skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> with instruction- and register-level hacks to save the 128 bytes of memory, with no source control aside from sneaker net, how many developers can reasonably work on it at the same time? 1? 2?

I don't know from first-hand experience, but my impression has always been that the main game loop would be virtually impossible to develop as a team effort.

To give a bit of back story for those that are unaware, the 2600 did not have a frame buffer for storing the current contents of the screen. To save memory, what it did instead is use a line buffer. This was a small amount of memory on the graphics controller chip (Stella) that it used (in combination with some minimal sprite logic) to render the current scan line on the screen. To display anything other than vertical stripes on the screen, the CPU had to update the line buffer and sprite registers for every change. (This is why you see vertical stripes when the 2600 crashes... the CPU isn't updating Stella, so it just keeps rendering one scan line for the whole screen.)

The other consequence of this line-buffer design is that to execute, the CPU had to run in lock step with the display update process. Developers had to know how many CPU cycles it took to render a line and frame of the screen, and write code that executed in just that many cycles. Otherwise, the CPU's display update would happen out of phase with the refresh process and you'd wind up with garbage on the screen. It is hard for me to imagine how a team of two developers could collaborate on such a small and sensitive section of code.

Another way to look at this is that developers that programmed the 2600 were almost working as hardware designers more than software designers. The 2600 CPU was essentially a super-complicated state machine sitting aside the graphics update logic. (Later Atari PC's offloaded display update to a separate chip called Antic that could pull data from a frame buffer, etc.)
4G definitions are still largely being fought over, and you're gonna try and jam "5G" down my throat?

The entire article is complete speculation, and the sad part is that they don't even talk about the cooler ideas they're coming up with for the specification.

For anyone wondering about 5G I think the coolest thing they've discussed so far is breaking down the different use cases (people in home, people traveling on trains, vs working in an office building) because these put completely different types of strain on a network. They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."

Honestly I'm surprised that didn't happen with 4G, I know there are things like Clearwire (I think they were bought by sprint?) but it wasn't a huge move from physical infrastructure.

For some more realistic info on what's happening:

https://www.ngmn.org/uploads/media/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0....

EDIT:

On a small note, this is "finalized" pdf but in reality it will change when implementation occurs.
It's interesting to use languages that do not harshly penalize recursion by imposing stack size limits. The upcoming GNU Guile 2.2 release, a Scheme implementation, has a dynamically expandable stack so algorithms that are naturally recursive can be implemented that way rather than contorted into iterative form to please the stack limit god.

For example, in Guile 2.0, this natural definition of 'map' will cause the stack to overflow on large lists:

(define (map proc lst)
(if (null? lst)
'()
(cons (proc (car lst))
(map proc (cdr lst)))))

The iterative solution is to construct the list backwards and reverse it as a final step:

(define (map proc lst)
(let loop ((lst lst)
(result '()))
(if (null? lst)
(reverse result)
(loop (cdr lst) (cons (proc (car lst)) result)))))

There's no real gain here in terms of performance or readability. You trade a large stack for a large reverse operation at the end. Guile 2.2 allows a whole class of recursive algorithms that were not practical before because of the fixed size stack (like most languages I know of), and they perform well, too!

Needless to say I agree with this article. Recursion is an integral part of computing, and more programming languages should provide better support for it. Embrace it, don't avoid it!
Don't know if you'll like this but these do it for me

DJ Apsara, After Dark.
https://soundcloud.com/search?q=dj%20apsara%20afterdark
Are you seriously suggesting Windows doesn't know the concept of UTC time? And secondly suggesting that fiddling with timezone offsets is an expensive conversion?
> People aren't going to reflexively favor technological progress for its own sake when they see it undermining things they care about (jobs, security, etc).

Correct me if I'm wrong it sounds like you are saying encryption is undermining security? It might be you have that backwards?
> I'm all for stopping the bad guys, but "justice" seems to be entirely arbitrary if you look close enough.

History and justice is written by the victors.
This distinction is generally made when economists think about advertising too -- for example: http://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/f...

Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.
>The digital world is very different from the physical world. In the physical world you can destroy something and it’s gone. But in the digital world, the technique, once created, could be used over and over again, on any number of devices.

They leave out the fact that Apple would need to sign (literally, using their private key) every time it is used.

>Unfortunately, we learned that while the attacker’s iPhone was in FBI custody the Apple ID password associated with the phone was changed. Changing this password meant the phone could no longer access iCloud services.

Why can't Apple change the password back, reset the flag that says the password was changed, and have them turn it on again?
I last used TaxAct in 2011, and would still be using it but for an increasingly complicated business situation which necessitates lots of accountant time (one benefit of which is that form manipulation is thrown in for free). It's great. If any of you are doing uncomplicated W-2 or small business returns which don't have a gazillion moving parts, give it a spin; it's much better than the price suggests.

Edit to add: I'd be remiss if I didn't note "Small software company in Iowa which doesn't have a blog, didn't invent Rails, and which > 90% of HN has never heard of before has > $100 million in annual revenue." It's a great time to be alive, isn't it?
Well aren't most government orders given with the implicit assumption that if they are not carried out human beings may come to harm?
That would likely involve Uber admitting that their drivers are not, in fact, self-employed.
Good idea, I'll be sure to do that too!

To be fair though, I believe people are much more likely to see a product rating than a seller rating. As evidenced by the number of "unbiased" 5 star reviews.
I wonder if a GPS jammer could disable navigation to a location. The car relies on other systems for driving, but I imagine the GPS would still be used for locating the destination. Though in the future there would likely be other systems by which the cars could navigate. This could just lead to more trouble though.

If the car could take you to the police station, then it would probably take you other places in other emergency situations. For example, in this scenario, I wonder if faking a medical emergency to go to the hospital would override a police flag.

Why fear the police? They don't put you in prison, the courts do that. The police still have to operate under certain rules. If they don't follow those rules then they are wasting their efforts. What you would need to fear is a jacked up system behind the police.

This article doesn't have to be about the future. The police already have access to tools to intercept your cell phone conversations. If I were operating outside the law, I would be more worried about cell phone conversations than a taxi dropping me off at the front door of the station (unless I had a warrant for my arrest.)

For criminals, self driving cars would probably be safer than driving yourself assuming you aren't creating an alert by jumping in a car. The police would have less of an excuse to pull you over, potentially leading to a search of the vehicle if you are in a self driving car. I'm sure the police could come up with whatever excuse they like, but you would be less likely to attract attention.

Any why would the police operate like this? I'm sure they would be much more interested in allowing the person to go to the destination while collecting video and audio. It's not what we know which is scary, it's what we don't know.
Nice. Here's an Erlang version of your code, which I think
reads even more like math:

gcd(A, B) when B == 0 -> A;
gcd(A, B) when A < B -> gcd(B, A);
gcd(A, B) -> gcd(B, A rem B).

I also really appreciated the posting of more of Dijkstra's
thoughts (from rer0tsaz) above, in particular this line struck a chord:

When programming languages emerged, the "dynamic" nature of
the assignment statement did not seem to fit too well into the
"static" nature of traditional mathematics.

(Along those lines, Erlang's recasting of the equals sign as a
pattern matching operator felt so natural when I learned how it
worked.)

[Edit: zap redundant sentence.]
This letter comes off very strongly. It's as if they treat the government as just another customer. The way they describe their process for assisting law enforcement almost reads like their process for providing developer support:

> We also provide guidelines on our website for law enforcement agencies so they know exactly what we are able to access and what legal authority we need to see before we can help them.

The concerning portion of this letter is:

> Yes, it is certainly possible to create an entirely new operating system to undermine our security features as the government wants.

I have a feeling Apple is currently working on preventing updates to the Secure Enclave ROM from happening while a phone is locked (or at least ensuring the keys are wiped if it does happen while a phone is locked).
The year when Apple's rivals stopped copying the iPhone
You may enjoy this Jon Oliver bit:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Elected Judges (HBO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL7l-Uk3I8
Facebook Open Sources Wireless Gear
> With 5G, downloading feature-length movies could take less than five seconds.

> With 4G, downloading feature-length movies could take as long as eight minutes.

Am I wrong in thinking that an operator would prefer to keep their antenna busy for only 5 seconds instead of for 8 minutes? If this is the case, if they have enough bandwidth to the antenna, they should try to move people to 5G quickly.

But you still need 90 minutes to watch the movie and you probably reach the monthly cap with only a few movies, so maybe this is not the main use case for 5G. The reduced latency to 1 ms is much more interesting.
The analogy is not apt. A closer analogy is not a programmer - the doctor is in IT support ... and is dealing with a unique combination of bespoke hardware and software for each case ... and has no makers documentation available.
You can't assign a category to the tokens in something like "T * p" unless you know whether "T" is a type or not. Suppose you have the following line of code:

T *p;

It means one thing if it were preceded by this, making the line a variable declaration:

struct T;
typedef struct T T;

It means quite another if it were preceded by this, making the line an expression:

int T=5,p=0;

(This particular problem also affects C.)
Facebook sniffs at slow telcos, launches own Telecom Infrastructure Project
Over the next 20 years, how confident are you that you won't switch carriers and your carrier won't start to move any faster?
10 years of Varnish Cache
Hi there, author here, happy to answer any questions.
Facebook's Huge Plan to Shake Up Dull World of Telecoms
They mean from a usability perspective. Mint is famous for it's volume icon that includes album art for what's playing, various other info, and controls to let you pause/skip tracks. It's like a tiny music player in your task bar.

That said, no it should not excuse poor security.
The Lost Wax Method of Rewriting Software
OCP Welcomes the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)
How Nazi's Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind
There has to be a way to reduce costs somehow. Is there any real reason besides greed for data caps to remain low/costly? Simultaneous usage (with everybody at peak speed) is/has to be planned for (assuming most plans reset at 1st of the month). That network is just sitting there costing money, why not utilize it more and increase revenue?
Personally, I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. That seems more realistic, though I don't doubt that the Bay Area will be happily basking in this 5G niceness by the time it happens.

I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England, my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data.

I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time.

It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to have it as a priority to supply internet.
>They're trying to come up with sub specifications to encompass more types of network use cases rather than thinking "xG is for cellular phones" it'll be more like 5Gx is spectrum/protocol for home internet, 5Gy is the spectrum/protocol the phone uses. Although from a marketing prospective this will sound like "Bring 5G to your home."

Intermingling the data and transport layers initially strikes me as a bad thing. What am I missing?
Installing Ubuntu GNOME and then installing Cinnamon would give you a nearly identical setup. Cinnamon is basically just a replacement for GNOME Shell. You could also install Nemo if you prefer that file manager.
Ask HN: Why do JavaScript developers favour many, tiny dependencies?
The more I delve in to the world of Javascript the more I come across projects such as:

* is-root: https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-root

* is-even https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

Often these are whole npm modules that comprise of a single line of code.

I've never seen anything quite like it when working with Java and Python.

Can anyone explain why? It seems to me adding a dependency I have to suck across the network, that may introduce breaking changes (or just disappear) is something that shouldn't be taken lightly. Doing it for a single line of code (that realistically won't need to change anyway) is borderline insane.

Am I being too paranoid or am I missing something?
I asked for privacy and decentralization, Google gave "clouded" SMS.
DataTau seems somewhat abandoned. I would suggest the subreddits https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning or https://www.reddit.com/r/thisisthewayitwillbe
China military able to detect U.S. F-22 stealth fighter jets
> The argument here is that once Apple creates that second key the effort required to steal it is significantly lowered. You can't steal something that doesn't exist yet.

The key exists. If someone were to steal it, they could sign any version of iOS they want.

I think the resources required to successfully steal Apple's private key for signing updates, which is presumably locked down very robustly, is an order of magnitude greater than the resources required to modify iOS to remove the erase and timeout features. The latter is very difficult especially without the source code, but it's hard for me to believe that it's harder than stealing Apple's key.
I am, although I use the Xfce version. Back in the day, before I learned to program, I used distributions like Arch, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. that generally required manual configuration and knowledge of the system and Linux in general. I realize this seems backwards, but these days I'd rather spend my time developing things than configuring my workstation. My interest in computers has moved from administration to creation, and using an operating system that takes care of the former allows me to better spend my time doing the latter.

That said, in light of Mint's issues I'm seriously considering moving back to Xubuntu or some other disto that has Xfce as a first class citizen. I'd be interested in suggestions.
> I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself;

No, not at all. That's the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell.

Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter's market to lose. So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage.

However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users. Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority. This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-s...
Getting Rid of Big Currency Notes Could Help Fight Crime
Wmail – Desktop client for Gmail and Google Inbox
Startups and Antifragility
This. Because of Linux Mint, I don't even notice my Operating System anymore(which is a good thing).

Everybody else here is recommending 'safer' options, but seriously I don't want to pay the cost of fighting with my OS (which is what every Linux experience has been for me since 1996). Linux Mint has been the only OS which makes me forget that I am using Linux. It beats OS X in almost everything.
Curious - which town are you in? I have 4g and 200mbs-1 fttp and I live in a field in the middle of suffolk.
Like he said, it's all about the narrative. Let me demonstrate. Pretend you're an average voter who has never heard of "Hacker" News.

"Encryption is used by terrorists and evil-doers to hide their nefarious plans to harm Americans and American values. Innocent and hard-working Americans have nothing to hide. Only those who wish to harm us do. Had Apple allowed the FBI to listen on emails and conversations and text messages, San Bernardino would not have happened".
All I can say about Amazon is the quality of the item selection has gone down so much that most times I take my time digging through reviews to ensure the padded 4 star rating isn't done by bots because I've bought some items that were 4 star rated only to find they were utter crap later. And this is only in the last two years for Amazon. I'm not sure what's happening but I can say that I'm looking closer to home for stuff I need. Frankly, I think Bezos and company got too comfy with their dominant position and now they're being lax on the quality. I would happily load up an order 60+ USD easily from Amazon but now I have to double check to see what I'm getting isn't from a crap third party (that's the biggest thing I'd pay to remove is the third party sellers). If they want more customers they need to get back to basics by improving selection, kicking out crap third party sellers, and stop shuffling items between addon status or Prime only. Otherwise, I can see them going under in a hurry.
>Assuming that it is using font substitution (as it should be whether or not you’ve chosen Sofia Pro as your browser’s default sans-serif font… unless you’ve also changed some other settings too),

Yes, actually. The only two fonts my browser is permitted to use are Sofia Pro and Meiryo. My point being nothing is wrong with alphanumeric representations of hexadecimal. Short of glyph fonts like Webdings, every font supports alphanumerics - even CJK fonts.

Some users change settings - heavily so. The "safest default" should be the assumption. Changing something that works for most people to work only for "people with a proper supporting font installed" is breaking the web as far as any devs should be concerned.
$100/year is nice but $0 is nicer. It's usually not hard to combine items to reach the free shipping threshold, and there are plenty of alternatives if that doesn't work.
TurboTax should focus on making long term paying customers happy. I did not file taxes in 2014 since I didn't really owe much and decided to put it off. I went last weekend to do my 2014 taxes before submitting 2015.

Turbotax told me I had to purchase the software for $60 even though I always have used their online service until 2013. A quick Google search and I found a free service that allowed me to get my 2014 taxes done in 30 minutes.

It was FreeTaxUsa if anyone else is in the same boat.
Antony Van Couvering Out as CEO of Minds and Machines
Uber for Welfare
That was my experience as well, and after interacting with them a couple of times on issues with name space collisions I realized that it was more like some person's distro rather than a new mainstream distro. The difference being are you in the release management business (hard) or in cobbling together a set of packages that you like for you (easier). I went back to Kubuntu and waited to see if they would grow into that. After all, everyone has to start somewhere.

The compromise on their site with Wordpress was sad, but the best description I've heard for Wordpress was that it was "a rootkit with a blogging package ride along." It is so hard to secure a wordpress install and keep it that way.
Everlasting Titanium Pencil Launched by Nicholas Hemingway
Due to a turbo tax bug my return was flagged for an audit. Not worth it. Never using it again.
"There is evidence for it"

I would be super interested to see some evidence. Any peer reviewed journals would be fine
There are two huge disadvantages why I wouldn't recommend it to everyone (though I use it myself):

1) strict licensing restrictions - lots of basic functionality/software missing from official repositories; there is rpmfusion of course, but that's not something my mom should know how to install

2) Very short support. You'll be stuck without updates in no time, and upgrading to possibly broken release (that might radically change things) every few months is ridiculous.

So.. if they were to offer LTS version, I'd happily recommend it to everyone. As it is, it's great if you don't mind the caveats mentioned above (especially everything that stems from 2nd point). CentOS is not a viable alternative, as it is "enterprise" OS stuck with archaic software.
I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue.

And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(
Vaccine Has Sharply Reduced HPV in Teenage Girls, Study Says
Then we're two at least. :)
Corporate Catering Services Receives Happy Heart Award