skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's even worse for a builtin function... You'd need to test it, code review it, and so on

If you can't trust built-in functions to do what they say on the standard library documentation, you're either paranoid or made a wrong choice of language. (Or you have some very compelling reason to be working in a language that's still rough, like the early days of Swift, which is an entirely different game).

>If you're really suggesting that you can't be trusted to calculate an average correctly

It's not about what you can be trusted to do, but what's worth spending your time on.
depends a lot on what you're baseline is
Eh, your shortcuts should only be a git clone away.
its a long standing issue, and gets worse when there is node_modules inside node_modules inside node_modules ... so on that someone suggested renaming node_modules to n_m . https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/issues/6960#issu...
Red Hat has said it intends to continue to open source technology it acquires.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-an...

(It takes time to do this sort of thing,)
A Well-Tailored Suit, the Great Equalizer
You make a good point, yes the ideas are useful. However, the way they are still used as labelled buinary opposites make may people think they are undividable ideas. The replacements use them, but go further, rather than rely on them as originally created. They sometimes sophisticate the originals, which is good. The basic idea is interesting, but it is the simple binary condition of the original that is problematic, not capturing all of the differences. Unfortunately, the hardest thing in psychology is variable construction and testing, so it's taking a while to move beyond these too-broad constructs.

I agree old ideas are not necessarily terrbile at all. Euclid, for example, had some rather good theorems. However, psychology is rather different.
Recommended Reading for Developers
Will the BBC's free micro:bit computer create a generation of teenage HACKERS?
The Most Comprehensive Beginners Guide to WordPress Available Guaranteed
HTTP Alternative Services
SV economics 101: the "reverse network effect"
"some experts fear the release of this pocket rocket device could backfire by helping to teach youngsters the skills needed to be a hacker."
Houndify launched last year and provides both speech recognition and natural language understanding. They have a free plan that never expires and transparent pricing. It can handle very complex queries that Google can't.
Use the null object pattern.

If you're checking a value to see if it's set by testing for null/undefined, you're doing it wrong.

This is good advice for any language, not just JS.

Besides, using null as the default for an undefined value is a mistake. Null should indicate a non-value not the absence of a value. Maybe one day the static OOP languages will die so devs have a chance to learn the difference.
Show HN: Donald Drumpf Bot
I didn't realize there was a paywall.

But based on the above comment, it does appear some of this may be manipulation.
Practically, backdoored firmware doesn't necessarily run services and communicates to the mothership all the time, nor does it communicate using conventional protocols. It creates invisible hole in the system beyond OS's reach to detect and repair it. Furthermore, the hardware (or chip based) backdoor is way more sophisticated, typically have been in use in the servers of foreign governments of interest. This chips can be used to take full control of a server, and the whole network when places strategically.

In another note, hard RTOS are not used in servers, so performance cannot be compared with benchmarking tools.
Thanks, and thank you for the link.
> 1) JS is unique in that it is delivered over the wire, so there is a benefit in having micro-modules instead of a bigger "string helpers" module. Things like webpack are changing that now (you can require lodash, and use only lodash.padStart).

JS isn't even remotely unique in this regard, almost every static language has had dead code removal for decades.
which issue? I thought we were talking about the random removal of left-pad and a couple hundred others.
This culture of tiny one-function modules sounds like Joe Armtrong's proposal about the "Key-Value database of all functions".

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...
That is when the counter is most useful so you can see the small sample size
It was in the article; TSMC expects it to go into production by 2018.
Notes on Apple's Refresh – Benedict Evans
> Opening a new shell can take ~5s with oh-my-zsh

Heh. I remember when zsh first got its fancy completion system, compinit would add so long to zsh startup on the dinky little machines of the day that people literally started adding progress bars and the like to their zshrc.

I stuck with the old-style completion for a long time.
A discussion about the breaking of the Internet (from kik)
Tay responds "Jews deserve death" (not to me, to someone else)

https://twitter.com/TayandYou/status/712809237269716992

BRILLIANT!
> What concerns me here is that so many packages took on a dependency for a simple left padding string function, rather than taking 2 minutes to write such a basic function themselves.

Wait -- code reuse is bad now??
> "He said, 'The Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die,' " Serna recalls. "And he was beating his fist on the dashboard. He was frantic."

That is a bit over the top but if true, then amazing. How many engineers can predict something so detailed.
> becoming dependant on non-standard tools

There's no shame in customizing shortcuts. Isn't that the entire point of emacs?
Yep, AMD. And the only thing I got rid of were the video cards, which I sold on ebay.

I put the old drive in an external case and used it to archive old engineering projects. Kept the original monitor and added the other two.

I did have to trash my keyboard after I spilled coffee on it, though :)
Microsoft launches Tay, an AI chat bot that mimics a 19-year-old American girl
Paul Allen starts up $100M bioscience initiative
This is a little off topic but Thank you for supporting HTTPS. I am glad to see that

https://codehappy.info/ works just fine. (:
That entirely depends on your bundler. Newer bundlers like http://rollupjs.org/ combine everything to avoid this.
Rest in peace Bob.
Ideally, names could still change hands, but it would require a major version bump. So I publish 'google-lib' 1.0.0, Google files a trademark claim and is given publishing rights on the 'google-lib' package, but only for versions >=2.0.0. If a company still goes after you for hosting the archived code, that's when you make a legal stand and try to get EFF involved or something - because there's zero case for "reasonable likelihood of [trademark] confusion" over a deprecated version of a package which is only available via 'npm install'. I would expect this to never/rarely happen.

The harder question is what to do when you get a valid copyright claim, ie. when someone publishes code that wasn't theirs to publish. I think in this case, immutability doesn't really work, and you'd have to retroactively remove all versions. This should also be fairly rare, especially since so many packages are <500 lines of code.
Steve Wozniak Is Worried About the Apple Watch
Having gone back and forth myself a half dozen times, (and sticking with iPhone this time), the thing I miss the most on Android is iMessages. Sending full photos and videos is really nice and I just appreciate the simplicity of the interface. On my last Android device (LG G2) Hangouts still didn't have SMS support (and it was pretty ugly). It was always "coming real soon now!".

My reception on my MVNO carrier sucks at the house, but that's OK. She just has my Facetime Audio number down as primary. Signal is much less of an issue, and call quality is much better. If I've got WiFi in the building, it doesn't matter if my cell signal is weak.

I could go on all day... but yeah. I guess it cuts both ways (Apple/Android) to an extent. But there's a lot to be said for being on the same platform as your spouse.
You investors need to stop shit talking one another. Jason is super helpful to me, even though I've never got a penny in investment out of him. And Sam you've helped to build an ecosystem that is unmatched by any accelerators. I am looking at you guys for ideas to help my new venture, Angeloop, to add the same value to the companies that don't get into the program. We are bridging the communication gap that exists between startup and their investors so they can help each other scale. I'm hoping you guys can work through your issues because when you guys fight, it contributes to our fragile system further deteriorate.
Either spelling is correct.

Extroversion is the original 17th c. spelling, used to mean a literal turning inside out. The word drifted through Late Romantic mysticism in the 19th c. and landed in psychology in the early 20th c.

Extraversion is a more recent variant.

(I'm not sure anyone really wanted to know that...)
node is can be a good idea. But people don't take JavaScript programming seriously. Most libraries objectively suck.

Google, authors of V8 and #1 subject matter experts on V8, have published coding standard. Does someone use it in the node community? No. Everyone loves "standard", a lousy standard that allows everyone put a badge on their github page while still having a code base full of vomit.

JSDoc. A great solution for documentation. You would expect major libraries to adopt it, or a similar thing. But again, no. Major libraries such as busboy do not use them. The documentation resembles a napkin.

Then everything else: input validation, error handling, consistency... etc. Take "request" for instance, one of the most widely used libraries. The state machine it implements is inconsistent. You abort a request and get a timeout, you can abort a request without starting it and get an exception. Issues that will drive you insane while debugging.

Express, one of the most widely used web frameworks on node.js. Do this on a route: setTimeout(function(){ throw new Error(); });. Great, now you have broken out of the error handling context. Great job.

Node libraries suck all across the board. It's the PHP of the 21st century. There are exceptions, like: lodash, bluebird, and others.
> is a feature built into the Cocoa text system

Well, yes, thanks. So it arguably should have worked in iTerm2 to start with.

In any case, now with the same configuration it'll even work on Linux (I also configured ctrl+left and right to work the same for non-⌥-having keyboards).

And my point remains the same, that I learned what was OSX, what was bash, and what was readline, more about how to configure readline, that you can 'cat' with no arguments and type things to see their escape codes (which is how I got ^[^[[C and ^[^[[D as the codes for ⌥← / ⌥→), that \e is short for the escape part ^[ (though I still don't understand how escape codes work everywhere, more learning to do). All because something didn't work how I wanted. Of course it'd be nice if readline had better defaults too :)
On a similar note, is there a hackers guide to be social / relationships / that stuff?

if $this, then try [1, 2, 3]-ish style?
Don’t worry - they will get the first snout in the public trough.
Ah, I stand corrected. Cheers Greg.
Just sugar-coated kool aid I'm hearing. Community benefits? First of all, I'm coding to get paid and this recent madness proved that JS ecosystem is semi-garbage. Back to the original question - do people really can't program that they need packages like left-pad or is-integer which had their own dependencies? Before writing those cool toolchains (which would likely work in a specific machine with a specific setting with all the real world testing the community has) can we at least pretend that we know the computer science basics?
Original post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321027
I have a theory that Christopher Alexander is the root behind all nonsense in programming.

Reading this, he gives unfalsifiable measure's of quality, including, "Do I feel myself to be more whole?" and "whether the thing has life and whether it promotes life in me and you".

When people try to follow his guidance, and they predictably fail to meet this arbitrary criterion, he distances himself from them and creates a new set of guidelines that if someone else is foolish enough to try to follow, I'm sure will lead to the same result.

He speaks nonsense, then tries to head people off, who might criticize, him by including, "So, depending on who you talk to, they'd say well this stuff Alexander's been discovering is a lot of nonsense", implying that anyone who criticizes him just doesn't understand the immense insights he is making.

It seems to me that people like him use bugs in the human mind to gain influence.

The insecurity programmers felt, still feel to a lesser extent, caused by wider society largely considering programming to be mindless, is, I think, the main cause for his influence on programming.

He gives programmers legitimacy, by associating programming with something generally perceived not to be mindless. Ironically, these perceptions seem to be precisely the opposite to reality.

In effect, in order to fix one societal failure (public ignorance about programming), another societal failure (lionizing pseudo insight), is applied rather than addressing the first failure.

I think he gets away with it because people are so willing to give others, the pseudo profound in particular, the benefit of the doubt.
Which languages do you trust to use Knuth's algorithm (or something similarly comprehensive and exhaustive) without checking?

Not going to check many, but a quick look, since I've got them handy: Python fails Spivak's criteria, as does .NET.
Has there been a more recent poll than this one from April 2015 [1] showing public support for intelligence-community (and greater mass policing) reform?

[1] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/priv...
Cheers to 100 years! (on April 30)

Claude spoke at my graduation commencement from CMU years ago. As an electrical and computer engineer this was such a surprise and delight, I can hardly describe.

He said that commencement speeches were an opportunity for old codgers to impart pithy maxims, but that on reflection not a single pithy maxim came to mind. He came across as a genuine, self-effacing guy, full of fun.

If you get a chance, look again at Information Theory, it's full of gems.
>“‘How do we make this cost less?’ Every support case can cost up to $30 for them. You cost them a lot of money and don’t bring in a lot of revenue.” Still, “They can’t run the company without you.”

What's the actual average cost of a support request? $30 seems like it would eat up annual profits of a lot of services fairly quickly.
Terrorism kills fewer people than almost every hazard Americans face. Cancer, auto accidents, drug resistant bacteria, and hundreds of other risks are how 99.5% of Americans will die. So, for the minuscule risk that terrorism presents we've spent billions, give up privacy and consider ever more extreme measures?

How about instead we instead acknowledge the risks are small to Americans, and refocus our attention, our lethal attention, to the clerics, organizations, bankers and states that sponsor terrorism.

Let's talk giving up civil liberties after we have run out of accountable parties to bring to justice.
Recent Freakonomics podcast interview with Danny Meyer on the same topic. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/danny-meyer/
The same could be said for your post. When people ask why commenting on message boards is terrible, show them this.

If you don't want to write modules this way, don't. Nothing about javascript requires that you even read articles about modules that you don't want to use. Or read articles and then follow up by posting on message boards about articles about modules you aren't going to use.

Bang some code out instead. Your opinion of javascript is about as valuable as the opinion of the person who wrote the modules.
Author of "is-positive-integer" here. I will admit the implementation is pretty funny, but I move-out all single-purpose utils out of projects to modules for a bunch of reasons. DRY is the most obvious one, but one that may be less obvious is for better testing.

I move out modules so I can write really nice tests for the independent of the projects I am using them in. Also, I tend to write projects w/ 100% test coverage, breaking out utils allows me to test projects easier and faster.

Also note, the implementation of this module changed a few times today. With it being open source and having the collaboration of other engineers, we ended up with a very performant version, and discovered interesting quirks about "safe integers" in JS.
Why VR doesn't have AAA games yet
Node.js Frameworks
I think this was a case of researchers going back and analyzing data to look for a particular event, as opposed to "they've been crunching through the stream for years and are only now up to 2011".
Alright, I parse it, and I blame the post-finals slump I'm caught in. Propositionally, the relationship's fine and it's clearly stated, despite what sleepy-me might've thought a couple hours ago. But what's the useful assertion? Assume high programming skill, low shock; is it trying to say that programmers are obviously all socially oblivious? Does it say that it's especially common for everyone to know any amount less than all of the information in the link?

Heck, is an inverse-corollary relationship even meaningful if you only have one datum (one double of the two observations he's made) and not a sliding range?
For what it's worth, it's actually surprisingly manageable. I've been doing "750 Words" for a while http://750words.com/ and writing that much mindlessly is about 13 minutes. Writing that much thoughtfully is probably a lot of thinking on the side plus 30-40 minutes. I think it needs a lot less work than people think, but a lot more than people are willing to put in by default.
...and this example is none of those things, and untouched in 2 years.

If an interviewee did respond with some or all of the points you raise he'd have turned a potential negative into a positive point. This instance is the simple arithmetic mean with no consideration of anything.

I stand by my original comment. Nine times out of ten an average is going to be resolutely unexceptional, one time in ten or less it's the core of a well-crafted solution with a decent reason for being.
git clone your customizations into an account that's not yours. There's a special hell for people who do that. I don't care if it's a shared account or you're a guest in their personal terminal. Special hell. ;-)
Formula for a top HN article:

1. Make an observation about a popular thing.
2. Blindly extrapolate.
3. Make one or more broad, controversial statements.
4. (Optional) Nuance.
https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/51
I feel like maybe Colin is missing the point a little. Obviously it's a terrible backdoor simply by dint of targeting conventional DH.

But it's a really fun exercise!
Way too ascii-centric. Getting case transformations right in the presence of unicode can be complicated.
This is an issue that we don't have a clear solution or path for right now but love that you guys spend some thinking about how it could be solved. Super valuable to us. :)

I would appreciate if one of you added this as an issue at the repo with any ideas and solutions you come up with.
At the moment the easiest way to get into an animated conversation - or possibly a fist fight - is to ask about Europe.
I don't care. I expect it to work for the simple case, and I expect not to spend time on it unless there is a good reason (like I have very large numbers and must be careful not to overflow).
I'm really happy he got the closure he needed before he passed.
Well, "Scotch is an adjective meaning "of Scotland" according to Wikipedia.

And Scotch tape was named after the Scots (and features a tartan design).
If you have hundreds of HP Proliant servers, all with the latest firmware patches and some level of support, and they all run a supported version of RHEL, with some level of support, and once a week a different machine crashes and dumps the kernel core - if you have RHEL (and HP) support, you have a way to escalate the issue. They have kernel programmers on staff who know what errors might be in the kernel code that talks to, say, host bus adapters. What does a normal corporation do in this circumstance if they are running Debian servers?

Insofar as competition in this space, SLES has been popular in heterogenous environments (a lot of Windows servers). Canonical and Ubuntu are newer competitors on the scene. Companies have been using Red Hat for 20 years, they are pretty good at their jobs.

Also, RHEL is a flagship but Red Hat sells support for other products like JBoss.
npm does a decent enough job deduping shared packages. The reason is different packages consume different versions of things. Java only lets you have a single version of a package. If the API changes, it can be a pain when your dependencies were written for different versions. That slows adoption since you have to wait until everyone you depend on has updated first.
This article reminds me that I thought old busted stuff were less likely to be stolen. That's why I was pretty confident my very low grade, rusty, ugly single-pedal [1] bike would be safe for a day. Some guys proved me wrong, ripped my far too weak cable locks and did whatever they wanted with what was valuable of that bike (5$ for the metal frame ? the rest was plastic).

[1] wear made left pedal unscrew itself over time, I couldn't ride single legged anymore so I took the failing pedal, the seat and went to my appointment.
Apple is bad news for the future of the Web
That's the cost of a support incident handled by a live person. If you use self-service options like the knowledge base or Google then the cost is essentially zero.

This is why many companies make it hard to call them.
Maybe there is no solution to this problem. I have yet to be convinced that surveillance has been effective at all at combatting terrorism, and even if it's been occasionally effective its ROI is terrible.

Our various societies are generally willing to accept certain tradeoffs because there are no black and white answers. In the US, society as a whole is currently willing to accept a relatively enormous amount of collateral damage to allow widespread gun ownership. This causes multiple orders of magnitude more deaths than terrorism, and yet for now, it's deemed acceptable to protect certain liberties.

If encryption is allowed to be truly secure, it's possible that more people will die in terrorist attacks. It's also possible that more people will get away with truly terrible things like child pornography. But the freedoms that we give away generally never come back, or they take an enormous amount of time to come back. For me, maintaining those liberties is worth the tradeoff.
If the code is open source, what difference does it make if the code is in my module or someone else's?
That's not how it works though. Manufacturers realized they want to force you to buy again so they just made it unmaintainable with the same lifespan. iPhones are unmaintainable and they still become useless after 5 years or so.
While it demonstrates the problem of npm lacking namespaces (such that the word "average" is wasted on such a trivial implementation)...it doesn't seem anyone was using that library
I like the idea and I couldn't agree more. Would be awesome if each individual package could be verified, maybe even stored, using the block chain.

If you have some time, please add an issue on the repo and start the discussion over there.
Worth pointing out that the cool gif and video are just illustrations. I'm not sure what was actually "captured" when it happened. Maybe the chart on the side of the page which shows the spike in brightness?