skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no generic pointer-to-pointer in C. You get an incompatible-pointer-types warning in gcc when trying to use void * * : https://godbolt.org/g/vxWFvl

There is probably scope for use of C11 _Generic, but I don't think you could support user-defined types in that way.

The usual macro problems apply when trying to do it as a macro:

#define FREE(X) (free(X),(X)=NULL,(void)0)

In C++ you can do something like this, which works well enough: (I don't use this specifically myself, but I have something similar for COM objects)

template<class T>
static void Free(T *&p) {
free(p);
p=nullptr;
}

This isn't completely useless, but it's not worth sweating blood over. Personally I think I've had more mileage from good-quality debug functionality in the memory allocator: fill newly-allocated and newly-freed regions with junk; check junk and metadata periodically; unmap regions promptly; and so on.
The most famous maintainer(s) I can think of are the people who paint the Golden Gate Bridge.
Even if they aren't paying any drivers?
Old music notes
Players and Listeners Both Prefer a New Violin to a Stradivarius
Coincidentally I was pulling apart a generative music app when I saw this post.

I think you make a very good point - which is that in the bigger picture, music is inherently evolutionary in a way that generative music isn't.

Having some experience with generative apps, I know that they absolutely do not make music spontaneously. You have to invent them, build them, and tune them - all by hand/ear.

It's more like building an instrument - i.e. a machine - and tuning/debugging it than cultivating a garden.

Music as a whole is much more free. When it's loose in a culture, it can evolve in weird, unexpected directions that no individual composer would ever be able to imagine, and no app today would come close to copying.
This is my favourite thing about Citymapper. I use it everyday (multiple times) in London. Went to Milan for the weekend and was able to continue using the same app. It made figuring out another transit system incredibly simple. It's becoming like Uber for me in the sense that when I go somewhere Uber doesn't support getting around becomes something that takes quite a lot of figuring out.
Not to mention that IPFS has been on HN repeatedly in the past.
The first has results from Geekbench finding that "A10 Fusion has roughly the same single-core processor performance as Intel's top sixth-generation Core m processor".

The second references Matt Mariska's misleading tweet: "Geekbench has the iPhone 7 beating the $6,500 12-core Mac Pro in single-thread." - Never mind that it's a $6,500 12-core Mac from over four years ago. This one gets regurgitated over and over.

The third still illustrates performance edging close to the Core M series of processors.
In my company, whenever a backend dev has to do frontend dev, it never ends well :(
Because being deliberately inefficient in order to give more people jobs is a slightly concealed case of the broken window fallacy; so all the same arguments apply.

Basically, when companies do that, they're engaging in a form of welfare, but it's neither fair (because of differences in implementation) nor efficient (because it involves wasted labor). It's fairly obvious that it would be better to have the same people who wouldn't be employed if not for inefficiencies, employed to work on something else efficiently - even if it's public projects, for example - and pay them by taxing the increased (due to higher efficiency) output of the original company.
> Surely it didn't bring up the standard of living worldwide, because we'd have noticed it by now.

But the worldwide standard of living has massively increased over the past 50 years.
What is a better pattern?
Here's a very old article on the subject

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/
How to beat procrastination
An article I read recently made a good point about Tesla's margins that I hadn't considered before.

Tesla is selling at retail directly to consumers, whereas most dealerships sell wholesale to dealerships. Of course their margins will be higher, but they have to eat the cost of their retail infrastructure that other manufacturers don't.

In that way, their higher margins aren't that much of a benefit because some of the cost is just getting shifted into SG&A. It was interesting because I had never heard it brought up but it made a lot of sense.
It may be due to John Oliver (again):

http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/160454924113/fccs-c...

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/2017050...
This is exactly why I've been trying to get my step-daughter off of the meds. She is on the autism spectrum, and her previous guardian solved behavior problems by pushing more and more meds. We've weaned her off of the anti-psychotic and in the process of weaning her off of the anti-anxiety. We'll see if we can do the same for the vyvanse or adderall.

I have worked with a lot of intense emotions and pain within myself. I have faced them in life and in meditative, psychedelic, and dream states. There are not a lot of darkness and intense emotions that faze me much anymore -- though it isn't as if I've become invulnerable to emotions. If anything, I've become to be more sensitive to emotions, and being OK with that vulnerability. Whatever the emotional state or the narrative, the way it dissolves generally remains the same.

In all the things I have tried, the key ingredient has always been mindfulness. I have found that surfacing up deeply-buried emotions don't do much if one becomes mindless and intoxicated by those emotions. At the same time, I have also tried suppression and repression. Numbing oneself or cutting oneself off from the emotions at best, defers the emotional work you end up doing. Instead, it usually causes more damage.

Mood-altering drugs can help _if_ they are taken along with therapy that necessarily includes mindfulness. The therapy helps change and shift deeply-held beliefs, and it is the mindfulness that lets one unwind the damage from root cause. The drugs in question can help if they support such a process, to be able to help face the scary things within you. If they are taken as a way to _avoid_ this kind of work, yeah, I too also hear they can freeze you at that emotional maturity level.
Uber hires Raquel Urtasun
At first I had a lot of trouble making sense of the UI, but now I think it's pretty neat. It's essentially the final form of the Material Design idea, where each app is a Card like a physical deck of playing cards, and you get to arrange them by dragging them around, with the important and intentional limitation that they snap into one of a finite number of arrangements. How do you undo a splitscreen or tabbed layout, though?

The rest is just mockups at this point, I hope; for example, the control center is pretty rough: presumably the user knows their own location, and when they're looking at this screen, they probably don't care; the full date is hidden whereas most people forget today's date much more often than they forget their own location; there is no obvious way to do auto-brightness, the negative space is in all the wrong places; etc.
Maintenance and green-field development are different skillsets. Green-field development requires that you can envision what doesn't exist and hold it in your head long enough, and precisely enough, to build it. Maintenance requires that you take what already exists and improve it. Green-field development tends to be more intuitive, and it requires the ability to balance many trade-offs and consider many possible solutions in your head. Maintenance programming requires less creativity and to some degree less short-term memory, but more attention to detail, more logical thinking, more communication skills, and more ability to read & make sense of existing code.

I've worked in both situations, but I'm better at one than the other. It's very rare to find someone who is excellent at both. You do get the benefit of accumulated domain knowledge when you keep the initial developers on to maintain the system, but oftentimes they don't have the temperament or personality to be happy and successful in that role.
> Uber sent emails to driver training them on avoiding detection (e.g. When at airport take down phone; have drivers sit up front; etc...).

This is literally my interaction with Uber drivers in Jordan. Originally just a convenience (available on demand, and that I don't speak Arabic), I've started getting nervous when using Uber because they aren't licensed in Jordan and drivers always have the discussion with me about sitting up front, telling the police that "we met in English class", etc.
I know, I just get used to using the actual delete key when I'm using an external keyboard, so my muscle memory never kicks in fully to use fn+backspace.
Few railroads run trains that tightly spaced. The London Underground and the NYC subways do have that problem, and they've both been cautious about installing newer train control systems. The London Underground's Victoria Line has a modern system, and it's been troublesome.[1]

The enthusiasm for GPS-based systems comes from low-traffic
railroads with a lot of track per train. Their maintenance cost for trackside equipment is high for the amount of traffic.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/09/london_underground_...
password-store fails to build when built in a path with ≥ 74 characters
'Civilization' Creator Sid Meier: “I Didn't Really Expect to Be a Game Designer”
Wouldn't a privacy policy cover "the prior written or electronic consent of the subscriber concerned"
I've only been once, but Mozza is fantastic (if a bit unorthodox). They have a bar special where you can get a pizza, glass of wine, and dessert for $30. It used to be an insane $20, but it's still a bargain when you consider that some of their pizzas cost $20+ and their desserts are in the $10 range.
The GPS, radio communication, etc., that the article talks about are not the important bits of positive train control IMO. The important bits are "positively" enforcing safety -- reaching a safe state even if a rail vehicle violates the instructions the signalling system provides it. America's PTC mandate was triggered by the tragic Chatsworth crash back in 2005 or so, which would have been prevented if the red signal shown to the distracted train operator had been positively enforced.

1920s technology can provide enforcement. New York City subway and the Berlin S-Bahn both use old-school wayside trip cocks that raise next to red signals, and if a train passes a red, a mechanism on the side of the train strikes the raised trip cock, triggering a mandatory emergency brake application.
1. Most people wouldn't have the desire or expertise to upgrade with third party stuff. Most people don't want to muck about in the guts of their PC.

2. Apple could sell those parts themselves at a much more reasonable profit margin than they do today.

3. Better to sell the cheapest option (at a good profit margin) than nothing at all.
Not saying you are wrong, but who is the most famous inventor you can think of? No no, from a startup, similar to the scenario depicted. That's right, none (+- a handful) - regardless, we aren't doing this for fame anyway (I'd imagine).
If I could get something close to an RV that could do the highway section to a national park or another major US city while letting 2+ people sleep in the back I'd be very interested in getting that and doing a very cheap vacation across the country.

As it is driving on a boring highway all day and finding a hotel at night sucks. I'd much rather leave the driving to the night while we sleep.
Full-stack Node.js web diagnostics
The existing track circuits do not provide the same flexibility and traffic density that PTC can allow. In the 1920's there was a Fireman and Engineer on the front end, and a Conductor and Brakeman on the caboose to check the signals and timetables. These days there is just one engineer. CTC won't dump the brakes when a train overruns it's ownership of speed, track, or time. PTC will.
So who are all those people going on about the inherent awfulness of government and how it should be replaced by private businesses?
While I love travis for what it is, this is a foreseeable result here.

At the very least they need to add a failsafe that checks all outgoing logs for any secure tokens and replaces them with '*' or something.

If you sign up to play a game of whack-a-mole you will lose eventually.
This comment is an argument that it's possible, not a claim that it's happening.

It'd be much, much easier for apps like FB messenger to transmit sparse samples of low bitrate audio to a server for processing there. 1 hr/day @ 8kbps ~ 110 MB/month. As a matter of fact, with "deep learning" and whatall, it doesn't seem like the audio would even need to be intelligible to human ears for it to still be useful in some marketing algorithms or to generate guesses of interests correlating to the audio. Those interests might be presented as an ad, search suggestion, etc. Why would google use something like this for search recommendations? Because it's training data, that's why!

What I'm arguing is that even though conventional "speech recognition" is processor intensive and unlikely happening on a mobile client side, it's just not that far-fetched that small snips of low bitrate conversation data might be used to tune marketing prediction models on the server-side.

In training general purpose models, huge amounts of data could be generated by only a little bit of data/user. Where would this sort of thing cross a privacy line? I'm not sure. Personally, it kinda creeps me out regardless.

Seriously, listen to these 8kbps opus samples: http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/ . If they're intelligible to human ears, I can't imagine what some clever learning algorithms could do with that and much much less.

Here's a random anecdote about how much data FB messenger can use: https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/49yhlh/faceboo...
huh, my mistake
Flying cars are what comes next after cars, and that's been going on for several decades now isn't it?

VR does have great potential, but not as it is right now. IBM and Xerox have put in a lot of money then in a lot of things. And Google is throwing money at several things too. But seldom do the big wave things pan out as expected when we want them to.
It's a risk/reward trade-off. You're never going to be famous being the maintainer, but you'll also never be viewed as crazy, nor do you have to face outright failure. You hear about the innovators who succeed; you kinda shake your heads and pity the ones who don't.
Or access to great skiing promotes a healthier lifestyle.
Not affiliated, but looks like it could be interesting to some people here.

Just found the license and seems it's a M$ product.
When did the downvotes start to happen?
I was hoping for a little more substance or specific examples, but I think it's long enough to make the point that microservices have been cargo culted and don't make sense at every stage, combined with early startups can be prone to over-engineering beyond their current stage.
The current MacPro was designed for one group of professionals: those using FinalCut Pro. Both the software and the dual video cards were tuned to each other, and at the time were a killer combination, faster than any other setup for that workflow.

The two mistakes Apple made (and is referencing there) were that 1) the GPU market would follow down the same path as CPU's were and going with dual (slightly slower) GPUs would win out over single high-temperature GPUs so they would have good replacements to choose from down the line, and 2) other software would adapt to the 2 GPU strategy and FinalCut Pro would be the leader on a new wave of software using GPUs through things like OpenCL.

Neither of these turned out to be true. GPU makers pushed hard into making single-card monsters (and it has worked well), and very few software titles have figured out (or even publicly attempted to figure out) how to make things use the second GPU on the MacPros.
Steal This Keyboard: Input Club’s K-Type Is on Massdrop
A smart bus trial for London
Κλειδώνει τον τελικό η Γιουβέντους
>A miles tax is far worse than a carbon tax; it's far more of a stab in the dark. It doesn't even account for wear & tear in any way,

I would assume that the tax rate would be based on vehicle class, but that seems too easy.
On a recent trip I discovered DeSano, which was awesome. Some of the most realistic Neapolitan I've found in the states.
So-called "Conservatives" have been much more "egg-breakers" for the past 30 years - they've gotten more done, and most of that results in a mess (two examples - Reagan: outspent Russia, ballooned national debt/deficit, Bush2: started 2nd Iraq war - we're still paying for it)

If you remove politics from your point, I'll rephrase as "we need both maintainers and innovators" but that doesn't get the page-hits, does it?
When I see a statement such as, Income in men declined 10-19% over several decades, I think:

OK. Why? Is the ratio of young/old different from before? Were those living on social security included in those stats? What does that have to do with wages? Is it because men are choosing different jobs? Is it because they are working fewer hours? Is it because they are choosing to earn less, because cable TV and internet connection are enough? Is it because cars cost less? Is it because, generally over the population, men are choosing activities other than work? Is it because feminists have changed women who have changed men into deciding not to marry women, generally over the population, which reduces the drive or opportunity to pursue larger incomes? Is the pay hidden somehow, more now than before, going to medical costs instead of salary?

The conclusions in the news article depend heavily on definitions for "middle class" and "workers" and seem to assume that wealth equals money and that income equals wages.
I used AOL and Compuserve, but after they had both expanded to allowing access to everything. What drove the expansion? It seems like the market worked as expected in this case...
Another discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14292651

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...

Original source: http://www.hotfixit.net/single-post/2017/05/03/How-to-build-...
The article says:

> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

In fairness, public infrastructure is already miles better in London than most U.S. cities. So the idea of tricked out buses with good smartphone integration seems a lot more realistic to me than if this were done in the U.S.
Now you can DIY a RISC-V SoC with SiFive's “hassle-free” process
Conservatives, of course!

Oh wait, now we've blown up the whole premise of innovation vs maintenance as regards left vs right. Hmmmmmm.
Of course depression exists for valid reasons (I've heard good evo-psych explanations concerning adaptations to signal guilt in response to belief that one has been exiled from a tribe, etc.)

But it's also an extremely maladaptive state to be in—no matter the environment—and one we'd best force ourselves out of, even if doing so is "unnatural." There is just nothing good that comes—ever—from a major depressive episode. It makes it harder to gather the energy to do anything about whatever is causing the depression. It's a positive feedback loop.

Note that I agree with you fully that dissatisfaction or sadness or ennui or whatever else, is a perfectly valid—and useful(!)—response to being in a bad environment, one that drives people to change their life for the better.

But depression is not any of those things. Depression is—as the pharma industry explicitly defines it—the feeling lab rats get when they've struggled to get out of water for so long that they just can't stand struggling any more, and give up and float. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_despair_test)

That state—helpless despair—is the thing that impairs feelings like sadness or ennui from motivating you to change your environment. Anti-depressants are targeted specifically at counteracting that feeling, so that negative emotions will be re-connected to motivation.

(Note that this is why anti-depressants always carry risks of suicide: suicide is one form of escape from negative feelings, and people suddenly motivated to do something to escape from negative feelings will have suicide suddenly pop into their heads as a strategy for doing so. Whether they consider it a valid strategy is up to the person's particular psychology, but they'll be itching to do something. I would guess that it's more likely they'll choose that option, the fewer other options they have.)
A few points:

1. The Jevons paradox. Increased efficiency, by itself increases utilisation of a resource. If you want to reduce consumption, you need to INCREASE costs. In the context of fossil fuels, this means carbon and other taxes, generally.

2. Efficiency gains are typically overestimated and underrealised. More generally, more efficient systems tend to require tighter integration and coordination.

3. Much efficiency within the US has to do with basic infrastructure and land use. Housing, commercial, and industrial building design. Land use, more than anything else, which drives transportation patterns. Appliance design, education, and more.

4. Le Chatlier's Principle probably also applies (and the Jevons Paradox may well be a special case / instance of this). Changes to a system in one direction tend to lead to compensatory response in the opposite.

5. Many efficiency technologies or adaptations are not themselves highly lucrative, or have greater costs than the apparent economic benefits.

On that last:

Proper tyre inflation and regular tune-ups. The first ... simply has to be done regularly. Tune-ups are pricy relative to energy savings.

Replacing incandescent lights with LED (Do this!!!). Start with high-use fixtures.

Proper insulation (easy) and weatherproofing (harder) of homes and building. Increasing ceiling insulation makes a tremendous difference. Blocking and stopping drafts and other leackages is much more intensive, and is often hampered by poor initial construction and standards.

Wrapping water and HVAC pipes and conduits. Thermal loss within the structure from water and space heating/cooling is another easy win.

Understanding your home's energy-use cycles and dependencies. In cold-weather climates, thermal stratification and hot/cold zones within the structure often lead to overheating (or cooling). Increasing insulation efficiency may exacerbate this as blower fans run for shorter periods of time, and hence mix interior air less completely. Counterintuitively, having high-efficiency, low-speed fans within rooms to mix floor and ceiling air, or running central blowers for longer periods of time, even when heating or cooling aren't being applied, may significantly increase overall comfort.
Don't forget the original Arinell in Berkeley, which I find slightly better than the Mission one. But both top notch for slices.
Productivity Application (updated): Board Groups, Fragments and More
@derefr, @mjevans I agree with you both.

It's my personal opinion that these meds are better used as a crutch to help someone seek out therapy. I've seen people get trapped in their own psyche where, they are running in a closed maze of suffering, unable to find their way out of it.

I also think modern society is bat-shit crazy. It isn't just that depression has been dismissed as a survival trait, or even that it is demonized. There are aspects of modern society that induces much greater existential anguish which is then cleverly swept under the rug of "Progress".
Guide to Extract Method Refactoring in TypeScript
Voting rights have value. If some entity wants to gain control of the company, then they would need to buy voting shares.