skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't matter, if you don't use threads in Perl when you could, that's your fault and benchmarks like this serve to remind you should. There are folks who use threads with their Perl code in real life btw
The destruction-of-beauty argument is not without merit, but no-one makes that argument about Mt Rushmore. You can make something more beautiful, and that doesn't make the destruction of beauty argument moot but it does make it less convincing. The hubris, or "playing god", argument is utterly unconvincing for me. Our environment would be safer if we spent more time playing god with genetic manipulation and less time worrying that the wheat will grow beaks and murder the farmers in their sleep. One era's playing god is another era's everyday life.
I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like the writers sacrifice historical plausibility to create strong female leads for a contemporary audience.

Ironically, so many of the GIANTS of computing's earliest days were female. Even at the rank-and-file level, women made up an astonishing number of early programmers. If you talk to retirement age people in our field, you'll find that mainframe developers were commonly female all through the 1960's and 1970's. It wasn't until the PC revolution that the field shifted to become more exclusively male.

I wonder when we'll see writers and TV/film producers start to explore that period of history? I'm sure there are some amazing stories that could be told. The crazy thing is, even if you just presented the field as-is without any embellishment, most people would assume that you were re-writing history in the name of political correctness. Most of the general public (hell, most young professionals in our field) just has no idea about this.
I still am hoping for affordable SSD to FPGA direct execution someday!
What will the world look like when 'free software' wins
Have you tried playing Citadels (https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/478/citadels)? It is an elegant card drafting game with simple rules and a lot of emergent depth. It sounds like it might fit in well with your gaming group.
You mean including code snippets of not compiling code in the automated(!) tests and compiling them from there?

Hm, That makes sense.
Anybody know a good framework for this? I can imagine that supporting different compilers output isn't a trivial thing that one should have to rebuild themselves.

Btw: The undefined behaviour question was meant to be unrelated to the "not compiling" one.
This is a truly excellent post, but Anish (humbly) buries the lede: Anish implemented a really fast checker called Porcupine which is available here https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine. Would love to hear more on how this helped you catch any bugs & how the diagnosis process goes from a failed check to bugfix.
> there is nowhere else within reach that is remotely similar to either planet

Now, hear me out here but have you considered Venus?

Cons:

Runaway greenhouse effect, sulfuric acid clouds, crazy hot, etc
Very long days (1 year = 1.92 Venus days)

Pros:

Nearer to sun => better solar energy collection
Nearly the same gravity as Earth (0.8-ish)
Lower delta-v to get there from Earth (someone double check my math on that)

You'd need to get material built into a 'solar umbrella' to cool the planet down, reflect light elsewhere. One idea (Kim Stanley Robinson?) was too make mirrors that reflect light from the way-too-bright side and have it instead reach the 'dark for half a year' side.

Once you've got it cooled down, you're a lot of the way there. Bleed off some of that atmosphere (hey, maybe Mars could use it?), get some plants converting CO2 into O2.

It's ludicrous, I know, but I find most conversations about terraforming are. The only real advantage that Mars has is that we could live there while we work on it. Venus, not so much.
Are there any public Scala to FPGA compilers?
Open-minded people have a different visual perception of reality
Ars Technica had a 'best two player' guide a while back:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/table-for-two-our-fav...
I had a question about the following passage:

>"Currently the only way to have safe authentication is to either enable TOTP (like Google Authenticator) or using a USB stick like U2F.

Both you need to do manually so practically nobody is doing that. They both provide terrible usability. First one offers you to write down backup codes on a paper (which I never did), second one is barely supported by anyone."

Aren't many people using Google Authenticator/Yubico/Push Duo versions of TOTP for github logins, gmail and bastion hosts? I thought this was becoming increasingly more common. At least its been pretty standard in the shops I have worked at in the last few years.

Also Github, DropBox, Fastmail, Gmail, Wordpress, Chrome, GitLab and BitBucket all have support for U2F:

http://www.dongleauth.info/
I'm not certain, but I don't think that's a coincidence. I.e. convnets were inspired by the neural visual system.
> There is a time and a place for zero tests, null pointers, and pointer/index arithmetic.

Yes. In MMUless microprocessors with kbytes of memory or less
Cool, thanks for the info
Yeah, it was a deliberate choice to hack together something simple.

Otherwise, I'd spend countless hours tinkering with frameworks and libraries and never actually write the damn book.
I'm hardly a guru, but I think that a tricky code, with an explanation. invites a number of subtle problems. You end up having to prove that the code and its explanation actually agree with one another. For instance your explanation could be crystal clear, but the code could still contain a bug, that's harder to see because it's tricky. Or, someone could update the code and not the explanation.
The Nonidentity Problem
> Also I really want to know what eye motion was present during each trial.

Incredibly important point. Looking at the physiology of the eye and the early visual system all together it's not clear that we can see anything without motion: object motion or saccade (saccade appears to be fundamental). Start with Lettvin's famous frog's eye paper.

More interestingly, it does appear that recognition of a 2D image may be a complex, abstract learned behavor, while 3D recognition is at its core innate. And that writing (well, drawing) preceded reading.
I love seeing new and inventive game mechanics. The ones you mentioned are great examples.

7 wonders - Your hand becomes your neighbors have next turn. Plus the simultaneous turns makes for a quick group game.

Pandemic - Challenging location-based co-op play

Race for the Galaxy - you and others decide which phases of a turn will happen (for everyone)

Catan - hex grid; resources produced the same for everyone (depending on your assets); trade

While I agree you can only handle so many games, I will definitely prioritize those with unique mechanics. And not everything has been invented.
My complaint may be less about this exact graph, as used in the article I linked, but more about the fact that I've seen this same graph in a bunch of places, and I've never really seen it mentioned what exactly the graph shows.

Personally I find it sort of suspect to compare "productivity", which is the average economic output per unit of time worked for all workers, then compares it to the average wage for the subset of workers. Particularly since productivity is usually presented in the layman's understanding of the word, which would imply that individual people are more productive, but are not being paid any more, but that is not what this graph is showing.

I feel like a better label for this chart is "economic growth is disproportionally going to the managerial/capital class", which is a thing that can be said without invoking productivity.
Yes. For example our project needs about 15-20 mins for a full compile on the most expensive 15" tMBP. (It's about 10 minutes on a desktop machine due to excessive thermal throttling on the laptop but Apple kinda doesn't support those anymore).

For an Android build that project needs to build at least two architectures (x86 / armv7) to even function on emulator and target device.

CCache, ninja and all other stuff really helps, but we're still talking about minutes of compilation for a C++14 project.
Unfortunately, despite years of bug reports, neither NPM nor the new kid on the block are deterministic when invoked on multiple builds on the same machine simultaneously. It's almost like their developers never use continuous integration environments. Ironically, if they used an actual lockfile in the traditional sense of the word and did that properly...
Turtles, all the way down.

----

Or to be less glib, that's a great question, and like many, not simple to answer well.

Mostly, it seems like a lack of positive reinforcement and role models (leading to self selection out at early ages), mixed with sexism in a a variety of forms (leading to lack of opportunities, or hostile environment and self selection out at later ages).

But that's an oversimplification.
My uncle is crazy, but not stupid (he has a PHD in physics) so, who knows :) Chuckle.
A few minutes earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14482406
Are you the maintainer? Thanks for keeping it running all these years, if so.

I don't go there often, but it's nice to know there's a way to get a vague understanding of relative performance for languages for those occasions when one needs to know "is it fast enough?"
Good luck on seeing D on that site. There seems to be a active war between the sites maintainer and D. There used to be D benchmarks on the old site and people tries to release new code to the site, but for some reason the current maintainer has a issue with D.

And he thinks its no unfair that D is not resented when a lot of people look at his site and think: "If your not here as a language, then the language must be bad".

Good luck on changing his mindset because i have seen topics going back years regarding D not being there.

If you want a more impartial benchmark set:

https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

And where is D on those tests ;)
Essays for people who still like them
> and the geometric kernel has a ton of little issues that you have to work around

Under the hood, OpenCASCADE is an eyesore. Here are my notes from a deep dive where I was attempting a sane reimplementation: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade/
>Worms are made up of neurons but they perform a different function from what the neocortex does so studying them is not like studying a simpler problem, it's studying an entirely different one.

Huh? Take your pick of creatures that display highly intelligent behaviour and have less complex nervous systems than humans. Insect navigation would be a good example. If we can't figure out the biological basis of that -- when in many cases we already have a good idea of what calculations are being performed -- then our chance of "solving human level intelligence" is zero.
>>>implying that only people who grew up as muslim can become terrorists.

>>OP here. I did not say that.

>OK. So what "subset of people" then?

Two corrections:

You talk like I mean general terrorists.

I'm talking only about the types of attacks we are talking about in this thread (attacks primarily target against civilians by attackers that do not expect or even attempt to get away alive).

It is written above: "everyone of these criminals belong to a very specific subset of people." (emphasis added).

>So what "subset of people" then?

Only the subset that are or are about to become muslims.

Again, until someone enlightens me I have yet to be aware of any of this kind of attacks by neither Christians nor Atheists.
More than a few of my AirBnB hosts didn't really seem like they needed the money, but they really enjoyed meeting new people and being in the company of their guests.
Experimentation is really the heart of scientific progress. Yes, experiments will yield results that do not confirm the hypothesis, that will happen very frequently, and that is good because we can chuck unnecessary results away, focusing on what fits the picture accurately, what doesn't, and what pictures we can make. I don't think it's really possible to have failure though, since you would just end up with inconclusive results and do more science.
Geniuses are often people who work at something for a long time until they slowly accumulate the knowledge and experimental results to make such a leap. After all, Lazy Geniuses don't achieve much, even if they have the potential to.
>The IRA were not on the scale of Islamic terrorism...

Seriously? When I was a child the Northern Ireland troubles were in the news every single day! At times it was a constant stream of bombings and executions. There were roadblocks in the street run by paramilitaries. Whole communities were controlled by these organisations and their fundraisers. The scope may have been restricted to England and the island of Ireland, but in these areas it was all out. The scale of Islamic terrorism in the UK does not even come close
It wasn't off at all. It was spot on. He estimated BLAST power, not total yield. Half of energy was released in form of prompt radiation, flash, and fallout.
I did not state that what the car companies are doing is offering the loan as a loss leader; I am saying it is a related concept. I was offering it to help in understanding that companies make tradeoff decisions of this kind. Please don't take my comment as making a direct equivalence between the two.
TFA starts by mentioning VW's origins in Hitler's creation of a group to create a "people's car", and cites a significant part of that as being an organization created and sheltered from outside influence, which apparently set up the conditions for a very autocratic CEO to create the internal culture that led to the cheating/fraud several decades later. It's a really weird, weak connection.
It may be easier to set up meteorite protection than to terraform. NASA's already on the job http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/13/world/nasa-planetary-defen...
Keynote – What's Different in Dotty by Martin Odersky
One point not mentioned by others here:

In the case where recovery entails a required password change and the site imposes some password history--the common case, though I don't know if this is true of Fastmail--the real account holder is guaranteed to notice if a recovery event happens, whereas ordinary password+SMS-interception may not be noticed.

So, yes, for the most part this is as weak as SMS second-factor--but it's less likely to go undiscovered by the real user.
Pretty much everything ever written by William Gibson should do.
Is it the same group? How can you tell?
First, that's a typo. Should have been 10s not 100s. I'll correct it in the original comment.

But the result was achieved mainly by lots of compacting source code into smaller TUs, mainly, e.g. by #include-ing dozens or hundreds of .cpp files into the one that was actually sent to the compiler, and other tricks to make the number of the things the compiler had to do much smaller than a naive ("compile everything as seen in the source tree") approach would require. The original build system was not optimized in that way and took much, much longer (well over an hour, as I heard it, but that was before my time). They implemented parallel and distributed builds after I left, and as I understand it that took the whole process down to "a few minutes."

Now, it's certainly debatable whether that level of effort should be required of a build system (I lean towards "no").
A "failed" experiment does not "disprove" a hypothesis, it only provides evidence which is not consistent with the hypothesis.
Any comments that "startup time is a concern with the JVM" always make me look for evidence that the person has made some attempt to investigate startup time for the specific circumstances they discuss.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/sometimes-people-jus...
Perhaps this is merely a reflection of the difficulty of finding where to download the measurement scripts? I found them (here: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html ) but, it took some clicking. Maybe a github link on the front page, or similar, would alleviate some of the frustration the previous poster had about it.

I assumed the sources were available, somewhere, but until I went looking for it, I wouldn't have been able to say so with confidence. That's not an obligation, of course...volunteers should feel free to do whatever they want with their projects. But, if you wanted to keep the community involvement the game had historically, linking source in the lingua franca of the day (github or gitlab, or whatever, seems pretty standard today) would go a long way.
I'm just a beginner since I've been meditating for only 8 years but from my experience, most video games involve at least one of the following:

- ego

- loosing track of time

- loosing track of physical reality, such as bodily sensations

- reacting

- desiring an outcome

- judging

Not all of them, and not for all video games. But any of those characteristic seems to be something quite antagonist with mindfulness.

Now somebody that is very focused, very selfless and equanimous in a competitive game will have something close to meditation. But first they are rare, and secondly the very existence of the game, being virtual and... a game, seems to be orthogonal the mindful state state.

I'm not a competitive player though, and:

- when I play dota I react A LOT.

- when I'm coding or watching a movie, I completely forget reality.

It contrast a lot with my meditation practice. Maybe some people are better at dealing with screens that I am.
> Its a chicken-egg problem. We can not start with expansive infrastructure.

That's true, but I had always figured that the infrastructure construction would need to be an actual profitable business outside of a planned colonization of Mars. Perhaps it would make sense to build or assemble satellites, or mine asteroids for rare earth metals or something like that.
Well, I did take a step back from the instruction pipeline analogy, but it's still covered by operations research and mathematical optimization.

The cost of waking a sleeping CPU core is perhaps comparable to the cost of building a factory in-game. Whereas, building a ton of factories that can't be saturated by the incoming cash money is comparable to building a superscalar processor architecture that can't be saturated by the cache memory.
1 40" 4k. I have the option of using my laptop screen and/or another 1440p alongside it. I tried both and find the extra screens a distraction.
My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my father — at the time married with four children. They were married in September 1969, a month before my brother was born.

I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the same thing
>In the debate regarding Islamic terrorism, in the West liberals tend to ascribe it to

Well I am a Western liberal and I believe much more often we have blamed it on foreign policy, amongst other things. You go on to make offensive gross simplifications/generalisations i simply don't recognise in liberals I know.

>Thank-you Merkel.

If you don't know why Merkel is liberal when it comes to immigration then i don't think Hacker news is the place for you
Nintendo Switch: New information about subscribing to online services
This discussion sets up my problem with the article. Of the two, the 'optimists' in e article have the darker world view.

I've had a lot of discussions and arguments with the 'pragmatists' you call feature fairies over the years, and the impression I get is that their world view is skewed to protect their own egos. They don't create bugs, some of them will tell you. It's supposed to work that way. They assume ther is a magic later when they will get to fix all the problems they created (but some will complain about "nothing to do" when there's a gap in the schedule). They plan and write features as if their luck will hold.

The optimists in the article on the other hand tend to be closer to realists. They don't traffic in luck. They know that people make mistakes. They see all the time frittered away on tech debt (we call it tech debt because it is accidental complexity that slows us down) and they know if you don't chip away at it constantly you'll drown. Fight the chaos or lose your way.
>> Thanks for keeping it running all these years <<

Thanks to all those who contribute their expertise and their programs.
For those confused, the linked patch page[1] has says that the patch got integrated into Debian (and Ubuntu) from 4.0.3-10, which means it would have been available since Lenny (2009).

[1]: http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/
Cobol's legacy lives as PL/SQL, ABAP, and other enterprise data handling languages. While everybody is quick to point that this is not "real programming", they required astonishing amounts of engineering efforts to make things work.

I would love to see a decent, modernized COBOL -- the same way they have modernized Fortran, so it is now a pretty decent numerical computing language. It would be a great hit.
Capitalism Is in Trouble. Socialist Principles Can Save It
> 3. Arcane write-only syntax which becomes context sensitive with Domain-Specific Languages which Lisp programs devolve to, creating unreadable and overly condensed spaghetti code(especially macros), making existing code inaccessible for developers.

Do you have any evidence that this happens? I always see this as an argument against macros, but I don't actually see this problem manifesting in practice.

In fact, macros are much less scary than monkey patching like in Ruby or Javascript, because a macro can only affect the code within the particular invocation, and it must be imported to be used.

Also, the success of Rails seems to suggest that creating specialized DSLs can be a big benefit.
BRL-CAD has been used seriously for many decades, but is more of a geometry modeling program.
A fourth million dollar computer tells you you're chasing an earthquake but you don't believe it and you come up with this on your own?
Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.
Senic Launches Smart Home Hub
It's such a short term, zero-sum view. Higher salaries increase the velocity of money in the system (each iteration of which is an opportunity for you to do some cream-skimming, Goldman Sachs) and improving the total operational efficiency of the system is what yields profit, so providing workers with better benefits does, in aggregate, improve output. All of which analysts would know if the industry tried to hire analysts with operational experience!