skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JavaScript was the first language that I learned, and I really got to know it. I could tell you the ins and outs of prototypal inheritance, how function declarations are hoisted, but expressions are not, how the only scope creator is a function, variable declarations are hoisted, etc.

I don't hate JavaScript, but I do dislike it. After advancing in my career and becoming a back end engineer I strongly prefer the type-safety of strongly typed, typically compiled, languages.

I've worked in large dynamically typed code bases and I've worked in large strongly typed code bases. I have loathed every refactor I have had to do in dynamically typed languages. I just did a big one for a Python code base and I caught more issues and dependencies using grep and emacs than using the IDE and PyCharm. I have about 25 sizeable unit tests for this code base just to check flow control and dumb things like typos. I wouldn't need these unit tests in a compiled language.

JavaScript is the most popular language in the world. It's going to get a lot of hate and love. You contend that it gets disproportionate hate compared to Python and Ruby, but I disagree. I dislike all dynamically typed languages (save bash), and I think many people feel the same way. I honestly fail to see what they buy me.

If it's short and sweet I'll do it in bash, if it's any longer than what bash can handle I'll write the few extra lines of code in Go, for its safety and performance.

If I have to write browser code, I sigh and get on with my life.
I restored my 22 year old BBS off Colorado QIC tapes by jury rigging an old mini-ATX board with a floppy tape drive and installing Win98 on it. They read perfectly. Of course you can always pay someone to dump the data for you, but where's the fun in that?! I think any off the shelf modern tape will be just fine in 10 years.
It took them until late 2013, and they still don't allow SD cards do they?

They also don't allow their apps to be moved to SD, which is especially aggravating for the crappy apps you can't uninstall on phones with small built in drives.
> Apparently this is also common at weddings, though even more so as the photographer might be taking shots of the same scene on two different cameras and then changing cards in both. Just in case.

More common is the requirement to have a camera that supports dual cards, so you can either write to both cards, or write JPG to one and RAW to the other, so you'll never lose everything.
It already has been replaced by systemd as of 15.04 (and 16.04 LTS).
Show HN: Get in Job in Tech Without Coding
Skew Image Correction Process and Improved Faster Image Rotation Algorithm in Java
Interesting effects!
Looks cool!

> No support for F#

Why is this? Is it a macro (as opposed to working with bytecode directly)?
There is some evidence to suggest that these DVDs have good archival support, and I can guarantee you that DVD readers will still be abundant 10 years from now:

http://www.mdisc.com/
We're not even near the scaling part. It's silly to argue about how something will have issues if the entire world did it. There are tons of things we do today that wouldn't scale environmentallly if the entire world wanted to do the same thing (e.g. flying).
Brisbane startup creates wi-fi sharing economy utilising unwanted data
Serious question: why is this considered innovative? 256 GB micro sd cards are widely available[1], and are less than a quarter of the size of sd cards (by area). Surely they can take a 256GB micro sd card's die, copy paste it 4 times, and end up with a 1 TB SD card?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G7L03OS
have you looked at chandoo.org

chandoo.org
The story about an open source machine vision robot running Linux and Arduino
The Livera board also integrates a MediaTek MT701 WiFi chip with 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g, and an 8-bit, 16MHz Atmel ATmega32u4 for Arduino support. An InvenSense MPU-6050 6-axis gyro and accelerometer chip is also onboard.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/945994322/hicatlivera-start-making-your-first-machine-vision/description
Yeah, I'm an idiot. I see it now. Apologies.

But I saw the sudden drop from top 4 to below the fold within minutes. Way too fast.
Once upon a time the majority of people were farmers or herders. 150 years ago the majority of non-farm workers in the advanced economies were doing menial manufacturing work. Machinery that automates work allows individuals to produce more with a given amount of effort. This allow people to produce/afford more goods/services, and leads to the human role in the production process being more managerial.
If only C# had LISP-style macros... .
I don't agree with basic income, because I believe like welfare people will find ways to exploit it.

The whole point of UBI is to avoid means testing, so there's no reason to game it. Of course, if anything, we won't have actual UBI because it's most likely politically untenable because of the exact perspective you have, but some form of extended welfare, which requires some kind of means testing, which is then gameable.

The people who have a drive to work will seem like they are getting less.

If it's truly UBI, then these people can avoid the feeling like they are getting less by not working, or taking a job closer, or starting their own company, that doesn't require driving to work. "I don't want to drive to your office" becomes an acceptable and usable reason to quit your job because you don't actually need a job under UBI.
> You could expect them to not call it autopilot, and instead call it lane keeping, like it really is.

That is all that most auto pilots in planes do, however. I don't get where "autopilot" somehow came to mean full autonomy in cars but not in planes (and other vehicles like boats) where the term was used previously.

Ridiculous.
Mad Fientist: http://www.madfientist.com/podcast/
1TB (8Tbit) sounds almost certainly like it's going to be at least 2-bit if not 3-bit MLC, maybe even 4-bit.
The endurance and retention numbers for 3-bit MLC are already pretty dismal in comparison to even 2-bit MLC, and the only way they've been able to convince consumers to buy this stuff is by increasing the capacity and multiplying by it.

The cells are still intrinsically more fragile, and increasing the bits-per-cell increases capacity only multiplicatively while retention and endurance decrease exponentially; theoretically, to a very rough approximation, 4 bits per cell will have 4 times the capacity but only 1/16th the endurance and retention of 1 bit per cell. In practice, it's somewhat worse.

Instead of a 1TB card using 4bpc flash that may offer 1K cycles per cell (1PB total writes), I'd rather have a 256GB SLC (1bpc, "old-school" flash) card with 16K endurance (4PB total writes). Both take up the same area (thus theoretically cost) and the SLC is in fact simpler in many ways to use because it doesn't really need such elaborate "management", but unfortunately in practice SLC is priced astronomically higher than the technology would suggest.

I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but it sometimes makes me really think if the industry is deliberately misleading us into the worse choice in terms of reliability, just so they can sell more. This is one of my big gripes about the flash memory industry --- there is a lot of marketing, a lot of fluff. But if you look at the facts it's clear that no one considering the tradeoffs logically would've ever thought MLC to be in any way better. It can certainly be two, three, or four times the density of SLC, but it doesn't even last a half, third, or fourth as long.
Teaching our Immune System to Attack Cancer Cells
You need to add [this js file](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js) that is near to 45KB. I have just uploaded an AMP version for my site and it felt a little bit ridiculous... I made a simpler version (with no js and limited css), changed `<img>` for `<amp-img>` and added this js. It would load even faster without this js!!
Facebook's Nudity Ban Affects All Kinds of Users
This is a sad thread to read, I'd read so many positive things about Microsoft recently. Are people from Microsoft bothered by such a strong negative consensus regarding Skype?
Operations research is 50/50 compsci and maths. Lots of interesting hard problems that require good maths and compsci skills.

We employ some very talented people working on these sorts of problems for rail: http://biarrirail.com
Digital interactions are still mere shadows of real world interactions, and will remain so fover long time.
If You Don’t Listen to Yoda Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
Brains and Sex = Controversy
An LTO drive is good long term since it's guaranteed to write 1 generation back and read 2 generations back. Very easy to use once you get the routine down.

As always, remember to do a restore to prove your backup is an actual backup.
What would that be, out of curiosity? Not asking rhetorically. I would just assume the exact opposite -- they have every incentive to provide a monetized, just passable enough to be consumable experience. The content (and ostensibly the design) is the product, not the load time. Performance seems low on the list.
Author here, happy this popped up and to see the HN community thinking through it. A few people have brushed off what I sketched as uninteresting and don't see any issues. I'll try to explain it another way (with three years reflection to help).

Single page applications are now quite popular. Most single page apps use a different definition of "back" than browsers do, and there are times when the two treatments conflict.

Many, or most, use a local in-memory database to keep track of information without going to the server. They update that in-memory store as you make changes. For example you see a list of names: Mary, Robert, John. You click Robert and edit the name to "Rob", the name auto-saves. Then you click "back".

Because single-page apps control "back" when in the SPA, they do what most developers want. They return to a semantically correct page, showing Mary, Rob (just edited), John. Tons of apps do this. This is not what the browser does. The browser, if following the "back" specs, would show the out-of-date names of Mary, Robert, and John.

The theoretical conflict can also become practical. Think through this flow:

* Visit /names

* AJAX for GET /api/names

* See Mary, Robert, John

* Edit Robert's name to Bob, autosave

* AJAX for POST /api/name/4 with the new name Bob

* See Mary, Bob, John

* Click on a link, lets say to Mary's website URL

* Mary's website, new domain, loads.

* ...click back

The SPA loads up, and attempts to GET /api/names. However, the bfcache is at play since the native "back" behavior is running. So the stale API response, with the original names Mary, Robert, John is returned. The list of names on the screen is DIFFERENT than what the user saw after they edited.

Additionally most SPA apps presume AJAX calls return accurate data, however here the names are not the names currently in the database. They are only in the bfcache. You can imagine, with more complex data, ways this can cause complex and unforeseen failures.

This is a very poorly understood corner of JavaScript development even today.

[edit]: formatting
NASA's new music video on the women of America's space program
Password management for consulting?
What do you use to organize and manage username + passwords, host information, etc. for accessing client machines?
I'd like to see some solid data on this.

I used to think that DVD+/-R and DVD+/-RW had a shelf life of <10 years (this was ~10 years ago) and I can't recall anyone asserting they lasted longer.

After running a long term program where backups were written to DVD+RW discs, and seeing them last > 10 years, I was impressed.

Now I'm finding sources that say that the post-write self-life of optical media is on the order of 10s to 100s of years.

Anyhow, it just makes me wonder what the practical shelf-life is, and what the underlying media "does" over time :)
I can. It is http://thesurge.net
Whatever happened to Microsoft's $150M investment in Apple? (2014)
I know what they say when polled, and it makes HRC's characterization an understatement. See, e.g., https://thinkprogress.org/is-hillary-clinton-right-about-tru...
Basic algebra for the substitution model and basic calculus for high order functions and the notion of a transformation in general.

Set theory is, probably, the most fundamental. Everything could be defined as a set or as a function.

Lambda calculus, obviously.

Some combinators. Basics of linear algebra.

No category theory and other bullshit is needed. Sets will do.

It is actually very important skill to avoid wasting time in disconnected from reality obscure academic bullshit, be it philosophy, physics or math. Do not follow other people's hallucinations. Have your own.)

As a rule of thumb - you need just enough math to understand The Wizards Lectures and SICP.

Again, the substitution model, sets (for notion of types and basic collecttions) and high order functions (the "domain and range" mantra) is enough.

For algorithms the notion of being bound by some function and orders of growth.
Store both the tape and the device to read it.

PCI/IDE/SATA interfaces are so ubiquitous that even decades from now I fully expect you to be able to use them. If nothing else, via some kind of adapter.
The problem is communicating with people that use those services
I didn't say it was proprietary, but it is an unnecessary addon that is already solved by the current standards. I oppose it because it's adding additional cruft, is from a non-trustworthy company, and doesn't address the actual problem.
Design as Branding
"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver." Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
I had about 1000 DVDs in storage of backed up satellite data. At one point I had to restore the backup using the DVDs and it was about ~8 years into the mission so I was worried that the data would be no good on the earliest discs.

It turned out to be totally fine, as far as I could tell. None of the early data had SHA/MD5 sums (I added this later), so there's no guarantee the earlier discs weren't somewhat corrupted, but they were definitely readable.

Back then, I had assumed they wouldn't have that long of a life, but as you seem to have found, and I discovered, once written, optical media seems to have a very long shelf life.
>I read articles saying the jobs will be offset with new jobs, but no one bothers to explain what. Also when everyone is unemployed how are they going to pay for these automated goods.

There's no "also" if job losses are offset by new jobs.
Care to try to parse those sentences for us, so we can determine if it is the reader or the writer with the grammar problem.
The FAA and NTSB have really worked well.
A summary would be awesome - I appreciate the amount of work and details that went into this, but a list of what worked and didn't would be a great start - interested readers could then dive into details
You're saying this is a sexist thing?

She was linked to Whitewater, was that because she was a woman?

She constantly defended Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435941/hillary-clinton....

She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.

She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?

Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.

What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?

How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?
How did this manifest?

SD cards that just weren't recognized over time?

Do you have any other details? Did you stick to expensive brand name SD cards? Did you write to them often, or read from them often? Super curious what the usage pattern was.
Wacky metric.

I am thinking of creating a metric that somehow computes the magnitude of skill of self-congratulation of residents as a way of ranking cities.

Or how about a metric of published authors per capita. Pondera County Montana would actually rank pretty high.
I've been recently trying to make my way though Elements of Programming (https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Alexander-Stepan...) by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones and it makes me say abstract algebra. It's the first and only rigorous foundation of software engineering that I've seen. It basically maps abstract algebra to this somewhat simple subset of C++, introduces new algebraic objects (such as memory) and then shows this really nice correspondence between the the C++-- and the abstract algebra.

If you are not familiar with the author, Alexander Stepanov is the guy who basically figured out generic programming, was instrumental in the design of C++ templates and the C++ STL. C++ gets a lot of flak but templates are very powerful (if you disregard the complexity). I think that they are actually one of the main reasons why C++ is still relevant. Also I'm starting to think that generic programming might actually be the most powerful paradigm out there (this is just a hunch). This book doesn't take the middle road, only the low level (C++) and extreme high level (abstract algebra) and totally cuts out the middle part (aka boiler plate).

Funnily enough, this C++-like language actually translates very nicely to the modern C++ successors like Swift and Rust (or it seems, I'm in the progress of exploring this).

Has anyone here tried to explore the contents of this book in either Swift or Rust?

But remember that this is not an easy book, I've met very smart people who told me they read only a part of this and are still wrapping their heads around that.
I would add

1a. Management buy-in to devote resources to clean up complete/unsuccessful tests.

I witnessed first hand the ball of mud resulting in 10 years of test upon test upon test. It's a huge impediment to quick iteration; simple changes are hard and hard changes are impossible. It's especially bad because test code tends to be poorly designed and documented due to the get-it-out-the-door mentality.
I'm pretty sure they'll eventually figure out how to get self driving cars working in snow, or rain, with protocols on when to stop that match when humans should.
And it's now almost 2017 when Apple just made 32GB the minimum storage for their iPhone 7.
I'm not sure it's accurate to call this a hedge fund? From a zero hedge article[1] (that also refers to it as a hedge fund)

> "it is all invested in ultra-safe securities."

If we take hedge fund to mean, "pool of less regulated money" then yes, but they're certainly not executing the sorts of strategies that are typically associated with hedge funds.

1. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-23/worlds-biggest-hedg...
Show HN: A comment system over the blockchain
I agree he didn't invent the genre, although he certainly helped popularise and develop it.

"plenty" perhaps oversells the genre pre-Tolkien, and also afaik Jack Vance didn't start writing until well after The Hobbit was published, so I'm not sure he belongs on your list - William Morris would have been a much better example as a direct precursor to both Tolkien and Lewis.
As someone who keeps having the same thoughts and Amiga flashbacks, take my modernized wish list, in case you ever set out to actually do something like that:

Hardware: Smallish form factor, not with an integrated keyboard like the A500 but maybe a flat elongated box that can sit between the keyboard and the display (or wherever people want to put it). It needs to be absolutely silent, or at the very least silent at idle. It needs good audio and a decent, modern GPU. It should have easy user access to RAM, SSD, and other upgradeable parts if applicable. It doesn't absolutely have to be an Intel/AMD CPU, although that would not be the worst idea, but it can't be a low power ARM - it has to have reasonably good performance. USB 3, Wifi, Bluetooth are mandatory! User-controllable GPIO pins would be a huge bonus. So would multi monitor support, preferably up to 3.

Software: a minimal BSD or Linux base stack would be nice, and a sane and tight GUI on top of it. No mandatory cloud shenanigans. Come to think of it, sane and tight should be the overriding software theme. Ship compat libraries so it's easy to recompile existing software for it, especially web browsers and game engines. People who want to ship software for it shouldn't be made to jump through hoops (looking at you, Apple). Choose a single minimal but powerful GUI toolkit (or invent one), and build all the OS GUI with that, make that the default choice for your IDE. No insane plethora of background system services. Fast startup time, under 10 seconds minimum. No console-based tweaking should be required of the user for anything that is within the standard usage envelope, but all system management APIs should also be usable from a text shell if necessary.
The town itself is less than 3,000 people. Tourism is it's major industry, and without it the town would disappear.

> Why don't "tourism people" just pay people constructing buildings to use the colour "tourism people" want?

That implies they could ignore that rule at any time. Reimbursement programs are an increase in paperwork, which many would simply ignore for convenience. This would give the town the "Tragedy of the Commons" problem, erasing it's historic sense (and primary revenue source), and it would become another run-down town like many others in the region.

Is that fair to those who invested heavily in keeping their businesses and homes in that area? Their answer is a resounding "No"

If somebody balks, just like this, there are other more modern and relaxed cities within a few miles that can accomodate their building ideas. These cities even have more access to freeways and trains, so economically it makes sense to put their businesses inside those cities.

Instead, the primary draw towards this town IS it's historical authenticity, and thus the people living there keep it maintained through it's building codes. There is no other reason why a business or homeowner would live in that area, so it makes sense to keep with it's character. If that's too onerous, then perhaps your motivations for building should be reexamined.
No one has been born depressed.
How to convert video to lossless WAV format
Men with anxiety are more vulnerable to cancer, study says
I hadn't realized we were discussing R.R. Martin here.
It is very likely that the most important new algorithms in the next few decades will involve probability theory.
Show HN: RocketAmp – Google AMP for Shopify
(as a neutral party btw), I thought public pressure from the dnc leaked records showing how they fixed it would have had her replaced.
North Korea Has Accidentally Leaked Its Propaganda Websites
He's leaving out some words that makes it a bit hard to parse:

> [This is] A record of nootropics I have tried, with thoughts about which ones worked and did not work for me.

> These anecdotes should be considered only as anecdotes, and one’s efforts with nootropics [should be considered] a hobby to put only limited amounts of time into due to the inherent limits of drugs as a force-multiplier ...
It really depends on your domain. Knowing more math is never a bad thing. It provides you tools for you to model and solve problems. That said, two areas that I felt most broadened my horizons are probability and linear algebra. They are pretty ubiquitous topics that come up regularly in more sophisticated and exotic algorithms.
About 40 years ago the company I was working for bought a big videotape recorder, and procured a custom controller for it to use it as a large random access storage device. The controller used a large Reed-Solomon code to detect and correct fairly large multi-bit errors. It worked quite well, storing images for Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnel-Douglas aircraft maintenance manuals.