skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That assignment has 9 pieces of extra syntax above a b c 10 20 30. By contrast, (setf a 10 b 20 c 30) has only three: two parens and setf. Let's count the crumbs:

[a, b, c] = [10, 20, 30]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

In Common Lisp, you an express that 10 20 30 should go to a b c using values:

(setf (values a b c) (values 10 2 30))

That still has fewer overhead tokens!

(setf (values a b c) (values 10 2 30))
1 2 3 4 5 6 78

If they are bother make yourself

(vsetf (a b c) (10 20 30))

This is easy to implement in a quick and dirty way:

(defmacro vsetf (places exprs) `(psetf ,@(mapcan #'list places exprs))

(macroexpand-1 '(vsetf (a b c) (1 2 3)))
-> (PSETF A 1 B 2 C 3)

psetf is probably a good choice here since it is probably best for the construct to have parallel semantics. That is to say, we want, for instance, to be able to exchange variables with it:

(vsetf (x y) (y x))

which will work thanks to psetf.

We could huff and puff a little harder in the macro and make it work like

(vsetf x y = y x)
For much of the article the author is saying that with less time to complete a project you now use your time more wisely and you'll get the same amount of work done in a shorter window. If that was the case then managers should instead add 20% more to every project.
That's still three superfluous words. I have to agree with abritinthebay, especially when comparing with Python's destructuring, which doesn't even need brackets:

a, b, c = 10, 20, 30
Free Ebook – Comprehensive Introduction to ECMAScript 6 and TypeScript
The proposed logos don't look like anything. They either need more proposals or stick with the current logo.
> HN.

I can't speak to that. My quote was about Quora.

> By bubble, I mean the memetic assumptions that any culture takes for granted.

Oh, I see. Like slavery, religion, or when people talk about morality without knowing there are different moralities, or the unquestioning love of the state. AKA mass ignorance. Or more benignly: tradition/mores. And on the positive side: protocols.
Uhhh, exactly what does this "world peace" you're talking about look like? Preventing any other nuclear powers from rising by, what, nuking them? What if we can't tell that they're building it until it's done, which is exactly what we did during WWII? Not like there's any shortage of incentive to hide it. And nukes don't kill everyone. What do you expect the survivors of these attacks to think and do? Clearly in this vision of "world peace", we'd have to be regularly attacking other countries with nuclear weapons, and at some point, somebody else would succeed in building an arsenal of them and have every reason to immediately attack us with them. If that's what world peace looks like, you can keep it.

I'd say what we have now is much closer to world peace than what you propose. All of the big industrial countries have lots of nuclear weapons, and nobody uses them, so they're all too terrified to attack each other. The only wars we have are major powers occasionally invading small, weak countries, rightly or wrongly, and either dominating them or being chased out by insurgents. Even if every one of those invasions was horribly, horribly wrong, it beats the hell out of having another WWII every generation, or everyone constantly nuking each other.
For much of the article the author is saying that with less time to complete a project you now use your time more wisely and you'll get the same amount of work done in a shorter window. If that was the case then managers should instead add 20% more to every project. Now you'd be delivering 20% more with the same resources as before. Not buying it.
True, not every totalitarianism is communism, but, as Leszek Kołakowski proved in "Main Currents of Marxism" monography, totalitarism is deeply ingrained in communism ideology. Every single country that was ruled by communists long enough ended up being totalitarian regime. There are no known examples of country being democratic and communist at the same time.
WHile I despise this new licensing, your redition of history is not correct

Monty sold MySQL to Sun, he believed Sun would be good steward of the project, provide it the resources it needed, and allow it to flourish remaining Open Source

When Oracle bought Sun, Monty and most of the MySQL devs where very very very very very concerned that Orcale would be detrimental to MySQL going forward so they forked it and founded MariaDB to replace Oracle's mySQL

Some of their fears never came to be, but Oracle has closed the development of mysql is many ways, it is not as bad as it was orginally feared, but it no where near as open as it was under Sun.
How many times is this guy going to rehash being fired from facebook as validation?

His projected image repels me: the antithesis of a hacker - a smiley/slick bro-dude.

Who ends up ruining your startup culture.
Going back to the conversations we've had in the Zika thread[1], why are we OK with eliminating the Guinea Worm, but not certain species of mosquitoes?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12322885

A lot of people in that thread made the argument that we shouldn't exterminate a species without first fully understanding the consequences. Yet we seem to be doing that here with this parasite, and no one seems to be saying, "but... think of the ecosystem!"
The goto site for discussions about interplanetary and interstellar anything is Centauri Dreams:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/
What about all those superfluous commas? I also dislike languages where expressions don't have visible bounds.
You don't need warp drive to go to the stars. You need suspended animation, extreme life extension, brain uploading, sentient AI, or some combination thereof.

At 10% the speed of light it is maybe 50 years to the Centauri system including time to accelerate and decelerate. We already know one physically plausible propulsion system that could do it: thermonuclear Orion. Fusion rockets could as well but the physics is not as totally proven out as e.g. H bombs.

50 years is fast. It only seems slow because we are very short lived and very fragile. Biology, not propulsion, is the primary barrier to interstellar flight. Even if it were possible, fixing biology would probably be a ton easier than a warp drive.

But see also: Fermi paradox.
If you look on the mozilla site they've gone to great lengths to remove the dino branding already, which is a shame, as who didn't like the dino guy?

That said, who cares about mozilla's logo? If this was the firefox logo, that'd matter a bit more, but in the end, this is just a bunch of costly big company bs that matters very little.
How many thousands of Thunderbird development hours could have been paid with this completely unnecessary nonsense?
I entirely concur. I don't see why they think they need a re-branding either. It's more like they need a strategy to compete with chrome. Or at least one successful project other than Firefox.
...yet.
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
Agreed, and the "merchandising" they designed even has a monster: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/files/2016/08/jb_Mozilla...
This is not groundbreaking to read, but it reminds me how some people are detached from reality. They think they are bulletproof, they bring so much value they can't be replaced. Usually this can be true only in very few situations like for top salesman operatives or for genius programmers. People that are as rare as it goes.

Marketing, management, administration - those folks are usually replecable.
I asked a paleontologist about this recently, and their answer was that the density of fossils is too similar to the surrounding material for ground-penetrating radar to be useful. I wonder whether the challenges couldn't be addressed with the right technology-- maybe borrowing from radio telescopes.

That said, "dig until you find something" is not really the way it's done. You find bits of bone on the surface, or sticking out of a hillside, or anywhere that the earth has recently been weathered away, and look and dig near there.

Edit to add: You, too, can go on a dino dig through Experiment's (YC W13) partnership with https://twitter.com/BBPaleo. I highly recommend it!
A lot of college stem students have a hard time finding even a minimum wage job. I bet they'd be a great as basic programming class instructors.
> I'd like to suggest that "unpleasant" doesn't cut it. Rape threats...

The reason Mz gave for choosing not to give examples of the "subtler pattern of behaviors" which she is lamenting was that this would lead to "all kinds of drama". To my mind, rape threats aren't "drama", they're crimes.

But I don't really want to quibble over terminology. If you like, you can consider "unpleasant" to be a deliberately ironic understatement. Fighting civil rights battles can exact a heavy price. Sometimes people actually get killed. I get it.

But let's not lose sight of the actual point here: at least part of the reason for the situation that Mz laments -- that people do not see the "subtler pattern of behaviors" that characterize sexism -- is that Mz refuses to point them out because she doesn't want to deal with the "drama". Again, I sympathize. It should not be the case that people have to suffer to advocate for just causes. It sucks. But alas, that is the world we live in. And Mz's unwillingness to take this fact on board tells me something about the content of her character, and also suggests an alternative explanation for her financial woes that I humbly submit she ought to at least consider.
NEW-GET OVER 1000 TOP SEO and INTERNET MARKETING TOOLS
Not sure, I haven't done all that much physics since undergrad (it was my major). But with regard to the negative matter issue mentioned by another commenter, there is this in the wikipedia article:

> However, at the close of his original paper[2] Alcubierre argued (following an argument developed by physicists analyzing traversable wormholes[3][4]) that the Casimir vacuum between parallel plates could fulfill the negative-energy requirement for the Alcubierre drive.
It doesn't have to be sexy: valuing things besides the compiler in Rust
At last... I remember Richard Feynman complaining exactly about this!
That dog closing the door for him with the tug rope!
Indeed, my main point is not verbosity —it's regularity. I'd rather repeat `setf` in most cases in the name of regularity. That way we spot the semantic difference between lines more easily.

You'd have to use the assignment heavily to justify implementing the `=` syntax, which is barely prettier than the regular `setf` syntax. Plus, you'd probably have to add some annotation anyway, partially defeating the point:

(assign
x = 10
y = 20
z = 30)
Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in
Ten things you need to learn in design school
Show HN: Every morning get an inspiring video to your mail to motivate you
It is a genuinely poisonous idea, and one we should all seek to rid ourselves of, that other people do not really enjoy the things they seem to enjoy, but are instead involved in some kind of status pantomime that we like to call pretension.

By thinking this way, we misunderstand and alienate ourselves from other people, and we cut ourselves off from experiences that we might really enjoy. Given that we all only have a limited time on this planet, that's a high price to pay indeed.

Don't mean to jump on you specifically; I just found the use of the word "pretentious" in this thread very triggering. =p
As a contrarian in these topics, without being able to prove it, i assume that nothing terribly Bad can come from exterminating a species, even if it were bees, and their connections to the ecosystem are well understood. Nature is a rough place as niches tend to fill up extremely fast.

So if we were to exterminate mosquitos, my gut says we'd survive it. But luckily my gut doesnt make Policy.
Show HN, Another Productivity App, Mac OS X
I use this app daily and find it invaluable when managing projects or school work. There haven't been many sales yet so maybe it could improve.

Anyways, there is an Mac App, Bspace, that I made to keep track of my web searches for every project so they would be more accessible and less clustered.

The whole point was that the app was easier to use than existing bookmark managers.

Another use I found for it, was to open PDFs in the browser and saving the "links" or saved files into the app. Surprisingly, the app had no problems opening the files back up.

The app's cost moved up to $1.99 when it became chrome compatible. I am in a masters of science in analytics program so I was kind of hoping to make a buck from this app.
We banned this account for trolling.

Please don't.
I agree with the idea of the unknown consequences of eliminating pieces of ecosystems. We've seen the impact of the removal of apex predators like wolves, and movements like rewilding champion the idea of reintroduction, rebalancing of the ecosystem through brining such animals back. So we seem to think that maintaining ecosystems is important now. Complexity theory and modeling could be very useful to "estimating" the impact of eradication, I'm not sure how the impact is being evaluated though. (In the future can man-made animals step in and play vital positions in ecosystems, like biological shims when we realize the importance or primary role a species played within that ecosystem?)

Rewilding References:

1. Reintroducing Wolves in Scotland: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33017511

2. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_(conservation_biolog...

3. Rewilding Institute: http://rewilding.org/rewildit/
If the interface had an estimate of population density at night (homes) and day (activity) and an estimate of cost for each line, then we could at least play a pseudo-informed minmaxing game.
You're selling Aniracetam for $.86/gm; I'm buying it from other sites for $.19/gm (bulk powder).
Why would you even say that considering how huge this is?
Stating that I see a connection is not remotely the same thing as asserting it is the principal cause.

This is a huge derail from a discussion that should be about congratulating Sharon Pope and welcoming her. Largely for that reason, I don't plan to comment further here. If I have anything more to say about any of this, it will wind up on my blog instead.
Guiding a Venture-Backed Startup to a Felony
Python needs a piece of whitespace on the left of the correct size and tab/space constituency, and a newline on the right.

It's ambiguous. What is the relative precedence of the comma and equal sign? You just have to know.

Lisp means never memorizing associativity and precedence tables again.
Noah is a content marketer. He'll repackage the same content over and over until people stop clicking on it. I don't understand why people read these kinds of blogs, but apparently they're popular.
The quote:

> The BEST way to get famous is make amazing stuff. That’s it. Not blogging, networking, etc.

That reads like making a product was never the goal, his goal is attention, I don't think I know one programmer that's programming because they want to be famous.
He says it cost him $100m. Is that because of the stock options he lost when he was fired?

To have $100m in stock - he would have been a very early hire?
Just a guess... But probably wrote the article to get billions of ad views specifically from HN this week.
Simulation Finds Self-Driving “Taxibots” Will Eliminate 90% of Cars
Your system of minimal dependency java is interesting. Do you have anything open source I can look at or otherwise get a dive into this technique?
"Hashing" and "random keys" are different. The author keeps mentioning "hashing" but it's "number of true random bits" that matters.

If the generation of those keys uses pseudo random data, time, etc, the risk of collision goes up.

Read 16 bytes from /dev/urandom and stuff them into base64encode and you have a pretty good random API key in readable ASCII.
Implementing a research paper
How do they measure the tree rings on a live tree? How else do they determine the age?
Sooner or later we will end up with only one language on Earth - it's very likely I think. (if we survive long enough)
What's their current logo? Lowercase "mozilla"? That dinosaur isn't there anymore, is it?

I rather like the Moz://a logo. Beyond geeky, beyond clever. Maybe too clever, I dunno.
While impressive, it is not the oldest tree in Europe.
see: http://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/records/europe/
And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA2ks_cFr90
There are at least three ways to solve your problem:

1. Use fcc_clear=yes to not encrypt the copy in your sent folder

2. Use GPG's encrypt-to in your GPG configuration: https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1261.html

3. Add --encrypt-to to the GPG commands mutt uses: https://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG#TheCodeSourc...
Water Disinfected in Minutes with Newly Developed Solar Gadget
The essence of the post is "In Japanese there are characters that represent words". Is that a surprise to anyone? (I don't speak Japanese or any similar language)
How many current community college profs are qualified to teach this?

Would you sign up to teach a community college bootstrap course? Normal pay is $10-$15 an hour, and you get to deal with all kinds of BS unrelated to your class.

The reason it kinda makes sense is it lets the programming teachers get paid market rate.
Just a ping from four light years away does not seem worth the effort to me, it seems just slightly above throwing a rock in the direction of Proxima Centauri. At least take a picture.

By the way, there is also a thing called wait calculation [1] which deals with this very problem, when should you start an interstellar journey. There is not much of a point to start today if you can cut the travel time in half in, say, a hundred years since you would pretty quickly overtake the mission started today and arrive first despite the fact that you started a hundred years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_Calculation
> Nasa announced it is making all its publicly funded research available online for free

This is the way things ought to be for all publicly funded research, not just NASA. Thank you, NASA, for leading the way.

The beginning of technological progress for mankind started with writing, the beginning of the industrial revolution started with the printing press. Having all the world's knowledge available on your desktop just a click away is the beginning of another exponential leap forward.
New Outlook.com confirmation dialog is well-designed
"There are no duds in the mix"

More like they're all duds. Terrible, unless it was just a student doodling while learning design.

The Moz://a one instantly makes me think there is a new product from Rand Fishkin's Moz.com (formerly seomoz).
I'm actually curious what is new within this. As it stands, NASA research pre-prints are available on the tech reports server (http://www.sti.nasa.gov/), typically right after the export control review process.

edit: maybe it's related to certain journals where there wasn't access on the STI server? Seems odd to me. For the 8 years that I've been at NASA, it's always been expected that my group's work had to be accessible.

edit2: not all rules are universal across the agency, so my experience may be too specific to Glenn Research Center/my division. In any case, the more open, the better.
I would even agree that the Soviet Union was super evil, but I don't think it's worth the casualties of a major nuclear exchange to try to end it 40 years sooner. And there's no way to be sure that a major nuclear attack would actually end the Soviet regime. Wouldn't the surviving Russians now think that America is not just a worrying rival, but a catastrophically dangerous enemy? Why wouldn't they unite behind the strongest regime they can make to defend themselves and strike back? AFAIK, quite a few Russians are still sympathetic to Stalin even today based on the idea that nobody else could have industrialized Russia fast enough and led with enough determination to resist the Nazi invasion. They lost millions of casualties and had huge swaths of territory occupied and destroyed and still went on to win the war. Do you really think they're just gonna give up after a few nukes?

Also, try making a list of the biggest mass murders in history. Hitler and Stalin would be on the list. Also Mao Tse-Tsung. Possibly a few leaders of Communist regimes in SE Asia, depending on whether you look at the proportion of population killed instead of raw deaths. Do you want to see America at the top of that list? Based on a vague theory that the world would be better off somehow?
There's also the EmDrive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster), which is controversial because it seems to violate all known physical laws. But there are prototypes that seem to work and have been replicated a handful of times by responsible and credible research teams. In each case, there are possible sources of error, but the fact that it appears to be replicated and we can't (yet) rule out the idea that it does work is very exciting. It should be aggressively pursued, because if it does work it's a very big deal.

Instead of looking at things like this with jaded skepticism, we should look at them with excitement and pursue them aggressively! The moment we get overconfident in our own knowledge is the moment we cease to discover new things.
Extensive discussion 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876453
Amazon to experiment with part-time tech teams
That doesn't make sense. The brain is highly interconnected and there's no such thing as a "Go" or poker area. Many of the same structures are recruited for different tasks. For example, the part for recognizing faces will also be recruited for reading letters or playing Go. But the important thing here is that AlphaGo is a fixed program. It's no different than chrome or firefox in that it can no longer do learning based modifications on itself. In a sense, it's actually more limited than a browser in that it cannot simulate arbitrary Turing Machines. As a feedforward network, it's not Turing Complete.

Lee Sedol meanwhile is at least as capable as a Universal Turing Machine and was learning far more per game and modifying himself while also doing the highly complex tasks of vision integrated motion planning.
I'm surprised that the internet so often comes up in the context of humanities great technical achievements.

Don't get me wrong, a seamlessly interconnected network of computers has changed society and our lives tremendously.

Technically speaking, it was not that remarkable of an achievement though. We already had some forms of remote communication for quite a while (telegraph, telephone, radio).

With the rise of computers, connecting them was bound to be the next step, and not that much of a challenge as far as hardware and technology goes.

The actual (technical) achievement was the computer.
A line break isn't visible? Not by itself, I suppose, but in the code, it's hard to miss.
This is not very well thought out.

1) If you are generating API keys, those are presumably used to make API calls, and every such call has to verify that the API key exists so it can deny or allow the request, which means that doing a lookup on any API key has to be an extremely cheap operation.

So do the lookup after generating each and check for collisions. If you hit the jackpot and actually managed to randomly create a duplicate, generate another. Problem solved, and you don't have to worry about the collision frequency of your hash algorithm as a weird workaround for skipping a single extra lookup at API key creation.

2) Use GUIDs. It's what they're for. It's in the name. Globally Unique Identifier. This is the problem they solve.
He said he worked there when there were 30 people so he must have been a very early employee.
If you repeat setf, you may need a progn to make it one expression. And parallel assignment is off the table without temporary variables:

(if condition
(psetf a c b a c b)
(psetf a b c a b c))

:)

P.S. of course I know rotatef would be better here.