skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have not seen any theoretical breakthroughs in over 20 years anyway. Unlikely programming is going to change fundamentally.

But there is a lot of game changing practical advances which totally overturned the way we design systems.

Microcontrollers are powerful and dirt cheap now. Low end FPGAs are more accessible than ever. GPGPU is a dramatic game changer, and it is dead easy to use it these days. RAM is nearly infinite. SSDs are cheap and fast. 1gbps networks are everywhere. CPUs have dozens of cores. So, yes, on a practical side everything changed.
So long as this doesn't translate into a grant that confuses CS with Programming I'm all for it. Students already have to learn mathematics. Learning about computation is just as important these days.
It's notable that the Solaris unexec() implementation[1] is basically a thin wrapper around dldump()[2].

1: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/src/unexsol....

2: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0627/6j9vhfmop/inde...
http://www.tclassociation.org/wub/proceedings/Proceedings-20...
How...

* ...does the page look before the JavaScript loads

* ...do you handle media queries, pseudo selectors, pseudo elements

* ...is this better than inline styles (only one I can think of immediately is support for stuff like autoprefixer, but that isn't needed for any of the provided functionality)

Basically, what's the benefit here? Is is just to avoid using inline styles? Has the anti-inline-style dogma become so strong that we basically invent a version of inline styles just to get around using them?
they manufacture apple devices and were reported to have a high suicide rate among employees due to working conditions
Sorry I misunderstood, this is an interesting concept. You mean that, we could look at demand and the back that out to get the neccessary total.

This would be super interesting. If you could find, with a reasonable statistical likelihood that demand is D and computing power is C, if there was a large inexplained discrepency you could calculate the size of skunkworks projects.
what do you mean soon.
Why Mars? If all you want to do is mine asteroids, what sense is there in clawing your way out of a deep gravity well, only to jump down to the bottom of another one? Why not Ceres or Hygiea or Vesta or any of the other minor solar system bodies?
You have a lot of fun :)

Thanks for the read.
I think the market still feels like selling stuff isn't sexy. Worry about grabbing users and worry about monetization later.

And there is real truth in that. But its a decade past their founding. Their growth is slowing.

Another problem is that the "how to monetize" method is still just a slight variation on how Google and Facebook do it.

I fear we are about to find out that all these companies hoping to monetize like Google and Facebook are going to find out they are all competing for the same pool of advertising spends.

Wall street and VC's may start valuing users and user-engagement less and less.
I am not sure what's going on at NY Times. They seem to write a lot of articles focusing on negative things about India. In a country as large as India, you can always find something exceptional. This article about Indian women is as much a news to me as it is to anyone else. From the place where I come from, I don't know of any woman who doesn't work because of some family/societal pressure. That doesn't mean that there are no other issues, but a balanced narrative would have been nice.

Examples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/the-right-wing-att...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/suicide-on-an-indi...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/insider/we-will-not-apolog...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/indias-move-agains...
Also: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=sys_checkpo...
In defence of Barbie, that waist is at least partially utilitarian. It's there to hold the cloths on. Dresses would fall off a more human figure as soon as the kid turned it upside down. It's an answer to the interesting design challenge of trying to scale clothing down to doll proportions without resorting to paper-thin microcloth.
To be fair, I was rather confused when reading the title. I tough the original JADE was being sued. Now most Google results are related to new JADE lang. Obviously, there is a trademark issue. The fact that HN seems to like this new JADE more should be irrelevant. I am surprised to witness such a biased reaction here.
And even if there happens to be, check back in six months and see what's happened. Did your beautiful design smoothly accommodate the fix for the tricky issue #5388? Was there enough time then to update your clear documentation, or does the documentation now clearly explain something false? Did the new coworker who implemented that new feature understand the point of your design such that she was able to extend it properly while you were busy for three weeks chasing a deadlock? And so on. Beauty always fades!
Agree -- but doesn't strike me as a big deal. For me, emacs is something I start and will often have running for months. 5 second startup time is irrelevant. That's no slower than starting Word or Excel, either. Even browsers take a couple of seconds to start from cold.
How Many People Are Having Sex at Your Gym?
I don't think so. Tk was simple when a lot of GUI programming was complex. That's what it brought to the table.

HTML and CSS is already simple. QML is simple and beautiful. Tk-style layout design wouldn't bring anything to the table in 2016 that other people aren't already doing, and doing pretty well.
Do you think that sort of a problem (incremental changes eroding an initially sound structure) could be fixed with better refactoring tools? It seems like the issue you're describing is that logic is leaking from some parts of the codebase to others, which might be fixable with sufficiently powerful refactorings.
Like near-copy pasta: https://codebeat.co/projects/github-com-google-seesaw/report... ?
The Art of Saying NO
> Please try to keep the English language alive and well

Which English language? British? US-American? Guyanese? Canadian? Those are just the once spoken in areas I lived in and they all differ.

This reminds me on my English teacher who told me that nobody says "coffee to go" but "takeaway coffee", only to be replaced by another teacher the following year who insisted on "coffee to go". A few years later I spent some time in the US and the UK - and saw that both versions were used in both countries.

Edit: Let' just use French - sounds much nicer anyway ;)
> Sleep. A lot of programming problems get solved while you sleep.

I love it when I go to bed mulling over a problem, and when I get up I have the solution. The brain is truly a wondrous machine!
Rithmomachy
Understanding computing and programming is useful in careers that aren't specifically centrally about programming, in much the same way that being able to write is useful in careers other than professional writing. But, sure, more people programming will mean more people who are can take jobs that are centrally programming jobs, which is a good thing for everyone except incumbent workers in the field who have more competition.

It also means people working in other fields who can more efficiently applying computing to their own domain, either directly or by being better able to identify opportunities and work with people who are primary programmers.to realislze them. That's also a general win.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10694306
It would be great to set up an institute for upholding scientific/research integrity. Have one division focussed on reproducing published results, and another focussed on checking publications for statistical errors, and a third on the look out for academic fraud (fudged numbers, undisclosed funding, citation rings, etc.).
The only thing I think this achieves is helping stop FOREIGN government agencies from getting the same data. US government agencies have access to interdiction, implanting backdoors in nearly all the electronics, and in networks. You'd have to build your own hardware from scratch to avoid getting spied on by USA based state actors and then you'd probably run afoul of the FCC.
Towards the end of 2002, there was a general strike in Venezuela, where, most importantly, a large percentage of PDVSA's workforce was on strike and oil production basically halted. Chavez went ahead and fired 18,000 people (skilled oil industry workers) after the strike in one fell swoop. Those workers were replaced with workers loyal to the regime. Basically, everyone who opposed the government was fired from PDVSA.

Many of those skilled fired employees found themselves unable to work and left Venezuela to other countries, notably Colombia, which later experience a surge in its oil industry.

Source: I'm Venezuelan... But here's an article that talks about this: http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21607824-venezuelas-l...
I don't think programming - in the sense of what 99% of programmers do - is as difficult as programmers love to blog about. Most professional programmers write stuff that is not all that hard, and most of it has been done by others countless number of times. All the "hard" cutting edge stuff is done by a tiny tiny fraction of programmers. Heck even the things people think are cutting edge now, just taking a random example - VR, have been explored decades ago. Seriously, go read some SigGraph papers.

However, programmers more than other professionals love blogging about their work, which is great - because it helps spread ideas (more so than any other field I've seen), but also creates this illusion that programming is this super hard thing. I mean people complain about going to interviews and being asked about algorithms and stuff that you could "just google" when, if you were to ask an average scientist, the amount of active working knowledge they have at any given time is simply astounding.
Open Game Benchmarks: Benchmarks for Linux Games
> So, I think I need to stop complaining about it, and start asking the right questions of BSD users. Why is ports such a fiercely defended thing when it has so many weaknesses compared to modern package managers?

First theres no dichotomy here. A person can use ports and pkgng. Secondly there's many nice thing about ports. If your organization has custom patches or compile options for common software, you can use the port system. Also I think a more important use of ports, is security fixes. When OpenSSL drops it's bug of the week you can patch openssl and rebuild the port tree. Then you can push the new, patched binaries into production. A sysadmin can do this all without relying on the package maintainer, ie no waiting on Redhat to push out new rpms. This can all be done in under an hour depending on the performance of the build server and automation processes in place.

> Does pkgng actually solve these problems (I can't really tell, it seems to be a meta-package system that still sits atop ports)?

Yes.

> and building from source on a production system is silly and potentially dangerous

Well of course you don't build directly on the production box. That's what a build server is for. You can use poudriere to build packages from the ports tree and then run your own package repo and have your production boxes pull from your private package repo.
>came about in 1987

Well, no. Email dates to about 1971. [1] In the 1987 timeframe, it was widely used within some walled gardens (my company at the time used email extensively within our own network with our proprietary software) and it was doubtless fairly widely used in various corners of the proto-Internet.

My recollection is that 1991 is still pretty early to call it "widely used" among the general public--although the "endless September" was in 1993 so perhaps it was getting close.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson
He does not just want to go to mars. He wants to live on mars, to make it habitable and wasting all his money on sending probes to mars today will be a useless waste of money and he will be bankrupt before achieving anything
A shuttle to mars with enough for a people to go and live today would cost hundreds of billions which be doesn't have so be is doing the next best thing bring down the price to millions so that he can go.
I think that Bernie, as a self-proclaimed socialist, would pursue Chavez-like policies, not Trump.
I tried my hand, dear Frondo. I tried.

http://tanzer.io/
Ok, let's add "Node.js template engine" to the title. That's the project's self-description at https://github.com/pugjs/jade.

We also changed "lawsuit" to "trademark" in the title, since it's not clear that there's a lawsuit and it is clear that there's a trademark.
Slack Hubot GitHub
First self-assembled superconductor structure created
The Superconductor of the Future May Be This Self-Assembling Plastic
Too many guys like this are what makes software dev hard. Too many yahoos who think its just about code. Code is only an implementation detail of how most dev is done today. Even today, code isn't about the code. It's about explaining your program, your process, wtf you where thing when designed this thing to the next guy/gal.

Sadly, what too much code tells us is "Design? That's what gui people do, right? I just kept typing stuff until it worked enough for non-technical person to think it was OK or we ran out of money/time."
More than music, foreign languages, chemistry, physics....

"English" and "math" are the two things you'll be taking constantly in middle school and high school.
Consider indoor positioning. World of opportunities there I think.
The quality varies a lot with these logos like anything, particularly when scaled down to tiny sizes, but some are really nice.

The paperclip one would be great for company that gets you paperclips, _fast_.
Of course. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
Rumsfeld's Game
Hugo Chávez has been dead for three years, and the Venezuelan parliament is controlled by right wing parties. Obviously economic problems of today are attributable to someone buried three years ago, not the right wing parties who control the parliament today.

It's interesting how Venezuela's economic problems started with Chávez. How did Chávez come to power? If you look at the history of Venezuela from World War II on, you see a lot of economic problems. Chávez was elected because of the economic mess his predecessor presided over.

Chávez died in the spring of 2013. Oil prices began diving in mid-2014. I don't fully blame the right wing parties which control the Venezuelan parliament for their economic problems - they're dealing with a problem all oil-producing countries are dealing with right now. The plunge in oil prices since mid-2014. For how long is the Washington Post and the right wing parties controlling Venezuela's congress going to blame the three year gone Chávez for Venezuela's economic problems?
That's correct, however there are rather aggressive rate limits in place right now that would make this hard for your typical SaaS-on-a-subdomain deployment if you have more than ~5 new signups per week. Plus, if SAN support is a concern, wildcards are preferable too.
I take the and in his reply to infer he agrees something additional should be done. Whether his ultimate response for how to do that is adequate is unknown, since he didn't really elaborate on exactly what he thinks should be done. It could be he meant that to signify agreement with the suggested course of action in addition to agreement that there's a problem to be fixed.

In any case, the only thing clear to me from his statements is that he agreed that there was a problem in need of attention, which makes the response here somewhat baffling to me (although not as baffling as it should be. It's fairly easy to see how a lot of the animosity comes from feeling about systemd in general and Lennart in particular, especially since some people state as much, as if that has any bearing on his response in this instance).
console video games are very intimate with their host platform, to the point where 6 years old GPU/CPU combo produces better results than lots of newer PC's.

I'm not advocating that this should be the norm, simply noting that there are cases where you need to be.

Otherwise you can't achieve smooth 60 or 30fps, without tearing, popping (audio, streaming, models), etc.
Four Korean proverbs applied to software development
> "Given how cheap solar panels are now (<$1/W), and how expensive an urban road is ($2000 a linear foot!), the solar road competes not against a solar rooftop installation (15% efficient) but against a conventional road (0% efficient)"

It competes against conventional road + solar rooftop.

I don't think it will ever be price-competitive or efficiency-competitive with doing both things separately.
SpiderOak Semaphor
Talking at conferences
I believe author means things like code, build system, etc when they say "inputs are beautiful". Cause In my experience one of the major inhibitors of beautiful code, what takes many tests, and what makes dev hard is how fucked up input is. Esp user, as in interactive human, input.
I think it's difficult because no one particular change is a problem and in isolation they are mostly completely reasonable. It's the accumulation of these changes that cause the code to rot.

There are a whole heap of "human nature" problems that are the same like getting into debt, being over weight, protecting the environment. The short term pay-off is fairly big, the contribution to the long term problem is very small.

Also the person who is often responsible for making the decision may not be technical, so finds it difficult to imagine the eventual impact. Plus in the fast moving field of software development, they'll be unlikely to even be around when it happens.
If David Sedaris was a software developer...
Cloud-Based Collaborative Game Engine
Personally, I use Emacs as a Notepad as well as a coding environment.

Also, if I'm screwing with my .emacs it's nice to have instant feedback beyond eval'ing any changes I make as I go.
H1Bs won't like this answer, but it should be retroactive to all visa holders. Six years is six years too long to wait to fix things and get the situation to turn around.
To the usual family sending their kids to school, nothing.
Fibonacci's Infinite Sequence
No. Areas to put solar panels are not that scarce.
Twitter is in trouble if they are on a path to competing with Facebook. They are fine if they manage to reflect on what made them successful in the first place: information constraint and a small(ish) but passionate community.

The culprit is diluting the product to chase after growth. This is a losing strategy. They should instead think of catering to their core users and monetizing. They will disappear overnight should the core exit.
While we're on the topic, please stop saying the following: Unicorn, Disrupt, Hacker/Hacking/Hackathon, and Freemium.
According to Wikipedia the ruling party in Venezuela is the PSUV (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

What are you on about?
Yeah, practical and cultural shifts determine how the theoretical foundations come into play.

Ten years ago, if you said you were into functional programming, most people wondered if you were crazy and why you didn't just program in a real, normal language.

Fifteen years ago, garbage collection was considered slow and mostly only suitable for "scripting."

Twenty-five years ago, there was Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and so much cool technology and visionary ideas. For most of the time since, it's all been considered weird, fringe, academic stuff.

The past decades of industrial talk about best practices and methodology doesn't seem to have been wildly successful, and now we're looking at other ideas in a diverse way. So it's an interesting time.
Very nice, I quite like it!

I recently hacked together a completely web-based, client-side CSR generator for PKCS#10; you can take a look at it at https://johannes.truschnigg.info/csr/ With something like that fused into your project, users wouldn't even have to execute `openssl` to generate their key material and CSR, they'd just need a modern browser with support for the W3 Web Cryptography API.
Inner city school. First of all they often have basic infrastructure issues: leaky roofs, poorly- or non-working heat, rodent and insect infestations. OK those things are in theory correctable.

Secondly is the demographics. Inner city kids are often from low-income single-parent homes, living with foster parents or extended relatives, moving a couple of times a year, one or both parents may be incarcerated. Being around substance abusers is another big problem. Education is really low on the list of things they or their parents care about. And it's impossible to fix that at school.
Yup, my first thought when I saw the headline was "this is a non-military attack on Taiwan due to the KMT (pro-Beijing party) getting annihilated in the polls two weeks ago".
The problem with India is that no stereotype really exists. For every truth, the opposite is also true. I wonder why the NY Times, the BBC etc.. focus so much on the negative. Does the idea of India go synonymously with poverty for them?

Yes. India has enormous challenges. But the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty in just 25 years.

It's time the narrative changes.
It took me a while to get that. Yes thats a very useful word. Much information per character. If we could use it as a verb also it would be very useful. Ex: I meh calling her, could you do it?
Will a robot take your job? (2015)
My pet theory is that even relatively simple programming problems drain a very limited daily resource of programming time (something on the order of 2-4 hours of real work per day). Because a programmer can be drained of programming ability so quickly we just compensate by blogging, posting, talking about it incessantly as a backfill.
Messenger based von PGP, IMAP and SMTP. Host on your own infrastructure
Yes. And all I see from Lennart is agreement and the statement of a few facts (some programs need access), which implies that a slightly more nuanced solution may be required. I fail to see how this reflects poorly on him.
So much this. My cohorts and I aren't spending hours talking about why we should use es2015 or typescript or whatever else. We're spending hours nearly coming to blows over how to properly implement a Flux architecture.
It's not just nytimes lol https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/14... ...just saw that one yesterday

To be sure, I love India (from afar), but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a first-world nation. Fixing infrastructure and cultural issues (neither of which will be easy) would be a massive first step.

Also, India is so large that trying to claim that "India is like this" or "India is like that" seems futile, as evidenced by your (admittedly anecdotal) example.
Taiwan != China, at least in terms of "not trusting ___China___".
There used to be a difference between scripters and programmers. I'm a scripter, and it feels similar to learning a natural language and writing essays in it. In other words, it's easy and doesn't require any mathematical skill.

There are low-level programmers who do things similar to other sciences involving math, and my brain wouldn't be able to do that.

So if you're talking about scripting, which I think most people do, then I agree it isn't difficult.
All conventional imperative languages? Open your mind. Try Prolog. Try Clojure. Try Verilog.