incorrect or suboptimal results; all other inputs are guaranteed to generete correct and optimal output. In order to correctly and optimally handle the failing inputs, they are hard-coded into a lookup table that maps the failing inputs to correct and optimal outputs. Combining the special handling of integers and this lookup table, Errol3 is guaranteed to be correct and optimal without runtime checks.
Thanks for your suggestion - I've had a little look and this does seem spot on in terms of being able to quickly build actual projects. Even though you're far removed from the workings of the computer itself, it looks like you're able to throw yourself into the code without too much preamble. Definitely feeling inspired by this - thanks very much!
I like the moral of this idea
These look very cool - thanks for the suggestions.
Netflix to Stop Australians Accessing US Content Library Using Proxies and VPNs
How to decide what to learn next if you want to become a FrontEndWebDeveloper
What does a city have to do with it? I live in semi-rural area and I would be impacted by this law if it were to pass (it's not going to).
Your experience sounds similar to mine. I'm going to experiment a bit on my own first, but I might well take you up on your offer of a chat after a little while. Thanks!
In 1997 David Bowie shorted the music industry by issuing “Bowie bonds”
It's not just culture, even many people who love to read, find it difficult to read among all the distractions and the impact of the net.
On the other hand, std::string already existed back then, but they still chose to reimplement it.

This points to a more systemic problem in the C++ ecosystem. Has C++ evolved to the point where, say, a new library written today would not have to redefine std::string?
Sorry but you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

> I don't think drupal had any actual design goals

You dont THINK? Well maybe you should LEARN and then you will KNOW.

Actually Drupal is very good (the best framework I know) for migration and interoperating with other software. But you don't do that by connecting DBs directly like you seems to want to do... (which is wrong with any framework/cms)
Not in payment industry, but side project requires heavy security, any good guides to PCI auditing, I see lots of fluff when I search and the auditors I've run into in the past have been at best a bit of a joke :)
This looks like a great game, but I'm not sure it would give me enough freedom to experiment and actually make stuff. Definitely glad it's out there and looks like a great way to learn.
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B Irvine.

The last few months of 2014 and the first couple of months in 2015 - when Canadian winter SAD and the stress of starting a new business kicked in - really did me in mentally and I was going through a severe bout with depression.

This book was recommended to me by a friend and founder. It gave me the tools I needed to deal with the ongoing BS life tends to throw at you. Amazing how powerful and still highly applicable a mindset developed centuries ago can be today.
Calling two person without using conference call or putting someone on hold
Maybe they just hoped the value would keep decreasing until they could cover it up? Their loss already was halved by waiting 1.5 years.
1) Nothing is stopping you from refusing to deal with any Bitcoin exchange that is not audited to adhere to PCI 1 standards as adapted to deal with Bitcoins. If no such exchange exists, nothing is starting you from starting one.

2) I think far more damage is being done to Bitcoin by the political fighting and poor technical decisions of the core developers. Bitcoin weathered Mt Gox, it can weather Cryptsy.
I'm actually a bit familiar with NetLogo, but thanks for reminding me! This is definitely the kind of stuff I'm interested in.
Generally at most companies past a certain size it's done by a product manager (who might sit in marketing/product/tech) and often via a tool like optimizely rather than direct engineering.
Building a compiler bomb
Major Bitcoin supporter quits, says it's a failure
I'd say that the 'original title' policy simply trumps the 'gratuitous swearing policy'.

Just don't attack people personally and you'll be fine, though a user that excessively swears without purpose would likely be chided (is there a keyboard version of Tourette's?)
And that no one send them on mars [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars]
> Having a standard also means that other compilers will compile your C++ code.

As someone maintaining code that must run on VS2012, VS2013, VS2015, GCC 4.7+, clang 3.5+, on both x86 and x86_64, I chuckled hard at your comment.

Let's just say that I'm looking forward to moving on with my career in a few months. Hopefully to something that doesn't involve maintaining C++ code.
http://www.flir.com/flirone/

They are $250. Resolution is increadbly small (gen two has 160x120), then upsampled. Still useful.
I have the book, ordered some years ago from Amazon, but I have to admit that I opened it perhaps twice... The German Amazon still has on in stock (overpriced):

http://www.amazon.de/Fun-Programming-Cornerstones-Computing/...
Very cool. File this under the list of "things I don't need but want anyway".
Is the zlist version even re-entrant?
> Imagine a SaaS company which takes out a loan for $100k to acquire customers and has $10k in bank at any time. That company is insolvent.

I don't think that is right. Yes, they have more in liabilities than assets but insolvency would mean that you can't service your currently due debt. If you took out a loan with a $5000/mo payment, you would not be insolvent until you cannot make that payment.

In the case of an exchange, that liability doesn't have a future due date - so they would be insolvent once they do not have the assets to cover their liabilities.
The site we're on is an informative reference for this particular meaning of "hacker".
Are You Sure You Want to Quit the World? (2011)
Doesn't matter much. Netflix has the data to detect VPN users among its customers, because it has a country from the payment provider.

If you connect to Netflix from a colo in the US and your payment provider says you're in Kazahkstan, Netflix has good reason to think that that IP address is a VPN exit point. When that happens two or three times with different customers and the same IP address, boom.
So NY going to ban books? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher