skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time.

It is common to draw diagrams when you are trying to understand or explain a problem. If you want to give somebody a rough idea of how your program works, it is infinitely more likely that you use some kind of drawing than music, touch or smell.

I don't agree neither with visual programming inviting people to lose time in details. The same you do not lose time thinking about how to structure a sentence to write a program, you would not lose it changing colors and fonts in a visual programming environment with an enforced "syntax".

I do not like visual programming (I have had very bad experiences with LabView), but I think it may be as good (or as bad) as text if the field had evolved differently.
I'm actually reading this article while in a two-day introduction to PLC programming. It's been pretty fascinating, and is an interesting view into earlier days of programming...

...From here, I definitely feel like there's something "we" missed in how these systems work, and the situations they describe. But there's also a great deal that they've missed - and are stuck in the 80s.

I think the big one is that these systems (PLC visual programming environments) don't let me make my own domain-specific languages, and that's maybe the killer app of modern code.

But there's also some interesting bits - there's something that looks like agent-based programming: There's a series of environments, and you have a function (agent) that modifies an environment. You point it at each the environments, just like a loop, and it does it's thing, like a weird cross between functional and state-based, that works because it's all a form of stigmergy.
Derailing, that's my biggest ":-/" with the Silicon Valley start-up "move fast and break things" culture.

If we as software engineers want to work on problems that matter, and not just dating apps and ad networks, we can't have a work ethic that encourages us to ignore troublesome laws and regulations and launch half-baked MVPs with a plan to maybe fix problems as they arise in future iterations. Sure, work smart, automate all the boring shit, but your automation has to be correct. Sure, focus on a MVP to get off the ground -- but make sure your product is viable, and correct across the minimum set of features.

Even when we are working quickly, sparsely, we should be laying good foundations for the future. We shouldn't be lazy conmen selling poisonous snake-oil.
I don't think its fud. Calling apt-get is just crazy on my view.
Rather than getting constructive feedback from the "internet", like you are asking, it would be much better to get constructive feedback from your actual potential users.

So rather than posting to Show HN, Reddit, or random internet friends, make a list of 10 people who you could consider potential users and email them asking for feedback. Then for any/all that respond, given them a small reward from iTunes, Amazon, etc.
Wow, I feel like I'm meeting a celebrity. I absolutely love your book! I'm about a third of the way through and love the flow and logical process you take when going through the lessons and what to teach in what order and you use great examples. Thank you so much for writing this Eric!
Governments have employees. They also have customers in the form of the populace and stakeholders in the form of voters and lobbyists. I'm not sure I see the difference.
Why didn't the terminator upgrade to windows 10?
I asked him and he said, "I still love vista, baby!"
Can you elaborate on the consequences of doing that for the non-Mac users among us?
Dell open sources DCEPT, a honeypot tool for detecting network intrusions
Presumably because patented drugs don't have any bioequivalent drugs to compare to and the margin of error is based off of how different the generic is from the original. Originals do have stricter regulations on the amounts of inactive fillers used though.

> Most regulators worldwide have decided that a 20% variation is generally not clinically significant.

>Two versions of a drug are generally said to be bioequivalent if the 90% confidence intervals for the ratios of the geometric means (brand vs. generic) of the AUC and Cmax fall within 80% and 125%. The tmax (brand vs. generic) must also be comparable — and there should not be any significant differences between different patients.

[1]https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/generic-drugs-are-they-...

[2](cmax, auc, graph comparison) http://www.bpac.org.nz/BPJ/2007/March/bioequiv.aspx
He's arguing about ideological stagnation. That's bad regardless of just about what the ideology is and whether you agree with the particular.

To quote Max Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." That's as true of anything as it is of science.
December 2015 – the warmest month since 1880 (NOAA report)
If Microsoft really were to "love Linux," this would happen. Feel free to gauge their marketing/PR sincerity in light of this. This and Office are really the only 2 things Linux really needs from Microsoft. Everything else is taken care of. I mean, SQL Server? That's fine, but, if you really needed a terribly-expensive database server running on Linux, we've had Oracle for, like at least a dozen years now.
FoxType: A.I. to help you write smarter
I tried to get SSL cert for my fathers company and different kinds of certificates just scared me. Do you know there is a kind of cert where you need to go in person with your ID and register yourself? I'm currently using LE for 6 domains, 2 of them joined as first 100 LE domains, before LE was supported by Ubuntu.
Objective C has fallen much more than Swift has risen. Is iOS development falling off?
Show HN: Find out if employees have been in a data breach, leak, or hack
We usually stick to the official Debian python-* packages (if they exist upstream). When they don't we use python-virtualenv[1][2] to pull specific versions and dependencies from pip into a virtual env.

Now when we build our Debian package (debian/rules):

override_dh_virtualenv:
dh_virtualenv -p myproj --use-system-packages

[1] https://github.com/spotify/dh-virtualenv
[2] https://packages.debian.org/jessie/python/python-virtualenv
As said by others if you run it with certonly it doesn't touch the config at all. My cronjob contains a

path/to/letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot --renew-by-default -w /var/www/letsencrypt/ -d example.com

and puts the signed certificates into /etc/letsencrypt/live/excample.com/fullchain.pem . This is followed by a service nginx reload

I did not trust their automatic configuration as well so I simply configured nginx to use the keys + cert and to serve .well-known/acme from /var/www/letsencrypt/ for all my domains.

That's all. It works quite fine and if something does not work (e.g. python breaks.) such that the renewal is unsuccessful. LE will send you an email in advance (I think 30 days) so you have plenty of time to look after it.
The article does not suggest low protein intake, it states that results indicate "high levels of animal proteins promote mortality". I.e. high intake of protein from plants is not associated with increase in mortality.
i dont think this is correct from the article in this post

"We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017."

so you will have the core capabilities in 2016, but by mis 2017 i am expecting the full thing
People who think they should be doing concurrency shouldn't be doing it
That would be nice, but with it being so easy to get a certificate, you could just add a new SSL cert when you add the new subdomain.
Remind HN: Unix time is Not the number of elapsed seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00
Instead it is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 NOT COUNTING LEAP SECONDS.
This means it is neither a linear, nor a unambiguous representation of time.

This should be kept in mind when developing time sensitive software to prevent major errors!

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time for a more detailed explanation.
Photo: Wayne Rooney Plays with Adult Tiger in Dubai
Flask application context problems, hiding exceptions within tasks, Json Serialisation sometimes does weird things and hard to configure (the default, pickle, seems to be warned against as a security vulnerability), weirdness with Gevent/Socket.io flask stuff, difficulty (impossibility??) to emit socket events from within a worker, finally the canvas stuff seems great on the surface but I found it mind blowingly difficult to debug weirdness with it.

My Pika/RabbitMQ stuff was much easier to build, unit test and debug (i.e. it actually works). There is every chance the I am just a bit retarded when it comes to using celery, but the fact I've built the Pika version maybe these were just real issues? Dunno, it might all work flawlessly for you in which case it's a great tool.
Google AI begins battle with humanity’s best Go player tonight
This basic idea was the seed of a slow take-off superintelligence in the book Avogadro Corp.

http://avogadrocorp.com/
Swarm simulation built with D3 – parameters are tunable
> If you're not acutely aware of the rules of C', you won't get what you want.

The same can be said of any language that lacks a rigorous definition; misusing -Ofast is just an example of one. Even then, the definition can be too large or tricky for anybody to truly understand, but that's a bit of a grey area... at some point you have to draw the line and say the programmer made a mistake. The only sensible thing to do is draw the line at the definition of the language, otherwise there is chaos.
Working as Full Stack Software Developer.

- Get browser details (http://getbrowserdetails.com)

- SpotTrek ionic mobile app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.metatrek.s...)
CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
That's not it. The problem is that individuals have cognitive biases. People rarely change their minds. As a society, this is offset by a slow, regular replacement of its members.

If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.

That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.
Probably having the screen too close to his eyes. I know one problem for me is that my screens are just past the point where I can see without glasses, but it's probably not a good idea to use glasses when the screen is only a foot and a half away so I can relate to the parent. My room/desk setup also doesn't allow for me to rearrange this to make my screens closer to not need glasses. Guess I'll see how much this affects me in a few years lol
Moore's law has not been an exponential increase in technological capability in general. It has only been an exponential increase in one particular technology - more of the same. I see no evidence that the development of novel technology in general has sped up in any way.
Replacing Pingdom with Lambda
At SAIC, on a project that produced two full VR scale race car prototypes, part of my responsibilities was motion control and managing the steering wheel.

I had taken a three day racing class taught at Laguna Seca and one of the experiences with a real race car is the feedback on the steering wheel: chattering when one tire goes of the track to the warning string, the smoothness when a car goes into a spin, and increased tension on turns. I had full control over the steering wheel because in addition to it being an input device, it also had a precision servo motor that I could control to get these effects. Awesome experience, if I do say so myself.
Backbone lovers who want a mostly compatible but modern tool (no jQ, state/reactivity, updates) ought to look at Ampersand.
The UK certainly does have strict liability offences:

http://www.peterjepson.com/law/A2-2%20Jonathan%20Wight.htm

http://www.drukker.co.uk/publications/reference/strict-liabi...

It's a little unusual to have strict liability result in jail time for directors, but this is tax enforcement. See the ongoing Rangers case.
Was going to say something similar, that IB is great if you are doing one-off screens, but it isn't the best for creating reusable / composable UI elements.
Computers have been faster than humans for the last 40 years. That doesn't make them more intelligent.
> According to Ray Kurzweil, as soon as something becomes an information technology, it starts progressing according to Moore's Law

My field of chemical information - a subfield of cheminformatics - has been an information technology since the 1800s. It was the Big Data of the 1940s and 1950s, many of the pioneers of information retrieval worked on chemical data (Luhn, Mooers, Taube), and the term "information retrieval" and concepts like stop words (as part of KWIC) were presented at chemistry conferences.

The doubling period for chemical information is 15-20 years.

Citation indexing is another offshoot of 1950s information technology. Scientific publication grows by about 5% per year (says http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909426/ ), so doubles every 15 years.

Either 1) those are not information technology fields, in which case, why not? or 2) "according to Moore's Law" means generally "has exponential growth", not the more specific doubling every two years.

With #2 firmly in mind, consider "and that's the main reason why we can expect medical technology to advance exponentially in the future."

How do we measure "advance" in medical technology, how do we know it isn't already an information technology field, and why should we expect the doubling rate of under 20 years?

Finally, here's a quote from someone who "served on the advisory council of [a longevity] organization, along with the chairmen of a number of major US corporations":

> Why has the problem of aging been such an intractable one? Up until [recently], the prevalent view of scientists had been that the task of controlling aging was fundamentally impossible. But today, such a consensus no longer exists. Many researchers now believe that their predecessors failed, not because their goals were misguided, but because the tools and the level of sophistication they could bring to the task were inadequate. Moreover, it is argued that progress has been hampered because funding has been scarce, and researchers concerned with aging have been too few and far between. ...

> Growing public and private support for aging research reflects the scientific community’s own increasing commitment. Today, aging research occupies unprecedented numbers of highly talented individuals, not only specialists in gerontology, but researchers from other disciplines as well. These include biochemistry, endocrinology, immunology, neurobiology, genetics, and cell biology, to name only a few.

I'll give the link to where that quote comes from, but before following the link, when do you think it was written? http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p107y1983.pdf .
How about a monthly HN "Criticize Me" post where people can show their current projects?
Every top-level comment is a project and then the community can give feedback. That way you don't have the pressure of "Show HN" but can nonetheless benefit from the HN community.
> Are you serious? Would you base your research career on software that you don't trust? I wouldn't.

I guess you haven't seen the quality of academic code recently. The choices are basing your credibility on slow badly written code or fast badly written code.
JetBlue Is Seeking Applications to Train New Pilots to Fly Jets
That's basically what he was arguing. "Instead, what will occur is an ecosystem of supporting technology will prime the ground."

Those problems you're talking about will be figured out bit by bit, and only once all those things are figured out, will someone realize "Oh shit, we're at the point where this is possible now!" while everyone around them isn't paying attention and still thinking "It's impossible. It's impossible."
We are way too far from really understanding our own biology to be able to predict such an over-the-horizon end result.

I don't even know if we'll be able to reliably cure toenail fungus in the next 20 years - much less be able to solve a significant number of problems with aging in 30 years.
> how is it possible to learn superhuman performance in anything from examples of mere human performance at the same task? I don't believe in magic.

Computers could be better at assigning probabilities to ambiguous examples. In particular, for an image that is very ambiguous for most humans, maybe a computer would assign 99% probability to it (hence it would be only a little bit ambiguous).
Channels are not enough (golang)
I also greatly respect Jeremy for the work he's done on Backbone, CoffeeScript, and Underscore.

I'm confused by his stance on versioning, however: he's very much against semver, which means these tools can be tricky to use with npm (which assumes all packages follow semver).

https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/cbd2b088e20279ae2c8e
The use case of only handling valid input is a very common one, Particularly during compiler construction.

But what about the use case of building an Editor (IDE) ?
In this context it would highly beneficial to be able to handle invalid inputs as the user would still expect outline/navigation/formatting/.../ to work even when there
are syntax errors.

Error Recovery algorithms are heuristics, they can never solve all the possible kinds of errors. Automatic error recovery is also not mutually exclusive with expanding the grammar
to support some "tolerable" errors, Both can be used to improve the "robustness" of the grammar when fault tolerance is needed.

Also note that expanding the grammar will work best for simple common errors (missing semicolon), but what about when you need to re-sync an unknown number of tokens and unwind the parser call stack?

Also note these "heuristics" are not "mine", they are based on heuristics used in Antlr 3.
Which is itself based on Academic studies in this topic:
Specifically:

Josef Grosch. Efficient and comfortable error recovery in recursive descent parsers. Structured Programming, 11(3):129–140, 1990.

Rodney W. Topor. A note on error recovery in recursive descent parsers. SIGPLAN Not., 17(2):37–40, 1982.

Niklaus Wirth. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 1978.
Ask HN: What's the highest math level you need to be a hacker?
BTW I'm not good at math but I would love to after taking some Online courses available. I'm wondering what's the highest math level you need to be a good Hacker?
You may also be interested in thee 97 HN comments from yesterday, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239674 .
https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/assets/ig-ecosyste...
The article argues it doubled its share of public European stock trading since Feb. 8, when it banned what it considers a problematic high-frequency-trading strategy, just wanting to limit proprietary traders to passively providing price quotes, i.e. banning HFT firms which are parasitic orderflow frontrunners not market makers, and take zero risk which is about 99% of them.
Unix time is linear and unambiguous. It's our actual accounting of time that is not linear.
Microsoft Open-Sources Team Explorer Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse
Build or Buy Is Dead – Treat Your Product Like a Hot Rod
Project Fi exiting invitation-only mode
Oh, I agree. It's just that historically we've not been terribly good at that.
Crypto-Anarchist Virgil Vǎduva of Cell 411: We Won’t Need Police
C/C++ still rocks.
Finding resources to learn modern ios development in objective c is no longer possible
What makes you sure? Central nervous system neurons are incapable of regeneration[0], so is anybody's guess what would happen if they did get replaced. And, long term, "significant" has to be "all".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration
Ruby and Reality, How I Discovered Spain Is in Africa
Entity('Spain').continent => 'Africa'

Edit: https://github.com/molybdenum-99/reality
Very nice, love the simplicity. Full syncing is going to be key though.

The biggest "complaint" I have after 5 mins is having a quick way to jump to a new line at the bottom. You wouldn't want to override the default of the omnibar having focus, but a simple keyboard shortcut would be nice. Currently it seems I need to tab down into the page, but then that still leaves my cursor at the beginning of the document.
#define "good hacker"
Takes me back to my Max/MSP days.
Apple partisans act as if the money is coming from Apple's petty-cash drawer. My point is somewhat similar to your: in that they would do anything not to pay the half a million dollars.

Comparing to the numbers in their last FY (Oct '15), the settlement is 0.94% of their annual profit. I too wouldn't be "hurt" by a 1% fine of my net annual income, but I'd rather put it to better use.
I've had the same thought so many other times. We blindly believe the 'clergy' of science despite not having any evidence ourselves of what is taught (other than for the obvious that we experience every day). String theory? Black holes? Gravitational waves???Granted, it's probably true (I'm a believer too), but it's blind faith -- I've never replicated any experiments myself, would have to trust the measuring devices even if I tried to replicate the experiments, so I believe because everyone else tells me to. And that's the hard-core replicatable physics! It gets worse as you move to less mathematical sciences like chemistry, biology, psychology, nutrition, etc.
Why wouldn't they write it in C? I'm pretty sure it's a mix of C and C++. Postgresql is written in C as well, as are most of the SQL servers people use. Or at least a mix of C and C++.

I don't really see many other choices being available. Sure we have Rust, Go and other languages now, but most of the current SQL servers are 20 years old or more by now. C is a well known language, there are good tooling, the compilers generate fast code and you can do very precise memory control.
Power Wastage on an Idle Laptop
acme-tiny is another good and simple client, which I personally prefer.

I've recently compared 10 different Let's Encrypt / ACME clients: https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets...
I swear I just saw a pig flying across the sky.

What is going on in Microsoft? Have they finally seen the light? First today comes SQL Server on Linux and now this.

It makes a refreshing change. Long may it continue.
I'm not so sure, that sounds like blaming outside flaws on a programming language. What would anyone be doing that Go, written properly, wouldn't be fast? As another poster has said, the JVM is also plenty fast when used properly.

Sounds like they went from Java with heavy frameworks to C++ with no frameworks.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they really take their words into action nowadays. Seems like there is at least one news item per week. They have been really active in the open source space recently.

Personally, I love this. Have recently been learning ASP.NET and started using Azure simply because I find it to be one of the easiest frameworks and platforms to iterate quickly on.

I love the new Microsoft, I hope this continues. It feels like they have had a lot of brilliant people previously held back by rules and constraints which are now removed.
Everything You Want to Know About Spark and Its Resilient Distributed Dataset
I think this your mis-characterizes things a bit. The benefit of frameworks and highly dynamic languages are is that for early stage products, they allow you to rapidly iterate while you're finding a product-market fit. There is absolutely no reason to worry about performance when you are still counting active users in some multiple of thousands, and a large part of the product could potentially be rewritten at any time.

Once you have found a product-market fit and what you're offering has stabilized to a large degree, then it makes total sense to go back and rewrite things to improve performance and eliminate technical debt.
The ETFs I looked at do disclose this. I guess it's a legal requirement, since it affects risk structure. No idea about the ratio.