skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've watched enough other people throw away opportunities, and seen enough opportunities I've thrown away to realize that most everyone gets lucky opportunities. Preparing for them, recognizing them, and taking advantage of them, is another matter entirely.

I know a number of successes and failures. The successes tend to be people who take responsibility for their lot in life, the bad as well as the good. The failures tend to be people who blame others or bad luck for their lot.

The empowering thing about taking responsibility is then you can do something about it.
You don't necessarily need to render everything at full resolution, just the area the eyes are focused on which you detect with good enough eye tracking.
Electrician and Women Latest Short Films
This explain why Santander's ATMs (4B ATM) have the same UI since 90's and can't send an email instead of printing on paper when you do some operation on it.
vaporware computing
Isn't it, in practise, basically the same thing though? The theoretical difference is this:

1. Option is a regular data type/object that represents "a collection of at most one value". It's similar to a list, set, heap, tree or whatever other collection types you have, except it can not contain more than one value.

2. With explicit nulls I guess any data type (e.g. Integer) will automatically get a clone of itself (a different type named Integer?) where also null is a valid member.

From a purely theoretical standpoint, I like #1 better.
You're right that the technical rebuttals are fairly slim, but the rest of the exchange, which is all about political play and saving face[0], isn't pointless.

The whole argument Dijkstra makes boils down to "if everyone was as technically competent as you and I, then I wouldn't need to do this. But the sad truth is that the incompetent are not only the majority, they decide what gets funded and researched, so I have to." I think he is right about that, and probably even acted correctly on it, but even so: positioning himself like he's taking on a sacrificial trollish saviour role and just doing this to save programming research is pretty arrogant, so Backus is right as well!

And that's just the politics of it, saving public face hasn't even entered the equation here. Don't forget, Backus' reputation also directly affects the respect and by extension funding that he receives for research that he wants to do. With that in mind I can very easily see how Backus must have been furious after reading EWD692, especially considering that it contained a few insinuations about him, which again I would partially account to Dutch culture, which (used to) have a severe case of tall poppy syndrome[1]. But from Backus' point of view, if they had been friends and colleagues before, it might have felt like backstabbing, both politically and as friends.

So I think I understand Backus' ad hominems - I suspect he was sincere about trying to criticise Dijkstra from the position as a long-time friend; his writing style boiling down to: "Look, I respect you and all, but I have to point out that you're being a dick; oh and have a taste of your own medicine on the side, because two can play that game."

Of course, it looks like he played right into the hands of Dijkstra, because Dijkstra doesn't appear to be as emotionally invested in saving public face, and seems to rather enjoy puzzling Backus a bit longer.

In general, I think it speaks for both of them that they managed to resolve these differences to what appears to be mutual satisfaction!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
I thought the whole point of css was to separate content from presentation. But it only seems to be used for reskinning sites and - occasionally - for producing a "printer view". I suppose I could pretend to be a printer. But can I not instead just pretend to want to read the text?
LabShape – Get in Shape and Stay in Shape
It's not a basic human right to own a house in Palo Alto.
OpenRefine is a powerful tool for working with messy data
Elon Musk’s Poor Diet and Lifestyle a Mars Bar for Breakfast Followed By…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux -> 4 MiB with X11 on a 386 and 20MiB or diskless with 16 MiB of RAM

* On 1998 I ran SuSE 5.3 with KDE and GNOME (even Gnome 1 over KDE 1.x !!) on a machine with 16 or 32 MiB of RAM and a AMD 486DX5 at 133Mhz . And was working fine.
Land tax penalizes retirees is why.
Recommendations

Intermittent Fasting combined with a fairly clean and lean protein diet, followed by a couple of 4 minute miracles a week. Guaranteed busy schedule proof!
This is e.g. what rust does. Another advantage of this is that you can also use them with types that aren't pointers (e.g. chars, integers, enums).
Did you read the opening posting on VK.com? I guess it only takes 10-15 years. And in some situations, e.g. entrace checks, public transport etc. you've even right now a high chance to obtain great facial images because you (as in state, authority) are able to control the environment.
What if I don't want to make money from my content? I just want to share it with the world, let them read it (or not read it) however they want, share it, copy it, comment on it, link to it.

That was the dream of the early internet, and with the centralised nature of Facebook, Google Groups it has faded.

It's easy enough for me as somebody technical. But what about my non-technical friends? They move to Medium, Facebook, Blogger, etc, as a way of hosting their content because it's easier.

WordPress is probably the remaining champion of the easy-to-use open web, and all we do is bitch about how slow and insecure it is.
ISIS selling sex slaves on Social Media?
The timing attacks on AV software are interesting. Didn't know that was possible. Why doesn't the cross-domain policy reject pings to localhost immediately?
It is indisputable that more knowledge is a good thing. My point is merely that "in a complimentary matter" so very often becomes "instead of", because of the insidious nature of procrastination.
If we struggle to reason about code we've written, perhaps we weren't so good at writing code?
Well, you might actually want to watch the talk, because it's pretty much the exact opposite of what you describe....
In a sensible system, local taxes would go up and up to be able to pay these necessary workers enough money to live there, which would also act to make the place less attractive and thus lower prices. As it is, we have a system in which rich people get to pick when such a system operates and when it doesn't.
Invasion of Manchuria was 1931; 1937 was invasion of mainland China until Zhejiang and Hubei. In consequences, there was the alliance of Germany and China fighting against the Soviet attack on Xinjiang, for instance.

It directly contributed to sanctions such as American embargo of Japanese imports, and things like Export Control Act of 1940 and then the Tripartite Pact.

(BTW, thanks for asking; this made me read more about history in the area - I had no idea, for instance, that Soviet artillery and airplanes had attacked Chinese Muslim nationalist (KMT) troops with mustard gas in 1934 in the Soviet invasion of Xinjiang, nor that there were still White Russian troops that operated on same side with NKVD and GPU troops. What a murky business.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Xinjiang
DoppioJVM brings JVM apps to the browser
How does this relate to the talk (rather than some of the comments here)? Did you watch the talk?
Wow so much fail. Where do these mickeymouse programmers repeatedly spring up? "Oh, I'm a supermanprogrammer and I can get it just right the first time because I use my brain!"

Sure I believe that there are people who can do this and get the code right by just thinking it through. But I have a question for even these people (and their organizations).

- What happens when these people leave and the new junior dev becomes the maintainer?
- What happens when the code is migrated/reused somewhere else?
- How do you make sure your code works at least the same as it did before after you:
* modify it
* update some dependent component somewhere, say some open source library that your code uses internally. These have bugs too you know...

Simply you don't unless you write the tests. The real value of testing (unit testing, regression testing, system testing) comes once you have that nice test suite and you can automate it and make sure that on every change nothing breaks. This is a beautiful thing to have, because simply no human can understand these software systems fully to make sure that some innocent looking change doesn't break something. These things unfortunately happen.

Sure testing is hard if you make it so. I said before that I get an average ratio of about 2/5 of actual code/unit testing code. This doesn't mean that "this is so bothersome let's not do it", what it should mean is that you design your system with testability in mind. A primary architectural goal in any design should be testability How easy it is to write unit tests for your classes and methods. The easier it is, the smoother the unit tests are to write and maintain and the better code quality you will have in the end.

Also note that when you design your software to be testable you get a few other abilities for free such as reusability. One of the most important starting points is to find the right separation of truly orthogonal components and define their interfaces right. Way too often I see code where the engineer didn't understand this and clumped several unrelated concepts together. This really makes the testing hard and painful.
Only he doesn't - he just makes claims. You happen to agree so you are satisfied - but the test is, would you like that post if it stated something you don't already agree with?
Very simple, the problem is not education but the true purpose of it. If education is a mean to earn more money, or the best way to get to the top and it doesn't matter how to get it, then learning only teach you what to avoid and how to simulate being a person.

Education is about making up what is important for us as a society. If we are to allow million of people to starve and get convince that what we see is just a natural state of affairs, then we have defined education as a system not about us as a society but about you as an individual. Society must speaks out with their pockets: If you are paying low wages to scientist, teachers and doctors, you are educating people about what to do with their lives. Forget about the shiny words, education is a lot about economic, incentives and giving people a decent life. Education can't be build without a framework and a clear purpose. Today all of us know what is the purpose of education: save yourself, stay alive, survive. The rest is just a hollow mud of words, deceitful, vain group of vacuous words.

In this forum virtual reality can be turned into a platform for education. We can use virtual reality to replace opium and get people sideway of our way, that is convert into passive, sleeping minds.

But otherwise, we could transform virtual reality into a platform for action, were people are actively engaged into learning and helping others to create and promote knew ways of learning and discovering what is being a human being in the 21th century.

We all want feedback, learning is about communication for action not for self-oppression. I am for an education for action. Now, go, ruin the idea, sell the product, crook the intention, ban the action and feed the vultures and continue educating for succeed.
Similarly these birds are attacking drones midair which may cause them to spiral to the ground and be destroyed. It seems like fair game to build anti-bird defences in to your drone given that birds are being trained to attack them. Perhaps it will make these people think twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_elision

I used to wonder the same thing, but C++ is just weird in that way.
I really wish the web could be more like that. Too many websites these days consider themselves applications where really they're just showing simple documents which should conform to the user's viewing preferences.
Is it cheaper to buy a robot, than just hire a dog walker?
Are you saying the requirement to unit tests is the main reason why those developers don’t write 1500-lines methods?
The arguments I've heard against checked exceptions are that they're hard to compose.

If you write the `send_mail` procedure you might only want it to throw `MailException`s of various kinds. But if you use a TCP procedure inside, you'll have to declare `send_mail` to also throw `ConnectionError`s, thus revealing its implementation. To correctly hide/abstract over the implementation, you have to internally catch any `ConnectionError`s thrown by the TCP procedure, and re-throw them as `MailException`s. That's a lot of manual work that shouldn't be needed.

Another similar problem is what someone else mentioned: if you don't actually know which specific exceptions your method can throw until runtime, what do you declare?

----

Note that this is also the case for some "null alternatives". Sure, the `Option`/`Maybe` type is easy to compose, but as soon as you start inserting error information in there (with an `Either` type) you run into some of the same problems. This is acknowledged by language communities where that is practised, and some of them prefer unchecked exceptions to `Either`-style types for that reason.
Also the basic goal is not achievable. The moment you find method X creates success everybody is doing method X and "success" gets redefined.
Forex trading recommendation on USDJPY 30-05-2016 by AzaForex forex broker
When people have the opportunity to earn more, they do, no matter how hard it is for them. Then they find things to spend that extra money on that they wouldn't otherwise have spent it on, like a house in a more expensive neighborhood and they end up still not having much money. It's just a personal choice. Ask if your wife is willing to not work, buy a house in a cheap town, buy a used Japanese import car and carry on living a comfortable 50's lifestyle if you want. But you won't want because you'll see all that money waiting for you.
See: https://panopticlick.eff.org
OUR FITTED SHIRTS – BODYBUILDER APPROVED
I'm happy for Do What I Mean when it's a nullipotent action -- the `git lgo` example there -- less so when there are side effects.

Then again isntall => install is going to be correct 99.999...% of the time so there's no harm done here; it's the suggestion for a general autocorrect that worries me.
Get a phone number like everybody. You are like 0.0000001% of the market. Nobody is going to twist their product to cater to you.
Your children will have grown up since the 90's dot com bubble when you would have first seen the writing on the wall. This didn't just happen overnight. It's been going on for a couple of decades.
Google gives exactly 1 result for "A Natural History of Childhood", and it's not for a published work. Is the title correct?
"Our lord and saviour."
Install and Configure Tomcat 8 on Centos-7
Meh.. In this case, I think it's not worth it. The paper is around that specific use case of the phrase.
Nulls are not a mistake. They are a trade-off as so many other things in language design.
I'm starting to suspect they have the same people behind them.

Either that or Loper OS http://www.loper-os.org/
At Chinese wage levels you might just set up a sweat shop and have people send messages by hand. It worked to break captchas, too.
Convert a Ripe.net probe into an OpenWRT router
Also known as 'the knack'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P1xG32Feo
Ouch. As if it's a chore instead of a privilege to get to do so!

Well, luckily my story had a happy ending: my colleagues (who were checking the assignments with me) stood up for me, and after the course other students defended me by saying "finally, a teacher willing to call out the freeloaders! It's so demotivating to see them get away with not doing anything while I put in so much effort and get nothing in response."

The reason my former boss had reacted like an overprotective mother was because the complaining students had made me look like someone who motivated through bullying, intimidation and fear. He takes his responsibilities of creating a safe space for students to learn and overcome their insecurities very seriously, and I respect that. Meanwhile, I have high expectations of my students precisely because I believe they are capable of so much more than they give themselves credit for, and he now understands and respects that, and has given me some pointers in how to get that across in ways that Swedes aren't allergic to. So we resolved our issues too.

But yeah, that was a pretty strong culture clash; in the end it was educational for everyone involved I think.
Which sounds all reasonable; great even. But then MS adds the secret ingredient, which completely breaks it: mandatory autorestart that can't be switched off without also breaking the autoupdate (or at least, I have yet to see a way to do that in WinX). "Oh hey, while you were out to a meeting/lunch/sleep, we decided that nothing you had open was of any value, and threw it away. Shouldn't have been using that software if it didn't provide autobackups, eh?" (Even with software that does have automatic backups to guard against unreliable machines (sic!), it's an emergency measure, not something I should want to use)
Benefits of nullable by default: -

Drawbacks: numerous

How is this a trade-off?
A real entrepreneur wouldn't bother reading these books. They'd be too busy working on their idea and learning firsthand.

I've read two titles from this list (The Lean Startup and Trust Me, I’m Lying) and halfway through both realised I knew it already.

No book has all the answers. It's better to attack a business idea intelligently in your own unique way.
The Most Important Skill in the World Today
Would it be fair to say that the Tor browser and Tails OS are being specifically targeted?

It seems to me using these tools is enough in to provide a suspicion and thereby having the opposite effect than what they are intended for.

So essentially, using Chrome on Windows, though perhaps less secure makes you less likely to be targeted than using Tor on Windows or on Tails.
Ambilight system for every input connected to your TV
If formal education only impacted our ability to earn a living wage, then it wouldn't be a problem. The article points out in various ways that the impact of our formal education far exceeds that narrow remit. If I was to summarise, I'd say the way we teach breeds disconnectedness and resentment in a way that alters our personal lives far beyond the time at which our time at school comes to an end. Moving forward, I think we should stop the pursuit of education for the sake of creating compliant workers, and let our education reflect that humans can learn more from self-discovery than authoritarian decree.

That being said, it'll probably take decades before we can ween our society off the formal education models that are prevalent, the least we can do in the meantime is to make it less authoritarian. This clip from Michael Moore's documentary 'Where To Invade Next' shows what that can look like by looking at the Finnish school system:

http://youtu.be/1ZbGlDMF7HQ
How to trust online writing servcie?
There are many writing service online due to the great demand from the customers. Also many spam sites are arising in addition with the good one. Most of them are ultimately aimed to seeking money from customers, also they not able to write quality paper for the customers. So be careful on choosing online writing services. You have to ensure the quality and experience of the service. Also you should check the service writing standards, pricing structure, customer support and offered guarantees from the company.
http://www.buyessays.us/
Most of these would be caught at compile time in a language like Elm or (to a lesser extent) Haskell. A common pattern in some of these languages with actually strong type systems is to encode these failure possibility points in the type of the associated functions.

Also, in Elm as an example, there is no runtime class generation, the type of user input that is possible is checked at compile time, and you're forced to explicitly handle many of these potential failures. If you want to crash the program if you get unexpected user input, you literally need to type "Debug.crash" and then you pretty much deserve what you get.

If you're actually interested in maintainable code you should concentrate on reducing the state space of your program wherever possible, then using exhaustive (if possible) or property testing to fill in most of the rest of the gaps. Unit tests can help too, but I really think of them as less useful than all of the above.
Interesting that the concept of Antifragility is gaining traction with regards to software.

Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post "Antifragile Software Ecosystems" that discusses how IMO antifragility relates to how software is developed.

https://opkode.com/blog/2014/01/14/antifragile-software-ecos...
Not really.

Two solutions: either rely on the private sector to provide `reverse mortgages'. Or let the government offer the same product, ie allow people on low income but with lots of land value to defer payment until death or sale.

In addition, phase in land tax over a decade so that people have time to adapt. If you phase out other taxes at a similar rate, you will even get a great increase in land values.

(Basically, land in a jurisdiction that charges less eg income taxes or sales taxes is great for doing business on. So people will bid up its price.)
To drag out that old Proudhon quote: "Property is theft". The basic idea is not that "everyone should be able to live everywhere", but that if you wall off a piece of land, given that land is a scarce resource, you are depriving others of access, and some considers that to be equivalent to depriving other of liberty.

From that, even if you believe that property is necessary you may believe that efficiency of land use is an ethical issue where regulation to increase efficiency of use would be the ethical thing to do.

One might also simply believe in a "lighter" version of this and believe that the ability to own your own dwelling should be right, and that high prices and scarcity created by large estates exist "at the expense" of others for that reason.
> the new junior dev becomes the maintainer

this shouldn’t happen. Maintaining a complex project is the job for a senior developer.

> What happens when the code is migrated/reused somewhere else

someone else need to carefully test what’s he/she reusing.

> The real value of testing comes once you have that nice test suite and you can automate it

Sure there’s _some_ value, especially for dynamic languages and/or for developers who don’t use asserts and other runtime checks.

But that value isn’t free.

Not only they’re expensive to develop, they also make very expensive to change things: you change a minor thing in the code, and suddenly dozens of tests are broken.

If your code is implementing some 25-years old spec that’s not going to change for another 40 years, unit testing will likely pay off. If you’re creating something new and rapidly changing, using a statically-typed language that you know how to use correctly, and you understand the value of asserts — unit tests are IMO waste of time.
Who cares for the motivation (outside of MS)? End result is identical.
The emergence of historical mega breaches
Sure, but why not just charge more and sell to the highest bidders?
How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me (2014)
https://goodbyegunstocks.com/alternatives/VDIGX?gunStockRang... sooo I was digging around annnd... any ideas for alternatives on this one? has anyone done this before? tips on what to do next? =)
Do you have data for that? It's a statement that sounds like it makes sense, but so do a lot of statements in this sort of discussion.

(I'm not disagreeing. Intuitively I'd tend to agree with you that those things would have a measureable effect. I just don't trust intuition in this sort of thing. :) )