skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like FOSS is growing/winning for developers and shrinking/losing for users.

FOSS is used a lot by the major SaaS companies to deliver their solutions, but none of their solutions are themselves FOSS. For example:

Google search, Google email (I mean why not?)
Facebook
E-bay
Amazon
SalesForce
LinkedIN

All of these companies now believe in Open Source for developers, and not for users.

And I think that division has firmed up over time, a new generation of Web-centric developers have come through. Challenger app developers are highly in favour of FOSS for infrastructure, but I don't think they even consider it for the application [0]. For example, Asana, <and a bunch of stuff I don't use>

If anything, I think the steady move towards apps/closed-gardens is a big risk to FOSS as a vision for users, though the vision for developers continues to grow.

[0] what everyone is doing may well be rational from their perspective, we've learnt since the 90's that open source is a development methodology not a business model.
ClojureScript and optimized C [video]
(Kickstarter staff here.)

We did. Those are great projects.

Personally, I see Vault having a lot of community momentum behind it; and it can easily solve some complicated security infrastructure beyond storing secrets (the PKI, MySQL & ssh secret backends are particularly compelling).
Bitbar rules. Currently use it to monitor CloudFormation runs on Amazon Web Services, and active turns on two different play-by-web board game sites.
Who would've guessed that ant makes java in nature as well!
Interactive Graph of Energy Use in the US
I am definitely biased, but I think the includes are important and are almost part of the lesson. Teach someone how to write their own containers and classes, then show them that there is a library they can easily access that does a much better job than they ever will and just how easy it is to use.

And while there are better languages from an educational standpoint, having something that is usable/"real" is quite valuable.

But I definitely approach things from a more practical/industry oriented perspective. so grain of salt.
Yikes. important words that don't appear in this: 'static analysis', 'verification'.

On the 'wow' side, had no idea there was a _Generic macro. Pretty cool.
PSD to HTML is dead. Is it so?
I agree that a comprehensive test suite is valuable, but I don't think it's safe to assume that errors like this will always be caught, no matter how good your tests are. It's not reasonable to write a test for every possible situation that could ever occur. In fact, it's a giant waste of time.

> of how much value is a rigorous type system?

It saves a lot of time on those tests you won't have to write and maintain just to ensure that you're getting your types correct. Strong static types are also good documentation. Some type systems (e.g. Haskell) can even explicitly indicate whether a procedure is pure or has effects. Static types also enable dispatch that can be resolved at compile-time, resulting in more efficient execution. And the list goes on.

Of course, advocates of languages without static types have heard and dismissed all these arguments before. I guess it's really just a matter of taste.
>enjoying the danger

This is a hilariously bad attitude for any software that other people will use. When software crashes, people lose work and time. When software has vulnerabilities, bad guys take advantage of them and build stronger botnets. "The danger" isn't like wiping out when you're pulling a stunt; "the danger" is wasting the good guys' time and empowering bad guys.

>There is a lot of great code written in C, and a lot of crappy code written in C

This is true of any mainstream language, so it's completely uninformative and pre-emptively shuts down the possibility of any meaningful language criticism.
Hmm, good point. Makes me wonder why that policy doesn't apply to video games then. Maybe it does.

I wonder how useful the average person finds book reviews. Regardless, that's a shame about their response.
Would like a comparison to Blueprint that doesn't include the project's landing page.
In part I think it comes from the constant source of heat energy we're surrounded with on Earth. We're used to the idea of taking -300F materials and just allowing them to warm up. On Titan, that procedure subtracts from your minimal energy budget.
My suggestion is to take a trip to China seeing them in real life instead of reading from media!
I have. The movie changes things a bit, but it captures the spirit of the short story very well. I recommend both reading it and watching the movie.
It does not address my latest issue with reviews -- the reviews don't apply to the actual item in question. Looking for a copy of "Don Quixote," the first 5-star review discussed two different translators -- neither of which was the translator for the edition in question. Most of he reviews were for other translations of the book.

This is not limited to books, either, as every now and then I see a review for a different model number of a piece of equipment I am looking at.
This article starts with this quote:

> “We are all fragmented,” Fernyhough writes. “There is no unitary self. We are all in pieces, struggling to create the illusion of a coherent ‘me’ from moment to moment.”

I think brain is deceptive to us and it only bring the part of personality (fragment of experience and memories) which seems to helpful to achieve the short term goal.

Quite possibly choosing that fragment of us can be random because he haven't yet established that free will exists.
Please stop propagating such baseless and contentless opinions. It's sad that,
apart from geographical location, Poland's IT workforce is graded in such
articles by successes in algorithmic quiz competitions that are totally
irrelevant to real-world programming.
You want a really unfathomable amount of money? The Department of Defence's Joint Strike Fighter program is forecast to cost $1.1 trillion over its lifespan. The program is already $117 billion over budget.

China is building a world class railway system for a third of the cost of the budget overrun of a single fighter aircraft project.

http://gao.gov/assets/600/591608.pdf
My biggest gripe is that they merge the reviews of different vendors of the same product, so for heavily-scammed items like laptop batteries, the reviews are almost useless.
I think if you stick to items sold by "Amazon.com" and items that are hard to or not economical to fake you are probably ok.

So complicated electronics, your probably safe. Unless its a premium brand:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3133627/technology-law-...

The fact that Amazon somehow let 90% of a certain set of products (Apple Accessories) be sold as fakes is crazy. Basically, I no longer trust Amazon at all. I will still buy from them, but it just got a lot more tedious (verification required on all my purchases).
> So in this sense, the quality of the C you write is really a reflection of you as a C programmer, not the shortcomings of the language.

Can't you substitute "C" with just about anything in this sentence?

It's all well and good to talk about how "beautiful" a language is, but when people are literally endangered because of totally preventable security vulnerabilities that don't happen in programs written in other languages, it's hard to sway me as to how important this so-called "beauty" is.
So, if a consumer has the reasonable expectation to pay for something which fulfils an immediate need, they do not "really want to support free software"?

Surely you must understand how that is a meaningless phrase?

Software services are R&D _at some point in time_, which is also a meaningless phrase. Right now I can go buy Microsoft Office and fulfil all my document editing needs I'll ever have. However MSOffice to me is a product, not some distant R&D objective.

Maybe FOSS could be better guided by focusing on what a product really is.
Font Awesome Reopens Early Backer options... only 3 days left
Win32 has various different calling conventions, and each function is annotated accordingly in the header files. It's all a bit of a mess, which is presumably why they drastically simplified it in the x64 transition.

(And realistically, for all but the most trivial functions, having one convention is probably a highly reasonable default. Trivial functions should probably be made available to the compiler for inlining anyway. Note also that GCC allows you to override the number of arguments passed on the stack via an annotation on 32-bit x86, if you insist.)
I think there is cyclicity to software development. It starts at some point it goes to greater abstraction and then when it gets a to point it becomes more about getting closer to metal to improve performance and then that cycle skews toward abstraction again.
Lean Belly Breakthrough- Lose Belly Fat Quickly and Easily
I stay away from third party sellers on Amazon these days as much as possible(as in I'll look elsewhere and only come back to them if they're the only viable option) and Amazon had been getting a lot closer to regular retail for stuff they sell directly, but I still find them cheaper in a lot of instances.

I've not had problems with two day Prime shipping. They seem to have good relationship with USPS locally and things get delivered quickly and smoothly. Where I've been less impressed is their so-called "same day delivery" that has been very unreliable. The company they use here for it is Lone Star Overnight, and they drop the ball all the time, sometimes badly enough that I would have gotten it as fast with 2 day shipping. Only bright side there is that I've got lots of partial refunds and a few months of Prime for free.
Look at all his comments in this thread. He is just fishing for an argument/attention.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The Trump phenomena is a new, interesting phenomena, though. People still have no idea how he won, I sure as hell don't.
Most of the cost of the Central Subway is the stations, not the tunnel. Distance is perhaps not the best measure in that case.
Vellvm: Verifying the LLVM (2015)
In theory, a good fraction of these can be caught. In practice, these issues keep coming up in production again and again and again.
Problem is that cancer is not just one disease - it is about two hundred different types. I'm not sure I want to take two hundred different anti-cancer pills every day.
But would it put Rich Hickey's children through college?

This is just not something we've got a good, reliable answer for. E.g. I'm pretty confident that his creating and being the BDFL of Clojure wasn't sufficiently remunerative.
We had trains, and we still do. We just stopped moving people on them, and shifted it all to freight.
> Is it the use of animals as decoration that's disturbing or is it the possibility of being in contact with dead animals, possibly hitting them with a skate.

It is although I would say that for fishes there's an exception. They are commonly seen in aquariums and if they are treated correctly, I hardly think that people would complain about it. Even dissected animals have this creepy atmosphere around them that not many people like. I also don't think that people would like to see animals trapped in cages around them while eating but cat cafes are pretty much accepted.

> If the fish were beneath a transparent frozen surface, do you think it would be less troubling?

I think people would have enjoyed it way more than that idea with the frozen fishes. In the end I think it's seen as a disrespectful act towards the animals.
Link for those like me that want to read it: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...
Or as it's been renamed last month to: "StatefulSet" https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/35534

Mostly what I was commenting on was how they are building some type of declarative infrastructure where they define the topology they want and then system will build it. This was screaming k8s to me.
Both. Some goals are easier to achieve by outsourcing, others are not.
Nasdaq Proposes Alternative to Speed Bumps
The molasses itself was fermenting raising its temperature significantly. It cooled and slowed very quickly when it was out of that environment.
I tend to see typedef on a pointer type to address this.

typedef char * pchar;

pchar var1, var2; // Now they're both pointers

I'm not really a fan, but it can address the problem.
Yeah. I second this. Having non-obvious focus state is a deal-breaker. Obviously, it can be manually added in via CSS overrides on top of this library, but it would be nice for the library itself to have decent focus states.
Undefined/implementation-defined behavior are necessary if you want optimal performance (unless the compiler requires formal proofs of correctness).

>it is human nature to forget

High-performance programming is a job the average human does not do. A professional programmer should use spaced-repetition technology to rise above human nature, and use tools like valgrind for extra safety.
Top 4 important keys for becoming successful
A time will come when our entire concept of programming will shift due to advances in hardware unlike what we have today. Consider quantum computers or some biological machine etc.

Those who use C and assembly I imagine would be better equipped to understand the new paradigms. It's best to understand how to implement data structures in their most rudimentary form because implementing them on new platforms becomes easier.

In addition, higher-level idioms become easy to understand if the parts that make up the whole are understood. And underneath all those layers of translation and compilation we have raw assembly and the bare machine.
The docs should never be "out of date" as in not working, though some parts don't have more than type signatures yet. Working on it. Please file bugs if something is not working, or swing by #rust-beginners, we love to help!
> Seriously, vulnerabilities and bugs are found everywhere not just in C.

The black-and-white security fallacy again!

The simple fact (and this is a fact, not an opinion) is that the most severe security problems—remote code execution, in particular—are found way way way more in programs written in C and C++ than in other languages.
They don't need to work during the day on weekdays.
I recently moved from being twenty miles from a distribution center to the middle of nowhere.

After eventually getting annoyed enough to contact Amazon, it was explained that Release Date Delivery and Prime 2-Day Shipping aren't actually guarantees.

And that mostly lines up. When I lived next door they were super fast to refund instantly. Now that I don't, they are a lot less likely. A proper return and refund is the same, but just a "So... where the hell is my coffee grinder that I ordered last Friday?" exchange results in "It is on the way. You might see it Thursday" response.

I still prefer Amazon and still go for prime shipping products (it is still worth it price wise), but I am a lot less likely to buy time sensitive stuff through them anymore and a lot more likely to just go with the "I don't care when it gets here, give me some store credit" shipping.
The movie sacrifices some of the logical soundness of the short story to make it more accessible and dramatic. That said, I found it equally enjoyable.
Ask HN: Bootstrapping my app, tell me what you think?
Hi guys,

I'm bootstraping a mobile app that enables long distant couples to virtually interact while timezones apart.

The heartbeat feature will let users hear each other's heart beating in real time and the shared clock will sync differing time zones or busy schedules and send a notification when you're mutually available.

Going to use the lean startup method and build one feature first.
I have a site up, would love to know what you think. Does it clearly tell you what the app is about?

www.closerthanapp.com
Given the explanatory text - I think this was more of a "test of intuition" accompanied by a "gotcha!"

As someone unfamiliar with C - I initially thought it would go on forever. The explanatory text explained why I was wrong and this can be equally parts "clever code" or a "gotcha!" depending how you view it. With your experience you're seeing it as overly clever code. With mine, I'm seeing it as a "gotcha". I don't think it is supporting writing code like that. :)

>The third for appears like it would go on forever, but actually counts down from 9 to
0. In fact, in the next section we will see that “sizes” in C, that is numbers that have type
size_t, are never negative.
There is a reason I phrased it as a question. Thanks for clarifying this; comment redirected to the downvoters who haven't seen fit to articulate a response.

Out of curiosity, what does one have achieve on HN in order to get downvoting ability in the first place?

EDIT: No, I clearly screwed this up by presuming and I apologize to johncoltrane for that.

It doesn't change that no downvoter, nor johncoltrane, has been able to justify their position. Are they against criticism of this kind on HN? Because I think that's a tenuous position. Do they believe it's not really a risk to users when CEO's set a tone by editing for their personal agenda, or that such isn't relevant to HN?

To me, those would be reasons not to upvote... but in this case, downvoting without comment suggests that these are simply liberals who dislike Trump supporters and cannot separate that from the involved principles.
Just a list of domains compiled by a guy. If you want to know more about the level of thinking behind the list of domains, this[1] page linked from the BS detector readme gives the general idea.

I would say it's the product of a very earnest idealist who thinks he has solved the problem because he hasn't spent enough time thinking about the problem to understand the ways in which it is non-trivial.

https://www.inverse.com/article/23781-bs-detector-facebook-f...
> it does exactly what you tell it to.

This is a tautology.

What do you expect to happen on signed overflow?
It worked surprisingly enough, well enough to make me consider trying out some gpio stuff to play around with.

From there I'll let you know, I'm still learning Idris and dependent types so I'm a fairly boring test case. This was more of a: lets try it and see what goes kaboom test.
Karma > 500
I've been working full time for years on a browser written in Rust. Which category am I in?

Yes, C++ is very entrenched. That is a problem. We should be fixing that.
That or customers write reviews for things like the way the product was packed, or the shipping method that brought the product to their door.

Not only does it not have to do with the product, but same SKU is often sold by multiple sellers. So your packing/shipping experience will differ depending upon whether you bought it "sold by Amazon," "sold by $COMPANY and fulfilled by Amazon," or "sold and shipped by $COMPANY."

A rating for a book shouldn't be affected by the fact that one buyer ended up buying it from some rando third party retailer who fulfilled the order by packing it poorly and sending it media mail.
How the Internet works in less than 25 minutes for FrontEnd developers [video]
What kind of dev work are you doing? What languages/frameworks?
Yes, support is definitely an important one.

There are other attributes that some professional users care about more than just a simple functional matrix.

For example, I've been in situations where the ability for the professional user to fit the software to their specific requirements over time made FOSS the choice. Even though the initial solution was worse than the equivalent proprietary one. But, the idea that they could develop and improve it over time to meet their specific requirements was powerful.
(I'm the author of the lecture notes.) I totally agree, and this is an underappreciated view in the PP community. The hype says "you just write your model; you'll get inference for free," but that obscures that current languages do nothing to help with cooking up an efficient inference algorithm for a particular situation. That's still a hard problem. When the only inference algorithm anyone actually uses is some MCMC variant, I think that's a broken promise.

There's some chance we'll be able to find clever new ways to derive better inference algorithms in specific situations using program analysis, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And it's impossible, of course, for anything like that to work for every possible program in a Turing-complete language.
Managing my fear of missing out [pdf]
I wish Stallman got back to its printer roots. Hardware is where the battle is. Good enough GPU / DSP / NIC and the rest is set. Sane not too hard to write drivers that works fine under open source OSes, enjoy prolongated lifetime for your devices and more interesting uses.
> it should be a criminal offense to knowingly publish false information outside the protections of entertainment/satire/art etc.

That is a rather dangerous idea.
User Hook SDK released for Unity mobile apps
And.. While they express such distaste the haters probably serve their web apps via NGINX.
Apple Support Article, showing how on iOS and MacOS, "Create or use your Apple ID without a payment method":

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204034
San Francisco Metro System Hacked with Ransomware; Resulting in Free Rides
We've been overwhelmed by the interest. Thank you guys for all the interest and great comments! We're re-adjusting our infrastructure to deal with the demand. The site and infrastructure is a bit suffering today, but we're hard at work and get all ready during the day.
lol rust, get real.
Certainly copyleft has a place, but changing the license to LGPLv3 would allow this very useful library to be used much more broadly while continuing to require that improvements to the shared code be made public. If glibc were GPLv3 rather than LGPLv3 (same goes for Boost, etc.) almost no one would use it. IMO this library will either be re-written under a less restrictive license by some other author (wasting time and effort of the community) or migrate to a more open license (LGPL, ASLv2, MPLv2, MIT, etc.).
Mark Blyth: Global Trumpism
Show HN: Automate the creation delivery pipelines in minutes
This could be a infrastructure stimulus project that helps millions of construction worker (railway construction for the most part) stay employeed. And it will also help alleviate the pressure of highly populous capital metro: skyrocketing real estate market (due to supply-demand imbalance), traffic congestion, garbage processing, food/water supply, all become a big headache when Beijing has to support 23 million people (probably more if you count those unregistered migration workers etc.)
Sweatshops, environmental destruction, child labor etc. has only been effectively fought through government intervention. Personal empathy has no net effect in a free market.
Applications for UK tech visas soar after Government relaxes rules
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. So would it be fair to say that PP is an interface to statistics, so that those who know how to code but not advanced stats can do stats without learning it? (On simple problems)
Probably one of the more interesting things to do with slack.
Fantastic lovemom networking
it is an option. usually not the cheapest one, but in quite a few cases makes more sense/convenience compared to flying - ie if you have less than 5-6 hour distance to cover it's faster, plus the hassle of airports, security, baggage limits, ending in the middle of nowhere compared to city centre etc are not that great.

another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.
Visualize animations easing in DevTools