skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't really answer the question, though.

Experience shows that such proposals go nowhere because
backwards compatibility with the PDP/11 and the finite
number of programs written are much more important than the
ability to write the potentially infinite number of programs
in the future in an efficient and secure way.

What does secure mean, here?

A length-prefixed string object wouldn't have solved lifetime bugs like use-after-free, which are far more common.

NUL-terminated strings are effectively an immutable type. The NUL byte tells you nothing about the size of the backing store, so nobody appends to a NUL-terminated string without being given ancillary size information. For the most part NUL-termination is irrelevant to the problem of buffer write overflows. Some kind of write overflow is usually a prerequisite for gaining control of execution remotely.

Because the beauty of C lies in the manner it exposes pointers, any such alternative solution would also have to tackle the problem of deriving slices/vectors that point into larger arrays. The length-prefixed string solution doesn't solve that directly, whereas NUL-terminated strings naturally offer an elegant (if simplistic) solution for character strings.

Pointers are useful in other situations. You usually don't need the power of pointers, but where they're most valuable is precisely where obvious, effective, and simple solutions are sparse. For example, pointers naturally length themselves to iteration. How many iterator interfaces has C++ gone through? Swift? Rust? Languages like C++ and Rust retain pointers because often times they're still the best model, especially in the most complex situations prone to mistakes.

It has yet to be shown that there are simple solutions that are "secure" while maintaining the simplicity, transparency, and efficiency of C. (Cue Rust fans!) I don't doubt that such solutions exist, I just doubt they're as easily discoverable as assumed. C is a great language because of the tremendous expressiveness it offers for it's minimal complexity. If better expressiveness, or better "security", comes at too high a cost in productivity, there's no reason to think such a language would have triumphed over C. After all, Pascal and many other languages predated C.

Regarding the PDP-11, C predates the PDP-11. The B language also used a terminator rather than a length prefix. See

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

The whole PDP-11 angle is both dubious history and highly speculative. It's certainly a simple and convenient narrative, though. And those are always the most fun.

I'm not defending NUL-terminated strings. I agree length-prefixed strings would have been preferable. I just disagree that they would have magically resulted in substantially more "secure" code. The alternative universe where C had length-prefixed strings is certainly not one with $0 of unnecessary costs related to bugs and intrusions. Indeed, there's little reason to believe it would have alone resulted in anything more than a marginal reduction in costs.
Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but getting any income from your open-source work is a good motivator to keep working hard at making stellar software.
Agreed, in theory it's possible to create a tricorder-like system. Basically, radiology and advanced diagnostics in a box.
You're not getting old. You're getting older. Welcome to humanity. :)

I am 43 now. The last 10 years of my life have been equal parts challenging and amazing. I have a little girl who is about to turn 5. My teenager is about to turn 18. I've made more "progress" and done more growing and experienced more in the last 10 years, than in all the years before.

Whether or not you have kids, I would do your best to learn how to enjoy each day. But learn. Whatever you do... keep learning.

Contrary to popular thought, you don't have to be young for great things to happen. They happen all around you, all the time.

Also, there's an author by the name of James Altucher and he's written some things about just being a little bit better, a little more improved than the day before. His stuff is good. I'd recommend it. Also, Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts. I'd be happy to talk more if you ever want to.
I can't find a list of local Superfund sites that shows degree of pollution or costs of cleanup, but the Lorentz Barrel & Drum fiasco got a lot of press.

That site is now a parking lot for (apparently) auto dealership storage. It's at 10th and Alma, across the street from both Spartan Stadium and the Ice Center.
And for context "beefy PC" here means less CPU power and RAM than the cheapest smart phone today.
Fully agree regarding your points about micro payments. Patronage, monopoly-priced copyright, and advertising have all proven to have bad side-effects.

IMO, the market may be acting rationally here. I have tried Octave several times, and always moved on with little regret. Genuine Matlab is tolerable for some prototyping tasks. A slow clone of Matlab has little value outside of academic environments where Matlab compatibility is required. Programmers use their favorite language, and others use a spreadsheet.
Ask HN: I won some money for my side project, where do I put it?
We won a couple thousand dollars in a pitch competition, we plan to spend ~50 bucks a month for APIs. Is it worth creating an LLC and getting a checking account yet, or is there a cheaper option? If not, what bank is best to use?

Shameless plug for anyone interested the project-> http://appointmesh.com
The 10 minute test plan (2011)
> At its peak ... encrypted e-mail and messaging system was the gold standard for security for enterprise and government customers, providing secure access for as many as 90 million users.

Until they gave in to some government's demands and showed that they could not trusted.

This seems, to me, to be one last "hail Mary" attempt to save the company. Blackberry (RIM) was at the top of the "smartphone" industry 10-15 years ago. It's too bad they couldn't adapt and stay relevant. I'd still happily be using my 8830 if I could.
Nice. 100K database nodes! Is that like, Facebook or Twitter?

I hope you write about that somewhere.
Wow. Significantly slower than the IDEs I used to think were bloated JVM beasts.
I'm actually with the others on this. I've been looking at CompSci papers, engineering methodologies, and real world code going back a long time. I saw a few patterns in use like Parnas' information hiding or state machines. I didn't see GoF patterns until I saw Java people using them while recommending the book. Also, many people in industry forgot about prior methodologies that got results without over-abstraction such as Cleanroom but were all over GoF patterns and latter Agile methodology. It seems their work was pretty influential.
I took the grandparent post to be one example of how to execute a greater strategy. This would presumably be one way to appeal to electronics enthusiasts, among many.
Twitter sentiment analysis with Machine Learning in R using doc2vec approach
I don't understand how YC can fund non-profits like VotePlz and the ACLU while not funding stuff like this. All of the startups funded by VCs use free software, often exclusively, but these VCs continue to refuse to adequately fund its development. Marc Andreessen even publicly boasted about how much OSS his companies use[1], which he of course doesn't pay for.

I also shudder to think of how Eaton will fare on the job market should he actually be forced to seek regular employment. Will he be whiteboarded? Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? And what about his age? 25 years on Octave could mean he's pushing 50. I could easily see him getting a "no hire" from plenty of trendy tech companies.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9
>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get

Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X.
It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...

Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png
And why hire someone highly trained to sell a $35 pi, when someone with no training can sell a $700 iPhone.

There is a reason they tried to switch to cellphones.. needed something easy to sell and expensive enough to justify their rent.
nothing against haskell, but this is funny:

http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/143847262458/hask...
“If they don't want to cooperate then you don't come in.”
Funnily enough I never assigned "megalomaniac" to a certain name; it appears it was just assumed I was talking about Trump.

That being what it is, seeing it as an outsider to the US, the glove certainly appears to fit. If good people can't stand up to this sort of behaviour, and call it for what it is, I am rather worried.
Why can't a company like google just hire and let him work octave like 20% of the time. They can afford it.
That's because Jira is just a bug tracker. None of us need any assistance understanding the implications of a bug tracker, even one as sprawling as Jira.
matrix.org
I see what you're saying, but I can't feel sorry for people in this position.

It's a no brainer that giving away a product for free won't be a sustainable way to earn a living. It's not like there's a big mystery around how to make money off of software.
Nice idea.

By the way, are you Scottish? I don't think they use the word "without" in that way anywhere else.
There There!
I think the same way. I feel like LXC is super powerful and flexible at the same time. Docker and all its terminology around(docker file, compose, swarm and many more) just feels like unnecessary complexity..
A few unixy scripts to automate LXC commands and The infrastructure should be set. The less wheels to grease the better at this level.
Now all we need is 'Windows subsystem for Linux' to run on wine, and we'll rip a hole in space time continuum.
I thought this was going to be an announcement about how they finally fixed search...

A suggestion: When I search, what I want 99% of the time to happen is that the current window I'm looking at quickly gets filtered to my search query. Ranking doesn't matter, just show exact matches ranked by time.

1% of the time, I want something else.
Well, maybe if you convince the MathWorks guys of that they'll hire this dude, but otherwise he's not going to get to do both things.
I don't think we're going to solve this here. A few thoughts: first off it wasn't a coup since the Shah had the power to dismiss Prime Ministers. Second, Iran had gone through more than a dozen Prime Ministers in that time period. Mossadegh was one of many who were booted out of office.

Claiming that if it weren't for the CIA that Mossadegh would have stayed in office and led a gov't with the confidence is the people is stretching it.
Sometimes I dream that if I ever become very wealthy (either because of something I created or because I won the lottery) I would go around and donate some nice money to these under-appreciated developers/organizations/projects.

I mean, if I had billions, wouldn't it be feasible to spend say 1M or even 0.5M to say, 100 projects? 200 maybe?

Does this not happen or do we just not hear about it if it ever happens?
Much more than that. For example, both audio and video drivers had massive rewrites and rebuilds. Video drivers received a lot of tweaks for DirectX 10. More importantly, MS pushed the entire audio stack to use the User-Mode Driver Framework [1], which resulted in a lot of changes in how audio drivers access the underlying hardware.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Mode_Driver_Framework
I assume the parent is referring to the problem where it's prohibitively expensive (from a payment processing perspective) to receive lots of small, sub-dollar payments.

Also there's a lot of friction if you're relying on your users to pull out their credit card info for such a small amount.
I see from the screenshot that it's running on Windows 10, Cloud Edition. I thought that the rumored Cloud Edition doesn't run any software not from the Windows store?

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-coming-windows-10-cl...
If they don't believe in the company why would they loan their shares instead of selling them.
Breathing New Life into ‘Great Oxidation Event’
Agreed.

body{max-width:640px;margin:auto} The extra 33 bytes won't slow things down (unless you somehow hit the next ~1kb packet boundary)

line-height 1.5; would also make it more readable.
The worst thing to me is that they seem to think it's OK to do something like this and then not do something in the UI to make the blessedness of the specific date they choose clear.
Your comment about internet speed is interesting. Why do you think it's faster in Eastern Europe than in the UK?
More films available from OP's website: https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/
Using the Closure compiler to add types to JavaScript
If we are to be rational, regarding anything at all which is to be truly understood, then all sides of an argument must be considered. Scrutinized, yes. Saying someone is just calling 'bullshit' and they need to rethink or re-calibrate their 'bullshit detectors' or initial thoughts is not in line with that.

I agree with you at the same time that they could simply be making an example of this man.

But, I believe they are 'making an example of him' to cover their own incompetence. I am not saying evidence has been planted, concocted, or otherwise. I am saying this just not seem like a cut and dried case of mishandling by a long term employee who should be more than aware of procedures and policies in place after 20 years.
Now I want to see the results from neovim, or anything with a client/server architecture. I'm surprised emacs is so slow (compared to vim) and I wonder if that explains it.
I assumed it was a reference to the "Lock her up" campaigning.
Most people would rather save 1,000 people from Malaria in Africa than give 1 white college educated man living in one of the richest counties on earth a year's salary to write code from his home office.

(I am sure it happens, but I am sure that it is pretty low on the donation list)
I'm on the outside looking in, but various reports and speakers I have seen imply that without trust the intelligence community can't function. I also imagine the compartmentalization would make it hard to observe any but the most blatant violations of security policy.
Huge Explosion at China Chemical Plant
This sort of shit is why I go through FB periodically and delete nearly everything. What bullshit.
I suppose, then, it's a bit closer to moving the target
I don't believe it's a lack of money. There's no shortage of investors looking to make money in the U.S, and we have very low interest rates. If people aren't investing, it's because they don't think they can make a profit.

So I believe the real question is, why is it thought to be a money-loser?

And somehow, Chinese investors seem not to care that much about profits? It's unclear how much of these is foolishness versus vision versus corruption.

In any case, lots of great infrastructure gets built by companies that go bankrupt. From the point of view of someone who didn't finance it, maybe it doesn't matter whether it's a smart move or not.
https://keybase.io/inv/72ee2e6801

I have a lot more, message me if you want one.
I thought you downloaded the Linux Subsystem from the Windows store?
Yards or Meters?
You're entirely correct here. These OSS creators have leverage but are either unaware or unwilling to take advantage of their advantageous position.
The worst part about wsl is that it doesn't work on windows 7 :(
I had no idea these were freely available. Thanks and then doublethanks to whoever is behind thoughtmaybe.com...
If a vendor were sure that this version of a driver will be the last they ever issue, they could do that. That seems a fairly rare circumstance.
How can telling your employees "move or leave" be good for morale?
... that'd be the guy who refused to answer even basic safety testing questions though, right?

Or am I thinking of someone else?
Reminds of when I started reading Code Complete. The construction analogy really helped me conceptualize the difference between making a personal one-off project (like a shed) and an hardened mission-critical system requiring test suites for everything. (building NORAD). Not everything needs to be a TDD, elegant haiku.
Now I'm not specifically criticizing mints usage here, because I'm not a mint user. But it's been my experience on both sides (as a dev and an app-user) that it seems companies regularly send unwanted push notifications, that if clicked open the app. If a user opens the app even for 1 second in a month, they are counted as a silly metric "Monthly active user."

Through chains of management and obsession over charts and bad metrics (like MAU) it's been my experience that the whole intent of building a great product usually gets lost by persistent opt-out messaging. And it's a situation where everybody loses out (because I uninstall the app, don't recommend it) and I get interruptions I don't want.

Now I recognize this article is specifically talking about pushes that do deliver some form of value, but what I don't see is any follow up research on whether ultimately these users are glad they got these notifications (or whether they feel stressed by them, or nagged, or whether they uninstall)
> Let's say 1% of your potential users use such connections. It only makes sense to support them if your total userbase is a large enough number. For Google, it's a no-brainer. For other sites, it's something to consider.

Your making it usable for that 1%, but you're making it better for the other 99%.
4 Things Every Entrepreneur Retreat Needs
The US Government's 100-Mile “Border” Zone – Map
Uh, no. It happens all the time in Scotland, particularly the highlands. I ran into it in Iceland as well.

Generally, the car closest to the nearest spot suitable for passing just reverses to that spot. The other car passes, and they both go on their merry way. Very little in the way of communication required.
Scientific support for mindfulness meditation
...and sometimes backwards.
> I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.

It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but "support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower tiers.

I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs, before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.
Is there no middle ground between OSS maintainers/contributors going hungry and them holding businesses hostage for ransom?
Well, that's because it's often not the case. Take the two cases:

* Engines get more efficient (fewer litres per kilometre traveled). Does the total amount of petrol consumed go down or up?

* Flushes get more efficient (less water / successful flush). Does the total amount of water consumed go down or up?

Both of these have a more efficient use of a consumable quantity. Often, however, more efficient engines lead to more traveling and larger vehicles whereas more efficient flushing leads to reduced total water consumption usually.

The fact that gains from efficiency can be outraced by the induced demand can be seemingly paradoxical. And "seemingly paradoxical" is the only thing that makes anything labelled "Paradox" interesting.
I've found coverity to be very hard to set up with a normal developer workflow on github. ==> I think I've given up on it 3 times.

Do you have any guidance around getting it to work?
For me (network/server guy for a small ISP, with complete decision-making authority in this context), I'd love to run FreeBSD on all my servers and OpenBSD on all my routers (even though I (mostly) make my living from my Cisco knowledge).

Here at home, within a six foot radius of me, I've got a nice new (waaaay overbuilt) workstation, a pair of ThinkPads, some cheap Dell laptop, and a rMBP. The Dell and rMBP are rarely used but I had to decide what to run on my three "primary" machines (and the couple of neglected machines in the garage).

I'd much prefer to run FreeBSD everywhere but suspend/resume on the laptops is a deal breaker for me. I could run FreeBSD on the workstation (which is always running) but then I've got two operating systems to keep up on instead of one, so instead I just run Linux on all of them.

At work, on the servers, my line of thinking is basically the same. I pretty much have to run Linux (over BSD) in a few cases, so do I run FreeBSD where I can and Linux everywhere else or just make things easier on myself and run Linux across the board? Since I'm already running Linux on all my personal machines it makes sense to use the same at work.
The Linux "solution" would be to yell at the driver maker to contort their driver to fit the Linux model and put it in tree. A vendor that refused would need to have their driver installer manually blacklist the kernel driver, and get support calls whenever the kernel's updated because the abi breaks again.
Ah, you wanted a Secure National Agency :-)

I'm sure they do have elaborate security procedures but the size and scope of the organization means that any operational issue (including security) is almost always Someone Else's Problem. And since the NSA's purview is basically ELINT + crypto, they don't have the same sensitivity to more traditional espionage methods that a HUMINT organization like the CIA does.

Incidentally I'm thinking of setting up an OSINT entity if you're interested.
Are you looking specifically for debates? Otherwise, I'd recommend reading "Understanding Power", which has ~450 pages of footnotes alone, to the point where they are not included in the book and published as a separate downloadable PDF: http://www.understandingpower.com/

Other than that, this ones seems to go into details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68wFDvTBHys
So you feel that the ROI is greater for companies going through YC now than it was 10 years ago? I suppose it's true that the network of founders has grown significantly, but it's hard for me to imagine that a founder in the class of '17 becoming the head of the YC Accelerator.
(Hyperscan team lead here)

Interesting. I should point out that Hyperscan is not abandonware; it is still maintained by Intel.

Streaming is not unique to Ragel.

You're not wrong about libpcre compatibility. We have very tight syntactic compatibility with libpcre (that is, we won't misidentify an unsupported construct and supply some erroneous semantics) but we make no secret of our inability to handle general lookarounds and backreferences.

I'm interested in how you went about handling backreferences in Ragel. They have been in our 'too hard' basket for years, although many instances of backrefs are tractable in our framework. It's always seemed easier to not do any of them rather than handle just a few.

Ragel certainly ties into the host language differently, and more tightly, than Hyperscan. We use it ourselves, to lex regexes on the way into Hyperscan, as it happens.
I really hope web concepts move gracefully into VR. I suppose "immersive location" is just like a URL and full-VR experience is just another Content-Type.