skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My ALWAYS playlist in Overcast:

- 99% Invisible
- The Changelog *
- Dan Carlin's Hardcore History *
- EconPop Podcast
- Engineers & Coffee
- Freakonomics Radio *
- The James Altucher Show
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- The Journal by Kevin Rose
- Planet Money *
- Radiolab
- Reply All *
- Revisionist History *
- This American Life
- The Tim Ferriss Show *
- The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe *
- The Winning Agenda

I will delete episodes with uninteresting starts or guests, most notably on Rogan because it's so long-form. I listen to everything on 2x speed with "SmartSpeed" to also eliminate pauses. Threw an asterisk next to those that are the most significant for me. If I were to pick just one, it would be Tim Ferriss.
I thought it was interesting that the ants and the coffee plant are both three million years old.

Imagine if the ants were a bit older if so I wonder if it would be possible they created the coffee plant through selective breeding.
No.

Completely unsourced material is not news, regardless of if we 'agree' with it. If completely unsourced material is labeled 'news' then this material could reasonably be called 'fake news'.
I would not let that line pass code review.

Obviously. However, it is an appropriate example if your goal is to teach the intricacies of the C language. You're right that if you provide such an example this early, it could perhaps use some additional commentary.

Not only is that confusingly cutesy, but largeA[i] is a double.

That was the point of the exercise: !! is an idiom to convert to boolean (which happen to be integral in C) and something a C programmer (or JavaScript programmer, for that matter) should be familiar with.

This is flatly untrue on x86 and I suspect many other architectures.

Agreed.
>Compilers are also mature enough to issue warnings about the use of uninitialized variables

That depends on the compiler. It's not true with GCC: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18501
I can see elements of danger if improperly used, but, from my point of view it is no more dangerous than libel laws or any other law which requires explicitly "knowing" what one is doing.

A law like that is dangerous only if the burden of proof is on the journalist. Which in our modern society should never be the case. I admit, sadly there seems to many cases now where innocent until proven guilty isn't as strongly held.

It is tremendously hard to prove that someone 'knew' the information they were publishing was false (outside of an explicit confession or conversation) and it absolutely should be hard. But, such a law may make people who are in it for the money at least give pause.

I can't think of a case where if it isn't fiction, satire, humor, commentary etc etc, and you know it to be false information that you choose to spread as fact, that you aren't doing so with malicious intent to harm others or to personally benefit from the exploitation of others? The social contract of society exists primarily for protection from such actions, and its tool of protection is the law.

If there are cases you can think of where that wouldn't be malicious or exploitative I'm really interested. While I still hold true on the idea that the most important thing with fake news is to empower people to make their own autonomous and informed decisions, I'd quite like to be wrong about criminalizing the spread of false information - as I am a fan of as few laws as possible to get the job done (as long as the job is done well.)
What sort of programs is Prolog good at expressing? I've looked at it a bit, but can't really think of any good use cases.
I was really pissed once when I got a Steve Alten book, it was terrible, then when I looked at the glowing 5-star reviews they were transparently written by him or a delegate. I've never returned a book before, but that time I wanted to do it out of principle.
Half-Ton Handbuilt CPU Heads to Centre for Computing History
Thanks! I'll be looking into these. From a first glance, Coding the Matrix looks to be excellent and exhaustively complete, but also very verbose. From Mathematics to Generic Programming appears to be the kind of book I want to avoid. It seems to be more about a study of a few particular algorithms useful for generic programming than actually understanding the principles of mathematics.
Thanks! We updated the link from https://thetechgraph.com/2016/11/28/japans-new-130-petaflops... a little while ago.
Yes! Ever since this latest 10.1.1 update running the smallest app with cause this new "overheating issue" on the iPhone 6+, battery drains to 70% within 30-40 minutes. NEVER happened prior to this update. I'm barely getting 5 hours life out of this phone now, % is showing random numbers as well..it may even turn off and reset after it hits 45%! AND the battery is pretty new - replaced in late September after it started to bulge...$$ out of my own pocket to take care of that issue (Had to be replaced ASAP fearing it blowing up) Stopping in the Apple store this weekend was a complete waste of time, it was beyond packed due to the timing of the wonderful Holiday Season [sarcasm]. No one there could help me.
Could you expand on why "database servers... should never be dockerized"? You mention that database servers should have access to all of the resources of the server, but Docker doesn't prevent that.

What other reasons would you give someone when they are considering Docker vs Ansible/Chef/Puppet to deploy a database server or cluster?
He owes the political establishment nothing, yet his cabinet picks are all dyed-in-the-wool Republican insiders.

The claim sounds incompatible with reality.
The story regards access to social media sites in various countries where such access is blocked, however, I'm sad to see there is little subject given to the number of file-sharing sites which have come under fire in the last few years, especially by governments under pressure from the MPAA and the like.
The most interesting thing about this is, that it is written in Rust.
500 is peak output, usually for sustain cruising speed only about 10% power needed, only to overcome friction.
I considered it, but the used car business is something I have absolutely no desire to get into. Fill your boots.
Differentiating Under the Integral Sign [pdf]
I would say the best benefit of using Linux over Windows for a casual user is to avoid viruses and ransomware and the like.
No, Photon is doing "Massively Multiplayer Online As A Service" (did you even read their page?).

And actually they are running game loops, but you can't inject code into them unless you run their software on-premise, or use a separate system I recall them mentioning that offered server-side scripts that got injected in their loops.

And cost per message make perfect sense because of the networking model, which is fully message based. Paying per message is paying for bandwidth + cpu usage as a single combined rate.
> Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting.

Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'

From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.
I guess CNN is backing on his current fanbase (mainly teens) staying loyal to him as they graduate from HS and move to college. CNN knows that demographic likely won't have a cable subscription, so this feels like an alternative platform to capture that audience or at least try to. Time will tell if it's a successful strategy.

We'll likely never find out the terms, but I doubt anyone made money out of this deal with the exception possibly of Casey via his new contract with CNN. With over $6m raised, best-case scenario is the investors were made good and the employees walked away with greater long-term certainty and a stable paycheck.
Overall, the site does not seem to be built to meet my needs as a tea drinker. The first thing I 'discovered' was a quiz that presented itself as mandatory. Bypassing it to the Tea of the Day was not an overwhelming experience. It lacked detailed information and informed opinion. Mostly it was a link to buy.

In general the site does not seem to be built around my goals and there is not a sense in which the company is interested in aligning its goals with mine. I did not come to the site to take a quiz.

Clicking on the link to the Tea of the Day takes me to Amazon where buying three of the product is about 25% greater unit cost.

It appears that , Amazon is running in a frame served over HTTP. Including the login page. Clearly that's not in my interest.
Typically exacerbated by lack of measurement for either developer productivity or application performance. Without measurement, you're just firing away at targets in the mist.
The Oberon operating system is as old as linux, yet I'm pretty sure you use the latter more often than the former.
Wow, to be honest I didn't realize this would be so amazing. I'm going to tell all my co-workers about it as well. I upvoted you on Product Hunt as well: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/devknox
Please let's ban paywalled articles or else change the link to a google search so that the free version can be clicked.
Squats, stiff leg deadlifts, back rows should do it, but you need to be cautious of your form. Still, none of that will mean squat (no pun intended) if the diet is crap.
When it comes to software, "no copyrighted elements" is not clearly defined.

For example, the output of a word processor is clearly not copyrighted by the word processor author. Most people agree to this.

However, if I created a remote login system where millions of users could access one and the same windows word installation, I would likely get sued by Microsoft. Even if the small amounts of data that is streamed through remote control has no copyrighted elements that is owned by Microsoft, the fact is that I am evading the copyright of Word and undermining the market value for the program (or at least thats what I suspect the lawyers should say).

This is generally where clear lines end, and the fuzzy world of legal opinions of juries/judges starts. The output of a word processor program not the same as the output of remote controlling said program. Evading the copyright through remote control doesn't sound as something a judge would look favorable on, and in the end it is the infringer that need to convince the judge and jury that their activity is within the license/law, or that the usage is within reasonable expectations.
Switzerland can't support TVG-style speeds because of its topology (too many mountains, curves), but then again, the country is small enough that you can get to Zurich from Geneva in ~2 hours 46 minutes.
Alenka: A GPU-Driven, Open Source Database
I think there is an affect where nobody resisted regulation creep because nobody was building a lot of passenger train lines anyway.

There is something analogous with city center housing in Sweden. For decades not much was built. The population is fairly stable and many were moving to suburbs anyway. Today, not everyone wants a suburban house, and nobody wants to live in '60s concrete "housing project" exclaves, so central apartment prices and rents skyrocket. But now you cannot build the kind of central flats people want any more, because of decades of accumulated regulations about noise, sun angles, parking quotas, etc. The market is dominated by 50-100 year old buildings that predate the regulations and are very popular.
Yes I totally agree with this and think that it's funny when people go off on the danger or C due to the fact I learned it along with many other kids between the ages of 8 and 12. At Oglethorpe University they ran a coding camp for children like me interested in learning C, QBasic, and ASM. At the behest of a fan letter I wrote to LucasArts as soon as I saw a C instructional class for younger people I had access to I signed right up. Being in Florida that was the closest me and my family could find and within our budget. I remember there was one kid in the ASM class who made a TSR for another more obnoxious student that re-wrote his hard drive until it physically broke. It was quite the statement but some of us apparently didn't consider these design features dangerous rather we considered them powerful. As far as writing good C code is concerned if a bunch of pre-teens could do it then I'm sure its possible for anyone given enough practice.
> and trust in my fellow citizens to do the right thing

And there is your mistake. Our republic has endured precisely because full trust wasn't placed in the hands of the people, but rather the people were simply another check on the power of the government that was subdivided, distributed, and balanced.

There is a path for amending the constitution and it requires overwhelming consent, as it should.
Huh, interesting. I (and my wife) have contacted Amazon a number of times about shipping estimates being off/wrong and have only ever received the same form response (even when we respond to the form response, CS reps just mail back the same form response again). I'll keep this in the pocket for the next time it happens.
If the sites are on a root domain, then you can put ADWords on the site and get paid, but not much. Typically a thousand impressions is a dollar. Depending on how long the URL stays on the frontpage, you could be looking at 20,000 - 50,000 impressions which roughly translates as USD 20-50.

You get paid even more when ADs are clicked on.

To be honest this is a rather dated way to monetize a site now with the sudden surge of visitors using ADBlockers, and you might want to look into other ways to monetize, such as

- Affiliate links

- Premium/paywalled articles / content

- Donation buttons, using PayPal / Bitcoin/Litecoin

Also keep in mind that since getting frontpage on HN is so rare, then it can't be a sustainable source of income
Everyone should write your second example. The first does nothing but confuse. C has enough hazing rituals without garbage like "-->".

The fewer tricks and patterns you use in C, the higher chance actual bugs have of being caught. Cutesy tricks like "-->" confuse human analysis and gain nothing.
It's a delicate balance between refining the message to make it simpler & clearer, vs changing it because you're getting bored. At the beginning of the project it's probably important to try different approaches, but then stick with the message once you have it.
Many people would say that it's best to A/B test different messages in ads, and track which one works best. I'm finding it important to pitch the idea to 50 people first, get a feel for what resonates in the room and then test the messaging in an ad.
It seems there is more backlash for Uber's engineering blog posts though and the points seem to make me doubt Ubers engineering chops.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054705.
Probably both.
Most of the assumptions in the comments boil down to its a bad idea if you're resource constrained because you'll get much better performance when everythings on one big server with shared ram.

However, possibly, their engineering goal was detecting and isolating hotspots and minimizing debug/downtime effort. And possibly they have an infinite pile of cash or at least they're not resource constrained. In that case it might make sense to fragment massively.

For example, lets say database #235 is using 75% of a shared server. Then at least in the very short term migrate the numerous other databases at the container (or image) level to other servers so the overloaded database doesn't flood out every other business system you support.

Now the argument is if you ran mysql bare metal then you'd have more memory and maybe only use 25% of that shared server, but sooner or later you'll get a big enough flood of traffic that you'll want to segment off and your operations team understands docker at 2am but not mysql DBA stuff quite as much. Sometimes its nice to have everything use the same standard and everything lives in docker might work.

This also has fascinating forensic and QoS implications where you can do interesting snapshot and cloning tricks affecting precisely and exactly one DB at a time.
That's just journalist doing a bad job. There is Chongqing the municipality (equivalent to a US state) and there is Chongqing the city. According to the source used on the wikipedia page the city's population is 18M.
Running Optcarrot, a Ruby NES Emulator, at 150 Fps with the GUI
I would say that reliability is not perfect so far. I'm getting timeout error on IMAP and webmail
I think you're right that Wirth's own compilers usually used a lexer.

And you're right, you do need one token lookahead, not just one character, in a few places if you insist on entirely unambiguous symbols immediately.

The point is that it's not necessary, as the few places where there is ambiguity while looking at only a single character, it's sufficiently unambiguous that it doesn't matter until after you've parsed enough to be able to discrimate it.

E.g. this is from Oberon:

statement = [assignment | ProcedureCall |
IfStatement | CaseStatement | WhileStatement | RepeatStatement |
LoopStatement | WithStatement | EXIT | RETURN [expression] ].

All of the above except "assignment" and "ProcedureCall" starts with a keyword. ProcedureCall and assignment both starts with productions that ultimately starts with an "ident".

So you can parse it like this (Ruby-ish pseudocode)

ident = parse_ident
if !ident
# throw error here
end
case ident
when :if
return parse_if
when :case
return parse_case
... and so on ..
else
return parse_assignment_or_procedurecall(ident)
end

So you know that you are dealing with a valid program as long as you find an "ident".

It is still often cleaner to simply use a lexer vs. doing something like the above example of passing "ident" to a subroutine, or adding backtracking ("unget") support to the parser, so I'm not suggesting it's always a good choice to forgo a separate lexer, but the languages means you can.

In particular, if you don't want to add backtracking, even if it'll rarely be many characters, you'll need to "unroll" the grammar more, like with the "parse_assignment_or_procedurecall" example, and that can get messy, but it works fine.

E.g. in the above case:

assignment = designator ":=" expression.
ProcedureCall = designator [ActualParameters].

designator = qualident {"." ident | "[" ExpList "]" | "(" qualident ")" | "^" }.
qualident = [ident "."] ident.

So "parse_assignment_or_procedurecall(ident)" would for the most part be relatively simple, and the one complication is unaffected by whether you use a lexer or not, and actually probably the most tricky production I've seen in a Wirth grammar to the point where merging the parsing of the two is probably simpler - ActualParameters is a strict superset of "(" qualident ")" I believe, so as long as you keep seeing "(", you expect either just a qualident or a list of expressions; once you see something that isn't just a qualident followed by ")", you're at the end of a ProcedureCall or have an error.
Would async/await work in Swift/iOS?
Simulations of complex modern chips don't run in real time.
I agree. For this reason I wish the author would promote (no pun intended) the use of signed arithmetic.
> just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing.

Well, at least that means they've all got an excellent zoo and a really good used book store.
> 1) MySQL requires one file to configure it: my.cnf. This is not exactly a huge amount of configuration which needs to occur. Installs via puppet, Chef or Ansible tend to consist of two commands - one to install the package, and one to write the my.cnf (templates are good so you can use the same command on any sized server). You can add one more command to set up the initial users, should you so desire.

Really? The mysql System Database is filled with tables that hold important configuration information. You can say "add one more command to set up the initial users," but if you have a lot of grants, you've got six levels of database privileges -- global, database, table, host, stored procedure/functions and proxies -- that all need to be configured. You've got the event scheduler. If you have UDFs that you expect on every server, those need to be configured. None of this is in my.cnf. Maybe at the scale you've worked at, you've never had issues with any of those things in a three-command puppet/Chef/Ansible setup, but maybe Uber has problems at a scale that you don't have, rather than them not understanding how MySQL is configured?
We've merged the discussions into this thread.
Your patronizing tone aside I see what you mean. Yes, that would be "time travel". Again, it just seems like you're being antagonistic here and now putting words in my mouth in a vain attempt to prove your own superiority.

The only claim I was making was to clarify what OP meant about time not being a phenomena like gravity and to passively ask if there was any evidence of time as a physical (rather than purely conceptual) force.

Sorry if my amateur curiosity offended your professional (?) understanding of such things.
Interesting Open Source projects list
Remove external link styles from gov.uk
Building Modern Progressive Web Apps
My dad and I went on a driving trip around England and the Isle of Skye. The only destinations we couldn't have reached with train were Mediobogdium and Uig when we got to the Isle of Skye.