skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Likely alluding to the Forth development experience where you start with writing a word (function) that toggles a single bit on an IO port and a couple dozen layers of abstraction later you have an assembly line or telescope, but just like Feynman and the turtles, its turtles all the way down, or Forth words all the way down or whatever.

Whereas OS style, you'd pick some layer of device abstraction, probably extremely arbitrary, and on this side its all assembly or C and on that side its all ... something else, Perl or shell scripts who knows, and generally people don't ever cross the arbitrarily placed abstraction barrier. Its an extremely hard arbitrary barrier.

A classic example of randomly tossing down a barrier over the decades, should RS232 API be bit banging a TX bit with your own timing routines on the application side and the OS merely arbitrates access or way on the other side should the OS implement a full TCP/IP stack and your application talks to the RS232 API at the TCP session layer while the OS does all the rest, maybe the OS even implements a NFS server talking UDP in the kernel and your API is being a NFS client? I've lived thru both extremes and everything in between. It is totally arbitrary and mostly just gets in the way.

Back in the old days when the unix kernel was written in C and so were all the apps... Well no one wants to hear this, but those were good days...
> they're still pretty much bicycles.

And Rust is still pretty much a programming language.

A FORTRAN developer from 1960 would recognise Rust as a programming language in the same way a cyclist from 1900 would recognise a Brompton S-type or a Specialized Shiv TT. The general shape is still there, everything else has changed.
> I don't like to sound rhetorical, but writing a memory management system for anything non trivial

Writing a generic memory management system is non-trivial.

Designing and implementing a memory management strategy with an understanding of the application semantics--especially when you can modify the semantics, or enlarge or narrow the relevant context, as appropriate--is much easier. Trivial in many cases.

Writing a GC for the JVM is difficult because the 1) JVM has far fewer degrees of freedom, and 2) they have to solve a much more difficult problem. All those awesome-sounding automatic optimizations JIT compilers can implement pale in comparison to the overall difficulty of the underlying problem.

By way of analogy, look at formal software verification. The underlying computational complexity of the algorithms are extremely costly. The only way to make it work is by using a human to refactor the big problems into many smaller problems, including smaller problems that encapsulate other smaller problems. Only humans can do that, and it will be that way for quite some time.

Manual memory management is the same way--a human can do better than a generic collector because only the human can refactor the program. Only a human can say, "this part is too complex, with too many lifetime and ownership interdependencies, so I'm going to refactor it so it's easier to use a more elegant memory management strategy". Generic collectors like those in the JVM can't do that--they have to work with the software they're given.

If you're having trouble with memory management, perhaps it's because you haven't yet figured out that you don't need to play by the same rules as an automatic garbage collector. And you certainly don't need to be, nor should you be, restricting yourself to a malloc/free-like interface.
A multi-linugal talking to-do list app normally $4.49. Free for a limited time
Yeah that was lazy work on my part. These pet feeders are quite reasonably priced. But i was looking for something with programmability. I still want to feed my tigers breakfast. I just want them to be OK with me sleeping in. So the compromise is to have something that disperses very small amounts of dry food at unpredictable intervals to keep them entertained and have a light appetizer while dad gets another 45 mins sleep. The feeders capable of doing that level of configurability started at $150 and they were quite impressive but I personally felt compelled to make something fully programmable for the way my house works. But youve got a good point here so I will update the link.

EDIT: the link I was talking about was thhis: http://www.super-feeder.com/
It is very cool if money is not an object to you
Could you talk a little more about DOSEMU2 versus DOSEMU?

I'm literally spinning up DOSEMU today to run a bunch of old DOS compilers (Watcom). I can't find much on DOSEMU2 other than its release logs, which seem focused on games and amd64. I think that Lredir/emufs (access to the Linux filesystem) and "dumb" stdin/out are important features to me.
Stop chasing the next framework, no more todomvc – build something interesting
I don't buy the high socioeconomic status bit. MOOCs are hugely popular in countries like India where education is extremely competitive. I help run an international science camp for late-teenage kids. More and more we're seeing applicants who list the MOOCs that they've taken, and most often they're not from 'developed' countries.

If anything the opposite is true. MOOCs have enabled vast swathes of economically challenged people to learn from high quality video material, whereas before they were limited to textbooks.

The key is that these kids are absolutely determined. And similarly if you really want that job at one of the Big Four, you might also consider soaking up as much prep material as you could.
$6,600 [1] for a master's from a top 10 computer science program [2] is an absolute steal! My master's program costs that per semester.

[1] https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/prospective-students/faq

[2] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
I've read reports on the incompatibilities, but the odd part is that you can popen which, under FreeBSD at least, is a fairly thin wrapper around vfork() and execve() makes that feel suspect. It may be a bit more work, but commands like this still should be treated as special.
How (inter)national money transfers works
Yes, I also climbed it once, on a fantastic clear summer day. The view was amazing, could see many of the islands from the summit. Would love to do it again sometime.
Dental technology comes out of stone age :) Most of 'innovation' was around x-ray machines and nice chairs for last several years ( at least for most of patients )
I'm usually the first to pounce on such errors, but I actually liked the writing style, and the story - inspiring, particularly for those of us who are outside the usual career path. I think the message can be more important than the presentation. Well done, and thanks for the inspiration.
What's absurd is that there is an RSA iphone app now...
This toothpaste claims the same, not sure what to make of it:

http://www.smile-store.eu/prevdent-re-whitening-and-enamel-r...
How VR is about to transform the entertainment world as we know it
The MIT Lisp Machine had been developed further and ported to a bunch of CPUs. LMI and Symbolics started with the original CPU. Symbolics then developed a 36bit machine and later a 40bit machine. TI developed 32bit machines. LMI and Symbolics were working on a new generation, which did not reach the market.

All these released CPUs were basically stack-based architectures with a bunch of Lisp support and even some esoteric stuff. Early CPUs had writeable microcode, so that special instruction sets could be developed and improved.

The main compiler/runtime was never (AFAIK) ported to support conventional CPUs of CISC or RISC types with mostly fixed instruction sets. Symbolics seems to have been working on a portable Common Lisp (for Unix etc) for a short period of time, but I have not heard of a portable OS on 'conventional' CISC/RISC hardware. Symbolics developed an embedded version of their OS, but still for Symbolics hardware.

I can't remember that that any of the competitors were developing a Lisp OS on top of something like SUN/IBM/Apollo/SGI/DEC/... hardware. Xerox had their Lisp OS ported to SUNs as emulation and you would run it on top of some SUN OS / Solaris. Symbolics ported theirs as emulation on top of DEC ALPHA / Unix.

For companies like SUN, DEC, IBM, SGI, etc. it was possible to license some core OS and develop from there. But there was no portable core Lisp OS to license. One could license the MIT Lisp OS, but the code you got from them was for a special Lisp hardware.

Symbolics and TI were able to use some standard chips for some interface functions in some of their systems. It's not just the CPU, which needs to be supported, but also the hardware for serial interfaces, ethernet, graphics, disks, wireless, ...
JavaScript for Beginners – My YouTube Course Preview
The date on the article is November 23, 2015.
It might have been unclear, but I meant the closure syntax/capture itself is less flexible. You can get the same result e.g. using a move closure and declaring references outside the closure then capturing that by value, but I'm sure you could also do that in C++.
Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job'

Yes, it is.

More to the point, it's built-in bias toward recent college graduates. Once someone's actually been out in the real world programming for several years, any space in their brain's metaphorical working set that was ever dedicated to remembering how to do this stuff has long since been paged out in favor of the actual day-to-day knowledge they need to do their job. Implementing basic data structures and algorithms is not part of what they need to do their job; that stuff's already provided by the platforms they use.

So when you get to the interview, if you just put someone on the spot and ask them to do one of these things, you're inherently biasing toward an inexperienced recent college graduate who will have this stuff close to the top of their head (on account of having just done it in school and not yet swapped it out of working memory through time on the job).

Which is in turn why there are now books you study -- as an already-qualified programmer -- in order to freshen your memory and ability to quickly regurgitate problems that have nothing whatsoever to do with your day-to-day work, in order to be able to perform them on command in interviews.
In C++ with the Itanium ABI, exceptions only add overhead when thrown, not on every function call. In Rust, the result of every function call is checked.
nLab
Docker on $9 CHIP Computer
> For anyone who wasn't watching: Unnamed sources in the CIA claimed that the DNC, a noted private organization, had their email hacked by Russian sources of some variant.

It wasn't just the CIA, it was the consensus of the entire US intelligence community. And it was reached after private cybersecurity experts (CrowdStrike) reached and publicly announced similar (but somewhat more specific as to the exact Russian government actors involved that the public statements from the intelligence community) conclusions.

> The media, once again collectively, made this seem like the election itself was somehow hacked

No, it didn't. In fact the media often explicitly stated that that was not, in fact, the case (often also citing specific government sources who articulated high confidence that that was not the case.)

> Julian Assange says he got the emails from an internal leak.

Which claim the media also prominently reported.

> Okay, so no matter how you look at it, pretty much every major source of news was spewing forth genuinely fake news in torrents of excess.

Even in your distorted description, there is no account of anything that would be "genuinely fake news"; at most there is a suggestion that entirely factual news was reported in a way that created a false impression of a different event, and that itself rests on your omission of some and distortion of other relevant facts.
AmigaOS 4: Enhancer Software 1.2 released
Show HN: BossSensor – Hide screen when boss is approaching
With Scala you have to be very careful to explicitly avoid blocking operations. You also have to micromanage execution contexts across the various components (or services) of your app. I also like the sound of the resilience provided by the Erlang OTP and the "crash early" strategy.

What I don't like is the prospect of losing static typing. Nor do my co-workers. We need to spend some time doing R&D.
I'd love to buy a tricycle version for a relative who would like a kind of motability aid but wouldn't like to have one of the typical electric scooters. Anyone have any experience with them? The ones I've seen seem to require manual gear shifting and it would be best if it's as simple as possible.
I don't agree with everything Skidelsky (the author) writes, but his main point rings true:

"Today’s professional economists... have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time."

In other words, they lack what Charlie Munger calls "elementary worldly wisdom:" https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html.
The discussion he referenced, if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13267537
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2016/10/brad-delong-end...
Next level: Now I have to learn to create 3D models with Maya, Cinema4D or Blender as a web developer :)
Next: teenagers
11,000 Penguins VS Santa Claus Army – Epic Battle Simulator (15,000 Characters)
Are you sure they weren't humoring you? They could've just converted to Fahrenheit for your benefit. I use SI units all the time when I'm around Europeans (and they're thankful for it).

Also, how old were these people you were interacting with? The UK switched to SI quite recently, well within the lifetimes of many living people.
agreed! it would seem ready for production given the alibaba association but docs and official support for vue (weex is based on but not actually vue) seem like the blockers for other orgs to adopt it. evan has stated in some HN thread (can't seem to find it now) that an "official vue" version of weex is coming very soon, though.
reading comments gave me a illusion that only the smartest people deserve to use Word. seems I can get a Mensa certification on using every editions of Word well without too much learning.....God I need to test my IQ, should be 9999.
Ah, yes. Cool :)
AllConv networks perform better and are an even simpler modification of the typical CNN architecture: just replace max pool layers with strides convolution. Why did the authors not benchmark against state of the art (also see fractional max pooling)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6806
I'm studying a 3 year coursework masters that allows people with no background in CS (just had to do an additional semester of courses) to participate and it aims to give a pretty well rounded CS education. Not a common thing, apparently.

I completely agree, the motivation and environment that it gives you, the reinforcement that you're actually doing something official and serious as opposed to doing something that very few people outside of the software industry take seriously, the structure it gives you, the fellow students you meet and befriend, it's all huge. Additionally, looking at the Udacity/Coursera material, a lot of it is shallow, poorly taught, and would not have taught me nearly as well as my master's program has taught me.
What about the dynamics of a mixture of self-driving and humand driven cars?
It would look a lot like emacs, one of those guys with 100+ buffers simultaneously open who does everything in emacs from git to IRC to controlling their music player. They get a lot of humor involuntarily applied to them, they also get a lot done.

If you get the "privilege" of working on COBOL it has native record/DB storage ability which can make life get really weird. Not until Perl in the 90s did we have a DB API so closely and popularly tied to the language.
I'm not sure what you're arguing about. You're saying exactly the same thing, just another way.

> You're after a chip with wifi, that you can program using the arduino IDE, that has a programmer on it, and that has the pins broken out.

That would be an ESP8266... no? The ESP8266 is everything you just listed as a requirement - it literally checks every box you laid out. Now you just pick a board in the form factor you need for your project, and has any additional features you need/want.

> The D1 is by far the best ESP8266-based board I have seen so far.

You just said it again right there. The D1 just happens to be the packaging the ESP8266 is wrapped in.

> When I am buying, for instance, a bean (basically an arduino variant with a BLE radio on it), I am not buying an AVR

Except that you are! The bean is powered by an ATMega! The 328p to be exact!

> If tomorrow, wemos swapped that chip out for an identical one, people would STILL want the D1

Probably not, since any other chip is unlikely to have as much community support and integrate so seamlessly into existing arduino IDE's.

People don't want a wemos or D1, most people don't even know they exist! People want an arduino with wifi that doesn't cost $99 and isn't in a clunky shield form factor. They get that with an ESP8266 wrapped up in one of the hundred different board options, of which, the D1 is but one.

Heck, you can even get an ESP-01 (ESP8266 chip with only basic functionality exposed) for less than $2, and add wifi to an Arduino Uno, or any other device with serial capability.

> Bluntly: I spend about 100% of my time working from a hackerspace, and a good chunk of that time is spent teaching people to program microcontrollers

Perhaps you should spend some time teaching people about what they are really working with. They don't need an arduino to build their project, they need a microcontroller, and the ATmega328p happens to be very cheap, easy, and accessible for even complete beginners. You're kind of doing people a disservice by leaving the arduino as a magic black box.
This is relevant because their ISO's have been already compromised once.[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11149839
> Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability.

I wonder if this is a contributing factor to the success of those who completed MOOCs. There was zero accountability but they STILL manage to complete the coursework and assignments.
That would be an interesting service of AI to categorize expenditure.
I get what you mean by "least bad". I guess I'm wary of all configuration formats. Would plain old INI have been an option or is it too poorly specified?
> I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may.

Anecdotally I'd assume that intellectual curiosity often increases with age, although that might be attributed to the availability of learning materials now compared to years ago. Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs.
You can regrow tooth enamel on your own right now. It's much, much slower than this and requires a criminally large amount of cod liver oil and butter oil (ie: vitamins A, D, K2 and calcium).
Harman Kardon and Cortana: Premium Audio Meets Personal Assistant
Go to a good art museum and see the "studies" associated with many pieces of art. Before the final product, the artist has a bunch of experiments with techniques, framing, and the like.

One of the things we often lack in software is a good medium for exploring mechanics. Getting something to the point where we can conduct an "Is this fun?" test or more generically "Does this serve the purpose" without a massive development undertaking.
I was expecting the AI to reveal for the first time what the bats were saying, instead we learn that AI significantly under-performed what humans already understood about bat communications. Why is this even relevant? Also understanding 61% of the times what the animals were talking about is pretty close to a coin toss. Not impressed -!?

"The results revealed that, based only on the frequencies within the bats’ calls, the algorithm correctly identified the bat making the call around 71% of the time, and what the animals were squabbling about around 61% of the time."
Speaking about Vue. There's definitely shared API. The breaking changes were very well documented and there was a tool which would analyze a project and recommend upgrade path.
Like it - I will be using this with some of the classes I teach.

I have a couple of requests (I know it says fork it at the top, but I've taken a look and would be way, way out of my depth!):

1 - modes of the other scales given (melodic and harmonic minor)

2 - a less daunting way of selecting arpeggios - possibly by selecting what would be the first note then removing that from the available options? I love the diagrams, but the massive table is somewhat daunting.

3 - the ability to export a MIDI file of a single run of the chord progression.

Nice work though, lots of interest and fun to be had in exploring the possibilities locked up inside the scales/chords.
You may have won an Internet Argument(TM) (or they gave up). The glory!
The original 'POSTAL' is now open source under the GPL
Okay. In my experience "the address of x" is taken to be synonymous with "&x", but I suppose that's a pedantic difference.
Ask HN: Content marketers of HN, what % converts from downloading Whitepapers?
Seeing this trend more and more as a logical extension of inbound marketing - so out of a 100 people who download your whitepaper, how many actually convert? And has anyone done a cost benefit analysis of whether it is worth it?
This one is far more exciting to me. The idea that we can re-create dentin from stem cells with functioning nerves and everything is crazy.
React gets a lot of things right but the technology is not exclusive to JavaScript. We will see adoption of similar approach in other languages with potentially portable views and semi-portable business logic (more decoupling I suppose).

In terms of ReactVR - yes it is pretty cool.
There's Silver Nitrate / Silver Diamine Fluoride [1] which appear to be as effective as drilling + filling cavities. Of course, they are also much, much cheaper, so they will cut into that average $160K/yr salary for dentists in the US...

1: http://www.dentistryiq.com/articles/2016/07/the-dos-and-don-...
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? Of course it's not a good idea to carry batteries with exposed terminals, which is exactly why Samsung includes plastic cases for them. And if you're already spending ~$800 for a high-end smartphone then an extra $45 for an external charger and battery kit doesn't seem like much. In practice Samsung usually sends customers an accessories coupon code when they register a new smartphone purchase on the web site, so the actual battery kit price ends up being even cheaper.
He has helpfully linked to it.