skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is so funny. Yesterday there was another discussion on how C needs to be replaced due to security/corectness concerns (the K&R topic), today people are fascinated by a UI(!!!) library built in it.

And they actually consider using this library.
Hi, BitQuest developer here.

In a nutshell, every item bought from villagers goes to a "loot" wallet where sort of randomly faucets out back to players who kill monsters.

This post explains it a little bit more:

http://bitquest.co/2016/05/19/bitquest-2.html
The FFI reasonings are OK, I understand them. I didn't think in those terms originally. (Thought I asked about writing a C app not a C library...)
But speed and C are othogonal nowadays (at least if productivity is in the picture). It is so much simpler to write correct programs leveraging multicore environments an/or asynchronity in other environments, that it is not productive to chose C for speed. (In terms of development costs. Ofc. there are special cases when it might be worth, I'm talking about the general situation)
Interesting. It seems we're hearing from different people!
I know, we always do this, but...

I hate this website. I feel like I'm looking at a Medium post, stuff is popping around as I scroll, hero carousel, unclear Metro-style tiles that turn black and disappear the text on mouse-over, the works. Spent way too much time trying to figure out where the API docs and examples were hidden.
My go-to was Britney.

http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
You’re correct in regards to terminology; apparently what I was describing is more related to the terms “positive/negative predictive value.” Your definition of false positive rate is the correct one. But I believe my argument is still valid.

If we test a group comprised of only former presidents, all positives must be true positives. So our false positive rate will be 0% while our female test set has been observed to have a false positive rate of 10%. This illustrates that the sample set effects the observed false positive rate.

As the rate of occurrence of what we are testing for approaches 100% in the sample set, the false positive rate drops to zero. Inversely, as the incidence of what we are testing for in a (sufficiently large) sample set decreases from 100%, the false positive rate will eventually increase to some non-zero percentage unless the test is perfect.

So if we only test meth addicts for meth, our false positive rate will be lower then if we test the population at large.
And you gotta love the Swift REPL :)
All of the above? Totalitarian regimes always try to control the public narrative. It matters.
I think that the fact that GitHub doesn't count pushing to non-master branches as "contributing to free software" is quite silly. If I do a lot of work on a feature branch and it isn't merged, it doesn't count as "work". Not that I really care about imaginary green internet squares.
> Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities.
My feelings exactly. (thus my question above)
Ok, but my question was not about FFI, but writing a GUI app...
Have they addressed not being able to add custom text when someone goes to the new issue tab?
Umm, Gtk?
Nobody has commented on that Russia only has 2% of jobs that they see are easily automated. That feels utterly ridiculous
> The study had roughly zero effect on the beliefs of the person who shared the article.

There's something called the Backfire Effect, wherein presenting facts and evidence actually reinforces people's positions, and can make them believe even more strongly in the thing you're proving is incorrect.

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect
[2] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
[3] http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why-facts...
Yes, but totalitarian regimes also tend to torture people, and that doesn't work in the long run. Being totalitarian doesn't make you competent, but it probably makes you less likely to carefully study your methods for efficacy.

So I wonder, is there any evidence that this works, or is it just a sop to angry old men in the politburo who don't like what they see online?
Nice! How do you feel about gambling? Plans to do anything similar to BitVegas[1]?

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas
Apollo Client: GraphQL with React and Redux
>> 10" tablet.

> Really? That seems unlikely. I mostly see people use phones, and small tables, so <= 7".

Ignore that, I misread the sentence. I thought you were saying most mobile browsing is with a 10" tablet. I'm not trying to tell you that you're wrong about your own reported habits...
This analysis seems as though it could be misleading. Couldn't the number of bugs reported vs. the actual number of bugs that exist in the code differ significantly?
You get stuck in a filter bubble, which may work to either your advantage (Pythonic results), or your disadvantage (you'll miss results that go against your opinions, or you'll get feedback which distorts the value of something). I first saw this when Dave Winer noted that his "Fargo" program had reached the first page of search results for "Fargo". Which it had: For him. Not for anyone else.
And Swing is Java. So?

C and C++ are not the same, by a long shot.
I appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback. At the core of Algorithmia we look to operationalize for scale. You can develop your own algorithms and use us as your infrastructure never having to worry about spinning up a machine again. You can mix and match work from others regardless of language. You can open source it all and make it available (caveat we still charge for running on our infrastructure) or you can make it closed source and share with no one. The algorithm developer is always in control, we just look to facilitate actually using these algorithms, libraries, ml models and functions vs reading about it in an academic paper or trying to resolve every dependency under the sun. The truth is that getting things up and running can take hours to days and Algorithmia turns it into seconds. This is how we beleive we are liberating knowledge... By making applicable and usable to developers in their day to day.
> I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user".

Having every facet of your digital life mined for personal data, for the sake of a mega-corp's bottom line?

> If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day"

Not at all. Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing that.

However, let's play along anyway.

> If the TV channels shut down tomorrow, your TVs effectively stop working too, you still buy them.

No. Just. No. I literally don't remember the last time I watched broadcast television (hotels excepted), even when I lived in a country where I could understand what was being said on the broadcast channels. In our last house 1 of 2 TV's was connected to a satellite receiver for when my father in law was in the house. We moved 3-4 months ago. No satellite dish hooked up yet. No terrestrial aerial.

> There are hundreds of such devices out there, which you buy because it's pretty evident the company is not shutting down tomorrow.

I do? Would you care to enlighten me about these devices I apparently buy?

> On the other hand, even if Google shuts down, a lot of things on your Chromebook will keep on working offline

Are you kidding me? In offline-mode, you can't even edit your calendar on a Chromebook.

You're also not thinking about things like e.g. users on the system. It's inherently dependent on Google - you can't just add a local account like you can with a regular computer, you have to be online, with the person sitting there next to you, so they can sign in with their own google account.

> especially with the advent of Android apps now

Right, because apps designed to work on a mobile phone, which generally has it's own data connection independent of whether wifi is available or not, will just naturally assume they need to work offline. Good luck with that.
Streak (YC S11) hiring a Back end Tech Lead to build email graph database
Is there a complete list of the DBs in leakedsource.com somewhere?

They have this result: VerticalScope Network (Vbulletin) (939 Websites). Would be nice to know all of those 939 sites.
s/encrypted/hashed/
I've done my share of startness-upness and web development on both asp.net and rails. After designing desktop user interfaces using various versions of delphi, using visual and non-visual components that are bound to databases is great ease. (optionally using an API layer to do server-side processing) the amount of complexity, speed and ease of use you can cram into a single form while remaining responsive and user-friendly compared to wizard-style web pages is much staggering. The ability to step between dynamically loaded libraries while debugging is such freedom.

Overall it was an easier and more productive development experience for me.
Why Finland Is Able to Implement a Basic Income Experiment
That sounds much better than the Java stories I've heard, which makes sense since Go is better at avoiding the heap.

No idea how it compares with others; and not sure if it is representative, but to me that sounds pretty decent.
A Secret Forest Grew for Millennia in North America Without Anyone Noticing
The only sane schemes are ones that choose passphrases solely based on entropy. So, Diceware or other random generation systems.
All regimes try to control the public narrative.
Do you use -noprofile? (you probably should for build steps, or else make sure all your build environments have a similar profile to yours) Then the startup time is usually much better - at least I haven't seen it going over some 100s of mSec.
I learned from Black Swan about how pervasive power laws and fractals were in social/financial phenomena, and how the important the framing (i.e. the prior expectations) of 'black swan' events are (black swan event for the turkey who gets beheaded, not for the farmer that does it every Thanksgiving). I'm a geophysicist and this stuff is our bread and butter, as a ton of risk and complexity theory applies to earthquakes (self-similarity, power laws, etc.) but I had never really made the connection to the human side of things, which I still thought about on a more atomic/psychological level than a systems level at that point. Since then I've read more widely in complexity, econ, etc., and while Taleb wasn't an introduction per se, or even that influential, I did learn some important things from him by virtue of reading him early on. Your friends might be in the same position.

The book itself was fairly repugnant. The few interviews I've read since have been interesting in that you can watch him self-destruct. For example the Edge.org interview where he answers the question of 'what scientific idea needs to be retired' with 'standard deviation'.

However, by far the best part of reading Black Swan (or some interview?) was his discussion about how he believed the body adjusted to regular but not random exercise, and therefore the best fitness strategy was to randomly break into a sprint when walking. I haven't been to NY since and would prefer not to but if I do go I really want to see him pinballing through bewildered pedestrians.
I have to say I agree. The old site was plain and simple and straightforward. I think a site can look great but doesn't need to be overly fancy. (says me, now I'll get back to implementing that fancy UI feature).
Yeah, my point was that thin shims are free, and "thick" safe shims take effort but as far as comparing with pure C is concerned you only need to compare the cost of thin shims. C doesn't have safety so the concept of a thick, safe shim is nonexistant.
I've never gambled IRL or online and I won't feel comfortable to write gambling code as opposed to skill based games, which is what i've been playing my whole life.

I'll be happy to help, by making the bitquest repository easy to understand so people who want to make it can use our code.
> Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first

Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these corporations.

> and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future

That seems rational, but the countless examples of "worse is better" in life indicate that that outcome is far from guaranteed.
Triplebyte figured out in twenty minutes that I didn't learn enough while getting a CS degree at CMU in order to get a programming job so... good luck to them.
No I think this is more like someone working for some new startup talking it up, or talking up the product. It may not be in the job description, but one might be inclined to say good things.

Do recall these jobs are ones one gets by studying hard for a rote test/civil service exam. So one might feel obliged when working for the state (where it's prestigious to work, as seen by fam) to defend the state.
> Shouldn't they support c an c++ over rust ?Shouldn't they support c#, coffeescript and go before scala or ruby ?

c/c++ are legacy. c# is an m$ thing, coffeescript and go are beginner languages. scala and ruby are used in production.

> All the latter programming languager are more mature, more used than the supported languages.

I wouldn't call c#/coffeescript/go more "mature" than scala. And popularism is unrelated to the topic.
Couldn't you simply believe that for yourself, your biggest contribution to humanity is not politics? Plenty of people are plainly worried about it and discussing it in great detail. Why should everyone be bound to the same goals when their marginal contribution is just that.

This is not to say that you shouldn't participate if you feel compelled to, but unless you have an issue, isn't it mostly just a waste of time? What if you want to enjoy life and not feel angry all the time? If you have options, does that mean you should never ever exercise them in solidarity with those who have fewer?

Does not PG's advice apply to people without the ability to choose some aspects of their identity given that they have a universe of other traits they do have control over? Sure, one may be a dominant problem, but you can help yourself out by not adding more problems to your problems.
Firefox edges out Microsoft globally for first time in browser wars
andlabs (Pietro) is writing this library in C as a support for the Go ui library he's been building.
https://github.com/andlabs/ui

However, as others have pointed out, this will be very useful for many other languages as well. I would love to see a Renaissance of native cross platform apps.
5 Easy Ways to Become More Productive
IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interoperability was concerned.
You didn't by chance write the Phaser JS game engine did you?
Yes but the difference is in totalitarian regimes, theirs is the only narrative. No one or nothing else's story is permitted, while theirs is made to flourish.

On the positive side, when you have an undivided narrative like that you can get a lot done (sometimes bad, sometimes good) without impeding distractions.
Some try a little bit harder than others.
ChatOps: How Software Teams Manage Issues
Cygwin provides another way to run the bash shell on windows. It is really helpful with full features of some commands like 'find' 'sed' 'awk'.
Once Swift has achieved its goal of readability and the lexicon has stabilized, it'll be nice if they [re]introduce a more compact syntax, that you could opt into on a per-file basis, say by setting ".swifter" as their extension.

Bring back ++ and -- and currying, even if just as syntactic sugar that can be converted into the regular syntax by a tool, for those choose to write in it.

I appreciate Swift's philosophy and agree with their decisions so far, but there's a certain beauty to concise code (when it feels like writing maths) and it'll certainly make prototyping in Playgrounds more fun and, shall we say, swift.
That was a bad idea. Much better: graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, briem.net, italic-handwriting.org, studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, BFHhandwriting.com, handwritingsuccess.com, Lexercise.com, HandwritingThatWorks.com, freehandwriting.net/educational.html
Substance Designer – Non-destructive application for creating materials
We have seen exactly the same fear with the appearance of machines and automation in the industry after the war. Look at historical news footage and people were concerned that this would lead to massive losses of jobs. And it did, the industry is a lot less labour intensive today, at least in the western world. But jobs were created elsewhere and the economy adapted.

Beside, with outsourcing to China, there aren't that many manufacturing jobs left in the US and Europe for robots to take anyway. I think where robots will have a huge potential is for domestic tasks: cleaning your home, taking parcels while you're away, preparing food, doing the laundry and ironing. A home robot that would do all that would have a huge market. But they are not going to replace an existing workforce, rather free up time for women (who still predominantly bear the burden of these tasks) and enable them to focus on their career.

I think there could be another wave of automation in the service industry, but it wouldn't be robots, just software. Today there are a huge number of manual tasks done in the service industry: processing invoices, preparing financial accounts, payslips, paying a lawyer to rewrite the same contract over and over, etc. Some of that can be automated by outsourcing it to a provider who has the means to automate it, but a huge fraction is just too specific, customized to a business, to justify paying for an IT team to build software for it. The way to automate it is for business people to build their own automation. In a way Microsoft Office has done partially that (an accountant with Excel has the productivity of 50 accountants from the 50s) but I think we can gain another order of magnitude of productivity by enable people to code. For that, basic coding skills should be widely deployed, in a very simple and highly productive language. And I am not convinced this language already exists.
First off I'd be skeptical about working where they take your linkedin account seriously. Secondly, no. Because everyone sucks, everyone can get hacked, why don't you have a Facebook account, a Google account, it's only a matter of time. No one is invincible.
Can't we just put up a bounty for a computer worm that wipes out all the XP machines in the world, and then stop having this conversation? :)
> I was recently thinking that operating systems should ditch their custom desktops in favor of a browser based UI.

Why?

> it still seems to me that a browser based OS UI would be far more effective than things like Gnome and KDE and all that stuff.

How so? My needs haven't changed. I still need a UI that provides a searchable launch menu, some quick-launch buttons, window management, etc. Rendering a bunch of things through a browser doesn't do that for me any better than rendering those things through some C libraries.
FuzzBuzz and the Art of Programming
It depends what country you live in. In the UK, BT Broadband, the largest ISP, hands them out for free (or used to) so they're reasonably common.
This would be pretty interesting.Considering I'm studying Psychology a bit, this would really be a field to look at. How does it affect whether a user wants to visit a certain section of a site more or not or how does this ultimately affect the development of the GUi in the long run?
The problem is not in the amount of job to be done. The problem is the cost of replacing a human being with a machine. Until the cost is higher than the worker's salary, that worker is fine. When it becomes lower, there is no job for him any more.
So far we've always been in a situation where for any job that could be done by a machine, infinite more would only be doable by a real human. But we'll quickly reach the point where there will be NO jobs that can't be done by a machine for cheaper.
On the other hand, if information technology keeps evolving much faster than robotics, the kast jobs to actually disappear will be the low qualification manual jobs. Note that truck driving is an intellectual job, not a manual one.
I would recommend lofting your email authentication into the same protection category as your bank account:

a) There is a nonzero probability that your bank can be socially engineered using information obtained from compromising your email account and anything that trusts it.
b) An email account compromise implicitly means every service that resets/recovers through it has to be rekeyed. The subsequent cleaning of the stables can be messy, lengthy, and itself somewhat risky.

In particular, if you haven't already, enable MFA. If your email provider does not support MFA, change your provider.
It is appstream, fix is:

cd /tmp && mkdir asfix
cd asfix
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/appstream_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libappstream3_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libappstream3*.deb
sudo dpkg -i appstream*.deb
I got the same email a few weeks ago and a few days later a similar one from twitter.
Nitpicking. Even the Unix guys, whose line editing language you're using there, called the password hashing function "crypt"; everyone knows what it means.
Damn - I should have thought of that. Well played sir!
There is no value in automated refueling - almost everywhere in the world drivers re-fuel their cars themselves, so there is no money to be saved by making this process automated. The only exception to this are some american states where you can't do it yourself by law.
They're encrypted (or should be), so no.
I didn't. I've been told it's a really good engine.
Finally Sonos on Chromebook!
April Fool – Motu Patlu in Hindi
In non-totalitarian regimes, you only get your career threatened[1], in totalitarian regimes, you could be imprisoned.

[1] http://gawker.com/this-is-how-hillary-clinton-gets-the-cover...
ProtonMail for a Private Secure Email
If there's one program of which I'd really like to see the source it would be Reason. And others like Cubase but to a lesser extent. I've done some applications which also do multi-channel audio routing through different processors etc and it's already pretty hard to do that in a nice way, and then some more to make sure everything is fast enough. But that didn't even have such lovely UI on top of it as Reason has.
I'd say rather than refueling, repairing. Right now there is a human in the truck who will do basic repairs, change a wheel, etc. If you have driverless trucks, they will need people available all over the country to service them on a short notice. Although admittedly these jobs could also be automated in the long term.
Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to rendered emoji?
The worst bias is letting the users choose their passwords. They should use a generator such as [1]. The reason is that the "entropy" is not a characteristic of a password but of the way it is generated. Computers are much better at entropy than humans.

[1] http://passwordcreator.org/
Interesting. Does that mean they have relaxed their t&c on how old you have to be to get a google account? I seem to remember a few years back google deleted an email account that some parents had set up for their child to email their grandparents.