skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm in Northern New England, so I get it. Around here nobody's going to talk to you unless you make the effort. People just default to leaving each other alone. But they're mostly nice folks if you reach out.
The author snorts at aspects of C that led to its commonplace usage.

> 9. New design goal: trim out anything hard to compile from CPL. Naturally eliminates most features for robust and maintainable programming.

Naturally? If those features are hard to compile, then they are hard to reason about; the author begs the question in their statement, but I am not convinced by their conclusion. There's a tendency for things which are hard to reason about to be difficult to port to other systems; it is a complexity issue, and the complexity of a behaviour influences how it can be re-implemented easily or swiftly by others.

> 11. The result of these was BCPL [5]: a typeless, word-oriented language with few keywords and unrestricted use of memory. Created philosophy of "the programmer is in charge and gets no help." Compiler was easy to write on Most Godawful Computer on Earth. Ran fast on it, too.

Great!

Sounds like BCPL was an excellent tool for their use case, and in providing power with a low difficulty for implementation, it would be easy for others to enjoy its benefits.

> 14. [...] Stripped out or changed most features benefiting safety/security, maintenance, and consistency.

Because they were unnecessary. Don't over-engineer your products, or you'll end up with a product that fails in the market; like MULTICS. It's like they learned a thing or two from their past ventures.

My Conclusion: C and Unix succeeded because they were simple to re-implement and/or port. Other, more complex systems were too hard or near-impossible to re-implement and/or port. At a time when good, cheap software was in-demand but scarce the pair were well-positioned to sweep the market, and so they did. Unix may have failed to reach the desktop, but C made it there; because it was easy to implement, had a small foot print, and produced fast code.

It's not like C and Unix stopped development, either. Let's not ignore the last 30 years, now.
> ... as if all development of C stopped with the first ANSI standard?

For a significant portion of C developers and target platforms, it did. On my last program at my previous company I was required to use C89, in 2012, for portability reasons. The justification was political, not technical.
Hard or impossible to solve with CSS alone, now made trivially easy with Flexbox
No, PowerShell on Bash on Ubuntu on a Windows VM on a Linux host is a thing :)
OK, but thats not in the client (which is what I meant)
It's not the most efficient way to do it, but if you just want to get it done, Powershell has had e.g. ConvertTo-Json since version 3, I think? You can serialize pretty much anything at that point, and just hand that off to your target language.

If you're talking an FFI though, not so much, I think.
Just a real life example, I check something im interested on a classified ad and want to go see it, as you say the seller tell me how to get there, referencing other streets and local businesses (streets here are named after generals or war heroes, not grid style).
When I try to find the address on Google Maps this is what it shows.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*wK-gIc8QQYHwEz5-Ba...
And this is a city just 10 miles from the country capital.

"3645 OUR DUDE - Central,Paraguay" would have been useful.

Agree with you but dont have to be a "this or that" choice.
Er, it's a world all of us live in. Say, for example, ‘ps’ or ‘ls -1l’.

Then you end up using awk, which is rather like a half-assed version of powershell to work around shortcomings with the unix everything-is-a-string design.
Wait. It should be a good chip performance wise, and great value for the money, too. Also, the more we put pressure on Intel, the better it is for everyone in the long term.
From reading your post, I feel the biggest issue you are facing is that there is nothing differentiating you from the common "wacko" inventor who thinks they have the next great thing. We'd get nowhere if we followed each perpetual motion machine, infinitely scalable database, and alternative theory of quantum physics. So the system is good at identifying those patterns and churning through them.

Your idea is good. Let's just say that.

What you have to do next is to differentiate yourself from the crazies. That means some of the following:

* Tech demo you can show someone in 30 seconds
* A "shiny" frontend that the layperson can understand
* A concrete value proposition, other than that it can be acquired

You don't want to be stuck in the following pattern, which makes you no different from the rest:

* Secrecy
* Promises
* Vagueness
But thats why there are tools like awk.
I wrote a bash script to sort processes by age on an old redhat 4 machine.

What sounded like a very simple thing, quickly ended up being a complete nightmare of bash, python, and an unholy bunch of linux commands.

It was ugly, and a terrible way of doing it, but we got it working.

It would have been amazing if i could pipe PS into something that could sort by the dates on the 4th column, and return the last column in the sorted order.
Anyone heard when "later this month" is? I'm going to be in Pittsburgh this weekend; I hope it is later enough to try it out.
It's easy to get in a rut. It's especially easy when you have a lot of distractions.

Kids are a big distraction. One of the magical things about my wife is that she handles a lot of distractions for me. Most women just won't. It's slightly unfair to her, but she's a Professional Mom and extremely good at it. As has been noted in literature, it's all but impossible to price this.

The downside is - one stream of income. And it's been pretty scary when I've gotten laid off.
I'm not at all convinced that the syntax is any better for typing in as commands in an interactive shell.
the prices are attractive. the basic instance is just one dollar for a month.
> I'm not sure why he'd chose markdown when epub is just structured HTML.

Markdown's a lot simpler/faster to read and write than HTML, and books rarely need the extra features HTML provides. When you do, you can always do inline HTML in Markdown.

> Also, to anyone planning a novel: get ready for annoying inconsistencies in display across the various Kindle + iOS + android devices. Fonts not displaying correctly, sizing is off, things not centering, some CSS selectors not being applied at all.

Oh yeah. It's even worse if you write a technical book.[1]

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/03/bringing-my-web...
You could probably hack something together with awk, but this sort of thing is exactly why I like powershell a lot.
> Ballmer said Linux is cancer

He more or less said that the GPL is cancer which is pretty accurate. The entire quote is

"Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works"

Not very nice but not entirely wrong either.
Well he doesn't believe in governments for one. And his very far left views make him unelectable.
They didn't say it wasn't possible - just that it is more expensive. And they're right. Far more regulations/building codes and limited structures (that are resistant to the sway that occurs during earthquakes) are what can be built... and they're more expensive if you need things done "the right way".
The “Bee Algorithm” – The Best Way to Find the Most Efficient Delivery Route
> So many strongly typed shells exist already.

But no one uses them, and no one is building an ecosystem around them. That's what I'm hoping will change thanks to this announcement. Even if it's not PowerShell itself, if a different strongly-typed shell gets traction because of this, I will be happy. That's what I was trying to say with my comment.
I've been enjoying the fruits of Bell Labs and UC Berkeley.

I'm not a "dev" or even a Linux or Bash user. I like the simplest Bourne shells the best. Plan 9's rc is also good.

I've never enjoyed using Microsoft Windows. (But if they gave away the source for NT kernel I might find use for it, after a lot of work trimming it down to size.)

Maybe the size and power of UNIX has spoiled me.

MS obsessively focuses on their competition to the detriment of users and software quality.
"Android is doing this using Java code," said Hurst.

I thought the whole point is that Android doesn't use Java code and that APIs are not considered code.
Uber acquires autonomous truck startup Otto
Infrastructure as Code?
Powershell is essentially running a JVM stlye virtual machine in the background though.
They will have to do something once everyone stops using them as a social network. Like when MySpace became a music site.
Basically every single Bay city has a severe case of voter-induced NIMBY

This is literally every place I've ever lived, both big and small. Everyone wants to be the last person to move to a place.
Ask HN: OsiriX and fork experiences? (OS X DICOM imaging viewer)
So, as a long-time OsiriX user for medical images, the (open source) software has become more and more restrictive as its parent company tries to monetize. There have been 2 forks - Horos and OsirisLXIV - that are compiled without all the restrictions (forced delay in image opening, etc). Does anyone have experience with either? Will they bork the default DICOM image library?
awk is rather similar in many ways to powershell, actually, but untyped. I agree most of what powershell does you can do with awk, but it's often less pleasant than powershell (in my experience).
I know how to take screenshots on Linux :D Taking pictures of the screen felt more "authentic", in the same way that I took pictures of the printed book instead of pasting a PDF.
Bootstrapping an Enterprise SaaS company as an engineer
Link to the previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12260958
For starters, read this, and then read everything it links to:

http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

The economics are clear and intuitive: the "filtering" effect of new construction happens on a decades-long basis. Building today won't have a downward impact on prices on any timeframe relevant to the people involved in this discussion. So fine, build more...but don't expect it to solve your problems.

Considering that the current housing crunch began in ~2012, it's far more likely that we can impact prices on a timeframe that matters by discouraging the (acute) crisis in demand. We can start by reversing the ill-conceived tax incentives we give tech companies to move to San Francisco.
Any acquisition of AMD will be seriously complicated by potentially needing to re-negotiate the patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel. There are lots of companies that could have been great buyers for AMD in the past that have passed or not even looked into it because of this, I don't think it will change for the foreseeable future unfortunately.
I got to use Windows 3 and see it as an improvement over a CLI-only system, and got to edit my X11 configuration for making my monitor don't blow (or at least stop making that infuriating noise out of frequency monitors do - but the documentation was adamant it would blow). I saw the beginning of the GUI spread.

Yet, I was never able to make any sense about the Windows double-click required standards. It just looked completely arbitrary, like any action MS wanted to map into a click, but there was an action mapped there already, they made it a double click. I am pretty sure the author is rationalizing that line about side-effects.
Last IronPython release: 2014

Last IronRuby release: 2011
Absolutely so! Any international org is subject to pressure and corruption, just look at UN, FIFA or olympic judges. Saudi Arabia is on UN council of human rights. So Russia will be very glad to see honest and independent representatives of certain African and Arabic countries control the Internet.
No, it seems like the action of a government attempting to appear concerned when quite clearly humanitarian issues were a tertiary concern.

If a genocide occurs as a result of a commitment to a political or economic ideology, does intention really matter?
You might want to rephrase. I assume you're saying, the perversity goes well beyond prisons, including the companies that profit from war and paranoia generally. But as your comment stands, its hard to tell.
I don't see a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom in Powershell. It may be newer, but I'm not sure they looked at prior art or had design members who were shell gurus in any other shell than `cmd.exe`, which is a horrific shell. Why are commands horrendously long in powershell? If you spend time in the shell, you don't want your fingers falling off due to overuse. Aside... one of the design decisions Microsoft took that absolutely blows my mind is using `\` for file hierarchies instead of `/` when you're writing an operating system in C!
Poe's law
Always wait.

Always buy now.
Jeff Lierberman's slow motion picture frame
>I wonder why he chose medium (I wonder why anyone chooses medium over their own site)

http://blog.onyxbits.de/the-importance-of-running-your-own-w...

Medium's business model is: you just started your own website and don't have enough content there to rank well with search engines/attract visitors? No problem! We got a shitton of content and are well indexed. Just write an article for us (add to the pile!) and we allow you to link back to your own project.

Medium pretty much is on my ignore list. The only thing you find there are fluff pieces without substance that are meant to drive traffic elsewhere.

And there really is not a lot of substance to telling the world that you can use Markdown to format a book (though I really wonder he didn't use LaTeX).
I think it might have rolled out already. Turn on Developer Mode in Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, and ssh to port 22 with a valid l/p?

Doesn't look like you even need to install WSL.
You seem to be suggesting that his core argument is only worthy as headline-bait. I thought it was quite an interesting critique.
When you sign up to use Facebook and click 'I agree' you are making a promise not to block their ads. It seems to me that to break that promise because the ads are annoying is morally wrong, but many people don't see it that way.

I sell software as a service. If a customer doesn't like some aspect of my software I expect him to cancel his subscription. If he continues to use my software without paying for it he is breaking his promise to me, and most people would see it as wrong.

What's the difference?
So you're bearish on any investor.
Sure, sounds like a good idea for a follow-up post!
If you have full autonomy to get to the passenger, then you don't need them once you've picked them up.

Never mind the fact that now you have to worry about drunks, making sure insurance is cleared and people have perfect records (and know how to drive), want to drive at all (I don't -- isn't that what I'm paying for?), etc.
"As a side note, Tesla claims to have put quite a bit of care into designing the floor pan and battery such that in cases like this, a fire shouldn't breach into the cabin for a while. In theory, even after the fire is well underway, the design of the car should give passengers plenty of time to get out."

That's not particularly (or at all) unique to Tesla. Safety regulations and laws require all new cars to be designed in a way to maximize the time needed for flames to impinge upon the cabin.

As a firefighter, vehicle firefighting is an interesting endeavor: we have to cool down bumpers (the heat can cause struts to expand/explode, blowing the front or side bumpers or panels out, possibly directly into the path of legs). Similarly with wheel wells. The typical approach will be to cool down with water as approaching from an angle (or from the direction of the cabin if there are trapped occupants), have a second firefighter breach the hood, get water under there, and go from that point on.
If you hear "..It's like..." or "...we always..." then the mentor is doing it wrong. Experience is only good in details.

Single wire morse code with distributor becomes X bit X stop bit serial becomes teletype. Teletype with protocol (STOP = .) ... becomes TCPIP.

Yes, "strong opinions loosely held" is what you are looking for in a mentor.
> They will have to do something once everyone stops using them as a social network.

Do you really see this happening any time soon?
I can't find it anywhere, I have tried.

I think it is in the plan 9 mailing list - 9fans, as that is where I have interacted with Rob
That's fine for you. Mac has traditionally been a very good option. However, I hear Apple's been making it difficult in the lastest updates. For me, anyways, it's academic, as I can't afford apple hardware.
Are they going to have two separate game stores/platforms? Oculus store for VR and a separate one for everything else?

On the one hand it seems redundant, on the other they can at least share a single sign on and friends list for everything they do, being Facebook and all.
I know the problem you are talking about - it has bitten all of us.

The new language mode you use when writing classes in PowerShell shifts the needle more towards programming semantics than shell semantics and addresses this.

Give it a try!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Wow, this is one of Uber's biggest acquisitions to date. Otto employees receive 20% of the profits from the division too.
Another social-discussion voting system I wanted to try out was one where:

1. both of the 'unit-weight' up- and down-votes were only done through implicit/passive actions (basically a piece of Javascript running in a browser extension, that tracks whether you read the whole article/comment—i.e. scrolled through it at a reasonable reading speed—before scrolling away/closing/going back/beginning to reply)

2. there are above-'unit-weight' up- and down-vote mechanisms that are explicit, but require something humans consider very-slightly onerous: solving a CAPTCHA, paying a tenth of a cent of pre-paid credit, etc.

In my conception, the small votes would be named "OK" and "Meh", and the large votes "Love" and "Hate", with about a 10x difference between their power. The site, of course, would be called "Mehddit." ;)
I really read the article like a "Trouble Brewing" "Far Side" cartoon. Guy thinks "going into management" will mean the skies will open up; guy is overleveraged and one layoff away from bankruptcy, maybe divorce, who knows? Guy is clearly not "management material" in the eyes of his employer, which is a dwindling enterprise with probably an end date.

The main thing he: he depends on credit vendors for establishing limits on spending.

I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical and hard to substitute for.
In a world that is overflowing with competing and incompatible operating systems, it's the most portable and fast language that wins over the hearts of those writing software.
I'm currently working 4 hours a day, usually from 10pm until 2am. I'm living in Thailand, so these hours overlap with clients in the US.

I'm still productive, but I'm the only developer working on this project, so I don't think it's ideal. I think I could be about 3x more productive if I was in "startup mode" with a lot of equity. But I don't want to do that for this project, and 4 hours per day suits me very well.

It can be hard to keep saying no, and hold onto my 20 hour weeks. The client keeps talking about bringing me on full-time, and I keep politely declining. But then I've been thinking about saving up to buy an apartment, or a new car, or a vacation to Europe... I might go full-time for a little while to save up for that vacation. But apart from that, I really value my free time.

I spend a lot of my free time working on side projects. But I also really enjoy the freedom to read, or work on filmmaking, music, or other hobbies. Or to go for a walk, sit by a lake, watch TV, or just do nothing at all. I'm also working during the night, so it feels like I have the whole day to do whatever I want.

It's sad that this article only talked about "flexibility", and didn't mention anything about shorter work weeks.
CNN Launches Drone Operations to Film News Events
I feel very similarly, but then I'm of the mind that if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested, and I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world.

As for the NIH syndrome, one of my favorite Paul Graham essays is still "What Languages Fix" (http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html) particularly for C#: the problem that C# was invented to solve is that Microsoft doesn't control Java.
Agents for Software Developers, Revisited
Fair enough. I really didn't know whether I could pull off writing an entire novel at all, so for my first attempt I'm totally fine for it being formulaic. Even so, most of the people who have read it have enjoyed it - some read it in a single sitting, which is probably the best compliment they can make :)
I thought I was the last person using scsh!

Now if I could just imbue my coworkers with your good taste....
Yes, it seems that life has generally gotten cheaper if you don't require health care, childcare, or education. The one thing that hasn't gone down in price that everyone needs is food.

http://theblinker.com/mainpage/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/co...
San Fran is particularly bad, but it's a problem anywhere that is now 'desirable':

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2016/05/port...
New Stripe docs: redesigned layout and richer code snippets
I don't disagree wrt. UB. I've read somewhere that the reason C is so portable, despite not being designed that way, might be due to "underspecification." Regardless it's something one must be aware of.

As for Jai, etc... right. I was conflating two things. Jai for keeping the spirit of C wrt "the programmer is in control." The other idea being FP languages with hardware-level capabilities.
"But Foxx lets you specify your own endpoints ... Foxx is currently the only way to do that within a database" ... so you mean like /rpc/storred_precedure_name in PostgREST :)?

(don't get me wrong, anyone capable of writing a db from scratch is a genius, good job and good luck)
That is true. I've used the computer controlled metros in Paris often enough and there don't seem to be too many problems but I suppose there are guards around. As for buses, I find there are two cultures, either the bus driver has some amount of responsibility for what happens on board his vehicle, answering commuter questions, announcing stops, checking tickets etc., or he completely dissociates, and just drives, sometimes not even being the one to check your ticket. In the latter case you tend to have a lot more theft no buses. (In my limited experience. I'd love to see data on that, actually.. although the distinction is perhaps a bit hard to define.)
Most congressional contests not contests at all
great decision teaming up with Volvo for self-driving car experiments, Volvo has an excellent reputation for safety.
Well, one way to look at it is fuel is a very dense battery. 1 liter of diesel has about 10kWh. 2 gallons of the stuff has as much stored energy as a fully charged Tesla Model S.

I think as battery storage gets denser these fires will become more common. Because there is just so much energy packed into such a small package.
I never try to use Safari for WebGL. I just assume it isn't supported or so broken it might as well not be.
Its not about making it accessible, its about writing baseless wrong things.
The book author will do more harm then good for general audience. Its total waste of time to read this book. Our time is limited better spend it on something useful which is correct.
Judge for yourself with these nVidia demos

https://www.google.com/search?q=nvidia+real+time+raytracing&...