skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wouldn't be wise to focus on unresolved problems like hunger, poverty, education and incurable diseases?

Several times on HN I have posed replies that consist of the snappy comment: "your logical fallacy is: " followed by a link. It doesn't usually go over well.

Yes, it would be wise to do those things. I mean, to do them as well: It's not one of the other. The "don't go to Mars, fix poverty" argument is something like Whataboutery or "Fallacy of relative privation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
It's not going to happen by then. Musk is trying to provoke a greater interest in space exploration. He has done the same for electric cars.
This may lead to greater public funding for NASA, and more private investment for things like SpaceX.
So I never take Musk's timing statements literally, but his hype-mode is an intrinsic part of him realising his vision, sooner or later that is.
There ought to be a check against a DA pursuing a vastly unpopular prosecution or pursuing a case with highly disproportionate threats. The incentives are messed up. A DA spends public money going after a case that might be good for their career but is totally out of line with what the public wants. I'm sure many people would be happy to see him face some consequences for what he did to JSTOR but I bet they would be overwhelmingly opposed to threats of the magnitude he faced. The problems aren't limited to the CFAA many federal laws are very broad and anyone can become a target. The situation is almost as if we have bills of attainder. If your name appears in the newspaper a prosecutor can find something to pin on you and make threats that force a settlement and or cost you a fortune in legal fees.
> This sounds like other similar language will not get the job done.

That's not what they're saying. If someone knows a tool and it works for them, then it's more immediately useful than another tool which they don't yet know how to use, or how well it works.

> The truth is that there are much better alternatives which are a lot more pleasant to use and will get the job done in a much better way.

Quantify "better". PHP has its flaws (quite a lot of them), but it also has its advantages. It's a very popular language, so if you want to do something with it, almost certainly someone else has tried to do the same thing, so there will be libraries for it, guides, people who you can ask for help if you have trouble. It has a shared-nothing architecture, which aids scalability. It has extensive documentation. It has a large selection of battle-tested frameworks. There is an almost infinite selection of hosting providers.

> This is a myth. Php is not easy to use. May be, It is easy to start.

PHP's flaws can make it an occasional pain, but it is not really harder to use than any other ALGOL-like language. It is sometimes easier as it tends to expose simple interfaces to things, rather than requiring the user deal with a lot of complexity.

> But you need to know a lot of useless stuff (outside the context of Php), to get anything to work any where near reliably.

This is, to some extent, true for other languages as well. But yes, I'd agree with you here that PHP has more baggage than its contemporaries.

> Also, be prepared to write a lot more automated tests if you want to keep it that way.

This is true of dynamic languages generally. Though PHP has (limited, runtime) type-checking, which can reduce the burden here somewhat.
Whoa. Had to Google that. TIL there's a significant rhetorical distinction between the two. Edited and thank you.
I use VBA for automating the production of pharmaceutical analytics reports, and have for the past 8 years. It is horrible in so many ways, but as far as I've found has the best support for manipulating the MS Office DOM, which is important because all the pharma reps use Excel/PowerPoint for everything and tend to have very specific nit-picky needs regarding their custom reports.
My dad uses and has used BASIC.

He's not a teacher, nor a hobbyist.

He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company. UBS, Bank of China, and other names all run this massive million(s)-line BASIC codebase, that he almost singlehandedly wrote, on minicomputers[1] powered by OpenVMS. With it, according to my father, they process billion dollars worth of transactions and other facets of their business. Every day. Surprisingly for enterprise software, his customers love it. They are only being forced to move to a completely new system since HP went and deprecated their entire minicomputer line.

Given this and other parts of the story-- perhaps better saved for a blog post-- I've always seen him as my 10x engineer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer, just so we're all on the same page.
Except those millions of users are divided among thousands of subreddits and don't all read or vote on the same stories. So no, you can't.
For the time being, Silicon is not going anywhere. By that I mean, Si the element being involved in the semiconductor process.

For channel materials, Intel has been using SiGe as the channel of their pmos transistors for two generations now, so in a sense elemental Si has already disappeared from the channel.

The wafers are still made of Si, half the oxide stack is still Si-O-Ni. The rest is Hf-O.

Polysilicon is still used a resistor material.

The semiconductor industry has changed a whole lot in the past, there is no "Silicon is dead moment", rather gradual shifts toward different materials used for different purposes.

Satellite radio transistors (HEMTs) already use InP and GaAs and have been for decades.

If you want an actual prediction:

Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide are going to be the two actively worked on materials in the near future. Both have a higher bandgap than Si, which means less leakage current and lower static power but they both come with their own problems.

There is a lot of research going in semiconductor industry, people are well aware of the problems and there tons of possible avenues of improvements on current technology (such as better lithography).
Many POS machines lately have a bank selection screen at the start. although banks are pretty interconnected, they have ridiculous fee differences between their cards and other banks'.
Raymarching Distance Fields (2013)
My jaw dropped. This is not a joke right? Wow! Empathy zero.
Urbanisation amid chaos in India, a photo library
Harman's How to Listen (2011)
Ask HN: They said I should Not learn HTML and CSS. Why?
I recently gave a seminar to marketing students at a local college. When asked how many knew any HTML and CSS. Only 1 person raised his hand.

After the talk was over, a student came to me and tells me that "They said I should not learn HTML and CSS"

The next day I asked a local FB group to guess how many students raised their hand when asked if they knew any HTML or CSS.

What started as a mission statement to change. Became a heated conversion why you should NOT learn HTML and CSS.

Why?
That kind of comment is not appreciated here. If you have some knowledge about this topic that the author doesn't have, HN strongly encourage you to write it down, rather than attack the author.
Probably, but that assumes that Musk's goal is saving the human race. More likely, he wants to go to Mars and is using this as an excuse / inspiration to others.
I use JavaScript to develop web applications in the financial sector. The runtime is a rusty bucket held together with duct tape, the language is dangerous and awkward to work with, and the ecosystem is utterly schizophrenic. Still, the money is good, so why not?
As a young developer, do you know where and how I could go about getting into the COBOL industry?

All the job listings seem to require a decade's worth of experience and lists expertise requirements in technologies that are proprietary and only available on a mainframe. COBOL on its own is not very hard to pick up, but I'm lost as to how to learn about the ancillary technologies. I'm not sure it's so much that nobody wants to learn, but that nobody knows where to learn it.
Plenty of companies pay lots of money for logos that don't actually reflect their individual company, message, or values. This just lets people with no money do the same.
Show HN: Openblog – Blogging with GitHub Issues
Well, Musk has also been working on climate change. I think that counts as an existential threat.

But with the decent possibility of somebody like Donald Trump becoming President, I think the journey to Mars can't come soon enough.
While I'm not particularly keen on revisiting PHP, given the bad taste it left me with, I can believe the language has changed for the better, however programming cultures, like all cultures, are way more inertia-prone, and I'm really sceptical about whether the duct tape mentality I've known PHP devs to exhibit has gone away
What's great is that the soylent-oculus-isolation pods could be reused for other purposes, such as

* Mental institutions
* Homeless shelters
* Public schools

No more need to deal with the risks of humans interacting with other humans in meatspace. Awesome.
There has been a shift of public opinion since the space age. People dont just want to avoid extinction, they want to live forever.
Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

Crying hypocracy is a substitute for an arguement.
The present is like Tetris, the future is like chess.
Seems like a bit too either-or.

An effective pattern in physical services (such as private healthcare) is to implement an SEO strategy with the expectation results could take around 6 months to realise. In the meantime, PPC campaigns can be used to bridge the gap between then and now.

Of course budget constraints must permit but generally if there is a budget for consistent advertising campaigns over 6 months, there should be room for both a PPC plan that tunes downwards as results from organic search efforts grow.
We use a business-basic style language called ProvideX[1] from the mid 80s.

99% of our codebase is GOTOs, GOSUBs, and PERFORMs. It's a mess to deal with.

But at the same time, the language has a database layer built in that (while slow) works well enough for our uses, it has a GUI toolkit that works cross platform, and you can run the same GUI panel via a web browser through a shim that the company created.

That's the one thing i've never seen anywhere else. I can make a program and GUI, and have it run on windows, linux, osx, and the web without any changes. And the "native" programs can run entirely client side, or they can behave as a "thin client" to a server somewhere, again without any changes.

We haven't moved away because moving away would basically mean replacing every single line of code ever written here... But we are slowly replacing it with more modern languages and systems.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProvideX
Empathy is pointless, the only relevant question is: would you rather spend time in the authors prison or an average standard us prison? If you, like me, would prefer the authors prison then it doesn't matter why he made it that way, whether it is because he belongs to an obscure sect that only allows prisons designed that way, or because he cares about prisoners.
>Boom & bust cycles are driven by the fundamental difficulty of quantifying value. Since there is no true value

I disagree with this statement. Although I do agree that it is hard to quantify or even estimate value, all things do have a true intrinsic value relative to the utility they can provide human beings.

Entire empires have been built based on the concept of intrinsic value. Berkshire Hathaway is probably the most famous.
You got all that from my post which said nothing about a logo needing to be "slaved over"? It does, however, take some thought.

Perhaps you were referring to my comment about Mayer, whose creative output amounted to a collective shrug, as she (and, sure, the design team she micromanaged) produced a logo that did nothing to communicate a new strategy, vision, or purpose.

Which is perhaps appropriate for Yahoo, after all.
"He writes bank software. In BASIC. For forty years. At the same company"

I would have gone insane :)
My paycheck is there to make me considerate of my employer's priorities, it does not make me be a slave to them. If those priorities are misplaced, I have no obligation to support them.
Come on, PHP is hardly old or unfashionable
Yes, I read 18F, but where are you from?
Coine – The free BTC advice bot
Not everyone has to share your profound insight about the meaning and purpose of life.

This is a classic example of a limited rationalised mindset. Imagine how much more enriched people lives would be if they got to know their great grandparents and more. Death is a tragedy, there is nothing stopping you and others who share your beliefs from ending life at any moment they want. This is about options, think about the potential -- it would change society is so many ways.
I could not throw anything together of this quality. If I were to create a product by myself, using one of the ones available would certainly be a step up.
A Programming Language with Deterministic Multithreading
Democracy? We don't even have a functioning one between us ourselves. Shameful attitude.
Oh, look, we got a comedian
With respect to But whether it’s The SoyOculus method or some other, a first principles approach to American incarceration is definitely overdue., I don't think this is it. The article doesn't seem to consider why people go to prison in the first place, and it is not a convincing argument that food and VR will keep them from returning once they are out.

And We’d eliminate prison violence.: exactly this proposal does this is unclear.

Meanwhile, Soylent and Oculus have nice solid government contracts.
What was their reason of not wanting to learn HTLM and CSS?
Baltic Dry Index 1985-2015 https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch7en/conc7en/bdi.ht...
The panic he describes reminds me of my learning to drive. I'd been an avid cyclist, and the sensation of the car moving under its own power, independently of me, was shocking.
I raise you one Edward Snowden.
More life advice from a 20 something? Oh Medium.
Anyone use ABAP (language for SAP)? I think you can get paid a lot of money as an ABAP programmer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP
Hardly "unfashionable"
I liked this but vehemently disagree based on a few of the reasons others have mentioned. I will say my old chess teacher had an excellent quote about life that also applies to Tetris. "There's only ever three moves, a good move, a bad move, and the right move." I still say that to myself all the time when things get hard.
>Quantify "better"

Better as in more correct. The endless gotchas in the language makes it harder to write correct programs that works as intended by the programmer.

>so if you want to do something with it, almost certainly someone else has tried to do the same thing, so there will be libraries for it, guides, people who you can ask for help if you have trouble.

That is more or less true for the alternatives as well (Python, Ruby, Javascript...)

>This is true of dynamic languages generally.

Yes. that is why I emphasized "a lot more"...
Yeah I do wish I could see a bunch of unstyled, barely functional UX "designed" by engineers who have no understanding of interfaces or design.
There exist more than two possibilities
Not quite "unfashionable" give it's the most used language by many a metric
I had to re-read this about three times to figure out that I agree with you ;-) The "yes, but..." really threw me off.
people that socialize using OR aren't really taught to socialize

As long as your mind can be convinced that you're really socializing, what's the substantial difference? If it would be possible to use VR as treatment for, say, social anxiety[1], there's no reason it wouldn't work here.

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15295148
FOSDEM live
Class(American)
Druid: oss analytics data store designed for bi (OLAP) queries on event data
Do you realize how many company logos are just the Helvetica font? You can't get any more basic than that. When you're just getting started, especially a one man operation, anything to get your product up and running quicker is a good thing.

Here's a few "no name" companies.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/40-excellent-logos-c...
You are surely joking. Do you really mean to say that Cobol is not a mainstream language? Are you claiming that banks and similar institutions are niches? If that is the case then pretty much all programming languages are niche languages.
You wish, and so do I.
There is a better than even chance that the GPS tracking device in their pocket was manufactured by or gets service from a company that works directly and openly with the government on matters of intelligence.

You think companies really care about the perception, when people don't?
Your dream body is just a click away
ARMs customer facing code is 100% verilog and this reflects most of the industry.
PiLove – LÖVE on RaspberryPI [LÖVE 0.10.0 and SDL 2.0.4]
VectorWorks has a python interface [so does Blender, but that's not really used as CAD]. The problem with building CAD software on existing platforms is that CAD vendors don't build app stores. There are three reasons: a robust independent apps would compete with features, CAD users tend not to have budget discretion, and CAD API's have the sort of privileged access that can wipe out a computer.

The real nexus of programming and mechanical engineering is embedded software. Microcontrollers have become powerful enough that Python and JavaScript can be used where margins are fat and bean counting is balanced against programmer productivity. Of course, tradition and commodification of hardware make other languages more common.

Then again, learning more languages is probably going to be part and parcel of a programming career for any recent grad.

Good luck.
Popular isn't necessarily the same thing as fashionable.
Perhaps being so dismissive about something that is potentially very useful for seeding new ideas about identity wasn't the ideal way to present yourself. Unless that's your personal brand voice, I guess?
I use a language originally called MUMPS, with the alternate name of M, which is the core language in Cache Object Script.

I use it because it has features that are still not (really) included in more "modern" languages, because it is actively used in niche markets, and because I've used it for 34 years, so I have a lot of experience in it and tools written in it.

It is incredibly terse, which allows for use in tight memory situations, and it is high-level enough that the implementor can optimize persistent storage to get speed gains that other languages can only meet by including very low-level code. It has built-in concurrency, again at a high level which allows the implementor a lot of leeway in making things more efficient.

As a niche language, it has specialized uses in Medical Computing and in Financial Computing. Its sparse data structures organized around strings of character is very suited to dynamic data (as a NOSQL datastore) and its handling of transaction processing and concurrency allows retractable computation as well as ACID data storage.

I am proud to call myself a MUMPSter.
I tried switching to Soylent and I would consider this inhumane treatment for prisoners.
Wow what a great idea. Would it be possible to list comments inline as well?
The goal is not to dissolve but for everyone to respect and accept. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau puts it perfectly in this video: https://www.facebook.com/quartznews/videos/1097902360243465/
Prolog. It fits my brain.
Double the handy wipe ration, add a few bucks for lotion. Problem sorted! /s
Why are these empty promises still taken seriously by supposedly intelligent audiences like HN? Elon Musk wants to have cancer ridden hospice on Mars, fine. But do not call it a "colony".
People are intelligent in many different ways and I don't believe that most people have the abstract thinking skills necessary to really thrive in computer science.

Forcing everybody to take part in computer science education is probably going to frustrate the hell out of most people (make them feel stupid and annoyed at having to do this stuff) and dumb down the curriculum for the small percentage of kids who would naturally thrive at this stuff.

Also, given the insanity in the education field, I don't see too many actually good computer science teachers wanting to be there even if more money is being thrown around. If I had to guess, a lot more career minded Machiavellian types are going to be trying to grab onto the gravy train and get some of these gigs and the side effect of this will be that the kids get even crappier teachers.

Like most government programs, on the surface this sounds good. I could very well be wrong, but like most government programs it will probably end up costing more money than planned and have the opposite of its intended effect.
Once a premium has been sold, they can be aggressive in trying not to pay for procedures. It's strange that they're so silent on this one.
>It's your fault, if you don't revisit PHP. A lot has changed since PHP3 days.

Wow. You make a lot of assumptions. I have been using Php until quite recently. I left it at 5.6. I know about 7. But that it is getting additions does not compensate for the fact that the core remains rotten, and is still as dangerous and weird as ever.

It does not get much worse than this

https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/41fqib/it_is_so_sim...
Does it find incorrect locking code bugs in multi-threaded languages?
Goldenjewellery
The pharmacy logo is more or less the logo of Lloyds Pharmacy in the UK. Close enough that it could be deemed to be infringing their TM IMO (it's tricky though with generic imagery).
I couldn't find any record of this guy playing chess in either USCF or FIDE.
As hard as this may be to believe, tptacek's opinions are not the gospel of technology. I've been with Linode for several years and their staff has been top notch.
Agreed. Correspondingly, if you don't adequately support their priorities, they have no obligation to continue to employ you.

It truly is a two-way street and works best with cooperation and some give and take on both sides. Treating it as a purely antagonistic relationship is poisonous and generally not sustainable. If you think it's that bad, go someplace else.
Remote debugging of tomcat using eclipse
This seems more reassuring.
This comment thread...

There's a lot of bashing the author for perceived lack of empathy and precious little explaining exactly what's wrong with the ideas presented.

The idea here is improving prison and reducing its costs, not perfecting it. You will not have a Nordic-style prison system in the USA in your lifetime. Too many people that vote have too few fucks to give about people they're conditioned to not give fucks about. It's a people problem, and the author even touched on it - any positives you make to improving the system will be slagged on by the ignorant as being soft on evil people.

So, given that we're operating in a framework that requires prison sucking, how about we start by making it suck a little less and cost a little less?
I wish things like square and paypal solves this problem.