skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I dislike that the whole lobbyist conversation has gotten dumbed down to the point that any kind of conversation is by definition evidence of corruption.

quadrangle talked about conversation and campaign contributions together. Conversation by itself is fine. But I see no reason why payments by lobbyists shouldn't be de facto evidence of corruption.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11089174
Show HN: We have put our TOS on GitHub
Is anything being done to remedy the soul crushing compile times of GHC?
That's nice to hear (python (and C) are my strongest languages ATM), and what you describe is one thing which irks me when programming with python.

As for conciseness, I do think it matters; it's not about how fast you type really, but how fast you can read what you wrote a week later. But conciseness is perhaps a bit of a blunt term, and maybe needs a bit of qualifiers. Now, take this with a large grain of salt due to my very limited knowledge of Rust. But, say, for a short program/script I guess python "wins" clearly since you can just let it bomb out with a stack trace if something goes wrong, whereas in Rust you have more explicit type conversions (.to_string() etc.), and you have to handle errors somehow, even if it's just with try!/unwrap() etc. which adds clutter. But for a larger program, maybe the difference isn't so big anymore, since Rust, unusually for a "close-to-the-metal" language, has a lot of higher-level functional-style features, and for python you probably want to handle errors in some way anyhow?
One of the best things about Java is that getting old code running on newer hardware is so much easier compared to the COBOL cluster-fuck we have these days. Hopefully we won't see as much 30+ year old hardware running our mission critical Java applications as we see our COBOL applications.
It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community.

People supplied small scale infrastructure for free. Supplying the sort of infrastructure necessary to run the internet at scale is very likely impossible without some sort of commercialisation. You need full time people to keep it going, so you have to pay them because they have rent and food bills. You can't run things on a voluntary basis once they get to a certain scale.

Likewise with professionally produced content - you just can't expect it to happen without paying someone to do it because it takes more time to make than you can reasonably expect people to give for free. People need to eat, which means you have to pay them.

That, of course, does not automatically mean you have to have a corporation involved. Something like Patreon[1] would work just as well.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/
Here Comes the Hammer
This is like competing with Intel in CPU server market, where he has 98% market share.

So they are trying to compete using 2.5 mil dollars with software backed by multi billion dollars, hundreds thousands of servers, tons of data, thousands of developers, ML integration etc.?

Good luck with that. Many tried backed by x times more resources than this 2.5 mil, unfortunately all failed.
I think you missed the point of the article, which was that students, parents, standards-setters, educational theorists, and legislators have a distorted idea about what education is for and why certain subjects are taught. We don't teach history so that children can recite the years in which various battles happened. We don't teach algebra in order that everyone in society knows how to factor a simple polynomial.

The author can no longer understand his dissertation, but that doesn't mean he failed, or that the educational system failed by granting him a PhD for the work. Rather, the dissertation was about proving to the system and himself that he had learned how to tackle a complex problem and generate a solution that would pass muster with his academic mentors. In the process he learned many skills indirectly, became a more effective problem-solver in general, and had fun, all of which are far more valuable and far more important than the topic of his dissertation and whether or not he still understands it.
Yes. It's dismaying. Evidence of lack of character a silly insistence that everything is perfect in Linux and should never change.

(Systemd is plumbing. Users should never know it exists. Everyone else is paid to deal with it.)
To encourage competition in the space, the UK recently reduced certain capital requirements in relation to banking start-ups, compared to established banks. This article has some good background:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-18/mondo-s-ce...
http://twitaholic.com/stephenfry/ says he had 12,182,681 followers and 21,816 tweets
In my opinion programming is about solving programming problems. There are other important parts - like understanding user needs etc - but solving problems is at the core of it. In practice usually these programming problems are easier - but to test how a programmer is proficient in solving them you need to use harder problems or maybe do some programming speed tests (many easy problems).
My baby has 11 months and can slide to unlock my wife's HTC Android phone. That point was useless, but yeah, Apple users are usually not hackish nor need all the customizations and power user options Android offers (without talking about rooting and custom ROMs world). This is probably similar to Windows/Mac vs Linux discussion, although still my wife has zero technological skills yet uses Ubuntu on her laptop with zero issues. I still think that Apple products are way overpriced but they still sell because of a perfect marketing hype campaign. It is true that Apple really excels at making the right product from existing ideas, but still overpriced, and IMHO highly overrated. It's just not worth the price. I would go for Android/Linux every time even if I didn't need the flexibility they offer.
As usual with these things: What about app/server security. Simple token verification is prone to abuse (malware) and spoofing is becoming a bigger issue on mobile only platforms than ever before.

Server abuse is difficult, but not impossible and since getting a banking licence usually does not verify any security measures, I'm wondering what they already did (or didn't) do.

(I'm well aware of the state-of-the-art, and the usual less than so, security of banking apps).
> I find putting an API in a header file and an implementation in a translation unit really helps me reduce time later on. It's an automatic API summary without needing to review your implementation. When I move on from one part of a program to another, I don't want to study my source code just to remember what the access is. Just show me the header. I miss header files in other languages.

`make doc` (maybe as part of your build process even), then view the autogenerated API documentation. This is at least a feature or extension of most languages. C++ even has a number of documentation suites (e.g. Doxygen, IIRC).

Furthermore, if you're using a "good" IDE, I would expect it to be able to provide you the same basic information you get from header files (i.e. method signature & names). It could at the very least have a "collapse function implementations" hotkey to allow you to view a source file as if it were essentially a header file.

I don't know, the fact that it's somewhat trivial to actually generate a .h file given a .c or .cpp file (look up LZZ - Lazy C++; it's not maintained, but it did exactly this) makes them seem pretty much useless to me.
A "middle man" isn't of dubious value and parasitic, the role is essential to connect producer and consumer, whether that be artist to listener, scientist to reader, teacher to student, or, in the case of news, witness or spokesperson to the rest of us.

But it's a role increasingly performed by technology, and the traditional media may be as obsolete now as other middle men.

Of course someone has to pay for that, but the service can be free for many users, paid for by alternative revenue models.
What I'm afraid is less bureaucratic and more efficient totalitarianism. The bureaucracy may actually be a safety mechanism: the government can't go to the extremes because it'd be buried in paper.

Whereas in electronic surveillance and control...
But if you take away cash people will simply invent their own non-fiat currency to do their shady business or giving tax-free presents from grandma to grandson. In the end people will simply use silver and gold coins again, you can't just take away those.
Here is a nice talk their founder did at London Hacker News Meetup https://vimeo.com/136918188
New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors
I didn't know Bill Ackerman, or his fund, before this battle.

While I agree with Ackerman completely, I think at this point, he should take his short position off the table.

Bring down Herbalife down for moral reasons. We need morality. I didn't know Ackerman was only 49. I thought he was much older. I think Ackerman might have a political future, if he desires politics? Maybe, he just doesn't care about how that short looks. I thought it looked o.k., until today.

I'm not a fan of financial activism. Positive, or negative activism.

I am so tired of the poor/naieve being exploited. This financial activism is not going away; it's just getting started.

(Suprised George Sorrows was in this mess. He one of the rich boys I actually like. He's be of the few rich boys who tells the truth. He once said, while being interviewed on his yacht, 'I owe all of my success to my father, and his fortune. I would be a nobody--if it wasen't for his money, and guidance.')
Here's a video from a similar talk at Golang UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFJkLfujOts
Is that a actual question? Because everything needs a responsive Website! Visitors are from something like 30-70% mobile users, depending on the sector.
The Department of Energy awarded Carrier $5.1 million in clean energy tax credits in December 2013.

The announcement said the money would allow Carrier to “expand production at its Indianapolis facility to meet increasing demand for its eco-friendly condensing gas furnace product line.”

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/carrier-receiv...
Very interesting. As far as Mondo goes, it's great so far - am on the alpha program and have been using it for almost a month now and very impressed by it. Using it abroad was the main selling point, as that's always a mess otherwise.
Basically how banking should be in a modern day and age, even though it's only with a prepaid debit card at the moment.
How My Brother and I Took an Instagram Account from 0 to 3000+ Followers
The main advantage of C (and, to a lesser, but still very significant degree, C++) in this field -- besides the number of people who speak it -- is the availability of a great deal of mature, well-tested compilers, static analysis tools and so on.

We have about 40 years of experience writing C compilers today (and we still screw it up sometimes; C++ is... well, I mean, we have about 30 years of experience writing C++ compilers, but those are still in the "mostly right" state). Many subtleties of the language are well understood and many problems have had idiomatic, well-known, widely-used solutions for decades now.

Ada would be a good choice for such projects but for the relative flimsiness of its ecosystem. It's a great language, but its development is fairly underfunded, and back when all this stuff was happening, its future was very uncertain (it still is, I guess).

And when I say "fairly underfunded" and with a "very uncertain" future, you should understand that I mean "it used to be funded by the DoD, but with various levels of commitment" and "only a few companies, most of them government contractors, and maybe a few state institutions along with a small, but enthusiastic community were pushing for it".

Its fame on HN and Reddit may not indicate it, but Rust fares even worse in this regard. Ten years from now, Rust may not even exist anymore.

It's not only about technical merit. Projects like these would benefit a lot from being written in Ada (and Rust, too, I guess -- it's a great language), provided that there were such a well-developed ecosystem around either of them. But there isn't. E.g. when choosing their static analysis tools, these guys settled for the top 5 solutions. Top 5! They evaluated a bunch of programs and settled for the best 5. I don't think there are 5 static analysis solutions for Rust in total (and I'm pretty sure there are only two or three for Ada that have been maintained after 1999 or so).
TeXmacs has visual macros.
Also, the computer should not spontaneously combust. And it shouldn't try to bite my hand off. And it shouldn't morph into a soul-devouring monstrosity either. In other words, there is an infinite list of things that your/my/any program shouldn't cause. Good luck making user stories for all of them.
Thanks a lot for the list mate! It'll definitely be a huge help!
Needs change and buildings age.

The City of New York is just building a new police station in an area that's been fully built up for roughly 150 years. http://www.dezeen.com/2016/02/01/big-bjarke-ingles-new-york-... I expect the Vancouver police department also ends up paying its officers extra to cover the boomtown rents.

(Not just police, of course. All public services.)
[I work at Mondo!] Investment will be at the same valuation as our VC investor - £24m pre-money.

We'll be releasing details of terms & share-class next week before the investment goes live. There are a few regulatory questions we need to settle first.
TeXmacs doesn't use TeX. Rather, it has its own real-time typesetting engine that produces output of quality comparable to TeX.
Is this really relevant in any way? If celebrities want to play the internet game where everybody can answer they should get used to people complaining about insubstantial stuff.

All these mainstream culture wars are getting more and more boring as they go on. In the 90s everybody stayed in their own corners and did their own things, now every single small thing has to be relevant for everybody and all audiences want to be pandered by every single small corner of the media.
It's a summary of the talk at https://vimeo.com/84991949 , where Holzmann just mentions the use of grep verbally, not giving the exact commands to run.
Yeah i get that, i'm remarkably better then i used to be, but i still feel that its not enough. Honestly i think i'll only be contempt when i cut off everything non work related from my life to be more productive
Show HN: The Top Fives – now with Dark Mode
Keep on changing your tune. Every developer you know uses a macbook pro because they don't want to set up a linux distro, but not all of those macbook pros are running OSX? What are the non-OSX macbook pros running? ^BSD? Just as much fiddling as linux. Windows? Now that is a rare creature.

> most [broad demographic] are [negative attribute]

Sure they are. At least the GP openly recognises that they might be projecting.
> "The color coding green/yellow/red had a psychological effect. The software developers worked really hard to make all the buttons go green."

There is a possible risk element of Cargo Cult'ing here. I would hope that all programmers understood why the buttons weren't green. It sounds like they would have, having been certified, and in an environment that lives and breathes code safety, but it is always worth being aware that metrics like that can have hidden consequences.
Most compilers should give a warning about this.

Of course warnings work until you have source from something external that throws lots of warnings that you can't reliably turn off (possibly due to completely broken and ignored warning bugs in ICC for example).
The fact that Mondo does not yet currently have a banking license in the UK is a big risk. If you're thinking of investing consider the value of that investment should the licence application fail.
The way I've often viewed it is that (to exaggerate a bit), you have to mental bandwidth to either figure out your own route or to carefully listen to and follow instructions (whether from a GPS or a person). It can be hard to listen to instructions and evaluate in each case whether you should follow them or not.
Alternate Class Warfare: Workers vs. Looters
I wonder why you got downvoted for this, for me security is a key concern for the challenger banks.

What Mondo is (from my reading) trying to do is very cool but quite ambitious. A new bank in 2016 will be a serious target for quite sophisticated attackers so they're going to have to do app/inf/ops security very well do avoid damage.

On the flip-side they have the once in a lifetime golden opportunity of a green-field deployment to actually get security baked into their systems before they're live without a load of legacy cruft holding them back.
Most of which was originally developed to fulfil some government tender; space flight is not exactly the paragon of commercial innovation.
Yeah, you know why? Because developer is the new cool, and you can't be cool enough without an Apple logo. People that really don't care about cool don't use Apple, e.g. Stallman, Linus. One really good dev I knew for a couple of days (he was a customer of ours) had to use a Mac because of company policy, he just put installed a Linux on it and put a sticker over the Apple logo.
And I did spend 10 hours to set up a Linux distro because I cared actually learn something about how an OS worked. Then I made my own just for the fun. Now most Linux distros install and work flawlessly in 10 minutes. I use Ubuntu at work and I don't have any major complaint in over 3 years: it has all UNIX tools a REAL developer needs (no need to install Macports or whatever for really basic tools) and even if you need anything is as simple as apt-get install (and this since I started using Linux back in 2002). When online stores first appeared (e.g. Apple Store) all people were amazed, and we Linux users were "meh".
And developers can be technically inept. I know a lot of those that don't even know how a network or an OS works, because they don't care. From my experience, and generally speaking, those are the kind of unhackish devs that use Mac.
O no, what's gonna happen to gNewSense?
Top Wireframing Tools for Mobile Apps
550 million users and less than $100 million in revenue.

A penny and a half per user per month.

This company turns 10 next year.
Eh, I don't want to go back to the internet of the late 1990's, which is the earliest I knew. As much as I dislike some aspects of today's internet, it's massively better than what we had in the past - both in content and in what can be done online.
How Twitter will save itself from annihilation
Windows? Now that is a rare creature.

Not in my experience. At most .Net/Windows dev events I've been to Macbooks running windows are hardly uncommon.
I don't get attached to "devices" they are tools, "means to an end", something most iPhone users forget
Can you or anyone else using the alpha give a bit more detail about what you love about it?

How is the app compared to say Barclays or some other mainstream bank? Is everything via the app rather than the website?

They have an API I think which is pretty cool for a bank, and I'm seriously interested. Disappointed to hear they won't be doing business accounts too, but I guess they want to stay focussed for now.
I've been using their card for about 2 weeks, and I'll be investing whatever I can afford for sure! It's a fantastic product.
New Zealand has Callaghan Innovation, who are a relatively bureaucracy-free grant provider. They're very fond of paying companies to take on interns for projects, which is good for the company, and good for training up developers.

[0] https://www.callaghaninnovation.govt.nz/
Will they allow customers to buy and sell bitcoins without freezing their accounts? That would be nice and novel for a UK bank.
I, for one, don't feel that technology is doing a good job in regards to finding music that I like, deciding which (academic) articles are worth reading, or which things are newsworthy and/or important for me to know. That's what publishers are for and that's what they'll stay for, in the near future at least.
I'm looking at it from the UX / motivation side. There's no trigger to change the time manually and people are great at forgetting things when there's no external stimulus. I see the issue not as people failed to adjust their timepiece, but as people relying on technology which relies on them to remember to do actions after events which they passively observed. (plane landing)

Theoretically it's the same thing, but in practice "don't make me think" applies. If we can make watches adjust themselves, it's a really good idea to do that.
This Android Trojan steals banking creds and wipes your phone
C is the most widely used and deployed language in the world and it has a very long tenure. I would trust it much more with billions of dollars at stake than a less proven language like Rust. And as a C programmer, it's really not a bad language, and it makes sense for this application.
Highly configurable WordPress plugin for proofreading texts
Is the white noise a good choise to make the work done?
Fish Shell Design Principles
> Unfortunately, I don't know any good english books on the subject

Absent a better recommendation from someone else, I'll suggest "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" by Adelle Davis. I regard it as a databook on the components in your body.
When I completed Hackerrank tests for my last role, I used an IDE and then copied and pasted the code into the browser.

This gave the benefit of a familiar working environment, and I could quickly TDD as needed. I highly recommend this approach when faced with these tests. That and working out in advance an appropriate way to accept input.
AMD Will Soon Support FreeSync on Linux with Their New AMDGPU DAL Driver
https://github.com/imageworks/pystring
Someone just posted a write-up https://medium.com/@johnwmidgley/going-fullmondo-8a536bc758a...
Why interest rates are a powerful tool with Bitcoin
The Problem with Customer Support
Not sure what happened but I kinda miss some(many actually) of the tumblr blogs that I had in my bookmarks, most of them return a 404.
This so much.

If your Agile developers follow user stories to the exclusion of common sense, you should probably fire them now.
On a side note, apple got 17.0.0.0/8, only a handful of companies can compete with that.
Rolls Royce is now owned by BMW. If you're calling BMW "not all that great", I wonder what your standards are :)
>We aren’t a bank yet, but we are applying to the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)
and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for authorisation to become one.

I don't want to be negative, but this is a huge consideration.

After 2008, unfortunately, regulations have made it much more difficult to incorporate a bank and comply with the law. Is a million enough for that?
> Keep on changing your tune. Every developer you know uses a macbook pro because they don't want to set up a linux distro, but not all of those macbook pros are running OSX?

That's reaching - you know full well I wasn't talking about distros like Ubuntu, hence the 'no one has heard of' part.

> Sure they are. At least the GP openly recognises that they might be projecting.

Projecting their l33tness, which literally no one cares about or wants to here. Simplicity is better, there is nothing inferior about something being simple.
IMHO HN is more effective, watch out for the Whoishiring thread and be sure to apply like hell. I'm currently on a remote contract Gig which I got via HN a few months ago. Have also gotten one time jobs via HN's who is freelancing.