skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say several things:

- Its small size (the PUC Lua codebase is about 15000 lines of C and compiles to about 250 kB). PUC Lua is the reference implementation of Lua, as opposed to e.g. LuaJIT.

- Its portability: PUC Lua is written in Clean C, the intersection of ANSI C and C++ 98. That makes it trivially portable to any architecture that matters in games.

- Its performance. PUC Lua is already faster than most popular scripting languages and uses less memory. If you need extra performance you can switch to LuaJIT and come close to C on a lot of codebases.

- The syntax is designed for data description, which makes it a very good language to implement DSLs for lots of things. Also the parser is very efficient so you can store data in Lua files.

- Coroutines. They let you propose an API to users (scripters) that appears synchronous but actually runs in an asynchronous fashion.

- The language is made to be embedded. Its C API is a central point of the design. The interpreter is reentrant so you can run several instances in threads without any problem.

All of this made Lua very popular in the game industry, along with its use in pretty famous games (initially Grim Fandango, then lots of others including World of Warcraft).
This Planet Money episode covers the history of why the chip took so long to arrive in US credit cards: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/13/474135422/episo...
Recruiters, real estate agents, car salespeople, etc, in general seem to be people that have no actual skills and get by in life as a warm body that's generally accepted as a required party when two other parties have a supply/demand situation.
> iPhone stock keyboard is horrible for foreign languages, and just flat out doesn't offer auto suggest for a lot of them.

That's not true. Why do you say that? I've used the foreign keyboards for Spanish and for Korean, and both keyboards are excellent and offer good autocorrect. I've also never heard anyone complain about the foreign keyboards being bad before.
Yep. This is what I do. I have a couple of large plastic Tervis glasses that work great for this, and as a bonus if I've put too little ice in or heated the water too much I can adjust on the fly by seeing through it.
The original comment read:

> they probably won't be allowed to go and live in Europe for a bit when they hit their 20s anymore.

You write:

> British youth will have worse opportunities for working in Europe than they now do

Which is something else.
This seems unlikely. I ordered a new Volkswagen back in July of last year, and was tracking ship traffic. By following the logistics company they use, you could see new batches of VWs departing Emden Germany for ports in Canada and the US (Halifax, Dover, Jacksonville, Houston, Port Hueneme via the Panama Canal) almost constantly. I'd say a new ship left every 5-7 days, which meant that at any given point in time, it was almost certain that a ship from Europe was in the Atlantic on its way to North America carrying VWs. I'm sure VWs represent a very small percentage of the trade from Europe to North America.
"I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of."

Clearly he doesn't, otherwise he wouldn't be doing shady stuff like having the company continue to hire people who have to relocate, only to lay them off a week later.

"Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business."

That isn't the problem here.
A few days old but I wanted to contribute anyways:

I do a really fresh/clean install. I install tools as I need them and find myself leaving tools behind often and trying things out. I get setup on new machines pretty often: whether I installed a new linux distro on my chromebook, finally dual-booting Linux on my PC, or just setting up a dev VM.

Anyways, I recently abandoned using Tmux because I prefer using i3 as my window manager and it works for me much better because now I can not only tile terminal windows but also other utilities.

I've also moved on from using CMDer straight to using ConEmu on my Windows machine. Every reinstall is basically doing inventory of my tools.

Obviously, I keep a repo of dotfiles and other settings files.
Your belief is not crucial to the argument. I do pardon you, of course, please, think nothing of it.
Can a H1B visa holder start a company?
What are the options for H1B visa holder to do side projects for money?

Thank you.
Yeah sure. And interesting idea about using the frame to hang another material. I didnt think of that one. Has potential.
And the stigma of being trump supporter is way higher.
It's the same with the Populism/Trump people and their counterparts in the US. Nobody wants to discuss a solution. Minds have been made up and if you don't agree with them, its all safe spaces, "neener neener neener cuck" and all that crap that goes with it.

For a species that imbibed itself with the idea of the republic, we certainly like to squander that gift.
Apple to discontinue Thunderbolt Display
This is only true if you are in a position of having enough power and resource to perform that analysis.

If you don't have that resource or power, change for change's sake is rational.

Put another way - when you know your leaders are taking you in the wrong direction, then a random alternative is a rational choice if it is the only other option.
Widower Recreates Photos of His Late Wife with Their Daughter
there's no reason to suppose non-white people were/are somehow intrinsically less capable of innovation.

The GP didn't say that they were.
Bay to Breakers is the iconic San Francisco race, with tens of thousands of runners (many in costume and some in nothing) running 12km across the city.

Thought it might get a NSFW tag, but it turned out to be hardware disassembler pr0n.
The name is interesting. I wonder if it's a reference to carbon 14, the radioactive isotope of carbon used for carbon dating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating

Or, maybe the service is 4.66 times as good as Amazon S3?

Or, the 14th letter of the alphabet is N. If we swap that for 14 we get "CN", which is the top-level domain for China, which is most certainly not in France.

The conspiracy theory possibilities are endless! ;)
I guess it has a bit to do with Nintendo's choice of architecture. They haven't moved past the Gamecube architecture - the Gamecube, Wii and WiiU all use the same PowerPC CPU, the Wii is just faster and the WiiU has two. Same for the GPU - they keep using pretty much the same Radeon, just newer, faster, etc. This has allowed the project to remain relevant (able to play mostly current games) for three console generations and find the support of qualified individuals.

I agree that it's a bit weird though - the best, most well managed emulators seem to be for Nintendo hardware. From the NES through to the Wii (and I expect Dolphin to support WiiU soon), every console is reasonably well supported and emulated.

Part of it might be due to Nintendo picking architectures that aren't too alien to emulate on a standard PC.
I don't agree that allowing the young and inexperienced to vote is a feature. Inexperienced people make bad long-term decisions simply because they don't have the history to draw likely conclusions from. There's nothing wrong with that and there's nothing that can be done about it; it's simply a function of age, which no one can change.

It seems accepted that a baseline amount of experience should be necessary, which is why we have a minimum voting age in the first place. I believe that the baseline is too low (and that it was intentionally lowered to more easily allow charlatans to acquire power).

I agree that telecommunications, and especially television, have had a serious negative effect on the political discourse and that we need to devise a way to make people less vulnerable to them. Things were much different when you had to read someone's pamphlets and evaluate their proposals to decide if you supported them v. watching them wink at you on TV.
Another US Voter Database Leak
Go. It's far more approachable, and is already the _linga franca_ for a huge class of software, namely infrastructure and cloud automation, which is still exploding in market and mindshare. It's also quickly gaining traction as an implementation language for microservices, which is pushing it into the enterprise. Rust is a great language and I think will continue to grow and expand its niche, but, at least for now, I think that Go is outpacing it.
Generally I buy and I usually don't buy Stumptown's prepackaged products as I don't think they're great and generally overpriced.

I usually just go to a cafe and ask if they have cold brew (most do in Portland at least in summer), and New Seasons (local grocery store chain) makes cold brew all year round.

* Courier Coffee has probably the best cold brew in town on a regular basis.

* Barista is good, always good, courier is just ever so slightly better. They have it year round too which is a lifesaver for someone like me.

* Pie Spot actually has damn good cold brew on the inner E side.

Breakfast places with enough of a "hipster" (I don't say that as a negative, I probably am one, more just a way to identify them) vibe usually have cold brew as well.

In the summer, I generally consume a lot more coffee will more regularly make myself some. It's quite easy, you really just need a cheese cloth and some sort of bucket. Throw it in and wait ~12 hours. Last about a week.
Hello Robert! Thanks for doing this (again). I got two questions, but any answer is appreciated!

1st: I’d love to stay in the US as a “digital nomad” for some months. I’d have to work on my own projects and maybe on some client ones while doing this (all of them outside the US). Which kind of VISA would I need?

2nd: Are there any chances to get a work permit if you don’t own a University degree? (Eg. starting my own company in the US?)

Thank you!
I also prefer it - I think it tastes better (even if I then microwave it, seriously) but it's also way, way less acidic, and for people with acid reflux (moderate or severe) it makes drinking coffee a lot more comfortable.

Not going to make a claim I can't back up, but a lot of people take acidity to equal flavor - which is why Starbucks coffees are insanely acidic. Whether or not that's why the author prefers iced, hot-brewed coffee (for the acidity) and is conflating that with flavor, is not something I know for sure, but it's a possibility.
The TCP messaging analogy here is that the design was a protocol, which focused on how different components in a TCP system communicate with each other. Rather than a design that focused on how each component worked internally.

The inter-communication was the central design, not the intra-communication.

Many OOP programmers today spend the bulk of their time thinking about how their objects should work rather than how they should communicate.
A family member of mine works for DHS as a paralegal, more or less, and their department deals with illegal immigration into the US. They often tell tales of how illegal immigrants will commit heinous acts (rape, murder) or somewhat more pedestrian crimes (heroin possession, for instance).

Anyways, the most striking part about this is that it seems a lot of the judges who handle these cases simply don't care. Because these people are often deported and then come back a week later, not a lot seems to be done. Some of the criminals won't be charged, and it seems a lot of people on the in the system will just turn a blind eye. I'm not sure if it's apathy, or if the system is so inundated that they're just unable to keep up, but have you experienced anything like this?
What you've described sounds like a significantly worse implementation of the fundamental idea behind Plato's philosopher-kings.

Put simply, systems like this deny the population the right of self-determination.
So what does extraordinary ability mean? Are we talking PhD level ability here, or Turning award level ability, or somewhere in between?
Well, TCP/IP was just about the mechanics of getting 2 machines to be able to communicate with each other. He hints at the end of that comment on how to expand that to include meaning and interpretation of the actual message. One way of thinking about it - how would we communicate with an alien civilization? In a way that's how 2 machines that never interacted before could negotiate common meaning.
Hence the statistic where 1/3 of your lifetime medical expenses come in the last year of life.
That's a bit of a misunderstanding of the role of the Commission.

The Parliament and even the people of Europe (via a petition) can ask the Commission to propose legislation, and in the case of the Parliament, it's widely considered that the Commission is compelled to do so.

See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/bibliotheque/briefing/...

The Commission has only once ever in the history of the EU refused to produce legislative proposals after the Parliament asked them to do so, and the reason there was that existing laws already covered the case. So effectively the European Parliament has legislative initiative - it's just that the Commission is the group that drafts the detailed proposals, which are then debated and amended by the Parliament.

As far as I can tell, the Commission takes the role of the Civil Service in the UK parliament to a large extent.

(Also, I don't believe I argued in the article that the House Of Lords was the only part of the UK government. Obviously it is not.)
Ask HN: How is software consulting different than working on an internal team?
I have been a web engineer for a while. In my early days I did some work at agencies, mostly on ad work. I didn't care for the fact that everything was rushed out, tracking billable hours and not being able to iterate and grow software over time.

I've spent the better part of the last decade working on-staff building internal projects, and have been frustrated by the bureaucratic slowness and how behind on technologies we are due to brownfield projects. Those seem to be mostly the exact opposite problems I had early on, although I absolutely do not miss tracking billable hours.

I am considering switching employers and wanted to know how life at a developers-for-hire company is. I would especially like to hear it contrasted with being on a software team at a medium-large corporation.
As much as I would like to have high quality when it comes to contractors, I cannot really afford it. Consequently I do no projects at all. The kinds of things I would be interested in a contractor for are more of a luxury than a necessity.

So, is there a creative way that you could address the price issue that none of your competitors can match? What drives the price - materials or labor? One of the things that can lower construction costs is pre-fab in your workshop. What could you do to pre-fab things that are currently impossible to pre-fab? What if you came to the customers's site and made 3-D scans with millimeter level precision. Could you then take that back to the workshop and accurately fab things?

So if you did all of these things you wouldn't position yourself as a "contractor" per se, you would be a service-oriented high-speed precision engineering firm, that just happens to be price competitive.

Good luck!
That is of course a major factor. The costs all in, including legal fees and filing fees, vary considerably from attorney to attorney but the average, as far as I can tell, for an I-140 extraordinary ability petition is between $5,000 and $15,000. This is the same range for an I-140 national interest waiver petition.
But they are still common to all of Europe.
Yep, that was my whole point. I'm curious about how much (if any) an improvement there would be by switching an existing OS (namely Linux) to a "more modern" language like D or Rust, which are purported to be better for writing OS kernels. You're not going to find that out definitively by writing a research OS in them; you need to write an actual OS kernel in it, which has a counterpart already written in C, so that you can compare directly.

Writing a research OS in D/Rust seems to me like someone claiming (before Tesla/LEAF were released) "electric motors are better for cars! Electric cars are superior to gas-powered cars!", but then instead of making an electric car that's actually comparable to a gas-powered car, they build an electric tricycle (velomobile) out of mostly bicycle components that weighs 40 pounds and seats one person and has a custom carbon-fiber fairing and a max speed of 30mph. Yeah, it's nice that you can build that, but it doesn't prove the assertion at all, because the vehicles are totally dissimilar and incomparable.
When you do a bad thing, stopping that bad thing when being called on it doesn't mean everything is suddenly fine again. You still get punished. Your reputation still suffers. And people will be less likely to trust you.
The primary thing that determines overall group performance (assuming no interpersonal biases like peer pressure or coercion, etc) would be the probability that any individual chooses the "right" answer. If this is greater than 0.5, then according to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the limit of the group as a whole choosing the right answer is 1 as the group size increases.

Perhaps having a smaller size allows the "noise" in the group to still produce the "right" answer more often than it would in a larger group?
As to compatibility, excellent point.

The word "running" doesn't appear on that page. (Actually, no requirements at all appear on that page; it speaks strictly in terms of strengthening or weakening the case for inclusion, not disqualifying.) Can you explain briefly why that page is evidence that the running text requirement does not apply to Chinese, and where it specifies what the running text requirement is?

Alternatively, what requirements do apply to Chinese, and would they preclude an invented character like one with 女 on the left and 离 on the right?
The UK has a law called "Joint Criminal Enterprise" which is oft critiqued[0]. In America, this same concept is a de-facto legal and social standard to apply "Guilty by Association" wherever it can.

So, in the USA, it can be (incorrectly) argued - by very, very high powered RIAA legal team - that this was aiding and abetting.[1] It's absolutely wrong, but this is the legal world we live in as developers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_purpose

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiding_and_abetting
What was the most difficult case you have ever faced in trying to acquire a visa for a founder?
I have several sponsored (H1B?) friends / co-workers who I would want as employees in my future startup. How expensive / difficult is it to take on sponsorship?
UK is no longer the fifth largest economy in the world
Hey Robert - My Question:
What do you think would happen to tech in America if H1b's were done away with and all foreign workers had to leave?
We've had silly magic graphs for years!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/swingometer/

Here's a clip from 1979 http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/swingometer/11202.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8646445...
Lua is a very simple yet very powerful language. I like to say it is the best of JavaScript without the warts of JavaScript.

Lua is one of the best performing interpreted languages around. If you use LuaJIT, it competes well with the best JS jits. It also has a small memory footprint and reasonably controllable GC pauses.

Lua is very easy to integrate into C/C++ projects. It is easy to write a debugger for Lua. Like everything else in Lua, debugging capabilities are libraries that can just as easily be invoked in Lua itself or in C.

IMHO, very overlooked is that Lua is a batteries-optional language. It comes with a small standard library that keeps it's footprint and capabilities reasonable. If you want more, there are lots of open source libraries you can add. But, more importantly, almost all of the standard libs can be stripped out and Lua will still function just fine. Don't want your scripts to do file IO? Don't load the IO library.
Hi Peter! Thanks for the AMA!

Can you please describe briefly about the process to establish a company here while on H1-B. From incorporation to founder's visa status. Whether there has to be a American co-founder or if it helps to have one. If funding helps in getting a visa etc.

The description about the 2 visa's for GC is clear, i just wanted to know about initiating the process.

Thanks in Advance!
I don't understand the exclusivity outrage. It seems entirely fair to me for a platform holder to expect something in return for funding development of a game.

Consoles have had exclusives since time immemorial and no one seems to bat an eye when it happens. What makes this case special?
Hi Peter, first of all thanks a ton for doing this.

My first question is how much time it takes to get green card through employment for someone who's not from India or China.

My second question is, does it make any difference to complete my MS before starting the process, or it doesn't change the approval chance and/or delay at all? (MS is from a middle eastern uni, not US)

--
Here is a bit background about me: applied H1-B 3 times, didn't get selected. Now the company that applied for H-1B for me is preparing to apply for GC for me next month.
I have a BS in CS and 3 years of experience, and almost done with a MS degree outside the US, just need to complete my thesis.

Thanks a lot again!
The time Sony installed rootkits on music owners PCs
I think he was referring to the madness that occurred from the governor recall and revote a few years back, which would be like a major referendum
Can the rise of skimmers be attributed to the fact that a chip card is more difficult to "hack" into and since more and more customers and vendors are requiring dipping chip cards the thieves want to get as many cards as possible before all vendors require chip and dip?
We implemented a 'smart' contact form. I basically was a decision tree based on our FAQ (updating our FAQ also updated our contact form). People had to choose the subject and some follow up questions wit radiobuttons. At the end (just 2 or 3 clicks) we showed them the answer from the FAQ. It that didn't answer their question they could fill in their question.

5^3 (5 choices and max 3 clicks) makes 125 possibilities and will cover most questions (if not all).

It made the support questions drop with 90% with the same customer satisfaction if not more.

TL;DR: People don't read FAQs, make them pick the correct subject for contacting you while showing answers to common questions. It will decrease support questions with 90% (n=1 though).
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-su...
> Presumably the previous use cases are left behind

No, they are not. The optimization discussed here adds something to the existing GC, and removes nothing.

> Does anyone feel confident that a 'good enough for everyone' GC will ever be produced?

The Go GC is constantly improving, and its performance in Go 1.6 and 1.7 is considered very good my most users.
Did you ever experiment with 'late-binding' hardware? IE something akin to FPGAs today? Could that be considered the progression of the Alto's microcode design?
Only run an untrusted kernel in a VM.
Never mentioning the poor behaviour doesn't reinforce the message. When you teach a child you have a continual need to do this, "I don't want a fuss like Saturday when we do this, I want you to behave, like yesterday" then ideally get them to say what's they are going to do. Corporations are clearly like young children in my mind.
Software is essentially a luxury item though. I know that we engineers like to think we're the gods of the universe, but nobody needs software to survive. People survived just fine without software for literally all of human history.
As a Canadian citizen, working as a software developer for the past decade. I did not finish my degree in CS. Am I eligible to work in USA? What Visa would I need?
Latest version of Chrome can't copy and paste urls to Outlook