skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, IMO it depends on how many locals there are more than the number of lines. Reducing the state space definitely improves readability.

If you have a function with 15 locals, it could be hard to keep straight in your head, even if that function were 50 lines or so. If you can split it up into 3 functions with 5 locals each (and a small number of arguments), that is usually more readable.

As long as the functions are named well and communicate (only) with params and return values, it doesn't hurt readability to split it up, even if it's only used in one place.

On the other hand, I suppose you can have a 500 line function and if has few locals, then you probably don't need to split it up. The canonical example would be a function that only prints stuff to the screen, maybe based on a couple parameters. But I don't really run into those situations very much -- more often I run into the big functions that can be split up.
Free software for free systems
Well-done DRM is even worse, because it normalizes usurping control from your machine in the name of protecting the interests of a 3rd party.
"Not content with just smoking cannabis, we bred super-potent strains of the plant, extracted the active cannabinoids and moved on to dangerous synthetic versions."

No, that's just bullshit. This guy doesn't even know the difference between cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids. He clearly hasn't done his research. If people want more potent cannabis, they get concentrate, not synthetic shit that can kill them. Only people who can't get cannabis or are subject to drug tests generally use the synthetic bullshit. It might be an opinion piece, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be subject to basic fact checking. Then again, I think he's trying to be sensationalist so facts don't matter much to him.
Jawbone has been around for almost 20 years. Doesn't fit in with the rest.
It's a fantasy that you're going to pull one over on the ginormous mega-bank that does this for a living. I recall a time when many manufacturers were offering 0% interest on car loans. Obviously they just shoved all their profit into the principle.
We are one worm away, from a society where everybody searched for embarassing stuff.
And now they're all coming to Europe. Woo!
Otherwise we might as well include Apple and Google in a list of well-performing startups.
A beginner guide to become a Front-end Developer in 2017
Good for temporary logins to services when using someone else's machine as well.
Kenya’s Ushahidi reportedly covering its executives accused of sexual harassment
Show HN: No coding needed to track form submit events in Google Analytics
And this will never change. I live in the DC area and when you live here, you see how much of our economy in America is dependent on our ability to continue fighting wars.

The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going.

Very worrying state of affairs.
Entropy can decrease, just with vanishingly small probability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
Yep, they tried really hard to make it sound like it was some far flung place and showed a lot of cleverly oriented pictures to make their case, but this is where the festival was meant to be located:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Exuma,+The+Bahamas/@23.635...

Zoom out a bit to see exactly how 'remote' it really was.

Edit: Meh, mobile GMaps is messing with the link, but their property was on the north side of the island a few hundred yards from a marina.
Bloat due to long running transactions and batch writes is a significant operational pain in PostgreSQL. For extreme cases where vacuum isn't doing its job, check out pg_repack.

There is another approach to queuing in postgresql that doesn't suffer this problem though:

* Give each of your workers an id from 0..n.

* Open a connection to read from the queue, ordered by your priority index, and partition for your worker id (eg primary key % n = worker id). Make it a cursor.

* Read from the cursor in batches. You'll never see the same dead row twice because the cursor is stateful and is doing a single scan. You generally won't see dead rows anyway since this worker is the only one assigned to update these queue items.

* Perform your writes in a separate postgresql connection to avoid invalidating the cursor. Think about it like how a Unix process has a stdin and stdout pipe, except your pipes are postgresql connections.

This approach is great for throughout because you request queued items in batch, and there's no contention between workers. It's admittedly not as good for latency because a new queue item won't be dequeued until the worker it's assigned to finishes its run and restarts with a new cursor. For low latency queues, use FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED.
What happens when the enqueuing fails after a successful commit?
You also had Intel move in with Atom, and the two of them combined basically put down a stringent definition of what a netbook was supposed to be.

This in large part to avoid Netbooks eating into their lucrative ultra-portable platform that corporations kept buying for their road warriors.

The fear being that corporations would switch to Netbooks with a mobile data connection and simply access corporate computing resources using Citrix or similar.

Note btw that this was much the same idea that Google had when they first started pushing Chromebooks, to the point that one of their big launch demos were the ability to run Citrix.

Never mind that this also mothballed any plans for Android beyond phones. As seen with how even the 3.x "tablet" UI, that was perfectly adapted for landscape use, was gradually rolled back.
I wonder if this will derail Yhat’s progress from some of their platforms and tools. Python is a great language for “data science” but for me R crushes it in interactive data exploration. R the language is weird, but RStudio is the killer app. The Python ones are not there yet.

Rodeo development has been slow, but its the one I was hoping for, targeted for data analysis work vs a complete application development environment.
You're right that doctors can prescribe fentanyl, but I'm not so sure about your (implied) claim that prescribed fentanyl is contributing to the opioid epidemic. To my knowledge, fentanyl is safe to take when done in proper doses (as are most painkillers). The problem with fentanyl is that since it is so much more potent than drugs like heroin, when the two are mixed people can overdose much more easily since they won't know that the fentanyl. And the fentanyl being mixed in with heroin isn't coming from Dilaudid prescriptions, it's coming from China: http://securepackages.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/USCC-St...

So unless you can figure out a way to stop the drug trafficking industry, fentanyl+heroin aren't going away. Perhaps we will see fentanyl produced less if China cracks down / increases regulations on their pharmaceutical industry.

Unfortunately the opioid epidemic is going to have to be stopped by moving away from the casual prescription of opioids, which is what creates opioid addiction in the first place. I think your open doctor project is really cool and is a good way to start: shame doctors who are essentially operating as pill mills for their "patients." My hope is that people so obviously abusing the system like the doctors at the top of your list end up losing their license to practice medicine, or behind bars.
How do you queue that job only after the transaction committed?
Car dealers do not loan you money for free. Interest rates are low, but it costs them money to service that loan. What they did, since the dealership owns the bank, is they shoved their profit into the principle instead of getting it back in interest. In other words, they simply charged you more for the car. And even a 0% loan is a risk from a personal finance standpoint. Options 3 and 4 carried no risk, lower cash in hand, but higher positive monthly cash flow (because no monthly bill). This freed up your additional monthly cash flow which would have been spent on a car payment to be invested and earn a return.,
Those practices (handing out oxy) are a major contributor to the current epidemic, if not the root cause.

I've gotten opiate prescriptions I had no business having without asking. I get that some people need pain medication or will suffer, but there's a whole lot of suffering that opiate addiction causes and that is not really factored into the 'do no harm' calculation doctors are supposed to be doing.

It really is a great thing to see legitimate restrictions on these prescriptions, as that should cut down on new addicts at the very least.
Even social impact companies are affected?
So is the idea that the school tells them they could totally do this, and they'd get caught, so as to preempt students from coming up with the idea on their own?
Does it take into account the benefits of developing large scale engineering and construction expertise?

In many ways the United States Apollo program was also a white elephant as a space program of that scale was economically unsustainable, however, it had a huge impact on accelerating pace of technology development.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2525898/app-development...
What top college students in the US are reading this summer
Yikyak removed anonymity (it wasn't anonymous in the first place - devices, phone numbers, and invisible accounts were tracked/established/attached to posts), added public user profiles/names.
Yeah, their explanation didn't make a lot of sense. Mt. Gox was notoriously opaque, and what little they did say publicly was often flawed in ways similar to what you describe.

That said, it's not impossible that, say, a rather young hacker got into Mt. Gox, and naively sold stolen coins during the incident. Most people are not familiar with how exchanges work, and so they may not have known that a large sell order would evaporate the order book. It's important to remember that most people who are adapt at technology do not necessarily have financial acumen as well. It's a tangential skill set.

But yeah, we can speculate in all sorts of ways. Maybe the 2011 hack was fake; a way for Karpeles to pilfer the coffers. Again, hopefully something more concrete will come out of the trials.
Is there something deeply broken with this link on an iPhone? I get a weird 17776 number.
Wait til you hear how much Israel gets alone. Aid isn't a no-strings attached handout, it's policy in dollar units.
Doesn't "clockwork" imply that true randomness can't exist and quantum physics tell us that it does?
How could it tell coordinates in either space or time? non-military-grade GPS is spoofable (not really easy yet, but easier by the day) and GPS signal is rarely available inside a building (and sometimes just under an awning or cloudy days, or near skyscrapers - GPS in NYC is horrible; mobile phone GPS are as reliable as they are because they take cell towers and wifi into account).

The important point is " making it harder " - but how hard is hard enough depends on the party in question, and for many important ones, the simple answer is "not hard enough".
Yep. In O-chem lab many years ago one of the first things we did was "alkaloid extraction", where we pulled caffeine from tea bags, which was a yellow, clumpy powder, which we then washed out the impurities and it was a clean white crystal. Caffeine is in the same family as meth, and the process is similar.

The teacher joked that she used to teach in San Bernardino and there were a lot of chemicals that the department never had to buy because the police would turn it over after raiding meth labs.
HN isn't just limited to technical and startup discussion. Sometimes you just want to share something cool :)
>Why assume it is them being dodgy? Perhaps it is really hard to put a number on it.

>What number would make me risk my life on a low-shoulder highway in the middle of the night with my son in the back seat? I have no idea, but I can tell you it is not in the ballpark you are discussing.

I should add: While you don't know the number, it's not as nebulous as you may think. If you paid $10K more to get a newer car that you think is safer, we know it's at least $10K.

If I offered you a car that costs $40K more than your current one and convinced you that your son will have a 50% lower chance of injury/death than your current car. Will you pay for it? What about $100K?

Let's not kid ourselves. Everyone has a number. It may be hard to tighten the bound, but it does exist. There will be a price point where for a 50% reduction you'll say "You know what? I'll take the risk". Or even "You know what, I think the risk is low enough as it is in my car - a 50% reduction of a tiny number is not much of a gain"

I do hope you will never respond with the latter, because you have no idea what that number is. Or at least realize that if you rationalize that way, so do people who buy cheap cars. They likely think the probability of serious injury/death for their son is not much different from a newer car.
A Guide to TDD a React/Redux TodoList App
Using chip memory more efficiently
Who said anything about draconian measures? Most modern DRM is almost completely transparent to legitimate users, particularly the technologies used with rental models rather than permanent purchases (where as I've said elsewhere I think both the ethics and practicalities are somewhat different).

It's easy to snipe from the cheap seats, so let me ask you some questions now instead. Do you believe that financial models other than a complete, permanent purchase of a copy of a work are useful? And if so, how would you propose to set up a realistic rental/library/PPV scheme for digital content without relying on anything that could be called DRM?
The README states that there are no improvements for real world applications. What's missing to get there?
39 essential albums for audiophiles

https://www.stuff.tv/features/39-essential-albums-audiophile...
Jodel is the main replacement to my knowledge. There might be others too, but I don't think any of them have caught on very much. It's a shame because there definitely still is a market for a yikyak clone, but I doubt investors are going to be very bullish about one.

I think the main reason anonymous social media is out of favor is that it's hard to monetize. It's hard to gather information (and thus serve valuable ads) about your users when they are explicitly using your app to not share that information. When yikyak introduced profiles, I think that was when everybody stopped using it.
I don't think clockwork implies determinism, only that rational actors can understand cause and effect in the system. Much like a window into clockwork.

That said, i do appreciate the horror of being a wound up automaton, but i think this is a mistake to think of humans as primarily rational. Hubris, even, might be a good name for it. We are influenced by thousands of arbitrary signals every day and react in mostly normal ways; this doesn't seem to scare people at all. That is: even if we have a full mechanism of free will, we don't have functional free will, as humans are clearly influenced by many unconscious factors.

I'd have to look at Jefferson's writings again to confirm, but i thought "god" in a deism sense was portrayed, in many senses, as a scientist himself watching the progress of the universe, not an author laying out a grand, anthropomorphic, meaning-laden story. That is: even the clockwork deists were not explicitly deterministic!
A lot of fentanyl is coming from Mexico, where they easily synthesize it, and it's introduced into the heroin supply as a cutting agent. Whether or not it's "contributing to the opioid epidemic" depends on how you interpret that phrase. In other words, people are getting HOOKED on opioids because of the 12hr dosing of oxy etc that has been discussed on HN in the past. But people are DYING OF OVERDOSES because they cannot afford/lose access to pills and switch to heroin from the street (adulterated with fentanyl).
So this is basically a blockchain, but with transactions instead of blocks, and diverging-then-converging graph instead of a linear sequence of blocks (like a real family graph instead of just one-parent-one-child families common in blockchains). Looks nice, what are the problems with the approach? (the paper only lists the benefits).
Agreed. A film and its corresponding image management toolchain is a fantastically complex automaton.
What a crock of utter and complete nonsense. If you isolated the simple statements of fact then this article would still be a long and enjoyable read, but instead i am assaulted with corresponding insane ranting; accusations against huge swaths of people that are totally unsupported. So nobody googles if their daughter is smart? Maybe its because parents are worried that looks and not intelligence are important for cohesing in school and not getting bullied, for girls. Maybe the same for boys, but with social quickness and intelligence. Maybe they are responding to the behaviour of the kids themselves, who might openly worry about being smart or ugly; perhaps girls and boys have their own tendancies about which one worries them because of the small fact that they are differnt biologically, and that visual attractiveness is much more important for men? Not a single alternative is explored by this author and it should be no surprise because when you zoom out and look at the whole picture of this article its obvious that this guy is simply using these issues as a tool for popularity and self advancement. Im not saying it shouldnt appear on hn because the phenom of using these issues for personal gain and the death of journalism is in itself an intellectual curiosity. But i will die before letting this shit go uncommented upon.
We can get a lot of useful numbers, including road type, here [0] Only 12% occur on interstates and freeways. So I'd assume that a lot of collisions could be impacted by getting people to drive less inside a city.

[0] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... (You need to manually divide for the percentages, oh well)
Canada U19 vs. Italy U19 live stream [pdf]
From the article's addendum:

> The point is not that some people become rich and never lose their top position. This runs infinitely and will contain every possible sequence of good and bad luck for every person.

> The richest will become the poorest, everyone will experience every rank, and so on.

> The interesting thing is that this simple simulation arrives at a stationary distribution with a skewed, exponential shape. This is due to the boundary at zero wealth ...
I would argue that is not a pragmatic approach. The article makes a good point about the huge benefits of this approach for relatively small workloads. Transactional guarantees are hugely useful! Being able to rollback something like a user create including a queued job to send out a welcome email is incredibly nice.

IMHO HN conversations tend too much toward solving problems at google scale. We often forget here that there are tons of high-value business critical systems that generate mere 10s, hundreds, or a few thousand background jobs a day. Given the numbers quoted in the article, DB backed queue systems scale quite far. I've successfully used them to handle tens of thousands of events per day with no problem over a timespan of years. It's clear that this is a great approach for some situations, and that one size fits all doesn't make sense here.
Reading Kindle books does not require any Adobe stuff. You can just read them on your browser, or via a Kindle app on your PC/device. Sure, it is still DRMd, but at least the UX on the happy path is halfway decent.
The headline may sound like an overstatement, and as written it probably is, but "the equals sign changed mathematics" would be a simple statement of fact. Proper understanding of the use of the equals sign is highly correlated with mathematical ability; studies have actually been done to demonstrate this.

On the other hand, see https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/1300/how-do-... for an illustration that we shouldn't take too literally this story's conflation of math's `=` with the various flavours of `=` in programming languages.
byteball
It's a self-repairing system. Talented people will stay away from particular tech & companies and do things talented people do with other tech and companies. Then we'll all go join them.

It's not zero-sum, as though talented people will shrug and become coal miners and technological progress will come to a stand-still.

If 'bro culture' companies are doing well and attracting talented people, then evidently they know something we don't.
If you're looking for programs verified down to the machine code level, using C and the Verified Software Toolchain (VST) is one option. C programs are proven in the Hoare style (pre/postconditions) inside Coq, and then compiled using the verified CompCert compiler. Properties proven in Coq are guaranteed to hold about the compiled code.

There is nothing fundamental to prevent using VST to prove Verdi handler code correct, but the current runtime is not set up for that workflow.

http://vst.cs.princeton.edu
The finite states argument feels kind of wrong. You're usually interested in the general behavior for n people, and the number of states is exponential in n, which means that you need time exponential in n to repeat yourself. What you're seeing here is the early behavior of the system. Your arguments is a bit like saying every computer is actually a finite state machine, because of the finite memory it's going to repeat itself eventually. The argument is fundamentally flawed because you inflated one part of the question (time of running the question) while keeping the more significant part (number of particiants) fixed.
A better analogy would be to landlords rights vs. renters rights. DRM sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on protected media as leases set on rented property.

The difference, of course, is that it is very hard/impossible to break the restrictions set by DRM, whereas the restrictions set by leases are hard to enforce.

The problem that I see is that the language around DRM needs to change - you aren't buying that Kindle book, you are renting it from Amazon under a digitally-enforced lease.

So DRM is protecting property - it's just not protecting consumers' property, since they effectively don't actually own the media in the first place.
This is the actual beach they would have been on: https://goo.gl/maps/VN5r6NPas512

I found it by comparing the stylized ground maps they released with the satellite imagery.
>I think "you can't block GMail" here is meant in the sense that "you can't block the Google crawler". It's certainly technically trivial to do so, but the opportunity cost from lost users will be, for most businesses, unacceptably high.

Excellent interpretation. Gmail = Google crawler. I've made a note of this now.

What needs to happen next is a deep discussion between yourself and logicallee, in the context of Google crawler as well as how to make gmail come further out of the dark ages with high entropy and no security obscurity.
The Century of Biology
Anecdotal, but previously at UCB and now at UW for undergrad I've not seen a single person with Jodel installed - none of my friends have ever used or even known about it either.

Is it more EU-targetted or seeded initially?
I use google search all day every day. On those occasions when I want to do a search and not have it end up in advertiser databases, I switch to duckduckgo.com.

Do you HN'ers generally consider DuckDuckGo to be trustworthy for search queries of a private nature?
I'm pretty sure you can just go to the steamapps directory and run the .exes directly
The words "bite the bullet / grin and bear it / do what needs to be done for the company to be successful, or it will fail" could also describe the job of a parent. Yet we don't usually think of parents as being warriors. Thanks for giving us all an example of assumptions about gender that cause huge problems, can I use your words as training material?