skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am iOS developer and I really wanted to say swift is headache and not a good language for Server development. I want to see how it goes but as far I know it is not flexible enough. I mean if you are building a production server you really do not want to think about language issues. Like dictionary is taking 4000ms to compile (yes it is true 4s) and compilation error message which has no link with what actual error or language syntax totally changed now you need to change million of lines of code to new syntax. It might be improved in future but for now I do not think it is time to swift as server language.

I really like the language but for using it on server development nah.

I need to wait for 10 minutes or more to compile my code. I am really frustated. I am solving for 2 days Xcode 8 issues beacause it compile slow and it is really frustating as a developer. It does not matter how I write code
in a language but in swift 3 dictionaries are really mess and slow to compile and it's long way to go for swift.

It's just my personal opinion.
For embedded, I'd start with the language primitives easily producing efficient primitives of the machine, the cost (esp time/memory) of language primitives must be intuitive (ideally deterministic), be able to size/manipulate variables at the bit level, probably support pointers, have anywhere from tiny to no runtime, probably a good C FFI given existing stuff will be C-based, and ideally support inline assembly for stuff specific to MCU/CPU if not C-based.

Any embedded developers want to add to or dispute anything on that list? It's recent draft of a reference I'm working on to answer this common question.
I would hope computer manufacturers would simply stop selling to SC to set an example. I can imagine the cost involved for them to have a SC-customized sales and build process would be substantial.
Mirai vs. Nitol
>But just like height might explain women's relatively low leadership rates, it might explain Asian American's, as they tend to be shorter.

If anything it would be more probable that the causation goes the other way arround.
Software is Politics
DIN (Deutsche Industrienorm) paper sizes, by the way, are beautiful:

A0 is 1 m^2, by area, with sides in a ratio of 1:sqrt(2).

When you fold it in half, you get the same ratio, but now A1:

A1 is 1/2 m^2.

A2 is 1/4 m^2.

A3 is 1/8 m^2.

A4 is 1/16 m^2.

etc.

So, if you buy paper, it will be, say, 80 g/m^2. Now, one page of A4 thus is 5 g.
It's not a bad scripting language in that case.

Quick startup, a good amount of CLI-specific APIs, available on many servers already, and no compiler or huge amount of tools needed.

It's a bit verbose for little scripts that should be in something like bash, but it's a great alternative to something like python if you are more familiar with it.
McKinsey's 2016 Analytics Study Defines the Future of Machine Learning
It's not possible to remove a message embedded within the Bitcoin Blockchain. Locked Post assigns a sequential number to the beginning of every embedded message ("L1,Message" - sequence number "1" for example) - this acts as a easy way to verify that the data has not been modified or removed (by allowing anyone to check the sequence hasn't broken and that the web-site content matches what is stored in the Blockchain [The web-site provides links to various services that allow you to view Bitcoin transactions and therefore the embedded data within.]). You can see every message ever posted here: https://bitaps.com/1K69sEhUwNgiva3xzPnToxS89dzydU7nPm I will also eventually release code to easily verify the web-site.
Let's not forget how much of this research was driven by anticipated military needs. The 'D' in DARPA stands for 'Defense'.

I don't think that the US cut military-oriented R&D expenses significantly. Does anyone have and idea how did the direction change?

OTOH, AFAIK, a few of the most pervasive technology changes, like the GUI or mobile networks, were not military-driven, but were purely commercial R&D (Bell labs, Xerox PARC, etc).
Yes, but that owes heavily to growth in pre-internet industries in developing nations. Unless the Internet is a crucial enabler of that growth (possible, but not a given!) the more relevant question concerns growth in the developed world, which has been lower.
More than anything else, what stood out to me was his discipline for knowing how to manage his time in a way that enabled him to build something like this while still juggling the n number of other things on his plate.
Worst Advice: Harvey Weinstein Video
Well, most people wouldn't work with Steve Jobs by choice either, but a few did.
Unless somebody does it well, and it catches, we are going to repeat again and again reinventing UDDI, semantic web services and other past intents...
In practice the V-chip didn't dial out and couldn't really accept orders from a central authority. A v-chip owner could set programs of a given rating to not be displayed without a password.

I suppose the system could have been suborned to make all tv shows have the most strict rating blocking it on TV with the chip enabled... but if you have that power you can just turn off the TV signal. Anyway the lack of central control prevented it from being meaningful.
Last week, there was a HN discussion on how Instagram's latest moves have successfully reduced the need to use Snapchat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166882
$20,000 x 700 cases = $14,000,000 out of $1,000,000 PER DAY in coffee revenue over decades is also statistically nothing.

McDonald's judged that injuring people and pounding them with lawyers was more cost effective than customers not having hot coffee after they drove to the office.

McDonalds got off lightly.
This is how it should work but it's not how it does work.

If you approach an investor with the idea for a "bridge", they won't fund it because there's no proof people would use a bridge, and you can't prove it until you're funded. End of story. No bridge.

Give them an feasible idea that is somewhat backed with a guarantee that the money they fork over for you to spend on developing the idea won't simply be copied - and the investor will take that over a terrible idea with someone they know.

Please, point me to this investor. I think your hope of what it should be masks the reality of what it is. I'm with you; I wish it was that way too.
I'll just focus on one thing here:

The only implication of judgement upon the person is one you have applied yourself.

It isn't even one the recipients have seen.

The judgement is entirely on the work: seen by how the fixed work is gratefully added to the whole, in a manner befitting the project.

If a Finn wished to insult you and not just your work, there would be no implication. It would be explicit.
All of this was written before the Dotcom boom!

Do you remember when you had to .com after every company or had to put www. before every company, because almost no one knew how to search (on AltaVista or redirect in a DNS record), or just restarted their computer to get back to the Yahoo! home page?

If not, then you don't remember this time... but almost everyone remembers the DotCom bust 3 years later, when the nerds got their comeuppance!

Within two or three years, the current mood of American triumphalism--our belief that we have pulled economically and technologically ahead of the rest of the world--will evaporate.
-Krugman
Native people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet
CHIP-8 in Common Lisp: The CPU
That doesn't make those people deserving of abuse, it just indicates they were willing to subject themselves to it in service of something. What's your point?
> Resources are never "misdirected," as both the lender and the borrower must agree on the venture.

That's not what "misdirected" means. In economics, "misdirected" investment is investment into unproductive things. It doesn't matter whether the lender and borrower agreed with a bad idea; if it's a bad (unproductive) idea, the investment in that idea is still misdirected.

Now, you're right that after the fact, it's easy to call what wasn't clear at the time. But the flip side is also true: In the heat of the moment (when you think there's a lot of money to be made), it can be hard to see what will be blindingly obvious after the fact - that this is actually a really bad investment.
I disagree.

Of course we need general-purpose, extensible languages. We also need motherhood and apple pie. But multi-paradigm languages are usually mistakes. They aim to give you the best of multiple worlds but frequently wind up giving you the worst.

We saw this with C++, which was supposed to be a structured / OO hybrid. The trouble was, the mismatch between the strucutred world and the OO world created huge complexity, starting with functions that might or might not be virtual. Non-virtual destructors anyone? Not to mention the fact that structured programming doesn't use GC, but proper OO programming requires it. See http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/faq/oo-faq-S-3.12.ht... for the reasons why.

The problems get even bigger when you try to hybridise functional and OO paradigms:

* In OO the core concept is the mutable object. An object has an identity that persists as it mutates, and you can distinguish between two otherwise identical objects because they have different identities. Hence the distinction in all OO languages between reference equality (two references pointing at the same object) and object equality (two distinct objects that are equal in all their fields).

* In the functional paradigm, on the other hand, there are only values. Asking if two strings are the same object, or two employee records, is as meaningless as asking if two "3" values are the same object. Values are also immutable, so the idea of changing a string or employee value is as meaningless as changing "3" to be "4".

So when you create a hybrid functional/OO language you must deal with this impedance mismatch. If objects are mutable then the order of execution matters, and you have to trust the programmer to get the data flow and control flow to agree, thereby losing the big advantages of the functional paradigm. If objects are not mutable then you don't have an OO programming language.

Finally, I do not believe that "Any sufficiently large program will have parts that are expressed best in different paradigms". Claims that some domain is best expressed in one particular paradigm always seem to end up with statements of the form "Yes, but I want to do this my way, and your paradigm makes me do it your way". Sure, if you try to write Haskell in an OO way you are in for a world of pain, but that just means that when using a functional language you should architect your application in a functional way. And similarly for an OO language of course.

I spent a long time in the OO world, and I've used the best OO language ever designed (Eiffel). I moved to Haskell, and have become convinced that for most general purpose programming the functional paradigm is superior to OO. (The exceptions are in hard real-time and resource-bound environments). And the reason is that Backus was right.
Russian Ambassador to Turkey Fatally Shot
I think you're still making it, just in a more subtle way. What happens to the money those people spend on arthritis treatment?
If those are providing tremendous value, as is I think your implication, then it's not "makework" as I would use the term. I have no objection to finding projects we want done and hiring people to do them (I may or may not object to the individual projects). I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one so that they "have a job".
And, don't forget that the first book printed was the Bible. Of the next ten thousand, many were smut. Civilization survived.
Github has had this type of problem before, and it seems that they handle it pretty well. I think as long as a single repository doesn't become a massive hotspot, Github don't really mind. I'm pretty sure that go checks out dependencies direct from github for every application, so the precedent is there. Shards also caches the repositories globally, which is nice.
Interesting. Do you think Swift isn't as good a language as Objective-C? Or a headache in what way?
Which Java? Which JVM? Which libraries, etc.? JDK 8 bears little resemblance to JDK 2. The latest JVM bears little resemblance to the first ones. Java is old. It is a huge ecosystem with lots of warts and cruft. There is a lot of good stuff, however, in that ecosystem and it's so good that it runs a huge portion of the Internet. So, some good criticisms but too much missing the forest for the trees.
Developing for any Apple OS, other than that not really.
This feels unnecessarily reductive and hostile.
A Caution on Superfluous Code
That might be a bit misleading for some readers, so let me clarify.

Most political stories are off-topic here, especially pure politics and most especially pure partisan politics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We tried a no-politics-for-a-week experiment that we canceled after a couple days (mainly because a week turned out to be longer than needed). When we did that we reverted to the status quo, described above. That certainly does not mean that most politics is now on-topic for HN.

The way I think of it is that HN has a small 'budget' for politicized stories and it's important not to spend that budget on run-of-the-mill material. It should be saved for particularly substantive articles and/or ones where the topic is clearly of core interest to this community. The budget needs to be small because, if it weren't, politics would quickly drown out everything else and destroy the thoughtful discussion we're hoping for.
Nothing, if you're close enough to the situation to know what's going on. In other cases at best you are adding noise.
Since I bump back and fourth between sysadmin and programmer gigs, I don't get why a system admin wouldn't want a programmer to build their software with privilege separation? What am I missing? Having a secure system is a big deal for a system admin (these days the #1 deal), but at some point you have to rely on a programmer getting it right.
Sure, but any metric or process put in place is vulnerable to be gamed. In some way, I respect individuals who do this. Just don't bother my team.

But managers aren't intrinsically bad people, they just have different motivations. And they have their own problems caused by politics. Ideally devs would have tools to combat this problem directly. But life isn't always fair.
> Levy, Steven (2001) Crypto: How Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

Thanks for telling me about this. I read about 50 pages of it on kindle this weekend. Its a beautifully written book.
I'm not insane, and was doing Cocoa programming years before iOS existed. To each his own, but I'm not willing to work on codebases that are dogmatic about _not_ using IB. Use IB where it makes sense (most places), do what needs to be done in code in code. Interface Builder was one of the selling points of development on NeXTStep...
Of all the things that are noteworthy in this email thread, Linus calling the branch a piece-of-shit seems the least of them.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1612.2/00545.html
Yes, it supports custom log formatting but you'll likely have to write a bit of parsing code in the config, see docs here: https://goaccess.io/man#custom-log

There are also a lot of log formatting q&a in the github issues (both closed & open) if you're using a popular format.
We've been hearing the other side's point of view for years in the papers, on commercials, in the news and on talk shows all painting an elderly woman whose genitals were melted off as a parasite trying to take advantage of a large corporation.

This is the first bit of dialogue from the site's video:

HOST: "What do you think of the movie?"
FIGLEY: "I saw it as propaganda. Well done propaganda... But, propaganda."

So says the panel of tort reform supporting lawyers and professors.
In real life, typically organisations start talking to other organisations and _maybe_ there will be computers involved eventually.

Do they? I work for a company that does a fair share of M2M integrations, yet we almost never talk to the other organization, we merely use their APIs. I don't know what's typical, but our case certainly isn't rare.
Try something that is more its weight, like Rust.
Thanks for the link! I will check it out.
The 7-Step Process We Use to Grow and Convert Organic Traffic
Well, OK, but this was expected from sysadmins as well. It was always sysadmin
who is responsible that the application died, no matter the real reason. Where
do you think the idea of putting programmers on call to reduce crashes came
from?
Here's the part I find most humorous. Machine to Machine communication has already been attempted, and it always fell back to requiring human intervention. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) was an attempt to exactly this, and it failed.

WSDL didn't fail because it frequently tried to describe SOAP connectivity (and everyone knows that SOAP is obviously bad for all things), it failed because it was still people writing the APIs and the descriptions of those APIs. And since people aren't perfect, humans had to intervene to find and fix the bugs to properly communicate with a WSDL defined API.

Until AI gets good enough, or we adopt a specific definition to meet all use cases (should be fun to watch), such attempts are going to keep failing. Because it's humans hiding in the box of the turk, and will be for the forseeable future, and computers are still pretty terrible at communicating with humans.
Chisel is pretty cool in its own right. But the best I can say about RISC-V is that it's clean and open source. It is clean. Basically, it's a clean up. Get rid of register windows, branch delays slots, tagged integers, ..., every wart that previous RISCs thought were a good idea but turned out very bad.

Clean is good but in 2016 that's not enough for me. x86 is very ugly but Intel has spent decades making it fast, low power, ... Anything you want it to be but never perfect.

I think RISC was sort of a good idea in the 80s. Not great but good. It continued the ld/st/register approach of Saint Seymour. IBM ran with it and arguably started it.

But it's been tried and found ... wanting.
If this was 2014 it would be potentially quite ironic, still can turn out to be quite Ferdinandish.
I think once someone has done enough programming to understand or care about being closer to the metal, they prefer what they already know, which is usually imperative languages.

I wonder which paradigm a total beginner would prefer? As a beginner they would not be influenced by "how the metal works" because they don't know or don't care. My guess is that beginners would prefer imperative languages as well, even though it has nothing to do with "the metal".
First, note the phrase "could not get it to repeat when we tried to track it down." Secondly, I'm pretty sure that that flag wasn't just labelled SERIOUS_RUNTIME_ISSUE_ACTIVE; there were presumably other good reasons for the flag to be set the way it was, and other serious problems that flipping it might have caused, as far as they could determine pre-launch.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. You can eat a healthy diet for very cheap. Rice, beans, most in-season fresh vegetables, out-of-season frozen vegetables, flour, peanuts, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, russet potatoes, etc are all quite cheap. Throw in some spices and your protein of choice, and you can eat more cheaply on these foods than on a "not caring about what you eat" diet of lean cuisines, fruit loops, and poptarts.
Confusing tweet from the bill's sponsor: https://twitter.com/BillChumleySC/status/702746882385248256
SiFive.com seem to be closest to having 64 bit hardware. They came out with 32 bit hardware a few weeks back (which doesn't run Linux -- it's a sort of Arduino type board). LowRisc.org may have 64 bit hardware next year. There are a few others, best to see the recent conference talks for details: https://riscv.org/2016/12/5th-risc-v-workshop-proceedings/
a piece of paper and a pen. Oh, you need goals too...
Ask HN: Why isn't Social Security more automated?
Every couple of months, a retired person that I know has to spend a significant amount of time correcting ridiculous mistakes that the SSA makes in paying benefits. One month, they suddenly "forget" to count their spousal SSI, and pay too much. Another month, they double-count some SS income as other income, and pay too little. There seems to be no end to the number of ways they can miscount things or simply use wrong figures, which my friend then has to correct by a laborious process of collecting documentation. This has been going on several times per year, for the 5 years since they retired.

I always respond with incredulity. It's just hard for me to believe that a 3 trillion dollar fund could be administered in such a way that individual government employees are free to make numerous mistakes, on a case by case basis for every individual person receiving benefits.

How on earth is a fund this large, with so many transactions, not administered by a computer system that can accurately remember people's situations, and carry out the rules in a consistent manner?
Creating a Hero with a Featured Video
Call for new Stackage Curator
People all over the Internet are shouting Archduke Ferdinand. I hope not. 2016 hasn't been good so far and there are a few days to go.
In the context of a DHT, F2F stands for friend-to-friend, i.e. authenticated nodes.
This is fascinating (to a non-crypto nerd such as myself). It would be nice to collect some code that will fail all the unit tests to study why I think as well as reading the commentary. Also if theres a way to use this to audit legacy Java apps that would be fun as well.
Snapchat Plays Hard to Get with Celebrities and Influencers
I understand that designing processors is fun, but I hold several things against RISC-V:

- the assembler dst, src backward syntax (like intel);

- the fact that this processor design is being aggressively pushed here (featured several times already);

- the fact that the instruction set is non-orthogonal (32-bit fixed encoding makes the decoder simple, but creates the same load-store problem as on SPARC - hello non-existent, synthetic instructions!);

- the fact that they could have extended the open source UltraSPARC T-series design, but decided to just re-invent the wheel all over again. How does 128-bit support justify starting from scratch, and not re-using what is already there and open sourced?

The last point is their biggest sin, in my view. There is already an open source processor design, and a good, solid design, and they just went ahead and invented their own anyway. All the lessons about reuse went out of the window. We're the only industry that I know of that keeps nuking itself and starting from scratch, throwing away all the work which had been done before.

Oh, and I seriously dislike the instruction mnemonics. To the authors of RISC-V:

couldn't you have made the mnemonics MC68000 compatible, or at least make them similar?
So I didn't even need to say modern! Thanks!
I was just responding to your initial claim that a self driving car could dream at night and the suggestion that this might make it conscious.