skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite confused. Two examples:

> It turns out there is very little code that would break if Emacs strings became immutable

Which means that very little Clojure code would break if they just went ahead and used Emacs strings.

> Common Lisp fans claim that lisp-2s have first-class functions, but the way they are kept separate from other first-class values in their own namespace ghetto brings to mind claims of "separate but equal"—at best it is Jim Crow functional programming.

Jim Crow functional programming?? The virtue signalling is strong in this one. He's wrong on the facts, too.

A Lisp-2 doesn't keep the function inside the ghetto, it keeps everyone else out. Functions can be everywhere, but a non-function can't be the value of a function binding. Function's aren't second class in this system, they're royal class.
No, because a carpenter can't switch out for a welding torch with a hotkey. Nor can they woodwork with the torch.

The reason the fe/be distinction exists is mostly management, accounting, and legacy, not the actual work. These days the engineering itself can be interchangeable across the "ends", depending on the toolset you're using.
Concussion is a huge huge deal in rugby these days. Something like 50% of international matches see a player having to leave the field for a precautionary "head injury assessment". At junior levels players need to be immediately substituted if there is any suspicion of a head injury.
All but a handful of EU countries. Lived in DK, ES and BG. I can tell you that very few teenagers speak English well enough to learn to program so they can start a Facebook at 18 year.
Some of what's written here is not quite right. ASCII was developed in cooperation with ISO, ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer's Association), and BSI (British Standards Institute), and CCITT (International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee), and it was clear from the start that there would be national/linguistic versions — this was the origin of ‘code pages’, to use the IBMism.
ISO 2022 / ECMA 35 had defined the means of designating character sets (both 7-bit and 8-bit) by 1971, a decade before the IBM PC chose to ignore the standard.
Let's fix it together.. One line at a time
Co-processors don't matter for power consumption if they aren't being used because you can always just turn off the power to those areas of the chip. People talk about a coming area of "dark silicon" where transistors keep getting cheaper without getting more efficient. That means we'll keep adding more and more specialized structures to chips which are very fast and power efficient when in use compared to a general purpose CPU but each sits there dark and silent most of the time.

Back in the day the advantages of RISC were that since everybody had small teams of designers you could spend less time implementing instructions and more time optimizing and adding features like pipelining. And also that RISC, when introduced, could be squeezed onto a single chip whereas CISCs needed multiple chips which resulted in big speed penalties. These days everybody has humongous teams and much better tooling and more transistors than you can shake a stick at. The complex decoding of x86 instructions gives you a 5-10% power penalty on big cores (and a larger one on small cores). And also the strickter memory ordering requirements of x86 might be a disadvantage, I've heard contradictory things. But in general the performance differences between ISAs is pretty small at the moment.
fork() also clones all the filedescriptors that might be open to the child. It is the resposibility of the forking code to close filedescriptors it doesn't need. Easy way to cause too many open files errors.

(I read this article quickly, so apologies if I missed it.)

And then there's the fun of dealing with stdout, and stderr at the same time; in a single thread.

One more fun thing to do with fork is to learn to pass ownership of the child process to pid 1, what the command nohup does. A parent process when it exits, requires that all child processes exit as well.
I used to think this, until I used Clojure. I'm surprised you used it professionally and have that mindset, I write far less code in Clojure and get far more done. The productivity gains are amazing, especially when I can just upload new code on the fly as the program is running.
On Becoming the Enemy
Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference.

On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference.

Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.
Open Source Software needs more time, not (only) money
How exactly can you get insurance for a concussion as a software developer? How would you even prove that you can't do the job anymore?
WannaCry ransom notice analysis suggests Chinese link
As the article mentioned, "low" is relative as different people require different amounts of sleep. 6 hours might be totally fine for you while someone else would be a complete zombie.
...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.
Let me state here again that I would love to use Firefox, and I've tried more than once, but Chrome DevTools are much faster.
Here is another excellent resource for AWK, written by William Shotts, the author of "The Linux Command Line" http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_adv_awk.php
Digital Nudging: Altering User Behavior in Digital  Environments [pdf]
That's just not accurate at all.

It's even less accurate again if you're moving in business/tech circles and not travelling around as a tourist.
Living in Paris, I can feel a strong momentum of entrepreneurship and startups. ex: Recent "Station F" incubator from Xavier Niel is opening in 2018 and will be one of the largest startup campus in the World. Macron is strongly pro-startup. there are a LOT of options for funding (quite crazy when I saw how much we can get with my startup (Banque publique d'investissement, crédit impôt recherche...). It is really easy to start a startup, not much paperwork (surprisingly).

Contrary to 10 years ago, best students coming from "les grandes ecoles" want to be entrepreneur or join a startup. This is a radical change to the mindset from the past when the best opportunity would be in big companies. PhD start to be recognised as they should in private sector and more PhD are leaving academic to private (which I did).

Now, I think that comparing Europe to SV is too premature, (A change in culture is yet to come). But the dynamic is here.

In Paris, salaries in tech startups are high (for what I saw: ~42K junior, ~60 senior (5y)) compared to the cost of living (in France healthcare and education are free), rent is high.
So yeah, I am confident for the future of Europe :)

edit: and from what I saw, most startups' products have english language available (interface/doc). Most of them have international expansion in mind.
String-matching is really scary in Unicode, especially since the exact form of the string matters with respect to composition — and that’s before you even consider that some characters just plain look like others or even are the same glyph. And strings can contain things like zero-width spaces that look like nothing at all.

Sure, there are recommended practices but there have been enough mistakes already (or lazy programmers) that it is hard to be confident that any string with “interesting” symbols in it is exactly what it appears to be. And there have been security problems related to the fact that many interfaces expect the user to know exactly what they’re reading, much less the programmer.
Guessing complexity of algorithms
People will often charge a daily or weekly rate, and may offer a lower rate if the project will take a long time. But $100 per hour is nothing crazy, and I think it's actually on the low end for a good software developer. It's not uncommon for a remote software developer to charge between $100 and $200 per hour, depending on their experience. If you have some very specialized knowledge and a strong reputation, you might have a weekly rate of $10,000. (But these are typically very short term engagements.)

patio11 has a lot of good posts that talk about consulting rates: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/
Photoinstrument 7.6 Build 902 Full and Keygen
That would never have worked.if you want to enter the French market you need a French product.
Are you saying that the mortgage interest reduction is causing the insane housing costs in the cities? If this were the case, wouldn't we see an equivalent increase in costs in the somewhat rural areas?
Depends how your stream encryption is done and what you mean by stream encryption.

- If you mean encryption of messages using a stream cipher, generally a single IV is used per message so it could be used there.

- If you mean encryption of a stream of data, well, if you're using a block cipher to encrypt a stream of data, this indeed could be used as a block cipher inherently creates blocks in the data every X bits.

- However, if you're encrypting a stream of data using a stream cipher it is indeed impossible as all data in the stream isn't known when encryption begins.
Yes, you are right about most things. I live in NL and just started as a software engineer this year. I make 45k. Probably a lot less than someone in the US with a similar position.

The story has 2 sides though: you have to pay a lot of things we in Europe take for granted. And you should include those payments in you calculations.

And most of the things like healthcare, depend on you having a job.

I will never be without healthcare. Education costs are €2000 a year for uni, free for anything below. Unemployment benefits for up to 3 years after losing my job. State pension when I retire. More personal freedoms. 30 vacations days + 10 national holidays. Etc...

Money isn't everything.
Maybe its just me, but I would rather have PR functionality in git itself.

Linus, please make it happen :)
In fact, original version of ASCII even left some of the codes under 128 undefined or available for local redefinitions. This is why Smalltalk uses _ for assignment (it was left arrow on Alto) and why some still used encodings have local currency symbol (eg. ¥) in place of \.
6th RISC-V Workshop Proceedings
If it was off by 5%, there could be some weird reduced-rate VAT @ 5% (https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates) not being printed out separately but included in the total nonetheless.

If I remember correctly, most booze is at the full 20% rate. I can imagine a mistake like this happening at least.

Of course, if it wasn't off by 5%...
Of the many projects mentioned in the article I find the automation of contract analysis most interesting. Seems like a rich area for application of a whole variety of NLP techniques.

I would be curious if the current state is to essentially read the contract and mark up or label all the critical bits of the contract and then pass it to a human for final review and approval. Or, are they processing it using bank business rules and logic and automating approval without a human in the loop?

Anybody out there on HN who can speak in more technical depth about the contract analysis projects without giving away any trade secrets? I could imagine applying some old school controlled vocabularies and automated indexing as well as more statistical techniques such as topic modelling and Named Entity Recognition.
> I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day.

This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.
Unfortunately Firefox (Chrome too) use more CPU than Safari when browsing static pages or being unfocused. Which makes them a battery drain.

Otherwise I'd use Firefox everywhere.

EDIT: numbers on 2013 11-inch Macbook Air

Firefox 3-10% vs. Safari 0.2-2% when idling

Firefox 10-40% vs. Safari 5-10% when scrolling HN
I'm surprised no one has mentioned improvely.com by Dan Grossman.

I think it makes around $40K to $50K per month. Over the last few years, I've seen it grow from around $10K to $50K. That slow steady SaaS growth is pretty inspiring.
The average person, even the educated ones so maybe more than just average is utterly incapable of estimating complex derivatives such as their energy footprint.
Might have to do with the pressure they're feeling from the unavoidable: RISC-V replacing ARM.
There's a difference between protecting citizens and overloading them with meaningless warnings that just end up desensitizing them.
Indeed, latin1 is currently the default for MySQL. But it changes to utf8 in MySQL 8.0 (in development).
Yes, good recommendation. I have mentioned it here on HN before. I had got to read it when working in an HP joint venture, years ago. They (HP) used to ship a complementary copy of his book with every new HP-UX business server or workstation (CAD etc.) sold. IIRC the book even shows how to write a simple DBMS (not RDBMS), with client and server parts. And shows how to write all that code somewhat portably (in C) across some Unix versions that were common then. Quite an achievement. The book is still available (in an updated version - after 19 years!):

http://basepath.com/aup/

It also shows how to set up pipes - using the pipe(), dup() etc. system calls. There are some subtleties involved in that. And that stuff is used for the shell he creates.

Good stuff.
I personally disagree with that analogy (I'd consider the hiring of any additional labor to deviate from a company's "one person" state, custodial personnel included). I also disagree that equity is the only consideration for similar reasons (if I own 100% of the equity, but run an office with a receptionist and service desk and programmers, that's very obviously not "single person").
That is not the absolute minimum. Unicode is complex beast and oversimplification is dangerous.

When these absolute minimum intros talk just about encoding it misleads people to think that that's enough. I can't count the number of people who have read Joel's article and have the misconception that all user perceived characters are mapped to code points. I was one of those people. Just because ASCII and Latin-1 character sets can be mapped to code points does not mean that's how Unicode works.

At minimum every software developer must know four different levels:

* bytes,

* code points,

* combining character sequence

* grapheme clusters, extended grapheme clusters

Joel stops at the second level. He never gets into point where he explains how encode user perceived characters, how to detect grapheme cluster boundaries in the Unicode encoding.

examples: 각 , नी , நி
12 creative social media visuals you might want to use this Children’s Day
I highly recommend her 1969 book, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals.
That was true years ago. It's really not the case anymore. Related reading: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/08/python-packaging.htm...

More to the point, even if what you said were true, the tooling is still absurdly complicated in the JS world. Your comment is a mix of of a red herring and whataboutism.
Football ruins this guy's life and when he finally gets better he coaches kids' football. It sounds like he has an abusive relationship with football.
My shipping address is "Roņu street, Liepāja" and in the other end of our city is "Rožu street, Liepāja"

If the address gets somehow mangled, as it often does, the shipping label could read "Ro?u street" and the postal offices guess on the address being "Roņu" or "Rožu" is as good as anyones.

I too usually just write "Ronu street"
Would it? 18 years ago? I doubt it. Google itself is really not as good in other languages as in English, even today. Could French google in 1999 have become world class in a non-native language?
How would that work? Besides starting completely new centralized git service to compete with github and co? Anyway, git already has a "pull request" system in the form of git send-email and related commands.
People will eat more if you make them bike for 6 hours a day.
Yeah, so I have always eaten both meats and veggies. My blood results still showed a vitamin B12 deficiency. I was already noticing symptoms like anemia, mental fog, lack of energy, etc. I upped my meat intake to mainly grass-fed, fatty beef, and my latest tests show a normal level. You cannot get B12 from plants, period.

Meat is necessary for human life. Saying otherwise is dangerous. After seeing my experience, my wife (vegetarian for almost a decade) has started eating meat again. This isn't something worth dying over.
While Pieter does most of the work himself, he does have a few people helping out here and there.
Ask HN: Ex-Founder. Should I take lowball buyout offer?
Anonymous for obvious reasons.

I am the ex-founder of a company that has had some moderate success, and I own a 5% equity stake. They're about to raise money at a $XX,000,000 valuation. I am skeptical of the company's future and want out. The hardball CEO offered $100k. What should I do?
> due to efforts of people who love the language

Extremely tangential, but does anybody actually love javascript? We've been in a captive situation with this deeply flawed hack for 20 years.

Once WebAssembly is mature enough to fulfill its promise, and after that once we've burned through the generation born into this JS captivity, is anyone going to want use it anymore?

Like, if it were magically possible to use anything else natively in the browser today, would the next big thing be another 10 million person-hours put into yet another angle on working around JS's flaws... or something in another less clunky language entirely, never to return?
Show HN: PJON v8.1 runs on ATtiny85, Arduino, ESP8266, Teensy, RPI and WINX86
> fork() also clones all the filedescriptors that might be open to the child. ... Easy way to cause too many open files errors.

fork() cannot fail with EMFILE or ENFILE[1]

[1]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/fo...

> It is the resposibility of the forking code to close filedescriptors it doesn't need.

FD_CLOEXEC can cause exec() to close file descriptors automatically.

> A parent process when it exits, requires that all child processes exit as well.

This is not true
Yes, the fact that we can take for granted some things that you don't was exactly my point. Here, when you think about getting seriously sick, what most people think about is the loss of health - the loss of money comes very far behind.

Regarding military spending, I'm surely grateful of NATO - especially during the cold war - but I think you're severely underestimating European defense capabilities and, most importantly, needs.

Let's say that for an act of magic NATO went away tomorrow and a EU-only army or alliance had to be created to replace it, and let's say we didn't even increase military spending from the current level. Who would/could attack such EU alliance?

The only neighboring power that would have the resources to even think about it is Russia, but then again - with current spending and capabilities - Putin would have exactly zero chances of successfully invading the EU. Just look at the size of our combined armies and the difference in economic potential (in case of a prolonged war). This, even without even counting that France (here I'm making the UK magically disappear as an ally too) has enough nukes to make such an invasion an act of folly, and that several other EU countries could easily develop nuclear capabilities if required.

Of course you're free to disagree, but my very strong impression - as someone who also has some family in the US - is that this "we can't have good, affordable health care because of NATO" is just a very convenient way for your politicians to put the blame elsewhere. The US is so rich that it could easily give EU-level healthcare at EU costs to everybody, but then doctors, insurance companies, big pharma and everybody related would need to be less rich, and all other high-income people should pay higher - and not even so much higher at that - taxes, as it happens in the EU.

You could do that even without cutting military spending which, by the way, is mostly geared towards the ability to project US power overseas wherever and whenever it's needed, not to protect Europe from Russia. I don't have the numbers readily available, but I'm pretty sure that your 11 carrier strike group cost much, much more than all your troops stationed in Europe.
> ...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240...

I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something like https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png

The article says this feature depends on support from your hardware.

Of course, in the typical Mozilla fashion there is a six year old bug that seems related https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733

I don't know what to say. Sigh.
I use Firefox as my primary browser. Do you have another example outside of google docs that behaves that way?

The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there.

Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.
Since begining of may I had some issues with NFC payments which manifested themselves by terminals printing out receipts with error messages that consisted of box drawing characters interspersed with random letters. I though that it was caused by the card expiring in may and not allowing NFC payments in the last month and that it was somehow feature, only after seeing the message in correct encoding I realized, that it was user error as I had both old and unactivated new card in my wallet.