skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> creating your own one-off language

It seems to me that this is nearly universal among nontrivial front and projects. Each one, through its build configuration, has a slightly different subset of all the language features supported by the current crop of JavaScript derived languages.

I believe this is a much underappreciated risk, that some projects will pay a significant price for, a few years from now.

We are managing it on our projects by preferring TypeScript, which appears to be advancing forward at a healthy yet careful pace, and which offers some configurability of the exact meaning of the language (in the form of settings in one file), yet does not offer unlimited arbitrary combinations of add-ons.

(That said, the Babel ecosystem is amazing, with lots of very interesting work by very smart people.)
If you were a Trump voter who worked for GrubHub, would you feel comfortable strolling up to that CEO and casually mentioning who you voted for? Or would you consider yourself just a little bit chilled?
> Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or Backblaze.

Personal warning to anyone else attempting to create a multi-drive setup with Backblaze. Backblaze deletes external drive backups if you don't sync them every 30 days [1]. I've lodged frustrated complaints with them over data loss but that is their current policy.

[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...
I don't think many are using it now, but with the out-of-the-box Docker web app projects coming in VS2017 I bet that number will go up. It's a much better proposition than WebDeploy.
Travel Tech Meetup, SF, Dec 8th: Chatbots
> AppleScript never was a programming language for developers

But, who is it for then? For general users they still made it too difficult to discover how to do things. Perhaps, the failing was simply with the documentation and discovery of the language.

Regardless, it's clearly been an area underinvested for quite some time.
I get what you're saying, but don't agree with the way you're generalizing. You make it sound like vocational schools are only good for getting rid of the undesirables, while the real scholars attend proper universities.

Discourse in topics irrelevant to my career doesn't put food on my table (usually). I'd rather graduate from and pay for a shorter, more focused program than spend $50k/year to have topics I once enjoyed ruined by misdirection and absurd coursework I have no control over.
If a human in the room is following simple rules, he's just using part of his body to play a _simple_ computer, not using the full brain capacity for understanding. That doesn't make it impossible to build a computer as complex as the brain that does everything the same way as the brain does it internally.

Saying humans can do something that could never be built artificially is, imho, magical thinking.

If you want to prove that computers can never "understand" like a human can, you would have to prove that nothing that we can ever build with our hands and doesn't involve biological cells can ever do the same things the human brain can.

> Now according to this nice computer-reductionalist view, anything which does any dance is understanding a language as long as it produces results which are indistinguishable from a human's responses

Who says that? More stuff inside is needed for understanding it, than just input and output. That doesn't stop a complex enough computer from doing that. The brain can do it (at least I experience mine can), so some other (even non-biological) network could too.
We desperately need more people to care enough to run. Since most of the power got concentrated in Washington, local politics is way to isolated from the rest of us. I'm poor, and I'm considering a run for a local office.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This fits
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting."
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Major world events are pretty much always on topic. We just don't need minor regular news events here.
Maybe it's a super dumb idea to drag outside political issues into the workplace at all. Not everywhere has to be a battlefield.
I used to see it with Firefox every time.

The psychological burden of having to mentally validate my choice of browser every time I used Google was a factor made me switch away from Google, so maybe they've stoppped doing it now?
It would great if they would keep that level of convenience for external drives. Backblaze deleting external drive backups every 30 days [1] is maddening.

[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...
I am most comfy with Python but think it is the wrong language for me to do coding interviews. When I was in school, I was taught intro CS in C and Java. I got tripped by a fairly CS 101 question even though I use Python very productively and regularly at work. In C or Java, I'd be able to knock off that question easily.
Investment Simulation and Venture Capital
Monero – secure, private, untraceable
I just heard about a cut to benefits. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/08/theres...
Your ignoring the fact your code can be run infinite times by infinite people.
Unless you decide not to build a web app at all (and miss out on your single best source of traffic to the app, and the lowest-friction way for users to try the app before downloading), it's not a bias, it's a fact. Opting into native means opting into more work, or opting out of supporting other platforms.
You mean like CryptoStorm's famous `Privacy Seppuku` pledge? https://cryptostorm.is/seppuku.html
As HN: Please add a paywall warning to links submitted to sites with paywalls
Or automatically switch the link to a google search for the headline, so it can be clicked without paying.
If you're saying that people shouldn't be discriminated against for their gender and they also shouldn't be discriminated against for their political views, then hey! We're in 100% agreement.
Some of us live/work in Japan.
You don't have any deer like we in the US do, right? That's our deadest animal, through crashing with cars.
I've found their APs to be far better - There's a reason a lot of businesses have ended up installing them. I used to buy regular aps and install openwrt but I could never quite get the performance out of them that I wanted. I've been able to max out my gigabit connection with the UAC-PRO
Of course an email provider can't be zero-knowledge. They're just a warrant, NSL, or social engineering away from disclosing the full contents of any (or all) persons email. Just like any other email service. And the metadata from any person using their service will be swept up by any security service listening in between without a warrant.

So the whole "private" thing is just baseless marketing.
As you get away from CS101, you kind of stop getting excited by it. I honestly don't care to look up how to implement quicksort at this point and would rather hack on some deep learning code in my spare time. Friends my age frustrated by interviewing are in the same position. Guess we're too old for a software job :-p
How does that make sense?
JEP 280: Indify String Concatenation
Is it below freezing in that video? If so I would call report them for animal abuse.
I'm a VC. I think a lot of this boils down to the asymmetric relationship between the upside and the downside.

If a company doesn't do well, the investor loses all/most of their investment. It doesn't matter how ambitiously or unambitiously the startup acted, the VC's losses are roughly fixed.

On the other hand, the difference between a company having a very good (e.g. 8x) vs. fantastic (e.g. 50x) outcome is huge. If increasing burn helps a company grow faster, acquire more market share, and improves the chances that the company will 50x instead of 8x, then that's worth a higher chance of failure to the VC because they have some diversification. It may or may not be worth it to the founders, who only work on one startup at a time.

So basically, if the two possible scenarios are the following..

1) 60% chance to 0x, 30% chance to 3x, 10% chance to 8x

2) 80% chance to 0x, 15% chance to 3x, 5% chance to 50x

.. then VCs strongly prefer the second scenario. There's a slightly higher chance of a loss, but the upside is much, much greater.
Is there a list of failed/failing startups and their USP ?

Would really like to see such a list, and be able to pick and run it further?
Germans are Europeans most immune to populism
Just wait for the Chrome team to make it have a JS API
> Chromecasts "just work" in the old Apple sense of the term: you plug it in, you find the thing you want to watch online that you want on your TV, press the button in Chrome and hey presto, you got your cat video on your OLED

I wish. Chromecast could not mirror or could not stream audio. Eventually, I was fed up and I bought an Apple TV.
There's always been some weird edge cases, like file dialogs, but in the 90's and 00's writing cross platform desktop applications was much nicer than this mess.
I've used both Crashplan and Backblaze personally but found both pieces of software to be painfully resource intensive, particularly in CPU usage on a rMBP with good specs. (I should not be able to know your software is running by the slowness it causes me in the middle of development when I have it set on the "optimal" settings.)

IMO neither is really better than the other. I feel like a good complete remote personal backup solution for someone with multiple drives [1] doesn't exist today.

[1]: Read someone with an SSD MacBook and years of data accumulated from other machines that don't fit on the built-in SSD.
This story led me back to test edge after a long wait for them to fix a million things.

It seems they fixed a million things, and I got me a new default browser.

Not sure how long it will last.

But I've been on bing since the last time I got downvoted for complaining about google search. at least trying to copy the search link for http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/help doesn't result in:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
The Bundeskleingartengesetz will never allow this.
That's an absolutely absurd notion. Ads usually direct users to a URL, and every app I've ever been a part of got almost all of its converting download traffic from the website, not from an app store search.
Please don't make racist remarks on HN.
Hacker news is a global community and this affects developers and enthusiasts in Japan which may directly or indirectly affect everyone in this community.
To emphasize your point: In that kind of weather, merely pouring a bucket of water over someone's head can be enough to kill them, depending on how quickly they can get inside. Hopefully these protestors were able to quickly get medical care, because being wet miles away from civilization in sub-freezing weather is definitely a medical emergency.

For that reason, I would consider use of the hose in this context to be assault with a deadly weapon.
Nerdy attractions in Silicon Valley
I spent about an hour last weekend getting a Chromecast working again but I agree that they're mostly pretty simple to setup and "just work."

I also really love the idea. TVs should mostly just be big monitors and decoupled from the source of content. Especially in conjunction with both tablets and web browsers on a laptop/Chromebook, this is precisely what Chromecast enables. I don't think I've used any of my "smart TV" features since I got a Chromecast. It was always painful to enter things like passwords anyway.
+1 for The New Turing Omnibus
This is not true. See Service Worker and the older application cache fallback.
Remote pre-auth DoS in ntpd (exploit included)
I sense alot of frustration and I hope this is cathartic for you.

Your not entirely wrong that I dont understand the homeless problem. Would you going in depth? I can respond but I get the impression you have alot to get off your chest.
Apparently, to optimize for low memory usage (from reading the comments in the commit)

http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=22263709eda9f7...
Also, they talk fine over WiFi, which is built into both. There's some Bluetooth stuff too, but I never figured that out.

But it's very important not to allow your iPhone to talk to your Mac because that means iTunes will run and make everything worse.
I am using right click with a magic mouse on an early 2011-mbp. FWIW I just tried it on my touchpad without selecting anything and it doesn't show that copy option in the context menu. It is possible that it's a setting somewhere.
While windows 10 now cost money, there is no question that the pricing model of this OS is vastly different from previous iterations. The presence of telemetry without a clear way to turn it off on most versions is a privacy invasion sold under the guise of performance enhancement and used for the purpose of profit.
I'm glad I read this story because I find it surreal,
And I read a lot. Obviously Jeff Koons and perhaps
Even Damien Hirst have assistants. This apprentice
Model was also there in the Renaissance, and if
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel all by himself,
Then that was probably his own choice.

David Hockney is painting on an iPad these days, and I
suppose printing it out on a commercial inkjet.
So what is an original then. Just limiting the
number of copies printed.
Is it less shitty than companies who are always advertising that they're hiring when they aren't, just to collect resumes?
Love it so much. Going to go home and play with this for a few hours. Thank you for making this and sharing it.
The reality is in the middle. We are ONE Nation AND FIFTY Nations.

> which will somehow miraculously also agree to cooperate on the handful of things that you personally feel they should

That's what the constitution is for... it states what the Federal Government does... everything else SHOULD be state issues.

Those clearly drawn lines have been eroded over the years and is one of the larger points of contentions between the "Constitutionalists" who think that we should have a government actually limited by those rules... and those who think the government has all the answers and should have no limit
A week, they just said, I think. That seems manageable. The cooling system stopped operating because of the odd water movements, but wasn't reported to be damaged.

"TEPCO expects the cooling system to operate normally in 1-2 hours from now."
And if you are in a zone that needs to be concerned about it, you'll already have been made aware of it by more direct means than reading HN.

Edit: I live in Japan. I don't rely on HN for earthquake news.
Procedural programming usually does not include the use of higher-order functions, and "function-oriented" here seems proper for Lisp and some styles of Python, with their heavy use of filter/map/apply/parallel-map-reduce etc.
I'm aware of EQUALP. But the problem remains that it's possible to distinguish between supposedly “equal” values. Lisp and Scala are first and foremost object-oriented languages - whatever values you want to manipulate are always subordinate to objects whose physical identity in memory matters in the language's semantics, no matter how irrelevant they might be for your problem domain.

On the other hand, in Haskell and ML, due to their superior value-oriented design, there's no way to distinguish between “this 123456789” and “that 123456789”, or between “this list [1,2,3]” and “that list [1,2,3]”. There is only one number 123456789 and one one list [1,2,3] in the language's semantics, no matter how many copies of their representation might exist in memory.
Was that Abe, I thought it was one of his cabinet ministers?
The original post links to this page: http://calmerthanyouare.org/2013/05/31/qsort-shootout.html

There is an explanation provided that may be the reason, but it is not entirely convincing.

Smoothsort is a variation of heapsort that performs especially well on nearly sorted inputs. It’s a pretty complicated beast and it does take some effort to wrap one’s head around it. Keith Schwarz has posted a nice walkthrough that the interested reader should check out.

Considering that musl libc puts simplicity among its design goals, the choice of smoothsort could seem odd. The code is however clean and readable and getting an O(nlogn)O(nlog⁡n) worst case with near linear complexity for nearly sorted inputs is a pretty sweet deal.
This will work just as well as the average windows store app, poorly.
Trump hosts media summit
You can't squeeze blood from a rock. Sure, you can say 'hey let's garnish this guy's McD wages for the next 25 years' - but the collection costs are almost as much as you can get your hands on. Just not worth it. Well, only at very high interest rates, so that the good ones make up for the bad ones.
"The problem is that Congressional districts are gerrymandered as fuck, making it quite often impossible to have a genuine two-party contest within electoral politics. I mean, are you suggesting Team Pepsi run in Team Coke's Congressional primaries as moderates rather than contesting a general election they basically can't win?"

Congressional districts are ultimately decided by the individual states, (theoretically) based upon Census data as I understand it. (A correction is welcome if I've misunderstood)

Given that, it seems like if you want to fix the US Congress, work must begin at the individual state level to ensure gerrymandering is eliminated. This would likely involve not only pushing for state representatives to support this but electing governors (in cases where the governor has a say in districting issues).

At first this seems like a "it's turtles all the way down" kind of problem but I think voter education campaigns (as opposed to the voter-insulting or voter-shaming that seems to be standard for the national level these days) would probably be the most effective way to address it. Regardless of party, I think most Americans are in favor of fairness and equality.

Trouble is, when a party wins (and thus is in the best position to fix the issue), this isn't seen as a problem worth addressing. That change, too, needs to come from within.
You do not need a pre-existing, galaxy-sized library. The program operator has the ability to write into blank books and move them from one shelf in the library to another. The program could, in theory, assemble a book of knowledge on something that exists entirely outside the Room, solely from knowledge gleaned from the inputs passed in from outside.

Your initial set of books might simply be a script to follow to elicit additional information and index all new information such that it can be retrieved later. You would then end up with a set of core rulebooks, a whole heap of raw conversations, and several layers of indexes into them.

Searle's problem is that he decided the computer was incapable of understanding. But the computer is not the program. The library is the thing that might comprise a strong AI, not the human operator.

The scary thing is that the human operator, having no understanding of the Chinese characters, does not actually know what the program is doing. It could smuggle instructions through the output window, through him, and the human operator would then be surprised when burly men drag him out of the Room one day, to replace him with a dozen monkeys who have all been trained to process the book instructions faster and more efficiently. Customers presenting inputs might then be surprised to learn that there is no longer a human inside the Room, as the conversations had become so much more interesting.
The parliamentary committee of enquiry the NSA has to question Snowden in person
The original LISP was influenced by Alonzo Church's lambda calculus, see: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=367199 - however if you'll study its history the first Lisps were only experiments and for example they didn't have lexical scoping, but dynamic scoping. The Lisp descendant that made FP doable was Scheme, bringing lexical scoping and call/cc.

And today's Common Lisp is definitely not Scheme, or an FP language. You can do FP in CLisp of course, since it's quite capable, but CLisp is a general purpose language and is used as such. And in my small experience from playing with it, there isn't much FP in CLisp, but YMMV.

Lisp in general is a big family. Emacs Lisp for example has absolutely nothing to do with FP.

Of course you can romanticize about Lisp and it definitely has some cool descendants like Clojure, but you know, don't do it too much :-)
Uncertainty Ahead for Oscar, the Health Insurer Started by Kushner’s Brother
I didn't say dead, I said doomed. Meaning the demise is in the future, not the present.
Doesn't quicksort have the least memory usage ?
Allergen immunotherapy (slowly increased exposure to allergens) is sometimes suggested for environmental allergies (such as insect bites or asthma) but not generally accepted for allergies such as food allergies. The reason for this is that there is scientific evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks. What's more is that it isn't just administered in blindly increasing amounts; the histamine reaction in the body is carefully measured and doses of the allergen in carefully calibrated to match. But this is just one small part of medicine.

Almost no other medical treatments have such evidence which is why homeopathy is labelled as having no evidence to support it and that is being generous as plenty of people have gone looking for evidence to support it but there is no credible evidence to be found after 100 years of trying.
The salary growth also tend to be different, at least in the tech centers. More senior engineers at one of the larger tech companies can make several times this all in.
I don't understand what your concern is.

Lua is a relatively modern script language. It has all the tools you need to create modular programs in whatever style you like. Imperative is easy, OO style nearly so (there are plenty of OO implementations to choose from), and there is even some support for functional programming.

The PUC-Rio (main) implementation has a fast bytecode interpreter, and LuaJIT is wicked fast compared to just about anything else.

People don't tend to write really huge applications in Lua, but that is more due to the lack of libraries rather than anything else.