skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If reading regexes you wrote is a pain point for you, then you're not making as much use of the readability tools Perl provides as you could, i.e. the /x modifier to make unescaped whitespace insignificant, and in-regex comments. ( http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html )

And well, honestly, more often than not i found that "hard to read" perl code would be just as hard to read if it was written in lisp, python, c, or any other language you care to name; since more often than not that code is hard to read due to variables and functions having names that don't help the reader understand what they're holding or doing, and long blocks of code not having been encapsulated into functions well enough.

And lastly, to tie in to dang's point: Having "used Perl a lot" does not mean much if you have not also "learned Perl a lot". I've known, in the extreme, a Perl dev of 10 years experience, who had started out as a C dev, and yet did not use or trust Perl hashes, instead opting to write his own data structure encoding format. Have you ever read chromatic's Modern Perl?
Building recommandation engines with graphes
There are two trust problems that verifiable builds are supposed to solve:

1. Did the authors manipulate the source code compared to what they published?

2. Did a third party manipulate the binaries on the distribution channel?

The process of verifying a build can be done through a Docker image containing an Android build environment that we've published.

For the verification, you now depend on a complex binary blob provided by the authors, that is distributed through a different channel (Docker images instead of Google Play).

This is a good solution to the second problem, but it does not preclude OWS insiders from injecting malicious code (they merely need to add the backdoor at the SDK level[0] and use that same SDK for the public releases). Such a manipulation could be performed by an evil insider, or be part of a "government cooperation". I am not saying that OWS is or will be doing this. This is merely an observation of the shortcomings of the overall solution.

[0] "Reflections on Trusting Trust" https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
>> like removing the library from repository, what happened to left-pad

> This was entirely npm's fault for allowing it.

Not entirely. npm's fault is more along the lines of fsckup, and that
happens from time to time. It's everybody else's fault for including such
a trivial module to their code (I mean, those who included it directly), what
leads to much bigger exposure to such things (because there's much more
modules to depend on).

>> but also suddenly changing interface and/or call semantics, bumping only patchlevel part of version number

> This is actually less likely with tiny modules.

Times the number of the modules. Or rather, (1.0 - likeness) ^ count(modules).
You end up with much more fragile application.

And even when we put that aside, you still have large surface for all those
unlikely events when somebody makes a mistake, but it's not from the
publishing and versioning ground.

> If it were a large module like underscore, and its just changing this one tiny function a little bit, its okay if they bump the minor verision number, right? Well, it broke your program because out of those 100 functions you were using exactly that one.

There are two issues here.

First, the new release was probably totally unnecessary. Why not bundle
several such changes together? And semantic versioning scheme calls for
increase of major number whenever the change is backwards-incompatible. Too
bad that the change was tiny. So no, it's not "okay if they bump the minor
version number".

Second, if you were only using one function for those 100 functions, you
screwed up. You probably didn't needed that one tiny function that much, so
you added an unnecessary dependency. It's the same mentality of micromodules
that leads to a dependency fractal, which in turn leads to a fragile codebase.

Adding a dependency has its cost, but it costs in the (somewhat) distant
future. So you're taking some debt now, to repay later at much higher price,
except probably you don't see the price at the decision moment and you don't
realize it's an instalment when you need to repay part of it.
Multiple libraries for assertions in your test classpath
Academics are joining tech companies
I have inherited code from bioinformaticians with the same problem, except that it was written in Python.
Track danish politicians real-time
Looks like a joke against Apple products presentation. Nice one ;)
Well I have. And I deeply respect what he is trying to do. It's solution oriented unlike cheap talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiwJ0hNl1Fw
This itself, is an April Fools joke I hope. How meta ;-)
Ergo, Erdogan isn't bright.

No one - least of all @gkya - is saying he is bright. They are saying his actions aren't stupid.

Former dictators who censored speech don't generally have happy post-political careers.

Plenty have died in office while still holding power, too. Most of Turkey's immediate neighbors have had dictators who died while in power.
That's indeed true. Android phones are not still really updated often and I guess they need to keep backward compatibility for lots of things limiting their options for this kind of tricks.
Roughly how many petabyte customers are you talking about?
Perl Monks is far better than Stack Overflow for Perl questions, as they actively encourage the discussion that Stack Overflow avoids, leading to a greater understanding afterwards as opposed to just something that works.
The History of Web Design and the People Who Made It Happen
I'd like a pair of the rose tinted ones.
[free Course] File Encryption and Best Practices Using CrococryptFile
I wish it was banned globally.
>The ancient tradition of hoaxing and playing practical jokes on the first day of April has fallen victim to China’s crackdown.

Reading that the first time I thought 'hoaxing' was a chinese word.

How weird.
Processing large CSV files with Ruby
Metafont uses Hobby splines. Here’s the paper: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1047/CS-TR-8...
Yep, general programmers are the blue collar workers of this generation.

It's important to understand the technology but just programming alone is not enough of a valuable skill to separate someone.
Material design principles native to apps in space
defer resp.Body.Close()

That's almost a proverb by itself.
Show HN: Using Intro.js to add hints
Not boring at all.
Things like DRM can be fixed from the user demand side. If there are enough products on the market, then users can simply choose not to use products with DRM.

On the other hand, with issues like "banned encryption", if the government has its ways, there won't be any choice at all for the users.

Whether or not in the real world there are enough choices with regards to DRM and why or why not is a question for another time.
100,000 * $1,000 = $100,000,000
"20/20 Resolution" - ooh burn!
What It’s Like Being a Sudden Savant
Doh! Why did I think this was a real product? I blame Apple...
Seeing the Beauty in Concrete’s Rigidity with Ludovicmaillard
I found that at least one "local" Google is also introducing an innovative new concept today. Google Netherlands : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSZPNwZex9s

Any more from Google <your country here>?
I lost it in the video where it says works with all apps.

By the way, I have a Nexus 5 and never bought a Google Cardboard, is it worth it just for the joke of using it?
Better than I expected :D
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4cqyia/for_y...

Makes it a bit easier to see what's going on.
China is no longer a nation of tech copycats
Love the "Self-driving Mom" title for one of the people in the ad.
Despite the obvious considerations du jour, this reminds me of something which happened years ago, against SecondLife. It was something like a campaign, named "Get a first life", with a very apt slogan along the lines of "First life is a 3D world where server lag doesn't exist".

They did have a point, much like the "BEYOND VIRTUAL REALITY. ACTUAL REALITY." slogan in this.
You have a point -- hoaxing has a fishy smell.
And playing looks like it could be a Chinese word too!

[1] xing: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrs...

[2] ying: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrs...
Why immutability is important for the React Lifecycle
What about community-driven languages that are rapidly evolving? In that case, would you say that the community expects developers to always gobble up whatever is thrown over the wall? (See: web frontend development)

> "as if it's our duty to relearn how to do X for the Nth time, this time with bells and whistles?"

There are a few areas of computing that are fairly stable, if stability of knowledge is your priority, you should seek one of those out.

But in many other areas of computing, our discipline is young and rapidly evolving. Some of that evolution is being driven by a corporate need to sell the next version. But plenty is driven by the rapid evolution in languages and paradigms. And why is that? Because we all know that programming can still be (much) easier, more reliable, more predictable, cheaper, and more fun. This is why many devs, myself included, like investing in "ephemeral" knowledge.

Honestly, I understand that the decay of hard-earned skills is distressing for many people. Not all fields have this characteristic. But in our field, it just comes with the territory.
I've used a couple of tool$ AKA commercial tools

Cadence Allegro PCB Designer is a right steaming pile. The whole issue with path's are a problem. You don't have libraries like you do in Altium or ancient ORCAD, you have directories of files that define pads and parts.

Lately poking about with Altium. I think it's fairly good.

I still have a copy of the old ORCAD circa late nineties, was 'okay' Or put it this way, needed to layout a PCB in 2005 and tried Eagle and... dug out and installed ORCAD from 1998.
When will the Unity game engine support this?
I actually also thought that this was a problem so I started trying to build an ORM-ish thing in F#. I havent had that much time to spend on it lately, but its in a pretty OK state as is. If you have any comments or opinions then Im open for all suggestions :) https://github.com/wastaz/hyperboliq
Fundamentally, selling software for your users to run on their own devices is pretty close to zero cost. It's literally just the cost to get it to their device, and that's it (disregarding payment processors, support, etc.).
> I think the JVM backend was broken recently by a patch

That's a wrong way to describe it.

There were some important performance related changes to the spec prior to the Christmas release. The focus was on keeping MoarVM backend up-to-date, that's my understanding.
> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS

Not sure if that counts, but they hired a few of CentOS's core developers a while back (one or two years ago, I think), explicitly to make communication between RHEL developers and the CentOS people easier/faster. CentOS remains what it was before, but Red Hat now pays a few people to work on it full time.
Its a pretty interesting experience, obviously not quite as good as a proper VR headset, but for the price its a great way to get a glimpse.
Don't forget green subsidies
> The goal is maximum production

Paperclips?
Summary -- There are two themes here: appealing to someone's (1) vanity or (2) pain.
> We don't need that much manufactured goods.

And I think we're needing less of them too. Everyone who opts to rent vs own is one less mower to sold, one less shed to be built, one less piece of "infrastructure" to maintain. We're all begging for shared public transport which will result in less vehicle production. The way we live fundamentally shapes our economy; I feel like we forget this sometimes.
> You say potato, I say potato

Amazing
But necessary.
Unpublish isn't that bad. He could have just as easily made patch updates to each of his modules with malicious install scripts and/or malicious runtime behavior.

Depending on 200 tiny modules, you have 200 different risks vs just having 1 risk.
Google Self-Driving Bicycle
> What they could argue is that by ceasing to publish the canary, you're committing the crime of communicating something you're not allowed to communicate. That, however, skirts dangerously close to forcing someone to lie.

This was my point, but the issue seems to me not about them forcing you to lie but rather about you setting up a system that you know will either force you to lie, or to break a court order by communicating something you were ordered not to. The only point of a warrant canary is to try to bypass the intention of a potential future court order.
"Adding a dependency has its cost, but it costs in the (somewhat) distant future. So you're taking some debt now, to repay later at much higher price, except probably you don't see the price at the decision moment and you don't realize it's an instalment when you need to repay part of it."

That is a very nice and succinct summary of dependancies
I don't think that's a contradiction - I'd guess that sans serif is indeed much easier to read specifically on signs.

When the UK designed its road/motorway signs they conducted all kinds of usability studies and ended up designing the Transport typeface; just about any country I've been to in Europe uses sans typefaces for roadsigns and station/tube/airport signs.

The jury may well still be out for body text in books and other publications. That's not the problem Johnston was asked to solve though.
The difference between openSUSE and Fedora seems to be that openSUSE is based on SLES and Fedora is the base for RHEL. That may be different approaches, but I feel like it has very comparable results. Fedora is a community project heavily sponsored by Red Hat and open to everyone, it seems to be very similiar to openSUSE's governance model. Most things Red Hat is creating for RHEL is available in Fedora before (in fact, I cannot name any RH product that's not available in Fedora thinking about it).

> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS

CentOS is part of Red Hat (for like 1 - 2 years? Not sure).

I'm kinda irked by your original post because it seems to imply you cannot get Red Hat technology without the EULA or only by paying. That's just wrong as both CentOS and Fedora prove.
What's the advantage of a "column-oriented" data store/database?
Show HN: Triangul-Art – make pixel art but with triangles
Elixir 1.2.4 released
Google Japan: https://www.google.co.jp/ime/furikku/

(incl. schematics on GitHub)
Mine must be broken, it's all rather blurry for me.
The situation with Microsoft in the 90s was substantially different. Go read all of https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f..., but here's a random paragraph:

> 35. Microsoft possesses a dominant, persistent, and increasing share of the world- wide market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems. Every year for the last decade, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems has stood above ninety percent. For the last couple of years the figure has been at least ninety-five percent, and analysts project that the share will climb even higher over the next few years.

Other than the surface similarity that they both involve browsers, the situation in that order and the present day could not be more different.
DoSelect Web Services – Utilizing wasted compute resources in the cloud
Silicon Valley Must Corral Its `Unicorns,' SEC's White Says
I could imagine Red Hat having lots of customers that would like running their .Net applications on Linux, so it makes sense for them.
> There's a far more people that know mathematical summation than know how to program

Source?

My experience is about 100 to 1 the opposite. I know tons of programmers that don't know math notation. I know few people at all, even non programmers, that know math notation.

I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math.
CentOS is actually an official part of Red Hat by now[1].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
What is considered a house has changed significantly, our expectation have grown both in size and amenities. Additionally, land use restrictions and migration have caused disproportionate demand in certain areas drastically increasing the cost.
Discovery Could Rewrite History of Vikings in New World
Warren Buffett slips but still winning epic hedge fund bet
Coming from Python, Go seems to be a pretty nice language. Is it worth giving it a shot?
According to the Snowden documents, traffic is hijacked in a targeted manner. So, for example, only on pages served to the designated user, IP address or IP blocks etc. We would not see all it's traffic altered, we would only see traffic being altered if we were being directly targeted. It would be incredibly hard to see by others.

Also, the SSL keys are not stolen, we have to assume that they have been given to them based on the letter. The gag order and canary indicated that everything has been compromised.
European tech funding almost flat in Q1 2016 – excluding Spotify's debt round
You can put CentOS on production machines. If I understand the news correctly, the free developer license only applies to ... well, developer machines.
The requirement of a mobile phone number and either Android or IOS, or a linked instance of one of those seems even more restrictive for a tool that claims to be all about privacy. The way governments are rapidly closing up methods to register a mobile phone number without ID are disconcerting, although predictable due to the common use of burner phones as communication device of choice for nefarious purposes.
This is really nice. I have been struggling to understand docker, but this made it a lot clearer.
Welcome to DoYouModCOD's Web Page
It's very easy to create something nice with it. https://www.instagram.com/p/BDgZ_bQI-hO/

But this is a dummy basic editor. I know a looooot of features are missing. Check the GitHub repo for more info.
Clearly you don't know what FUD really is.
Analytics like sum(column) are much faster if data is saved column-oriented. Also every time you don't do select *, but select a, b, it's much easier on disk because you're not even touching some columns.
Company creates "Government request officer" position in company.

Company policy states each month a polygraph must be taken by "Government request officer" covering "certain" topics, and the results are posted online.

This month the "Government request division" officer failed his poly.

The wording of poly test could be done to never even speak of nsl etc or even what poly was designed to do, and no company document/policy or spoken word ever says anything about the nsl etc.
I don't mean the range so much as it sounds like he could be hinting that the car will be capable of being fully autonomous. Considering the price point for the entry level version is ~35k, could we be about to see the first mass market self driving car?
So much of the syntactic sugar that you'll almost always will forget to use.
7 Soft Skills Every Freelance Web Designer Must Have Pt3
Show HN: News API by AYLIEN
Great for novelty factor and the couple of tiny games available, but loses its novelty pretty quickly.
I am horrid at predicting the future, but I'm seeing too many of these cute companies' commercials like Birchbox, Lollipop, cute.com, cute30employedfemale.com, cutesinglebadgirl.com, boredhubbyathome.com, buymycutechinesegabage.com, hayourvansarecutebuyyme.com, dinkswhobuythings.com,(this will perk up marketing majors.), etc.

I see a big crash. So big, rents will drop in the Bay Area--big time!

I guess homeless shelters/programs won't be controversial? I really cringe when I think about the future.

(I'm kinda just kidding, but some of these companies just look like they are trying to spend what's left of the funding on advertising? Don't get me wrong EBay needs competition, and dating services need competition, but don't do it in a cute way? Just offer a good product. Low fees, and honesty. Get rid of the MBA's. Get rid of the Designers, at least the one's who are just copying a TED presentation?)
New elliptic curve attack. New recommended keysize went from 256 to 3072 bits. "ECDLP can be solved in 24-th root time" https://t.co/v29zE9S6v7
Craig Wright’s upcoming big reveal
Sonified Higgs data show a surprising result
I am sure they could make a cockroach cute as well, but the fact is that rats/cockroaches are seen by the majority as gross.

I never got the impression that mice are seen as gross.
This has been known for some time (and proven with some good examples) but still is a shock to people who believed somewhere in '90 that the next stage in the economy is the shift to services instead of industry.

I recommend this book from Ha-Joon Chang that has a nice chapter on that (a very pleasant read with references):
http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...
In theory, yes. You can copy indefinitely the software but there's always some friction to market adoption and to circumvent that you need marketing, and sales people... which doesn't scale well unless you have a good recurring revenue base (sell once, collect forever. Like Oracle business model)
Maybe that's true for list price, but it's definitely not true for my organization for negotiated price. We have ELAs in place for both Oracle and Microsoft and the upshot of it all is Oracle RDBMS is significantly cheaper for us than SQL Server. Enterprise licensing and contract negotiation is definitely a case of where YMMV.
Strikingly (YC W13) Is Hiring Developer, Marketing, Blogger – Shanghai
> Like democracy and free speech, it is a Western concept that simply isn’t welcome here.

Ironic propaganda. Analyzing soundbites requires slightly verbose context:

"Why do conservatives insist that democracy was invented in ancient Greece, and that it is somehow inherent in what they call 'Western civilization'—despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? In the end, it’s just a way of doing what the rich and powerful always do: taking possession of the fruits of other people’s labor." [...]

"Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word 'democracy' was invented in ancient Greece—but largely by people who didn’t like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really 'invented' at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It’s not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.

"In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself."

— David Graeber, "The Democracy Project"
404. Has it been taken down already?