skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C created this wrong perception that you need lots unsafe code, due to how it does strings and vectors.

In all safe alternatives to C, just like Rust sure you need unsafe at the Assembly FFI level and hardware integration like IO ports and interrupt handling.

But everything else can be just plain safe code.
Probably the single best essay on startup advice that has ever been written: Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing

http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/06/03/jessica-livings...
Expensive wine is not always good, cheap wine is not always bad. One of my favourite wines is a ten bucks a bottle; it's more expensive for me now because I need to order it by the case and ship it across the country to get it, but so it goes.

If somebody brings a bottle of wine to dinner, unless you specifically planned the meal to go with a specific bottle of wine (or if they specifically say that this bottle is meant to be opened at a certain time or for a certain occasion), open the bottle they brought. Otherwise, you're sending one of two messages:

1) I'm certain that this wine you brought as a gift is so bad, I don't even want to bother drinking it.

2) I'm certain that this wine you brought as a gift is so good, I don't want to share it with you at all.

Neither message is a good look. If it's bad wine, open it, share the bad experience, and joke about how horrible the wine is. You've all learned something. If it's good wine, open it, share the good experience, and marvel over how great the bottle is.
I am reminding myself of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/386/, but at the risk of wasting our time...

You said that in Somalia, the government is accountable to the citizenry. Yet you suggest that that's legitimate ("...ultimately to the citizenry as a whole..."). If I personally object to a law, do I have any recourse? What if my town does? My state? My region? At what point does it become immoral for the government to ignore change requests?

The door analogy is clever, but inaccurate. It is not possible to transmit door keys (or battering rams) via email, and use them to simultaneously bash open the doors of millions of people. Creating a method by which a phone can be cracked weakens the security of the phone for all users, including innocent users. So the FBI is asking to weaken the security of all phone users. The "plausible mechanism" would be "hacker pays off an apple dev for a copy of the hackable OS".

The last point doesn't make sense to me. Firstly, in a hypothetical libertarian legal system, corporations would not have a right to self-defense, or any other rights, as they are not humans. Even in individual cases, any level of violence in self defense is definitely not justified. When you said "...Apple would be justified in torturing and executing the FBI agents on their property...", that's saying that trespassing warrants murder, which I do not claim.
Share things with your neighbours
Quantum Computing with Ordinary CMOS Transistors
It really isn't backdoored, though. Bada55 made a legit point that curves shouldn't be required to derive from simple math constants, but it does less of a good job showing that math constants are themselves necessarily untrustworthy. You'd need an awfully funky looking set of constants to get the degree of freedom bada55 proposes.
I grew up in a house with lots of stuff and share Derek's aversion to clutter. My solution is to aim for quality over quantity.

I think there's still a case for keeping a good set of tools around. For us software engineers, most tools are virtual with the exception of our computers and / or writing utensils. I don't view it as any different from someone mechanically inclined keeping their physical tools around. Same deal with hiking or camping gear.

I still find it hard to dispose of books. Not so much because I want to keep the physical book but because the book is a physical manifestation of an idea I respect and want to keep a physical record of it in my life. (I even own both physical and electronic versions of some of my favorites to re-read when traveling.)
College costs are decided by the market, and right now there is no shortage of those who can get their hands on loans, and there is not much limit to the size of loans they can get, so prices have to go up until supply and demand hit equilibrium.

So it absolutely does need to be expensive, because scarce resources such as an education have an inverse relationship between degree value and number of degree holders. Otherwise it will be soon enough that our advanced engineering degrees are worth much less than before. Software Engineering average salary doesn't even keep up with inflation any more so in my opinion we are already seeing these effects.

Also I would argue a lot of the worthless degrees we see today are worthless due to both the volume of the holders of those degrees as well as the fact that they are premised on a field which doesn't have much practical value but if they were scarce they would be worth much more in the job market.
I believe "turning a 4 line for loop with accumulators into a single line of code" increases clarity for all of the above. Do you disagree?

If you have a coworker who doesn't understand it, pair them with someone more senior until they get up to speed. If they are simply cognitively incapable of understanding the concept of mapping a function, in my opinion they are not capable of becoming a good developer.

Yes, there are times when reducing lines of code reduces clarity. But in my experience they are rare and exceptional. Far more real world code lacks clarity due to verbosity than from being overly terse.
It's the unicorn crash. It's mostly affecting later stages of hugely valued companies. So far the impact in the seed and A markets and more reasonably valued companies is minimal.

Whether that changes depends on a bunch of factors. The two biggest are the overall health of the economy and how economically incestuous high-tech has become. If write-downs and possibly failures among the unicorns trickles down a lot to smaller ventures and investors, it will get worse. Otherwise it will be mostly isolated to that segment of the market.

Edit: check the other response to the parent-- looks like we might indeed be seeing a pullback in angel/seed.
The problem is that they didn't develop their views by really thinking about the issues. They got some focus-group tested soundbite that sounds good to them but they don't really understand it. It's hard to discuss then.
The line between tool and stuff is quite often blurred.

Lots of tools exist only to facilitate a very specific task and can be replaced by a less specialized one. Its not always as efficient but most of the time its enough. A knife can peel, mince, cut, etc. It can easily replace lots of 'stuff' in the kitchen.
> we were even arguing about endianness for God's sake

Why is that? Where you scared that developers might have made mistake while typing constants in their implementations?
A person as you describe, complete devoid of nuance, would not likely be a very agreeable one. Luckily most people think in varying shades of grey. Lots of us are more "grey" than we think, but you'd never know it unless you talk to people away from the Internet.
I'm slowly reading this with a lot of attention, will soon have a better idea of the proposal. Until there, take a look at this https://github.com/floooh/fips (and yes, I know about CPM, Biicode, Conan, Hunter, etc..)
Resizer: an interactive viewer for testing your responsive UI
I think the attitude that rolling your own crypto "is serious deep ninja-god black magic voodoo stuff that is beyond mere mortals" has a lot to do with why we've been blythly taking NSA's deliberately broken crap.

While I know it's hard, very hard, we shouldn't be discouraging people from making up new stuff, let a thousand flowers bloom around the NSA's walled garden .... what we should be doing is getting rigorous about testing and verification of new crypto be it from the NSA or the good guys
Vim is adding native package support
Bill Gates on Charlie Rose, February 22, 2016
Because there is a little-known IETF/IRTF bylaw that no important standards debate can take place without relitigating endianness. You might think I am joking, but I am not. It's Postel's Second Law.
Hear, hear! I agree with my esteemed colleague on HN. Clean energy is important. After 60 years of warnings, let's be happy that Bill Gates has stepped up.

http://youtu.be/m-AXBbuDxRY

Now back to that Reader mode thing. Firefox and IE have them too.

Can anyone guess why clean energy hasn't been solved? Look at the chart in the 1950's and 1960s. We were barely doing any damage compared to today.
start->command->fail

(command as in command.com)
Other nerdy folks will be happy to grant that an icon is merely that and not intended to be a perfect embodiment of a molecule.
System Profiling: Ohai and the Chef Node Object: Part I
15-year old bug in Firefox bugtracker
"I will no longer be supporting Firefox on my site. I will [cite] this bugzilla entry as why"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790
That's an interesting thought.

I wonder how safe the internal apple devs are that could build what the FBI is demanding. If the FBI can identify them, they might "disappear" if the FBI doesn't get their way from Apple.

But nah, our government would never do that, right? Only China and Russia, etc. Wish I really believed that.
Not that it alters your point in any way whatsoever (except to date third party engine-reuse even further), but Hexen used a variant Doom engine, not quake. Hexen 2 was the one that used the Quake Engine.
We've had a lot of great feedback on this article since it was published on our blog last week -- check it out!
> ~2x-3x or more premium

Sometimes you get lucky. I booked 1st class for my xmas trip home last year, and it was only $100 more than the comfort seat upgrade and 1 checked bag that I was going to spend anyway.
0xffff2 - I can't reply directly to you for some reason but I went to UC Berkeley many years ago and the third undergrad course, CS 61C, laid the basic groundwork for beginning to understand CPUs. Here's the syllabus from the most recent semester. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp16/
Follows the launch of the Flurry App last week:
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/yahoos-flurry-unveils-rede...
Getting annoyed at people for choosing to give you gifts has to be the very definition of 'first world problems'.
I'm having trouble understanding your definition of "refactoring", then.

When I refactor, it's almost always to eliminate repetition and make the code more concise. But doesn't the same thing happen in a functional program? If you find the same code twice, refactor into a single function.
Yup. Wishlists are a wonderful solution to this problem. You indicate which specific item you want, perhaps with a justification for why, and someone has the option of getting it for you, or not. Or just giving you some cash to go towards getting that one particular item.

Of course, gifts in the $300+ range are relatively rare, so most musicians won't usually have to worry about someone getting them the wrong, but high enough quality you can't return it, item.
It may sound exaggerated but when I think about it, every interaction with german government sponsored software I had, has been rather terrible. Admittedly, it weren't that many occassions, but in comparison enterprise software generally felt like progressive and forward thinking as hell.

I think you have a very valid point here. Still, their intentions are worrying.
Does anyone currently use Fabric? And if so, have you moved on to integrate MoPub Twitter-ad-network functionality? I'm curious how adoption has gone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11161388 (in this page)

It's not only lawyer's trick, it's actually something pretty basic in persuasion's toolkit.
Get back in the designated free-speech zone.
My entire git workflow is based on these tutorials (don't seem to need much else): https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching... and http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Anyone knows what would be most usefull outside the scope of the tutorials above?
Higher altitude means lower air pressure, simple as that. Remember, evaporative equilibrium is directly related to pressure. Additional factors involved in evaporation don't help either: though not perfectly universal, usually higher altitudes are also more arid as well, which further increases the rate of evaporation, as do higher wind speeds if you're outdoors. Combined though and at 1800-2000m above sea level for example you can easily see water loss from perspiration and exhalation double, which over the course of a day adds up to a significant amount of water even without any other activities. In general at low to medium-high altitudes dehydration is a much much more common issue then reduced oxygen, and some of the symptoms can be confused.
I own very few things and live with a roommate in a furnished apartment. I am minimal to a fault EXCEPT when it comes to books. I have dozens and dozens of them. I can't seem to be able to let them go.
You have a point, but why not disincentive their behavior by just blocking their number? That's way easier than setting up an automated prank answer system.

But I guess that's not as exciting, no "entertainment" there.
Poorly, see https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Benchmark-with-other-e...

Primarily due to the use of asm.js. I intend to implement a JIT similar to QEMU's tcg as soon as Web Assembly supports it: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FutureFeat...
> However, I think it can be proven but once it is, what will there be to know?

If reality is a computer simulation I can think of a multitude of other questions about reality:

- Can we communicate "outside" of the simulation?

- Is the simulation a product of intelligence that is intentionally running the simulation? Or is it a mere by-product of a higher-order universe?

- By studying the simulation in great enough detail, is there anything we can learn about the "outside" universe?

- Is the "outside" simulation a turing machine? Can it compute a higher class of computational problems?

- Are the simulations infinite? Is the "outside" also a simulation? Is it simulations all the way down — or all the way up? Is there a "real" reality?

- If its simulations all the way down, how did the first simulation get started?

- If there is a "real" reality we get to start all of science over at square one studying this new reality.

This is a rough initial list, but I'm sure there's an endless number of questions to be asked and answered about reality even if we prove its a simulation.
Thanks! That's a wonderful compliment. Email & introduce yourself sometime.
I think you have proven my point. I'm talking about this:

void something(const char* const s);

Maybe I'm extrapolating here, but it surprised me.
Chinese Factories Turn to Robots Due to Lack of Workers
Jason Calacanis talks AI with the founder of x.ai
Save this for 4chan.
Microsoft re-wrote their C runtime library in C++, taking advantage of the language features for writing safer code.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2014/06/10/the-great...
FYI it's built using Swift and ReactiveCocoa. They put up all the dependencies licenses in Settings so I made a list of the packages they use https://gist.github.com/ropiku/b259f35060a40eab1597.
They'd be buying the users.
This seems like a great opportunity for African countries to build on their energy infrastructure which would both generate revenue for governments and provide a stable industrial environment for development. It sounds like a critical missing component in Africa's economy. Although this would also depend on the public's ability to pay for monthly/yearly energy fees which might depend on subsidies.

I've read a few articles mentioning how Africa has been inspired by China in recent years who focused on infrastructure as a base for domestic growth instead of just exports or raw materials.

I can't imagine the struggle it must be to survive without access to energy and clean water. Our household recently had our pipes burst from freezing and were nearly at a breaking point after three days without water. Worse yet is the occasional black out. So I'm very sympathetic to this cause.

Bill and Melinda are doing some great work.

Sidenote:

> Changes in weather often mean that their crops won’t grow because of too little rain or too much rain. That sinks them deeper into poverty. That’s particularly unfair because they’re the least responsible for emitting CO2, which is causing the problem in the first place.

Is this really true? I thought farms were responsible for the most generation of CO2 and pollutants? At least in North America livestock accounts for something like 50% of the pollution (aka "cow farts"), even more so than oil/coal. The worlds obsession with meat is actually more harmful to the environment than cars/gasoline... but this is never popularly advertised thanks to efforts of the livestock industry and willful blindness by government agencies.
Right. Hence "nothing up my sleeve" numbers. It's hard to fit a backdoor into Pi.
> racist remarks which are the actual cause

That's very convenient.
They should rename "Google search" into "Google advertisement search". Since when I search on Google I just get ads above the fold. This is a slight inconvenience for me and but significant inconvenience for my mother in law.

I cannot judge whether this is good or bad from point of view of Google.
Not sure about GP but I avoid Heathrow because the UK requires me to have a transit visa just to fly through. Most other EU countries don't.
@add.register(int)
def _(a, b):
print("First argument is of type ", type(a))

Is that the preferred style? Won't '_' makes it hard for syntax-based tools like an IDE to implement features like "go to function"?

I know in my case I do C-S or grep "def abc" to find a function starting with "abc". That seems much more difficult if '_' becomes the standard name for this case.
Hmm in the aggregate, we reported a pretty sharp decline in 3Q and 4Q 2015 for angel/seed round count - http://imgur.com/CSqVOVQ

I don't think the sky is falling, but people are tightening up on the number of deals being done, there's no doubt about that.
Not sure who your issue is with, me or the author of the article?
Ok, but which idea is not simple?
I have to ask, where do you draw the line? I had a team lead that disliked me writing things like (in C#, been a bit so forgive errors):

List<AClass> original; // perhaps as a parameter to the function
List<AClass> filtered = original.Where(x => x.Field > 10);

Arguing that I should instead have just used for loops (showed him foreach and he agreed that that was better, at least) like:

List<AClass> filtered = new List<AClass>();
foreach(x in original)
if(x.Field > 10) filtered.Add(x);

Ok, so it's only two lines longer (three if you split the if and its effect, 5 if you also add in braces, 7 if you put opening braces on their own lines). The `Where` version is not that complicated, and only requires understanding one (potentially) new concept for programmers, namely anonymous functions.

Wouldn't the briefer, but still clear, code be preferable for maintenance?
I like when people buy me nice film.
Well, you appear to have a point. I was thinking that since, you know, planes tend not to have a bunch of unused seats lying around, the situation may just have not reached that point, but that's definitely not true.
In case anyone else was confused, Fabric is also the name of the CSS framework from Microsoft for developing Office 365 add-ins. https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-fa...
I'd like to emphasize that I have absolutely nothing against gear.

But I'm a little surprised that people continue to insist that no, one really needs lots of stuff.

It's just not true that you need a huge variety of stuff for over $1,000 to bake bread. Think about it. The history of bread goes back thirty thousand years. You don't need a cupcake tray. You don't even need a baguette pan to make decent baguettes. I'm not making this up: I baked bread nearly every day for months using nothing special.

With podcasts, I again resist the idea that to go beyond "superficial" you need anything except a phone. I've recorded audio on my iPhone lots of times. In a quiet room, it works fine. There are plenty of very serious podcasts with people who participate by phone, and that's just fine.

Again with running. Nope, you don't need that stuff. How did people run a hundred thousand years ago? It's a fundamental bodily function. I have a pair of Merrell Trail Gloves that I also use as walking shoes in the summer, and they're just fine for running, and no other equipment is necessary at all.

I program just fine with just a laptop.

Again—it's all just preference and availability. But you can't say that everyone needs this stuff, because they don't. And I resist the notion because I think it can prevent people from getting started with the stuff they actually have.
I used to work as a telemarketer because there was a recession on and that was the only job I could find after months of looking. I was literally a couple weeks away from being homeless, so I wasn't much inclined to care if I was causing hassle. It's legal, there's a market for it, and I need to eat.

If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors, you go right ahead. But if you think you're teaching that telemarketer a lesson or somehow punishing them, you're not. They won't even remember you at the end of the day. You are one of 100+ calls that telemarketer has to make every day. And if you don't say the magic words "please take my name off your list", they will call you again next week. So you're really just wasting your own time.
We also have Facebook and similar social networks now, though I don't use them. All kinds of social networks reminded people about birthdays ever since the era of PHP forums.
I don't know why but this was really moving. Upsetting, a little, maybe, but so moving.
According to this intro https://docker.wistia.com/medias/mdseh9gv6v, 200 out of 230 people working for Docker Inc are engineers. I like the ratio.
Leap Motion CTO live demos Orion at SFVR #12
Anyone have an idea if this means anything other than trying to cash out an investment before real estate prices potentially decline? Does this make them a better/worse target as an acquisition? Or could this be generating cash so Z could acquire someone else?
Brain activity is not a precise meassure, not in terms of fMRI, which just shows an increased blood flow.

The hypothesis is obvious on the other hand. However, individuals that would submit to a test on psychedelics is likely the type that gets easily exited just for the sake of it and doesn't. Or brain activity doesn't corralate with actually functioning correctly. I' expect a failing subsystem would respond with increased activity, simple feedback. Eventually some controle unit would shut it off or the subsystem would keep working but a bit unusual, despite increased blood flow.
Amen, it's a landgrab right now.
Why? Foreign governments can't prosecute (or persecute) you.
Meta: Recommend changing the HN title to "Typesafe (makers of Scala) Changes Name to Lightbend".

Personally, I am very interested in Scala, but didn't immediately recall that Typesafe was the company that owns it when I saw the article title. The conversation here is valuable (about roadmap, developer sentiment, etc), so don't want folks to miss out.
It's a neat building. It sits in the design center of San Francicso, and was originally built as a mall. Here is some of the history.

http://www.syserco.com/projects/zynga
Twitter's mobile dev tools are fantastic. Love that they have this on iOS now.
Detecting intoxication is a problem, but how is that different from before legalization? If someone was smoking illegally before, you still wouldn't be able to determine if they were driving stoned. Unless you're saying any amount of weed in their system should result in a DUI, even if it could have been from a week ago.