skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it unwise to start a large, new project with CoffeeScript?
I know it's grown out of fashion, but I still really like CoffeeScript. ECMA 6 is great at all, but ECMA 6 + CoffeeScript seems even better. I'm sick of braces and semicolons if I don't need them.

I avoid the more syntactically ambiguous parts and try to use sensible whitespace.

Would it a bad idea to embark on a new, large project using 100% CoffeeScript instead of Javascript? Are there any other JS transpilers with a Python/Ruby-ish syntax that would be recommended over it? Should I stop caring so much about syntax sugar?
It seems to be more than compile times. Something about Java, the IDE, and all the other tools/plugins/whatever make it painful to use.

The first thing that usually happens when there's a switch from Java to most other languages is a shrinking of the codebase. That is, it's not uncommon to go from 200,000 lines of code to 20-30,000.

If you still need the runtime speed Java offers, then that's one thing, otherwise, you can use some dynamically typed language like Python or Ruby. I suppose there's also Go, as many can't go without static types.

At the end of the day (especially if all compile times end up being similar), I'd prefer almost any other language over Java. Swift, Kotlin, Nim, Rust, Elixir, Crystal, Julia, D, C#, anything.
To be honest, most Python coders probably never get deep enough in the language to start overriding hash values, and those who do probably understand the implications before they get that deep.
systemd has an initscript compatibility layer; it works with initscripts, and there is no expiration date on that functionality, to my knowledge. What more do you want?
Why are you speaking in the past tense?

COM usage on Windows only increased after Windows Vista and is at the heart how UWP works and user space drivers.
Because it's not just a snapshot—it has a growing diff to the WHATWG spec, and when they do copy over commits they sometimes do so incompletely. (An example of this is the HTML 5.1 definition of document.domain: if you try and set it to any host except for the current one it throws SecurityError; this came about as a result of bogusly applying patch from WHATWG spec.)

As far as I'm aware, most of the annoyance of the W3C fork is the fact that there's good people spending a lot of time on it (instead of, e.g., working on specifying parts of the Web platform that every modern site relies on that are essentially undefined, like the CSSOM), and the fact that it isn't just a snapshot and that it therefore causes confusion with two different, at times contradictory documents.
Udacity Blitz wants you to hire away their best engineers after working on your project... well, well, well
> There's a reason newer buildings use lever handles over doorknobs

For the cats.
The registry was supposed to improve upon dotfiles. In practice there is often one dotfile to delete versus hundreds of scattered registry entries. If an Android app is removed, the local settings are also completely removed, because they didn't just copy the design of windows.
> "In life there's winners and losers and when your car breaks down, your kids get sick or you have to take a second job to pay your mortgage, you don't get to go to a cry zone, you don't get to pet a pony. You have to deal with it."

Meh. People end up learning that lesson at some point. This bill seems stupid and targeted at suppressing anti-trump people.

I do think the people who need to go cry in a room and have grief counseling over the president elect need to get some perspective. If you are that upset then stand up and do something about it. Go join those protesters, get involved politically. Spend the next 4 years fighting against the BS Trump is peddling. Life isn't fair, but you can't just go hide from it.
The Unix/emacs-like keybindings are great, aren't they? They're included in the default bindings of the Cocoa text system, and, though I wasn't able to find references to it in the limited searching I did, it's not so surprising given that OS X comes from NeXTSTEP which was a Unix-based system. I did find that you can change these keybindings as well.[0][1] Pretty, cool, eh?

Minor pendantic nit: ⌘-C, ⌘-V, ⌘-X originate with Apple, so referring to them as "Windows-like" is backwards.[2] Like I said, minor, eh? Normally I'd suggest alternative wording in the interest of providing constructive criticism, but I'm too lazy to do so right now, so feel free to disregard :)

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Co...

[1]: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz...
My email is public on my GitHub profile (it's the same as my git author email, which is also public) for the last few years, and I don't have a huge problem with spam. I get a couple emails occasionally (a few every month), and they're easy to say "no thanks" to.

What made the most positive difference was deleting my LinkedIn account, I was getting way more spam there (via its own messaging system, not via email) that was very unpleasant.
Curious if this is actually true, statistically speaking. Is there some statistically significant relationship between delaying profitability, investment and exit size?

It would be interesting to see aggregated data on this.

Ie, look at companies by cohort, determine if / when they became profitable, how many exited, at what amount, and how many failed, how many flatlined.
How to Seamlessly Navigate Vim and Tmux Splits
It wasn't just Iraq - it was PFI, identity cards, workfare, privatize-everything and a bunch of other stuff including the above-mentioned (and already pretty crap) RIPA. The "tough on crime" tabloid-feed propaganda ended up creeping into their actual political platform (thanks to Blunkett and friends), and by the end Blair just wasn't listening to anyone, completely lost in a Catholic neocon trip with authoritarian undertones. It wasn't just people writing him off, it was him shutting out everyone else and refusing to reconsider what had become untenable positions.
>> How frequently do you get these kinds of recruitment emails?

I'm actively contributing to popular projects, have more than a dozen of followers, and my email is public but I have never received any recruitment emails. It's a pity.
Sure, there will always be room for improvement. However, I disagree with your latter point, putting ignorant, anti-science, religious, magical thinking people into power is really hurting science. Unlike religion, philosophically, Science is always open for improvement.

Edit: I had a comma party.
I used a recruiting tool about 2 years ago that crawled GitHub & other sources, building a profile which including email addresses. One developer's profile didn't have an email address, which I thought was odd, as the email would likely be in a git repo. Sure enough, it was.

As I write this, it occurs to me that there's not a foolproof way to verify an email in the developer's GitHub repos belongs to the same developer. GitHub user janedoe may or may not be the same person that made a commit w/ the email address jane@doe.com.
So would you suggest we should have a safe space where people have to listen to each other?

I will defend people's right to say things I don't like hearing. However I will also defend other people's right to not listen (as long as they don't try to prevent the speech from happening) - that is also a freedom.

To modify a quote: Your liberty to speak ends where I am forced to listen to what you are saying, my freedom to not listen ends where I prevent you from speaking.

Downvoting does not prevent the speech from happening. It merely says I don't like this. Flagging does...
Uh, no, I'm not. But don't let that stop you from jumping to whatever conclusions suit your fancy.
Cinnamon Packets: New Product About to Take Starbucks by Storm
That's a purely ethical perspective (although even in that perspective ethics, I don't think your conclusion is clear-cut at all), but Twitter's decision may be based on social damage rather than just ethics. The damage done by someone who represents power when attacking those with less power is greater than the other way around, regardless of the beliefs of the speakers. This, BTW, is why I'm so frustrated when people understand these things to be about someone taking offense. When society approves (or approves by ignoring) marginalizing actions and speech, there is actual damage being done through social signaling regardless of whether anyone present has been personally offended or not.
Good luck David. Too bad I'm not living there anymore :(
Both examples are invisible. But one works with the flow of getting in your car and the other requires arcane gestures.
Tesla Shareholder Meeting Regarding Proposed Acquisition of SolarCity
I too get the meat I prefer ever since I found this recipe,

https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyhorng/travel-to-new-york-city-...

I never realized how much more flavour your able to get out of chicken thighs. I highly recommend it!
Even at Whole Foods the air cooled chick breast are rarely over 6.99 a pound and it seems like the norm for "boutique" chicken.

I think I got bone in breasts for around $3.79 a pound at publix this week.
Here's a nicely realistic breakdown of the physical affordances involved in useful interfaces in VR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id86HeV-Vb8&t=5m34s
> We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting.

No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.
A Rubyist's Guide to Big-O Notation
There's a fallacy in our history textbooks that Copernican astronomy was so obviously superior to Ptolemaic astronomy. The truth is, it wasn't.

The Copernican model held that planets moved in circular orbits at uniform angular velocity--which is sufficiently wrong that it required only a few less epicycles than Ptolemaic astronomy. You can't fall back on "it's more accurate" since the results weren't really any more accurate. Yet, for this inaccurate results, a Copernican would have to explain:

* The lack of stellar parallax

* How the Earth can rotate around the sun

* Why we don't fall off the planet

* Why the rotation of the planet doesn't throw us off the planet

The Copernicans had no good answers for these questions--the latter were eventually explained by Newton's Law of Gravitation which proved to cement the transition away from geocentrism (the accuracy of Kepler's elliptical orbit also provided another major impetus for the transition, since it didn't need any epicycles. Incidentally, Galileo saw Kepler as a Copernican heretic and viewed his model of planetary orbits as utter rubbish).

Stellar parallax was resolved when we actually found it--in the 1700s. The Copernican attempts to explain it were weak and sometimes involved actual heresy on the nature of God, declared as such by the Catholic church 100s of years prior. Tycho Brahe gave a fairly comprehensive, scientific denunciation of Copernican astronomy based on his stellar observations.

Incidentally, your number for the deaths caused by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition is off by over an order of magnitude. The Spanish Inquisition appears to have executed only around 2000 people, and that for all of the major executions put together doesn't seem more than around 10,000 people. In general, the Inquisition's goal was mainly getting heretics to convert, not executing them: only around 5% of guilty sentences produced executions in the first place.
Agreed that it seems magical. This is one of the areas where the open-source tools are way behind commercial solvers. Cplex and Gurobi are really impressive pieces of software.
Well, they probably have an entire team of paid engineers working on it, and a business model to make additional money. Can you really blame Evan for not being as full featured as that?
> COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables

No, it is actually quite actual, I guess you haven't looked into how Windows 8, 8.x, 10 and UWP applications work.

Great summary, though.
Slightly OT, but I realllyy wish Keybase would prioritise email validation so that it could fulfill the much needed role of general PGP key server, with the added "sum of your social identities" assurance.
Nice - learned something new. Thanks!
Nice write-up. Bonus: It comes just in time for traditional Thanksgiving family arguments!
For effectiveness, here are links to Snowden documents indicating that VPN has thoroughly been defeated. The links are all hosted on the German media outlet that helped to process the documents from Snowden's whistleblowing.

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35513.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35514.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35515.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35516.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35517.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35518.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35519.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35520.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35521.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35522.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35523.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35524.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35525.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35526.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35527.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35528.pdf

http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35529.pdf

With the original site linking there here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-documents-atta...

Namely, do not let stubborn insistence endanger your wellbeing. If you need something in a life threatening situation VPN isn't going to be enough alone to help you.
Writing a C extension for Ruby in 2016
> I did not read his statement as a blanket statement; it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would until I saw your comment.

You haven't been on the internet much have you?

Get out before it sucks all the optimism out of you and replaces it with cynicism.

I feel it's a non-reversible process.
Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
Show HN: Express-routemap – Print express routes in terminal
My worry is that Trump doesn't deny it (well he does publicly), but rather privately realizes that it's already far too late. There's nothing we can do, collapse of global civilization before mid-century is probably inevitable. So what can you do, well ramp up every dirty trick you can think off … because it doesn't really matter and it makes you look good with the public (sorry to say, it does, climate change is still not popular in public discourse).

To stay within the 1.5 to 2ºC bounds, the IPCC already includes massive carbon sequestering technologies in even its most simple recommendations. This is technology that does not exist.
We're betting life on Earth (and truly, it is that dire) on tech that might be impossible to build and scale. Even if we reduce our carbon emissions to 0 today the delayed effects and non-linear dynamics are so poorly understood, that it could very well be that nothing truly can be done to avoid our mass extinction. And, this too goes for carbon sequestering; even if we magically suck the last 5 decades of carbon out of the air, some stuff that is broken can't be fixed. Thresholds, catastrophes, oscillations, bifurcations, etc are real. We really have to think in non-linear systems when dealing with climate, and that is something we're very bad at. Especially when it comes to the media-voter complex.
But picture this, you are driving your car down some road, and everything is fine. You're minding your own business. There's nobody else there, so what the heck, let's ramp up some of the speed. And you go faster and faster. Until bam, unexpected steep corner, your car flies off the road and you die. At that point going back a couple of miles is never going to fix you. It's too late.
It sounds like they're only talking to chicken producers, and the producers have a pretty obvious incentive to lie to regulators if it increases the price they get for chicken.

An easy fix would be to contact retailers like Walmart or Kroger to see what they're paying for chicken. Hopefully the liars would offset and end up closer to the truth.
Source Code Transclusion in HTML
Evidence? Windows has continuously made improvements in security and there has been a lot of emphasis there in the last ~10 years. If you have some reasoning, I want to see it, because I just can't find any studies/blogs/anything one way or the other.

Also note that this isn't intended as a security feature - it is a convenience to get Linux userland programs on Windows without a resource-hogging VM.
In theory this could be illegal in certain states, right? You have to notify all parties that they are being recorded.
* the W3C wanted to publish a "finished" version of "HTML5"

Putting "finsished" into quotes is a hint of sarcasm of the WHATWG side.

* continuously maintaining the specification

Fixing known bugs is also a kind of continuous maintaining of a standard (this is what the W3C and other standard bodies do). That the WHATWG writers put this into contrast of the approach of the W3C is smugness again.

* rather than freezing it in a state with known problems

Fixing bugs and publishing errata is common for standards. The wording implies that this is something the W3C does not do.

* and adding new features as needed to evolve the platform

Having a stable standard which one can refer to (say in project contracts or for tooling) is also an important feature. The WHATWG connives over this and only considers the things that they do as features.

* Since then, the WHATWG has been working on this specification (amongst others), and the W3C has been copying fixes made by the WHATWG into their fork of the document

A very smug way to say "WHATWG does all the work and W3C is a copycat". Though the facts might be true, there are more humble ways to express that.

* (which also has other changes).

OK, what the W3C does is not really important - we can skip over these changes as they are not important (only the WHATWG version is).
Thanks, that went over my head the first time I read it.
The problem here is that + is used for both addition and concatenation. Most of the time you know what you are doing though (smile) and string is the default. When I started out with JavaScript I used -- (minus minus) for addition just to be safe. If you where to compare "22" == 22 ? it would be true, so the type doesn't really matter. If you want to do arithmetics on a string, no problem! Even null behaves like a teddy bear compared to other languages where it can bite you hard. Also note that this child toy language can run on embedded systems, and doing memory safe IO concurrency is so easy it's hard not to, like oops I did ten thousand concurrent request, but it finished in less then a second, because this is 2016 and not 1986 and computing performance and memory has grown exponentially since.
Don't get me wrong though, systems languages has their place in lower level where the bits, bytes and performance matters. Someone once told me that JavaScript is a lot like assembly because you are so free, there is no one telling you "No, you shouldn't do it that way" like in Rust.
> Something about Java, the IDE, and all the other tools/plugins/whatever make it painful to use.

That's an issue with your toolchain.

> The first thing that usually happens when there's a switch from Java to most other languages is a shrinking of the codebase.

This is debatable and depends heavily on the langauge you're moving to. Further, even if true, it will definitely result in either a performance hit or a code complexity hit (heavy use of FP), or even both.

> I suppose there's also Go.

I haven't seen the numbers comparing compile times for equivalent Go and Java codebases, so I cannot comment on that. I'm assuming that Google's main goal with Go is to improve compile times relative to C++ and Java, which they extensively.
Regularly to the public email listed, I just set mine to private, didn't even realize it was public...
Motorola Brick here. My hipster street cred is through the roof.
Cars are designed so that you stop the car by pressing the brake pedal, so that is generally the better way to do it.

* 4-wheel braking, even if it is a 2wd car.

* ABS/Traction control systems are designed around brakes, not engine braking.

* Regenerative braking (if equipped) uses the brake pedal

* There is a smooth application of braking power from 80mph to 0mph. Engine braking is indexed (I can only choose which gear), and cannot bring the car to a complete stop.

* The limiting factor with brakes is traction, which isn't improved by using engine braking.

* Using the brake pedal is a single action. Engine braking involves at least 3 (clutch in, shift, clutch out).

* Brakes are cheaper to replace than clutch/transmission.

* Engine braking alone does not activate brake lights.

The only exception is when there is a danger that the brakes will overheat: descending a large hill or hauling a heavy load. The default instinct should be the brake pedal alone.
Don't Store That in a Float (2012)
Because the President-Elect has shown himself to be dangerously autocratic, almost comically (if it wasn't so tragic) unprepared for governance up to and including things known by 8th grade civics students, grudge-holding and vendetta-seeking, not a fan of freedom of the press, again almost comically (if it wasn't so tragic) sensitive to insults and slights, and shows no sense of even understanding, much less respecting, the institutions that we have built to rein in this sort of thing.

Like I get it, I was in the streets during Clinton's terms and during Bush's terms and I strongly opposed the expansion of the shadow surveillance state under Obama.

But pretending that handing it over to Trump is a normal handover to a Republican administration is whistling past the graveyard.
This issued as US patent 9,386,790, so it's not just an application.

Most can keep fasting intermittently without infringing at least claim 1, typically the broadest claim. If you don't have (and know you have) "pancreatic beta cell destruction," you don't infringe. Even then, if you only cut to 51% of your normal intake or more, you don't infringe. Even then, if you restrict sugar but not protein, you don't infringe. Even then, if your re-feed at greater than 100% of your normal diet (which is common), you don't infringe.
Maybe then just prefer if reachable? Soon enough it's the new standard.
I was wondering about that too: where do the drones deliver? How do they make it safe? What if something happens and the drone falls on people?
Let me have a go:

When I was at university google had 8 employees :) ... who would have imagined then jobs like SEO/SEM Consultant, blogger, online life-coach, android indie game designer, stay-at-home person selling junk on ebay, etc, etc.

For self driving cars... how about:

- Guide (jump into the self-driving van, and I (human) will give you a personal and engaging tour of the region, parks, people, wines .... we'll do a few stops at designated restaurants and souvenir stores (where I'll get a few dollars per visitor).

- Self-driven drug / alcohol / party stuff / shopping / pet / kids / delivery

- Artist (drawing random patterns on the dusty planes with programmed cars?)

- Game host (where you offer 50 cars to some players who do some kind of AR laser tag activity while driven ... all the while trying to figure out the patterns they are driving in to win)

- Real-life marketing consultant (sell pay-per-detour, is paying for the detour worth it? Only if they used keyword X last, week and you have the right store front design, blah, blah, blah).

- Scheduling Assistant (Human helper to call your rides)

- Mobile Mechanic (fast response team to fix those helpless cars stopped on the road because a leaf covered the LIDAR)

Will the number of jobs add up? It's anybody's guess. I think the transition is going to hurt badly. But it will reach a new equilibrium eventually.