skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rust is already paying the cost of unwinding. RFC 1236 added unwinding machinery for catching panics.[1] ("A drawback of this RFC is that it can water down Rust's error handling story.") This is the expensive part of exception handling. Rust has exceptions, but they're not very good.

Go also backed into adding most of the machinery for exceptions by adding catch with unwind for panics. If you're going to have the unwinding machinery, why not have real exceptions?

Exceptions aren't so bad if you do them the way Python does, using a predefined exception hierarchy. Catching an exception catches everything in its subtree. Catching RuntimeError catches most of the things one can induce from outside the program. Python's WITH statement also has one of the few mechanisms which can gracefully handle an error on releasing a resource. Exceptions in C++, Java, and Javascript are more troublesome.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1236-stab...
I'm honestly kind of burnt out by the end of the work day and want to get out and socialize to recharge my batteries. I've been investing much of the rest of my free time into getting back to recruiters, checking out companies in cities we're considering relocating to, etc.
Although I was never a mainframe programmer per se, I did quite a bit of interfacing between mini/microcomputers and IBM mainframes, so I got to see under the hood a little. (If I write something stupid, it's either memory issues or ignorance).

I recall seeing how files were allocated on disk (remember that mainframes have many different OSes, like OS\390, and even OSes on top of OSes like VM/CMS, and I don't remember what this was running on).

In this particular case, a file was preallocated in JCL to use N extents starting on a specific cylinder. Fixed size. None of this fancy ext3 or NTFS ;)

JCL (Job Control Language) was a language to control batch jobs, and many have called it the worst language ever designed, although not as bad as brainfk.

On the other hand, I had a chance to interface C++ with CICS (a transaction processing subsystem) using WebSphere MQ, and I must say, I was really impressed with its sophistication. It was a kind of SOA long before the term was invented.

A lot of what I saw in the mainframe world predated things - by decades - that some may think are new(er) concepts, such as clusters (sysplex), front-end processors, hypervisors, HA, and so on.

Those of us who had to fiddle with implied file formats with fixed-length fields and records won't find this stuff quite as alien, but equally as painful to deal with. I recall using some sort of ETL program to get around this. On the plus side, these primitive formats certainly were efficient in terms of processing speed, and a great match for COBOL.

Speaking of COBOL, as part of this project, I had to write a parser in C++ to parse COBOL copybooks (kind of a COBOL data structure definition) and generate C code to read the data.

It is a very different world, but I don't think it's all bad. After all, the technology has been working very well for a long time. Kudos to the COBOL Cowboys. I hope they charge a lot more than $100/hr!
> The named plaintiffs, Marciano and Kissner, will receive $7,500 each and Liss-Riordan will get up to $1.25 million. The approximately 33,744 class members will receive payment as part of the settlement.

The lawyer gets $1.25 million and the people supposedly impacted get $125 each. I don't what erudite Hacker News-worthy comment to make except... SMH.
There are thousands of people invested in the next CNN, GPU, CPU, TPU, or FPGA architecture. Having a few smart people with demonstrated experience try an idea that doesn't fit the current biases in the field is perfectly reasonable funding allocation and great for science. If there weren't neural net holdouts getting funding doing something that didn't seem like it would work we'd be still using SVMs or arguing about probablistic graphical models.

If you think this approach isn't warranted, I suggest that your example of an LSTM chip is also not sensible. First why not something simpler like GRU, secondly it's not compute efficient for the memory stored as compute scales poorly due to the matrix multiply for the size of your hidden state vector. If in a couple months we have a new differentiable memory architecture (a la neural Turing machine) all the work you did building a chip is outdated!

Starting with first principles of what you can efficiently do with current process technology combined with an understanding of computational neuroscience is what Kwabenas lab excels at.

It's actually very difficult to simulate the mixed analog digital asynchronous chips coming out of Kwabenas lab or elsewhere in the industry.

There are plenty of other academic chips that fail after tapeout. Kwabenas lab has a proven track record of taping out chips that does what he claims. So from a hardware perspective I'd rather bet on a guy who has successfully taped out dozens of chips in his lab, and have the rest stick to simulation.
It's wasn't uncommon several years ago at one studio I know of to have core components of multiple titles maintained by permanent in-house staff and much of the feature development done by contractors. They had a ratio almost inverted from what you describe (approximately contractor:perm::3:2).
bing isn't half bad, but i still use google a hell of a lot
> If you’re an employer and you’re trying to get every last drop of productivity out of your developers, ...

Running people without sufficient rest is like running a car without sufficient engine oil.
> This is part of the problem of having to rely on hype of general public with short attention span

The nuke industry could hire some of the big tobacco lobbists to educate (as oppssed to misleading) the public. Compared to oil and coal, nuclear power is orders of magnitude cleaner. Closing nuclear power stations means burning coal most of the time, because the coal power stations are already there. The only renewable resources capable of providing base load that can replace some of the nuclear power are geothermal, but to use that you need a suitable site and solar thermal with molten salt storage. Aging coal power stations could be probably converted to biomass as well. But none of these are going to fully replace nuclear power.
> all this to allow developers to use whatever version they started of

That sounds like exactly the same reason everybody's crazy about containers ... and I do mean crazy, because it's a maintenance and security nightmare, but the whole industry seems hell-bent on going that way.
This isn't anything new to how the business is structured. Note the elision of the 50+ employees in-house: even if it's one artist and one programmer, you really need them to be full-timers to run the main production cycle, or at minimum longer-term contractors who have time to ramp up. Otherwise you get too many bottlenecks. Outsourcing ports, localization, and audio was done almost from the beginning. (Go look up how Rob Hubbard wrote the soundtrack to Commando on C64 for one example)

That said, the trend definitely continues to lean towards a small core team that can put the pieces together, and then external teams who can leverage a longer term specialization, lowering management risks on both ends by reducing the "seasonal layoff" dynamic of game launches.
Agreed. I'm 42 and I spend more time on the Internet than I probably should.
> An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth.

They have at least the first two, and tobacco companies have, or historically have had, all three. Job titles are slightly different, but basic functions are the same.
There is an additional side effect of the missing directory browser: every sync cycle results in it rebuilding its (apparently sql-lite) DB. This is particularly a problem if you happen to have a large number of books - one ends up waiting 15 minutes or more for this process to complete. As soon as I could, I moved my Kobo Aura HD to KOReader+FileManager.
Get calls from web site to call center directly
A few weeks ago I spent a day interviewing 20 different Hong Kong banks about API availability for cross-border RMB transactions. None at all offered it.

They don't do it because doing it while complying with all relevant regulations is more complicated than you realise. That's what banks are ultimately in the business of, finding ways to do business across jurisdictions. And it's why most fintech companies fail: their beautiful code runs headlong into the messy, illogical, unpredictable real world of regulatory compliance and guess what, the regulator always wins.
I find that each search engine has a slightly different "dialect", and I've been tuning my search wording for years on google. Using other search engines is actually sort of challenging and often frustrating. I do like peekier.com though. I feel like it's a step forward for innovation with great layout/menu-design.
A regular, non-convoluted[1] syntax for C? Hygienic macros instead of defines? These two are sufficient reasons to consider it.

But they also seem to offer namespaces, type inference (even through macros), sum types, anonymous functions, overloaded functions, a form of runtime introspection, and a bunch of goodies like containers in the stdlib.

Quite an offering, I'd say.

[1]: http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html
I'm from the lab working on this platform. A lot of people in this thread are claiming that there is no use for these spiking neural nets and I have to disagree.

Brainstorm can run Spaun, the world's largest functioning and behaving brain model. [1]

It can also run Adaptive Control circuits, which lead to unprecedented adaptability in arm control to undefined forces, such as changes in arm length, medium the arm is acting in and weights applied to the arm. [2]

For an overview of how programming with spiking neural networks is different than normal programming, see this blog post I wrote almost a year ago. [3]

Finally, framing spiking neural networks in opposition to Deep Learning networks is innacurate and harmful. We're currently investigating biologically plausible backprop and have already converted ConvNets to spiking nets for significant power savings [4]. Personally, I'm looking forward to an integration of biologically plausible networks with Deep Nets to completely theoretically unite all the approaches to brain modelling in general so we are no longer limited by metaphors [5].

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202

[2] http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1843/2016...

[3] https://medium.com/@seanaubin/a-way-around-the-coming-perfor...

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05141

[5] https://medium.com/@seanaubin/deep-learning-is-almost-the-br...
I used to watch a lot more tv before I had 24/7 Internet access.
Geeks vs. non-geeks graph of how they plan tasks
Its Symantec, they run AV on thousands of computers across the globe. All the events generated from these computers get sent to them. Removal/cleaning procedures would be one of those events, probably for this very reason (i.e creator gets sloppy, installs and then uninstalls on their own machine).
It's a question of sheer amount of corruption. We're at a point where the revolving door has become an expressway, and the connection has become so hardened, that the only option becomes to shut them down.

Most agencies are now captured by the large interests.
https://i.imgur.com/UiH0Dmb.png
https://i.imgur.com/ZQsJN6T.png

Anyone who mentions anything about this must face an army of shills and dependents, while actual whistleblowing goes unreported and ignored.
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/JessRowlandMari...

Sure, in a perfect world you'd rather have functioning agencies operating in the public interest, but people need to remember that every agency created represents yet another attack surface for corruption.
>The Undoing Project

I heard about it on Freakonomics. I will check it out as I have time now ;-)
Sorry that doesn't sound sensible to me at all. How about we keep the tools and learn to discipline ourselves better?
Electron is flash for the Desktop
I don't know if I agree that the best arguments result in agreement between opponents.

It's nice to have and good when it happens, but many arguments boil down to matters where there are, in very real terms, winners and losers.

Not everything can be patched up procedurally, nor can people "switch up" when it's eg: a black man told to try to understand the slaver's argument.

It's good to develop some capabilities to cope with difficult and heated discussions.
I'm speaking of environmental impact. Sure, things may be looking good if you look at base crime statistics, hunger statistics, and war statistics. But certainly not if you look at the bigger picture. Way too many unknowns at this point in terms of consequences for unchecked industrialism for us to simply say, "Yep, things are good here."

But I'll bite. What metric are you using to say things are better than ever?
Hi, one of the authors here. Yes this is a school project. This pdf was a draft, not the final version for the class submission (the paragraph in question never made it to the final version). Don't know who shared the link here, but it is updated now.
Just an observation, shouldn't it be Internetic, even though it sounds wrong:

Alcohol-ic so Internet-ic
Reals are not equivalently as unrealizable or dubious as infinitesimals. Infintesimals can be constructively specified as nilpotent/nilsquare entities, numerical entities which when squared equal 0 but where those entities themselves aren't reducible to 0. All of this can be done in a constructive manner avoiding any use of infinity or classical logic that depends upon indirect proofs (ie excluded middle). John Bell's 'Primer of Infinitesimal Analysis' has good details.

The computational techniques from Automatic Differentiation use these types of entities to calculate derivatives exactly without approximating infinite (limiting) processes.

Calculus can be done constructively without infinite limiting processes purely algebraically using these nilpotents. And from a geometric interpretation there is nothing nonsensical about a tangent line to a curve.

Also you don't differentiate numbers (real or rational), you can only differentiate functions.

Also the idea of a actual infinity is a poetic mathematical one. It doesn't have to fit reality. The issue is whether it is useful and to what extent.
Luxembourg prince tours asteroid mining company
10.9 is confirmed on a Ryzen wafer. https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/63xw8c/maverick...
I seriously doubt that, given a signup sheet of legalese, in most jurisdictions any service provided through an appropriately authenticated API is different in legal standing from the same service provided online through internet banking and slow, manual, error-prone process.
Lol +1 here. I guarantee LeoNatan25 that the situation is MUCH more complicated than he/she is giving credit
Dutch town has traffic lights on the ground because people are staring at phones
Kindle Oasis or iPad/iPhone?
Hard to do when you're a web developer, and you work from home.. but good luck with that..
15 DIY Projects Make Your House Look Amazing
I really didn't read this as an attack or polemic on code interviews. It's just a fun parody. Like how the TV show Silicon Valley some times pokes fun at actual Silicon Valley, but isn't an attack on it.
Smoking is very common in Italy and I'm curious to know if the study elaborated on it's effects on these long-living Italians.
I've found that it was too easy for my co-workers to ping me on things that can wait until the next day or stuff I can't do anything about until I get to work. I've asked them to call me if there's an issue that I have to fix. So far I've gotten zero calls and it's been over a year. If ever it becomes an issue I've got internet access within 5 mins from me. I suspect it's the same situation for most people.
My point is mostly focused on the extremes. I realize that I brought up the moderation bit and the true benefit/harm of moderate alcohol use is up for debate.

But if you look at extreme overuse of alcohol, there is nothing good about it. Pretty cut and dry.

Extreme "overuse" of the Internet - may have negatives attached, but is still in that "debatable" territory. True impact (positive or negative) depends on what the person is spending their time on, depends on the nature of their work and personal relationships, depends on what they have access to away from home, etc. etc. Even the definition of "extreme" or "overuse" is entirely relative and depends on the specifics of the situation.
It's amazing how almost every one of these articles about the Fourier Transform actually only talk about Fourier Series. Perhaps because most of the people who write these articles themselves lack an intuition for Fourier transforms (hint: there isn't much)?
Foxpass (YC S15) Is Hiring a Head of Growth
A while ago when I was researching how the Yamaha OPL-series FM synths work, one program that I found was an instrument-builder. It gave you direct control over the hardware registers and showed some information about the waveforms that would be generated, if I'm remembering correctly.

Dosbox has an OK OPL3 emulator built into it, so that's an easy, software-based stack to work from (ummm....if I could re-find the program that I was using).
Please don't remind me. I had to convert the expat XML parser to compile on z/OS and work in EBCDIC, and found that round tripping between ASCII and EBCDIC was sometimes impossible because of the existence of not two, but THREE line terminator characters: CR, LF, and NL (0x85).

Not to mention that you cannot test for uppercase or lowercase like the ASCII `ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z'` because they are not contiguous in EBCDIC. A good reason to use the C RTL.
Seems I agree with you (or you agree with mine) :)

I don't have problem with calculus -- or I wouldn't be able to do physics. I am having problem with calculus based on infinity.

> Also the idea of an actual infinity is a poetic mathematical one. It doesn't have to fit reality. The issue is whether it is useful and to what extent.

Well said.

> Also you don't differentiate numbers (real or rational), you can only differentiate functions.

Of course I meant distinction.
As I mention in my comment [1], there are already a lot of designs that do work on very real world problems. Also, we've already started mapping CNNs onto the silicon for greater power efficiency. But you're right to say there's still a lot of work to do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14084846
Bing offers a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, its search relevancy is actually really great, its special search features (weather, elections, etc.) and graph tools are generally better than Google's and they overall just seem to try harder on search nowadays.

On the other hand, search isn't the only important thing - presumably that is why Google doesn't seem to focus there. Bing has seemingly given up on some of the big things, like Maps, and failed to promote others (like Translator) in ways that really compromise the core offering.

Bing Maps used to have a very legitimate edge over Google; then they stood still for years and I'm not sure they could ever catch up.

To make matters worse, Bing has lost lots of cool, useful features; features that I could show someone and then expect them to legitimately consider Bing. For example, searching for a song used to let you immediately read the lyrics without ads, listen to the song through Zune or buy the song through various providers. Wolfram Alpha used to be directly integrated into the search engine; it was extremely powerful and convenient.

I really would have liked to see a Bing that didn't take as many steps back as it took forward; that Bing could be a real contender.
The most expensive mistake I've made is not focusing on a single goal, task, technology, or stack. I keep changing my goals. Because of that I have learnt nothing today. Any idea to get rid off this habit?
Some of the most cynical middle and senior manager types I've ever met were hiding in the woodwork at Sony Playstation. Invisible if there was any danger to them and not supporting the people doing challenging work, and taking credit and ownership anytime anything was successful.

Not a good HR model for the wellbeing of 'free agents'
Have two dev leaders.

Also, more/better automation and fallbacks, an employee to cover all these extra shifts you're working, or trade out time with a colleague where you cover for each other which brings you back to having two dev leaders.

Either the business is successful and you can hire another 2nd leader; or can merge with a competitor to gain the 2nd leader and more resources of some sort (you have too many customers too little infra, so look for a company with underutilized infra). Or it's actually not that successful and is using your life 24/7 as life support for itself and it's past time to cut it loose.
This is a really interesting comment, could you elaborate on it a bit more? Which part of a deterministic universe would the halting problem serve to enable free will? -The universe as a whole? -Any agent claiming to have free will? -Some physical process that couldn't be simulated faster by something else in the universe?
Banks have always been in the data management business. The first local bank in NZ was set up on the goldfields during the gold rush, and turned gold into data (managed on ledger books). If you got enough gold, you could move to the then-affluent city of Dunedin, and turn the data on your ledger into a house.

The tools have changed, but it's the same core expertise: data management.
Unfortunately not, in fact we're letting one iOS developer go soon due to company shifting a bit.

I'll send you an email if anything changes (checked your history out).

If you're keen on moving to Bangkok it should be fairly easy to check out job listings on LinkedIn etc though, there's certainly demand.
We have a lot of result to back it up, as I mention in my comment on the article [1]. However, Turing machines and spiking neural nets have different goals. Spiking neural nets are distributed, analog/continuous, asynchronous and approximate. Turing machines are usually individual and with discrete state. I discuss this further in the blog post I link to in my comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14084846
I never understood this argument. If we are in a simulation, what manifold do the simulators live in?
Video game studios often go cheap on things besides contractors, my experience from the inside is that the majority of voice talent is used outside the usual Hollywood system because they don't want to pay close to a union actor's competitive wages, and forget royalties for people who are not Hollywood famous. For instance, this is part of the reason Bill Roper is the voice of a lot of Warcraft 1 characters - they didn't want to pay professionals, and he was already there.

I haven't been on the inside in a while but we might have one musician on a AAA title and he/she would compose all the music and they might also do all the foley work because musicians you might have heard of would probably laugh at the wages and would demand royalties. Obviously part of the issue is making video games can be a crap shoot where a game with original IP is just as often a failure as a success so it can be hard to justify spending money on an unknown entity, and royalties don't exist except for bigger successes for the most part.
Part of learning self-discipline is learning what triggers or facilitates undesired behavior and modifying one's environment to increase desired behavior. This can include limiting internet access, such as removing home internet, or switching to a dumb phone. This isn't weakness; it's learning about oneself and working with what you have. Certainly, there are ways to increase will-power, but relying purely on will-power can be difficult for many people.