skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That same generation of programmers also moved us out of the GOTO hell that they existed in with more reasonable structured languages. There's a reason, and it's not just coincidence, that old school Fortran and BASIC and assembler written in an unstructured manner is difficult to maintain and reason about, while software written in more structured language is easier to maintain and reason about.

This is what Dijkstra was commenting about. It's related to his "Go to statement considered harmful" (1968) paper and his text (with Hoare and Dahl) Structured Programming (1972).

EDIT: I was looking for something like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC

Version 6 saw the introduction of separately compilable
procedures with parameters. In 1976, Steve Garland added
structured programming features to create Dartmouth SBASIC,
a precompiler which produced version 6 output (and which
formed the basis of ANSI BASIC).

Structured programming was introduced into at least this version of BASIC after Dijkstra's statement about BASIC causing brain damage.
HSBC slashes Zomato's valuation by half
> Layout frameworks (eg Bootstrap) tackle the problem of developing a site that's readable at resolutions from 320px wide on a two year old phone up to a 5K iMac.

Displaying information readably has been solved by HTML for twenty years. It may not be pretty, but it will be readable.

> Application frameworks (eg Angular) make it much faster, and consequently a nicer experience, to maintain user state, load content, navigate around template driven pages, etc.

You know what's a better way to maintain state? HATEOAS. And there are no client-side libraries involved!

You know what's a better way to load content? Letting the highly-optimized browser do it!

You what's a better way to navigate around a page? Don't take over my space bar and cursor keys, and let me use my browser to browse!
> Rails remains to this day the tool I go to for building web applications because it's so well suited for building something quickly. Sure the effort to make it scale is present but I see any scaling effort as big regardless of framework or language.

This is why I continue to use Rails despite being interested in this that and the other new thing. It's very productive in terms of getting something up and running.

I mean, heck, Twitter started with Rails, and despite some hiccups, managed to grow. And Twitter is pretty much the poster child for something that has to scale massively. Odds are, you won't have the same problem.
Parsing UDP in Elixir with Binary Pattern Matching
Given the choice between hand-rearing cattle and growing wheat versus buying a ready-made burger, well, it depends on whether you want to eat slightly less well, sooner or slightly better, later.
There is a free service that does this for you. It automatically sends a Pull-Request whenever one of your dependencies are outdated. This means that you can easily check that all your tests pass before merging it.

https://doppins.com
Previously posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658356, with great comments
If you can afford an IDA Pro license and cost of plugins, does it matter?
Part of that might be that conservatives and moderates hear the liberal opinion expressed in so many out outlets that it is fairly easy to give an accurate answer where liberals hear what liberal outlets think conservatives think which is sensationalized to gain eyeballs.

I was taught to be able to argue the other sides opinion as well because then you truly understand what you believe.
> but not necessarily an argument in favor of taking action with it.

Stopping genocide is the clearest justification for "taking action" with a large military.

IMO, the issue is not that the US has a large military. Scale is hard to judge, but the US has a ridiculously huge military. The US military is designed to fight 3 wars at the same time which seems to be vast overkill. The #1 Air Force in the world in term of military strength is US Air Force, #2 Air Force in the world is the US Navy. That's vastly beyond what it takes to deal with local genocide.

PS: Consider the F-15 Eagle introduced in 1976 currently has a world wide 100:0 kill loss ratio in Aerial Combat, that took an insane amount of R&D and training. In fact the production is scheduled to in in 2019. While impressive it's hard to call that anything but overkill.
I think in the US newspapers are more constrained in their biases, but as you say TV stations do take editorial views. But, as an example of regulation, only US citizens can own TV station in the US. Additionally, no single US TV station has anything like the viewer share that Facebook has.
Nielsen makes specific claims about the meaning of its data to people who pay for that data, so it would be fraud for them to undermine those claims by manipulating the data. I doubt Facebook does anything similar.
> already generously offering their content for free

If they're attempting to make money from ads, they're not offering it for free.
I think Clinton's main social points in terms of get-out-to-vote issues are abortion and immigration. I don't think Gays, Guns, and God are get-out-to-vote issues for Sanders, Clinton, or Trump. Those votes aren't easy to secure for these candidates.

My point is not that Democrats or the GOP have social issues as part of get-out-to-vote drives. My point is to look at the content of the GOP points, whether on scientific policy or social issues.
Large corporations routinely finance both parties' national conventions; the fact that several like Walmart and Coca-Cola are pulling their funds because they don't like the nominee is unusual.

I can't seem to find any information about how the Democratic convention is being funded this year, but in 2012 they specifically rejected corporate funding [0]. Not sure if that was a one-time thing or meant to be an enduring policy.

Also, boo on Forbes for calling it "Trump's Republican National Convention" in the headline. It's run by the party, not the candidate, and there's currently a lot of contention between Trump and the convention leadership [1] so calling it his is a little misleading.

[0] http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/no-corporate-m...
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/us/politics/donald-trumps-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factor...
The emphasis on magic was a particularly bad decision. It looked wonderful in the original screencasts that let you build a webapp in 5 minutes. It causes terrible pain when you're trying to do something complicated.

This was one of the mistakes Django made and - to their credit - got over relatively quickly. It began as a kind of imitation of Rails but they stripped out the magic pretty quickly and made it a lot more explicit.
I think there's some middle ground that could be found here. For arguments sake, how about:

1. A drug company can charge whatever it wants for a drug until some predefined multiple of the cost of developing the drug is recovered.

2. After that point, the patent expires and its up to the free market to determine prices.

Set the multiple of R&D costs high enough that it allows for the low success rate of drug research, and you have a model that still encourages risk taking whilst preventing profiteering.
From Stroustrup of C++ fame: There are only two kinds of languages [frameworks]: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
> The documents have revealed the hidden assets of hundreds of politicians, officials, current and former national leaders, celebrities and sports stars.

I feel bad for the celebrities and sports stars. In all likelihood, most of them probably have no idea that their money is in a tax haven. Some of them probably do, but most of them probably outsourced their money management.

The politicians I'm thinking probably had an idea of what was going on with their money, but maybe they outsource just as much.

I'm just saying a lot of the people in this database are probably just rich people who made a bad (or good depending on your point of view) choice in accountant.
Yes you can. An executable (using ELFs as an example, most formats are similar) is nothing more than some headers and bytes. The executable code can be modified in any way you please, as long as you're writing valid opcodes (the program will crash if it hits a bad opcode).

That said, it's usually much more complicated to change the size of the executable section (this requires modifying the headers and this tends to be a rather involved process), so usually if people are doing binary patches they are only modifying bytes, not adding or removing them.
I am highly unconvinced that at this point there is some piece of information that will add credibility to conservative rhetoric, economic, or social beliefs. Sure it can happen, it's just unlikely to. Positions do not gain credibility by "what-ifs".

What biased information am I acting on exactly?
Yeah, it matters. If this is better, I'll use this; if IDA is better, I'll use IDA. I'm not 100% sure I understand your comment.

Btw, most companies can afford an IDA license. It's pretty cheap compared to the salary of a developer, at least in the coastal US.
There have been 30% stock price drops multiple times during the 13 years of continuous growth. They are clearly not correlated with the actual growth prospects, and if the stock market actually thought that Apple was dropping like a rock as you claim, you would expect to see a far higher discounting.

You mention the Mac, which as declined in absolute terms but has continued to grow relative to the declining market.

The same is true of the iPad, and there is evidence that it's decline is actually halting - I.e. it is reaching a plateau that is lower than its peak. Whether it will return to growth or not is an open question, but it is clearly not dropping like a rock.

So - the stock market story doesn't support your conclusion, nor does the iPad or Mac.

That leaves the iPhone. It is possible that the iPhone has reached a peak in terms of revenue.

Is it possible that it has reached an all time high in terms of active user base? That seems extremely unlikely.

For one thing, the total number of iPhones sold per year is still astronomical, and the devices have a long useful life. Even without a change of strategy, there will still be a huge number of new iPhone customers over the coming years.

Secondly there are many possible strategic solutions to a reduction in sales. Apple is selling far more SE devices than they anticipated, suggesting that there is pent-up demand for cheaper iPhones. They can address this segment easily, which will continue to increase the user base of IOS, even if revenue growth stagnates as a result of lower ASPs. This is just one possible strategy adjustment that would address the concern.

As I said, there has been a decline, but nothing supports your conclusion that Apple is 'dropping like a rock'. As such this is a bad conclusion on which to make a choice about whether to learn Swift or not.
Pip-tools: A set of tools to keep your pinned Python dependencies fresh
Wait so I am going to pay money to send my shit to these guys?
An interesting question. They're licensing highly dodgy insurance agents who can still misinform, break the law and cost people money. That's not as bad as selling full-on fake insurance, though.
Can you elaborate more on Swift vs Scala? What are the strong and weak sides of each language?
They're over 5 years old? That's just sad.
Increased marketing for deals on terms so favorable to the client that there is no way they could make a profit. Usually when they rope in these clients, they then book 'future revenues' on them against their current losses.
ORMs get a lot of undeserved flak for being considered "training wheels for SQL" but they can save you from writing an awful lot of boilerplate code.
So we're counteracting the immorality of profits with morally sound regulatory code? What if I don't like your religion?
You can actually go the other route too. There's a library called Thrust that provides a STL-like interface to CUDA, as well as "glue" functions that go between the finely-tuned stuff.

One of the things Thrust supports is an OpenMP backend, so it can emit code that runs on a CPU instead of a GPU. I've never tried it so I don't know how good it is, particularly on the collective operations. But I assume if what you want is a "#pragma omp parallel for 1-to-N" then it's probably great. Construct your operation as a functor and use a thrust::for_each from 1 to N.
There are hybrid systems that combine the prompt deallocation of pure reference counting with the superior throughput of tracing garbage collection.

Part of the reason I really dislike the "reference counting vs. garbage collection" debate, and keep emphasizing that reference counting is garbage collection, is that it sets up this false dichotomy. In reality, there are all sorts of automatic memory management schemes that combine aspects of reference counting with tracing in different ways, most of which were created in the 80s and 90s. Sadly, almost nobody in industry is aware of this enormous body of work, and the simplistic "RC vs. GC" model has stuck in everyone's heads. :(
Funding Sites I Like with PrivacyBadger
I can guess that product-specific questions are not really appropriate for HN -- but I don't know anywhere else I can ask this.

I am currently on google "contributor", but I'm unsure of if the advertising bidding process happens such that blocking, say, "analytics.google.com" or "adwise.google.com" (and all the other domains that PrivacyBadger generally excludes) will mean that the website owner doesn't receive my "contribution".

Anyone in AdTech know how this process actually works and if PrivacyBadger will mean noone actually gets "paid"?
No really, this is confusing. OP and the person who downvoted this, it's better to explain. There is Offshore Leaks and there is Panama Leaks. Or is there a different offshore leaks, and Panama papers are also called offshore leaks?
I can imagine such a thing; it's called a programming language. A GUI application, you say? Well then you're just asking for a graphical programming language, and as they say, now you have two problems...

I think the more general-purpose a tool is, the more intelligence and/or general knowledge is needed to wield it:

"Here's a widget thromper. You push the big green button and it thromps the widgets."

vs

"Here's a car. It will get you from virtually anywhere to anywhere else. Don't kill anyone."

vs

"Here's a general purpose computer. Knock yourself out."
I feel the same.

Plus I hate the forced corporate atmosphere. I've noticed anyone with strong philosophical opinions on software are typically shunned in favor of the corporate narrative.

I feel like a couple of years ago HN had a pretty diverse culture when it came to OS and software stacks, the past few months it seems EVERYONE is shoving corporate shit down my throat: VSCode, "Bash on Linux", Azure, TypeScript, Windows 10, and don't forget real programmers spend 90% of their time editing decades old MSWord files so they can't possibly go without MS office.

If it has a big corporation behind it HN will shove it down your throat, if it's a small open source project HN will circlejerk around it like it's the next big thing, if it's an OSS project that threatens some big corporate project you can bet money that HN will shit all over it.
Targeting Efficiency: A Dynamic Path for Learning to Code
Google is making its AI binge-read thousands of romance novels to get warmer
Likely they are working out the bugs before discussing pricing.

Routinely in my job I will produce a free of charge beta for testing purposes before we have price discussions.
You're working with a definition of "Zero Bug" that doesn't arise from the meanings of "bug" and "zero" combined together in the obvious, orthogonal way.

There are such compounds entrenched in the English language (like "new wave" or "blackboard") but they take decades to enter general use.

I don't think we need "zero bug" to be a non-compositional compound of this type. The terms "bug" and "zero" are too significant in computing for us to allow them to be hijacked like this.

For instance, we wouldn't redefine "zero latency" as being 5 seconds (say, in a situation in which we can't get it any shorter for the given span, due to the distance and the speed of light). Latency is latency, zero is zero, and five seconds isn't zero.

I urge you to reconsider your use of technical language.
There's certainly a lot of truth in this (I especially like the duck-typing image), but the example feels like it throws it all away. You can, after all, have a _super_ fast and simple asset pipeline by keeping things...simple (to say nothing of skipping it entirely); having CoffeeScript compiling to JavaScript is not really relevant to either Ruby or Rails.
> The Star Wars-themed conference rooms will soon be renamed after inspirational entrepreneurs

Because that was the problem.
Panopticon is libre software. You can improve it and use it as basis for your own research on program analysis.
Welcome perspective

After 30+ years of coding, my first encounter with Rails, a summer morning I received a ripped draft of a very early book on it remains one of the seminal moments of my career - so many elegant solutions to so many issues I'd grappled with since the mid-90s

As with any tool it's got some quirks and areas I could criticise - but it's got a place in my toolkit and will have for some time
I don't believe that at all. That said, i 'm OK with people finding legal ways to avoid taxes.
Deepinder Goyal's announcement on Zomato's valuation being slashed down
There have been a number of dodgy ethical things in YC companies. I don't know of Sama & co returning their stake in any companies as a result.
This seems similar to 857Coin https://github.com/davidlazar/6.857coin
> people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets.

The fetishization of "natural" (and related terms like "naturally occurring") is, I would argue, one of the major areas of health misinformation when it comes to foods. (In any case, maple syrup isn't naturally occurring, its a processed foodstuff -- the process may not require particularly modern technology, but its still processed; there's a considerable difference between unprocessed maple sap and maple syrup.)
> Having offices doesn't make one a news org.

No, having reporters and editors who cover current events does. The reason I brought up huffpost was anyone saying breitbart isn't news, immediately I'd have to test them with HuffPo. You know to spot the hypocrite. But anyway, HuffPo and Breitbart are both news orgs like it or not. News has always been slanted whether by selective coverage or the way things are framed. Example: 2 stories about refugees, one covers a family (with photos) where the children speak english (outliers) The other covers a boat load of military age males (again with photos), talks about concern over violence and culture war.

Both would be news stories. One you're likely to find in NPR or the Washington Post, the other you'll find on Breitbart. Sorry you're wrong about what's a news source and what's not. feel free to comment on quality or slant though.

>Why do libertarians...
I don't know, ask them.
Interesting. How much "smaller" is this in practice than a stripped down Linux image?
I often hear "Ugh, it's tiring you telling us what all the problems are, why can't you tell us the solution?".

But I get "Man, I'm so glad you saw that problem way back at the design stage. We really dodged a bullet there." about 3-4 times as often.

What I generally don't hear is, "OMFG, our project is about to fail. Why did no one see that this issue was coming and do something about it!".

The assumption that anyone noting a problem is just whining and complaining is a good way to tank a project. I've seen that type of thinking prevail, and it sucks for everyone.
In this case, "We got an anonymous tip" is a lie, and "we used Stingray" is not a lie.
Scott Hassan Wants to Give Us All Robot Bodies
10 words of app creation wisdom from someone who’s already been there
> Most people wouldn't last a week, let alone 3 months.

Not even the native people of the area could have done it. Hunting for sustenance isn't a solo activity. Hunting large game is high reward with high uncertainty. You probably need a group of at least five people. With multiple hunters only one of them has to land a kill to feed the group. And it means there is the manpower present to process or eat all of the meat before it spoils. Which is what happened to McCandless. He was a skilled hunter to bring down a moose with a .22 but he only got a few meals from the carcass before it rotted, wasting hundreds of pounds of meat.

I can point you to a record from 1770-ish of a native american woman who managed to survive for six months alone in far north Canada, after escaping from her slavers. The party who discovered her was shocked she could even be alive and none of them had ever heard of such a thing. (Samuel Hearne's journals)

edit: Bagging a single moose during the season isn't "sustenance". It is sport. If it ends up in a chest freezer, then it doesn't count for this discussion. Sustenance means 100% of your calories come from hunted game. And sustenance-hunters at that latitude, even with a group, can go a week without seeing any animals.

Scaling up what I've seen people do with white tailed deer, 5 people could probably process 800 pounds of moose in two days if they already had stockpiled all the wood. Groups of 100 could eat it all. And groups that large were common for moving across the land.
Sometimes it's, "Because I don't want a repeat of this crappy thing that happened to me."

Often software is used as a means for one group inside a company to control another group.
Usually. Just make sure the new machine code is the same size as the old.

That said, if the code is signed and there's a signature check - the check will fail if you modify the code.

If the signature is a simple crc/checksum, you could also update the checksum.
If it's a cryptographic signature, it might be a lot more difficult.