skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What's the equivalent in chemistry/biology/pharma? That is, how do you get into the field/expertise/mindset in which you're creating and testing out drug compositions in a methodical way that Dr. Conover did when he was able to discover and confirm tetracycline in a matter of months.

I'm not a chemist, but several times I've walked up to a organic/medicinal chemist and been told something like "putting a fluorine there (pointing at a chemical structure) should make it bind better. I can do that for you in a week or two."

There's apparently whole bodies of work [0], especially in medicinal chemistry, where you methodically put a fluorine at different positions around a ring (or something similar) and you test each new compound. Sometimes one will have some property that's a few orders of magnitude better than the rest, and you get a "miracle" drug.

[0] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm800219f
I'm really happy to see this. It's actually quite frustrating that although markdown is so nice, it barely has a consistent standard. It's almost impossible to use it cross-service.

Hopefully now that Github has standardised their own flavour of it (and quite a nice flavour too), more people will start to use it.

Of course there is the obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
Using my definition of EVM, I think it's already possible to create a small verified compiler.

My priority is on keeping the formal definition in sync with the Yellow Paper and the implementations.
Thats an intriguing prediction of the future.
Oh, awesome! Thanks for pointing that out. :)
Even if you're not using Java code, it's still the best language going IMO.

What are the alternatives? I couldn't live without HKT these days (once you're used to thinking in them it's painful to work without them), which rules out most languages even in the ML space, and Scala has better IDE support than anything that's left (indeed an excellent tool ecosystem in general in terms of e.g. profilers, instrumentation) except possibly Ceylon (which doesn't have anything like the library/developer ecosystem of Scala). Even assuming Ocaml lands their modular implicits functionality doesn't change this as far as I can see.

Haskell is an option, but eager evaluation makes reasoning about performance much easier. (And I do think there are legitimate use cases for traditional OO inheritance, though this is debatable). If and when Idris reaches a similar level of library/tool support to Scala then it might become a better alternative to Scala Native, but not that many people are willing to use Idris in production yet.
Thank you! I very much agree with this. Most claims I see made against video games (as a whole or phone-based) tend to be made from atop a pedestal, and usually with very little willingness to open one's mind to the plausible benefits (visible or otherwise).
There's also something to be said for long-form writing with snail mail enabling this. A very quick wit is required to make such insults in real time, as opposed to behind a pen with a day or two of thought.
Thinking about WordStar always gets my ire up, not about WordStar but by comparing a word processor that fit on a single 3 1/2" floppy and comparing that to the size of modern word processors that easily eat multiple Mb. I know that they are often adding features to increase audience, but I rarely do anything in the modern software that I couldn't do in WordStar. It seems like such a waste.
(I've related some of this stuff to you before, but I also am writing this for 3rd party readers.)

Spotting and calling out "insta-pubs" was one of my hobbies in the US rust belt. It was one of the more profitable things to do with an old gas station in the late 90's/early 2000's, apparently. This led to some incongruous moments. I was in a musical group playing a regular thing at a very fancy insta-pub in Covington, KY. Our band leader was born in Ireland, but his college professor dad had moved to Atlanta, Georgia when he was just 13 or so, but he defiantly tried his best to keep his accent and not talk like he was from Georgia. Since the pub was new, it was staffed by a lot of native born Irish. So it came to pass that a young woman from the staff accused our Irish born band leader of faking his Irish accent.

(No one on the staff commented much on my being a Korean-American playing Irish traditional music, however.)

especially irritating given Ireland's former colonial status

Musician and professor Mick Moloney has often commented on the "reversed colonialism" of Irish traditional music and culture. It also applies to a lot of other traditional cultures. The past several hundred years of Irish culture can be characterized by various forms of destruction, warping, and rebirth/resurgence of cultural forms. (One could joke that the 78 record did a better job of destroying regional diversity than Cromwell, but not be too far from the truth.) That Irish traditional music should be in pubs at all could be taken as a bit of a cultural distortion, actually.
It supports direct allocation via both the heap and the stack.

type Vec = CStruct3[Double, Double, Double]

val vec = stackalloc[Vec] // allocate c struct on stack
!vec._1 = 10.0 // initialize fields
!vec._2 = 20.0
!vec._3 = 30.0
length(vec) // pass by reference

...and...

@extern object stdlib {
def malloc(size: CSize): Ptr[Byte] = extern
}

val ptr = stdlib.malloc(32)

http://www.scala-native.org/en/latest/

Otherwise it currently uses the Boehm GC.

One big area that needs more work:

"Scala Native doesn’t yet provide libraries for parallel
multi-threaded programming and assumes single-threaded
execution by default."
I feel there are a lot more consumers than you might imagine, myself included. I'm on HN constantly but I rarely ever comment. The karma system is not for everyone.
> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
No, almost everybody in the field laments SSL and TLS. It's probably too late at this point --- and has been for well over a decade --- to get to something better than TLS, and so TLS 1.3 is what we're stuck with. But that is demonstrably not the case with JWT. We don't have to convince all the browser vendor to upgrade out of JWT in lockstep. Avoiding another 20 years of hair-on-fire crypto vulnerabilities seems reason enough to lobby against that spec.
Is this one of the devices on CIA hacked systems list?
>the capitalist perspective would be that companies that offer a more enticing employment package would naturally have an easier time hiring

This assumes that hiring costs are significant relative to wages, which is rarely the case.

>At-will employment seems to mess with that arrangement in the US but here in the UK it seems like a fair trade.

The notable difference being the state regulation in the UK which requires employers to provide that stability. And even that is eroding with the rise of zero-hour contracts.

>infrastructure such as water can be competed on (both directly as in a second water plant, and indirectly as in building home water tanks)

A second water plant isn't competition for the infrastructure, just the purification process. The water still has to get to your house, and the company which has already built a pipe is at a huge advantage compared to one that hasn't.

>As for network effects, there comes a point where pain from monopolistic exploitation outweighs the marginal utility of the product.

It's certainly possible for monopolists to push things too far and end up vulnerable to a market entrant, but the result of this is a brief period of competition followed by the winner returning to monopolistic behaviour. And the entry cost of this kind of disruption is sufficient that it happens very infrequently.
the author has never heard of 4chan?
the quality is pretty diluted by that point
>The so-called "aha!" moment was remembering that bishops always stay on the same color. I can't claim any great insight, it's just something I read somewhere (so it could certainly be programmed into a computer).

Yes and no. You can easily encode any specific heuristic into a computer. And brute force (add more hardware) can ensure you hit a lot of the heuristics.

But the hard part is ensuring that your search of heuristics is intelligent, and only needs to do a small number of steps before it hits a good one; in your case, what caused the "same square" heuristic to reach the top of your mind so quickly? That's what we want to reproduce.

(To be sure, the "bishops stay on same squares" heuristic is simple, but once you have a lot of heuristcs/theorems to build off of, it's just one fish in a very big sea, so you need a scalable, general approach.)
I might say "gentle criticism" rather than insults, but the beginning and end of the letter do make it clear that he is specifically advising his brother: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6408/6408-h/6408-h.htm#link2H...

> You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture.

>You must drop your vanity, you are not a child ... you will soon be thirty. It is time! I expect you.... We all expect you.
A New Paradigm for Software Development
That's why I like Clojure(script). It does not fight the language and the ecosystem. It's "hosted" - meaning that like a symbiotic organism it "latches" onto the host language and can fully reuse its features. It does not try to "reinvent" and fix what's not broken, yet at the same time liberates you from glaring awfulness. It enforces certain discipline to protect you from shooting yourself in the foot.
Quite a buzz around this stimulating case, but the message is clear. Dildon't do that again. Always have to be careful with the penal system.
Personally, I didn't understand how a chat app for software developers could in good conscience be called 'Slack'.
... Or pick a product name that can be trademarked?
I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus":

http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky....

His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.

And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.

People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.
Actually, you're allowed to be a monopoly. They were accused of abusing their monopoly status.
Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.
Scale is a very wishy-washy term. You can build complex applications with JS, you just need to move the scale out of the main loop. Don't run business logic alongside your render, or else you will indeed run into these problems.

This advice isn't unique to Javascript and goes back to Carmack hacking on Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and beyond. It's just that Javascript makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot here, because this isn't a role that was forseen when JS was designed.

Do you have any links to share? I'd love to learn more about these performance problems you describe.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit
The perils of teledildonics.
I don't doubt that most people would probably not "publicize most details of their lives" - but the fact that we want attention is obvious.

I talk to lots of people and if I start asking them about themselves or their life most are happy to talk about themselves as long as you don't seem like a threat in some way.

People are naturally self-centered and enjoy attention. Kids are the best example of that.
Diamonds are mercifully unchanged by their journey through a kimberlite tube. It's true, you still have to break them out of the rock, but it's better than swimming through mantle!
You can now get a mortgage to buy an Earthship. It only took 4 decades.
You cannot do that right now. There are a few libraries already bundled which you can use. But we are planning to work on adding this feature.
Despite WikiLeaks, the CIA Can’t Crack Encryption in Secure Messengers
The big issue with the author is having the time to build something. I wouldn't necessarily have chosen one framework/language over the other.

The reason why is the author's current level of proficiency for building something that he wants. For example, if he was an ace at Assembly (instead of familiar with Angular) he could've easily wrote an article titled "Why I'm throwing out Angular 1.x and going back to Assembly".

Its all relative. Some people can afford having the "most beautiful code", but that also goes with a budget and a group of people who can make it work (e.g. Steve Jobs ordering beautiful code/engineering for the Macintosh).

I would say the most logical route would be to "Build the Damn Thing". Facebook used that notion, got the product out, got ahead, and now can afford sound code. Heck, Zuckerberg doesn't even code on Facebook's source anymore. No one (besides us engineers) knows or cares what Facebook is running on. Same with many other productions (not only software) out there (when was the last time we cared exactly how an Oreo cookie was made?).

So to answer Steve's question "What am I supposed to do?", I would say "Just Do It! Make the product.".

Do the work and live the dream (Same with all of us dreamers).
The Diebold Memos (2002)
Wall Street Has Found Its Next Big Short in U.S. Credit Market
> Competition makes our world prosperous.

Competition only increases efficiency if the price of a good is currently inflated.

Labor is likely under-priced as a good relative to other expenditures, like property and the means to production, so an increase in competition for jobs does not necessarily equate to a more highly functioning society.
> Now, we all know that it can take a while to find a long sequence of digits in π, so for practical reasons, we should break the files up into smaller chunks that can be more readily found. In this implementation, to maximise performance, we consider each individual byte of the file separately, and look it up in π.

So basically like a regular filesystem except now lookup each byte every time you intend to use it?
Two questions for you:

Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?

Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?
The most effective way to handle these kind of errors in Java unfortunately requires understanding class loading, thread contexts, wrapping connection primitives in the right kind of references, and then making sure that all resource deallocation/closing always use the same codepath. Even though you really only need to implemnt it once, it is both somewhat tricky and technically challenging.

It's a pity that so few Java projects have tried to use these mechanisms without building them as part of massive frameworks, sometimes apparently even without understanding what they have built.
Pretty sure the reason they had to spend so much to get a new CEO is that no one wanted the job, it was perceived as a very difficult turnaround.
Julia startup time is 0.5 seconds on a very weak laptop. That's comparable to the JVM, which is nevertheless fairly popular. You may not want to write command line tools in Julia, but there's not much else that's a serious problem since process startup time is rarely that big of a performance issue.

Disregarding JIT time, Julia is as fast as compiled languages – we benchmark against C and Fortran and don't grade on a curve. This is not an aspiration, it's a well-established performance characteristic in both benchmarks [1] and real-world applications [2].

Regarding JIT time, it's important to understand that this is a fixed cost – for any computation that takes long enough to matter, the time taken by JIT will be a negligible fraction of the time. The reason to exclude JIT time when benchmarking is because most benchmarks don't take much time – tens of milliseconds, compared to which JIT is significant. But we don't actually care about the speed of things that only take tens of milliseconds – we're using benchmarks to extrapolate to things that take much longer, which is why you exclude JIT.

[1] http://julialang.org/benchmarks/

[2] http://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/
No, I pretty definitely wouldn't exist. My father's family has been in Canada a lot longer, and I'm half him.
I agree that people want attention, but I think the notion of gaining attention through notoriety online is generally a bad idea. It is however, very profitable for people to seek that kind of notoriety, and unprofitable for people to be anonymous.
In Scala it's very normal to write libraries or frameworks in "pure" Scala (i.e. not using reflection, annotations, proxies or anything like that), and all of those should be fine to cross-build for Scala Native (assuming their upstream dependencies do first). The state of libraries for Scala.js should be a good indication - anything that's cross-compatible with that is likely to work just as well for Scala Native.
It's a specification based on the commonmark specification. Both are not a formal specs. They are more of an informal specification with some edge-cases listed (in contrast to the original markdown specification which has known unspecified edgecases).
Biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness
I think this project might not be entirely serious.
Yup, deleted my account a while ago, haven't used it in years. Don't miss it one bit.

At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.

What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.

Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.

As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.

People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.
A fun little Pi Day app project
Factory robots have been killing people for decades now. This particular incident seems to have resulted from a failure to lock out the robots in the adjacent work cells, which should have been SOP but apparently wasn't. If you're in the work envelope of an industrial robot, it should be completely powered off. This is one of those basic safety procedures like "assume all glassware is hot" and "don't unkink a hydraulic hose".
How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?
Nit: "exponentially" does not mean "really", as in "really small". It means increasing (or decreasing) at a far faster rate than what it's exponential with. Often time, but any metric can be used.
Which countries in question do not provide roads, public education, police, military, and fire fighting services to the population at large?

How can we discuss where the term is used inappropriately without discussing what the term means?
a small subset does not justify the norm.
I'm probably missing something here, but how does one oversee a downfall as ethically dubious as Zenefits' and retain the confidence of 90% of his investors?

I try to be optimistic about venture capital, and I want to believe when I hear investors opine on the importance of integrity, honesty, etc. in founders, but this seems like pretty naked evidence of $ > all.
A sex toy being hacked by some hacker could make for an interesting porn plot..
The Companies Disrupting the Optical Industry
... says "throwaway420"
Relevant early xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/
Name is already taken.
You should have payed attention.
> If you are comparing Sowell and Chomsky then Sowell will come up noticeably short.

If you carefully reread my comment, you'll notice I didn't compare the two.
HelloSign (YC W11) Is Hiring a Front End Engineer
It's easy to forget that R inhabits a gray area between a full-fledged programming language and a "statistics package" like SAS or SPSS or Stata or GRETL.
Ex-Google Ventures CEO Maris Set to Raise $100M Fund
Oddly, most of the garbage that accumulates on the streets where I live consists of empty cigarette packs/butts, coffee cups, beer and soda cans, junk food and fast food wrappers, etc. And the hospitals are full of people suffering the consequences of recklessly consuming those things.
Most things called native are not.
Man it's times like this that I wish the mods didn't turn my votes into shadow-votes (a la shadow-ban) and that my votes actually worked.