skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LaTeX generates DVI files, which need an extra conversion step to be generally useful. PDFTeX generates PDFs directly, and is generally preferable (unless you need legacy Postscript stuff).

XeTeX and LuaTeX deal with Unicode properly and can use normal fonts. Both of these output PDF files directly, like PDFTeX, but have the above advantages over it (+more). LuaTeX, as the name suggests, embeds a Lua interpreter which enables far more sophisticated and performant programmatical things (at the cost of compatibility). XeTeX can cope with legacy Postscript things like PSTricks (ick!) by generating the Postscript and automatically converting it, but that's a slow process, and I often rewrite PSTricks pictures in TikZ or Asymptote when I have to deal with them.

I generally use XeTeX, or LuaTeX when I'm okay with sacrificing compatibility for programmability.
I, for one, have always preferred all of my `figs` at the end of the document anyway. ;)
I guess, but I think you're forgetting just how bad the trust situation is with some groups. I mean, just 43% of people surveyed worldwide trust it:

https://www.ft.com/content/fa332f58-d9bf-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6a...

With the figures getting as bad as 24% trust in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/16/britons-tru...

And it apparently goes as low as 5% among Republicans:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-trust_us_58...

Does that mean the average person has good critical thinking skills? No, not really. A lot of people's distrust comes as much down to feeling like their views/tribe are under personal attack rather than an actual analysis of how the media covers them.

But if they distrust mainstream media sources about stuff like Trump and his policies, then the likelyhood they'll trust them about how others in their own situation are 'crazy' could be even lower.

I mean, they're already used to seeing themselves painted as 'deplorables' here.

It's also likely people outside the larger outlets will write and heavily promote articles that counter any 'narrative' they detect in more mainstream sources.
What does “oui.sncf” mean
I am very very interested in this myself. I proposed something similar to my current company but got refused.

I experimented with different hours off on certain days and found that the thing that would turn me into a productivity monster would be a 4-5h work day with remote option. But now try to find something like this (especially in Asia). Despite loving my current job, I think if I would get a counter offer from a company with these benefits, I would probably quit right away.

I am personally not a office bee and dislike leaving when it's dark. I'm drained of all my motivation and the darkness makes me just want to go home, watch a YouTube video and sleep, just to repeat the same cycle again. I managed to counter this fairly successfully by working outside of cafes that have terraces and picking a new location every day. My motivation and productivity level stays up longer and the drain is reduced, but now if I just had more time...
No Turks in the region at that point in history. Turks are related to Mongols.
Social media and young people’s mental health and wellbeing
What do unsigned ints bring to the table? I'd use them in C to avoid undefined behaviour, but that's not a problem on the JVM. Value types sure, I guess, but they don't seem super important.

Can't we just make DOM bindings for the JVM and reuse the huge existing library base?
Hey, congrats on putting this out, one small thing: Homebrew is showing v0.8.3 as the latest version however v0.8.4 has been released (probably an easy fix), also I was wondering if there were plans to make this a native / non-javascript app?
I will definitely share more in a future blog post (subscribe at http://thibautbarrere.com). Emailing you to make sure you have the information.
> Purity is tricky to define.

I think it's pretty easy.

Purely functional (it's important to retain the word "function") means that we have a language in which the value of a function application "f x" depends only on the body expression of "f" and the function argument "x". That's why we say "purely" functional, because it's just functions of this flavor.

In types, f : X -> Y means that for all terms in X, f x maps to a unique term in Y. In Haskell's, Elm's and PureScript's case, it's weakly normalizing (meaning it might get in an infinite loop). In Agda's case, it's strongly normalizing (modulo implementation bugs).

> if you can measure how much time a computation takes, then Haskell is impure, because a lazy value takes longer to compute the first time than the second

Time is an operational concern. "Purely functional" is concerned with what things mean, what do syntactic expressions in the language denote? If 1+1 launches missiles every time it's evaluated, or causes the machine to get hotter by 1°C, that's an implementation detail that is not observable in the language. 1+1 normalizes to 2. You can do all your regular equational reasoning and follow the substitution model. You might chide the writer of the interpreter or compiler, though.

For example, here is a substitution stepper for a dialect of Haskell http://chrisdone.com/toys/duet-gamma/, and each line in the bottom left is equivalent to the line after it. You can pick any of those lines as your starting point.

> And that raises another problem, where printing to standard output becomes "pure" if the standard output can't be observed by pure code (which is true in Haskell).

It doesn't "become" pure. You're making a category error by calling an implementation detail by names that we reserve for expressions in a language. We should use "observe" in a precise way: to observe means to write a case analysis on something.

> You could try to patch it up by saying the impurity must be observable via pure code, but that makes the definition circular.

Where exactly is the circular part?
It's best to have couple of working/competing implementations first before defining a standard.
> instead of one Chrome instance, I'm now running five which use more than one GB of RAM each

Is that true? Executables and shared object files are supposed to share (code) memory.

So what big data structures does Chrome use that it can share between tabs (which are processes) and that it can't share between different instances of Chrome?
Official WhatsApp Desktop Clients
True, but among software devs it's proably a lot more common than in the rest of the population

Even among that small subset of the population I doubt it's common. Your lifestyle expands to fit your income. That makes it increasing difficult to accept a lower wage. Further to that, it'll become even less common as developers get older and more commonly have mortgages and families.
But they are for the "Linux Desktop", hence the joke.
Maybe Cretan/Hittite could be, but Greek/Turkish, I doubt.
The great thing about having Tuesdays off in NZ is that stat days are usually Mondays - you catch nearly all the stats as paid days and get an extra long weekend.
Which gets you into that boring part of actuary calculations. In seismically inactive parts, "bye-bye and rebuild (while the cluster is running from a geographically remote datacenter, and only a slight increase in latency indicates this)" could be an order of magnitude cheaper, and thus preferable. In other words, downtime is not replaceable, hardware is.
Good summary, thanks for the tldr;

+1 for the comment about Electronic/Javascript, also don't want to start a flame war heh.

exploratory.io looks really neat, it's a shame about the pricing and I'm not quite sure if it's a native app once you purchase or if it's an in-browser online-only app, because if it's online only 1) I'd be worried about uploading data to a 3rd party and 2) The internet in Australia is _terrible_ so uploading / downloading larger data sets might be painful.
How is this different than CryptDB?

https://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/
Traversing Trials
Web developers, bless their hearts, feel uncomfortable with the word "emulate", so they use "polyfill", or sometimes the more general "shim". To some degree, "polyfill" implies that the functionality being emulated/shimmed is functionality that is under some other circumstances is expected to be provided by the browser itself.
Clojure Data Validation with Data
Microservice communication methods
Try benchmarking OS read() calls vs. either sequential or random reads using memory mapping, whenever I do this OS read() calls end up being quite a bit faster.
That's Haskell I can understand.
I admit I am one of those conference speakers that doesn't prepare a lot. I tend to discuss the topic beforehand with the organisers, go inside the venue to get a feel for the audience, go on stage and just deliver. IMHO it is all about creating a bond with your audience and interact with them as spontaneous as possible. Works for me, but I know it's not for everyone.

I also rarely use slides nowadays. That helps a lot. Sometimes I use a whiteboard. The way I deliver keynotes and presentations is maybe best summed up (and definitely inspired by) this article from the late Pieter Hintjens:

http://hintjens.com/blog:107 Ten Steps to Better Public Speaking
The article references the Henderson Escher example, which is nicely surmised in a SICP lecture from '86: SICP-3A video https://youtu.be/2QgZVYI3tDs?list=PL8FE88AA54363BC46&t=3678

I was instantly thrown back to my time watching this series and doing the exercises, which I highly recommend to anyone.
> Also only very few people watch conference videos.

This is quite often true, but it hugely depends on the conference in question. The annual Chaos Communication Congress for example (well-known international IT security conference in Germany) records all of the talks, which usually have between 500-3k viewers at the venue, and the better ones usually get >10k views, with some top talks even topping 30k-50k over time, on the official recording page of the conference alone (there are quite often copies uploaded to YouTube and other outlets, and those amass similar numbers of views in addition). In addition there is usually a number of streaming viewers who watch the talks as they happen, in the figure of 500-3k.

In this case however the recording quality is generally very good, so that might also explain why other conferences with only mediocre recordings don't reach similar numbers of viewers. And the videos are released under a CC license, so sharing/reuploading/using them in education or similar stuff is all legal.

The WWDC talks most likely also reach high view counts, since many people would like to go to the conference but can't and the talks themselves as well as the recordings are usually of good quality.
SQL Server Parameter Sniffing in Depth
I don't know. If the court thinks there was a deal between Uber and Levandowski where they "fired" him for the duration of the trial, only to hire him back as soon as possible, that could lead to contempt of court charges, I feel. But IANAL either.
I would be really interested in a German version of this.

I wanted to do more a less the same: a "translator" that translates a German text content into a german text but by replacing words you don't know (e.g. extracted from memrise) into words you know. That way you can start reading texts of your foreign language without looking at your dictionary every sentence.
Google Just Killed What Might Be the Biggest Android Ad Fraud Ever
Damn, took me too long to type ;-)

But it's funny that you thought of the exact same conferences when it comes to good recordings with large viewer counts.
"people who haven't gotten the message"

You cannot add emoji reaction from mobile version of Github website.
> Is that true? Executables and shared object files are supposed to share (code) memory.

Different version - different DLLs
[author of linked article here]

Depends!

At PyCon US/EuroPython everybody pays by default and the money goes towards financial aid so as many people as possible can attend. As a speaker, you can also apply for finaid of course.

The bet is basically that people that are able to attend today are the speakers of tomorrow. And anecdotally, it’s working out quite fine!

I let my employer pay my way to PyCon US and EuroPython because I’d attend anyway. PyCon ZA is special, because it’s in Cape Town and I like to surf so I pay myself. :)

Other than that, if a conference wants me as a speaker, they have to pay for my travels and accommodation. I’m also a diva and ask for SkyTeam flights which at least gives me indirect benefits (status miles + segments towards my status).

I don’t have to take personal holidays because I work at a small company and being able to exchange myself professionally with other peers is critical to my growth as an employee.

All that said, you speak because you enjoy the experience. I also got to see Japan, Russia, Ukraine, … all places I wouldn’t have gotten to see! To make a living with it you’ve got to be famous/influential already.
The goal (afaict) is not precisely conversational fluency, but rather an ability to pass the exams such as GRE and GMAT - inferred from the fact that the lists are mostly from "Barron's" guides for those exams.
This line of reasoning supports the original comment they reply to that you can't count on battery prices to drop. Even if costs aren't substantial enough to affect EV sales, eventually batteries will need replaced.

I like the concept of EVs, but there are still 2 problems I can't get over. The first is that the environmental impact of building the car doesn't get much coverage and focus is on the impact of running the car. Are they really good for the environment? Who knows. The second is that recharging still takes too long and so I would want some type of range extender which bring oil back into the picture.
I think 60% is high...
I'm not sure how you can equate a corrupt money stealing government with a genocidal regime in which tens of millions of people were killed, imprisoned, and made refugees; while also drawing all the super powers into a protracted and bloody war, arguably we are still feeling the effects of today.
> Are conference speakers paid ?

They may be sponsored (by the conf, the employer or a conf sponsor) e.g. have their transportation and lodgings paid or reimbursed, but AFAIK mostly not, at least for "community" conferences.

In fact specifically for the first conference TFA talks about (PyCon US) everybody pays up to and including the conference chair: https://us.pycon.org/2017/registration/ but attendees (especially but not solely speakers and tutorial presenters) can apply for financial aid, financed by both sponsors and entry tickets: https://us.pycon.org/2017/financial-assistance/
Plus the DC itself might be running, but now you could be running it on a generator (no outside power); better hope you can get a fuel truck to it before the 1-week tank runs out (are there truckable roads outside now?). And connectivity - you might have line slack inside your building, but the fiber cables might be broken in several locations before they even get to next active element (which is also earthquake-proofed? And powered? For how long?); so perhaps you're down to the radio fallback (hope the antennas aren't misaligned too much, let alone that their masts are still upright); again, assuming that the other end of the link is operable.

In other words, preparing for vis major is far harder than it looks. Doable? Yes, if you're willing to go all the way to military-grade resilient comms...for a military-grade budget. Far easier to failover to a DC in a different zone.
I don't think most languages in widespread use have lexers that are regular. Here the same author gives the example of Python's indentation requiring a stack: http://trevorjim.com/python-is-not-context-free/

Also Haskell: http://trevorjim.com/haskell-is-not-context-free/

I'm pretty sure in JavaScript that the /s+/ regex syntax can't be recognized with a regular language. Perl is of course insane -- it's not even statically parseable [1]. Shell isn't context-free.

The theme of this set of posts is that most languages used in practice aren't expressible with CFGs, and I agree. I didn't prove it but he shows how you would prove it.

[1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/20.html (see the end of this post for links about C++, Perl, Make)
Some Afrocentrist professors are gonna be passed.
If a speaker should specifically train him/herself for a talk, the talk is not worth listening.
Just “Git” it
> I am saddened by this.

> House fires were doing a great job of partitioning houses from people that should never have been owning them in the first place. I was really hoping that a significant portion of my house had been burnt to the ground.

WannaCry damaged heathcare systems and caused real suffering for many people. This is way beyond people deserving a nuisance for being incompetent. Creating it was a dangerous and criminal act that should be seen on par with physical sabotage of important systems. Should derailing a train be ok because the tracks are "just lying there in the open"?
please conferences, record your talks. We, online talk watchers do exist. Besides, it's also good marketing material for you for next year, and for your speaker. Thank you
Looks good!

Noticed a few weird things though:

- `overflow: hidden` on body makes the page content jump as the scrollbar (dis)appears. There's an issue for that [0]

- `sweet-overlay` div has a different opacity on each open for some reason? I've seen 1.01 through 1.05, so they are all effectively 1, but it just seems weird to me… It probably has something to do with the `fadeIn` function [1]. Was there any reason not to use CSS transitions for fading?

There's a fork called sweetalert2 [2] with more active development [3]. It has these two things (and probably many others) fixed.

--

[0] https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/issues/590

[1] https://github.com/t4t5/sweetalert/blob/master/dev/modules/h...

[2] https://limonte.github.io/sweetalert2/

[3] https://github.com/limonte/sweetalert2/graphs/contributors
https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ declares in the section “About the name” that this is entirely deliberate. I like the rationale and agree with it too:

> The name of the project is “Tectonic,” spelled and pronounced like a regular word because it is one. Enough with the cutesy obscurantism. In cases where the name might lead to ambiguities, it should be expanded to “Tectonic typesetting.”

> If you’re feeling expansive, you can interpret the name as suggesting a large change in the TeX world. Or you can think of it as suggesting a salubrious offering for weary TeX users. Either way, the root of the word does go back to the ancient Greek τέκτων, ”carpenter,” which Donald Knuth — the creator of TeX and a devout Christian — might appreciate.
A Nightmare in Paradise: An Introduction to Counter-Infringing Personal Privacy
Am I in the minority that I think it is a positive development, when Google is discarding proprietary ideas in favour of open developments?

Not perfect but the direction looks good so far.
From their FAQ (https://exploratory.io/faq)

- I have very sensitive data. Is my data safe?

Any data you import into Exploratory Desktop always stays on your PC and never leave your PC unless you explicitly publish (share) it to Exploratory Cloud (exploratory.io). If you decided to publish the data to Exploratory Cloud for sharing or scheduling, you can share it in a private way so that so that only you and others you have invited can view it. The data is also stored in encrypted. Please take a look at our Privacy Policy for more details.

- Where exactly my data is stored after importing?

All the data you import into Exploratory Desktop is saved as a binary form (R's Rdata format) inside your repository, which is located under '/.exploratory' on your PC.
You could always start with poster sessions or tutorials if a conference you like/are interested in has that.
It depends on cars, and on quality of oil and on driving style/habits, I had a (German BTW) turbodiesel car where the on-board computer would tell me when the oil change was necessary, and it averaged every 30,000 to 33,000 km (which happened after a little more than one year). I changed car only when (12 years old) it was around 340,000 km without having ever had any engine related issue (and it was still running fine, I changed it only because a relative's car with only 80,000 Km became available).
It’s already not a thin wrapper around a C library; it has ~7,000 of functionality-adding Rust code, and is planning to steadily move things to Rust.
Its the ambiguity for new programmers. With something like awaitAll new programmers wouldn't need to learn about Promises at all.

You have a point with concurrency, but handling concurrency is an another beast altogether.
Of course, which is why I've never given a conference talk. I haven't got anything I feel like I should share.

The desire to give a talk is because public speaking is something I want to be better at, because sometimes I've had opportunities where I could have talked about something but didn't feel confident enough due to lack of experience. Also, my employer would like me to give talks, but again, I don't feel confident enough to do so. At some point you just have to take the plunge and I'd rather do it at a generally friendly tech conference talking about something I'm interested in, before I do this in a more hostile environment. Maybe that's too selfish a way to look at conference talks...
Viewing it as a game, I'm absolutely amazed (I'm a sucker for kinetic game ideas and this got me in instant Shut Up And Take My Money! mood - yes, I'm an adult, don't judge me :P)

However I don't see this game to be very successful in making someone curious about programming. It's based on the concept of using a computer as a mechanical calculator and, while this is the formal underpinning of all programming, it's not avery spectacular application.

I think the thing that is most mind-blowing from a user perspective is how to get a computer to perform all kinds of tasks that don't seem to have to do anything to do with computations: Creating images and animations, driving complex machinery, communicating, etc. The gap from theory to application isn't that interesting from a theoretical CS point of view but I think it's more important for teaching programming.
Yes, of course. I seem to remember that their data is still in their own datacenter though, so they might not be comfortable with using Amazon for this.
The permission to do so?

You need to get out of that incredibly toxic environment.
I think this is a good take. Is there a natural definition of equivalence that includes standard output effects but excludes time and space effects, short of enumerating all effects and saying which ones are ok?
That makes sense. Could you share with how exactly did you make the money - what were you offering before?
Websocket NGINX Proxy Redirect to Same Back End
If you invest in / buy a company for its IP then you normally - especially when the field is 'hot' and the IP is voluminous and created in record time - do some research to verify the origin of the IP is in fact what the company says it is. If you forgo such a check then you open yourself up to two potential problems:

- if the IP ends up being stolen then you may not have recourse against the person that sold it to you

- if the IP ends up being stolen you might end up being liable yourself because you did not do the minimum verification required to ascertain that the seller indeed had the rights to sell

That changes the game from 'we've been had' to 'we were willing participants' and that's a very dumb position to be in.
AI's are already underwriting insurance. It will have the the most immediate impact on the fields of Finance, insurance, and medical diagnostics.