skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What? No. Those don't add any complexity to the language

Oh, believe me, I'm all about the separation between language and library. I mean the smallest subset of Scheme necessary to use the api. For example, it might use string maps instead of association lists.

> Most of the things you included in your scheme BNF syntax aren't syntax, they're special forms.

This is just terminology. We have a hierarchy of languages here:

1. All terminating Scheme programs are Scheme programs
2. All Scheme programs are valid s-exprs
3. All s-exprs are plain text
4. All plain text is valid bytestring.
...

> Macros, too, have no syntactic differentiation: You actually CAN'T add macros to the BNF of the syntax, because there is no syntax to add.

I was doing a grammar for scheme programs, not anything else on that list. Macros invocation requires its own non-terminals because its arguments are arbitrary sexprs, not merely unevaluated expressions.

> How? What's so complex about having multiple forms at toplevel?

Imports. file=expression makes Nix's `import <some-path>` dead simple. Scheme's is necessarily more complicated.
#tinfoil hat on#

So the NSA could be spying on Fastmail and sharing that with Australia?

Anyway, you'd have to be crazy to expect privacy on cloud services with the way governments are ignoring laws left and right.
> But the whole idea of not having working redundancy in a multibillion dollar business really makes me question their story.

It really isn't that far fetched, IT is a cost to be minimized to them.
Something permenant, with supplied utilities (power+hvac+data), secured behind locked doors, with a reasonable view of the sky, on a university campus .... you are pretty near to 100k before spending a dime on the actual hardware. And then double every number if you want it under retractable roof/cover of some sort.

One-off temporary or unofficial rigs on rooftops can be cheap. But a system of installed, standardized, telescopes on university campuses won't be build on a shoestring. If you are going to do it, get the lens that makes it worth the while.
We design our tools for ourselves and other professional programmers so that we don't have to compete with non-professionals with a better sense of the requirements.

In all my decades of programming, I have never met a non-professional with good, let alone better sense of requirements. A layman does not think in terms of details; they think in terms of abstractions, often in terms of castles in the sky. The problem is that computers are the exact opposite of abstractions and castles in the sky: exact, unforgiving, and dumb.

In fact, in all my decades of programming and working with computers, in my journeys across two continents, the number of professionals with a good sense of requirements I have met can be counted on the fingers of my one hand. If that is not disheartening, I do not know what is. It's emotionally and psychologically devastating to me personally. It's extremely depressing to even think about it. What does it say about our profession?

As for writing tools for ourselves, learn UNIX, and then you'll learn of the UNIX programming model:

write programs which work with other programs; write programs with the notion that the output of your program could very well become another program's input. Write programs which accept ASCII input from other programs, for that is a universal interface. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
Compelling Science Fiction: Issue 3 and Beyond
>What rational person would ever take that risk?

A rich person who can afford to hire good lawyers. If the DA is offering 2 years for a case that could go 60 then the case is not strong.

The one area I would fight even if not rich is if I was accused of a sexual crime. In the USA this is a life sentence either way. The choice is between spending your life in jail if found guilty or living under a bridge if you plea.
I've been trying for the past 6 months, but I keep coming back to programming. Old habits die hard.
How to count them with less effort - no need to count over the whole map. Perhaps Google would ban you if they saw too many requests for map tiles.

So, here's how to do it: sample 100-200 locations in a country. In each location, extract a tile of the map and count the circles in there. Then you need to scale the sum by the total surface of the country divided by the total surface of the sampled tiles.
King of Na gold seal
> Windows Installer XML Toolset (WiX, pronounced "wicks")

> leaks Windows Installer abstractions

Okay
This was my take, and I'm pretty sure I belong to the group that does not.
The C compiler in question pulls in a bunch of libraries for dealing with math problems (libgmp, libisl, libmpc, libmpfr) and zlib. Does their config language need support for "integer points bounded by linear constraints"? And why are they pulling zlib, when they also bundle it?

I don't see the difference. Instead of including a specific compiler for their needs, they are bazaar-ing a full generic C compiler (along with irrelevant libraries) just like Mozilla is doing with a generic image manipulation library, which pulls libtiff since many packages that also use it need TIFF support.
I understand your frustration but I disagree. You should try explaining your work to a non-programmer. It's a challenge to 'dumb it down' and you only succeed if you truly understand your work. Sometimes the non-programmer is successful in suggesting a very possible solution which turns out to be a fun conversation.
Jury duty should be properly compensated. Why does everyone else in the court room get paid a real wage for doing their job except the jury?
Im surprised this theory took them so long.

making ball lightening in the kitchen is one of my childhood memories.

light a candle and stick it in the microwave for a few seconds. the tip of the burning candle will spit out ball lightening that will then happily float around the microwave for a few seconds.

be interesting to know if that is the same as what you saw in your basement.

if you dont feel like doing it yourself

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lfzA7WzVI
Sorry, - strawman was not intended. As a person with some experience in the graphics industry, the way I see it: if one uses hardware accelerated real time graphics capability, one is always effectively locking some parts of the rendering codebase in to some specific hardware platform. No matter what the API used to program the platform, you are effectively locked in to very few vendors. There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).
You most certainly don't want people to be able to modify safety critical code within a pacemaker.

What most developers don't realise is the level of engineering strictness that goes into anything safety-related. The rules and regulations related to anything that affects the human body is in a different league than what most developers are familiar with.

What is a problem here, is that the design (not the code) apparently did not take into account any messaging security, relying on obscurity as its only defence.

If the code was open-sourced, don't expect to find lots of buffer overflow attack vectors, or simple things like that. Its the design of the system as a whole at fault, and that is already open.

Medical devices such as these are not black boxes to the people that certify them, everything is open to them, source included.
Having worked in that sort of area, I trust the systems that are in place.
Others have good suggestions, but I would also add that login and user should be decoupled. A user should be able to login with facebook or twitter (or email) and have them be the same account.
I think the best solution would be if visited only applied to the local domain.

Like all the other cross domain policy stuff.
Where in the world is my data and how secure is it?
> I know that my wife appreciates hearing some about how my day went.

I believe that. My girlfriend really pushes me occasionally about my day, and I think it's because she knows that talking about her day really helps her. I'm happy to listen for her, but I've just come to the conclusion that trying to recap things I've done makes me more stressed out, and the fifteen seconds of "no, I really don't want to talk about it" is worth it.

And for what it's worth, having read back over that, I am not in a high-pressure job. I consult about thirty hours a week or so.
No need to, already included (though I'm not so familiar with the datetime module, so I had to look for it):

datetime.datetime.strptime("Aug 18 2015", "%b %d %Y")
> datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 18, 0, 0)

Like xapata said, if you import from datetime, it looks "nicer". I prefer to see where things come from most of the time, because I keep open long sessions and it can become messy otherwise.

I don't really see how this can take 10 minutes to setup. You can have the import already in a file called dateutils.py and you only set it up once:

import datetime
def string2date(val):
return datetime.datetime.strptime(val, "%b %d %Y")

Then your session becomes easier

from dateutils import *
string2date("Jul 4 1776")
datetime.datetime(1776, 7, 4, 0, 0)

However, I think at this point we're talking more about our personal preferences for tools rather than the original subject. It just struck me that your example was something that is available in Python using standard library modules.
Anything smoked is not only a disease, but a disease for every living being around
Ah... HN. Such a magical land, where people call adjectives modifiers.
Apple’s New Privacy Technology May Pressure Competitors
A shame, people try to use our best impulses against us.

Most people in modern societies have no idea what it is like to feel real oppression/suffering/etc etc.

Notice that this is a phenomenon limited to developed countries. People in other parts of the world would just sort of laugh and shrug off the shaming attempts.
When it comes to ecosystems, the definition of the Cathedral becomes interesting. Say what you will about business practices in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s...

In a sense Windows was a cathedral. It bent over backwards while accepting the new. Welcoming many under the umbrella.

Sure it is a stretch, but the Windows platform (for years) required backward compatibility. That was the world Microsoft worked in.

Today, the OS still maintains cathedral aspects, but the company is embracing the bazaar way more than I ever thought I would see in my lifetime.
any addiction other than smoking is fine
It reminds me of the recent Google/Oracle trial, where both parties got rid of all computer literate persons in the jury.

"Peers" in that case, maybe should have meant "people able to understand the technicalities", engineers and software lawyers.
It's really quite simple: you assume it's all worthless, because that's how it starts and that's how it generally ends. Even if it were going to be worth something, you'd have been better off taking the money up front and investing it however you wanted in the meantime.

But it doesn't really matter, because you have no control over this anyway. All you have to do is decide whether the salary is high enough; the rest is irrelevant.

Some people really enjoy playing the lottery. If that's you, well, knock yourself out getting into the details of the options package! Just don't kid yourself or make any serious life plans based on your hopes about that stuff.
Almost half my 150 steam games are on mac, and I don't specifically target any type of game.
That sounds like burning vaporised wax... Presumably quite different to what is being suggested here.
Australian #CensusFail
Yes, I would tell everybody because I'm a computational number theorist and (1) such an algorithm would also be very useful for many other algorithms in algebraic number theory, e.g., computation of rings of integers of number fields which requires factoring discriminants, and (2) whatever amazing insight led to the algorithm would probably also open up many new research directions in computational number theory, just as past progress on integer factorization has done (my thesis advisor Hendrik Lenstra introduced the groundbreaking elliptic curve factorization technique, telling the world in research papers and beautiful lectures). That said, sadly I'm not optimistic that there exists a fast non-quantum algorithm to factor large composite integers. It may simply be a hard problem.
It's funny. He says use a preprocessor to remove comments. Thus not using JSON. It's almost a joke. Except Microsoft does exactly that in their hip project.json format.

Double quotes everywhere are more annoying to read than end tags. If we're going to invent nonstandard formats, why not remove the redundant tag name in the XML end tag. Problem solved.
This is very bad. If I open a website and it knows which of 100 other specifically selected sites I visited, I'd be instantly "profiled" for advertising. Is it possible to block visited link leaks? I'd be willing to give up visited highlighting altogether.
Sounds like the stock market, or really any investment in business or land. The world isn't perfect.
Thanks for the interest.

http://github.com/lifebeyondfife/Decider
Also worth remembering that capitalism is not an -ism dreamed up by some theorist. 'Hey, guys, I've invented capitalism!'. As Tom Sawyer understood very well when painting his aunt's garden fence, it's the intuitive natural inclination of all peoples to want to trade goods and services with others.
There have been medical devices external to the body for a long time. Therac 25 (1982) is world wide web (1989). Airplanes were first flight controlled by computer in 1958, and commercially in the concorde in 1969.

Think about that for a minute. There has been an official government review process for safety of computer controlled airplanes since the 70s, and a good decade for medical devices (likely earlier) 10 years earlier than the WWW existed.

I think it's kind of funny that you'd think that you were doing it better than production life critical systems THAT CAN ACTUALLY KILL PEOPLE that have been around at least ten if not 30 years longer than the tech you likely (sorry assumption) base your career around.
Is it even possible to make a 100% standards conforming parser that is not vulnerable to at least DoS attacks?

(Automatically fetching XSDs e.g. sounds nice in practice, until you realize that it means your server will make HTTP requests to user-supplied URLs, so most parsers come with an option to disable it, which may or may not break documents relying on it.)
Single anecdote, but someone who started there a few years ago reported huge chunks of people basically just playing ping pong waiting for IPO+lockout period. They expressed a lot of frustration about it to me.

Don't know if a failure in entry level management like that tells you much more, but it didn't sound like a good sign for a company still on the wrong side of the profit equation.
> There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

How are they a good player, if they could back Vulkan instead of pushing lock-in DX12, but they didn't? It's clearly bad.
For me it's only ever happened on my side.
How did you arrive at the 100-200 number?
From system thinking perspective, addiction can be described pretty well with a fairly simple model of a few feedback loops. Regardless of the exact feedback structure, the mechanisms are both social and bilogical, human biology will get hurt in the process and the entire thing is likely to behave chaotically. This is why you can argue it's a disease (because you get biological causes and effects) and that it's not (because AA works by providing a balancing loop designed to be tolerant to substance abuse). And this is why you probably won't get to a clean medical diagnosis - a very similar set of factors can lead to a wide range of outcomes. Unless addiction is seen as a systemic issue, I can't really see how it could be better understood beyond describing less and less significant factors in more and more detail.
For everybody ? No.

But some minority have to take the open SOURCE seriously, if we want it to actually work.

I'm part of that minority.
Of course, obscurity on its own is not a defence.

its one part of a whole system, and in that, if it does delay or deter (even slightly) then it has worked.
A Street Map of New York City in the 1800s
Another bazaar IDE is Emacs, and I'd say it's not terrible, although YMMV.

I'm not sure how you can say Lisp is a cathedral; it's not even "a" anything. Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, Emacs Lisp, etc., many of which are themselves bazaars. Ruby, for another example, may have started as one person's vision, but now the canonical implementation is a big multisourced effort, and there are other implementations with lots of uptake that aren't directed or blessed by the mainline Ruby.
Artificial Intelligence and Personhood [video]
> So talk to the CFO about the numbers — when you’re hired, when it’s fundraising time, and any time in between.

Hahahaha, oh man so here's the part where I just dump all my emails about the answers I have gotten back from CFOs over the last decade:

- "common stock shareholders aren't privy to financial details"

- "we don't share that information"

- "I discussed it with the board [consisting of myself] and they decided not to release valuation information"

- "The stock options are just to retain employees!" and other awkward non-sequiturs that are distinctly not a financial statement.

So do ya'll want to unionize or nah, I have a feeling Peter Thiel and Andreesen would totally support it and we already make enough to make union dues negligible.
The basic thing to understand is the concept of "dilution". Companies can issue new stock in exchange for new investment funding, driving down the value of existing stock. Sizable dilution is rare in publicly held companies, but common in privately held ones. There are often contractual terms which protect some parties against dilution. Founders and early stage investors may be protected, while other employees are not. Sometimes founders don't have anti-dilution protection.

For an overview, see [1].

This is historically unusual. Up to the last decade, companies tended to become profitable and go public much earlier. Now we have round after round of private financing going into money-losing companies to fuel rapid growth, in hopes that, somehow, they'll dominate the industry and make the money back someday.

That may not happen. Twitter won on market share and still can't make money. Uber may be next.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/understanding-how-dilution...
Just wanted to say you guys were awesome and inspiring. It opened my eyes to a whole new side of programming.
> one of the reasons I chose to work on Wall Street prior to joining a start-up was to fully grasp the financing terms of the companies for which I would later work.

And this is also the reason why I'm very wary about equity. I'd certainly want to work for a company that's going to do well financially, regardless of how I'm being compensated, but I have only a layman's understanding of business and finance. I'm simply not equipped to judge the financial health of a potential employer and how much its equity is really worth.
In addition to all the other replies (because we have computers with powerful GPUs that run Linux, because many other games run on Linux, because all the modern games engines support Linux, etc), in this case one of the devs previous games also runs on Linux: http://store.steampowered.com/app/242110/. That seems like reason enough to at least ask the question of whether they have any Linux plans.
Tor Browser doesn't seem to add[1] any defenses against history disclosure attacks.

1. https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/
What else would you call them? Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs.
I've been following the author posting these on reddit. These are some of the best animations of linear algebra I've ever seen by a large margin. I really hope the author draws some encouragement from all the praise he's getting because I don't think I'll be satisfied with a dozen linear algebra videos alone.
Forget about equity, at least get the salary part right. Keep interviewing to check how much the market is willing to pay you and you will be surprised to know that "loyalty" does not pay much in America unless the employer is willing to offer you substantial amount of money to spend like 4 years at the company.
Excellent article; expresses exactly why it drives me crazy to see people arguing over a word. Also, it seems in this case the people who study brains are saying it happens in the brain ("disease"); the people who study minds are saying it happens in the mind (emotions etc): given that humans have been aware for some time that the brain is the seat of the mind, it should be obvious that the two possibilities not only aren't exclusive, but even cannot occur independently. I guess they are so focused on their own areas of expertise they apparently forget that the other field is looking at an equally real aspect of the same phenomenon.
I think you misunderstand my essay.

Yes, autoconf was clearly a response to the incompetence of the UNIX industry, were everybody thought they could become Da Man over everybody else.

But that doesn't mean that it was the right solution then, and it certainly is not the right solution now.

And autoconf is absolutly nothing like a cathedral: There is no archtectural vision, no economy of style, no consistency and absolutely no symmetry or simplicity.

Your argument that "autoconf [...] is [...] rarely run" is akin to saying "I only pee in the shower in the morning": That is of course better than doing it all the time, but it is still going to stink.
CMA paves the way for Open Banking revolution
IIRC Foursquare's primary revenue model was also subletting its office in Soho.
I think its rare to have any anti dilution protection for anyone in a high growth company.

At most you have then option to buy into further rounds, so you keep your percentage the same.
Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Review
Facebook will delete your videos and accounts at police request, with no warrant
Human civilisation had burned through (or been climate-changed out of) several ecosystems by 1600. Europe was reaching the point of overexploiting its fuelwood resources. India and China were peaking as civilisations, reaching levels they'd not return to until the late 19th or 20th centuries in absolute level, and reaching relative standings among other nations and civilisations not since exceeded.

I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering.

While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum.

(The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)
One time I had the privilege of getting the CEO's assistant to read me over the phone a prepared high level summary of company financials. She read very quickly and refused to pause or repeat anything.
Clean code is not an OO concept. It's a higher level concept. SOLID may help you achieve clean code in OO, but clean code does not mean "know SOLID".
Indian police try to block Facebook video mocking Sachin Tendulkar