skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do embedded work for a living and can confirm all this. Perhaps bsder is a little too categorical, but C++ is definitely a language that poses additional difficulties for embedded developers. Many people feel that it offers too little in exchange -- that is, when a decent, reasonably non-buggy compiler exists for your platform.

This is not to say that there isn't a lot of embedded C++ code (I don't have numbers, but I suspect C and C++ are a lot closer together than C++'s haters would think) -- or that there isn't a lot of good embedded C++ code. I've seen a lot of good C++ code, and the only reason why I haven't written any is that my C++ skills are so out of date that I have a good chance of borking anything longer than a hundred lines.

And indeed, as bsder points out, a lot of the problems are people/politics-related. It's not that "C++ sucks", it's just that there is so much of it that as soon as you get ten people together, two of them are bound to know and use some gimmick that the other eight don't know about, four of them want to avoid exceptions while the other six used to do Java so they have no idea how else you're supposed to deal with failures, and three of them love C++11's new features but that's irrelevant because your compiler (which, by the way, costs about as much as half a kidney on the black market) barely holds together and the team it was outsourced to back in 2007 can barely patch up the null pointer dereferences, let alone add new features.

If you have full control over your codebase and don't (or barely) need to integrate anything from the outside world, it's actually OK. Otherwise, there's a good chance that you're in for such a rough ride that you'll swear you'll never use C++ again.
> I think I did some of my best work when assigned a desk essentially in a corridor ...
> .. but the worst of all for me is emotional noise e.g. people bickering. Trapped in a small office with unpleasant people ..

There lies the problem. If its some unrelated people discussing stuff that doesn't interest us then its just background noise and get filtered out. But in office space it is exactly the opposite. You sit around with people who are doing similar work and most often what they discuss is directly or indirectly related to you/your-work. This is a problem.

Another thing i notice is that concentration is multi stage process. Sometimes when you are between something then its easy to get into the zone. But at times when doing some meta thinking, analysing where your thought process is correct or when trying to get grasp over a difficult problem, where again you have do analyse your thinking, it requires conscious effort to stay focused. If the environment is conducive then it becomes that much easier.
Not sure if you're teaching in the above environment, but one of the schools I teach A-level at has a high number of maths-failing pupils, and as a result, many of those I teach are re-sitting maths in both their first and second years that I teach them. It's a typical case of Gove not thinking of the consequences of his (backwards, IMO) ideas - these people are definitely part of the generation you outline; it spreads so they not only think they are bad at maths (which admittedly is often true), but that they are incapable of any meaningful learning. Those who do take functional skills and pass at least feel they have made some progress - despite this being a level of maths which most people would feel was far below the age level of someone taking at aged 17.

I know that anti-Gove rants are all over the place, but most of the people I know outside education don't have a clue about how poisonous his ideas have been; they don't withstand any serious scrutiny, but on the face of it may seem sane, so people who haven't thought about it will defend them. His replacement isn't far off his level, and I seriously fear for the future of education in the UK.
A shame. WoSign were super generous with their free certificate offering long before LetsEncrypt was a thing. They were a a handy alternative.

We should be thanking them for their free certs, and thanking them again now for giving us another example of how the PKI is a farce. The chances are there are a bunch other 'reputable' CAs out there playing these games.
Show HN: A Natural Language Query Engine Without Machine Learning
Sounds like you are describing reddit to me :P
Yep, I used to do a lot of work for indigenous communities, designing databases and the like. I was amazed to discover that something like a known date of birth was a rarity, especially amongst the Aboriginal elders. No birth certificates. Usually the data was obtained from other family members, purely from memory or based on other events around the same time.

In a lot of cases, only the year was known. If you were lucky, the month as well. We had to strip out all the DATE data types from our database because the validations were constantly failing, or we would have an inordinate number of people born on the 1st of January on a given year. We had to split the date fields out into three separate drop downs, each with a '(unknown)' option so that validation and statistical reporting would be meaningful.
I'm getting a browser security warning on the url on Android.
It's the CIA, there is a high chance that they are spending more money to fuel the revolution.
It's the same purpose, not the same usage. The administration is slightly different, the Adrenaclick injector doesn't have quite as fancy a safety cap and should be held in the thigh for longer.

https://www.epipen.com/about-epipen/how-to-use-epipen

http://adrenaclick.com/how_to_use_adrenaclick_epinephrine_in...

I think there is a legitimate concern about the usage being different, but I'm not sure it should prevent it from being substituted.
There is a twitter. He's not very active these days though https://twitter.com/richardfeynman
Looking at those pictures, yes.

I would need more pictures to be confident in the answer, but I think that subjectively the bottom two look more ordered (I initially thought the first was of a greater magnification) and I suspect there is some absolute measurement that can be made from the relation of the length and branching factor of the structures.
So name your function "ensure_line_return"!
If the only thing I need to do is show up at a door at a time, why do I need to sit in front of wall-to-wall advertising for hours first?

Why, in short, do I need to wait at all?
Yes, absolutely. I, for example, am one, though I admit I was born only after humanity has visited the Moon. Still, more than 16 years ago.
You know what's also an open-ended programming game?! Programming.
Some of that is just bad material (#3, shapes that should be shaded are not shaded). Others try to explain how at least I do arithmetic mentally (the particular example 7 + 7 feels silly because the answer was drilled to my brain in primary school, but the idea of decomposing number to parts that easier to sum together is sound -- and it feels like nice intuition to algebraic way of thinking). On the other hand, insisting in drawing graphical representations might be boring and feel silly if you already got it.

In other words, the Common Core seems to get flak because some of the material is simply bad and sometimes seems not to have good idea how to convey the Common Core ideas.
this is insane. someone should create a js obfuscator that converts human readable code to this.
Some airports are relenting, but you must stand.
Ask HN: What tool do you suggest for Websocket development?
Hi

I'm implementing a Webscoket server using go, and I need to have an interactive way to send messages to it and debug it. For REST APIs, I use Postman, and it had simplified my workflow hugely. Is there something like that for Websockets? Currently I'm using Dark Websocket Terminal, and it leaves much to desire for.

Thanks a lot.
True, but as a game, it's a bit too open-ended for my taste.
http://m.imgur.com/gallery/th6Ua

http://www.epinephrineautoinject.com/
I've run node tasks that run in pretty low memory... when processing streams I'll often use the command-line option to expose gc, and force it after each item... runs very light that way.
Compatibility with legacy software that only understands the older certs is my guess.
It's actually pretty good! Trapped me for couple hours solving some non trivial puzzles!
And taste of nothing more then exactly as much salt as it is topped with, without even the benefit of a crunch of the slice of toast which is unable to hold its own under the onslaught of up-bulking water released during the cooking^Wboiling process (and wouldn't be able to even without the water because modern bread is so laughably unbreadlike).

I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
I am not bothered by their English or using a proof reader. I just think it's hypocritical to throw stones at people for not having good English when they don't operate in an English speaking market when yours isn't perfect either.

Also do you honestly think that was written by the business team, do you think the business team would have been able to properly edit a technical document in another language?
It is linked at the end of the article:

http://www.jsfuck.com/
Towards Deep Symbolic Reinforcement Learning
With some code you don't need to run it though an obfuscator for it to be obfuscated
this would obviously be a fun thing to do, but I wonder how much larger the code will get via this means of obfuscating.

Maybe space isn't a concern in your use case though...
The title is incorrect; you need "!" and the only reason why I clicked on the article was that doing it without "!" would be a BIG deal. The title of the original article is "A Javascript journey with only six characters" and the topic has been posted/reposted and explained more times than I can count on HN
DNS servers have in fact been modified to make it much harder to use them in amplification attacks, by adding response rate limiting - see http://www.redbarn.org/dns/ratelimits
some how the link to
http://aem1k.com/aurebesh.js/
is missing, where he takes this one step further.
F# was based on OCaml. OCaml was attempted to be promoted several years ago and failed miserably. Yes, there are people interested in it, but not in a really serious way and only in small numbers.

I just searched through every article I could find and see that through sites and you would not believe the amount of "how can we evangelize it" sort of things I found- a site dedicated to evangelization, two GitHub PRs for part 1 and part 2 of evangelization. A post about why evangelization isn't working and how to fix that. An article in Code magazine which is controlled by MS.

From what I can see in HN comments, there is a minority of people that want to try it but don't use it. Quora has a recent answer about those using F# and mostly it's a short list of companies almost no one's heard of.

After all of that, a recent post on HN about F# got ~170 points for front page.

It might be a fine language for some, but it's not in the top three. If you don't believe me, just spend some time researching the amount of desperation in the evangelization.

I'm not sure how it got all of those points, but it seems like it wasn't purely on merit.
Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times has a section where the tramp is working on an assembly line and parts are coming down the conveyor. He has at it and manages to get 10 yards ahead of the conveyor, and has a rest. Just as he is relaxing, the conveyor belt catches up and he has to start again.

In my opinion a lot of the Coalition policies (housing benefit changes, nursing/police/teaching pension changes, reduction in the number of nurse/teaching training places) were like Charlie's conveyor belt. They got a couple or three years of savings but now the belt has caught up. It is almost as if they did not expect to form a second government.

Many colleges are using the legacy syllabus this year. So when the majority of those come back again next year, we will be catching up with the conveyor because of the topics previously on the Higher tier added to the Foundation. I especially like it when a youngster 'taught' (i.e. coached in a smattering of topics) Higher tier can tell me some half remembered facts about the sine rule but has to use her fingers to work out seven sixes...
That's the fault of product managers and focus group specialists. Programmers don't get much input into the design, at least when I was there. It can be good if you just like to code.
Isn't that SV/WASP-centric policy virtually racism?
Of course a social uprising in Tunisia is very unlikely to spread to the USA. Movements in the UK, Australia and Canada however...

As for staying off the wires. Thanks to the network effect you need to have a large portion of your network do the same.
For some reason, attempts at humour here on HN never leave readers indifferent. I should say thank you, I was very tempted by a 'reel of transistors' version.
He's not throwing stones at people, he's throwing them at the company, WoSign. FWIW, I agree. They should have gotten (i.e. paid) someone to write a coherent document for this important communication.
Yes obviously
Just used it for a while.
Pros:
Good concept.
Love that it's only 3.7mb to download.
One hand usage thing is good. Would be useful while commuting.
Cons:
Couldn't understand or make sense about the note feature. I'm not sure where it's related or linked. To the entire day or to particular task?
Wouldn't be typing the same things everyday so need a repeat feature.
Calendar view would be great.
It's not about a lack of support for SHA-256 on the CA side. But backdated SHA-1 certs are in demand because they allow other systems to keep working, systems like embedded/PoS computers that lack support for SHA-256, while simultaneously dodging errors on modern browsers that only allow SHA-1 certs if they were issued before a certain date.

Wosign was certainly capable of issuing SHA-256 certificates. But the customers needed SHA-1 certificates with a backdated issue timestamp. And Wosign was willing to fake the issue timestamp on new certificates, probably a lucrative market because no other reputable CA would be willing to do so.
Serious question, can you tell me how you use it in a way that you love it? Maybe I'm using it wrong, but I find it to be one more thing on the list of shit I gotta do today. I receive so little value in my day to day life that its barely worth it.
If the you find the policy so absurd, why not just stop using the service now? This sort of behavior, opposing policies but only acting on it when it affects you directly, is precisely what gives this "random social network" so much power.
it's not a negative term, so what's the problem?
Yes, it would? One would just have to move the point where it splits in the bottom right a bit up.
Oh sorry, how could I miss that :( Fixed it now
> Stay off the wires (including finance), and it's very hard for them to see much of anything.

NGOs. [yet again with silent (dumb?) downvotes in the same comment chain that mentions "network effects".]
Blue Man Group: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
> Wosign was certainly capable of issuing SHA-256 certificates. But the customers needed SHA-1 certificates with a backdated issue timestamp.

So they had a special side deal to get backdated certs? There's no way they were doing this for everybody or for "regular price" right?
Most offices already have dedicated space for discussions and exchange of ideas. It is called "kitchen", or "watelcooler area". Rest of the space should be private offices to do some quiet, focused work.
This is an extreme demonstration of the validity of a delightfully snarky blog post by Robert Harper on how dynamic typing is actually static typing using a unitype:

https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lan...

A string is a Boolean is a number is a function, and braindead conversions can happen without anyone noticing. How does one keep their sanity using a language like that?
See: fika culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fika_(Sweden)#Work_break
Yahoo was hacked and knew about the hack 2 years ago, but didn't tell users. Shame on Yahoo.

Yahoo works with the NSA and hands over our emails to the government, and is under gag order. Pretty sure all major players are in bed with the NSA... Microsoft, Google, Apple... nothing new here. Shame on US Government.

Yahoo has, apparently, a legitimate gender discrimination suit pending... the top managers were 20% women, then a year later were 80% women. If it's really that simple... shame on Yahoo. If it's more complicated... if we're talking a group of 10... that's not a huge deal, if we're talking a group of 100 that's a huge deal. Shame on... who knows.

All of this news coming out in such a short time frame... feels like Verizon is just doing what they can to get Yahoo for a lower price. Feels coordinated; and when something feels coordinated look at who benefits.
Doesn't matter they violated the chain of trust, the fact that they took extra money to do this doesn't make it any more or less of an offense.

EDIT: Was reading out of date info :)

~~However like some one else pointed out out of the discussion in the group looks like it was a technical bug, which is still bad, but at least not maliciously bad.~~
Gah HN why you still no do markdown....
If you're deliberately misinterpreting my post, we're done. If you're not, I see no point in engaging further with you.

Once again, if only for the peanut gallery: you are asserting that no sex workers have agency in the matter of their employment. Yes or no?
Where would all the sex workers who disagree be without you to tell them how they really feel!
That has nothing to do with animal welfare, but is indeed a core human interest.
There were a ton of firmware issues earlier. They have been (mostly) ironed out now. It was baffling when SP4 launched with so many issues. You'd expect that they would have learnt a lot from fixing the issues on SP3.

OT: Let's see how they fare with the SP5. I hope they upgrade the Surface 3 this time.
Swagger Ain't REST – Is That OK?
Relay Server for the Secure Shell Chromium Plugin
For the record, the game is 50% off here (and 10% goes to a charity of your choice): https://www.humblebundle.com/store/tis100
Interestingly, several western sites also have side deals to get SHA1 certs backdated or otherwise whitelisted, including Google and CloudFlare.
In my opinion: Gove's main change in Maths was in the exam syllabus that is taken at age 16. The new syllabus will be examined for the first time this summer, most schools started teaching the material in 2015. It will take another 3 years or so to see the effect of that on the GCSE classes (basically age 14 to 16) and then another five years for earlier years to shift what they do.

Change takes a bit of time when it is 700,000 children in each year group moving through 10 years of compulsory education. Politicians know this but the news cycle requires changes on top of changes...
There's one person left from the previous century too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Morano
With something like flowtype.org.
> First of all, that's not what cargo cult means...

Per the definition on the linked wikipedia page cargo cult programming is "ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose", "results of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle" and "organizations that attempt to emulate more successful development houses". It's of course based on the concept of cargo cult behavior, where you try to achieve success by imitating external properties without the substance.

I'm saying that Google by having things like a challenging admissions process, predictable career path, stark focus on credentials, all-inclusive perks and campus environment are trying to imitate an elite school which is an environment where many people at Google felt successful. By doing that they recruit computer science heavy coders which, at least when they are inexperienced, tend to overly rely on CS style programming (advanced techniques, optimizations, correctness) in favor of other concerns of software engineering (organizational friction, code flexibility, overall design). There's evidence that candidates that want to work at companies like Google often cram these types of questions without necessary having used them in real world projects. I would say both imitation of academia, over reliance of CS as a factor in recruiting and the risk of neglecting software engineering in favor of computer science techniques is relevant to the concept of cargo cult and cargo cult programming.

> Your argument is so bereft of anything resembling logic that you have to resort to completely irrelevant asides.

The whole point of the cargo cult concept is that you do things that in the end is ineffective. We all know that Google has a lot of smart people, with credentials and that can write code. Yet, that doesn't always seem to produce good result as far as shipping products. Yes, one could blame management but that is also a factor of company culture.

> I suppose they should just hire random 14 year olds to do their engineering since software quality is irrelevant.

Why would you accuse me of "irrelevant asides" and then bring up "random 14 year olds". Software quality is subjective. One could argue that writing, both as part of developing and documenting software, is essential for software quality. You seem to use a lot of rhetoric that isn't relevant to the discussion at hand.

> You seriously think that engineers won't have occasion to use loops, iteration, and data structures resembling lists?

That's not the point. There are other ways to find out if people can manage these things that doesn't favor people with a theoretical background. Other method might be looking up peoples portfolios, having them submit code they've written, pair programming or reasoning around example code.

Googles hiring process is adopted for how Google works. Having a common theoretical framework might be important at Google. But that doesn't mean that people who doesn't fit into that profile can't be good software engineers, nor that this process is even feasible for other companies.
It was definitively done on purpose based on customer requests. Look at the linked PDF, section 9.2.
I write a bot that makes technically correct yet obnoxious statements on HN - say, if it detects a race-related article "all lives matter", an article on golang "no generics makes the language less powerful", or an article on spacex "still not profitable".

Am I dealing with pedants and fanboys? Am I slaying the Valley's sacred cows? Or am I pointlessly degrading the quality of posts? Will such an effort be productive? Will it convince anyone that I'm right?
> The GUI was not as fast as it could be, but it was cross-platform, user-friendly, and it worked.

The UI was slow as hell, even practically unusable on something like a netbook at the time.

> I'm talking about Google Wave. It was federated, it was very advanced, and it failed spectacularly. Keep that in mind as you make further predictions.

As far as I remember Google suddenly decided to drop it after a very very short time frame. This combined with the bad experience of a slow UI practically buried it in the ground and the world moved on. What failed there was Google, we do not really know if the general concept of wave is a fail neither if its federated protocol is a fail. Most importantly I don't think wave tells us anything about the prospects of federal social networks in general.
In a related but tangential story about the difficulty of getting a blue color, the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to "Ivette Bassa, constructor of colourful colloids, for her role in the crowning achievement of 20th century chemistry, the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...