skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all 7.4 billion people want to write software. Computational power got cheap enough to apply it everywhere. I am sure there were zealots decades before who said they need no pesky battery controllers in their devices.
Steve the Dancer Hype Man for Hire
Chaos Monkey Your Team
If there's an addiction I'm stuck with, I'd rather it be a smart phone than anything else on the list.
There are some instances where dynamic scope actually is not as insane as it may seem. Although the paper is probably dated and opinions have changed since then I can still understand that there are practical reasons to dynamic scope in some instances:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC18

All my own Elisp code uses lexical scoping by default and I don't trust myself enough to use dynamic parameters liberally in my code. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to have the ability to dynamically override internals.
Ha, then someone just needs a flock of location enabled smartphones pushing faked traffic patterns back to Google and hilarity ensues... :)
It makes Swedish startups stronger (and any other startups) because you don't have to put as much money into software licensing.

When you have more time than money, it makes sense. When your company gets big enough and you have more money than time, more proprietary/commercial software becomes an option.
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Nowadays the only thing I use outside of Emacs is GNOME Terminal / Google Chrome / bash / screen / ssh. All the rest (including E-Mail) is inside Emacs.

The Emacs/Vim war is a bit silly, because historically they're really not comparable in that way (although vim has gotten larger). Emacs is more of an alternative to GNOME/KDE/Windows/OSX than it is an alternative text editor.
I dabbled with converting a Japanese text to an ebook and adding furigana to it. However, I couldn't find a free tool that supported generating 3.0 epubs, so I thought, it's mostly HTML, how hard can it be to just do it manually.

Very hard, I must say. The are all sorts of meta files that doesn't seem to ad anything to this format, but are somehow required.
It's also seriously useful in an email tempting system - look up this content, apply this XSLT, send the resulting HTML email.
Richard Stallman 2006 (as St IGNUcius): Emacs vs. Vi
I recently drafted a protocol for micropayments. It is almost trivial, and while it requires a trusted payment provider which issues and validates tokens, the way it is designed should prevent any vendor lock-ins.
My goal was to design something that avoids the need for user authentication and logins towards the website which provides content or services.
Anyway, here's the link to the specification I wrote:
http://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/
I am very interested in your opinion and I hope it is not considered rude that I am posting here.
Why do people feel compelled to create new accounts just to leave snarky comments like this?
Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today...

<rant>I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient standard user interface meanwhile the Unix world is anchored to Vi and Emacs. It seems like they've managed to starve out a good chunk of innovation on this front.
>with enough scale, it should be possible to use traffic data to figure out which roads should be prioritized

It wouldn't be perfect but, yeah, I'd expect to see some correlation between traffic and road condition--at least for a given area.

There's just a lot of nuance in road condition though. People who take their Jeeps off the beaten track every weekend in national forests and parks have a pretty different set of standards from an urbanite who is renting a car with a doughnut spare and no other special gear.
This is a terrible benchmark, but

https://twitter.com/bitemyapp/status/698975974277271553
> even in a situation where it ultimately makes economic sense.

For me, one of the nice things about living in Washington State is that the choice that makes the most economic sense is not always the one that is chosen. It would make a lot of economic sense for Seattle to sell off huge chunks of its massive parks system, but that doesn't happen. Tree removal and water protection ordinances are the norm and they are, by and large, enforced. There's a healthy respect for the nature found all over the state.

(I'm not arguing that "not following the economic choice" is the majority outcome; far from it. But coming from a state that lived up to the rule of streets in suburbs--bulldoze all of the trees and name streets after them--and pushes its Congressional delegation for exemptions from environmental rules in order to get man-made lakes built, it's a nice change.)
>It's not just the fact that it's an underutilized general computing device; just look at the apps on your phone and tell me the percentage of them that open to a blank "canvas" rather than some kind of stream / feed.

One of the best things about Snapchat is that it always opens on the camera. It orients the user immediately towards creation and sharing, rather than consuming.
Went out the door with Tip O'Neill, apparently. :(
That's why a language that forbids magic global state (or at least makes you clearly tag every tiny instance of it) can be so useful.
I'm betting on the modern app developers system being much easier to maintain and understand ( and pass off to junior programmers), at the cost of speed.
Sure. I think it is fair to say that AWS does not offer a "Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service". What doesn't seem fair to me is to complain that AWS offers too many products, or to ding Kinesis for making normal/understandable engineering trade-offs.

It turns out that while AWS doesn't offer a single "Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service", Google doesn't offer a single strictly ordered, at least once delivery message delivery service.

Personally, I think thats ok, as a variety of solutions is great for all of us, but its hard to say one decision is better than the other when they are solving different problems.
Higher order functions are one tool to help transform procedural interfaces into data interfaces---after all that's the whole point of treating functions as data.
Is this post Go biased? Why not C++ or Erlang? :) You can do the same with Python
New Therapy Halts ALS Progression for Almost 2 Years in Mice
There are tons of sites like Reddit. However, people need a reason to leave Reddit to go to one of these new sites.

Unless they pull a Digg, this probably won't ever happen. Reddit actually got really lucky that Digg collapsed when it did, or we might even be using it today.
As VCs often look for keywords, I suppose the trick is to build the old-timer system but describe it as the modern web developer.
The problem is the voids - tiny gaps in the 3d printed layers provide nice reservoirs for bacteria growth.
The smaller the minimum payment, the closer you can fit the area under the curve.
Agreed, I think very few "Old-timers" would be using go.
The whole of the Software Engineering discipline has not yet implemented a standard reply for "where are you at with this?" "is it done yet?"
Wikipedia Article to
Once, I used Emacs. All I did with it was play in the land of elisp. I never got any real work done.

Then, a passionate friend converted me to Vim. I only ever used it to do battle with my .vimrc. I never got any real work done.

Now, I use Atom. Click a button, install a feature. No more distractions.

I wish it were faster though; I can never get any real work done.
Why wouldn't you want to use an SQL database with an index to store this data? Just have a column for the ports and a boolean flag for the status of the port?

Honestly, I'd probably use bash/nmap/ping and psql to insert data. Want to query? psql and grep.

These examples seem like a great way to re-invent the wheel with modern buzzwords.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just use a relational database?
On many GPS models, including my own crusty Garmin, this requires an additional tap and a longish wait while it renders the map as an illegible squiggle. So I rarely do this unless I want to confirm that I'm going via a specific route, and even then it's only useful if I know the route options beforehand and can tell them apart.

As an aside, the Garmin routing is terrible: it (for example) frequently "optimizes" for distance by doing endless zigzags on small roads instead of a single turn on big roads, even when the settings tell it to take the "best" or the "fastest" route. Of course this is to some degree unavoidable when all the brains it has is a tiny on-board CPU; but I've already long since resolved that my next car will have Android Auto, so the cloud can do the work.
Do you get your code reviewed? That's a good incentive for high quality code.
As developers we need to take a moral stance and refuse to develop products that engender addiction.
Looking at the other posts in the blog, it's definitely Go biased. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing.

But it's making some seriously tenuous assumptions about "modern app developers". It's almost "Goofus & Gallant" levels of hyperbole.
I think the war has move from "Emacs vs Vim" to "Emacs and Vim vs all others".
When was this tipping point? What is the evidence that supports it has already happened?
Because then it would seem that modern app developers are actually competent, and that's not the author's intent.
Training a Recurrent Neural Network to Compose Music
Yeah or you should install Atom and be spied by Google Analytics [1]. Let's take the creepiness of the web to the desktop.

[1]: https://atom.io/faq
I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. If you're clever, you can represent any data as a bit array. And once you're there, counting bits or XORing them together is easy. But is that system easy to understand? Is the code easy to read for the rest of the developers who work on the project? Or for future hires? What happens if the data set becomes too large to fit in memory on a single machine? Storage is cheap and getting cheaper every day. The whole data set described in this problem (done the "inefficient" way) fits on a flash drive at today's capacities.

There are always tradeoffs when it comes to architecture design. Speed and storage space are only two of the many factors that require consideration.
basically just an example of how choosing a bad data structure can make your life a headache
09:30 (standup) - 18:00, startup, berlin
I went from Emacs to Sublime and back to Emacs. The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there.

But beyond that, I find that a lot more stuff Just Works in Emacs. I spend my days working in Python, and both major Python modes for Emacs are miles ahead of ST's equivalents. Things like linters work as expected and there are lot more packages available for niche things. Emacs is subjectively better, even if the UI doesn't feel as platform-native as other editors.

I don't use Emacs because I'm a graybeard afraid to learn something new. I use it because I've tried every new hotness to come along and I've yet to find something as powerful, well-supported, and ubiquitous.
There's a lot of antiquated stuff in Emacs, but despite the almost total lack of a modern UI toolkit for extensions, there are also interfaces in Emacs that are better than anything available elsewhere --- reasons to launch Emacs even if you don't need its expressive power for editing. Magit is a good example, Helm is another, org-mode another, FlyCheck another.

If Emacs looked as good as Sublime, I'd be marginally happier. But if Emacs lost Helm or Magit, I'd be devastated.
Not trying to be confrontational, but conversational --

I'd say that both vi and Emacs have solid fundamentals and have stuck with a model that works, to their credit. I must admit that I shop around for editors occasionally (I'm a long-time emacs person, who swapped back to vi a few years ago to re-develop his vi-fu), but I haven't seen anything so compelling that I've switched to anything else.

It may well be that I'm looking in the wrong place, or that I don't realize the true awesomeness of something that does cross my desk.

In the spirit of advancing text editing, what would you say is missing from vi or Emacs that you've found in other editors (even if the advancements aren't present in one singular other processor)?

Edit: stray words
Agree with this. My first language was C# and because of it I learned a lot about correct patterns and code readability/refactoring that I can use in PHP or JS now.
I'd be very interested to know, as it seems to have some interesting properties: can run on limited CPU devices yet easily cope with high resolution images, in a range of colours and contrasts, and and can detect the pattern at a range of sizes and orientations.
The "Law of Demeter" means something very specific in OO programming, often expressed by the rules:

1. You can play with yourself
2. You can play with your own toys (but you can't take them apart)
3. You can play with the toys that were given to you.
4. And you can play with toys you've made yourself.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki/LawOfDemeter?LawOfDemeter

Put simply, it means that you shouldn't attempt to destructure or inspect the arguments that were passed to you. If you're passed a point and need to access point.x and point.y, then you're a method on the wrong class; you should be a method on Point instead. If you're passed a file but only need to access file.path, your parameter type is wrong: you should take a filepath instead and let your caller destructure for you. If you need to access foo.bar and foo.baz but foo has 20 data members, you should collect bar and baz on its own sub-structure and pass that in directly, or better yet, make your function a method on the sub structure. If you need to self.mutate_my_foo(self.access_my_bar()), you should call self.foo.mutate(self.access_my_bar()). And so on - the point is for each function to have the minimal knowledge necessary to complete its task, and any decisions unrelated to that task should be propagated up to higher levels of the program.

I won't deny that this is frustrating, and I thought I acknowledged that in the original comment. The Law of Demeter has been very controversial in OO circles, because it's so restrictive that pretty much nobody can actually adhere to it without creating so much work for themselves that their project ships late. In forcing your code to always use the minimal set of data necessary, you force yourself to change the code (including many potentially highly-used APIs) every time you add or remove a data dependency, which is usually impractical. The whole category of dependency injection frameworks was invented to automate much of this plumbing work.

But I find it fascinating that Rust's borrow-checker has basically forced it down on one side of the tradeoff. It has a bunch of implications for what Rust is good at and what Rust is not good at.
Sure, it is nice. But, is it nice enough to convince me to spend hundreds of dollars on it when I am really happy with Fantasque Sans Mono?

See https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
The power increase from 50 kW to 500 kW is only 10 dB, which isn't really a lot considering you get the same increase going from 5 kW to 50 kW, or from 500 watts to 5 kW. You can see that there's a dramatic point of diminishing returns for any given class of radio service.

International SW stations are just that -- international -- so they're more likely to be able to justify the additional power.
Consistency would be better, whichever way was chosen (base 2 or 10).

Although even with base-10 being used all around, I might still end up explaining why an 8 billion byte file won't fit on an 8 billion byte USB key, while a disk image of the same size would because of file system overhead.
Business Guy shakes his head and gets a subscription on https://www.shodan.io/
Sublime Text is proprietary closed source. That seems counter to modern Unix/Linux goals.
Have you ever experienced someone close to you having a hard core drug addiction to heroin or meth or something similar?
"I can perform a simple AND operation on the 3 monthly bit arrays, and then count the number of “1” bits."

I think an old-timer would tell you that he'd be using an "OR" operation to count the number of hosts seen in the last three months.

As a long-time embedded systems engineer, you learn to guard every CPU cycle and memory location jealously. That behavior, along with avoiding needless abstractions that complicate the system AND cost CPU and memory, have served me well as I've switched to higher-level software.

As an aside, memory resident databases are now practical even for problems of this size. I've used the CERN Colt library to provide sparse arrays stored in memory in place of databases several times now. My current pet project is processing a mouse genome for my daughter's lab. With the amount of data being read, I'd always be I/O bound if I wasn't packing a lot of working data into memory. This is the programmers equivalent of the CPU's cache, but one we can easily control. Give it a try!
A lot of the reason I used emacs is that it works in a terminal... nothing else with its power does.
The best I've seen is from the NPR article at http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/11/01/163632... .

One of these cartograms is a electoral vote cartogram of the US 2008 presidential election. Unlike the above examples, it uses a continuous color spectrum from red to blue (going through purple at 50/50) to represent the popular vote - which does a much better job of conveying voter proportions than the standard color every state red or blue. On the other hand, the map is geographically coarse grained on the state level - every state is shown in one averaged color. I have yet to find one that has both continuous color spectrum and is continous (ish) in space.
One of my teacher friends taught 6th grade math. In his classes, he had to account for 4th through 8th grade math skill levels. Those with 8th grade being Khan Academy-style motivated learners.
> In my experience, this is not the case.

Not my experience either. We commonly hear the refrain "Haskell does not allow you to do exploratory programming". Personally I prefer exploratory programming in Haskell to any other language.
> while it requires a trusted payment provider which issues and validates tokens

The most interesting part about Bitcoin micropayments is that they can be done in such a way that you do not have to trust a "payment provider."
I quite like Sublime Text 3 as well, but only because it has a vi mode.
+1

Ill add that having your data in Elastic means that a (probably non-technical) user still can use it as part of their analysis without having to get dev involved.
everyone is gonna get over it soon the internet is getting boring
Lol store the bits in a file called hadoop.txt. if anyone asks how you did a query say you looked in hadoop.
I am surely not one arguing robots, etc. can do a reporter's job better than a person. No, what I am arguing is this continued BS of who is creative is basically a "No True Scotsman" commentary.

On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning.

As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
Ask HN: Examples for end user software hacks/repurposing
Which end user software hacks or repurposing have you seen or used yourself? I'd like to collect some examples, be they private, or even more interesting, department or company-wide. A classic one is using excel as a database.

My intension is not finger-pointing users’ ignorance of "right" tools, but how people come up with own solutions (ideally, you can give some context around problem and solution).
I think 13thLetter was just afraid the removal of the dam would lead to eg more coal fired power plants.

Even if all one cared about is nature, and put zero weight on anything else, that would probably be a bad tradeoff.
Teenagers today are 31 percent less likely to binge drink than teenagers 20 years ago

I am not convinced[1]. Experience and endless media items about health impacts of alcohol, increased binge drinking, etc over the last decade simply do not support it. Seems like they drink far more when they do binge too.

every two years, the federal government asks thousands of teenagers dozens of questions about whether they are all right

Teenagers today are 31 percent less likely to admit binge drinking than teenagers 20 years ago

Is a FAR more likely interpretation. Perhaps that's as a result of all that media coverage!

[1] Or perhaps the UK and Europe experience of alcohol over the last 20 years is the inverse of the US.
Yes! ES is great for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the one you point out.
It's not an extremely complicated problem.
The solution is use a phone to talk to people (if you must).
That's what a phone is supposed to do.
You probably do not need all the other stuff.
It's all a matter of choice.
That's a hefty endeavor. Care to share more about your experience writing your own?
Hope springs eternal!
I agree with you, but re-reading the original commenter's argument, he was saying that with AWS services you don't get seamless scalability, even though there's SQS, Kinesis, Firehose. I don't think he was complaining about the number of products, I think he was making a point that most AWS services don't seamlessly scale the way Google Services do.

There's an interesting blog in the works by one of our customers, who "surprised" PubSub with 4.5 million messages per second, and kept on this test for about a week. One hell of a load test :)

And this is especially true when looking at the product I work on, BigQuery.
pen and paper my friend. punched cards even.
Oh, economic rationality is a pretty weak constraint. Keeping your parks makes perfect economic sense---you'll just have to be aware that they are part of your consumption spending and account for them as such.

(And ultimately, all economic activity is to produce consumables one way or another.)
I think they come with quite a lot of baggage, yes. But if you get past the initial steep learning curve, there's a lot of productivity gains waiting for you.

With regards to simpler editors, the problem is that they come and go. Learning an editor is a big investment, so I'd rather stick to something that will still be around next decade.