skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Russia has shown they have tendencies towards nationalism and imperialism

"That's actually not true"

> Russia on the other hand would take Scandanavia in an instance if it had the capability.

No, not any person in Russia has thoughts like this. That's not even a topic for a discussion because nobody can think of such a thing.

> Why would the US invade such an obedient country? It's actually incredibly unlikely.
Incredibly unlikely scenario: Assange returns to Sweden and start publishing materials about trump through Wikileaks. Sweden doesn't give him out. Trump orders marines to take him out by force. Yeah, I know it's pretty crazy unlikely, that's the point :)

> The biggest hope Russia has now is global warming. It appears to disrupt most of the world negatively while increasing water passages and even likely arable land in Russia.

Russia can't even use current water passages capabilities.
Well for one thing, as best we understand there _are_ no other animals on Mars. If we operated with business-as-usual human obliviousness there we'd be doing a lot less harm to other species.
If you saddle people with debt that can't be discharged, they're less able to take risks that may end up producing major benefits for society. Instead, they're driven to compete for safe positions that have a smaller potential upside. This results in less innovation, and it also depresses wages for people in the safe positions. Besides making the lives of people who are already low on the totem pole worse, this depression of wages for safe jobs can ultimately lead to a greater reliance on government assistance. The only winner is large established corporations who profit from cheap labor and fear disruptive innovation.
Actually it's behaviour seemed to be geared more towards debugging than actual string formatting. The expected behaviour should be either a compile error, or the value when it's set and nothing, nil or None if it would be allowed to compile.
Yes, cryptocurrencies and tokens have a lot of speculation from a dollar price perspective, and there are still non-believers and manipulators, but the blockchain and smart contracts technology is brilliant and the idea is already on people's mind, and it will only become stronger, despite of the price.

Social Network: For years I've seen people complaining about Facebook, others building alternatives. If there is one way that Facebook could be defeated and decentralized is by using a P2P blockchain social network. Take for example Steem, not perfect but proof of concept works.

Advertisement: another example is BAT (by the JS inventor), funded in 30 seconds, it could be a real threat to Google. Just pair it with Mist browser and ENS, and you can see the potential.

...

I think it's no longer about Bitcoin, it's about a profound decentralization of the Internet. Some call it the Web 3.0.
If you have dreams to travel, just do it. Spend a year backpacking and you will not regret it. Try and stay in an area for a month or longer. The experience will change you in positive ways and leave you will very memorable experiences you'll often think back on.

It's simply harder to travel when you're older, and you'll have many more obstacles to long trips.

If I may, I also really hope you make the trip without internet access.
Except that college is more about becoming an adult, making friends, some partying, meeting co-eds, and learning how to learn. The social benefits should not be downplayed.
I think it hugely depends on what your WHERE clause is.
> It started with cave paintings and evolved to what it is now.

Actually, our writing system evolved from accounting tokens. Eventually we learned we could save on little figurines by pressing the one into clay a bunch. And at any rate, writing encodes speech and is severely limited to the limitations spoken speech has. Rather than be well-optimized, writing is severely limited by tradition, by the physical limitation of auditory communication, and by the physical limitations of encoding it into paper.
SE Asia? Come to Philippines, there are a lot of startups here and so much to solve out here.
This is actual disinformation?

Russia has a modern history of invading European countries and is illegally possessing the invaded region of Crimea and astro-turfing a 'civil war' in Eastern Ukraine.

They recently threatened NATO out-right over the acceptance of a new member.

But, in light of this, you think it's more likely that their strong ally for many decades, US or UK, would be more likely to attack them than the proven-aggressive adversary which self-titles itself enemy of NATO?

This has got to be actual disinformation.
That's some kind of ideology. The term modern is recognized as something positive, and then beeing used as an argument. I would argue developed countries are also modern.
Sweden is on Russia's border in the same way the US is. Aka it's a direct hop over an inland sea.
It used to use GPUs for training because I don't think the first gen TPUs could do training.
What. Stupid people outbreeding smart ones. That's where.
A bit off topic on my side here but, I've been a aware of both OpenCL and FPGAs for quite a while but never thought of these being combined in any way.

Would anyone care to comment on their experience with regards to the following questions I have about this?

1. Are you using an FPGA implementation of OpenCL, or are you synthesizing a specific piece of OpenCL code into the FPGA?

2. How does performance compare between OpenCL running on a high-end GPU and a high-end FPGA?

3. How does performance compare between implementing someting in FPGA directly and implementing it in OpenCL and running that on an FPGA?

4. How does working with OpenCL for FPGA compare to working with the FPGA directly? Iow, what are the advantages and disadvantages you find of OpenCL as opposed to Verilog or VHDL (or other ways you program an FPGA)?

5. Based on the above, if you had X amount of dollars that could buy you either a number of GPUs or a (probably different) number of FPGAs, which would you choose? Consider also the electricity cost of running these as I've heard that FPGAs generally waste less electricity because they produce less heat.
In all fairness, that was before the advent of modern weaponry, including precision guided munitions, cruise missiles etc. I highly doubt, for instance, Finnish supply chains would survive a sustained attack by Russia today.
Happy to see people trying to solve this problem. Can you talk about how this compares to redux-saga?
Introducing DecStack: A Virtual Co-Working Spot for Crypto and Decentralized Apps
Moving on from Fire Phone Turmoil, Amazon Plans Ice Smartphones
Visual programming does not have to mean 100% not text.

https://joshondesign.com/2014/08/22/typopl
I've written lots of servers in C and found this article quite interesting.

The techniques that the author presents are new to me and I know that I will take them into consideration when I write a server in C the next time.

More importantly, they are techniques that I think library writers should use. My uneducated guess is that the underlying implementations of servers in Node.js and Iron, etc, could be improved with these ideas, even though they might not be directly applicable since those servers are written in different languages.

I can't vouch for the results, but the author's experiments seem conclusive.
The title invoked in me a state of mystery, which is perhaps exactly the right way to approach this subject.
I suspect it has to do entirely with affordances.

Programming in text, you have to learn, in advance, what the commands are that you're allowed to type, and remember them. That's a heavy up-front investment.

Visual programming generally makes it much clearer exactly what your range of options are -- the goal is for the learning curve to be far easier.
Minus the ones which went to US and other countries with lower taxes.
There is an absolutely beautiful introduction to microprogramming, by Mark Smotherman:

https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/uprog.html
It could be also a candid moment to peak into the mind (and belief system) of person living inside Russian cultural space (i.e. is influenced by Russian media, social networks and education system).
That was why I clicked through also--I was expecting some sort of historical oddity!
Yarn has a "--mutex" option for exactly this purpose.
> a professor arranged my first professional job

Not typical.
The point of subsidizing college is to give the person who might otherwise become a roofer the option of a more pleasant, lucrative career.

Scientific and technical knowledge drives innovation. Economic growth on a per-capita basis is entirely driven by innovation. Thus scientific and technical education directly impacts your quality of life.

With regards to liberal arts education, I'm inclined to agree that government subsidies may not be the best use of tax money.
>As a culture, we really need to stop telling 17 year olds to not worry about money, go to college, and figure something out. There is always someone ready with a romantic appeal to a classical education, and it is so frustrating for me.

How about as a society we need to lower college tuition?
Haven't read this specifically, but agree with the concept. Also recommend The Psychopath Code by Pieter Hintjens (the ZMQ guy). Most books are ultimately quite abstract. A few are useful when the shit really hits the fan.
>that suggests that all current implementations are crap

Except the one time I've seen it in the wild, the implementation/UX was surprisingly good. Turns out Firefox can generate a cert entirely client-side and install it via Javascript. Chrome draws from whatever cert storage the underlying OS offers, so it should be as simple as saving the cert file to disk and opening it.

Mobile might pose a problem. Would have to try it out.
We call visual programming that doesn't suck a 'graphical user interface'.

Look at a daw like Logic or Ableton for example -- it's essentially visual programming.
I wouldn't recommend it after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11690774
Sport?
My horse carriage is very useful. The horse just feeds itself, if you leave him in a grass field. It rarely gets sick and last many years. The wheels are easily replaced from the store.

The other day I saw a crazy guy with a mechanical contraption that, according to the guy, moved by burning wood! The guy was demoing it at the town. He filled it with wood, and then had to start the fire. The crazy machine got so hot that nobody could get near it. The thing barely moved a few meters and then Kabooooom!! it exploded in a black cloud. What sane person may ever believe that one of these contraptions could be useful?

Am I right? Are you right? we don't know. Research is the only way to know.
Some good points. But I think your view has become too negative, perhaps due to your experiences. Or at least I see more hope for visual programming. :)

> I think visual programming is one of those ideas that intuitively seems like a good idea but never is. Thus, it never really dies, it just gets picked up as a kind of rite-of-passage by new generations of developers.

Perhaps the intutition is right, but the problem is too general and thus very hard to solve. And I think that, looking at the general trend, it does seem to evolve towards something better with every new generation.

Not the first and not the last idea like that.

We're just not there yet.

> For my master's thesis, some 15 years ago, I programmed a system for visually composing and executing Java programs.

Similar experience here [0]. :) But for me it was a year ago, so I guess I represent a newer generation.

> Since then I've twice found myself on projects where we had to work with visual programming tools

I worked with some too, mostly Unreal Engine 4. Fortunately all for education, not for work. ;)

And your experience is probably a good picture of the state of the art in this area, if it comes to complex and more general-purpose application development.

> The main reason that it will never catch on, IMHO

I'm still a believer. But probably not in my generation either. ;)

> the text editor is far better for managing complexity. It's easy to search for stuff, and it's easy to move or copy it.

True. Compared to a visual editor of today.

For this and other reasons, text coding can't and will not be replaced with visual coding. Visual programming, I think, should be thought of as an extension of text programming.

So I think that visual editors will only start becoming successful and more wide-spread among regular developers when they stop being visual-only. Or, in other words, when they stop eschewing all the good parts of text-based environments. Visual programming should complement text-based programming. Not replace it.

> Visual programming tools -- or at least those that I have met -- instead force you to deal with stuff that doesn't matter (such as aligning boxes and arrows), and views very quickly become cluttered when you start connecting things.

It's almost like coding in text without the editor helping you with indentation and structuring of text. You have to arrange boxes and connections yourself.

This is one thing that illustrates that some visual languages are really a few steps back in evolution compared to text languages.

But there are visual environments (e.g. Scratch and the like), which do help you with structure.

Anyway, I'm tired and it's very late, so I'll end here.
Cheers!

[0] (copy-pasted from my previous comment):

(a screenshot from my project) http://djedr.github.io/gfx/masters-thesis/ide-prototype.png

(link to my thesis) http://djedr.github.io/masters_thesis.pdf
Visual programming is used in Maya or Houdini for example (I think Houdini is more oriented towards it). While these are 3D software, I don't think there's anything 3D specific about how it works. I've seen a video of a guy showing how to create assets for game and building something that works pretty much as a function out of interconnected nodes (I can't remember the exact webinar I watched but found this other https://vimeo.com/202120820).
Now they don't call it programming but as I see it, that's programming and the basic idea could be made to work in other contexts.
Market salaries in Tokyo startups for developers cluster in the $30k to $50k range. Market salaries for developers generally in Tokyo go up to ~$70k (assuming one is in twenties or thirties). There exists a separate scale in finance and foreign-owned corporations -- AppAmaGooBookSoft typically (but not always) pay at discounts to their US operations but not typically 70% discounts.

You'll find wide variability with regards to working hours in startups, with most of the range covering "high-growth US startup" or "Japanese professional employment" levels of expectations rather than "unionized public sector worker in US or Europe" level of expectations. You will find similar variance in flexibility.
I was referring to the fact, that lately I was hearing a lot of things specifically about Sweden being afraid and even returning conscription (that awful atavism of the past) because of that.
I don't know about situation in Finland, but they seems to be welcoming Saint Petersburg visitors.
If you ask random Finn how possible is war with Russia nowadays, what do you think he/she will answer? (I really don't know, just asking).
We have airplane accidents every year, a great many if you include private planes, but people keep flying them.
> Changing the text and changing the data would require the same amount of time.

Really? really?

Open up powerpoint, openoffice, or whatever you use to make infographics.
Also open up vim, atom, or whatever you use to edit text.

Time yourself clicking and dragging to make a graph in one and then typing to write a number in the other.

> Imagine a decent IDE

I'm imagining something where you are able to select visual elements without either clicking and dragging or doing an O(n) walk by hitting alt-tab. But I can't imagine how you acheive that, much less efficiently specify how you connect things up and how you write automated tests.

Some of this is my failure of imagination, but its still on you to provide the sketch of a proposal if you want to convince.
Yes. If they want people to call it "Cute"... why not spell it like that? I don't care how it's capitalized - if you stick two letters together in an unpronouncable fashion, people will say it as if it's just those two letters, one after the other.

I can only assume this has something to do with its being written by non-native English speakers.
It bothers me a bit that the project has weak commit messages like this:

https://github.com/sakurity/securelogin/commit/975332ae0b0e2...

Literally just "1". Tells me nothing about what's happening in this change, and from the diff, it looks like quite a lot ("118 changed files with 283 additions and 179 deletions").
> terrorists seem to have done just fine in the absence of encryption -- the bataclan attackers coordinated with ordinary sms

Even if the UK somehow managed to illegalize use of AES and other "professional" encryption algos, it would still be trivial to communicate using simple innocuous sounding code words over plain SMS. There's practically no way to detect it. The entire effort is futile from the very beginning.
Apple will not sell hundreds of millions of $160 headphones. Few people even pay $40 for current wireless headphones. They're a luxury and $160 is far larger than most people's budgets can allow.
> 2) Sweden will give close proximity to Germany and to the rest of central Europe,

Russia already has Kaliningrad which is already very close to Germany and the rest of central Europe, for whatever reason you think it's good.

It also all involves some larger conflict with western war, large scale war. But it's a suicide for Russia, this won't happen. Russia isn't a blood-thirsty monster that each day thinks how to conquer the world or die trying to...
There's a lot of problems with Russia, but mostly poeple of Russia are the victims...
The household total[0] is more than 30% higher though: $49,905. Combined with the average totals for other forms of debt, paying this off can end up stretched out over a long period of time.

[0]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
Sketching a picture can help for certain classes of problems, but I think that is far from universal: it often tends to be of less use for logical concepts than structural ones, for example.

Beyond that, though, even when a sketch is a useful tool, I find I seldom use the computer to create it. A whiteboard, notebook, or back of an envelope all seem easier than working with typical graphical input mechanisms that are commonly available. Good touchscreens are a step in the right direction, but still far from perfect and far from universally available, especially on desktops. Aside from any innate problems with graphical programming in general, I think this input problem makes the approach generally unappealing at the moment. It's not an insurmountable issue, but until there are good input mechanisms that are as common as keyboards, I think you will just find that it is hard to reach the critical mass a new representation needs.

I know that input speed is not really a limiting factor in most programming, and maybe shouldn't be the deciding factor, but given how attached to their text editors programmers already are, and how disruptive and frustrating it can be to have to switch, I think it's clear that it is an issue.
It's pretty large and hard hop, you can't easily do it.
Smalltalk and Raspberry Pi
The largest buyers of Ethereum will be USD holders. That reduces demand for USD and is good for Russia.
I think there are people like that commuting from SF to Mountain View, or such long distances. I don't believe that they are a majority, though.
Zero syntax errors.
I think it's because some visual mediums are better at representing certain forms of information than others, and visual programming tools attempt to represent a form of information (programming logic) using a visual medium (images) that isn't optimal for that form of information. Analogies can be made for things like calendars (which are the preferred visual medium for visualizing schedules), sheet music (which is the preferred visual medium for visualizing music - though guitar tabs present an interesting alternative to think about), and movie scripts (for which text is the preferred medium).

In the same way that a movie script is best represented by text, my belief is that text is superior to images for representing programming logic, and images are superior to text for representing UI elements. I think most people at least feel the same about representing UI elements, which is why visual programming tools are appealing.

This leads to the conclusion that the best tools for building UIs would represent programming logic in text, and represent UI elements using images. In my experience, this is true; tools like Unity and Flash are, in my opinion, better for UI development than HTML/CSS (text). This also leads to the conclusion that unless someone invents a better way of representing programming logic than using text - like the equivalent of inventing a calendar to display a schedule, if we had never invented a calendar before - visual-only programming is inherently limited.

Tools that keep UI in visual-land and programming logic in text-land - and don't try to mix the two - work great.
The post insinuates that the etherium scripting language is Turing complete. How can that be safe?
Then again, the argument is not against the wide use of the language, but the way the ideas are manifested. For all we know, Dijkstra might have hated Python.
Higher-level causation exists (but I wish it didn’t)
The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency – Nick Szabo
I wonder if SpaceX will throw a big party after their 100th booster Earth landing.
> Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage.

Yes but that isn't actually making education better overall, it just means you're taking in better students. It's a zero sum game. Every college could deck out their dorms like the 4 Seasons Hotels, but it's not actually improving the quality of the education provided. It's still the same set of students, rotated around a bit more between which ones ended up in which schools.

That's the key part - is separating out what costs actually provide a better overall education vs. which costs just are "marketing in disguise" to take the top students from School A and convince them to go to School B.
And college got expensive partly through policy choices. Offering easy loans tends to make people price insensitive, so tuitions go up and a lot of that money goes to things like increasingly fancy buildings and making textbook publishers' shareholders rich. Meanwhile often less is going to state schools that, with low in-state tuitions, were historically a way up for a lot of people. (An older friend went to Berkeley a few decades ago for under $1,000.) There's some comparison to the housing bubble, where policy also supported big loans.

Don't have all the answers, but less emphasis on loans, competition from better-supported state and other non-profit schools, and having multiple forms of post-high-school education and credentialing available could all potentially help to bring some competition and sanity back to all this.
I work at a local community college that is in the network of the state University. The amount of waste that goes on is insane. I understand this is a state government issue in general but I'm pretty sure the school could be run with half the funds if they actually tried.