skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the US struggles not with spending levels on infrastructure, but with correct allocation. There's not enough focus on high throughput, high value trunks, because we throw far too much money at the environmental and cultural scourge that is the many-laned, unlimited access 45 mph roads frequently punctuated with stop lights.

It's true that there's that ASCE report from a few years back that decries how woefully underfunded our infrastructure is. But it also shows absurd things, like that we need to spend an extra 4.3 trillion on surface roads to save 3 trillion in potentially lost GDP over the next 25 years. The next most troublesome category of infrastructure from a funding gap perspective seems to be wastewater (~75% unfunded, but far smaller), which also stems from our failure to keep people in sufficiently dense development patterns.

Going back to the issue at hand, with the inland waterway: the same report puts the economic cost of underfunding waterways at half that of underfunding surface roads. But the underfunding for waterways is 2 orders of magnitude lower than that for surface roads... American infrastructure policy is akin to a dog perishing in a house fire because it's too busy chasing its own tail to step out the open front door.

I highly encourage people to think about page 5 of this ASCE report (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2...) and ponder the disparities.
Ask HN: Examples of excellent technical writing
Does anybody have any examples of what they would consider excellent technical writing (preferably paragraphs or small examples over books or larger projects)?
Run a honeypot. Just an usual Postfix with catch-all virtual mailbox and a learn-spam for the destinatin. Let spammers happily fill it (they will, in no time) and train your very own rspamd/spamassasin/whatever.

Sure, this works as long as they don't try to poison your filters, but given its a small and rare target, it's unlikely someone would bother.
I got an Echo during beta, and there was no API at all. Later, they opened up the API. They've had enough time to make it useful by now (like, answering more than one question in turn!) but it's still not 100%.

Meanwhile, Google Home shipped last month. Building a developer community with necessary support and safeguards takes time. Doubly so if it's a win-or-lose battle for corporate dominance -- they can't just experiment willy-nilly with this, because one mis-step, and people won't trust Google in their homes anymore.

That being said, Amazon seems to have lost it with Echo -- it was the greatest radio for me for a long time, but since a couple of months ago, everytime I ask it to "shuffle my music," it plays approximately the same 20 songs out of my library of >5,000. Not useful; no response; no fix.

So, now there's a Google Home on my bedside table. So far, so good.
My bet is that we call gg right here on Earth. We're simply not good enough.
He's ignoring a rather large elephant in the room: iOS is the most locked down OS in history.

That's going to keep two kinds of people from ever moving to it as their primary computing device: people who care about freedom, and power users who care about versatility and complex work flows. The latter includes most developers. You just can't do that stuff on iOS. You can barely even run your own apps on it.

I suppose you could push a model where all the interesting stuff lives in the cloud or headless metal servers and the iOS device is a portable terminal with apps and the Web as sophisticated terminal emulations more or less. Think of an app or a big JS site as a giant analog of a VT macro.

I see PC sales declining and then leveling off after having lost most casual and low end users to tablets and mobile.
Refined sugar is an absolutely lethal addictive drug with no plausible nutritional justification.

The health costs - from dental problems to heart disease to diabetes to other fatal illnesses - are beyond tragic.

My dentist told me she regularly has to extract some or all of the milk teeth from kids because they've been rotted by sugary soft drinks. She doesn't like doing it and the parents don't like watching it done. But cause and effect is a thing and she's at the wrong end of it.

Ending massive sugar addiction is going to be the next big social project for medicine.
How surprising and refreshing it is to find an essay about Pushkin on HN!
I should not need to run a background daemon for my text editor to load quickly.
If anyone needs an example of the first point, look to what happened to Sun's free/open projects and firmware downloads after it's acquisition by Oracle.
CLHS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_HyperSpec
Hammerspoon is forked from mjolnir

https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir
It’s not unusual to get your dream job – and then hate it
This is how I learned vi. I was a pico (now called nano) user but needed to edit the hosts file when Solaris was released for x86.
> Would anyone choose C for a new systems project with no legacy baggage or dependencies, in a world with Rust and Go?

I imagine it is easier to hire C programmers than Rust programmers, at the moment, especially in fields like embedded development.
One great example to try: add -O3 to the compiler options, then write a function returning its argument multiplied by 2, 3, 4, ...

You'll see the various ways the compiler avoids emitting an actual multiplication instruction. The smallest multiplier I found that actually produced an imul: 46.
I didn't use the word fallacy. You did.
Thanks for the info.
Congrats on the good life.
In programming languages I would say Perl, I have never heard some of the noises I have heard coming out of programmers trying to decipher and debug someone elses Perl program ;)
As they point out: Don't use SSL.

Also it's slower (despite marketing) and takes up more resources.
There's a lot of docs out there, and some test roms to help. A CPU emulator is actually pretty straightforward. Adding the PPU is more complex, of course.
In addition to the other reasons already mentioned, many believe that calculus further develops the ambiguous quality known as mathematical maturity so students who take calculus before linear algebra will be better prepared for the more rigorous course than those who jumped in.

(Here I use "calculus" to refer calculus courses without an emphasis on proofs.)
Unfortunately not, but I'd love to hear from those who do.
thefacebook.com
No it wasn't, they were talking about ASICs.
implementing the actor model

Each of my server processes in Go looks a little like an Erlang actor. There's a switch statement where a queue of input messages is processed, then each instance is run in turn. Instances also have a similar structure and maintain a "space" using an R-Tree. When it comes to efficiency, game loops are still a great way to do concurrency. Game loops per-instance allow you to sidestep many pitfalls of multi processor concurrency, much as per-process GC does with Erlang.
> Also, I like how returning 0 is "xor eax, eax".

Why is it so different with different optimisation levels? The default emits quite a bit of code, -O1 is `mov eax, 0`
Or play music, or set timers (especially in the kitchen), convert between units, set alarms (at night), or get random information like the time in various places? (I do all these things on a frequent basis)
Find the kind of businesses that you want to help, and offer a free trial and coaching for 30 days. The early customers are there for you to learn from so you shouldn't expect them to pay you (yet.)

Building a lead database of the kinds of businesses you want to sell to is your first big sales challenge! There are databases out there, but it may be better to select a few great targets early on through simple market research (based on meetup or web presence or whatever) and cultivate personal connections.

Btw: The value proposition of your tool sounds like Slack. (Or, perhaps, Confluence, if you're more about document collaboration.)
Step #1 is to understand and articulate how/why you're 10x better than the competition for the companies you target. Just by articulating that, you may come up with a good approach or inroad.
I signed up for mailradar.com and the confirmation email landed in the Spam folder of my Gmail account.
I'm guessing these administrations are the result of laws and/or regulations, right?

And the US probably has way more regulation, simply because there is a bigger pot to pay politicians and lobbyists from, and they all need something to do/to promise their voters?

Here's an idea: What if every new piece of law and regulation came with a mandatory expiration date - say 10 years. After that date it must pass the legislator again, at which point a new date is set based on an exponential backoff algorithm. At each new vote I'd expect there to be some evaluation of the effects of that piece of legislation.

Now obviously, you still have the problem of strictly partisan politicians, but if you could even just have 5% of legislators not being corrupted by that it would be enough to swing the majority to one side or the other, based on facts.
That's why they define community as "students, facility, staff, postdoctoral researchers and administrators" - not just people nearby.
It was a great movie. Slow for about the first half doing a lot of character development, then moving quick into all kinds of territory, and then mindbending finish. I didn't know it was adapted from Heinlein. Darnit. Scratch it off my list of "original" movies to put it on "risky but good."

Also, worth mentioning that the actor playing "John" had one of best presentations I've ever seen. Smart that they picked at "tomboy" for it as that fit most of the movie really well. Also, showed John's more straightforward acting took more talent than one would figure at first.

EDIT: "All You Zombies." Extra obvious now. Wish I read it sooner. :)
[2] is fantastic. I was just thinking about strategies to voice lead a set of block chords correctly while minimizing overall intervallic distance.
"In a fantasy world, Apple produces an Ax-based Mac"

Combining the iPad and Macbook is equivalent to rolling the iPod into the iPhone.

I also have a Macbook and its the perfect computer for normal laptop tasks. I am surprised by how many people don't know this exists.

"But what would an Ax Mac mean in the real world, to software developers?"

There are lots of companies producing iOS and Mac apps. It is going to be easier than porting programs from Windows to Mac.
The opposite happened when mainframes and minis transitioned to PCs, but he's right from the 2000s onward.

Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant.

I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.
My parents sought one after seeing/using mine. My brother in law commented a lot on mine after being over recently, and I watched my friend's 3 young girls ask to it play various Kate Perry songs every 7 seconds (they now have one). It's a new, somewhat expensive device, so it'll take time for it to make its way into the mainstream. It's also not for everyone, but it is for a lot of people.
In theory Blender being open should be enough.

I've written custom importers for Unity and it's a fairly straight forward process as long as the format you want to export to a format Unity likes from has an exporter you can call from the command line.

You just maintain some metadata on what hasn't been imported yet and use the asset import hooks to activate your conversion to a format that Unity already knows (usually FBX for 3D).

But honestly I wasn't aware that Unity doesn't already have reasonable Blender integration. I've been using Unity + Blender for years and never had too many issues.

It's been broken between Blender versions before because it does exactly what I describe (fires up instances of Blender with a python script that converts to FBX), but you can edit the script that Unity uses to convert and apply fixes which usually get shared pretty quickly.

There's also a little weirdness with the differences in coordinate space, but it just takes some mindfulness on the Blender side of things to deal with.

I don't know how much better the integration could get without going a step further and actually generating the FBX data from outside of Blender, but you can already do that with the same asset import hooks I mentioned before
If you think brave is cool now just wait for 1.0 . Some of the features are going to be mind boggling.
But luckily you don't really need to use the app much after initial setup.
Then how would foreign function calls work? If you're compiling Rust code that calls into a C library, how does it know what registers to use?

By using information kept with the function, or perhaps even encoded into the function name itself (as already happens when distinguishing between different calling conventions, or in the case of C++ name mangling)?

Coming from an Asm background, where there basically is no one "calling convention", and programmers would document which registers (almost always registers, rarely the stack --- and that can make for some great efficiency gains) are for what, I've always wondered why that idea didn't seem to go far.
NEW WORLD ORDER: THE LIE WE Live 2016
There are many excellent courses available online if you wished to take a look.

See MIT OCW Scholar's Linear Algebra offering: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algeb...

Take a look at the final exam and see if it seems like something you've seen. If not, I strongly urge you to consider studying the subject.

A book that shows linear algebra's applications at a more advanced level is Strang's Computational Science and Engineering: http://math.mit.edu/~gs/cse/
9

Would be a solid 10 as I love the actual work I do but being so busy at the moment means I am basically sat on my ass 12 hours a day - one of the downsides of working at home is not even getting your "Morning stroll to work" - not great for the waistline!
I wonder if it would also make it easier to exit--having dense atmosphere and low gravity. It might be possible to easily fly a rocket on the underbelly of a low-powered aircraft and launch it from the upper atmosphere.
50-60 mph on a non-enclosed vehicle violates my requirement for safety. I'm not going to use something that can't be hit by another vehicle without killing me. There's an aggressive attitude toward driving here, and it disproportionately impacts small vehicles like scooters, bikes, mopeds, motorcycles, etc.
Example of egregiously bad technical writing:

"1.4.1.2.1 Splicing in Modified BNF Syntax"
With such a strong, unequivocal, (strident?) statement, I'm honestly curious how you expect people to respond.

People who already agree with you might get more energized.

Those who disagree are likely to either (a) dismiss you because they know any discussion is likely going to result in a flame war or (b) jump in because they like the heat.

Those that are concerned about sugar might agree, but hesitate to participate in the discussion because of the flame war potential. Similarly those who are interested in learning more.

You're also making factual claims without providing citations. Like I said, honest question. What's motivating your phrasing?
Ask HN: Is root-servers.org still official auth for root DNS; is down now?
I'd like to know who has endorsed racism or misogyny. Could someone point me to such an endorsement from someone senior in Trump's administration?
>The President-elect has appointed individuals to positions of power who have endorsed racism, misogyny and religious bigotry

leans into microphone

Wrong.
Seems to me MIT cares more about political correctness than education.
You miss my point - it's not that you should learn it because its what people use, it's to learn it so you foster a love of the process! CDJ's and MP3's are fantastic (I pretty much exclusively use MP3 now) - but the feeling you get of playing on vinyl is totally different even if you will never use it IRL!
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason was that people at Bell labs were mimicking some older syntax.
Good article, and as the ex-CEO of Apple, he thinks more deeply about Apple's business than most of us.

Even though I have several Linux laptops and a Chromebook, the device I use the most is my 12" iPad Pro. It is great for light weight writing, SSHing into a server to trouble shoot a problem, run updates, etc. I just bought a new MacBook, which I am starting to like a lot, after a period of getting used to the keyboard, but I just use it for work. If my wife sees me using the MacBook then she assumes I am working (programming). With the iPad, I could be having fun or working. I look at the iPad as the future for most people.

That said, what I really want is convergence. I want one seemless environment that seems the same no matter what device I am on. I actually more or less have that, in a kluge way, but I want something more polished and effortless. I think Apple, and perhaps Microsoft have a good shot at doing this near term. With some trade offs, you can get this now with a Chromebook, Android phone, Chromecast, and Google Home but as much as I like Google's garden I don't want to live in it all the time.
GPL seems like a poor choice of license given the way the library would normally be used. What about switching to MIT?
How to rip Blu ray to 3D TS with DVDFab
Wow this is really interesting and might be really helpful for a problem I'm working on now. I'm wondering though, what is the advantage of using a whole new programming language rather than say, a Python library?
Absolutely! Until you have tried to keep a 2+ minute mix going on belt drive decks you wont understand how much joy MP3 with its zero wow and flutter brings haha
It's common, or at least understandable, just a little dated.

Mostly the people who use say/write it do so because they were exposed to RCS ("Revision Control System"), before they moved on to CVS.
I think this is the more relevant requirement, the above build even links to an audio library...
So what's the realistic throughput for an APU2 in a firewall configuration? (one port for LAN, one for WAN, forwarding traffic, no firewall rules)
I am curious as to why you were downvoted. I too am on the same boat and didn't know John Titor was based on `real` world events.
i don't understand - this just redirects to facebook for me?
He was never the CEO of Apple. He was Head of Macintosh Development.
> I also have a Macbook and its the perfect computer for normal laptop tasks. I am surprised by how many people don't know this exists.

They know it exists, they also know is $1300 and up.
China is, roughly speaking, on the other end of the spectrum from Venezuela: import mainly low value stuff like raw materials, manufacture and export almost everything else, create as large a trade surplus as possible, educate your work force, force people off rural land and into the cities to work, emphasize capital formation. Seems to have been quite successful.

Saudia Arabia seems closer to Venezuela than it is to China, and yet, it has at least saved a huge pile of cash, much of which is invested in valuable companies like Twitter.

My guess is that the US is closer to Venezuela than it is to China.
Getting started with pytest
My point was more that you can't treat Windows as "just a bootloader" as the parent to my post was implying. You also need to worry about security. I'm sure that a stock Windows install has more remote security vulnerabilities than lilo or grub.

No matter how much you lock down the guest VM, the host OS is still a weak point.
They're not mutually exclusive nor does pursuing one hinder the other. They're not even the same type of problem. The "scarcity problem" on earth, as economists of late called it, is pretty close to being solved. Solving our problems on earth is a political problem. Colonizing other planets is a scientific and technological one.
It looks like I mis-remembered the Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I do still think that the comment added to the discussion, but I won't talk about d...votes in future.
The New Workplace Is Agile, and Nonstop
I am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.
My take on this article in today's India is that, yes it will be helpful for more transparent cashless society hence eliminating corruption and dependence on middle man to large extent. We also need CCTV camera in every govt office and cash counter, so no one gets mistreated.

On the hand when I look at technology leaders like Zuckerberg who disguise themselves as philanthropist by offering "Free basics" in remote places of India, but are trying to be a gatekeeper of the open web. Same with Apple and Google.

Knowledge is power as we know from ages. So elearning can certainly benefit a person who does not have access to college education.

> When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.

Of course majority is going consume adult material and watch movies, when given a chance to be online for the first time. Sex is the basic need in Maslow hierarchy of triangle. I read the news about public masturbation in California.

In the end, question remains open. Does technology empower poor? Answer is yes and no. It depends on the individual who is using it. If he is wise enough, then he will make best of it. Otherwise, he will end being spoiled by it. Since wisdom isn't monopoly of rich or medium class, so we can count on technology as an aid for an underprivileged person.
John R. Ellis' doctoral thesis - Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures (http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf) is an example of excellent technical writing.
I think any comment that contains the words d...vote get d...voted.
He was an Apple exec, but never CEO.
They missed the RAND editor.[1] This was a full-screen editor of the late 1970s, years before "vi". It was originally designed for a specific HP terminal [2], one which had programmable function keys, and there was a little plastic overlay to place around the function keys indicating what they did. Later, there was a custom terminal with built-in keys for the editor functions. Expecting users to remember control sequences was considered unacceptable.

The RAND editor wasn't free. We had a site license for it at an aerospace company, so it was on all the UNIX systems. It was not used widely outside aerospace and DoD. "vi" was an attempt to do roughly the same job without the special hardware.

[1] http://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N2239-1.html
[2] http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/HP_2645A
I really enjoyed it and I would highly recommend it. It had the deep philosophical aspects to it but has a decent amount of humor to go along with it as well. I have been recommended the visual novel which i haven't read though. There is also a movie to go along with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate#Anime
San Francisco transit stations fall victim to a hack
No, it would ultimately have caused more fires with no way to blame them on anyone in particular. If we're going to treat batteries as safety-critical components, then it's counterproductive to encourage end users to replace them with the cheapest ones they can find.

Mobile phones with replaceable batteries aren't coming back, and good riddance.
vi was part of unix that came from at&t. i mean they still shipped ed, but

emacs was a thing developed and ported from other operating systems.
This is tangential, but isn't http://www.root-servers.org/ still the authoritative source for DNS. I was browsing DNS options (switched to open-DNS) but the main http://www.root-servers.org/ site is down. It appears to be cached as recently as this month with a map, but is not responsive. A few other "detector" sites have it down. Is this important, or does it not show up because it is a resolver?