skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I could like this book, but after reviewing the first chapter I can only imagine the confusion of students. I support very much the idea of breaking the book into levels, but it attempts to cover far too much, far too quickly and I don't believe this book would be useful for those who are not already familiar with the language.

I've been writing C since the late 1980s, moved to mostly C++ by the mid 90s, C# in the 2000s, and now I've come back to C. Most recently built some realtime components and drivers, having to drop back to C77. I mention this as I've taught many colleagues along the way and I'm sensitive to the places where beginners tend to get hung up with problems and I've come to anticipate many of the questions along the way. Let me take a moment to illustrate the base of the problems i see:

"Too much, too fast." The best example is right on page 2: a program which demonstrates a complex printf format string, along with arrays and loops. I can't help but sarcastically ask "Are you sure that is how you want to introduce someone to the language?" A beginner's eyes will glaze over.

Seriously, the way to introduce the language is simple examples. Explain the main is the entry point where all programs begin running, and that main returns it's success or failure to the operating system (or other program that called it). 3 lines of code.

Then add a SIMPLE print, if you wish, or a variable declaration. Int. Float. char. again, it MUST be simple.
Introduce loops.
Then show how to move some functionality out of main into a subroutine/a new method/new function, how to call that function, and return results. Talk about header files, etc.

From there, dive into the rest of the base language... talk up arrays, memory management, heap/stack, pointers, libraries, exceptions, etc.

But this is only my experience, and I'm sure that it is different for others. Kind regards.
> I feel like, i can never "start a life",

Are you familiar with Cognitive Therapy? When you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel.

The best book on this subject is Feeling Good by Dr. David Burns. Here's an interview with the author > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33G1Aue4cP8
Are the options in order of priority? If not, which one do you choose?!
> it doesn't achieve the aim of winning more users

Winning more users is not an aim in itself, not to me at least. It's not a cult that I want to win hearts for.

But if people see how wrong it is to have a single entity control your computer (and almost everybody's computer), they are definitely welcome to ask for help installing something better (in that regard).

I didn't respond to the rest of your post because it builds on that assumption.
To elaborate slightly, there's three components here:

let x = 5;
let mut y = 6;

The let statement binds a variable to a value:

* x and y are the variables
* 5 and 6 are values
* let does the binding

You can have an immutable binding, like x, or a mutable binding, like y. But most people turn "a bound variable" into "a variable" (or "an immutable variable") and "a mutably bound variable" into a "mutable variable".
Do they have the tech though (the Pudong one is built by Germans I think) ? Chuo Shinkansen in neighboring Japan is likely not be completed until 2045 (!).
There's a pretty big disconnect between 0.05% and 1.4%. Believing their numbers would indicate their average page sizes end up being around 7 KiB, or their headers end up being gigantic 4 KiB+ monstrosities, both of which I have trouble believing.

But it's still small. Instead of adding a large chunk of complexity to HTTP/2, how much of that 1.4% do you suppose could be gleaned by removing unnecessary headers like Date, Server, X-Powered-By, cf-ray (on Cloudflare), etc?

I understand that for Cloudflare hosting/proxying others' sites, their options are limited and they have to forward their customers' headers along. But I still think adding all of this is a bad idea. Not that it matters of course, it's already done. The IETF basically rubber stamped SPDY.
The biggest boon to lexical research this decade has been newspaper databases
Don't forget the horror and shame of helping a friend with the dishes because they weren't allowed to buy a bottle of wine.
> vi was part of unix that came from at&t.

And that's why USL settled the BSD lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc....
It does, but it's unnecessarily difficult to keep track of all the places undefined behaviour might occur and make sure you don't step into any of them under any conditions ever.

We shouldn't have to work like this anymore. C's been an amazing language, but it's getting time to gently, respectfully, move on. There's active and interesting development in alternatives which attempt to retain C's primary advantages while also allowing the compiler to keep you out of trouble as much as possible.

We have hugely powerful computers available to use as developers. We can contemplate designing and compiling languages with a complexity which would have completely defeated the systems available when C was developed. Why shouldn't we use some of that power to make our lives easier?
DevOps Defined
The paper is called, "Obligate plant farming by a specialized ant". (doi:10.1038/nplants.2016.181)

http://www.nature.com/articles/nplants2016181
I agree in spirit, but I think most people are capable of obtaining an STEM degree (you're being too pessimistic). You just have to work a bit harder than say you work for an art history degree (and you certainly come out of college less well-rounded, which is also a huge problem).

There are always going to be good jobs that don't require college degrees. Plumbers can make $100K a year if they're good and work hard. I'd rather be a plumber making $100K any day then working for $25/bucks per hour trying to pay off my $180K in student loans from a B+ list law school. (a lot of people are in this position)

If you can get through law school, you can certainly get through any STEM degree.
Can an entire company be vaporware?
The author forgot the other common usage of like, that is, in storytelling: "I was like, what are you doing here?" The word prepares you for not only what was said, but what was felt and done and whatever else needs to be communicated. Unfortunately this usage of like is so useful that it is certainly over-used now, and we need to go back to using the proper verbs. But that is easier said than, uh, said!
Startup Success Indicators
> Given how much it changes I would NOT want to bet on using it for at least 5 years.

Rust may be changing, but it's almost entirely _additions_. We've been stable for roughly 18 months now.
I think there are a lot of valid reasons for the current model and I'm pretty sure it (and the changes over time) are well thought through.

That said I also think it is worth to regularly revisit what an open sourced Datomic could do for adoption of Datomic itself as well as for Clojure (edit: not to mention what the impact would be like for the world at large). I'm optimistic that there are monetization opportunities through SaaS, consulting and other licensing concepts.

Ideas?
Helth.ai, the personal health assistant via email
Being the BDFL of a rapidly growing programming language has its benefits. Even Rasmus Lerdorf has an impressive CV, despite a public attitude of negativity towards programming.

If Datomic achieves widespread success with both community and enterprise editions, Rich Hickey would have an impressive range of opportunities.

The man, however, is far more accomplished than I so I can only assume he's thought of that and firmly rejected it. Perhaps, although he wants to see his kids go through college, he also wants to be a big part of their lives. Perhaps 2 massive, popular over source projects would get in the way of that.
There is a bit of compensation available. If an item doesn't arrive in 2 days you can request a free month of Prime:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

"If you received free shipping through Amazon Prime, you may be eligible for a free one-month extension when the promised delivery date isn't met. Prime Extensions are limited to one per free trial and 12 for an annual membership. Free Amazon Student Memberships do not qualify for this extension."

Just contact support about that order and tell them the item didn't arrive in time and you'd like your free month of Prime. Since they switched to the Amazon delivery service I'm about to max out my 12 free months.
The article also shows the problems with federation, although they do not acknowledge it:

> The drafted protocol is called OMEMO and combines the advantages of jabber and Signal. Even though the XEP Process will still take some time, the protocol is stable and can already be used today. On Android devices, users have the ‚Conversations‘ client [8], which offers an experience comparable to Signal, and on the desktop there is a plugin for ‚Gajim‘ [9, 10] under active development, which still has room for user experience improvements. Using one of the readily available tutorials, it is possible today to get started on Linux and Windows. iOS users will have to wait some time due to license issues.
nice! the digital equivalent of safe spaces. perfect for when I want to only hear opinions that conform to my own.
I agree. Moreover, we have ‘smart contracts’ technology now to make responsible society real. The problem is that we have too much parasites in human society who fight against progress in this area to protect their status quo. I think that in future responsible people won’t share the same economics/law system as irresponsible one, the same way humans are separated from the animals now. This split will happen once the world bullshit reaches its critical mass to make all reasonable people to unite.
There isn't news that aren't biased.
Not that I'm advocating this as viable but you could just ban the raising of livestock, and have a DEA type agency that infiltrates illegal animal farming operations
Which part of this paper is the part you're worried about?
It's in the last paragraph. I agree it was strange to leave it out of the rest of the article, emphasizing the "two" new usages of likes until a third was dropped in at the last moment.
I've been following musl for a little while because of its support for C11 threads. I'm surprised that none of the bigger libraries haven't implemented that.
Yeah I was wondering what he was going to do with the company, it seems to be popular between the current middle school -> high school age group.

I'm not sure how CNN is going to be able to utilize it.
I use a lot of open source, but there are definitely times I prefer to write something myself because it's faster than learning how someone else implemented it, and needing to hack a lot for special customizations. My favorite open source project is probably three.js.
> I would not let that line pass code review.

At least it's not

for (size_t i = 9; i >= 0; --i)

:-)
So if I'm reading this right, the freedom that in principle someone could make the software better is more valuable than actually having better software?

So the freedom isn't valuable because of what it achieves, it's just valuable intrinsically by existing in principle.

That's not completely bonkers. I've never been to Arbroath in Scotland, but I could if I wanted to. That freedom has value right? But only if I can actually exercise it in practice.
Things are better still when one stops looking at shared libraries and starts looking at run-time remote procedure call dependencies.

The GNOME editor, a "small and lightweight text editor" according to the blurb and its reviews by some clearly incurious reviewers, requires that a per-user/per-login Desktop Bus broker be running and also (on my machine) that the following Desktop Bus servers be running: at-spi-bus-launcher (which runs another Desktop Bus broker), api-spi2-registryd, dconf-service, gvfsd, gvfsd-udisks2-volume-monitor, gvfsd-afc-volume-monitor, gvfsd-goa-volume-monitor, gvfsd-gphoto2-volume-monitor, and gvfsd-mtp-volume-monitor.

Normally, it behaves like WIN16 programs used to behave: invoking the editor a second time simply sends a D-BUS message to the already running first instance to tell it to open another document and then exits that second invocation. If you want to start up a true second separate instance, one way to do so is use dbus-run-session to start it up with a private Desktop Bus broker of its own. Of course, doing so starts up second instances of all of the aforementioned D-BUS servers as well.

This is not "small and lightweight".

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/323700/5132

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/201900/
I don't really disagree with that. Especially if you're travelling between downtown locations that aren't too far apart on main railroad lines, e.g. York to London or London to Brussels, the train makes a lot of sense. (As indeed is the case in the Northeast US.)

It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.
CyberChef – A Cyber Swiss Army Knife
It is not crucial for functional programming, unless your functional programming language uses types as variant tags.

Both Haskell and OCaml use type erasure, and I doubt anyone would claim they aren't functional languages.
> I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.

There isn't a single country where majority of the population does some sort of research. And guess what, that's what people in the future will have to be doing for their jobs.

> It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.

You need a new system though. Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices. I guess it does get slightly better in college but not by much.

> South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.

I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society. The recent president Park scandal highlights quite a few of these issues.
I'm still waiting for my mozilla javascript phone bro

Rust is a neat a project and all but it's still slowly moving out of neat toy territory
Ah, they're doing sensor fusion with inbuilt IMUs? That makes sense...

I have a colleague with some deep technical knowledge in this area - he's the guy who did the heavy lifting when I built an inertial mocap suit a while ago. I've pointed him at your project. If it turns out that it is of interest, perhaps you can get some useful collaboration / suggestions out of that!
You are heading towards a search algorithm. That is, a search for the right incentives/disincentives for possibly all of the biological organisms that make up the manufacturing stack. Then the question becomes can you purchase enough Time which is perhaps the key ingredient in search problems.
"Don't you see? Science has objectively proved that blacks are terrible and the left denies it."
Enjoy, then, the need to run a whole bunch of background daemons in order for some "small and lightweight" text editors to run at all. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056252
Another java library with persistent/immutable datastructures is javaslang.
Whats with those header fields that start with a colon:

:authority:blog.cloudflare.com
:method:GET
:path:/assets/images/cloudflare-sprite-small.png
:scheme:https

Isn't that going to confuse every header parser.
Response #1:
date:Wed, 07 Sep 2016 21:41:23 GMT
expires:Wed, 07 Sep 2016 21:41:53 GMT

Response #2:
date:Wed, 07 Sep 2016 21:41:23 GMT
expires:Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:41:23 GMT

> Although the two expires headers are almost identical, they can only be Huffman compressed, because they can't be matched in full.

It seems like it'd be be an easy win to round expiry times to the nearest minute/hour/day. At least for requests such as these where that value is one year in the future.
Decrementing loops is the one place where I have indulged in some trickery. I do:

for (size_t i = 9; i --> 0; )

This has the advantage to be very easy to pattern-match once known. Obviously, for a beginner, I would just do:

for (int i = 9; i >= 0; i -= 1)
Cops kill at least one suspect in Ohio State University active shooter lockdown
Ask HN: Lower back exercise
All I didn't think it would get to this point but I am 200 lbs (5'11 height) and overweight by at least 20 lbs.
Lately, lower back trouble has started and it friggin sucks. I have not been exercising for a while so I know I need to get back in shape.
Any suggestions to deal with lower back without resorting to medications etc ? I end up pulling my lower back muscle randomly and it really hurts. Went to doc and they just said "loose weight".
I am thinking of buying a back brace and of course, start exercising. But any tips from pros here is appreciated.
> Free software or even open source software is neither superior nor inferior by definition.

Strongly disagree with your implication here and the rest of your comment, though I agree with the literal text you wrote in this sentence.

FOSS is superior for the end user because it can help avoid vendor lock-in (someone else can always take the code and run their own service/app that the user can then switch to) and allows the user themselves to pay someone to fix issues/maintain the software if it becomes unmaintained.

You are quite correct in your point that FOSS is not necessarily more featureful, more secure, or easier to use than proprietary solutions though.
Not what you meant but not having actual cloudy skies helps; living in the south of europe (PT/ES) instead of north (NL/UK) made hard times a lot easier. Somehow it does not seem important but when your month sucks you do not want to wake up in cold, rain and clouds. Opening your window and feeling warm sun does a lot. It is just the bit of lift you need sometimes.
Write You a Scheme, Version 2
That would be missing the point entirely due to the fact that most users care more about ease of use and apps than "advanced configuration".

Not sure why we have to "sit anybody down" either...that sounds a bit forceful and unnecessary. Last time I checked, "better" is completely subjective.

But for the record, most people think Windows is better since that's what they've voted for with their dollars. Windows won the desktop war. It's got more users, more apps, more consistency, more stability, more commercial support...more everything. People still fighting for desktop Linux to become popular with regular users are like Hiroo Onoda, the japanese soldier who kept fighting WW2 for 30 years. Good luck with that!
You might want to consider investing in a treadmill desk.

This is a picture of my office setup. I did it this way, so I could alternate between sitting and walking. It's the best!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/089qqvaa7j5ob77/office_setup.jpg?d...
Loved this article!
It reminds me of my middle school English teacher, who enforced a 'no-like zone' (in good humor). Every time anyone noticed the usage of like other than the old 'proper' usage, you'd get another tally added to your name.

I think it was a great idea, not because I'm worried about the new usage of the word like, but because it forced all of us to think carefully about our word choice when speaking in that class.
So you, someone technical enough to set up their own email server, was spamming people, and it presumably took days or weeks for someone to report you, and you to check your mailbox and get around configuring your firewall.

Now imagine the typical user who has no idea what the letter means or how to configure their router and just ignores it...

I'm surprised your whole ISPs dynamic IP pool isn't already on every spam block list.

edit: just realized you aren't the poster I was replying to, so presumably you're not running your own email server
Well, that's a detail of how the VM works. My only point was that type erasure is not inherently bad, as plenty of languages do type erasure, like Haskell and OCaml. Of course you can always create conditions where it could become a problem.

But the example with C# "doing it right" is a little odd in that case, since Microsoft had the opportunity to build something new, that didn't have the same issues the JVM had. And they did, in some ways, but that doesn't mean tracking type parameters at the VM level is the only way to do it "right".
Good start but it should be zero right?
About 50 fields. And a lot of those fields are really difficult for your average person to know how to answer.
> Amazon's retail catalog is flooded with fakes, drop shippers, bots and low quality products with fake reviews.

I've been noticing this more and more as well. For example, searching for a manual coffee grinder results in three dozen pages of the same four items rebranded and sold by hundreds of individual sellers (and a few chair parts for good measure). All with plenty of good reviews. Finding an actual product amongst all the dreck is getting pretty damned hard.
I too have this problem, or rather a different version of it. I fear my audience would get bored with the message so I unnecessarily vary it. I've since come to realise the true power of repetition, regardless of how many people think me a broken record...
Triangle center
I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I recently returned from Switzerland, and there is a good fast train going basically everywhere, whenever you want to go, and it's amazing and stone cold simple to figure out. You can do seemingly impossible things like wake up in an entirely different city to a place like Zurich, get on a train, and get off in the Zurich airport terminal and check right in. It's not cheap, but nothing in Switzerland is and it's relatively inexpensive by those standards.

It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place.

I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend.

It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.
> The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special

The concept of "American exceptionalism" is a strange thing that still has lots of real-world consequences, apparently.
Accurate Online Penetration Testing Service
Yes, my point was that there's nothing inherently wrong with type erasure. You can of course create conditions that would be problematic, like the design of Java and JVM does.