skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except there is a successful visual programming tool and it probably runs a large chunk of software in your car. It's called Matlab Simulink:

https://mathworks.com/help/simulink/examples/anti-windup-con...

Obvious lectures from this:

1) Don't be silly and copy a text based language into visual blocks. Nobody wants to drag&drop the components of a while loop or click a box to enter a variable name. If you have variable names, you probably failed this one already.

2) It's about the data, stupid. There is very very little explicit control flow in Simulink diagrams. Instead it's all about the flow of data.

3) Seriously, nobody wants to click together while loops. Simulink works because it has a very large and very powerful library of blocks that you need just a few of at a time to build very complex functionality.
I watched Stroustrup be hideous to a member of the audience at microsoft's going native conference 2-3 years ago.

"I understand what you are trying to ask and I think that you are wrong." -- or something so close to that as makes no difference. While the audience hooted, laughed and razzed.

Right then it became clear to me why the C++ community is so awful. It starts with Bjarne who is /not/ a nice guy. Every other language community I've dealt with, C, Perl, Python, Scheme is more pleasant than C++ with their annointed "smart people" who stand in their circle while failing to discourage everyone else who, well, acts exactly like Bjarne did above. And just to be clear, Bjarne gave a lecture in which he pointed out linked lists are awful on modern hardware. The question was, "Shouldn't the standard library make the right decision for you if one is always wrong?" Whatever you think of the question or the appropriate response Bjarne was just being nasty and enjoying it like a school bully.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson apparently had some experience of Bjarne he spoke about.
Animating blobs that turn into rectangles, in steps over 24 hours
Probably. Def good place for high caliber cofounders.
I wrote a fair bit of COBOL back in the 90s, and read a lot more of it.

There are so many different ways that software can be bad. COBOL had plenty of warts, sure, but it also had a very top-down simplicity to it. I'm the FNG at a new job and have been given a shitpile of Magento to shovel; I think I'd rather have the COBOL. (I'm pretty sure Magento is the absolute worst example of what somebody can do with PHP.)

COBOL didn't support any of the abstractions that programmers today abuse to as an excuse to build out intractably tangled messes of code so that they could refer to themselves as "software architects". That alone has kept a soft spot for it in my heart.
In New York, the state minimum is $10k for property damage. Good luck suing the guy carrying that low level of coverage!
Most of the sites that most people use are ad-supported to some extent. For better or worse, remove the ads and those sites go away. If you don't believe that's true, please provide a counterargument.
Building a website using AsciiDoc (2010)
Don't disrespect the clowns.
Gregory Benford on escorting Kurt Vonnegut
The previous title was better. Why was it changed?
She proposed natural language programming over 50 years ago.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274

There still hasn't been a whole lot of progress, although there have been some research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha.
Saying that they do not want Sweden to join NATO translates in my option to we want to keep possibility to invade Sweden open.

I think that it is a quite serious signal for Sweden to start taking again their army seriously.
Hundreds of millions of people have bought iPods and iPhones, if nothing else I think Apple has proved there is a market for luxury electronics.

Hell, these are cheap compared to what competitors like the Bragi dash were charging for headphones like these just last year with worse performance.
Ah but now you've invested your time.
I second this one! It's the only resource I've needed and still use for flexbox. I've got most use cases committed to memory by now, but every now and then I need to visually see what I'm trying to do and quickly reference its code.
They're not saying going to college and making the most of it is a waste. They're saying shipping all kids off to college under the presumption that things will sort themselves out and you'll end up with a bucket of money and a good job at the end is the problem. Kids need to be taught what college can offer them, how to make the most of it, and whether it'll even benefit them before we push them into going.
Franz Kafka: Before the Law (1915)
Ah, the ol' trickle down fallacy.
Because US colleges are better than international on average?
Now that I Google it a bit, it seems you're right that my definition of "visual programming" is too strict, although I do still think that most people wouldn't consider Python's whitespace to qualify. It looks like most so-called visual programming environments are effectively visual diagrams of standard control flow mechanisms like loops and conditionals.
> Her philosophy is "if we knew more, we could have prevented this."

What is there to solve? This statement is wrong in its core. Its like you looking at blew up grenade and scratching your head "how can we put this back together".

There is nothing to fix. Since they yelled "Allah Akbar", they were clearly motivated by their religion and "holy war on infidels". Unless you can read people's mind, I don't find access to their communication relevant if they've been practicing said religion since crib times and one day simply decided to go and stab few people with knifes.

For this to put in motion, you don't need a cellphone or any sort of communication at all!
"Why? Robustness (more use cases, platforms), efficiency/cost, and more user friendly."

More fundamentally, the second platform benefits from the hindsight of the first platform's experiences, having the opportunity to fix any mistakes that happened to be hardcoded into the first platform's design.
Legislators sure seem to assume that legislation can fix anything but it’s a dangerously ignorant attitude to have about technology. There is no single governing body, no single country and usually not even a single access point for Internet data. Even if a country seems to create what sounds like a decent law for that country, there is no way to apply that law to everybody. It’s also particularly ironic when a restriction is proposed for dealing with people that are probably already untouchable anyway.

Also, “the Internet” is not just what you can see on a web page, and screwing with traffic invariably damages everything else. (Ever see HTML returned in places where it wasn’t supposed to be there? Thanks, ISPs.) If your law can’t even reach the people it’s supposed to reach and your implementation is shoddy on top of it all, you’ve just caused a problem that you didn’t have before due to paranoia.

We should probably think of the Internet like the ocean: it connects everybody, maybe there are areas we can control for added safety, and in the end we all know in International Waters there are some shady things going on that we can’t do anything about. That’s life.
When I hit a deer with my 2003 Pontiac, I lost the bumper, radiator, quarter panel, hood, mirror and had a hoof scratch running down the length of the car. Total cost: $6k in 2007.

From what I hear, bumper replacement alone can top $10k on a Model S.
> Reverse Hollywoodism: The forces of good have every possible advantage, from money to expertise to knowledge to overwhelming numerical superiority. Yet somehow good still fumbles. Somehow a string of improbable coincidences, or a black swan or an orange Hitler, show up at the last moment to let horribleness eke out a last-minute victory, as if the universe itself had been rooting for horribleness all along. That’s our world.

This is kind of like Murphy's Law. Let's quote Richard Dawkins and Richard Hand from the Wikipedia article: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law)

> So-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. He gives as an example aircraft noise interfering with filming. Aircraft are in the sky all the time, but are only taken note of when they cause a problem. This is a form of confirmation bias whereby the investigator seeks out evidence to confirm his already formed ideas, but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.

> The law of truly large numbers should lead one to expect the kind of events predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. Selection bias will ensure that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true are forgotten.

So reverse hollywoodism is really a theory on the limitations of humans in their ability to be scientific: when humans go from the data to the trends (stories), they ignore/distort some of the information to fit the narrative. (See e.g. Trump's election; really not that unpredictable, given data like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr..., but easy to miss when reading the headlines)
Scott seems upset.
Testing begins for world's largest airplane
Bad case of the Mondays.
It's worth it! Pick a good domain name and set up a blog and then, write some awesome blogs! Hey, man, you won't regret it.
> why wouldn't you get a 0% finance deal over paying in full?

I have a 0%, 60 month loan on my LEAF. Having such a loan requires me to carry collision insurance, so I treat the insurance company's profit on my insurance as the financing charge that I'm paying every month. (I otherwise wouldn't carry collision, but of course collision insurance is worth something, so I am only "really" paying the spread between that value and its cost.)

About halfway through the loan (when the imputed financing charge interest goes up because the loan balance went down), I'll probably pay it off and drop collision.
I wonder how many people have physical issues with computer screens. My own anecdote is that I get severe eyestrain headaches and neck / wrist fatigue, when I have to do fine manipulation on a computer screen.

I spent a few months using LabVIEW, more than 20 years ago, and it was physically debilitating. I also have a hard time doing CAD. When I'm typing code, I'm not really focused on the screen unless I need to be. Sometimes I close my eyes and type, or look away from the screen.

Another thought about text based languages is that they make it much easier to create and explore new languages, because you don't need to program a full blown graphical editor every time, make it work on every platform, etc. Especially for languages that are supported by volunteers, maintaining graphical tools might not be the best allocation of effort.
Amdahl was an option.
Leaving aside the funny but flippant conclusion, I think this is still a bit harsh on the causal channel capacity argument of the paper discussed. The under-emphasised part is that our brains and bodies do have an artificially imposed uniform distribution over microstates, and that is why macro-level causation is so useful (and often wrong) for us. Of course that might seem obvious, and doesn't mean reductionism is false, and it's not something a reductionist would disagree with, but I think it formalises and makes explicit an assumption that often conceals the root of the disagreement.

The channel capacity thing provides an explanation (an excuse) for having to settle for macrostates.

The 'normalization trick' is another important reminder that our brains are scale-invariant. https://xkcd.com/915/
> What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world?

Free only means someone else pays for it. It is still a bad deal if you make someone else pay horrendous amount of money for a worthless degree.

> What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for free instead of not getting educated?

What you are saying is that vast majority of the people who themselves have not gone to college should be FORCED to pay for someone else's degree in French Literature ?

I see that as highly immoral.
Not really, Tesla drivers will just flock to other insurers who don't rate their cars appropriately.

Insurance is regulated, competitive and low margin.
> ...is a stoic enough soul to live on truck drivers' wages for 24 years

Truck drivers make decent money. $40k, usually closer to $50k+ if you're experienced without accidents. Much more importantly, you don't need to be in an office building in a high rent area every morning. If your spouse also works, those salaries buy a REALLY nice house in Nowhere, MS/WI/KS!

"Has the nerve and patience" might be a better way of saying it for truck drivers, at least. The job's downsides are the stress, risk of death/injury, and the crap hours.

> The temptation to start plucking out money from the S&P honeypot -- in the name of having a better life

And "temptation for a better life" isn't the only source of risk.

A lot of low-skill but decent-paying jobs are extremely vulnerable to economic cycles.

"Making the mortgage that was comfortable before the market crash / paying for medical bills that accrued while my insurance lapsed" can make a life time's worth of savings disappear in a matter of months.
horse's mouth haha

thanks
This is what I did. It worked well (for me). I would recommend it to someone like me. If you are smart and hard working, University or no University you will eventually be reasonably successful in the right circumstances. If you want to do something abstract, like invent or do business, it probably makes more sense to skip University. If you want to do something more professional or conventional, like engineering or medicine, you probably have to do University. For the most part, the implicated disparity is actually priced into jobs. Part of doctors income implicates paying off tons of debt and opportunity cost. Likewise, through compounding, hard work and networking, you can end up with the same net worth by other means. The key is to approach it in a self aware way. People rarely make any decisions on a purely rational basis, why start with University? University is easily reversible. Spend less time worrying about what major you take or college you attend. Spend more time worrying about being self aware, choosing a life partner and taking care of your physical and mental health.
>The events in the story are physically impossible. But still, using the plot line of The Walking Dead to justify yourself feels silly, but somehow old story's are given a free pass. Sorry, using a collection of meaningless words to justify thoughts or actions is irrational.

Sorry, but the story of Icarus is loaded with meaning, a meaning which has been examined, discussed, and argued about for two millennia by some of the greatest thinkers.

Most of myth, just like cautionary tales and proverbs, is meaning concentrated. It is an observation/insight/point made into story.

It's your comment that rather seems devoid of meaning, seeing that humans have been able since forever to construct stories, metaphors, and examples from both real and non-real-world-events to convey particular ideas, concepts and worries.

There would be nothing silly to "using the plot line of The Walking Dead to justify" one's self if it works for making their point.

What would be silly would be if someone conflated Icarus or the Walking Dead plotline for something that actually happened. But nobody does that -- they recognize it for what it is, a metaphor, and are able to see the point being made, regardless of if there are wax wings or zombies in real life.
With a computer and a connection to the internet, his reach and potential scale is much greater. That is why such powerful encryption is required for your average citizen.

I wonder if the encryption dilemma will ultimately be resolved with blockchain-like techniques. Cryptocurrencies work because their underlying trust processes are deliberately designed to require ever-increasing amounts of CPU time. They can be attacked, but only by spending enough resources to out-mine the other nodes. While possible in theory, it's simply not worthwhile for an attacker to marshal the kinds of resources that would be required to attack Bitcoin or similar blockchains.

So, while back doors for government access are stupid and unworkable for all of the reasons that people have stated, what about requiring a hypothetical encryption standard with no known backdoors or attack surfaces, but that is just strong enough to be broken by agencies like the GCHQ or NSA who can throw gigawatt-hours of computer time at the problem? Basically, if the government really wants to read my mail, they can, but it will cost them. It might take them hours to discover a given key, while nobody with a room full of GPUs or even a botnet could do it in less than several years.

In such a scenario, we'd be sufficiently safe from attack by cybercriminals, and most of the time, from our governments as well. Governments would still be able to target anybody, but unlike the case where a back door is mandated, they wouldn't be able to target everybody. That could limit the amount of harm that bad actors in the government could do.

It would be similar to the rationale of banning ownership of high-capacity magazines, except unlike that sort of feel-good measure, it might actually work.
It's not the first line. The first line is the Atlantic and pacific oceans. That's been Americas first line of defense since it's inception all the way up until WW2.
Bankrupt-able student loans will not help the problem. The universities who are taking advantage of the easily available money from the government will still get paid. During bankruptcy, the loan write down hurts the lender. In this case it's us taxpayers.

The real answer is to cut what's funded by the government, make the rest of the financing come from the universities themselves, AND make it bankrupt-able. Then as demand declines and universities share the hit for each bankruptcy, universities will lower prices to something more reasonable to increase supply.
"Well, what constitutes a programming language then? It sounds like there is a clear definition :-)"

Some bloke called Turing had a few ideas on a definition. (I'll whisper "whoosh" here - for my own note)

Given that any programming language can be defined in English (or any other human language, with a few contortions as required, if any) then of course English can be used to create a Turing Machine (TM). It doesn't take much NLP to define a full TM via speech.
While Wikipedia is certainly not any more objective as a collective than any individual alone. It surely is tough to deal with confrontation and rejection emotional support. It's frustrating to eb the one who is wrong or being wronged. But it is most of all frustrating to be absolutely ignorant and Wikipedia is a great resource at providing educative insights, even if the editing process is severely laborious and the needed quality not always obvious or easily provided.
The Infinitely Profitable Program
Why do you need a block chain for a decentralized social network?

Also what actual benefits would a "decentralized" social network bring? Facebook works because it got a lot of things right it let people communicate and share ideas rather than being a glorified geocities where bands come to die like MySpace and it got a critical mass of users which drove it home.

Blockchain will not decentralize the internet it might decentralize the World Wide Web, but even then considering the power costs and the fact that bandwidth still costs a ton of money even in developed nations why would you want to "decentralize" a bandwidth rich service in the current landscape.

I can understand the usefulness of a blockchain for certain applications e.g. clearing houses.
But every time some one says it's like X but decentralized and runs on the hot new blockchain I just want to head bang a wall, I could be too old or too dumb to get my head around it but it simply looks to me that there is a cool toy that every one wants to use as a hammer which makes them look at everything that they want to build as a nail regardless if it makes sense or not.
State universities are absolutely trying to pull in better students. They track average SATs and every other metric. For the top schools in each state, this is not just an issue of prestige, public funding, and attracting stronger faculty, its also about endowments growing because those students graduate and have more money to contribute.
Now imagine that both are part of the same territory but the planes still fly and the bombs still fall on the same places. It is clear that this is economic and political madness.

For example, China/Taiwan, North Korea/South Korea, which no longer fight.
Spending more does not help. Spending per pupil in Washington, DC is possibly the highest in the nation, with the most abysmal performance.
>Maybe, as the physicist Yakir Aharonov has advocated, our universe has not only a special, low-entropy initial state at the Big Bang, but also a "postselected final state," toward which the outcomes of quantum measurements get mysteriously "pulled"

This sounds a lot like Terence McKenna's "Transcendental Object at the End of Time".

But on the whole... wow, you ever get so upset about a presidential election that you invent a new theory of metaphysics?
You talk about the compiler having to be sufficiently smart, but I think you actually just need good IDE support, then you can store the code as text but display a nicer rendering.

E.g. the image literal could actually be Image.loadFromPath("../.../image.png"), but you don't see the code unless you want to; and if you drag and drop a file into your program, the IDE automatically inserts the corresponding code.
How can this reach the first page of HN. This is not science, nor it is sound logic.
EU General Data Protection Regulation – how ready are you?
So what happens when someone calls your nuclear bluff and you don't have a conventional armed forces? Especially when it's not an attack on the continental US?

For example, what if China decided to invade Diego Garcia or Guam or some other strategic asset? Or even the Aleutian Islands? Would you really launch a retaliatory nuclear attack? Would you send John Kerry to the UN to wag his finger at the Chinese representative? Would you call the Chinese ambassador to the White House and tell him that you're very cross with his leaders?
Sometimes they do. In my view the most prominent example is documentation for installing computer hardware and software on Windows computers. The instructions will be a series of pictures, with circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one (sic). This goes on for page after page. And when the OS is updated and the dialogs all change a bit, the documentation becomes confusing or even obsolete.

In contrast, the instructions for the Linux version of the same thing will be something like:

sudo apt-get install this
sudo bing bam boom
...
Sure, you will get something out of college....
better reasoning skills, better social skills and other 'horizontal' skills that you would probably have got from say an engineering major too.