skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" should stop publishing sample code (which they update sporadically at best)"

Ah? No. 'Sample code' is essential, often more valuable than the docs.

They are a $700 Billion dollar company.

You know what they can afford to do?

Have more sample code, better documentation - and update all of the goddam samples, moreover, to make it clear in each sample, which version applies.
AliExpress' Way to Microservices
This is great. How did you do the frequency groupings for more complex languages like German or Icelandic? Did you use a word stemmer or did you find lists that include noun declensions?
Is Crime Genetic? Scientists Don’t Know Because They’re Afraid to Ask
What you're describing is the perfect way to evaluate a developer. That's exactly what I promote to my employers. That's what I ask at the last step of the hiring process if we still have a doubt. we should use this evaluation only and get rid of the extras. Then we should talk about life and work in general for an hour rather than a stupid algorithm question just to make sure the candidate isn't a d*ck.
My cat utterly ignores the TV. Until one day it was a show with a lot of barking dogs on it, the cat got very interested in it.
So, can I use that to add Tab Thumbnails to Firefox? Can I use it to port AutoHiDPI, which changes the scale of the UI depending on which screen the window is on?

Can I use this to replace the entire browser history system and omnibar autocomplete with a custom one?

Can I use this to replace the entire browser chrome?

Some of these changes I need (AutoHiDPI) to use a browser at all. Others I wish for. All of them I currently am using.

The alternative is me staying on an ancient browser, or forking Firefox and browsing with a horribly outdated and barely patched version. Or reading HN with a magnifying glass.
Notice I wrote "could have led Ford and others to research ways to make the electric model more capable for the masses as consumer demand would seek such alternatives."

I think if oil was of a higher price due to lack of competition there would have been more incentives by car companies to try to figure a way to make the costs of running a car go down to appeal to the emerging middle class. There would have been more money in R&D at those earlier times trying to solve problems that were not really considered or kept to the side because they were too difficult. I believe for the most part discoveries could be made even then that would build up to suitable electric cars. Of course we wouldn't have had them by 1911.. as one would need to take into consideration the break up of Standard Oil. It would have been interesting to see what the military would have came up with during WWI/WWII if oil was too costly and battles needed to be won with the usage of vehicles and how that would translate over to private business and civilian life.
Linux is another beast, on my Ubuntu box Firefox gives similar performance to OSX. But on my Debian stable box Chromium plays a lot better with it and the Firefox build feels like it has a gremlin in it haha.
> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome ...

See that's some odd misinformation that's been spread around since Chrome first was released, it was the fastest browser at the time. Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis update.

So yah, I'm not sure why all this "Firefox is super slow" keeps getting passed around without anything to back it up.
In fact for WebGL Firefox is over 3 times faster than Chrome, so if anything Chrome is actually the old slow dog.

Current benchmark for proof:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
Objective C is going to "die" fast. It's basically an Apple only language, and the community is quickly moving to Swift.

If you don't know either language, simply compare the code. Objective C is a much noisier language.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objecti...

Apple doesn't dwell on the past. Most of their examples are in Swift for a reason.
There's a video of a large mirror placed in a jungle and the reaction of various animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaMylwohL14

Also previously on HN this same topic was discussed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751593
Heh, I thought maybe they were sample collection pouches...
Adobe has partner with Goldman Sachs, Vschool, DevMountain, and The Department of Workforce Services (and originally Cotopaxi, but they ducked out) over the last year to teach refugee youth how to code using code.org (the accelerated course) interlaced with robotics using the mBot. It uses the same scratch interface, so their code.org knowledge easily transfers to seeing some real-life application of something that they can touch/hear/see move around. They seem to like it. They definitely hate lectures, though. Clearly one needs to give them instruction, but excessive instruction definitely works counter to one's purpose. These are youth aged 13-18.

The mbot lessons slowly work them up towards a "sumo wrestling competition" where they have to push one other opponent's mbot out of a ring.

If anyone is interested, we made a little repo to hold our code. It's a little outdated, but we'll get it updated soon.

https://github.com/STEAMGEN/mbot-curriculum
Summary of pro death arguments

**Fairness**
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)

**Bad for society**
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)

**Bad for individual**
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)

More people make more progress faster. I'm glad my parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without me in it. Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc, still alive and productive would be nice. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer sucks, we'll know 100 years from now, and decide then. First 220 year old in 2136 unless you know how to make one faster than 1 year per year? And that's if you added 120 years to a 100 year old person starting TODAY.

P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles were true, even earlier.
I find it really fascinating that there's been problems using traditional brain-computer interfaces with these patients, and the researcher who developed this device specifically believes it's because once completely locked-in they actually experience a dramatic shift in the nature of their mental activity that prevents them from utilizing traditional BCI:

Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva and coauthor of the new research, has an idea about why this may be, although there’s little evidence to support it so far. He proposed that it becomes harder over time for patients to channel their thoughts into voluntary action. “Anything you want, everything you wish does not occur. So what the brain learns is that intention has no sense anymore,” he says. “It is too difficult for them to switch from [a] more reflective state into an attentive state."

And that the device they used itself was designed to be more a passive monitoring of mental perception of input:
The team stuck to simple questions that could be answered with a yes or no. “The answer in your head…occurs quickly and it occurs like a reflex. You don’t have to mobilize a lot of resources for such a simple answer,” Birbaumer says.

Earlier paper from Birbaumer:
We propose that a lack of contingencies between goal directed thoughts and intentions may be at the heart of this problem. Experiments with chronically curarized rats support our hypothesis; operant conditioning and voluntary control of autonomic physiological functions turned out to be impossible in this preparation. In addition to assisted communication, BCIs consisting of operant learning of EEG slow cortical potentials and sensorimotor rhythm were demonstrated to be successful in drug resistant focal epilepsy and attention deficit disorder. First studies of non-invasive BCIs using sensorimotor rhythm of the EEG and MEG in restoration of paralysed hand movements in chronic stroke and single cases of high spinal cord lesions show some promise, but need extensive evaluation in well-controlled experiments. Invasive BMIs based on neuronal spike patterns, local field potentials or electrocorticogram may constitute the strategy of choice in severe cases of stroke and spinal cord paralysis. Future directions of BCI research should include the regulation of brain metabolism and blood flow and electrical and magnetic stimulation of the human brain (invasive and non-invasive). A series of studies using BOLD response regulation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and near infrared spectroscopy demonstrated a tight correlation between voluntary changes in brain metabolism and behaviour.

[1] http://www.popsci.com/new-brain-computer-interface-helps-com...

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151357/
Black Mirror
Bill Gates Warns Tens of Millions Could Be Killed by Bio-Terrorism
I also emailed them based on that ad. I got an email from them yesterday evening, took the quiz online this morning, did really well. Emailed after, and received a response this afternoon that they are pursuing another candidate. So it sounds like they were just looking for one person. Disappointing because it sounded like a lot of fun and a good supplement to my day job coding. Hope that helps!
I have 3 kids, eldest is interested in web pages so I showed them html on a neocities site (thanks HN). They now have a photoblog based on w3schools css gallery. They didn't much care for Python.

The middle kid learnt some scratch at school and loves it, and has taught themselves loads about it on the web (youtube is by far their favourite way of learning). They have done a fair bit of Python with me too. However they are interested in 3d games so are teaching themselves Blender and Unity (and therefore some C#) aged 11! Now it seems they enjoy 3d modeling as much as coding. Interestingly they are also fascinated by working with the command line for anything, so they are learning some basic bash too.

The youngest is an avid Minecrafter, but at age 8 they have had a go at Scratch junior. However, they have decided they are too grown up for it and are dabbling in 'proper Scratch' now.

I don't push them, but try and create opportunities for them to see new things
Is there a good-faith way to ask that question?

I'm legitimately curious if KirinDave has evidence that r/t_d buys upvotes.
May I recommend http://ichi.moe? There's no browser plugin, but it has way better word segmenting and conjugation algorithms than jisho.
ESPway – A Segway-style WiFi controlled robot built on ESP8266
Suitably facetious counter-argument for the facetious Mecca statement: Well, given that the Hajj is over a million folks per year and Nebraska only has two million people, being that Mecca would bring in a ton of tourist money and employment opportunities. A huge economic windfall for the state.
Firefox now also requires SSE2.
Yeah - "The Saga Begins" and "Tacky" have completely replaced the originals for me :)
>I'd recommend a scripting language to get started, as it removes the need to compile code //

Or use a REPL (eg repl.it)?
You'll so enjoy it; even if it were completely wrong it's so beautifully written that it would still be worth reading.
Bill Gates Robot Tax Debunked in One Minute
wat do you mean by RE?
http://www.zim-wiki.org/ is a personal database I use to organise notes, projects and scripts. Simple cross-note linking and automatic TODO list generation are particularly useful features I use frequently. The 'database' is stored markdown-formatted files that can be easily version controlled and edited from the command line.
one thing about the russian that strikes me (native speaker) as odd is that the voice is female but sometimes uses male conjugations.
"turtle" is the what I use to teach kids programming, this is one in JS: http://berniepope.id.au/html/js-turtle/turtle.html

As they get more interested I switch to https://tryruby.org then scraping with nokogiri then asking them about the problems they want to solve.
A fun question - why does a mirror swap left and right, but not up and down?
It's not a web extension and will not work with Firefox 57.
Good point. No reason to bring someone in-house before you even know what your needs are.
Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
not from same album unless it's a greatest hits collection...
With Logo.

It gets the basic mindset right (loops and what not) while making things visual so that the kid's mind can follow what's happening in an intuitive manner.

If you launch them straight into "real" programming they'll get bored imo.
i'm not an insider or anything, so you can take it with a grain of salt, but i think the answer to all your questions is whatever is good for nintendo.

"what else goes into publishing for the switch?"
whatever's good for nintendo.

"what kind of content restrictions are there?"
whatever's good for nintendo.

"is it like the app store where you have to be 100% family friendly?"
whatever's good for nintendo.

"what percentage of the sales do you get as a developer?"
whatever's good for nintendo.

"will they be cracking down on asset flipping games?"
whatever's good for nintendo.

a game console isn't like a mobile platform. it's less like youtube and more like a television network.
Another animal without accompanying confirmations through other sensory channels, so they are confused and does not act as in the presence of a real animal.

There is no question that they see "themselves". Animals have no such concept since self-awareness (and concepts per se) require abstract reasoning which in turn require a language capacity by corresponding brain machinery, which is not present (not yet evolved).

To be precise, animals do have aggregated representation of a sensory input, which we might call a concept, so they recognize things and other animals, but no abstract concepts detached from perceptions and referentiable by sound-labels or words, which requires specialized brain circuitry.

Nothing to see here.
I suppose I should clarify a bit: I don't ignore finances until tax time. On any given day, I can tell you what's left in the bank, outstanding obligations, where money is going, and how much runway we have.

Right now professional bookkeeping (even part time), would exceed the cost of offering our entire service, and likely be our largest expense except salaries.
Hywel, I notice the blurb says "in line with the new National Curriculum" is that a USA-wide curriculum or is it in another country. I've got kids in that age range in the UK and they don't do any such computing/coding [at school!].
From your other posts you seem like a reasonable person, so I'll try to explain myself better despite the verbal abuse.

I realize that some software is more secure than others, and that changes can be made to make it more secure. My point is that you can't simply say "therefore these changes are necessarily good", because there is more to software than security, and those changes often involve tradeoffs in other areas, which have to be weighted. For some of us, in this case, those tradeoffs aren't worth it.
I've co-taught classes on Scratch and Python (seperate classes) to kids from 8 to 13.

One recommendation is https://www.nostarch.com/ - No Starch Press. There are a number of good titles in the kids section. They were also very decent in giving us a classroom discount for materials.

We used ChromeBooks as that is what the school had for kids. It is OK for Scratch but less than desirable for Python. We used repl.io for an IDE and it wasn't bad. It is better to use IDLE if possible...

I've had an idea of teaching a class where the beginning part is to get a Rasp Pi up and running - 1 per kid or 1 per pair. After that use the Raspberry Pi to learn Python / Scratch.
Microsoft failed to patch a flaw in GDI library, Google released a PoC exploit
Moreover, the things they would work on may not really change often enough for an in-house person to ever be worth it.
well in this case, asset flipping will be rampant, devs will get a shred of the profits and etc.
The Technical Challenges of Seattle-Vancouver High Speed Rail
Yes, Firefox is supposed be more like a hobbyist's car, optimized for tinkering and non-mainstream features.

Except that one day they're suddenly disallowing core features that such hobbyists care about. Suddenly, they don't allow manual transmissions "for security reasons" (you try to plug one in and the internal computer shuts down and refuses to boot, even though you set the computer to expect a manual).

And they've worked with transportation agencies to ensure that their cars get pulled over when they're using a manual.

I was so upset that I wrote a hitler parody when FF stopped supporting unsigned addons even when the user finds the settings and authorizes it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

"Why not just shrink wrap the browser and make me buy it from Microsoft at Walmart!"
Looks like this is a 2005 study from William Jones, et al.

If folks are interested in this line of research, Jones has a 2007 book called Keeping Found Things Found that takes a more comprehensive look at personal information management.
Sufficient extension points with APIs to reimplement the interesting addons should have been made available and working years before dropping compatibility. From the conversations happening around the most popular addons, that has not been the case.

It may be that the old APIs need to die; but this way isn't the way to kill the old API. You need as near to complete overlapping for a long time to get people to port over. You don't do cliff edges. That's how you kill your userbase.
> design decisions which may have made sense over a decade ago when Mozilla had 'software suite' ambitions

It doesn't change your overall point, but I think this part is incorrect. AFAIK abandoning those ambitions was the reason they left Seamonkey behind and developed Firefox.
Reverse engineer
> That is they get to pick a generated password (by the system) that is easy to remember. Maybe from 10 or so.

I think we need to get away from the idea that people should memorize passwords at all. The default should be "generate long password (or encryption key for sites that support it) and put it in your browser's password manager". You only need to memorize the main passphrase for your system-level encryption.
If you look at how PG originally created the algorithm in Arc this behavior makes a lot of sense, especially when alongside it is the explanation that HN will cancel out votes that look shady. (I could be wrong, but I believe this is the case).

Basically the algorithm looked like:

Score = (p-1) / (t+2)^g

p = points (the -1 is to negate the point of the original submitter)

t = time

g = gravity (or some gravitational constant)

So the p value matters a lot; especially when there's a smaller t (a new story). This gives newer stories a chance to bubble up with fewer points against the ones that have 1,000 points but have been on the front page for days. It's a pretty ingenious algorithm, actually.

It makes sense, given that formula, that even if all p values are weighted equally, moving p from 3 to 4 would make a big difference, and would be able to push something new to the front page. You'll see them now and then with 2-3 upvotes on the front page, because they're very new and the front page is relatively stale.

Anyway, I'm ~100% sure spammers can get around the vote ring detection, but I don't think that's happening on HN in a major way.
I couldn't stay on that page for more than a few seconds before the insane, random animation background made me physically recoil.
I agree with the complaints about project structure (GOPATH), difficulty importing third-party modules/packages, upper-case/lower-case public/private scoping not ideal... But I think it's a very good, flexible language on the whole and I think its approach to OOP and pointers is really good (even though it's different from most other OO languages). Unlike some of the comments, I think it's actually not too verbose considering the flexibility it offers (it's much less verbose than C++).

That said, for building web applications, I still prefer Node.js.
It's the same story with Office, you know; only 5% use any given niche feature. The trouble is, it's a different 5% for everyone.
BSD socket API revamp
I've seen systems that don't allow you to have direct access to the signing tools; it's an online encryption oracle.

With this setup, it could easily blacklist known retail binaries and refuse to sign them.
Are the APIs required to make TabCenter as a WebExtension guaranteed to work on FF 57? If not, temgo is still right, no? At least an argument could be made that the elimination of XUL should only happen when the current experiments can actually be implemented using the new model.
I had positive experience teaching kids scratch in an afterschool club environment. The Turtle library in Python is a good transition to show them things that Scratch cannot (its limited in terms of what you can do with variables , lists, etc)
right, but there was a time nintendo wouldn't even look at your game if you were a small indie team and not just anyone could get a devkit, even if they had the money. nintendo is really conservative about this.
As noted in the first link above, source compatibility isn't kept with Swift 3->4 anymore. There are changes to the String APIs.
Good luck proving that.
I guess the usability of HN depends a lot on your age and where you are physically located. When I used to live in the Bay Area, the significance reduced for me because I was able to have roughly the same coversations with people I would meet on a daily basis.

Coming back to Europe, the same conversations cannot be found. Most of my peers in college dont know where Silicon Valley is located and even if they would, they are more interested in drinking booze and planning on when to do it. The only way I can remotely keep up with the headlines of what matters in the Bay Area is to read HN.
Jar Jar Binks's Tragic Fate Laid Bare in New 'Star Wars' Novel
No Starch is awesome for kids - the "Doing math with Python" is a good title too
A service like this could never work long term. HN admins could just spend $10 to upvote something, see what the behavior is like and then fix it.