skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you help me understand the graph that article references to claim that more storms are happening?[1] It looks like some classes of disaster have tripled since the '80s, and in general that disasters have basically doubled. Those both seem way beyond what I would imagine being caused by the the global temperature rise of about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the same period. (If temperate increases continue at the same rate, would we see another doubling of all weather-related disasters in ~30 years?).

Anyways, that makes me wonder whether the graph captures something like reported disasters or if disaster trends happen on multi-decade scales and that 35-year span is dominated by "short-term" variation. I can't find the original context, but there looks to be an updated version of the graph in this report from the same source [2] and the commentary is "In terms of the number of events, the trend towards greater and more detailed reporting continued, with the total number further increasing to 1,060 events."

1. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pict...
2. Comment page 54, graph page 56 https://www.munichre.com/site/mram-mobile/get/documents_E-11...
Oh, I had massively confused expectations because of the title of "Dell's customer care is forcing a US customer to deal with a rude support exec".

Apparently "support exec" is euphemism I hadn't heard for support tech, and not an executive position. And "rude" is more of "completely unhelpful".

So yes, this sucks, but I thought something surprising was happening; it's not.
The point of learning the "Modern" style is so that the newer, safer features are the ones you think of when writing new code. No matter which style you're first introduced to, you're going to end up coming into contact with a lot of different programming styles. Given that you may have to learn them all eventually, and that you've got to start somewhere, doesn't it make sense to introduce students to the features of the language that try to correct past mistakes?
Actually brains eventually learn how to discern distance with one eye too, iirc.
Seems like these are different situations under the same support rep. I feel bad for the rep honestly, they're probably not allowed to do any more and I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up taking the fall for this.
Konami-JS: Add the Konami Code easter egg to any site
Dell's customer service is terrible. I had my harddrive die. My laptop was still under warranty, so I decided call Dell to get it fixed. After about 4 hours, I was able to get someone to start working on my case (I was transferred between departments 5 times, and only got someone to deal with the issue after I insisted that the previous person stay on the line until I did).

We than spent the next hour diagnosing the fact that it was, in fact, a broken harddrive. Although I told them this from the start, I can understand them wanting to verify this, but the we had found what seemed to be enough evidence that it was a broken HDD within the first 10 minutes, then just ran around in circles (I assume looking for a scripted error code that never showed up for some reason).

Once we were done, they agreed to send me a replacement drive, and I asked if it would be possible to upgrade the drive and pay for the difference. They then spent about half an hour looking up what HDD options were available. Once I decided which one I wanted, I was informed that I would be paying for the full price of the drive (but they could still send it instead of the free, non upgraded, one I was entitled to by warranty). I declined and asked for the free one.

Once that was done, as we were finalizing the shipping details, I was informed that I would need to send back my broken drive, which I was not willing to do. Eventually I agreed to just pay for a new drive (in retrospect, I should have hung up and bought the drive from another source). They sent me a drive and told me I would be receiving a bill.

The bill never came. Two weeks later, I called them again and spent another two hours trying to pay; before being told that I cannot pay because I have not been billed yet because I had not yet failed to return my broken drive in time. About a month after that, I get a voicemail from them about my failure to return my drive.

I try to call back, but due to ( I presume) time zone differences I never managed to reach them during office hours, so I just got to voice mail where I had to leave a message asking them to call me back. Despite this, I still had to wait through about half an hour of holding to get a line to the voicemail. After going through this dance a few times, I just asked them to email me the bill, after which point I payed them the $70 for the hard drive.
"Modern C++" at least partly refers to generic programming techniques that were popularized by Alexandrescu's book "Modern C++ Design"; a lot of the features in C++11 improve language support for such techniques.

The term also implies use of RAII[1] which is a technique that was used at least a decade before C++ was an ISO standard.

The third implication is a rejection of what is often called "C+" or "C with classes" which is the treatment of C++ as C with a couple extra features. Since a lot of early C++ programmers were C programmers, and a lot of early C++ compilers were fairly mediocre in their implementation of language features[3], the 90s generated a lot of "C+" code.

Really the first two points are a subset of this one as they are two prominent examples of programming techniques that are fairly foreign to C, but are extremely valuable for writing robust C++ code.

So "Modern C++" really means "Something widely considered a good idea for about a decade" at this point.

If you work on a good legacy code base, the typical old oddness will be "Version X of MSVC/GCC/whatever had poor RVO[2], so we did this ugly thing for optimization" and (obviously) either a complete lack of using the features in C++11 or using a proto-version of them via Boost.

Even the nicest legacy code bases will have really odd things whose original motivation would require serious archaeology to divine, but that happens even with relatively static languages.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_value_optimization

3: Believe it or not, a lot of the code from Alexandrescu's book could not compile in either MSVC or GCC when it was published. The library that accompanied the book became incorporated into many compiler vendor's conformance testing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/d177c/a_critique_of_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ujj3/a_critiqu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/13gfqt/before_...
I understand why this school bought the laptops they did, but I have to point out: The support costs of the requested help for these laptops outweigh the actual laptops themselves value, and certainly Dell's profit in it. Cheap laptops include cheap support.

If the school had purchased business-line PCs which are more suited to large organization use, they'd likely A. have gotten much better laptops, and B. gotten drastically better, on-site next day repairs.

But that costs about five times what they paid. So while I acknowledge, this situation sucks for the school, I kinda feel like we need to point out that they got what they paid for.
And no, Dreamhost.com doesn't fail the load test like the other domains.
Not sure what happened to the original post, but it can be found here:

https://m.facebook.com/Dell/posts/10206079690990070
Someone switched it then switched it back and changed the title. Mods on HN aren't doing a great job lately :(
This just in from the the State Department, Washington, DC.

"Successful interagency operations like this are an essential part of investigating and stopping the well-connected criminal networks perpetrating passport and visa fraud."

Nice to find out about such highly successful anti-corruption efforts where it only took 10 years to disable a vast conspiracy of "several suspects" who were arrested after nefariously deploying a massive network of high-tech equipment "that included a laptop computer; cell smart phones; 150 passports from 10 countries" and more, plus "an industrial sewing machine".

Very few law-enforcement agencies ever manage to apprehend any sewing machines at all.

Overcoming such a huge criminal enterprise certainly would not have been possible without every one of these powerful international investigative agencies on-the-job around-the-clock.

Fortunately only "Several suspects remain at large" and "this is only the beginning."

Excellent, in about 10 more years we should expect another criminal's laptop to be brought down.
>A lot of such things, that traded off sanity and security for ease of use made it popular. But that does not mean it got those things "right".

Ease of use is sanity in its own right too.

And C has been praised to high heavens by the most hardcore of hackers, but nobody would dare call it "secure".

>I am ignoring other inflammatory things you said

I think you confuse what the word "inflammatory" means. You posted ad-hominens in both this and the previous comment.
Big oil WANTS carbon tax as this would create predictability and stability albeit at a cost. What big oil doesn't want is unpredictable policy - policy that Washington think tanks want to put in place. Right wingers are terrified of progressive policies and this Pielkle fella is not doing the world any favors by advocating for useless policies such as a carbon tax. He may have good intentions and may be factually correct in his observations about lack of clear evidence but this doesn't change the fact that his work is being used to hinder climate progress.
FreeBSD jail
Hahahaha, more poor people getting access to phones = easier for rich man to spread false statements. Great, now all we need is Hollywood to make more disaster movies. Oh wait, they're too busy cranking out superhero crap. We are indeed doomed.
The Soil Depletion Crisis: A tragic episode from the 19th century
تور ارزان کیش ورود ۱۴ آذر ۹۵ در هتل شایگان و پارمیدا
That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that they got blamed for being the cause of the faulty equipment when in fact it had nothing to do with them!
Skimmed the article to see if it had been mentioned but from what I could see it wasn't. Stephen Bax, Professor in Applied Linguistics University of Bedfordshire:

Through analysis of a number of illustrations in the manuscript, including one constellation (Taurus) and seven plants, then drawing on European and Middle Eastern mediaeval manuscripts and contemporary nomenclature, the paper proposes the identification of a set of proper names in the Voynich text, giving a total of ten words made up of fourteen of the Voynich symbols and clusters. The resulting scheme is set out in Appendix 1 (page 56) of the paper. The aim of the paper is to attempt to lay the groundwork for an eventual full decoding and complete decipherment of this fascinating document.

The evidence shows that the manuscript is not a hoax, and is probably an explanatory treatise on nature. The script was possibly devised to encode a previously unwritten language or dialect, perhaps by a small community which later died out or disappeared.

The paper (PDF): http://stephenbax.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Voynich-a-p...

The video, 47m-11s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ
This book looks good from a cursory glance. Can anyone please tell me if I should read this one or Paul Graham's ANSI common lisp. I have some background in scheme due to SICP.

Thanks!
Which is baffling. It's your job, guys. Your entire organization with all its staggering budget exists to provide certain specific services to the nation. Deciding which of those services you feel like providing is not in your job description.
Another approach/method to dealing with identifiers, tokens, or system information (hostnames associated with your REST/DB/etc. calls) is to utilize serialized JSON/YAML. Also stored as KV pairs you can open/process/assign in your porject code. Thus keeping sensitive hard coded data elements out.

Really they are much of the same. Just a slightly different approach.
Didn't quite switch it back properly, it's the mobile link now.
Crime isn't force? Withholding protection from crime isn't systematic?

When Milosevic went to cleanse Kosovo, he didn't send the Yugoslav Army to put people in cattle cars. He just let Arkan's Tigers do whatever. Arkan got the message and so did the Albanians:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkan
Succinctly, there is no free lunch...
Did you tried «Fabulous» app ? It's using a scientific method, besides being very successful app.

-Hatem
> can be largely attributed to the increase in droughts in some areas

Among many other possible explanations.

Look, you wanted to show the author wrong, for whatever reasons, and you went looking for something and went with the first thing you found.

Now, rather than admitting there was nothing there, you really want to argue about the causes of wildfires? Your point was not a good one. Just admit it.
Did you tried «Fabulous» app ? It's using a scientific method, besides being very successful app.
how about bit look up tables.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12913658 and marked it off-topic.
Thanks, you're right, two separate issues relating to the same support rep. I've edited my comment.
I forgot to say that I'm reading your text now :) I had a compiler class with Marc Feeley, author of Gambit-C, and I've been sold on Lisps ever since. I really love the simplicity of Scheme, but I found that it's much easier to get going (i.e. not having to re-write even basic things such as for-loops) in CL than Scheme. I can write/read some basic macros but my end goal is being able to write a read-macro for a DSL. I can't really envision doing this as easily without a Lisp.
It's a proxy for painful changes that will require hard political work. If they used equivalent tons of carbon dioxide, the same discussions would be taking place, so what's your problem with it?
Well, it seems taking a principled approach helps avoid the WTFs :)

Please see my other comment for informative video links reviewing recent work by community collaborators.
I've had experience with Dell, but it was a nice one. I'm from the UK, so not sure if the service is better than the US counterpart of I just got lucky.

Like an idiot, I bought a cheap 3D printer called OneUp, built it, plugged it into the laptop and blew the laptop up. The 3D printer company both refused responsibility for printer replacement and laptop replacement despite somehow putting 240V onto the USB like due to bad circuit design.

Last port of call was to contact Dell for advice how to fix it, who then informed me it's still in warranty (bought the laptop from eBay so had no idea).

Sent it away, got it back and the parts sheet mentioned that they replaced everything in it. Everything. They gave me a brand new laptop inside it's slightly older chasis!
But Chrome doesn't use bitblt afaik. It's GPU composited, which does support a number of tile-level compression formats.
> Among many other possible explanations.

Like what?

> you wanted to show the author wrong

No, absolutely not. I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems. But I'm pretty sure that there is actually a lot of evidence that climate change is causing serious problems. The only reason I'm harping on this one dataset is, as I said, I'm on a slow internet connection and so I can't do any comprehensive research at the moment. I'm going the best I can with what I've got.
I do admit in this case Dell has messed up a lot. But for heaven's sake, why does a school buy Inspiron? Here in Europe, we buy Dell latitude - thru Dell Education Portal. I got 2 harddrives for my group with 10 machines in the University - next business day. No waiting with my express code.
These days I recommend Latitude even for my friends and family (unless they want OSX).
Deep Learning the stock market
My vision is that the next internet will exist in the hydrogen-fusing heart of nearby stars, such that interstellar travel will be required to see web pages. I know this will not be popular but the technology would be really cool! I'm also convinced that this can be funded by sales of toenail clippings, so that part is easy.
At what point does this rise to making the "warranty" Dell offers rise to the level of fraud?
For all the hype of Occulus, it seem like HTC Vive is better at the high end, and Daydream, Samsung and even PSVR are better at a lower end.

There was a recent story about the failure of MakerBot. It was the best at creating hype, but not the best product. Made me think of Occulus.
Haha, unless it's a USB issue which is equally likely. I find Dell laptops drop USB packets which most devices recover, for example flash drives or average devices. If it's a high speed WiFi card, problem. Had it on my laptop, sometimes it would miss the keyboard packet for "key up" events and just spit some value out continuously.
I assume you meant to type 47 rather than 14?
I don't know what you expect. That the U.S. is going to police every nook and cranny of every country when there is rampant local corruption.
Using Hacker News primarily for political, ideological, or religious controversy is an abuse of the site. Those things drown out what we want here, which is thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity.

Since we asked you to stop doing this and you didn't, we've banned your account.

We're happy to unban accounts that people give us reason to believe will follow the site rules in the future, so if you'd like to fix this, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't create new accounts to break the site rules with.
It's not evidence of anything but your own confirmation bias.

If you can't see why "the first thing I found may not be holding up well to criticism, but since it only took me five minutes to find, there obviously must be a lot more out there" is a bad argument, then you're just rationalizing.
Does Dell offer different customer support for Latitudes than it does for Inspirons? I collected on my warranty for a broken harddrive on my Latitude laptop and also had a terrible time with their support.

If you are just going through the common path of buying their product, it is not surprising that they offer a painless experience. The problem comes when something goes wrong and you need support.
Maybe you could warm up by releasing a new, updated edition of Practical Common Lisp? ;)
Now you can root your android in just one click without PC
If you like this subject take a look at gmplib (gnu multiple precision big number library)
Arc Forum
Moving the terminal cursor
> it is pretty clear that something has changed

You don't just jump into a debate about someone's scientific integrity with unrelated web links and speculation that you just pulled out of your ass, and then back out with "well we can't be sure, what do you think?"
If you are using default library IPv4 addresses stores as [16]byte: https://golang.org/src/net/ip.go
Please don't. HN comments need to get more substantive as topics get more controversial.

That takes discipline, but the alternative is trash, so this is a tragedy of the commons issue.
One problem he doesn't account for is that the community of users is often diverse and therefore ui complexity gets driven by corner cases. Often teams will start out with a visionary who holds the line for a while but gradually the pressure to add another bell or whistle increases until it is impossible to resist. For example coversion rates; if a feature is shown to drive up conversions by a small amount it will tend to get added, it doesn't take many of these discoveries to ruin an interface.
Thanks, I was probably a might harsh.
Rooting a VM appliance
> will require hard political work.

You have bought what they are selling
I get a completely different Facebook link to a completely different story about displays. First one I read was about 38 school children's laptops.
I don't care, I only eat good chocolate
It says "received". That often happens before a paper is published, but we want the publication year. That was 1987 according to Wadler's CV: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/vita.pdf.
>> Among many other possible explanations.

> Like what?

Now you are just being deliberately obtuse. You already responed to my comment where I provide an alternative explanation of changes in fire policy, and you agknowledge that "the situation with respect to fire is very complicated".

> I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems.

The author never made such a claim, going so far as to state: "I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax."
All ancient history now, I heard that MIT now teach Python.
It's not as though every border crossing in every country has instantaneous access to international passport registries. There are many, many places in the world where your docs only need to seem authentic to be useful.
> and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems.

... which is not even remotely what the author said. We are in "Did you read the article?" territory here.

> I'm going the best I can with what I've got.

What that means is that you've picked your conclusion, you scrounged some premises, and constructed an argument to fit.

It seems you're approaching this in a high school debate-team, rhetorical, "but what about" style and not actually honestly looking for facts.
It's dead now, which means it's mostly not visible. Only users with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile can see it.
Ask HN: Best talks on programming for beginners?
Which are some of the best talks/seminars I can find on programming intended for beginners? I am supposed to conduct a seminar on programming in a university next week and I want to make sure I do my research well before speaking in front of the students.
https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html says:

> V8 version 5.6, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 56 Stable in several weeks...

> Starting with 5.6, V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language.
Ask HN: What's the best way to guage interest in a product idea?
I have an idea for a SaaS startup that could potentially make money. I'm just wondering, what's the best way to guage if companies are actually interested in this product without giving away the idea to publicly?

The idea is not entirely new - there are a few players, but no one really big. And I kind of have a USP with this idea.

So I could potentially ask publicly, but is it worth the risk?