skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can't let distaste for Gawker in particular blind us to the underlying narrative here. I think Popehat[1] summed up the deeply concerning issues this Gawker mess has brought to the fore:

For most of us the scary part of the story is that our legal system is generally receptive to people abusing it to suppress speech. Money helps do that, but it's not necessary to do it. A hand-to-mouth lunatic with a dishonest contingency lawyer can ruin you and suppress your speech nearly as easily as a billionaire. Will you prevail against a malicious and frivolous defamation suit? Perhaps sooner if you're lucky enough to be in a state with a good anti-SLAPP statute.

[1] https://popehat.com/2016/08/18/gawker-money-speech-and-justi...
I love how this article (and the hundreds of others like it) points out that companies perform better when workers are happy, and workers are happy when (fill in the blank). There will never, ever, ever come a day when the owners of the companies care if the workers are happy. Even if you can convince them that they make more money when the workers are happy. The people in charge exist for the sole purpose of making people unhappy, even if it leads to non-productivity, even if it leads to loss of revenue, even if it leads to shareholder decline, even if it leads to workplace violence, even if it leads to suicide, even if it leads to armed revolution. The people who rise to the top do not care about any outcome except spreading misery "below" them as a means of asserting their dominance.
The thing I don't understand is how that jury arrived at its stratospheric damages figure. Was it designed by the jury to be high enough to put gawker out of business?

I mean. I have no sympathy for Gawker, and don't think there are any interesting free speech principles at stake here, I just don't understand it.
> It may have started this way in the committee (though that isn't true for e.g. type based alias rules), but nowadays it's depended on for performance. You lose a lot of ability to reason about loop trip count if signed overflow is defined, for example.

I agree it is depended on in many cases, and should not be. That is on the programmers though, not the language designers. The behavior does not exist to cover deficiencies in the language but those of its users.

> The probability that a program depends on any of (nonexhaustive list) (a) inspecting the value of a dangling pointer; (b) taking the offset from NULL; (c) type-punning through a union; (d) type-punning through any type other than char; (e) signed overflow; (f) order of operations between sequence points quickly approaches 1.

Just on your short list I can tell you the probably of any of our C code depending on that approached zero:

> inspecting the value of a dangling pointer

Our code was malloc once, free never. Dangling pointers were by definition impossible.

> taking the offset from NULL
> type-punning through a union
> type-punning through any type other than char
> signed overflow
> order of operations between sequence points

Our coding standards covered all of those, so their existence would be a code review failure.

We weren't specifically writing to MISRA C, but I will wager that your statement is not accurate for any project that follows it or any similar standard. Yes, it is a lot of work that you don't need to do with a more controlled and less flexible language. I'm not going to challenge that. I'm just challenging the idea that nobody is writing C that avoids undefined behavior.
I'm not a huge fan of PowerShell but you're not really making a good comparison here. Bash is "just a shell" that executes commands with a few bits of syntactic sugar here and there to make it easier to string those commands together and perform some primitive logic.

PowerShell is basically an interpreter that works more like a Java Virtual Machine. Consider the hypothetical example that you need to lookup 100 users in an LDAP directory from Bash: You run the openldap command 100 times in a loop. That's 100 processes that need to fork and quit in a serial fashion in order to perform the task at hand.

To do the same thing in PowerShell you'll be calling a native PowerShell LDAP API which will execute all 100 lookups without having to fork any separate process resulting in a vastly faster execution.

It's better to think of PowerShell like the Python or Ruby interpreters. IMHO, PowerShell is a vastly superior improvement to cmd.exe as a shell but on a Unix host it will be inferior to bash for day-to-day tasks.
The amount of editorial in this post is mind blowing. Am I the only one who found it extremely hard (yes, extremely) to sift through all the blurb of text. In the end, I am not even sure what is being released.
How to Use Hola Free VPN Browser for Android Phone
http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Rio+2016+Olympic+Games+Pr...

See those windows. This is an outdoor pool under a temporary structure. Sunlight (UV) is coming in and air is circulating. And if the the pumps are running, they aren't at full power during races. Often at such events officials will state that pumps are run when they are in fact off. This is a common conflict between the needs of the event (stable water) and local health codes that dictate that circulation pumps remain on. In a 50m pool, if they are on they aren't 'on' enough to keep things mixed.
Honestly it was a quick and dirty one-time project, and I just needed to cobble something together.

I was more just commenting on the fact that with a "strongly-typed" shell some of this stuff becomes much easier without every single tool needing to add all these options.

It gets much more "Unix Philosophy" when every command doesn't need it's own sorting logic, and doesn't need it's own date display logic, and doesn't need it's own way of displaying it to the user.

It can output an object, which can be piped into another program to use what it needs which can be piped to something else to do some sorting which can pipe it out to another to display it in a nice table.
Entropy Loss and Output Predictability in the Libgcrypt PRNG [pdf]
Ride sharing tipping point vs. public transportation
I just took my first ride this morning where Uber(Pool) was cheaper than public transportation. I live in the SF Bay area, and I just spent less than 50% of a 1-way Caltrain ticket (same zone) using Uber Pool. This is for door-to-door service. I don't see how Caltrain/Bart/bus/etc. can compete with this pricing and convenience.

Anyone else experiencing the same in other areas?
They will bundle a killer app with it, just like steam did with half life 2.
Yes, the burning season is terrible. We were away for most of it, but should have stayed away longer. I was also in Malaysia for a week when there was some really, really bad smoke from the burning in Indonesia.

So yes, one of the tradeoffs. Hopefully the government will figure out how to control it, but it keeps happening.
kill it with fire!
Well, the "scrum" methodology can be summed up as "how to (convince yourself even though you actually aren't) force people you don't trust to do stuff that you don't actually trust them to do", so the popularity of scrum suggests that the bosses don't trust any of us. If you trust them, that trust is strictly one-way.
Websites covering computing topics?
Asking for a friend (yes) - Social media specialist friend is consulting with a large IT and tech consulting company and asked me for a list of websites where he can become more informed as to the current topics in IT and consulting.

Can anyone suggest some sources? Any level of technical discourse is fine - I'm going to be a middle man in helping them learn more. Thanks.
Amazon Mobile Redesign
Open air stadium[0]

[0]http://www.unrealitytv.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/olym...
The main objection I've seen (not speaking for the GP comment here, just in general) is the precedent that courts are now allowed to determine newsworthiness.

That is, with enough money backing your cause, you can get information that people previously deemed newsworthy suppressed.

I have no love for Gawker, but I'm on the fence about this assertion.
Data analytics: Clever computers could transform government
On the upside, some nice office space in Manhattan coming on the market.
Agree 100%

I think Ted Nugent said it clearly when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "We need to give these people a public platform so we can keep tabs on them. I want to know what these crazy people are thinking and planning."

I think this should be the same thing. If we're all about free speech, that includes speech we also might not like so much. It also allows us to keep tabs on these people and who they're connected to (who's behind the accounts as well as who follows them) so we can better mitigate the threats they're posing.

Censoring them does nothing but push them back into the shadows where their communications then become encrypted, unavailable and out of the public eye.
That's actually the problem Ada's designers set out to solve. They add to what they solve every iteration with safe defaults and contraints on use. Whether you do Ada or not, you will likely find skimming this book to be helpful to see how one can systematically analyze all forms of programmer error and attempt to eliminate them:

http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical-papers/SafeSecureAd...

That's at language level. At process level, Harlan Mills developed Cleanroom back in 80's to try to get software defects as low as cleanrooms CPU's were built in. It combines a formal approach of describing/connecting things, constrained implementation for easy verification, iterative development, and usage-based testing. Defect rate was extremely low even for first use by teams with cost ranging from slightly more to cheaper due to less debugging.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88....

On productivity side, the DSL-based approach on top of safe, functional languages seems to be winning out. Safe, functional combo already knocks out a lot of problems. DSL's for common categories of programming let you read and write less code to get same work done possibly safer with sane auto-generation (eg parsers, protocols, GUI's). iMatix even did it for C-based, enterprise software.

So, there's certainly work on methods for mainstream software development of average coders with still high quality. Cleanroom was most successful in terms of defect rate. Eiffel pretty much made a market out of it by combining safer language, safe concurrency, OOP, and Design-by-Contract. They're still going strong. Haskell community probably most advanced given last item on my list with some financial companies using it. Jane Street's and Esterel's Ocaml work shows it has similar benefits. These have steeper learning curve but benefits add up quickly afterward.

Cleanroom w/ Design-by-Contract and safe, high-level language seems to be best combo to deal with your list.
Been using PS for a long time and I had no idea about this. Thanks !
I do hope they use the same care and due process as they do with root certificate inclusion in the public suffix list (as well as the ability to add/remove entries manually). I think this is a great move for better security, but with great power comes great responsibility.
The new configuration system in Qt, allows your define the content you need from each module in much more detail for your project and easily allows for feature based tailoring of the Qt modules. We are starting with enabling this fully for Qt Core, Qt Network, Qt GUI, Qt QML and Qt Quick. You can now fine tune which features from these modules you want to include in your project. There is no longer any need to include unnecessary features.

To be clear, this potentially reduces binary sizes, but it does not by itself change run-time performance.

No Open GL Requirement ... The Qt Quick 2D renderer can work in software only, but it is also designed to utilize accelerated 2D operations, for devices that packs a little bit more punch, but still doesn’t have full OpenGL support.

I wonder what kinds of devices this is intended for? Presumably, they are a very important market for Qt to have implemented this? And these devices have graphics displays but they lack GPUs? What device could that be?

CPU software rendering seems like a step backwards for performance. GPUs and OpenGL must be more energy efficient at this task than software rendering, and I would imagine that important embedded devices with graphics displays must all have GPUs or will in the future?

I would have thought that "Qt for any platform" would include web browser (WebAssembly / Emscripten / WebGL) but no such luck. Based on the title, I thought this was going to be some drastic optimization of Qt's GUI. It doesn't sound like that's the case.

I haven't used Qt on embedded devices, but I've looked at several demos of Qt compiled to JavaScript with Emscripten [1] and the results seem very slow. Part of the reason seems to be that these Emscripten demos have Qt falling back to software rendering, instead of using WebGL accelerated rendering ... I don't think that another software rendering backend for Qt solves this problem.

[1] http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...
Such sites need think real hard about whether they want to be a moderated community or a common carrier. Moderated community? have to hire a lot of people to monitor & cull content, publish clear rules about what's acceptable and what's not, and take their lumps when action/inaction has problematic consequences. Common carrier? then make clear nothing is moderated save for blatant criminal violations (at which point police are informed), and legal (if objectionable) content is simply published/transferred without hinderance.

Tough call. Twitter et al are trying to be both; this will backfire bad at some point.
Sadly, most of the history of hedge funds it would seem relates to winning in 'zero sum games'.

i.e. a waste of human potential.

Obviously there are side benefits: market liquidity, rational pricing, 'market making' for specific activities, the ability to allocate resources in more exotic ways etc. but by enlarge it doesn't look good.

It'd be nice to see more opportunity in growing the pie rather than fighting for the same pieces.
Receive SMS with AT Commands Using Sim900 and PIC Microcontroller
I did, and i found it a pretty big chore in practice. Its two modes (shell mode and python mode), never quite knowing which one you're in, I could never quite get used to that. PowerShell doesn't have this problem, because it was designed for the command line first and for scripts second (which is, incidentally, also its major downside if you ask me).
Private schools are for profit. They are generally regarded as the best education you can get for K-12 schooling (at least where I live in the US). Same goes for many of the colleges in the US (actually, wait, isn't that the difference between a college and a university?). For profit schools pretty much kick ass.

I think the exception comes when the government contracts a business to run a school. This is a very different arrangement and is prone to all of the horrors that come along with the government signing contracts for various services. Once the contract is in place, given how slow the government is to act, all one needs to do is comply with the contract enough to not lose it outright.
I've felt endless frustration with Debord's and SI's ideas since I stumbled on them about 10 years ago. I know there is something hidden beneath this life, and these works are simply pointing in its general direction. For a long time I thought truth was encompassed by the concept of "authenticity", in terms of expression and being as a human. That idea of mine was struck down pretty swiftly by a simpatico social theorist I admired on Twitter, he responded to my question, "What is authenticity, exactly?" with the answer "Don't worry, nothing is real. Everything is constructed."
Frankly I think the middle-road that we had for a while was pretty much the worst of all worlds, and I like the mostly-liberated relatively flat model better. You either have hierarchy or you don't, and DNS/ICANN never really manged to create (and enforce!) true hierarchy at TLD level.

Personally I would like a strictly hierarchical model (e.g. ccTLDs only with restricted 2nd level) more, but to enforce such system would have meant essentially a complete reboot of DNS which obviously would never happen. gTLDs were imho a mistake (probably caused by not being to able to predict the explosive growth of internet), but if we can't get rid of them then just liberating them makes lots of sense.
T-Mobile to give every user unlimited data
This is like complaining about downvotes, but worse: it destroys the conversation and is not OK on HN.

We ask that you comment civilly and substantively, and if you've expressed your views that way and the comment still receives downvotes then you should let it stand so that the conversation can continue. The community will often provide corrective upvotes—even in the midst of disagreement—but this can't happen if you've edited out your comment.
Higher level ones who's compilers can better reason about the code? See for example more generally Fran Allen's comments in Coders At Work for how desolate a optimization wasteland is C.
So basically you want to outlaw lobbying for representation? That's the outcome of your proposals. A union is no different than an individual, except that many people are included in the group. Outlawing lobbying by unions means that I, if I were theoretically a prison guard, can't lobby (ask for representation) from my local lawmakers on issues that I think matter. Is that the world you want to live in? What if this were applied to a group you support, like restricting the EFF's ability to lobby because they have a conflict of interest.
I really think that many people advocating any type of lobbying restriction needs to stop and think about the consequences of what they are working towards before proceeding.
They used \ for directories because most DOS programs used / for switches.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/06/24/wh...
That brings up something else that needs a complete overhaul - the lobbying rules, or lack thereof.
Nice to see another local pointing out the facts. The traffic at Hernesaari is basically non-existant, other than a few commuters in the morning and the #14 bus shipping tourists and hipsters down to Lolyly and Hernesaarenranta. It's actually quite a good place to try it out.

Lauttasaari would have been another good candidate. I am one of the people who have also had their commute messed up by the bus changes due to the metro delay but once it arrives there will be one bus service that just drives in a circle taking people to the metro station. A pretty good option for an automated bus I think, and a short route.
Hahaha thanks co-defendant! When you lie down with dogs...
That's an interesting point that you shouldn't credit me for making; I was just implying that other countries will also have arbitrary rules about what lives under their ccTLDs.
There is no inherent right to free speech on Twitter. Free speech has always had legal limits, and private organizations such as Twitter are fully within their rights to further limit speech on their platforms as they see fit. Terrorist groups (including ISIS) have publicly claimed that they are having success using social media as a recruitment tool, so this seems like an appropriate response.
There's a pending bill: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/BillInfo.cfm?sy....
Malignant empathy and how to exploit it
This is also true of most lisps, and, IME, any language with a good REPL. You can start with snippets which become the bodies of loops and functions, which grow into the full program with (as he points out) various tests and examples constructed along the way.

It's a useful way for approaching a sort of (in my use) hybrid of top-down/bottom-up programming. The things you see on the REPL growing into functions or structs or classes is the bottom-up part, but still with some specification (in this case KWIC indexing) guiding the ultimate interface.
No idea. Another one of my projects is a Computer Graphics textbook (I love CG, see http://gabrielgambetta.com/tiny_raytracer.html) which includes source code and diagrams and images the manuscript is also in Markdown with embedded LaTeX for the equations, so I'll have to deal with something more complex soon!
Then you must be glad that they are not handing ICANN to UN, ITU or any other pre-existing organization.
Another idea: many of the swimmers breathe only to one side (in the races that they breathe at all), so in one direction they would be able to (better) see the faster swimmers towards the center. Another possible psychological factor.
Seems like youre working in a very toxic environment there. What stops you from changing or starting something yourself?
This is complete nonsense. Money has influenced these policies and most "Americans" tune out the process.
So when are we shutting down half of the government prisons, laying off a million government employees at the federal and state level, and giving back hundreds of billions in tax dollars currently being used for the government prison complex?
its for a generation or group of platform users that will never use Steam, for consumers

and a new marketplace with either better rates or simply less competition than Steam

with the user base of Facebook
The Neighborhood That Google Swallowed
Hedge funds are really just teams of people investing money on behalf of others, without regulatory constraints that most mainstay financial firms have, due to the fact that you have to have a certain net-worth etc. to be able to participate.

There's no hard definition of it.

VC firms are essentially a kind of 'hedge fund' though we don't think of them that way.

Most hedge funds do have long 'lock up periods'.

Whether they are a 'good investment' is like asking is a specific home a 'good investment'. It depends on the home. They vary wildy in terms of quality etc...
I'm beginning to get sick of the Unity monoculture. All their games have the same feel to them, which I can only describe as 'sluggish'. Truly ambitious games built with Unity inevitably wind up buggy as well, since doing anything outside the box requires hacks and workarounds.
no because people who get used cars can't afford the ones that used to be 35k... unless they have a ridiculous amount of miles on them. have to be either in a wealth bubble or a tesla fanboy to think otherwise.
I suspect those filters produce the same quality as grabbing names from a hat, since they are a list of popular but vague aphorisms. Judging each and every investment on its own merits is the only way to succeed.
I'm doing this whole thing for pleasure, and for me f*cking around with the tooling was just as fun as writing the novel :D
> By being sued for invading someone's privacy?

The problem is businesses and politicians also argue they have a right to privacy.

If Privacy > Free Speech, you end up with a situation where revealing abuses by such people becomes extremely risky and expensive.

Just because Gawker and Nick Denton are pieces of shit doesn't make the precedent any less worrying.
> Our code was malloc once, free never. Dangling pointers were by definition impossible.

Dangling pointers can arise in other ways: use an uninitialized pointer variable, take the wrong offset from an otherwise valid pointer, etc.