skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It just sounds like someone who couldn't handle C++ whining and making a bunch of blanket statements without really having any proper understanding.

I agree that some of the features such as lambdas can use to hard to track bugs (lifetime issues) and difficult to follow code when abused. When used nicely though they can lead to simple, elegant and straightforward code (anyone who tried to use the STL algorithms before lambdas knows what a pita it was most of the time).

Bottom line, if your code base is a mess don't blame the tool. Blame the programmers.
ToneLoc (a war dialer), written in 1991, last version released 1994 before going to prison:

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

People still have modems???
In my experience, mainframes tend to be used where functional requirements are very slow moving and reliability trumps flexibility.

I don't know of any case where a mainframe couldn't, in principle, be replaced by a server farm. However, maintaining a sufficiently reliable and secure server farm is a specialist job too so the benefits aren't always clear cut.

Ease of migration is really down to what the mainframe is doing and for how long. In practice, they tend to be in place for a number of years in hub-type roles e.g. general ledgers, payment systems. That sort of thing. The effect is that extricating them is extremely complex and expensive.

However, these issues aren't really limited to mainframes. We have the same problems with trying to extricate Sparc Solaris applications. We generally want to replace them with Lintel as we use them in most applications. But doing so is horribly complicated as they're embedded in byzantine flows that few understand and the systems often assume a level of hardware reliability that commodity boxes don't have.
Many of these examples are older than me, but I wrote a userscript which writes a bash script which rips lossless audio from a music streaming service which is no longer with us when I was 14. It tags the files appropriately, and makes a release suitable for upload to a well known private music tracker.

I released it to a private group of people, it has been kept a secret within that group mostly and has since been extended to include support for many different services and integrated into complex automated systems which automatically rip, package and release new music as it is released and also old music as it is added to the request feature of the site. I released a much better pure bash version when I was 15ish I think, but many people still use the abomination of a userscript which writes a bash script as far as I am aware.
"Do you want... do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
The future of stalking: collect some skin cells, grow a clone of your object of desire.
Whiskey Can’t Hide Its Age
My mom is sick, so I've been hanging around her house to sit with her. She has some 5-10 year old magazines, including some of one of my favorites The New Yorker. I like the intelligence of the commentators and I feel that they often put into words things that I vaguely feel.

I was stuck reading them (or else: Fox News and the Catholic channel). Boy, they get just about every prediction wrong. It was shocking.

Makes me doubt we do much better than people in the past.
Sony's Xperia XA Ultra phone makes a bid for your selfies
Depends how well the project is structured. Imagine that you're writing a function that adds some values to a hashmap. Would you rather have the the logic, the hashing, and the datastructure details in that function? Getting a shorter function and reduced complexity in that function is great, even if it doesn't affect the complexity of the whole project.

If the modules are well-designed, you can ignore how the hashmap works and the details of hashing itself. You'll get at least 4 extra files, but yes, it's very likely worth it.
According to Wolfram Alpha [1], it's 9953280000000000000, which is 10 quintillion! :O

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e7+*+10+*+60+*+60+*+3...
Programming Doesn't Require Passion or Even Talent
leave it to the Atlantic to try to create a racial issue out of screen contrast. Does EVERYTHING have to be explained for political correctness?
Photonics advances allow Earth to be seen across the universe
How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available.
I suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the actual speech to text and back?

So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo

I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?) or directly speech-speech?

Edit:
This list seems useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...
I've experimented with this actually.
Loads of followers for $5
Loads of retweets for $5

All the followers followed me within 48 hours, within a week or two, all were banned.

All the retweets did nothing for my "organic" retweets, it provided no new coverage, since the account who retweeted it, only had fake followers, so nothing really happened.

I did use ads.twitter.com and that didn't really do much, but I'd say it did better for bang-for-buck.
If it was my software, I would not have accepted that as a proper fix though. For me, the real bug is to rely on the "file" command (a user diagnostic tool) to choose different code paths in a printing program.
My favorite OEIS-related picture is Sloane's Gap.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4470

Numberphile has a video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo
Another app that is similar to this is called tuingle http://tuingle.com
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” - Stroustrup.

C++30, might end up being D, today.
The big shift that's taking place is the gradual removal of nosology (disease classification) from its pedestal in psychiatry - naming symptoms as the foundation of all practice and services, which no other area of medicine does anymore - and replacing it with a scientific framework for discovering dysfunctional mechanisms at every level from genetic to neural to behavioural. This was started by Thomas Insell / NIMH (named in the article) and has been followed in the EU.

The framework is called RDoC and you should familiarise yourself with it if you've been influenced by psychiatric literature or practice as to your own mental health.

TLDR General argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZ-U0pj9LI

More in-depth presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU_5i2clSKI

Slightly more technical introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyGt8-ddacA

Google Scholar search: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=rdoc

RDoC @ NIMH: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtm...

RDoC inspired EU project: http://www.roamer-mh.org/

Interested if anyone here has an inside take on RDoC.
Reddit thread with more details by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4jnuzk/gtk3based_sys...
I'd love to be able to just carry around my phone and not a separate wallet. Particularly if I'm going clubbing in tight trousers. Getting a card out of a wallet is a fiddle compared to just tapping a phone, and a card loose in my pocket feels unsafe.
Characterization is not one of Stephenson's strong points.

Try an experiment: skip to 2/3 through the book, where it says "Five thousand years later..." and pick it up as though it were a new book. I think you might be happier.
> "If Stephenson wrote Huckleberry Finn it would be 4,000 pages long and mostly about paddlewheel design"

And this is the exact reason why Stephenson is one of my favorite authors.
A lot of unbelievable crap was produced by novices hacking away at Basic in an earlier era as well. The difference was you could move on to better things - Pascal, C/C++, Lisp, etc.

We're stuck with this cobbled together mess of mostly broken shit in browser-land, and there is no bigger-and-better thing we can graduate to.
In my opinion this only shift the problem from coding clean code to handling hundreds or thousands of simple and small source files. This will make much more complicated to handle a large project because everything is scattered in such an extend that a developer spend more time searching thru the include list of files than understanding what the code is actually doing. Implementing complex functionality is going to be a nightmare and the end, everything is going to be merged in a single translation unit anyway. But this is just my personal opinion..
Felt like this after doing lisp/python coming from Java. In the end it's about being sensible on reducing a system size, no matter where the 'unit' is.
This is like as if I’d trademark "Quidditch" for a sports league where a sport is played with brooms, flying around, etc.

That shouldn’t be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.
I wrote a similar script except in Perl for pretty much the same reason. I learned to hate CDDB files. Such a horrible mess.
MaxiPharo – Page 2 of 14 – Your One-Stop Spot for Life Changing Info
I feel the same, I have participated in aichallenge.org before and everything was run server-side, we had a 1 second move limit too, I have not run any starter yet to try it out but seems like using HTTP will have big issues with timing, I would prefer something that connects to a socket and keeps the connection up, would reduce some of the latency of establishing a connection.

Some people created a tcp server for the Ants one that allowed that: https://github.com/berak/ants-tcp
I don't remember much of the details, since it was nearly 5 years ago, but it was an awesome thing to participate in.
> these are the first sounds a child will learn.

Not really, no. 'Gaga' or 'kaka' are just as easy yet aren't universal. The mystery is not solved. (Could be just areal effects, for example.)
Can confirm this is now live.

Using latest Android pay app from APKMirror, nexus 6p and HSBC card I've made my first Android pay purchase ever.

That coffee tasted oh so sweet!
I wrote a Microsoft Excel macro (yes, it's VBA) when I started my current Job at 2008. It only converts badly formatted txt output of mainframe to an Excel file. Just does it only, but does it well.

I'm very amused that even today people use my macro and thank me for writing it.
How to Improve Website load time using webp image format?
I designed some of the electronics and wrote some firmware code for the Bell AH-1S Cobra in 1978 1979. The system is still flying as I see the external parts of the system in news clips. Does that count? Beat that!

Mean looking image of a parked up one - the red bag covers part of the system:
http://www.vaq136.com/misawa/cobra73418-017b.jpg
well, if ypu want exceptions that practically don't exist neither in time nor space, use something else :)
Not sure how it's in Australia but here (Austria) NFC requires a PIN confirmation for payments above 25 EUR or every third wave payment.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Yes, I would have never put those together either. One of the duplicate bugs has a similar thread, where a user describes reinstalling his system three times and failing to print every time. But after running updates after the third install, it suddenly worked again.

A helpful response then pointed out that after the third reinstall, his system clock must have gone past midnight, which means it was no longer Tuesday...
but from a consumer perspective who cares? you're protected either way. i prefer to carry a single card vs my phone if i'm running in the rain and want to stop for a drink. other times if i forget my wallet the phone is great, but it's totally equal as a user.
> In my opinion this only shift the problem from coding clean code to handling hundreds or thousands of simple and small source files. This will make much more complicated to handle a large project because everything is scattered in such an extend that a developer spend more time searching thru the include list of files than understanding what the code is actually doing.

I've worked on a number of very large codebases and that simply isn't my experience. If code is easy to understand it tends to make good use of the domain language and therefore also be easy to search.

> Implementing complex functionality is going to be a nightmare

The opposite, in my experience. The only maintainable way to implement complex functionality is to break it into small pieces.

> everything is going to be merged in a single translation unit anyway.

That's the compiler's business. I don't care one way or the other about its implementation details.
> contactless card are less secure than an tokenized mobile app because contactless card send you credit card number with NFC without encryption.

Only in the United States. In mainland Europe NFC has always used EMV authentication between terminal. Also as an aside: a european credit card's number alone is kinda useless.
I agree, I find Apple Pay to be far more fiddly to use than contactless. However, one advantage of the phone based payments is that they can have higher usage limits. Contactless is only allowed up to £40 (I think?) in the UK, whereas banks might allow larger payments with the security of a fingerprint-based payment.
Thanks a lot matthewn, that indeed does the trick!
I disagree. A complicated function may be made of a bunch of statements where each statement makes sense easily. The entire function may still be complicated. The same argument can be extended for files and projects. Even if each file is simple, if the code in those files interact with each other in a complicated manner, the project becomes complicated. This can happen despite having neat boundaries between files. Nothing stops a new programmer from writing new simple files that interact with the existing files in a complicated manner. Simplicity of source code in individual files or functions is just one of the factors behind a simple project. Simplicity of design has to go hand in hand with it.

On the other hand, a couple of files may be very complicated but the entire project could still be simple if those complicated files hide the complexity behind neatly exposed functions, and the remainder of the project does not make use of those functions in a complicated manner.
The Mind of Donald Trump
Which, to be fair, is also an apt description of defenders of C and C++ (I consider myself in that category). We are all susceptible to the biases of niches we have worked in and what we have seen working well in those niches.

C and C++ can be made to shine in some ways that I get the strong impression many people who happen to not have the same experiences will never appreciate, and perhaps that's not even a bad thing, maybe that just is.
Shit, WinForms is easier to write UIs for than the HTML/CSS/JS abomination.
Dear Sony Music: It’s Not “Fee Use,” but “Fair Use”
Using a phone instead of a card isn't the end of the journey, it's just a step somewhere (early) along the way. As people get used to paying for stuff using a powerful connected computer instead of a card all sorts of new possibilities will open up.
We can also arrive at Brave New World style human production. Babies are produced in factories according to characteristics projected to be in demand by the time they have fully grown. Except instead of the alpha-beta-epsilon types in the book, we may be able to breed for maximum diversity for maximum potential resistance against diseases. Or, of course, any other objectives, technology permitting.

We may also arrive at a common trope in sci-fi where reproduction is not an individual (or couple) decision. By default, individuals do not reproduce and the factories keep the society populated.
Well, it doesn't work for me at the moment (Nexus 6P). I'm getting "Android Pay can't be used" message when trying to add a card. It's worth noting that my bootloader is unlocked and the phone is rooted (stock ROM). It will be a shame if it requires phone not to be rooted, because as much as I'd like to use Android Pay - I like my ad blocker better.
Doesn't work for rooted phones [0]. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer before mutilating my contactless card.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Pkx4SRP.jpg
I remember reading an "interactive" book as a kid (a book with numbered short episodes, and at the end of each one you are presented with a couple of choices how the story would continue, it was awesome) where the good guy was sent back in time by the bad guy to the wild west where he had to convince the indians to trust him and fight with him against the same bad guy, who liked to slaughter them for fun, or die with them. In order to understand the natives, he had some gadget implanted in his brain that translated their language directly into his own. I remember thinking "yeah right, never gonna happen." :)

This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly, but still. The future came pretty fast.
Ask HN: Where VC money comes from?
People claim that there is no risk of economic collapse coming from the VC bubble because this is private money. Is it though? Isn't the large chunk of money coming from pension funds and the like?

Companies, and thus valuations are private. So the investors have a lot of equity on their sheets which is basically vapor. What happens when all those companies which received double and triple digit millions in funding can't reach the valuations and all the startups selling to other startups close shop? Did you spend your grandma's savings on hipster clothes and Starbucks?
"...although Barclays customers will not be able to use Android Pay. That is because the bank is going it alone, making contactless payments available through its own mobile banking app."

Barclays being one of the major banks in the UK
Joaquin Phoenix in the Sisters Brothers film, among other films
No, he replied ALL instances.... which is... pretty bad.
Since there is no secure element on most android phones it would not be permissible to use android pay on it. I'm sure there are ways to trick the check but it is not supposed to work.
It's always better to know about the design decisions others have taken. If they faced the same choices you did, you can know their view on the tradeoffs (and experiences with their choice) and choose the same way as they did or choose differently, but either way you make your choice with a little more knowledge. If they come up with an idea you didn't even think of, surely you want to know about it, even if you aren't actually going to use it.
Here a really nice Ted Talk about it: https://www.ted.com/talks/cary_fowler_one_seed_at_a_time_pro...
I'm far from being an expert, but I doubt that.

"it's quite simple" - Are we talking security here? Then that phrase can't apply.

"You can build a secure <something> out of any <something else>." - Is that how security works?

"it's secure forever." - Gung'f jung Pnrfne fnvq. (This sentence is "encrypted" in case that's not clear)
You wouldn't notice if you printed things on average once a week. But if you printed multiple times a day you'd soon notice the pattern, I suspect.
Only in the loosest possible sense. Having the same (or similar, or related) characters does not necessarily imply a "full rich series". The Baroque cycle, sure, because the characters share arcs. Cryptonomicon is a completely different story though.

Stephenson said this about the relationship between Cryptonomicon and its different-timeline "sequels" (not yet written at this point): " I'm trying not to give the idea that it's a tightly locked together set of books... There are always a few strange little corners of the story that may not make sense outside of the context of the full series, but 99% of it can stand on its own reasonably well, I hope."

http://www.locusmag.com/1999/Issues/08/Stephenson.html
I haven't met you you just replied to a comment on this forum. Plus horticulture doesn't imply an understanding of what is going on during cell replication at a molecular level (OK, I said did say biology, can we change that to molecular biology).
ls /usr/bin gives me:

cp
cat
cpu-intensive-program
curl
dot
echo
exec
fork_test
go-bench
grep
head
hello
hello-socket
http-example
lat_syscall
ls
mkdir
nice
node
pipeline-example
priority-test
rm
rmdir
sh
sha1sum
socket-example
sort
stat
tail
tee
touch
wc
xargs

Doesn't seem to be cd, but ls does work. Chromium on Arch.
Oddly, while I can find three trademarks, Yahoo isn't one of the holders.

https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html

https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html

https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.htm...
Don't even get me started on javascript, it's the new flash player.
> Exactly zero. The authors are well-known theory researchers at a major university, not NSA double-agents.

Two people said it, so it's about 50-50 at this point. Why would the NSA not pay well-known researchers? Or why do you think they can't afford two experts?

The more people agree on it the more likely it is that it is true. And that is not just the case in NSA times. Human error and other tricksters may also be considered.
It obviously won't have 'no effect' on grandma, but generally speaking, grandma's pension fund, if managed competently, will only invest a small percentage of portfolio in venture firms. The effect is therefore limited to a small amount of the portfolio.
Rooted phones not supported. This is well documented.

http://www.xda-developers.com/google-security-engineer-expla...

(PS there are workarounds)
Nokia branded smartphones coming back
http://www.xda-developers.com/google-security-engineer-expla...
Where does the Sigmoid in Logistic Regression come from? (Rather, why log-odds?)
What's wrong with Internet Protocol?
I'm not quite sure that's the case. Using an NFC app on my phone, I was able to get my credit card's number without any issue. Also had the expiry date and a list of transactions.

https://twitter.com/edent/status/724639270284189696

True, it didn't have the CV2(?) number on the back - or my address - but enough to make me buy an NFC shielded wallet.
I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way)

I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then?

To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances, you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.
Ok. Try a different language :)?

A single language needed to solve all problems is a fallacy.

I don't see FPGA programming ousting c++, but expect higher level languages with strong parallel semantics to gain "market share". You can always call a dedicated process written in optimized c for the hottest components. Compose the rest in go, elixir, or any high level language (lisp).

Architectures will naturally gravitate to higher level languages that support cleaner composition. The tools and interfaces will push towards higher abstraction without impacting build or run time. Maybe this process is related to Kevin Kelly's inevitable. I'm an optimist here.
In a mostly proprietary environment that's really hard to say. In the world I live in (Germany software business world) few things get really deleted once they made it into the daily life of a company. Nearly all companies have code that was written like 5 years before their foundation by one of the glorious first 3 guys and that is still used in most of their major software products. The tricky part is getting even awesome software into these daily routines.

Hell, I'm quite sure that some of the first software I wrote is still used in SAP despite me never having worked for them.