skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has tried, there are just too many things wrong with the web as a platform. I'd love to use it to ship great customer experiences, but:

1) Web Audio is awful -- https://chadaustin.me/2014/09/web-platform-limitations-part-...

2) You STILL cannot prioritize XMLHttpRequests. https://chadaustin.me/2014/08/web-platform-limitations-xmlht...

3) The input APIs are janky

4) High frame latency in Chrome, low frame rate in Firefox

5) Allocating more than a couple hundred megabytes is risky -- it might even crash your process (I've filed a few bugs against Chrome on this)

6) SIMD.js is a least-common-denominator approach, meaning you pay a penalty on one of x86 or ARM, just like we saw with the JVM and floats.

7) JavaScript still doesn't have int64.

8) Still no efficient memcpy.

As far as I can tell, the web is not on track to catch up to native platforms in terms of customer experience anytime soon. That said, you could probably ship some small things on this tech and get away with it, but in no way would they supplant a native iOS or desktop app.

[begin rant]

The WHATWG is a bunch of out-of-touch buffoons who have an opinion on everything even when they're not close to the problem domain. Browser vendors try too hard to work together, meaning if anyone has an objection about any API, it won't ship. (Or will take years.) The Extensible Web Manifesto seems to have had no effect. There are no conformance suites, so you can't actually rely on APIs working the same across all browsers.

[end rant]

I'm a strong believer in the open web as an enabling democratizing force for all kinds of content, but I no longer have faith that web standards bodies and consortiums of browser vendors will get us there anytime soon.

EDIT: That really got me worked up. Better than morning coffee. :) But I'd be remiss if I didn't call out a small group of amazing people who are, without much support, pushing the platform forward. Alon Zakai, author of Emscripten, is a visionary and has had a HUGE impact on the feasibility of games in browsers. Dan Gohman, even though I've disagreed with his opinions on how SIMD.js should work, does extremely influential work. Patrick McManus is awesome. Vladimir Vukicevic pushed WebGL, which is one of the few good web APIs. Also, major props to Google's PNaCl team as they've retooled towards WebAssembly. I'm sure I'm missing people. Contrary to what I might have indicated, there ARE people with taste who do great work. :)
wow, save my night!
I agree, Babel is often overlooked subset of orgmode's features. The linked article that's spawning these comments doesn't do an especially good job of explaining why a developer would should want to use orgmode. Common problem, though, orgmode is far more than an outliner tool, a lot of what it does is truly mindblowing.

Orgmode has so many features, and there are so many ways to combine them, that it's really hard to get a grasp on everything it can do. It is certainly not just an outlining tool restricted to working with strict hierarchies. E.g., searches can be done within a file -- or throughout hundreds of files -- which will then assemble all responsive headings (i.e., all connected items) in the Agenda buffer (which is, in a sense, virtual, since it doesn't represent any file or document at all; it temporarily collects items from different files). Many org-mode users "live" in their Agenda buffer. The Agenda buffer isn't technically "graphical", but in many ways it's better and more powerful than a graphical solution because the relevant, connected items all then appear as items in a single buffer, no need to follow lines on a picture connecting sometimes far-away items in a complex, confusing graphical representation.

There's so much more it's hard to know even where to begin. For programmers, learning more about org-babel is definitely a good place to start.
25 Creative Prank Websites and Products to Troll Your Friends
Top interview questions on java interfaces
PHP Ceo's response to one of sama's tweets [1] had me literally laughing out loud:

".@sama SO I SHOULD SELL SOFTWARE… AS A SERVICE?

WOULD I DO THIS ON COMPUTERS?

PLS ADVISE

THIS SAGACITY IS SURELY WORTH 10% OF MY COMPANY"

"@sama IF YOU HAVE ANY INSIGHTS ON HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE THIS WOULD ALSO BE APPRECIATED"

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/652242405966483456
I forgot the SJW downvote countdown.

Down in 3, 2, 1 .. done.
Two years later : "Mozilla will sunset it's games team to focus on Internet for dogs"
Sarcasm aside, I saw XUL, I saw Thunderbird, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Mozilla.
What's your stack like? For those interested...
Ask HN: Is anyone else depressed, reading about all the success stories ?
I have a feeling that everyone, except me is doing something with his life. I am very interested in starting a venture. But, i lack money. I can't pay even the rent next month. I am afraid that i will never be able to do something. Although i have ideas i want to implement. Maybe i should realise that i am just a wannabe entrepreneur, a wantepreneuer. Does anybody else feel the same way ?
IBM's Deep Blue used custom hardware. DeepMind's AlphaGo used Google Cloud Platform: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering...

It still uses a lot of hardware, but not hardware built for the sole purpose of playing Go.
Confessions of a Sponsored Content Writer
Really? Selective commenting seems a terrible way to handle the matter if that's the case.
I'm glad to hear that - I can see some really useful applications for this, and I'll be watching it with interest. A transition step that might make the current replication model more generally useful might be to have a quorum tool (internal, delegating to Consul/ZK/whatever, etc.) just for leader election and use the existing leader/follower logic for that.
*higher productivity
This is not too surprising given their other statistical creativity [0].

[0] http://www.economist.com/node/21548242
I think its a great business opportunity. Happy to put up with endless BS if it makes alot of money.
Library? Do you mean something like gpgme?

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/
Apple News Format Released: Guide to Setup in WordPress
I thought that I didn't need to explicitly tag that as sarcasm. Apparently I was wrong...
> Biology is efficient in energy use, so what?

That's a very bold statement to make coming from the perspective of an industry that does just about everything it can to save energy. Better programming means lower energy consumption, to achieve a win like this on 1% of the energy budget would be a major game changer (no pun intended).

AlphaGo is still using brute force quite a bit, the stage is set for a much improved batch of software that will focus less on brute force as a main strategy.
All I really want is C89 with stdint.h and safe(r) string handling routines (strncpy, snprinf, etc.). Hold the VLAs and the stdbool.h and the what-have-you.
A Chat with Joe Grand (KingPin) from L0pht Heavy Industries
I disagree. I'd much rather be forced to learn an entirely new profession and leave coding all together than to be required to write Javascript professionally.

One thing this survey doesn't really touch on is the way the rise of Javascript is related to a fall in software quality. We write a lot more code now. More people write code. And a lot of that code sucks and it's a shame someone foolishly considers it productive labor output. And a lot of that code, the sucky stuff, is Javascript.

Refusal to use Javascript is still a signal of a smart and quality-focused developer. Similar to refusal to use Mongo.

I wish the SO survey didn't just measure what tech is popular among employers or what tech is paid well. Employers are notorious for incorrectly investing in the wrong tech, shoehorning things in, and declaring 'victory' when they deploy a bug-ridden, 1-star app or something. That kind of situation, which is common, should be down-weighted in the survey results, if only it were easier to collect that data.
Sneakers had the best Clipper Chip ever, and in the 90's!
"Government driving up the cost of labor" is an absurd thing to say for the CEO of a company which is expanding and who, most likely, drives around in a luxury car and owns a private airplane. Rising wages are only a problem for greedy businessmen who won't buckle up for once and pay employees their fair share, sacrificing maybe a year or two of ski-holidays and caviar.
> But, there's still the time cost of commuting. If you pay a premium to live in SF, then you're not going to want to commute 90-120 minutes so South Bay.

Yeah. That's what I meant. Google could build offices in the Gilroy or the East Bay to improve those employees lives. Companies like Uber are opening offices in Oakland, which is a pretty central location from BART and freeways.
Can a Large, Mature Company Transform Digitally?
Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say
PhpStorm 2016.1 is Released
Why not just "President"?
A mobile optimized landing page is necessary for you to launch I believe.
Show HN: GraphQL Network – GraphQL Developer Tools for Chrome
This is really a net plus. The vast majority of people working fast food, really don't like it (as a job). They hate the pay, and most hate the work. Technology like this is a blessing in disguise, it frees people from working in places they hate. If you're the kind of person who actually liked a job in fast food, you're a special person... and a fine dining restaurant would probably be even more enjoyable for you. Of course the downside is our society requires you to have a job to participate in the economy, and the bar to getting a job just raised a bit higher. Technology combined with globalization isn't changing the world... it CHANGED the world. In 2016 we're at a crossroads to decide how we deal with it. To me the current "extremist" candidates Bernie vs Trump represent two alternative views... Bernie seems interested in building a society that takes care of its citizens, even if they're not capable of taking care of themselves in the new economy. He advocates not for "Free" college, but rather raising the bar to help people get the NEW minimum education required to participate. Trump says (though its unclear) that the solution to people no longer being able to participate in the new economy is to ratchet back the social (not technological) progress we've made.
Oh when you posted a YouTube link I thought it was the Star Wars script "leak" - but yes you're right that Edward Snowden video is absolutely excellent!
From my inside perspective, government IT is dumb.

Not that that excuses her going off and using her own. The NSA should probably evaluate if the end result of their refusal was more security or less.
this is what I have been looking for a long time. all doctor offices need this
Can you recommend a modem. I would prefer one without wifi or if with wifi, a way to disable it.
Really it doesn't. If you add C++ to the mix, you lose the clear relationship with code as written to what runs (is this operator overloaded?), and you have an open invitation for people to attempt to use more and more C++ features, many of which are not well thought through.

Instead of moving to C++, I'd rather allow mixed objects in a more sensible language (eg. linking with objects written in OCaml).
Who says they weren't in cryo or otherwise suspended for most of that trip?
How pledges on Patreon are distributed
particular advantages over wireshark?
In an imperative language, proving the constancy of even slightly non-trivial values turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Again, nothing specific to Go here; you'd likely be surprised what the compiler can't assume in almost any imperative language.

I was just trying to make a quick, generic point. If it helps, imagine 4 chained method calls instead.

I haven't checked but if it was just a struct navigation (X.Y.Z.A.C, no method calls) Go probably does just optimize it to the correct offset. But bear in mind that will be an expensive pattern for CPython or Perl, for instance.
Have you tried it on mobile?

I think it is optimized
As a network engineer, tcpdump and friends are on my list of most frequently used applications.

If you're not a network engineer, you'd be amazed at how many times we get issues escalated to us exclaiming that "it's the firewall" and demanding that we fix it.

It's usually not the firewall, though, and unfortunately it falls on us to prove that that's the case. It's not always easy but, luckily, tcpdump and friends allow me to show that and I can punt the issues back to where they came from.

(Several years ago, I was able to prove it was a customer's on-premise firewall -- managed by them -- and not our firewall based upon the packet timestamps and this little thing known as "the speed of light".)
That's what gTLDs should do going forward, even if it will be hard to change the mindset of people.
Verify HTTP/2 Support Tool
The World's Most Innovative Research Institutions
Yes, I see prometheus as a step towards a more sophisticated monitoring setup if you consider (and enable) this as a prometheus service. Satellite can push metrics to one of the prometheus servers for all the benefits prometheus provides. So neither is really a replacement - rather a complement. Satellite was born out of immediate need to monitor the cluster as it is being created and definitely appears naive in most other respects - it implements just the bits to do that. So, pairing it with an established solution like prometheus (or InfluxDB, for that matter) is an undeniable benefit.
Straight forward business idea!
This probably should be a regular submission rather than a "Show HN" because show HN is intended as a place where authors submit their original work.
>I'm really disappointed with how slow publishers are being to adopt these technologies.

And for that, I'm grateful.
It would be less hypocritical if we were helping them set up a renewable/carbon-neutral infrastructure.
10 steps to be more creative designer
Obviously a political statement supporting the profitability of his current business model!

"This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage," says Puzder. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?"

The 'human' question is, will a minimum wage job pay enough to support a person. Obviously this is not considered :(
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716538
Because those non-US residents who are abnormally uptight would remind the thread that there are multiple presidents, and that as a world-wide board we should make sure to be specific.

Or, once again, it's just the vernacular for journalists covering world politics.
I've only somewhat recently become a hardcore C programmer, but I actually quite like it. Wrote my own incremental generational garbage collector recently—the things you can do in C are fun. Here are some things I'd really like:

Not language, rather standard library, but I would like to see a new allocation API with explicit control over alignment, separation of reserving and committing addresses, and generally updated for the fact that memory systems are different now than they were in 1979.

aligned_alloc is alright, except there's no aligned_realloc. Linux always reserves addresses and doesn't commit until it needs to, but that can't be relied on for portable code.

In short: we're in a 64-bit, virtual memory world. I don't want an allocator design from 1979.

It's about time glibc's custom streams[1] get standardized. Real talk, it's 2016 and we can't define custom FILE * types. This doesn't even need to expose the libc's FILE implementation; it can remain opaque just fine.

Language-wise, I'd like to see a pragma to covert an array of structs to a struct of arrays; i.e. declare

#pragma struct SOA
struct entity {
uint32_t id;
...
};

struct entity all_entities[1000];

and have the compiler rewrite it to

struct {
uint32_t id[1000];
...[1000];
} all_entities; // where typeof(all_entites[N]) == typeof(struct entity)

à la Jai[2]. This isn't a particularly hard transformation to do by hand, but it's kind of tedious.

Standardizing M4 as a preprocessor would be a nice-to-have; i.e. you should be able to compile a .h.m4 or .c.m4 file directly. I don't know why GCC can't do this yet. It's a bit of a niche thing, but some of us are M4 addicts.

C is in a pretty good place otherwise. I like to think there are 3 known local optima in terms of programming languages: C, Lisp, and Forth. All of them are a little hard at first, but quickly become very easy to think in.

We'll probably never get any of this, which is a little depressing. I get the feeling the C committee doesn't really care that much about evolving the language any more. Modern, fast, safe(-ish), readable code is a GCC extension.

1. http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Custom-Str...
2. https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md...
And most purely-software developments in video gaming shouldn't be patentable.
Database backups less than 5GB can be uploaded directly to Runnable (https://runnable.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/208221743-How...)

Reach out to us for bigger backups, and we'll provide direct access instructions to your storage infrastructure.
Pretty harsh on the Jira comparison. Bashing a competitor kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
you've got it :-)
Looks like they're running a fork of ADI's Linux distro for Blackfin[0], along with a BEAM port for mmu-less hardware[1]

[0] https://github.com/lumenosys/lumenosys-adi-linux

[1] https://github.com/lumenosys/erlang-nommu
Welcome to being a programmer on HN / in general - where it seams every day a company gets bought / funded / 100k's of customers.

In reality, it's not like that. Ideas don't grow on trees and many, many people fail multiple times before they succeed. There's no book on how to do it; there's no 1 way and what works for abc company didn't work for def company.

Find a day job; make some money.

Find an idea that your passionate about; code it - submit it somewhere (here is a good start) - show people / get them using it / get feedback. If your not passionate about it; no one else will be either.

Stick with it long enough / until you can determine if it's going somewhere or not.

Rinse / repeat until you find the success you want.
Looks like a native ad.
Best practices for building a great software development team
Suggestions:

Have one or two sentences in larger type making the case for why TaskMail fresh instead of just listing the features and relying on visitors to put the pieces together.

The screenshot is also pretty plain and looks similar to many applications. You may want to consider zooming in a bit so visitors don't glaze over it as just a multi-panel view.

If the main pitch is that it's just like using email for users, maybe show gifs/images of Outlook/Google email workflow alongside TaskMail equivalents to demonstrate it.
Here in DC, TLAs and the like (in this case a FLA/5LA) are the preferred method of communication.
These kind of announcements from Mozilla have become quite regular, and every time I find myself wanting an Electron- or nwjs-like technology to evaluate the possibility of shipping a real app with it.
Hacking Polar Loop device – part 2
Join Us for a Special #c9d9 at Mobile Delivery Days March 22nd
sorry, you must have misread my comment I was talking about energy not money, but whatever
This is literally the highest level example of Bruce Schneier's theory that people understand risks, but security people don't understand people. [1]

Let's look at this classic case: they won't give Hillary Clinton access to a modified BlackBerry that Obama was using because it made security "unmanageable". Even though Clinton's position is literally one of the most important in the country, if not the world the NSA decided it was a security threat and so just didn't allow it to happen.

So Clinton setup her own email server infrastructure and conducted all State business through that.

So now those same security people caused a considerably greater threat to national security.

Someone should find who denied Clinton access to a secure BB, then they should be removed from any security related work. I almost feel sorry for them if Clinton becomes President, because their days will hopefully be numbered. But I don't feel sorry, because their short-sightedness caused a greater risk to U.S. National Security.

1. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/08/people_unde...
Could you provide some high-profile examples where the SaaS implementation is much more performant than the OSS variant? Genuinely curious... I figured the SaaS vendors (mostly) use OSS under-the-hood anyways, and then they have to take their overhead and profits, etc.
For the young and healthy that may be true. But we're all going to get old, and most of us will need medical care that could easily exceed that.
Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat
Frank Sinatra Jr. Dies of Cardiac Arrest While on Tour
Underrated comment
WATCH ME DRAW
I have never seen this before but was just reading about it. It appears to run unconditionally when the scope is exited though: how do you prevent it from tearing down even in the success case?
Real-talk: I spent 2 semesters with wireshark, tcpdump, AND libpcap in college back in 2007-8. Now I'm in an environment where I get to use them professionally :D !!!
throw Privoxy into the mix a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

http://www.privoxy.org/
Remove VLAs from the language. They were a mistake.
> Are you saying these people formed businesses and purchased domain names for the sole purpose of selling them for big bucks to companies that don't exist yet? That's insane.

No I did not say that. But I'm glad you created and responded to your own strawman, always useful.
Think of it as a system of low level K8s specific checks that is designed to be autonomous and does not need a third-party to run.

Regardless of any node failures we can still get the diangostic information about cluster state (as long as there at least one node left). We actually plug in these checks to a higher-level monitoring and metrics system (in our case it's InfluxDB and not Nagios as you've suggested)
Consciousness is the internal subjective experience that one has.
I was curious about this statement:

> The Standard is currently written in troff, which is subject to increasing bit rot as the tools for formatting it evolve.

What exactly is bit-rotting? There are multiple maintained troff's out there, and if they are breaking backward compatibility regularly it's news to me.
It's really not at all like vi.
saying a 40 year-old language that is one of the most widely used "seems unsustainable to me" seems weird.
My guess is this varies widely depending upon the business. Some are more compatible with automation than others.
The bottom quartile of workers still has to work somewhere.
I completely agree.

...and just because it's a single page app does not mean its fast. This is a very invalid comparison point to begin with.
It costs me twice to see an ad. It costs me time to look at it (and possibly interact with it), which is fine because that's what actually pays for the site. However, the ads are costing me again because they are using too much of my limited data (esp on mobile). Sure, I don't go over my allotment usually, but it does prevent me from using that data somewhere else.

The advertisers need to figure out the latter in order for the ads to continue to be a viable revenue stream.
I agree it would be a good challenge, but I disagree that it would be "fairer" and "much more important" than AlphaGo itself.

The fact that DeepMind accomplished this feat, period, is what's most important. The fact that it runs on Google Cloud Platform, not custom-built hardware (à la Deep Blue), is almost as important. When it inevitably shrinks down, that would be icing on the cake.