skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Private mode in a web browser isn't security, and the idea that Microsoft slipped this in at the insistence of the NSA, which has much better tools to track what websites a computer visits that doesn't require access to the local machine, is laughable.
I also like what I see every time I visit Racket but the fact that I'm not aware of any other project except Racket itself which uses the language and tools gives me the odd "why is this not more appealing - what's the hidden catch" tingling. Even OCaml has several fairly well known programs people use.
After 21 years in the business I am finally starting to realize that I want it to be something that it isn't. In the past, I have always been interested in programming as a means of creative expression. The last thing a programming team wants, however, is creative expression. You are successful as a programmer to the degree that you are able to make your thoughts, your solutions, your algorithms, and your code consistent with those of the rest of your team. Creative expression is ground away through application of best practices and through code reviews.

I have a healthier relationship with my work, and am thus more successful, now that I view it as assembly-line work and don't try to express any creativity at my job. That said, I don't find the work to be the least bit fulfilling, and I am working to make a career change.

I find programming to be an easy path to a steady, but ultimately empty living. I would only recommend the field to those who want nothing more from their job than a paycheck and who find meaning and fulfillment entirely in the nonwork parts of their lives.
Honest statement: people in big orgs string together stuff in mad lib format to get headlines. Speaking from personal experience, this is the way academics works. From what I can tell there is a disproportionate amount of this amongst the more stately corporations, IBM et al. too. I say this to advise consideration about how much impact will come of such "impressive" projects.
Predatory or Below Cost Pricing
I wrote a program using similar principles: https://github.com/tom-seddon/kbswitch (two versions, one for 32-bit Windows XP, one for Windows XP or later with any bitness)

The EXEs are indeed pretty small:

~/github/kbswitch % ls -l `find . -name '*.exe' -or -name '*.dll'`
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 5120 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch/kbswitch.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 11264 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch2/bin/kbswitch2.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 5120 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch2/bin/kbswitch2_dll_x64.dll
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 5120 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch2/bin/kbswitch2_dll_x86.dll
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 6144 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch2/bin/kbswitch2_helper_x64.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom staff 5120 1 Feb 13:50 ./kbswitch2/bin/kbswitch2_helper_x86.exe

VC++ makes freestanding programs no easier than gcc. (A good reminder that a C implementation consists of all the libraries that come with it, and not just a compiler that generates code.) Issues I recall having when putting this together (which was a few years ago now so I may have forgotten something):

- As with gcc, you need to fiddle with the linker settings to stop it including the stack check stuff

- Floating point is a bit hit or miss and using it can cause VC++ to generate calls to its helper library (I vaguely recall also getting similar stuff when using 64-bit ints)

- VC++ will generate calls to memset when default-initializing structs

- VC++ will spot many types of implementation of memset, remove them, and replace calls to them with calls to memset (particularly tiresome when trying to fix the last problem)

- the Windows headers include a number of handy-looking functions that seem just the ticket for working without the CRT, but a lot of them, once I followed through all the #ifdefs, ended up just being #defines for the corresponding CRT function

So I haven't bothered doing this for any programs since. I've heard of some people working typically without the CRT, and they seem pretty happy, but I didn't think it was worth the effort just to provide a tiny EXE with no non-system dependencies.

Regarding the size, I don't think it's a huge benefit these days - for small programs, where this stuff makes the EXE noticeable smaller, you're just not saving much. An EXE written like this might be 10K; the same EXE dynamically linked with the CRT, ~20K; the same EXE statically linked with the CRT, ~90K. That difference just isn't very important any more.

And regarding the lack of external dependencies, if you need that, you can statically link with everything (please do your own research regarding licensing and security ramifications). I think that provides you with basically all of the useful benefits of the above approach, for a fraction the effort.
How reliable is the documentation for the ch340g? I don't have experience with Olimex directly, and for production designs I'm wary of datasheets that are translated this poorly -- while they frequently are just fine, i've run into numerous cases where the translation has either introduced ambiguity or is just plain incomprehensible.

And that's the rub: if i get a legit ftdi chip, I have a high level of trust that it will do what it says, and there's tons of documentation.
You should have asked money from the manufacturer! They probably would've been a large enough company, that you could have specified your hosting expenses and they still would pay for it! Just to not have unhappy customers. Maybe this is unethical, but with '1TB of incoming requests', desperate times calls for desperate measures.
Hey Robby, thanks for the reply.
Yeah, I saw it mentioned a couple of times on /r/webdev and /r/wordpress in threads where people were bashing VC while talking positively about your plugin ;-)

I'll try out the lite theme and hopefully find it fitting to our site. Once again, thanks for replying to my off-topic comment. I just had to take the chance since i've been considering your product lately!
I finally got over the hump with my BrainRunner and BrainHub apps (companion apps for my SnailLife snail simulation). The BrainHub manages queueing brain checks of living snails in the world and distributing them to free BrainRunners. This way I can have an unlimited number of BrainRunners (well, limited by my budget) running brain checks in parallel completely separately from the user facing app.
> IIRC the bundle even advises you that addons may be risky.

The reason for this is that by installing various non-default addons, you're actually making your browser more unique. As a consequence, you're making it easier to link all of your Tor activity back to a single person.
See that just further goes to show my point. Where is the evidence of these assertions? Mainstream evolutionists have said that "group selection has been disproven" except possibly kin selection. So your example clashes with what they've said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Good_of_the_sp...

I personally think the benefit of the community is definitely one of the factors. And I think the evolutionists have it wrong. But why does the public just accept whatever they say? It hardly sounds like a settled theory.
Again: installing non-validated Windows updates is indefensible!

Safety-critical and safety-related applications are a totally different game than what most HNers are used to!
I love it. I've been programming since I was 12 (I'm 32 now). For me, the key to avoid burning out, is to constantly keep learning new things. I currently work remotely for a NYC dev agency, and we have a massively good team.

I have a couple of side projects, and one of them is generating an income of $500/week. Just keep building stuff during the weekends. Try to learn marketing, UX, UI, etc. Apply those new skills to your side project, and iterate again.

It's also important to not work in isolation. The most effective way to become a better programmer and keep learning things, is to pair constantly with better programmers than you are.

I spend about ~14h/day in front of a computer. If I don't enjoy what I do, then I'd be wasting my life.
Haven't seen the movie, but I suspect from the comments that it's a cinematographic 'tour de force' with many technicalities which makes it a wonder among cinema initiates. It's probably like listening to some fusion-jazz-bebop improv: to the 'non-musician' it might just sound like noise, but musicians are in awe of the mastery of the instruments in such music.
Nope, not that I'm aware of. Everything is Windows Server.

We had an application from one of our system vendors that incorporated FFmpeg for playing video streams within the app. We had to go and ask them to remove FFmpeg and replace it with some other video package that IT security approved of.

This is normal for my industry. It's kind of depressing. I hear about all these nice open source tools (pandas! numpy! for a couple of examples) and have to make do with closed source equivalents I like much less (MATLAB).
How does it know where the local files would be?
I've heard it, then did a safari in Bostwana, tested my ability to count zebras, and I can attest it is very difficult. I haven't performed the control experiment of counting horses, but I did notice that the stripes were seriously messing with my ability to detect edges.
That's weird. BlitzBASIC games run well on a 1.2 GHz single core Celeron with 512MB RAM. You must have been doing Hello World wrong :D
ComScore and Rentrak Complete Merger
Introducing GCC-Bridge: A C/Fortran Compiler Targeting the JVM
Google didn't specify in the quote. But we must assume it's the data that they are selling in hotel, flights and the other inclusion searches shown in the article.
That's simply false. What is true is that per-band allocations tend to be larger at higher passband frequencies, but the width of the baseband in absolute terms is what determines information capacity. See: The Shannon limit
Are the CH340G drivers open source? I bought a pile of them, but have been skittish about installing one because I can't figure out where the drivers come from. Granted, knowing that FTDI's drivers come from FTDI doesn't prevent them from messing around with them, but still, the CH340G seems like more of a mystery.
What it feels like to drive a Tesla on autopilot
A bold proposal to use the “gig economy” to reboot the safety net
UK is nominally 230V to standardise with the rest of Europe but actually 240V as it always was:

"Following voltage harmonisation, electricity supplies within the European Union are now nominally 230 V ±10% at 50 Hz.[6] For a transition period (1995–2008), countries that had previously used 220 V changed to a narrower asymmetric tolerance range of 230 V +6%/−10% and those (like the UK) that had previously used 240 V changed to 230 V +10%/−6%.[7] No change in voltage is required by either system as both 220 V and 240 V fall within the lower 230 V tolerance bands (230 V ±10%)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#Standardisat...

I don't know if 240V is actually being phased out now it's post-2008 but the mains of everywhere I've lived since 2008 has definitely still been 240V.
In the 'download' button case, the download button is itself scaling up which makes the tooltip inside it scale up too. Thats the reason of blur (which comes with scaling elements)
Musical ability is in the DNA
Ask HN: What are the worst paid tools you use at work?
As a follow up to "Ask HN: What are the best open source tools you use in your organization" [0]

By cross referencing these posts, it may be possible to swap out some of the paid tools in exchange for some better open source alternatives. Or, what must-have features these horrible applications have that force your organization to continue to use them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008784
Read further down, and the C-style syntax (curly braces, etc.) was a cause for problems:

"Ultimately, using a technique we call Token Accuracy Mapping, which is basically a way to figure out which tokens may have caused the problems, it appeared that C-style syntax was plausibly the culprit."
Medical devices don't run Windows Update. Changes are tested and controlled, exactly for scenarios like this.
If I had to guess I'd say IoT (yeah the hype is real, but there's some good stuff in there).
Keyboard accessibility should arrive soon: https://github.com/chinchang/hint.css/pull/111
Not really, the bandwidth doesn't depend on the frequency, but on the how much spectrum you have. The frequency impacts in other ways (noise, penetration, etc.) but not in the amount of raw data you can put through a channel.
I came here to say the same. Cities with expensive real estate are often the cities where latency matters even more. This is essentially a datacenter that can be dropped in the ocean, rent-free.
Virtual assistants are made of people
It's a luxury for someone who isn't deeply in the hole and doesn't have a family to support.
There are a few factors which for my current use case are helping rust outperform my previous c++ implementation. One of those is that it's far easier for a beginner to reason about the performance characteristics of rust code. Another is admittedly that I understand the domain better now. My favorite reason is that rust let's me exploit non-trivial parallelism safely, so I can use more cores much more frequently, still with lower development effort.
Britain gives scientists permission to genetically modify human embryos
Jeopardy Online Test Allows Users to See Questions Well in Advance
Planning a website animation project
Dazzle camouflage is fun but, at least originally, based on kind of specious logic.

"I suddenly got the idea that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading."

Thinking in opposites is an insidious trait that plays a big part in art and culture... but not in technology.

The dazzle scheme sounds more reasonable in this account:

"Wilkinson writes that “the painting of ships with the ‘Dazzle’ scheme is based on the general assumption that it is impossible to obtain invisibility at sea, especially where, as in the case of an attacking submarine, the object is seen against the sky with practically no sea to form a background…the only course open is to paint her in such a way as to deceive the attacker as to her size and course; this can only be done by extreme contrasts of colour and shapes which will so distort the vessel as to the symmetry and bulk.” (A Brush with Life)"
That's my point. They don't seem to have gone any deeper than surface syntax. They renamed "while" to "repeat", but is a while-loop-by-any-other-name even the best looping construct in the given scenario?
The Trouble with Strings
Thanks. I do wonder if there's something in particular about voice that lends itself especially to cynicism. Every time I wonder that, I always figure: surely not, when there's actuarial software, Wall Street...
I don't disagree, it's also indefensible to ship counterfeit parts. But it's likely to happen anyways.

It's clearly unsafe to not wear a seatbelt, but it's also clearly wrong to build a device into cars that kills occupants that get in a crash if they aren't wearing one.
Let's suppose I want to write a quick app to text people horoscopes. They enter their phone number and the horoscope is texted to them.

My first step now would be write a command-line function to send the texts. Once that's working, I'd knock out 5 lines of html and start showing it to people. I'm not even sure I'd wrap the freaking thing in <html> tags. For something nobody may ever use, it's simply not important.

The way the vast majority of programmers would begin this would be to set up a container. Then start installing a framework. Then buying a domain, downloading some tools, purchasing a gateway....

Programming is still programming, of course. But the way people think about programming today is total crap. You can ride the "It's cool! It's new!" horse around the merry-go-round a few times, but sooner or later it's gotta start getting old if you have any sense at all. Know what's a travesty? The number of working programmers in the world who have worked for years and have yet to actually make something that people use.
Ditto. I was also zoomed at 150%, zooming in to 100% makes it go away.

Still worth fixing if possible, since many users browse at non-100% zoom.
No. Well, you could use aria-describedby but that has to refer to a separate element. There’s no generic aria-description.
The Fine Bros REACT Trademark
Not even close. Everyone and their brother has a "vision" for what it will look like, but back in the real world there is nothing solid.
I have a side question, did you end up pursing a CS/Engineering degree? I'm trying to get a dev role and have a business background and looking for some advice on getting in.
Only good, as the rest of the bunch is so bad.
I really miss good testable "rules"[1] and reuse of them is horrible as well, as you have to make some arbitrary decision to make something a script[2] or part of the rule.

That being said, very stable piece of software and I haven't had surprise moments, unless it were my own "rules" which were wrong.

[1] https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/rules

[2] https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/Scripts
>if the company fails he can get a job somewhere else //

Because it's so hard to adapt CEO skills to the jobs market? Whilst peons can pick up a low paid job and should just lap it up and be happy about it??

If the founder is taking a risk running the company then the employees are taking a risk working there; their risk is often as great, the chance to lose one's livelihood.

To my mind a guy in sales that wrote up £1 million of orders in one days work and a guy in janitorial that cleaned the toilets all day both did a days work and both deserve a days pay - they're both humans who gave a day of their lives to the purposes of the company.
Do I need a website to get started, an entrepreneurs dilemma
Cellular network capacity is a function of channel width, modulation, and spatial reuse. Because there are many more low-frequency channels of a given width than high frequency ones, it's much easier to justify very wide channels at higher frequencies. The better propagation of lower frequencies is also a double edged sword. It's much easier to build a very dense cellular network if cell sites far apart can't hear each other (causing co-channel interference). Also, because higher frequencies propagate more directionally, it's also easier to take advantage of spatial reuse techniques.
To be fair, they did change more than keywords. They adopted a more Ruby-like syntax instead of curly braces, semicolons, etc.

There are a couple of issues with the research though that I have questions about. One is that, as most of us who program know, the syntax is just one part of it. The tools, the community, the documentation, the libraries and platforms, and so on all factor into our decisions and productivity when programming.

A second issue is more about the research. A/B tests and randomized trials are all great and useful. But that also is not enough. What is the theory or theories you are testing? I wouldn't choose a keyword over another just because one short, lab-based study showed a p-value under .05. You also need to do other styles of research to get a richer picture of what is going on, such as design-based research and qualitative research methods.
What about recurring payments?
Unit of Value: A Framework for Scaling your SaaS or B2B Business
Apple is developing wireless charging for future mobile devices
Very. Used to be an accountant. It is much more satisfying to create something.
There really is no secret. Just go do it.

If you're serious about it then incorporating becomes a good idea to protect your assets.

I would suggest starting with family and friends at reduced rates to build a portfolio.
[Podcast] What Makes a Great Product Owner?
Hacking IoT: Decoding LoRa Radio Protocol
By way of computers and headsets, Islamic teaching flows out of Pakistan
11 Video Game Kickstarter Tips from Successfully Funded Indies
News about interesting interactive digital project – Sons of Gallipoli
WP for nubes
While I agree life isn't an action movie, perhaps the long list of Iraqi scientists being assassinated or the even longer list of Russian, North Korean or Chinese dissidents being done away with seems to be a very simple thing for those oppressive, murderous regimes to do without much interference.

And what has anybody ever done about it? Maybe sent out a few strongly worded memos, if anything at all.
Why Learn to Program in C?
There's an applet at boardspace.net:
http://boardspace.net/english/about_rithmomachy.html
Another possibility would be to use the tarpit netfilter extension:

http://www.netfilter.org/projects/patch-o-matic/pom-external...
The definitive list of what everyone likes on Facebook
The datasheet does not seem to be very specific on what protocol it actually uses.
It does however state it is software-compatible to CH341 and for that there is a linux driver[1].

[1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
Compare that to France where it's $500 annual tuition (health insurance included).
> Or how to send mail internationally.

Yes, this will only work in areas where it's implemented.

> Or how to pay or even estimate postage if there are distance-dependent costs.

Presumably you'd include this in the USPS API, which knows your region. I already have to go to Easypost to determine shipping cost.

> Or how to send mail to me when I'm renting a vacation home for a few weeks.

What? This systems makes that _much_ easier, because the changes are centralized. Instead of updating my address on Amazon, eBay, and everywhere else that ships, I just update the USPS address.

> Or how to presort bulk mails for cheaper postal rates.

I'm not clear on why that gives cheaper rates these days. Unless your mailing addresses are hand-written, the USPS should be able to mass sort at essentially zero-cost.

> Or send mail to the current occupier of a house when the name isn't known. (Obvious ones include advertisements, political mailings, an municipal fee notices.)

Traditional addresses would obviously still exist--this is specifically a system of snail mail aliasing. If you don't want to hit a specific person, you could still use those addresses for mailing.
How students are getting productive in 2016: a inner perspective
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming - "Known for: Hamming code, Hamming window, Hamming numbers, Hamming distance, Association for Computing Machinery"

I do not know the origin of the term "Manhattan distance". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry says the concept comes from Minkowski in the 1800s, and a Google Scholar and Google ngram search suggest the term originates from around 1960, and the more common older term was "rectilinear distance".

(See https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Manhattan+dist... .)
> So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws

EDIT: to agree and amplify your comment:

In this case the copyright is dubious in the first place. Authors who work with public money should not have exclusive copyrights of the work they produce within this arrangement.
Big SEO predictions for 2016