skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Except you don't get to do all those things through the windows store.

It's almost as if there is a War On General Purpose Computation... and the locked down malware "appliances" are winning.

This started with iOS; the people that should have recognized the dangers of a gatekeeper controlling who can develop or install software decided to embrace the shiny iPhone and later Apple's tables. Now, even Microsoft is getting into the "app store" market and stripping away the remnants of their platform that weren't locked down.

> sideload apps

Is that the new euphemism for "install software"? Once everyone is convinced installing software outside of the "official" app store is deviant or unusual, it will be easy to introduce a meme that 3rd party software is risky/harmful/immoral.

> "This is not merely a technical issue ..."

/sigh/

Even with Tim Sweeny's current explanation of the problem and Cory Doctorow's warnings[1][2] several years ago, I doubt many people - even HN readers in this very thread - will actually fight this trend or even change their behavior in any meaningful way. They will continue to give Microsoft money and market share. Instead, I expect down-votes and complaints from apologists that pretend this is for "security", true-believers that pretend this trend to lock everything down doesn't exist, and willfully-blind nerds that think jailbreaking devices is a long-term solution.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y
How to DECREASE Your CHANGES OF EXTENSIVE MISSISSAUGA AUTO GLASS
A friend of mine has an as-yet-unfinished documentary about the early history of RPGs, based on interview footage he shot in early 2000s (including interviews with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson). My favorite moment in the rough cut starts with Frank Chadwick of GDW talking about how the anti-RPG frenzy didn't affect them (at the time, GDW mostly made a science fiction RPG called Traveller). Cut to Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games - an incredibly animated person - having an absolute freakout while explaining how the Secret Service raided his business and seized all his inventory, computers, everything. Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", declared it a "manual for computer terrorism", and the Secret Service flipped out. They nearly put SJG out of business. No charges were ever filed, as SJG didn't do anything even remotely illegal or dangerous. This event was one of the things that led to the founding of EFF.

So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. That's not just moms and journalists freaking out. That was the full authority of the US government.
You don't get C++11 or newer features on gcc 4.0.2 (https://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=help&d2=g...).

You have to keep in mind that code for this kind of competitions is generally write only and uses basic facilities of a language to solve given algorithmic problem as fast as possible. Consistency isn't important when your solution fits on a single page.
"Unless Microsoft rebuilds Skype for the ground up"

This. This exactly. Is it really unbelievable to assume Microsoft wouldn't attempt to build their own IRC+ clone and save a few billion while they are at it?

I do agree with you, Slack is much better than Skype, but I would add that Lync is just as good. I went from Lync to Slack (after changing jobs) and I would say that Lync not only works just as well but has more features a team would find useful. For instance, multi-user video+voice chat w/ great screensharing/presentation functionality.

Edit: Should mention I was using Lync in a Windows shop and now Slack in OSX. In Windows it worked perfectly but I could be convinced it had issues in OSX.
Not OP but I did my MS so I could teach at the college level.

Along the way, I did learn a lot that continues to benefit me now, 10 years later. I'd recommend an MS to anyone in the field who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of computer hardware or software (I did my MS with a Programming Languages emphasis) but who isn't necessarily sufficently self-motivated to just do the reading/open courseware without a supportive community of peers.
When kids play thieves vs cops or cow boys vs indians parents are not scared. Acceptable social games perpetuating legitimate fights between arbitrary good and evils.

However you see maybe D&D is racist : elves have boni in beauty, dwarves are ugly and strong ... but any characters can choose their morale demeanor.

In fact you needed assassins as much as paladin. No true D&D party could survive without diversity of classes, races and moral demeanor.

Yes D&D is a dangerous fantasy.

It is a fantasy that states that for making a strong team you have to embrace diversity and that teach you how to deal with discrimination positively.

It teaches you that mainly your talent were random (initial dices) but it was up to you to make them a strength and it did not even mattered you were weak you could level up through doing.

Yes D&D dangerous fantasies should stop because they are turning kids in better adults better understanding that everything is a weird cocktail of luck and determinism and that we can have nice adventures out of it and improve ourselves.

Dangerous game indeed. Giving hopes to kids should be forbidden. We better need an adaptation of 1984 in AAA format.
Right, because new media is all about fact-checking and sober objectivity ಠ_ರೃ
Facebook to Overhaul U.K. Tax Setup, Pay 'Millions of Pounds'
My view on the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
I agree. My friend was a barista with a philosophy degree. But he had the intelligence, the rigor, and the desire to learn. All I had to do was point him in a couple of directions and he picked up programming very quickly on his own with no prior experience. In fact, I would say he's far better at it than me even after just a year or so. Mindset is the key.
Yes, this. The problematic behavior is in the shell, but they "fixed" it by updating the standard library to have it try to auto-guess what the application wanted. The fix should have been in the shell.
> I would appreciate a response on this topic

I'm always willing to help clarify how HN works, but the first four sentences of your comment are such wild projections that it's hard for me to read your request as serious. And then you posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226294, which flagrantly violates everything HN stands for.

It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify that investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.
I think the answer to this depends on how much experience or practice you already have with programming.

It sounds like you're just starting out and you're nervous about your situation. In that case, I'd focus on a bit of simple private learning that will help prime you to get more out of any bootcamp or formal-learning stuff you may do later.

For example, set up a basic Python interpreter, grab one of those "teach yourself" books from the library, and at least run through using basic building-blocks like algebra, if-then conditionals, looping, functions, etc. It doesn't matter too much what language you use.
I make and solder circuits. Usually audio hardware but anything to make is fun to me. It usually involves the same mind-set because I have the chance to swap out components just like modifying a line of code and ending up with a new and improved version of whatever I am making.
Any tips on finding clients this desperate for code reviews and bug fixes?
> The squeeze theorem is sometimes also called the sandwich theorem, so that one threw me off.

E is also the "ham sandwich theorem", so it looks like they were going for deliberately confusing
What interesting times to live through!

"If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream."

I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler.

'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.
Ah, it's because we have Freedom™ instead of ideology[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ
> you have to wait for it to perform the commit and then ok another dialogue to do the push, rather than just hitting "commit and push" and letting it happen in the background.

There is a "commit and push" button. You have to hover your mouse over the Commit button in the Commit Changes window to see it.
BTW, Phil Spencer posted this on twitter
https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/705795213709561857

UWP is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, and can be supported by any store. Broad range of tools http://bit.ly/1QIHTf0
Beware beware. The investors in your next round WILL NOT LIKE THIS DEAL. Why? Their money doesn't go to building your business, it goes to paying off this SAFE.
It depends what kind of job you've got now. If it's technical, let's say engineering or science, data analysis etc... , then you can learn how to code on your own and build something that you can show to potential employers. You'll need a certification or something if you have no prior experience in a technical field.
Watchbird[1] incoming?

[1]. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579
As someone who's shipped games for direct download, and via steam, as well as in retail boxes (oh for 70% margin!), I can honestly say that I find 30% not in the slightest bit ridiculous. I'd give 99% revenue to a platform if it meant that I sold more than 100x the product.

Steam, for example, has been transformative for the industry, and has led to a renaissance in independent game production. I remember the bleak days of the early 2000s, when consolidation was sending even large developers bust, with little opportunities for their staff. Many friends and colleagues were jettisoned from the industry. Apple's iOS store, also, for all its well-rehearsed problems, has supported an industry that I honestly don't think would exist without it: largely creating a viable micropayment games economy that had been wanted by developers for 20 years at least. Both have increased sales by many times more than their cut.
Really glad MS didn't buy Slack. I think they're going to be an amazing big business that will generate a lot of cash and opportunity.

Most acquisitions by big businesses, either early or late stage, destroy value. Big biz thinks they can innovate by buying. Smaller biz wants an exit. The innovation exits on acquisition and after earn-out. Both suffer and we all lose what could have been the next Google.
It doesn't sound like the violation and the investigation were temporally linked though. When you're speeding and you see flashing lights, you know you're in trouble for the thing you're doing right then. If some minor violation is common practice (everyone is doing it all the time), how would you know immediately that you were in trouble for it when you get the meeting notice? The person even said that they had previously been called into HR as a witness in investigations of other people, yet this time they knew they were being investigated without being told.
Once again, I second the salary-based auction of H1B visas. But there should be no special pool for startups. What is stopping me from setting up a pseudo-startup-body-shop and misuse these quotas?

1. Salary-based auction,
2. Do not bind employee to employer after 1 year, and
3. GoTo #1.
Crowdfund: Pay what you want VPN that gives 10% to charity
That's a rather different situation from thinking that gamers are going to summon demons and stuff like that. cyber attacks have turned out to be a real thing, even though assuming SJG was a front for terrorism was nonsense. On the other hand, I have yet to hear of anyone successfully calling up spirits from the vasty deep.
Unless you have a very willing hacker willing to build the integration from scratch, IRC is bad.

There is a hurdle here, but it's not so bad if you're already willing to run your own IRC server. I wrote nodebot[0] to allow machines and scripts to send messages to IRC, it would be a day or so to put an HTTP request handler (apache with a CGI even) in front of this, slap some TLS and http auth on that URL, and expose a webhook that these external services could hit.

One of the great things about slack is that many integrations already exist, so it's often just a matter of sharing an API key or some other credentials between the services, and anyone can do that. I do, however, run into issues with things like github which has many outgoing integrations with services that also use github's incoming API. It can quickly become a mess -- where should the authority lie for doing integrations: with the chat app or with the individual services?

[0] https://github.com/thwarted/nodebot
Do Not Spend Money on Medication for High Blood Pressure
How to Avoid the Automation Apocalypse
That's what I said to my heart surgeon as I was wheeled in to theatre and I saw he was holding a book.

And again on the plane on the way home I said it to the pilot who was carrying a book into the cockpit.

And when my 18 year child went out driving for the first time on his own I handed him a book titled "How to drive".
It would make more sense for it to be handled by execve() or equivalent.

For example, you need to be able to execute a file named "/bin/sh" -- but for that file to be executable under Windows, it needs to be named "sh.exe". If you have a file with no extension in its name, Windows more or less doesn't know what to do with it.

Cygwin's solution to this is to treat "sh" and "sh.exe" as the same file, by tweaking the filesystem code. If "foo.exe" is the only file in the current directory, "ls" will show it -- but "ls foo" will show the same file, but with the name "foo".

Making any system call or library function that searches $PATH for executable files, or that executes a file, accept "foo.exe" when you specify "foo", would have been another solution, and perhaps a better one (though there could easily be some nasty gotchas that I haven't thought about).

There is, as far as I know, no way to implement a POSIX layer on top of windows without some kind of ugly hack for "*.exe" files (short of running a self-contained VM, but the point of Cygwin is that you can still access the Windows filesystem).
Moon Shot Official Trailer: Google Lunar XPRIZE
I keep hearing over and over about how horrible Skype is. I've been using it for over 5 years (on OS X) now and I have not noticed any issues, and the improvements to UI over the years made it really nice and user friendly. So I don't really know if people who complain about it actually used it in the recent years or not.
IRC is also bad because it is too client-side. There is no history: if you're not connected or not in the room, you miss all the messages there. IRC Cloud and similar things half-solve this problem in the ideal situation (eg: nothing fails, such as IRC Cloud connecting to the IRC server), but they are a kludge on top of what is really an inadequate protocol if you want to compare to Slack/Hipchat/etc.

Frequently we will @mention someone in a room that the are not currently in, saying something like "Hm, maybe @person can help with this?" and then they'll get the notification, join the room, read the last bit of conversation, and often provide a solution or something useful. That workflow simply doesn't exist on IRC.

There are a handful of other features that range from really-freaking-nice-to-have to essential, such as user avatars, away status, formatted code blocks, inline image display (upon seeing url), @mentions, @mentions that go to e-mail when you're away, synchronized notifications across multiple platforms, file/image upload (via copy/paste).. Some of these CAN be done with the right IRC client, but they're not universal or standardized.
Instead of exceptions, I personally prefer using assertions to verify things like preconditions; in which case if an assertion fails the software should generally crash before getting into a worse state. Arguably, if the software shouldn't crash it's probably not an exception. Assertions can also give an analyzer a set of preconditions to check. For example, Clang's static analyzer parses assert statements [1]. I'm not sure it uses them to verify the preconditions, but regardless it's still a good way to express them.

Another way to express constraints are attributes, which static analyzers (and optimizers) also use. For example, GCC has a number of function attributes [2] to express invariants about code.

[1] http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html#recommended_d...

[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Function-Attribute...
Performance and Usage at Instagram
Yay, even more half-baked console ports on PC. Noop.
I don't think side channels are an attack vector for them. These are running on machines that they own, and where they control all the software on them.

I wonder if removing side-channel countermeasures was part of the optimization?
I do find myself missing strong typing sometimes, but I'd been writing scalaz-flavored Scala, and one thing I do not miss is working around JVM type erasure all the time. It has been about six months since I've had to type .asInstanceOf[T] and I am not looking back. :)

Aside from strong typing, almost everything related to FP/concurrency/fault-tolerance that I liked about Scala is in Elixir -- first-class functions, immutable everything, shared nothing, everything is actors passing messages, supervision trees, etc. I can even whip out monads when I want them!

[1] https://github.com/rob-brown/MonadEx
FreeBSD runs multiuser under arm64 on Raspberry Pi 3
6 Photographers Prove That Customer Experience Is All About Marketing
The religious thing didn't make a dent in my parents but when this crappy movie came on TV it was nearly the end of D&D for us.
Yes, I understand
What the US has been doing since 2001 has been totalitarian and unfair, of course. Let's not play "but that guy is doing it too, so it's not that bad". It's all bad, and all needs to be stopped.
Generic Protocols and Subclassing Breaks Type Safety in Swift
It's not ridiculous behaviour; it's the correct behaviour for Cygwin in almost all cases.

Windows executables are identified by their extension. That's in direct conflict with POSIX-style executables. You wouldn't want to have to execute every command-line tool like ls.exe, cp.exe, bash.exe, rm.exe etc. So Cygwin looks on the filesystem twice: both with and without the exe extension.

Similar things need to happen when building code from tarballs. It's not just finding executables to actually execute; compilers and linkers need to work correctly too, and random build scripts aren't going to always be checking for the .exe version of files. So the behaviour applies to reading and writing as well.

Tar is already surprising in that it overwrites by default, potentially including the archive you're extracting from. It's usually a bad idea to extract tar archives into anything other than empty directories, unless you know exactly what you're doing.
The last one is trivial, too. Is 8 x 8 + 7 x 8 + 89 = 209 divisible by 77? Nope. Is 18 x 18 + 7 x 18 + 89 = 539 divisible by 77? Yes, gives 7, solved it. This isn't even worth trying to look for a more analytical solution.
Not to forget about Julia http://julialang.org/ and its high-performance JIT compiler.

A comparison with some of Julia's features:

(1) Multiple dispatch: providing ability to define function behavior across many combinations of argument types

Scala has the Cake Pattern

(2) Built-in package manager

SBT, anyone?

(3) Automatic generation of efficient, specialized code for different argument types

Dotty's Linker is on the horizon,
https://d-d.me/talks/scaladays2015/#/
Silicon Valley can provide tools, or perhaps supplant some industries, but the bulk of productivity improvement is internal to companies. I think the productivity slowdown is a result of many companies not investing in internal improvement/development and instead using their capital in non-productivity enhancing financial moves such as stock buybacks.
>When society doesn't value you as a human being, you don't value yourself as a human being.

There are many cultures that don't value people based on how much they earn. I think valuing people based on economic success is largely tied to Indian and Asian culture. As a white person from a white family in the middle of the US, no one that I care about values me based on my salary. Some cultures seem to be more obsessed with economic status than others. To me, it's repulsive.
Repeating yourself does not a point make. In response to what I wrote, how is the FBI's response unreasonable? And I'll warn you ahead of time that another "is so!" is not going to change my mind.
BCP38/Anti-Spoofing is a really really hard problem to fix. It may not happen in our lifetimes. There is the MANRS document/routing manifesto, which has been gaining traction.
https://www.routingmanifesto.org/

There are other initiatives as well. But the problem is very difficult to solve.
What does patent law have to do with Mickey Mouse?
Honest question, do you guys even test your releases? The 1.8 release must be the biggest trainwreck of an update that I see in recent time. I'm not talking about the UI, as each is entitled to his own opinion. But there are glaring bugs that made the software downright unusable. There were regressions everywhere. Does the QA process even exist for SourceTree?
> The previous person seems to claim it meant the disk was dead (i.e. no read works)

He made no such claim.

> while you seem to claim that it means an error caught by low level formatting.

A: There is no such thing as low level formatting in a modern drive, and B: No I don't. I said he should do a full disk read. Not format.

The SMART built in self-test does a full read of the drive, not write.

> Those scrubs do nothing to catch errors that the drives do not report such as misdirected writes.

That's only true with RAID 5. Ever other RAID level can compare disks and check that the data matches exactly. The Linux md software RAID does that automatically if you ask it to check things, and then it will report how many mismatches it found.

If you look he wrote: "I had to drop back to raid 5". He had a better level of RAID before, with multiple disk redundancy, that allows the RAID to check for mismatches and even correct them.

But because he never scheduled full disk reads the RAID never detected that many of the drives had problems.

> Consequently, there is no correct way to setup RAID in a way that makes dats safe.

That is not correct. The only advice I would give is avoid RAID 5. The other levels let you check for correctness.

> A check summing filesystem such as ZFS would handle this without a problem though.

Only if A: you actually run disk checks, B: and only if ZFS handles the RAID!!! ZFS on top of RAID will NOT detect such errors 50% of the time (randomly depending on which disk is read from).
This looks like market segmentation and not misogyny. If the known market for Borderlands is mostly male and some large percentage of those males have a girlfriend, it only makes sense to try to attract that segment to the product.

Actually it seems quite the opposite of sexism since they're deliberately trying to make the game more accessible to women.

Note this does not mean women are worse at first person shooters, it just means that the game is currently designed for "experts" and there's an adjacent segment that gets exposure to the game via watching their partner play. "Girlfriend mode" is an attempt to reach that segment.

Having a "boyfriend zone" in a women's clothing store would be analogous and also not sexist.