skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How “GPS data as a Service” will change the way location data is handled
As IOT and location based apps proliferate, the challenge of managing and utilising GPS data in a meaningful way assumes a lot of importance. The advent of API accessed mapping software such as Open Street, Google, MapQuest, etc., has revolutionized the way we use maps. A similar change is on its way as it relates to location based data.

Currently, app developers whether they be individuals or corporations manage GPS data generated by their solutions themselves. GPS data adds up very quickly. Indexing, storage, retrieval and real-time analytics and decisioning consume a lot of resources and require considerable expertise to manage the impact on system performance. Performance optimizations and scaling are huge challenges. The costs can really add up. This offers an opportunity for a specialized “GPS data as a Service” provider who can handle the large volumes of GPS data, index, store and allow for optimal retrieval, provide real-time analytics that can be used within apps (after all it’s the analytics that matters not the data itself) and who offers value adds such as scheduling, queuing, auto-dispatch etc., based on the data analyzed.

Logistrics Services (www.logistricsservices.com) is the first of this kind of service and offers API’s, libraries and tools to integrate location data and obtain insights and analytics in real-time that can help drive decisions within your apps.

We offer a free 14-day trial. Discover the power of “GPS data as a Service” today!
50 books that inspire Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans
Creativity is Intelligence having fun.

Accuracy is not so much fun, but computers do it well.

The computer should be accurate and the people be creative with them. That's the proper way to use tools.
http://www.logistricsservices.com
You wouldn't? You would need to know by context?
This then makes the CJK unification decision even more perplexing. Surely Japanese characters should not be treated the same as Mandarin ones, even if they look the same?
In that time (early 2000's), even if you had a strong interest in computers, you'd be pushed toward Computer Engineering instead of CS. Business school was a popular alternative with MBA enrollments peaking in the early 2000s.
Speed limit warning must have saved me a few tickets! I find its a better driving platform as its simpler. You can more easily read it at ta glance, whereas Google maps keeps getting worse on this front as they keep adding to it. Also their direction timing seems better. I think its a tad earlier and doesn't tend to get caught in loops where it tells you the same or irrelevant information again and again.
Nitpick: Google opted to pull out of mainland China instead of self-censoring. They moved Chinese operations to Hong Kong, but operate uncensored there.
Is that open source? I'm wondering if it uses SDL or a similar library - binaries look pretty small.
Actually products of labor and capital are both imported, and no one said anything about isolationism.
Show HN: Simple Downloader for Public Word Embeddings
Schools are built on a theory of mass production and we know from the last hundred years that mass production is expensive, slow, and low in quality. See Ford and GM vs Toyota in the mid 20th century.

Lean is about integration and removing arbitrary walls between types of knowledge. Hopefully today's Fordist mass production is soon replaced by Finland's lean education system. But remember, it will have nothing to do with iPads.
Organic chemistry looks complicated but it is, by and large, just an enormous amount of memorization. The kind of complex systems reasoning you have with any non-trivial computer science isn't there.

By contrast, even though it is the same subject matter, chemical engineering is (correctly) perceived as being vastly more difficult than chemistry because it requires reasoning about complex system-level behaviors that has no analogue in chemistry. This creates the oft-observed effect that being skilled at chemistry has surprisingly low correlation with being effective at chemical engineering despite being the same domain.
ARM’s new processors are designed to power the machine-learning machines
Prolog is already a general-purpose language. So is any Turing complete
language, by definition. Whether it's a "great" such language or not is kind
of a personal tastes thing.

As to why it's not more popular, I've thought about this very ofen and I don't
have an answer. What I know for sure is it's never going to become more
popular until people move on from that silly soundbite about its "general
purpose"-ness, which never made any sense to begin with.

People program "general purpose" stuff in languages that are much worse for
"programming in the large" than Prolog. Most of the big operating systems are
written in C, large swathes of game code is in some assembly language or
other, about 60% of enterprise code is in Java and most supercomputing code is
in FORTRAN fer chrissake. Not to mention, all of the internet is in
javascript, a language that was originally meant just for writing small
snippets of code to manage buttons and text fields and stuff. You're not going
to tell me that javascript is "general purpose"?

Prolog is already a general-purpose language. All you need to do is have a look at the library section in the Swi-Prolog documentation. Besides the usual suspects (constraint logic, tabling, lambdas and such and of course parsing all possible text-based formats ever in time dt) we find a bunch of diverse libraries:

An http package for all your client/server needs [1]

A library for opening web-pages in a browser in a system-agnostic manner [2]

A library for command-line parsing [3]

An RDF parser and a semantic web library

A package manager [5]

A random numbers generation library

A library for manipulating the Windows registry [7]

A library for solving linear programming problems [8]

A thread pool management library [9]

And a whole lot of support for a bunch of other stuff like corouting, multithreaded applications, a profiler, terminal control, an ODBC interface, an interface to Protocol Buffers, bindings to zlib, GNU readline, and so on and so forth.

In what sense is all that not "general purpose"?

______________

[1] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27pa...

[2] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=www_browser

[3] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=optparse

[5] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=prologpack

[7] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=registry

[8] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=simplex

[9] http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=threadpool
He put it back up once a lot of clones started appearing though, didn't he? The reason being that since people would play the exact same kind of game either way he might as well be the one to get the revenue?
Augur had been in development for quite a while and it seems to be going pretty slowly. I bought some REP in the crowd sale (which has gone up in value, with the rising tide), have been following along on the subreddit, and I'm not sure it'll ever have any use.
How Giphy plans to build a real business by animating the internet
I think GP hits the nail on the head there with the homework analogy, and you with yours. Just talking to my friends in other careers about the work that I do makes me check time and time again just how many assumptions of knowledge I make when talking about anything vaguely technical (which is possibly a criticism of how I explain things, but also/even if so says lots about this issue).

What surprises me is the lack of consolidated resources addressing these basic pain points. I don't think it would be hard to come up with a list of examples just by looking at a normal work day and taking a step back; really evaluating where you're relying on basic knowledge to do even the most mundane of tasks. Once you've been doing this for a few years those tasks are just that - mundane - but for beginners it's having difficulty with those basic parts that is a real turn off. "How will I ever be any good at this if I can't even download code off this thing called Github". If someone could point me towards some kind of existing resource covering a bunch of different areas in this way I'd be really interested in having a read.

On a related note, I'm reminded of one of Dan Luu's related essays on debugging [1], which I recommend reading if you haven't already.

[1] https://danluu.com/teach-debugging/
Not necessarily a bad idea. This will give you a better appreciation for why you would want to use the established paradigms taught in CS courses.
How does on patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?
> We've been writing SQL for decades without such complaints and it works rather well in practice.

SQL, at least prior to recursive CTEs, isn't Turing complete, and mitigates the problem, but the need to understand the evaluation strategy of a particular interpreter (which is more involved than understanding the unification algorithm underlying prolog) has been a common complaint about SQL for a long time.

But SQL makes it worthwhile by still being the most convenient existing method to talk to many databases that have desirable properties. Prolog doesn't currently have a recognized niche where it's the best language that is as fundamental as the one SQL has.
Cryptocurrencies are still new. Why is that a problem worth solving?
> by context

exactly!
Oh yes, the "we must completely fix the worst problem in the world before we even think about the second worst" argument.
Try the Europarl corpus (http://www.statmt.org/europarl/) or the TED corpus (https://github.com/ajinkyakulkarni14/TED-Multilingual-Parall...).
> Oh and learn git, too. And Linux. Just so you can hand in the homework.

They should know linux/unix/gnu before they start on anything cs related.Are you really suggesting the people that don't know anything about computers should be taking cs?

Git would have made debugging the missing semi colon a lot simpler because it makes the divide/conquer approach simpler.
Your comment got treated rather harshly, so let me try to explain. The post is on topic for HN because, although the question is a whimsical one, it gratifies intellectual curiosity (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Whimsical submissions like it have always been welcome here, as long as they're uncorrelated with anything that's appeared recently. (Sometimes people start doing the copycat thing of posting follow-up stories on almost the same topic. Those get old quickly unless they're really interesting, so the bar gets higher superlinearly.)

It isn't just a question of the community upvoting it. Plenty of stories get plenty of upvotes yet still don't belong on HN—e.g. most sensational controversies.

Many HN users value the diversity of the stories that appear here and don't take well to comments that appear to want to narrow the site down. That might be why your question got flamed.
> He ends up (spoilers alert) coaching football.

Jesus. It's like one of those generational cycle of abuse stories.
I think the founders of what now is CS would be lumped in with the very, very bright but still novice programmers. Most of the field has nothing to do with actual hardware anyway.
And then, in that very very rare case, the customer pays one cent more, or one cent less, and nothing bad happens? And since all amounts are in a whole number of cents, you can round to an integer after each such multiplication, and the floating point imprecision doesn't slowly add up. You could even subtract some epsilon before rounding to ensure no customers are never negatively affected by rounding.

Maybe I'm getting this all wrong, as I've never had to work with a register, nor do I have any experience with the software involved, but I hardly see the problem in accumulating a few cents of inaccuracy over time.
GPs issue seemed to be that it wasn't a great or popular language for general use, not that it isn't a general purpose language.
Microsoft Webmatrix will be discontinued on 1/11/2017
If it was just about transpiling, that would be fine. The problem is that some frameworks (eg: React) add on a whole lot more assumptions about how how your app works. Just look at the plethora of blog posts, tutorials and even whole mini-frameworks just to get d3 to work with React.
11 books that will teach you to get rich, summed up in a sentence
I understand the Haber process. I don't think most people know of or care about it. The point their making here is without the magic of current energy supplies things get very weird and difficult, even then you try really hard.
You start saying 'software engineer' and end with programmer.

Clarify your terms. There is a huge difference between willing to take on liability for your faults versus slinging code.
Just mentioning it. It has been a easier way to explore my files on Azure without the recommended practises, which seem less "workable"/"user-friendly".

PS. If you're on Azure, you should try it. Beats all current options for now :)

PS2. Better link: https://blogs.iis.net/webmatrix/webmatrix-product-support-en...
There's absolutely no news in this article, it's just basic speculation of the kind any seasoned sysadmin could have made.
But if he moved even a single millibitcoin out of his wallet I think the market might react with panic in fear that he would sell a lot of coins at once, and so the fear of the value plummeting might cause it to do just that.

So even if he is alive, could he ever reap the benefits of those coins?

Hopefully he mined with different wallets so that he's been able to sell smaller amounts of coins without anyone knowing that it was him.
How would a "three-for-one" action end up with floating point inaccuracies? I imagine the price for three items would tend to be dividable by three.
Thank you. I've now had a similar discussion with my two girls (Aged 11 and 4). Was a far better way to spend the evening than a typical night of Netflix.
Other than "data center power is supposed to be reliable" this article doesn't say anything.
Because Wikipedia is too useful. Note that it required a certain self-confidence that this was the case for Wikipedia to implement this strategy. And it's self-fulfilling - if Wikipedia allowed itself to be censored, then it would have fewer contributors and its usefulness would suffer.

There's a rather interesting analogy to be made with the GPL here. Critics argue that companies shy away from it because they cannot control it. Yet its entire goal is to not be controlled, and it draws its strength from the conviction that the body of GPL software is too useful to ignore. And again, that's self-fulfilling.

It takes courage, but it's important to know when you have the power to say "all of me, or none of me".
I see it as a toy language. The only person I think would find it useful is leafo himself since he can edit it however he wants. But everyone else should stay away from it. Plain Lua is so much better.
My comment makes no sense at all anymore now that the parent edited his comment
Also: how many of those professions simply assume that anyone good will be doing something else by the time they're in their 40s? A 50 year old lawyer or doctor might choose to be more supervisory but nobody is going to think they're a failure if they aren't, and their experience will be valued rather something they have to prove isn't holding them back.

> Many of the Ivey League students gravitating to tech are likely envisioning themselves as founders or C-suite executives, not engineers. Outside of the SV bubble, software engineer is not a top-tier job. Nor is it a particularly well paying job. In SV though, it has prestige.

My general rule is to follow the money, and at most companies the compensation levels don't look like engineering is a prestige position. Not bad, to be sure, but definitely outside the inner circle even at many companies where it's a core competitive attribute.

This isn't new: during the dot-com bubble, there were plenty of people who got decent numbers but the people getting rich tended to be management, sales, etc. with all of the talk of “passion” and highlighting the lucky few winners looking suspiciously like a way to get people to donate enough unpaid overtime to make someone else very rich.
Microsoft Real Life Code
This is a bit tangential and only based on recent events, but the US immigration uncertainty is probably going to be a factor in sustaining the ecosystem..
Just a heads-up, the Integrations text on the English version of your homepage appears to be in French.

Also, what would you say are your main selling points over your competitors (i.e. compared to other private social network platforms)?
What's your budget? "Much" is relative.

At work I hook my MBP up to a Dell P2415Q 4K monitor. It's nice because 4K at that size runs well at "Retina" scaling.

At home I have the LG Ultra Fine 5K, but that's a 27".
As with GitHub.
You have to know they exist, and know when you should worry about them (and call in to the appropriate APIs)

https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/15/breaking-our-l... gives an overview of most of the different things scripts do. Being aware of those helps a lot. It also gives a brief idea of how to deal with this stuff (usually it's just calling an API)

https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/14/stop-ascribing... gives an idea of how grapheme clusters work. You don't need to know the algorithm, just the stuff around it.
Tim Ferriss: Tools of Titans (Edited Version)
Microsoft WebMatrix product support ends on November First, 2017
And by "reportedly," they mean "we heard it from a guy on YouTube who said immediately afterwards that it's unprovable."

The original video is pretty interesting, and the link should probably go directly to there instead of a tabloid retelling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8&ab_channel=TomSc...
Is this the BBC's idea of journalism? An anonymous "IT veteran" emailed some pet theories to their top technology correspondent and he literally pasted it into an article with zero critical analysis or independent commentary. How embarrassing.

The final paragraph says it all:

> BA has said little so far about what went wrong. However, it will now be under pressure from investors, staff and passengers to provide some answers.

BA should be under pressure from you to provide answers. That's your job.
Simple way to download Instagram pictures to your PC
The question asked is "what would it take for Prolog to become a great general-purpose language". That sounds like they think it isn't. If that wasn't meant OK, but that's definitely what it reads like.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Node-RED yet: http://nodered.org/

Node.js-based with a Pipes-like visual wiring interface. It's quite popular with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino crowd. Lot's of input and output plugins, and you can drop into Node scripting when necessary. I quite like it.
Most companies have a Right of First Refusal (ROFR) doc as part of the financing. If you can find someone in the secondary market to buy your shares, the company, if they want them, has to buy them at that price. Finding such a buyer is difficult but still possible. If it's a hot company, a lot of private wealth management groups are looking to package up stocks like this to their clients.
FWIW, I made some videos of the demos; these are linked to from https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2017/05/dead-programs-society.h...
Poppycock. I studied CS at UVA in the late-90s and had no previous programming experience. I was an experienced computer user, which wasn't a given in the 90s, but I hadn't done any programming. There wasn't anything in the curriculum that required previous experience.

Linux wasn't required for entry-level courses. At the time, they were taught using C++ and a Borland IDE on Windows.

Similarly, source control wasn't introduced immediately. I'm pretty sure CS101 assignments were turned on paper, in addition to email.

And the department offered many options for lab time, office hours, and tutoring. I worked as an undergraduate TA for 2.5 years, which basically meant holding lab hours 3-4 times/week for 2-3 hours at a time, in addition to grading assignments and exams.
That was exactly my point. Small changes make larger impacts than asking to nuke everything.
"One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realize this in the first day of practical exercises."

Isn't that what makes CS easier? You get immediate feedback. You know if it will be right or wrong before you even turn it in.
I invite you to re-read this comment after you've had time to reflect. So much about it is representative of exactly the sort of casual sexism that runs rampant in this industry. From the assumptions about "human nature" to the straw-man "diversity" you describe, even.
It's a general purpose language, you never know who will use it and how.
the above seems to have only one temporal dimention, not 2. Why did you think the above is a bi-temporal data?
I know for me the combination of RoR and the MacBook Pro caused me to never look back
I agree with you that people should probably choose a career in something they're good at, but I think that's separate to the issue of making life easier for people entering the subject from nothing. The CS courses I've seen are different from those in other subjects in that they assume a whole lot more background knowledge, which is a pretty exclusionary assumption to make. Stopping this is no bad thing.
If you've even used an operating system or the internet there are a hundred algorithms/datastructures/CS concepts at play. One example is consistent hashing used by CDNs such as Akamai, so indirectly almost any website you visit. All of the routing/control flow/congestion control algorithms that make internet work. Algorithms to wrap text on a website to a certain width. Algorithms to schedule processes on your OS, variations of linked lists and trees to manage memory and give you malloc, parsers, compilers, interpreters everywhere including web browsers .... The list just goes on and on.

It sounds like trolling to CS majors because if you don't know CS, you wont recognize it where its used, so it will seem like its not used at all. Most programming jobs don't need CS very often, but thats because all the core CS is usually packaged in a library already and we just reuse/abstract the bits we need. BTW Michael Lewis got a masters in economics before working in finance.
Metatables are your friend.

-- LuaJIT

local oldG = _G
local newG = setmetatable({}, {
__index = oldG,
})
setmetatable(oldG, {
__index = function(t, k)
return rawget(newG, k)
end,
__newindex = function()
error('attempt to assign global variable')
end,
})
_G = newG

If you want to assign a global variable, `x = 5` will error but `_G.x = 5` won't.
This sounds like it's intended to evoke a "hold my beer" reaction.
1.
2. There were too many fully incompatible dialects of Prolog. I recall Lisp-like Micro-Prolog. Turbo
> Critics argue that companies shy away from it because they cannot control it.

No, they don't. Critics point out that companies avoid it, and non-critics ascribe this avoidance to "can't control it", which is false, because nothing under a third-party copyright under any non-exclusive license can be controlled by the licensee, but businesses avoiding the GPL don't generally avoid all non-exclusive licenses.
I would assume that it is because Computer Science in general academia only speaks to select number of people.
A co-worker worker and good friend of mine was caught and drowned in fast currents on a tubing outing 9-10 years ago. I wasn't there myself, but heard he'd just stepped out of his tube at the end of the trip when he slipped and fell back in, getting swept up in the deeper, faster currents just past the island. We lost a good engineer, artist, and great friend that day.

You can never be too careful.