skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Perl 6 depends upon the continued vibrancy of the CPAN community.

Why do you say that? Is this a theoretical point, a reasonable conclusion based on reading about Perl 6, or something based on trying and failing to do something with Perl 6?

> IMHO, CPAN is anything but vibrant by today's standards.

Have you encountered problems that aren't being addressed? What do you make of the river cleanup effort[1] and the new metacpan?[2]

> many [CPAN modules] are aging.

Do you agree that "aging" that's due to modules continuing to work without needing to be changed (due to careful maintenance of backward compatibility and mass testing[3]) is actually a good thing even if it looks bad?

Do you agree that the same "aging" point can reasonably be made about the module archives of Python, Haskell, Fortran and Rust? If not, what is/are the key difference(s)?

> Fewer than 800 modules are known to exist for Perl 6.

Do you agree this might be a good sign, reflecting the "lots built in" aspect of Perl 6?

Are you aware that it's possible to use ordinary Perl 6 code with modules from Python, Ruby, Lua, Perl 5, etc.?[4]

[1] http://neilb.org/2015/04/20/river-of-cpan.html

[2] https://metacpan.org/about/meta_hack

[3] http://stats.cpantesters.org/

[4] http://modules.perl6.org/#q=inline
Where the later (the Volocopter) is more advanced in its development, I think (they've already had unmanned and manned test flights, and preliminary government approvals), as well as a better concept all in all (what with 18 rotors above the cockpit, rather than on 8 rotors on knee-level).

Full disclosure: I've invested a trifling sum in the Volocopter, so I'm a believer... :-)
Enterprise Linux's Big Three
I never understood the point of flying cars. Do we not already have those but call them airplanes?

Flying cars seem infeasible to operate for the mass consumer as they (like airplanes) require extensive training to operate safely.
I've been thinking about doing something like this, since I'd have to fence my yard to have an ordinary garden if I don't want deer to eat all my plants.

Are there any concerns about levels of non-growth-limiting (or color-affecting) nutrients in container-grown veggies? Has anyone even looked into that?
IIRC, Perl 6 grammars are parsing expression grammars (PEGs). I don't know if these are compiled down to recursive descent or packrat parsers; my guess would be the latter (since that's typical for PEGs).
Related: https://kraken.io
You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees.

It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS, Engineering, and IS, at a time when the national level was lower.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-my...

I'm not sure if we're on the same page, but my contention is that western governments are encouraging kids to pursue STEM, knowing that there's already an oversupply of workers due to visas issued to emerging economies, and that the issue is compounding year on year.
It includes a web server.
> Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks

Okay, I get it, Clinton bad etc. But Trump has appointed tons of people from Goldman to his administration[1] and filed an executive order against financial industry regulations[2] - you know the regulations put in place after the last Wall Street crash, to prevent a similar crash?

Can we stop pretending that Trump isn't bought off by Goldman now?

[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-adds-goldman-...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/03/presi...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/03/presi...
That may be so, but the point was that it was not really the cause of the Amiga's downfall. The Amiga hardware changed substantially over the years, and e.g. with AGA (the chipset in the A1200 and A4000) and when we started installing graphics cards, a huge proportion of the software simply ran unmodified and most applications were immediately able to take advantage of it.

There was nothing like that in the PC world for the first few years of the Amiga's life cycle, and for games there continued to be nothing like that until years after Commodore went bankrupt.

While most Amiga games certainly did hammer the hardware, unlike on the PC where games of the era also hammered the hardware, the small portion Amiga games that were in fact system friendly from the start was far greater on the Amiga in the early years than on the PC (e.g. some notable titles included Cinemaware's King of Chicago, as well as Ports of Call, and a number of Sierra On-Line games).

The bigger problem apart from the ludicrous mismanagement at Commodore was that Commodore was too successful at marketing the low end Amiga's. The A500/500+ and then the A600/A1200 were the big sellers, not the higher end machines. These were price-sensitive buyers unwilling to spend money on graphics cards, because until first person shooters hit they had largely very little reason to.

This made graphics card a far more niche expansion on the Amiga, where they were a luxury, than on the PC where you increasingly had to buy one to run what you wanted.

It was first when first-person shooters hit that the planar graphics that had been a tremendous advantage with 2D games became a limitation overnight, that the Amiga suddenly was playing catch-up.

The problem wasn't inability to update the platform, but it was exacerbated strongly by a chronic culture of underivestment in R&D which had been a hallmark for Commodore all the way back to their calculator days that certainly made the updates happen far slower than engineering wanted. Commodore survived as long as it did because their engineers, and those of the companies they bought along the road, pulled off crazy feats when their back was to the wall, but they were frequently unable to get even minor funding to complete projects even during the periods were the company was pretty much printing money - Commodore went on death-marches when they were facing existential threats and were cash-strapped instead, and eventually it caught up with them.
They did hire some of the top self-driving car (can we call them autocars?) researchers.

>"these announcements into researching more solid business models are a red herring"

My view is that they are attempting to develop a more solid business model. Why wouldn't they try? Even if they fail to turn it into business it creates value that can sell to the companies that do succeed. Besides if they need a shiney for their investors, faking it seems to be just as much work as actually doing it.
I don't know whether it's mandated, but I think that a lot of gamblers would want it that way. They want to be able to influence the game. The outome will still be completely random if the other sources of randomness are good, but the outcome still depended on the gambler's timing.
H1B employees being exploited works in Murica's favor. It means American companies are more competitive at the expense of some Rajesh from Chennai. This is something Trump should love.

Even if American companies are paying lower wages I don't see the problem. It helps American companies make more profit and lower prices for American consumers. Something that we all must cheer.

Some people argue that it lowers the wages of neo-native people. It is good too. We all would love a cheaper electrician, cheaper plumber, cheaper burger flipper, cheaper doctor what is so wrong with cheaper coder ? It benefits the entire society.
> CPAN is anything but vibrant by today's standards.

I guess it depends on how you count it, but if you look at the actual statistics[1] the number of uploads, new authors is pretty much the same as when perl was in its heyday.

This isn't all old code churn either, from some brief clicking around new CPAN distributions in January peaked in 2005 at 251, whereas January 2017 saw 187[3].

Sure, Perl has been surpassed to a large extent proportional to other languages, but what tends to get forgotten in these comparison between language popularity is that even languages that have "fallen from grace" are comparatively going just as strong as they were 10 years ago, because computing has grown in the aggregate.

Which means that while your language of choice may not be as well known to your typical programmer as it was 10 years ago, the likelyhood of finding an existing module to perform some task is about the same.

1. http://stats.cpantesters.org/trends.html#stats12

2. http://stats.cpantesters.org/newdistros/2005.html

3. http://stats.cpantesters.org/newdistros/2017.html
Yes, I'm talking about that and it's in 9.5 (which was released recently)
BEIJING: China will double the number of AIDS patients it treats with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), officials have said, part of a broader push to increase the use of the ancient practice in the country's medical system.

The promotion of TCM is part of a five-year plan from the State Council, China's cabinet, to tackle HIV/AIDS.

"The number of people living with AIDS who are treated with traditional Chinese medicine should be twice what it was in 2015," the State Council said on its website Sunday (Feb 5).

The plan outlined collaboration between traditional Chinese medicine departments and national health and family planning commissions "to find a therapeutic regimen which combines traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicines".

The TCM push aligns with a recent effort by the government to make the practice a priority for both development and publicity.

TCM, dating back thousands of years, treats ailments using herbal mixtures and physical therapies such as acupuncture and cupping.

The science behind such remedies has long been questioned. Last month medical researchers disputed a study claiming that acupuncture could cure babies of colic.

In late December the Chinese legislature passed its first TCM law, which will allow practitioners to be licensed and make it easier for them to open clinics.

There are about 450,000 TCM practitioners across the country, according to the State Council Information Office.

The government sees the practice as a cost-saving alternative to modern healthcare.

The new initiative to tackle HIV/AIDS will aim to reduce "AIDS-related homosexual behavior" by at least 10 per cent and mother-to-children transmission rates to less than four per cent.

In a 2015 report China told the UN that it had 501,000 cases of HIV/AIDS as of the end of 2014.

- AFP
Evolving APM landscape
How? The same people are still running the FBI who were running it before the election.
And a descriptive standard is entirely useless.

The entire point of a standard is that implementors agree on a design definition, then implement it, and it stays consistent, forever.

If you look at standards that work and fail, you’ll quickly notice a pattern. Prescriptive are Metric, the A-series of paper, the entire SI system, most open standards, etc. Descriptive are the imperial / US standard, Letter paper, Microsoft "Open" XML, etc.

And before you complain that prescriptive standards are useless because you can never change legacy systems: Several countries have prescriptive language design, with legal authorities how the language has to be used, and they manage to deal with centuries of legacy data.
No. Usually web application would be exposed through FastCGI or similar
protocol.

Insisting that either your tiny web application that can do next to nothing is
the thing that owns 80/tcp (and/or 443/tcp) or runs behind a HTTP proxy is
stupid. Proxying HTTP requests properly is harder than it sounds, which is
surprising every now and then and thus is easy to screw up (what happens to
Host: header? who is the TCP client? is it HTTP or HTTPs?), and your tiny
web application, as I've called it, is not the only thing I want to host on
the machine.
Patents represent a deal: You publish specifications, and society will grant you exclusive use for X years. Thankfully, unlike their copyright cousins, patent laws have not seen an increase in X. This serves to prevent knowledge from being locked away as trade secrets.

Beneficial to society? Drug companies have patents, and patents expire. Upon expiration, generics become available because the synthesis of the drugs is public knowledge, which creates a competitive market and lowers the price.

Without patents, the drug companies could (modulo other regulations) keep synthesis of their chemicals a trade secret, which may not be replicable in a reasonable time-frame.
> I think the bans are ineffective at stopping terrorists and are just Trump following through on his populist promises.

I think you are totally missing the main opposition to the ban: not only is it ineffective, it also harms innocent people. So saying "he's following through on promises" should not be nearly enough to justify it. After all, one is entitled to expect the president to do a good job, not merely a legal job.
> How is this number different from other developed nations?

Germany fares much better in this regard, about 56% gets solved I think.
Overwatch director speaks out against console mouse/keyboard adapters
Smart TVs really need to follow 3D TVs and die as soon as possible. If I want my TV to be "smart". I'll just buy a $50 set top box and change it every 3 years. I don't want a TV that I will keep for 10-12 years to be "smart" and abandoned in terms of updates a year or two after appearing on the market (so not even after purchase).
Their business model has no barrier to entry. Uber fares are subsidized by something like more than half, and as soon as Uber runs out of investor money, there's going to be nothing stopping someone like Lyft from doing exactly what they do now. They need some kind of capital, be it self-driving cars or whatever, to maintain their current dominant position.
Mechanism aside, do you actually believe it's different? A price control is a price control, and it distorts information in the market, which is normally represented by price. I'd highly recommend you read up on the influences of the last boom and bust: https://admin.fee.org/files/doclib/houseunclesambuiltbooklet...
wanna know why tech companies are anti-Trump and against his immigration ban? Because they actually care about immigrants and human rights or because it will affect their bottom line. Hint, follow the money.....
A cloud-based service that monitors other internet-connected services
The key insight of this post for me is this: Code editing is tree editing! The reason why code is edited in text editors, is that tree editing interfaces are fundamentally difficult to do well, and often have to be carefully tuned to the properties of the particular trees and editing tasks. (Simple examples: Huge fanout vs. at most 2 children. Very large information-rich nodes vs. tiny nodes.)

In the early days of programming text editors, we dealt with this difficulty by exploiting the human brain's mechanisms for dealing with serialized trees -- which is to say the human brain's facilities for processing language and reading and writing text. By doing this, we could represent all kinds of hierarchically structured code, and let the human brain process it. But even in these early days, we started bringing in visual aids for reading structure: indentation and braces.

Now, if you look at modern IDEs, you'll find even more geometric/visual representation of the tree structure of code, in the form of collapsible tree controls operating on the code. This isn't to naively say that graphical programming is the way to go, since the potential for interrelation and complexity of structure in code is far too high to comfortably represent in 2 or even 3 dimensions. The way forward is to be able to dynamically visualize very specific contexts. (One example I can think of of the top of my head, would be to quickly visualize all "subscribers" of an Observer, then be able to visualize the 2nd order "users" of those subscribers. Another would be to visualize patterns in code supporting dataflows as an explicit flow graph.)
As so often:

Please don't show a blank page when no javascript is available.

Maybe a message that you should enable javascript or better some basic information what your service does.
true.

However my response was more to the click baity title giving the automatic impression an intern came up with an innovative approach that netted tremendous result.
There's nothing dishonest about casino games in regulated casinos. Detailed information on game mechanics and payout odds are generally available from one or more of the following sources: the casino, the local government gaming regulatory agency, and/or the manufacturer/publisher of the games. It takes a minimal amount of effort to figure out which games are the least likely to bleed you dry, and if you spend enough time in or around casinos, and you'll quickly notice that educated/skilled gamblers avoid slots and certain table games like the plague, and gravitate towards games that (generally, if following normal mechanics) have miniscule 'house edges' like single-deck blackjack, baccarat, certain variants of video poker, Pai Gow, etc.
Relevant short video from the Documentary "FatHead" that talks a little bit about what Gary Taubes is talking about in his book. The effects of carb/sugar and the insulin response that causes fat storage. https://youtu.be/mNYlIcXynwE

Not to say it's not a useful diet method. Just that there are a lot of factors that go into "calories out"-- what calories are being used for energy and what are stored as fat. How fast are you burning calories? Hormones are a big part of that. You can see this very clearly in hyper/hypo thyroid patients.
Interesting. It's fine for the government to collect data and spy on its citizenry (without disclosing that it's doing so), but if a company does it it means millions in fines? Smacks of rank hypocrisy, to me.
The article assumes all learning is academic from authorities and never from doing. WRT doing at only $280/mon at a reasonable billing rate I could burn thru my learning budget on a saturday afternoon and barely keep up with the times much less get ahead.

The other problem is it assumes all learning is of the mind, but if you get it in your head to get involved in physical aspects of the field, then some FPGA boards and oscilloscopes and next thing you know you've blown your budget until 2030 unless you're careful. Arguably even "mind only" developers who buy anything more than a raspberry pi should account for their annual $3000 mac laptop and $500 phone (and its $1200/yr of phone service) and pretty soon you have no budget left over just buying hardware alone.
Actualy, generally in the US, bitmap fponts are not copyrightable, nor are any pure image representations of the glyphs in a font. Truetype fpnts generally are copyrightable because they are small programs that generate the desired glyphs, and it's the program itself that is protected.
While I definitely feel investing in one's self is worthwhile. I am not sure if this is the right approach to think about the issue. The author compares the % of what companies spend on R&D and correlates that with what an individual should spend on educational material per year.

I'd be more inclined to say it should be a % of your time. Instead of 5% of your salary, perhaps 5% minimum of your time per year should be spent towards learning. Though probably more is better? It'd be an easy trap to get into of spending 5% on "education/R&D" and not actually fully leveraging or utilizing it. One could blow that easily on a VM or server and some books and just feel like they've accomplished something when in reality they have barely leveraged what they have. Though if you are pursuing free/low cost education material, that small costs here and there shouldn't be fretted over.
How to learn JavaScript and avoid common mistakes in development
We can only know that if we have stats to compare with other similar countries.

Otherwise, 157 out of 50.000 cases of "internet fraud" might be just average.
Dramatic new discoveries illuminate the lost Indus civilization
It is, insofar as it turns what could potentially be a civil suit into a criminal proceeding.
The last thing I'd want as a developer or manager is to wake up in the morning with a PR shitstorm and enraged users because I shipped some vuln.

What full disclosure does it put everyone on the same footing. Developers, users, and attackers all at once. It reduces the window for potential abuse as much as possible. As policy, it sharpens the incentives to be very careful in your development processes and improve security measures.

It's worth considering that this is actually a long-running historical debate. One of the commonly espoused positions is yours - contact devs privately, give them a reasonable amount of time to patch, then disclose after a patch. After all, it minimizes disruption to production planning and workflows and still protects users. Seems reasonable right? Everyone wins!

Catch is, it's historically been abused by companies more interested in their production schedules than the security of their users. Maybe that's not you! In which case, well done, you're completely awesome! However, this has historically turned out to be rather a lot of software companies.

Full disclosure, the policy I advocated for, seeks to short-circuit this. It offers maximum information to a maximum of people in a minimum of time. It pressures companies to fix their products rapidly and to ship better products in the first place. It also offers users the ability to be aware that they may be under attack and protect themselves in lieu of a patch which may or may not ever come into being.

At the end of the day, the question is this: who are you protecting with your disclosure policy? I would suggest that the policy you have advanced seeks to balance the interests of users and of developers/managers. It's perhaps worth considering that your users may prefer a policy that aligns your incentives more with theirs. Perhaps your customers might prefer policies that encourage a proactive stance.
Glad to see this occur, would hate to have production code running without the DB being supported. Kudos to everyone involved. Another win for OSS.
> I don't quite get that the eHang commands such a presence in the public mind.

I think it's only because they're the first, their craft is really a rough prototype, and in five years they'll likely be forgotten.

> With the rotors where they are, it looks almost designed to maim and cripple passengers and bystanders.

That's my reason for thinking they're engineers who aren't thinking of the needs and vulnerabilities of end users -- they aren't really thinking about end-user issues.

> The Volocopter, by way of contrast ...

* Much safer design, better protection against any single-point failure (the eHang can't afford to lose even one of its props and remain controllable).

* But soo ugly. :)

To me, the first large quad with protective shields around its props will signal a level of seriousness consistent with the supposed goal (end-user acceptance, non-prototype).
What he proposes here seems to be:

Service -> Messaging Broker (Kafka) -> Consumers (Samza) -> View, where writes go to service and reads read from a view.

However, I more often see a CDC (change data capture) approach used in practice:

Service -> DB -> CDC -> Messaging Broker -> Consumers -> View

My understanding is that there were three reasons that this was the case:

1) Many already had some conventional DB in place, so it was easier to slap a CDC + Messaging Broker to get a lot of the benefits with less infra changes.

2) You require strong consistency

3) Messaging broker of choice might not be durable enough to entrust your writes to.

My understanding is that Kafka is durable (as this article states), so aside from (1) and (2) is there a strong reason to prefer a CDC approach?