skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is itself a straw man. Follow the link to Mr. Hipp's comments and read them. He did not say this.

"Rust doesn't eliminate all bugs" is a rephrased version of "Some well-formed rust programs will generate machine code that behaves differently from what the programmer expected."

> That a programmer who has produced such high-quality and rigorously tested software as sqlite should be portrayed as either cavalier or naive about software quality is something I find profoundly mis-guided.

I don't think he's cavalier or naive about software quality! SQLite's quality speaks for itself, and he is completely correct about what you need to do to achieve the level of correctness that SQLite has. He knows a lot more than I do about the rigor needed to ensure that amount of software quality. I do think, though:

1. The amount of testing that SQLite undergoes is not economically feasible for most software.

2. Rust's testing tools would allow for the same level of code quality in the absence of evidence otherwise. (The example he cited, code coverage, is wrong, as kcov is available for Rust.)

3. There is value in static analysis above and beyond the value of testing (also vice versa), because testing only reveals bugs that manifest themselves in inputs available in the test suite. This is true regardless of the code coverage of the tests.

In other words, I think Hipp's argument would make sense if it were something along the lines of: "I couldn't test a Rust SQLite as well as I can test the existing SQLite because kcov is missing features X, Y, and Z, and the value I get from the static analysis is less than the value I get from those code coverage tools, since we've found lots of bugs from those code coverage features and haven't found as many memory safety/data race bugs". That'd be totally valid. But as a blanket statement that Rust would make things worse, it doesn't make sense to me.
> "The United States has the highest average age of developers at 32 years old while the media age for the entire survey was 27."

Why is the average of one thing compared with the median of another thing here?
Very interesting and relevant article about the American Concordes which never flew:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160321-the-american-concor...
I'd hazard a guess that there is some appearance bias involved, as well.

Older people tend toward higher BMI, and younger overweight people "carry" their weight better.

Discrimination on appearance is already well-documented.
I think this is caused by how heavily age segregated our societies are, from education and child care to nursing homes and elder care.
> I don't want to end up being a 50+ year old who can no longer get a job

So just stay relevant? I'm 28, been coding for 19 years. What was relevant to learn when I was in middle and high school is completely useless now. All those endless hours spent learning how to make games in Pascal, irrelevant technologies. All those endless hours spent learning PHP3/4 and cobbling together websites and crude frameworks, irrelevant tech.

But on a higher level, all of that has proven useful. Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.

Keep improving. Be an engineer, not just a coder.
That's got an "Imported by" name and so on — I suspect it's sold in the foreign foods section, along with other American novelties.

The more traditionally British options are probably these:

1) In a can: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=252750031

2) Cheese sauce: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=258436291

3) As a ready meal / microwave meal: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=272971891

But I'm more amused by the "Tesco Easy Entertaining Macaroni Cheese 1.4 Kilograms". Is it still necessary to thank the cook, if served this at a party? http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=291659455
Commuters' tales: No room to sit – even in the toilet
Golang has some magic too - for example magic with capital letters in exported symbols. But generally golang is easier to read than line like this:

> static NAME: &'static str = "du";
It certainly wasn't an underpowered rig. It has a Titan X GPU and top of the line Broadwell or Haswell CPU. I tried some of the Oculus demos as well as War Thunder flight sim. DK2 was miles better than DK1, but the nausea was still there.

You're right about FPS strafing and some other unnatural movement, that seems to make things worse for some people.

Additionally, I think the situation might improve if you really take the time to adjust the lenses and the headset to match your head and eyes. This makes the Oculus headset a "personal" device in that you can't really borrow or share one, though.

However, I got terrible nausea that lasted for the rest of the day and rendered me incapable of doing any work (fucked up my eyes so I couldn't focus on text) after just 30 minutes of play. I'll need a pretty good reason to try it again.
Why Voters Will Stay Angry
That would be like if Kraft replaced the macaroni with nails without mentioning it, and then later asked if anyone noticed.
we have 30- 40- and 50-somethings working for us that have 20 years of experience with the internet. the first dot com boom was that long ago (1996). the oldest started in their 30s, the youngest started in their teens. this doesn't even count archaic technologies no longer in use.

we are in a new era, one in which someone's age doesn't really tell you anything about their tech relevance. we generally hire based on experience only, not specific technologies or schools, so we end up with employees all over the map.
Side note: on most Linux distros, overcommit is on, and so malloc will basically always succeed; the OOM killer will kill your program before you'd get a failure

Clarifying note: this is configurable.
Google planned to help Syria rebels to bring down Assad regime,
You dont need a libc to start a process on Linux.
Obsidian: the open-source foundation your product needs to succeed
Proposal for an open standard instruction set and its ecosystem [pdf]
SVN is way simpler at the interface than CVS, you should really look into it. SVN is a spiritual successor to CVS, and is trivially easy for a CVS user to pick up. We switched from CVS to SVN at work several years ago and everyone was happy with the change.
This project does not really improve upon the situation, as it uses what it is to replace for building, and a very complex Makefile where there's no need for one.

I've said nothing about dependency management as in fetching code that the project depends on. I'm talking about compilation dependencies, i.e. file a.o depends on a.c, a.h, b.c and b.h. Make is for this:

a.o: a.c a.h b.c b.h
cc -o ${.TARGET} ${.ALLSRC}

But nowhere in the projects Makefile the rules are in this fashion. They are like shell aliases. What I wanted to say is that the Makefile could be replaced with a bunch of shell scripts that would be easier to use and maintain.

For the rest, it seems that we mostly agree, tho I do not think that CVS is not sane, it's perfectly usable.
RFC 2616: For 5xx error codes, User agents SHOULD display any included entity to the user. If your server serves up HTML on a 500, it should get rendered. This page happens to serve up HTML.

Why? Well, the server administrators would have a better idea after investigating than I do.

If I were playing the percentages, I'd guess "a poorly coded WordPress plugin is causing rendering the index page to time out after all content has been sent down the pipe; Apache then terminates the connection with a 500 error and sends down all the content it buffered locally prior to the timeout, which in this case happens to be everything."

Circumstantial evidence: no errors on rendering static resources even though they appear to go through the same server. Other dynamic pages show very long time to first byte but sporadically give HTTP 200s; I'm assuming that they render completely and return control before Apache times out the PHP.
Some people worry about the file size (which should be similar), but I worry about the speed. How much faster can we grep or sed with a Rust compiled grep vs a C compiled grep?
It's absurd and mocks authority, which are staples in British (not just English) humour.
This is clickbait at it's best. There is no hard evidence to prove this (obviously, it's Apple) and it couldn't be further from the truth.

iPads are far from a replacement for your MacBook or iMac - for one you can't properly multitask, and you as a developer you couldn't properly debug and write code on an iPad.

OSX will be around for years to come.
I've used this in teaching a class before as an example of a computer vision API...it's important to understand what it does not do...it doesn't have a huge vocabulary of trained words...and just a couple of months ago, what it was trained on was...not very optimal for showing off the product.

For example, this image of President Obama on the phone at his desk:

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1445/24129414022_f89da8ea52_b...

--- currently is interpreted by Watson's API as "90% person"...a month ago, when I was demoing the product, it also returned "person"...but a whole variety of other things too...most notably, "Flag Burning"...it's only when you dive into the API and request a list of default classifiers did you see that the API contained a lot of specific terms, but was by no means comprehensive...so "Flag Burning" had been trained, but not just "Flag". It seems they've cut down the vocabulary at this point, which is good, because it shouldn't be judged against APIs that purport to do face/celebrity recognition and have been trained for that.

I think the key advantage of this API is that it's the only one that I had seen that allowed you to build your own classifier. Here's an example I found in the wild, of someone building a classifier to differentiate between M1A1 Abrams tanks and...non-Abrams tanks (you upload a set of positive and negative images to the API):

http://cmadison.me/2015/12/03/classifying-tanks-with-the-ibm...

Here are some quick notes I wrote for my class...I have no idea if they apply exactly today:

https://github.com/compciv/watson-preview

And here's a example of the Watson classifiers performing on sample White House images:

http://stash.compciv.org/samples/watson-preview/printout.htm...

My favorite is the pic of Obama and the Pope, of which the top classifier is "Coffee_Maker -- 0.681709"

http://stash.compciv.org/samples/watson-preview/pics/popehou...

Now...the image is classified as: 99% Person, and 80% wedding...which, actually, isn't the worst guess :)
I agree, there is a small subset of such files where small pieces (or even the whole) can be compressed. If we just say "images" or "videos" there are also "uncompressed" variants of such, but such images or videos are always those which aren't even prepared to be on the web. E.g. "uncompressed AVI" or "Windows BMP." Those prepared for the web (e.g. MP4 or PNG) certainly aren't losslessly compressible.

Those that want to deliver the videos or pictures should use the proper format and not depend on Brotli or zlib.
Chevrolet Bolts are about to start rolling off the production line
New Scraping and “Pipes” tool
Spotify for Images
> So while this might be a problem now, it's correcting itself with time.

that assumes that the reasons behind age discrimination/bias are purely based on competence (or lack thereof).

I don't see the problem correcting itself when it seems the drivers behind age discrimination are wages and perceived cultural fit (anecdotally more evident in cases where the manager is younger than the candidate)
> I think they know the risk is too high

Yes indeed, let's not forget that nobody cares about this particular phone! FBI has got archives until 6 weeks ago, they should have had full access, hadn't they fucked up (or sabotaged?), and it's a professional phone that's most unlikely to contain anything interesting anyway.

The FBI thought it has a perfect opportunity to establish a precedent: Apple wouldn't fight against this case, because TERRORISM! It looks like it's failing, so of course they won't help establish a precedent against them.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and if you're a techie, everything looks like a technical issue. But this is not a technical issue, it merely masquerades as one.
> So just stay relevant?

The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.

Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).

There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
Can you guarantee that you will never write a piece of software under a non-GPL license for the rest of your life? I certainly can't and I suspect that few programmers other than RMS can.
Because the editor needs to learn how to use a full stop between sentences.
It is a bit ironic that these "gnu" core utils are not licensed under the GPL
Bear in mind that British Cadbury's, after reformulation, is still better than American Cadbury's.

Chicago may be the candy capital of the world, but let's just say that not all innovation in confectionery is to the ultimate good of the consumer. I don't know how, exactly, it has come to this, but I believe many of the chocolate-like products sold in the US are now labeled as "chocolate candy", as they no longer even meet any of the American legal definitions for chocolate.

It makes it really easy to adhere to a low-sugar diet when all the "chocolate" around you is junk.

Be glad if your chocolate still has actual cocoa butter in it, instead of coconut oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil, or shea butter. Or even sunflower or safflower oils!
Alupis wrote:
"Average users who just consume distro's are not going to switch to a new unproven CoreUtils (even if they knew how), and distro maintainers are not going to switch until it's proven either. It will take a huge company with a huge install-base switching and testing it in production for many years before others start to feel comfortable... however this is also an enormous burden on said mega-corporation, for little-to-zero perceived benefits."

Seems like this is a good opportunity for Mozilla to demonstrate the resilience of Rust and its ecosystem by adopting Rust as the language of choice, where possible, and deploying in-house a custom Linux system in which Rust-written components are plugged-in, as and when they are written and ready, with perhaps a full-fledged switch to Redox sometime in the future. If Rust and software written in it are pushed to their limits within Mozilla, then its not an unreasonable recommendation for it to be deployed on an even wider scale.
Large influencers are what attract people onto the platform in the first place, which is where ads and the like are supposed to take over. I remember when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher were battling to be the first to reach 1m followers, they bought billboards with their Twitter handles on them. The amount of new users that must have brought to the platform must have been tremendous, better than any other marketing efforts from Twitter at the time.

Twitter should be paying people with large follower counts, not the other way around. If they start charging for that, they'll just take their massive audiences elsewhere.
It's a useful example to people who need to provide Easy Read documents for people with a learning disability.

You can't just take the most used words and hope for the best. It takes real effort to get something understandable.
I haven't seen the specific study you mentioned, but it is referred to in the book, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" by Tom Vanderbilt. If you are at all interested in traffic, this is a very good book to start with.

Mind you, despite being very convincing, I'm not yet a late-merger. I do find myself trying to drive more smoothly, though.
but every time I read a code base, there is always a utility function reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes the wheel is invented because the existing wheel isn't built for the same purpose (ex: off-road).

ex:

I recently needed to check a buffer to see if it's contents were valid UTF-8 in nodejs. I wanted to do this without having to run it through something like StringDecoder, because it's an intermediate buffer, and I didn't want to have the overhead of actually converting it since it wasn't for my use. So I do 'npm install is-utf8'. Then:

let isUtf8 = require('is-utf8')
isUtf8(new Buffer('\u0000')) //false
isUtf8(new Buffer('\u000B')) //false
isUtf8(new Buffer('foobar')) //true

So the package is-utf8 is really more like "Is a printable UTF-8 string". Which is certainly a reasonable choice, and a possibly reasonable default, but was not what I needed.
Undefined behavior is not always identifiable through static analysis. Obviously it can be checked against at runtime, but that's actually quite expensive. It would, for example, include bounds checks for everything, and overflow checks on all signed arithmetic.
Be selfish.

Finishing a PhD is unlike completing a project in most other jobs. In most other jobs, someone needs what you're working on. Other people's investment in the outcome is similar to your own. If you fail to complete your work, others are likely to fail to complete their work. Consequently, incentives (hopefully) line up, and infrastructure (hopefully) exists to support you, with the recognition that your success is linked to group success.

Your PhD dissertation is not like this. Yes, your adviser is invested in you finishing - but not as nearly as much as you are. They will have other students, and they can always work on their own. Your peers may be invested, if they are working on another part of the project - but if you do not finish, they will find a way to get on without you. Your university is invested in you (quite literally, most of the time, with money), but again, not as nearly as invested as you are: plenty of grad students never finish, and they will help you, but schools also recognize that not all students finish.

The author has a good list, and I may read his book, but he's missing this attitude that I felt I had to adopt. The person who cares most about you finishing is you, and sometimes that means having to be selfish in order to finish. That can take of the form of not engaging in as much service in your department, or not providing some help on a project that is not part of your dissertation.

I do think this attitude is unfortunate, but it is a natural result of the requirement that a PhD dissertation represents work that the student owns. I much more enjoy the research I have done in an industry research lab, where me and my colleagues have collaborated equally. (Or equal-enough that in a grad school context, no one person could claim ownership of the work for a dissertation.) But, it's the system we have, and because of that, I think that in order to finish, grad students have to - at least eventually - adopt a selfish attitude.

Specifically, this "selfish attitude" means ruthless evaluating: will this thing get me closer to graduation? If no, don't do it. (Obviously this only applies to work. Having a life outside of grad school work is enormously important.) In the beginning, I don't think one needs to have this attitude. But as you approach completion, I think one needs to start thinking this way.
The Manga Guides to Databases, Statistics, Calculus, Molecular Biology, etc. are all highly rated.

http://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi...
Pastenib: The friendly Pastebin alternative
Hey,

Today I launched pastenib.com - Designed to be an alternative for other pastebins due to it having fewer restrictions, such as:
UNLIMITED paste sizes. Seriously.
No captchas.
No tracking, profiling, or adverts.
Robot friendly: feel free to use Pastenib as a place for your IOT application to dump stuff.
Ultra-simple to use and optimized for speed.

Basically, it's like every other Pastebin site out there, but without being unfair to the users. On pastenib, you can just paste your content and let us worry about everything else.

http://pastenib.com
In my experience, working at smaller companies helped me gain "broader" experience, where as at larger companies, you can go "deeper" experience. I would say go with the one that you are more passionate about.
>>So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.

How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?

All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.

>>You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.

You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy, which is heaven for terrorists.
Trac (YC W16) Aims to Improve on the Stopwatch
I think you're missing the point; this project looks to me more like a learning exercise, which is just fine.
I've submitted an issue asking to shift to a GPL license.

My general perspective on code I write that isn't for work - it has to be GPL. I refuse to have my code be yoinked by random corporations for their profit without having the code shared downstream.
LIVE survey results: Do you think that attacks in Brussels could be prevented?
I know the article is referring to "most commonly used" in a different way here (developers choosing it versus end users interacting with software written in it), but I would think that C is still the most commonly used language when you take the latter definition.

Think of all the machines running OS X and Linux (not sure about Windows), the system calls and drivers on most phones, the microcontrollers in your car, your toaster, your TV, etc.

I'd have to imagine C being the most "used" language, given that almost everything we interact with all day long, regardless of whether we are connected to the web, likely has something written in C on it.

Is there a ranking/estimate of this sort of "use"?
We did the same thing at reddit when we upgraded the search system.

First we put a little survey on every search result that said "Are you satisfied with these results? yes/no". After we collected enough data, we changed the entire search backend out, but told no one.

After a few months of collecting data showing the satisfaction go from ~70% to ~90%, we made a blog post explaining what we did.

Here's the real kicker though that makes it different from Kraft -- we didn't say that we had done it months ago, so we kept getting comments about how it was "so much better this week vs. last week".

We did that a few times. When we moved the site to EC2, we announced it months after the fact, and people would claim to have noticed the "sudden change".

It's an interesting look into the human psyche.
I just did this:

time bro --quality 6 --input linux-4.5.tar --output linux-4.5.tar.bro

real	0m18.436s
user	0m18.228s
sys	0m0.184s

time gzip -9 linux-4.5.tar
real	0m30.555s
user	0m30.424s
sys	0m0.172s

ls -lh (I removed the metadata):
106M linux-4.5.tar.bro
129M linux-4.5.tar.gz

Only 82% of the size at 60% of the time. Now this is pure text so that's not a good example of everything.
That's true, too. One has to be devious and effective to create a multi-part, lock-in strategy.