skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you believe that the gap between consuming software and creating software will disappear at some point? That is, do you expect we will soon see some homoiconic software environment where the interface for using software is the same as the interface for creating it?

I feel like the current application paradigm cannot scale, and will only lead to further fragmentation. We all have 100+ different accounts, and 100+ different apps, none of which can interact with each other. Most people seem to think that AI will solve this, and make natural languages the main interface to AI, but I don't buy it. Speech seem so antiquated in comparison to what can be achieved through other senses (including sight and touch). How do you imagine humans will interact with future computer systems?
Nice work! That home page, while admittedly simple, renders incredibly fast. Have you done any benchmarks / performance comparisons to other web frameworks?
As it ended up being posted, it really could have been "a <word>". During the course of producing it, it seemed like the entities involved might be confusing, and my first approach was to treat everything like a unique variable.

TLDR, made sense during composition, not w/ final product.
Not that I've noticed.
The new orchestration looks based on Swarm and possibly Compose; have they resolved the issue where the lack of lifecycle semantics means that your services don't work if they have any sort of cluster semantics, like Riak, Cassandra or Zookeeper? These previously always required outside hacks to work, and work flawlessly with Kubernetes. It looks like there's some service discovery support; which may or may not fit the bill.
I used my the legal plan through my work to get a lawyer to apply for citizenship (document review, walk through the process). She was awful, gave me outdated forms, was condescending, and told me I needed documentation that wasn't needed.

Long story short, I filed by myself and had a friend who is a lawyer review certain parts of my application which I think needed a little extra review.

Something like this is awesome, I'll definitely bookmark it for if I have friends or family going through the citizenship process.
What was the criteria to make this list?

I wish Connecticut could do something to get off the opposite list.
Hah, doing the process myself right now and noticing they charge in Miami $500 just for consultation.

Great product idea, I'm trying it now!
Yep, and CoreOS and Kubernetes are already moving towards Rocket as the default, underlying engine.
As a Microsoft employee who works on conference presentations, works on hands on labs, etc., you can't win on this.

If I use Edge exclusively in screenshots, people assume it's not cross-browser, it's not cross-platform, Microsoft is out of touch with other developers, Microsoft's living in a bubble, etc.

If I use other browsers for screenshots, I get comments like this.

As @dangrossman replied, we all use whatever browser we want for day to day browsing.

As a professional web dev, I make a habit of cycling through the modern browsers because it's just a good practice. I was the annoying guy in my dev team (not Microsoft, a financial services company) in the early 2000's that tested everything in Firefox when everyone else just wanted to use IE6 all the time. I'm typing this in Edge now, last week was a Chrome week.

[please don't downvote the parent comment]
Do you still see an advantage of using Smalltalk (like Squeak/Pharo) as a general purpose language/tool to build software or do you think that most of its original ideas were somehow "taken" by other alternatives?
Do you recall any interesting work on discussion forums or alternatives to them for promoting collaborative thinking?

Or for another approach, how do you like HN?
Well played, though I'd wager between trolling and conspiracy theories it's near impossible to pick out legitimate information from the rest.
I agree, and I've been thinking about why that is. It starts with Szilard's understanding, and then misstates that it "was realized in 1945" (the year the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), but anyone who has read about atomic energy knows that the Szilard tested his theory with Fermi in Chicago as Chicago Pile 1 [1] in 1942.

Secondly, it presents the choice of molten salt versus pressurized water reactors (PWR) as a binary choice when it clearly isn't. Running a reactor is a process not a simple act. Fueling and "cleaning" molten salt reactors is an additional burden on the reactor's operation. If you put the number of processes you have to develop to run a molten salt reactor to the number you have to develop to run a PWR, there are fewer processes for a PWR. So from a development stand point the PWR is the MVP of reactors. By the time the research was available on the needed processes for Thorium[2] nuclear power was already under siege [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_protests
The blog content is much more interesting than the homepage...

https://cocreate.localmotors.com/blog/post/local-motors-debu...
A piece of advice for software engineers on the mid of the careers ? How do you find challenges and leverage their experience ?
You have the wrong expectation of amateur radio then. It's about as anonymous as two friends going to a park and yelling loudly to each other.

Encryption is also not allowed by law, since it's public spectrum. Allowing encryption would be akin to allowing somebody to just build a structure in the middle of a public park. That takes away usable recreational area from other people.
Hi Alan,

1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while still enjoying silicon kind of performance?

2. What software technologies do you feel we're missing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
From what I have read elsewhere most of those stories seem to be in line with what the world at large knows. It is hard to tell if it's just two different parts of the shop lead by by different management with different goals.
And a Grand Prix.
Mind if I ask what your FB test was like? Most people who "test" on FB don't wait till results are statistically significant, particularly with conversion data. Beyond that, you typically need to test at a loss initially, get data, and then optimize to profitability as you dial in your targeting and test new creative (which you absolutely need to do given how quickly banner blindness sets in on FB).

Also, have you tried paid search? And if you don't already have one I'd consider an affiliate program. Gives bloggers another incentive to write about you, and you have a very "PR-friendly" business concept.
Show HN: Berlin public transport REST API (no key required)
What do you think of statement "Erlang is the only true object oriented language in use today."?
I honestly wonder how you can look at that edit and think he was bring serious.

Did you just skim the post for buzzwords and then comment on his edit?
The thing about the US immigration is, any mistakes have major consequences, often leading to deportation and/or multi-year bans for country entry. TurboTax can make a mistake, and you will just pay whatever the IRS asks you to. The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) is not that lenient.

That's why I think you have to be batshit crazy to use any software instead of a cheap immigration lawyer.

(I personally went through the student visa -> greencard -> citizenship process, so I know how it works)
Senior Systems Engineer
Ultra Mobile - Senior Systems Engineer - Costa Mesa, CA Full-Time (Onsite)

THE GENERAL SCOPE OF POSITION
As Senior Systems Engineer, you have the mind of an engineer and the soul of a systems administrator. You are the guardian angel of our systems infrastructure. A sounding board for the IT Director, you have no trouble communicating your take on problems that arise. Enterprise and network administration are in your DNA, and you have the blood test to prove it. (Or maybe just the experience. That works, too.)

- Oversee development and maintenance of infrastructure systems
- VMware ESX/ESXi, AWS/Cloud administration and support
- Create documentation and diagrams of systems and processes
- Maintain security, backup and redundancy strategies
- Evaluate and implement fail over systems for disaster recovery

TECHNOLOGIES YOU’LL WORK WITH
- Linux (RHEL and CentOS)
- Bash, PHP, Python and Perl
- Apache, IIS, DNS, Nginx
- Cfengine, Ansible, GIT
- AWS, Cloud hosting
- Windows Server 2008, 2012
- VMware ESX/ESXi
- Cisco ASA Firewalls, Cisco IOS Routers and Switches
- SIP, MySQL, MongoDB, MSSQL

JOB DETAILS: http://ultramobile.applicantstack.com/x/detail/a296ecjl909o
actually thinking about how I could use a button on mouse (middle mouse on my current one, or side buttons on some others) as a key to shift left side of keyboard to right side. That's really all I want. A way to have hand on mouse and still be able to type (though I avoid using mouse). Should be doable with autohotkey
Hi Alan,

In "The Power of the Context" (2004) you wrote:

...In programming there is a wide-spread 1st order
theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools,
languages, and especially operating systems. This is
true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone
down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build
your own tools, languages and operating systems, then
you absolutely should because the leverage that can be
obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to
fix other people’s not quite right tools) can be
incredible.

I love this quote because it justifies a DIY attitude of experimentation and reverse engineering, etc., that generally I think we could use more of.

However, more often than not, I find the sentiment paralyzing. There's so much that one could probably learn to build themselves, but as things become more and more complex, one has to be able to make a rational tradeoff between spending the time and energy in the rathole, or not. I can't spend all day rebuilding everything I can simply because I can.

My question is: how does one decide when to DIY, and when to use what's already been built?
The closest thing to a wonder drug is exercise
I stand corrected.

Also, being able to SSH into a rocket is pretty fucking awesome on it's own. :)
Hi Sir Kay,

How do you feel about the role of computing technology in society today ? is it still important or should be work on other domains (education, medicine, ecology, and the industrial tissue that is our interface to reality nowadays).

While I'm at it, just did a MOOC about Pharo (~ex squeak) and ST was indeed a very interesting take on OO (if I may say so ;). So thanks for you and your teammates work along the years (from ST to STEPS).
How do you become a lifelong learner ? How do you stay excited about the future ?
Fine.
But in practice. By time malloc returns null. It's blown up anything on the system that doesn't recover gracefully. possibly the file system. Which is possibly how the database becomes corrupt.

And I see plenty of reported examples and work arounds. Even yum has been suffering from it for years.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=260195

http://www.pvangsgaard.com/2016/03/16/yum-error-database-dis...
Thanks.

I will definitely keep a close eye on your service. Here's hoping it comes soon to non-US bank accounts.
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting how attractive early video games -- like SpaceWar -- were. This is a part of an industrial civilization being able to produce surpluses (the "industrial" part) with the "civilization" part being how well children can be helped to learn not to give into the cravings of genetics in a world of over-plenty. This is a huge problem in a culture like the US in which making money is rather separated from worrying about how the money is made.
Ask HN: Does the design of a programming language includes writing its compiler?
Or is topic only related to specifying grammars?
Note: I'm novice don't crucify me. :)
My random advice from the internet:

+ Tap financial resources as you go. You will [hopefully] be iterating. Limiting the amount of cash in the company will reduce the chance of overspending on dead ends. Manage cash flow: 20% of $20k is a lot less than 20% of $100k.

+ Paying off student debt is foolish. $20k is 10 months living expenses. Over that 10 months loan payments are probably about a quarter of that. That's an extra six months of life.

+ Divide the company 50/50. If there's success, the 2% difference in equity isn't worth fighting over, the 100% difference in control is. If there's a disparity in initial investment, make it a loan with moderate interest if you must. Otherwise, one founder taking control of the company from the other is within the rules of the game.

+ Working toward product market fit is more important than building a proto-type. It's also harder because it requires talking to people and changing direction and dealing with rejection rather than going head down building a prototype using familiar skills.

+ Tap into your 401k when there is a clear business case for doing so. You can't blow it on Aeron Chairs and Macbook Pros and Google Adwords until you've got it to blow. Wait until you really know what you're doing.

+ How much money you should save depends on the business model. A SAAS can go up on Heroku for ten bucks a month. The first quantum smartphone is another matter.

+ The worst course of action is to spend six months building something, uveil it, and discover nobody wants it. What you're building is a company.

Good luck.
https://pault.ag/go/debian

https://github.com/paultag/go-debian
Here are a few examples of things that are fun and are not conversation oriented:

- Radiosport: competitions involve completing short contacts with other stations, but the information exchanged is usually a serial number, location indicator, etc. This is fun because it's a flow activity that requires great strategy and knowledge of radio wave propagation, band conditions, etc. It requires no pleasantries or exchange of personal info whatsoever.

- Satellite stuff: Brief contacts are made during flyovers, but most of the energy goes into understanding the orbits, timing, doppler shift, antenna characteristics, etc.

- Low Power / experimental VLF bands: Some amateurs love to squeeze out the most from milliwatts.

- Designing / Building radios, circuits, filters, antennas, etc. There is always room to improve the state of the art, share designs, ideas, construction methods, etc. This is similar to hobby electronics however the communications use of the gear is a nice way to prove that your approach was solid (or superior to other engineering approaches used in the past).

I think for most who end up enjoying amateur radio, radio waves feel a bit like magic, and there is something very cool about understanding them and (relatively directly) manipulating them. If you don't feel a difference between communications on HF using gear you built or designed and using Skype, then I'm pretty sure you would not enjoy Amateur radio.

The same argument could be made about the other hobbies you mention. Why play your own instrument if you aren't better than whatever professional musician you like best? Why play casual sports if you aren't ready for the professional team?

If you look at the difference in band activity between popular radiosport events and casual conversation, there is about 1000x more activity during the radiosport competitions.

The nice thing is that many radio amateurs are fairly interesting to talk to and have interesting backgrounds and stories. Not all, but I'd say that compared to the people I typically meet at a meetup or random community event, amateur radio is a better predictor of someone being interesting, creative, successful, having good critical thinking skills, etc. There are always exceptions, but it is a pretty unique subculture.

If you don't find it a fit, that's completely fine, but it's likely to be your loss. I think your comment got downvotes because it comes off like a bro lamenting too many dudes at a bar.
Web based vscode in 10 ... 9 ...
Artists have historically made little money on the music itself, turning instead to franchising and concert tickets to really bring in the big bucks.

This isn't the best article for explaining it, but it's better than nothing. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/9-ways-musicians-act...

Why are songs on the radio played for free? Because copyright in music actually hardly matters. "Real fans" end up buying piles of merchandise or going to concerts anyway.

(Disclosure: I pay for Google Music. I don't pirate music, and don't advocate it. But it can hardly be construed as "hurting artists.")
But LeCun and Ng also made long term predictions. Lecun said it's unlikely that AI will be dangerous, and Ng said it's unlikely to happen in our lifetime. Both of those predictions are just as speculative as Bostrom's.

>Bostrom is basically dealing in the outcomes of very long joint probabilities, which, multiplied by the probability of each individual variable, is very low.

That's not how probability works. You can't just assume Bostrom is wrong by default. That might work for futurists like Hanson or Kurzweil, which do that. But Bostrom isn't making a huge number of assumptions. His book presents a large number of possible futures, and the dangers of each.
Message to Workers Under Scrutiny: Cooperate or Get Fired
Yes, NumPy depends on BLAS/LAPACK libraries which are written on Fortran. In turn TensorFlow and Theano which used for implementation of most state of the art deep neural networks depend on NumPy, so Fortran is still alive and gearing such modern research.
and a salt biscuit brand
Optimism (or Lack Thereof) with Civilization Fiction
It will get that data too with the scraper.

This implementation could theoetically work with your own profile (which is not as useful since Facebook lets you download that data), but it definitely will not work with other profiles.
> My conclusion was most of these computers aren't needed

I don't disagree, but I wonder what is behind the investment in China. They are putting a significant chunk of resources on this and I'd like to understand why.
I'd also recommend SDRPlay as a great (and relatively inexpensive) SDR that lets you listen to a lot of interesting stuff. The SDRPlay also lets you listen to HF, which is where most of the interesting stuff is (in my opinion).

http://www.sdrplay.com/
Meet the man behind NoireBnb, a response to AirBnb’s discrimination problem
180 Artists Signing Petition for Digital Copyright Reform
> My guess is you just don't consider declarative languages "real programming".

That's ridiculous. There's no "real" programming, and of course declarative programming is.. programming. However, with declarative programming you're still writing algorithms and doing computation (composing functions / querying predicates).

> Does it become programming if the config file is written in Python?

Is it an algorithm? No. It's just like JSON is for JavaScript.

> I don't think there is any firm line between computer use and computer programming.

Solving problems with algorithms is programming and while there is indeed a fuzzy line there, I still find it far-fetched to consider writing configuration files (which are static inputs without logic) or declaring html structure / css styles (which again, lack any logic) programming.
Did they just take a random sampling of US locations? Maybe I'm ignorant and close-minded, but I'm really, really struggling to imagine many of those places as a new Silicon Valley. Or even a modest imitation of it. Detroit? Mississippi? Is this real?

And I'm pretty confident that I'm not being close-minded about how ridiculous Russia or Ukraine becoming "Silicon Valley" is. Closed off, isolationist, adversarial, and regularly sanctioned Russia competing to become a global hub for information technology? It just seems laughable. I'm not saying they are a backwater or something, but Silicon Valley is the way it is largely because of a massive international influx, something that just won't happen in Russia for the foreseeable future. And Ukraine, which was just invaded and lost one of their wealthier regions, has a broken government, and is still in a civil war somehow turning it around? Right.
Common sense and paranoia. What do I install in my first 5 minutes? Winamp, Palemoon, Thunderbird.
Ask HN: Web Scraping with Node.js
Anyone out there have a cachet of good Node web scraping libs, and/or other resources? Opinions?

I have the intuition that my Google searches are a bit inadequate. Thank you!
Is a web browser sufficient to provide rich and meaningful experiences on the Internet?
Maybe I'm being naive, but won't there be a record of the address the item was delivered to? And credit card details? How do you avoid that?
> you can just leave the room and clean it the next day without any problems

Wouldn't it radiate into the room and make the room... bad? (Sorry, I'm clueless about this subject)
British identity is extremely weak - even in England, there's been a decades long decline in the number of people who consider themselves British first and foremost. As it stands, a tiny minority in the UK - England included see themselves as only British, and I believe a minority now see British as the most important part of their identity.

The only thing "saving" the British identity, is the weakness of the English national identity.

That English is one of the oldest established national identities in Europe, I'll buy, but in the last twenty years there's been a lot of agonising in England over how weak the English identity is in many respects.

E.g. England does not have an official national anthem (God Save the Queen is the anthem of the UK), or really any day where people celebrate being English. The flag is amongst many English people seen as a bit of an embarrassment hijacked by far right groups and football fans. Unlike the other home nations, England does not have a parliament of its own, and so on.

A lot of the rest is tied to a UK identity that has steadily faded after the collapse of the British Empire.

In a way the English national identity is in crisis because England let itself become the UK in a way that Scotland and Wales did not, and as a result both identities have been watered down.

It's clear that there is still some sort of a cultural identity in England, and wider in the UK, but it is an identity that in most respect appears to be in decline.

In a sense I would be more inclined to buy that this perception of the decline is feeding into the fear of the EU in some groups. Few people in most other European nations would be likely to fear the disappearance of their national identity, but the UK has seen the slow slide towards the disintegration of the country itself, and have to face a shared identity that has been steadily weakening for decades, all the while at least in England there is little to take its place.