skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few friends of mine are VR developers, so I've tried every sort of headset and game under the sun. Short of CAD/CAM and video games, I can't see a reason for VR in its current form. And though I love video games, the space requirements, isolation, and setup involved for the Vive lead me to prefer non-VR experiences.

Having tried a Hololens though, I'm certain that AR can improve in a direction where it would replace my laptop. I wouldn't like to use it for games, though.
More specifically, according to something a RISC-V guy wrote, Intel has kept its (and AMD's) x86 ISA network effect alive by regularly introducing not-so-useful new patented instructions that at least someone will use (or be persuaded to use); so that others can't claim compatibility with the accumulating ISA for their now-public-domain ISA CPUs. If so, that rather requires Microsoft's connivance, since they could refuse to use any such new instructions in their OS, and even refuse to allow programs to employ them, theoretically. I'm blue-skying here, but I wonder if Microsoft hasn't withdrawn that kind of cooperation a long time ago; or been able to use the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip, here.

There is also the legal angle - Microsoft could sue on the grounds of patent misuse re that RISC-V allegation, and hope to invalidate the current x86 IP. Trouble is, that area of law has been deliberately allowed to fall into contradiction and confusion over decades in the U.S.; because corporations like to misuse patents to extend their monopolies and network effects - so I don't know how much luck Microsoft would have (and of course, they're vulnerable to similar accusations.)
Could either of these labs be described as a "startup"? Fundamental research seems hard to do while searching for the revenue to stay alive. You need a stable source of funding, either from a large corporation (like SAP, Xerox or AT&T/Western Electric) or a government department (like DoD/ARPA) -- not VC funding which carries the expectation of near-term growth.
I am a multimillionaire. Came here with a negative net worth, by way of skilled immigration. Born and raised in the USSR. Don't bother trying to convince me about the virtues of socialism. Unlike you, I actually lived it.
That's probably not just modules though. Pascal, being one of Niklaus Wirth's languages, was specifically designed to be easy to compile, generally not even requiring building an AST (though a particular compiler still might, especially of it added extensions to the language).
Debit cards and gift cards carry the same branding as and look similar to credit cards, but don't provide many of the same functions. For example, it can be hard to rent a car using a debit card.

A credit card means that the issuer vouches for and will (effectively) underwrite your credit. A debit card means that Visa will process payment if there is sufficient money in your account.

An important question is whether debit cards can be used to rent the bikes, or if the vendors want assurance for liability in addition to immediate payment.
The sweet stories of fake fruit flavors
Wasn't McNealy on the Sun company ice hockey team back in the old days? It sounded like an incredible place to work back then
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
> was fairly counter-productive with all its talk about "UTF-8 strings"

Eh. I agree and disagree. I agree in the sense that the phrase "UTF-8 string" is generally a misnomer and is a good signal that there's some confusion somewhere, but I don't find think I find it as damning as you do. In particular, not all languages represent strings as sequences of codepoints, and instead make their internal UTF-8 byte representation a first class part of their string API. Two languages that come to mind are Go and Rust, where Go's conventionally uses UTF-8 and Rust uses enforced UTF-8. But in both cases, accessing the raw bytes is not only a standard operation, but is necessary whenever you want to do high performance string processing.

That is, if someone said Go/Rust had "UTF-8 strings," that wouldn't be altogether wrong. UTF-8 is a first class aspect of both string APIs, while both provide standard functions you'd expect from Unicode strings.
When will Oracle turn off the marketing for Solaris.[1]

[1] https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/index.html
"... someone needs to be held criminally liable for situations such as this one."

What is the crime that "someone" should be charged with?

In the VW case the media reports it was fraud against the government and violation of the Clean Air Act.

To do what you suggest, one first needs an applicable criminal statute. What is it?

(Not implying this is impossible. Only trying to focus the discussion beyond the usual rants.)
What version of c used integer and logical as type decls?
If one engine starts even a fraction of a second too late, it will suck up the exhaust from the other engines with predictably mission ending consequences.

I might totally wrong, but I don't think the engine are brought up to full throttle in a normal launch while it is still strapped down. In a hold down test, they are. I am just wondering if they are going to to risk possible synchronization issues in a hold down test, which effectively doubles the chance they will encounter a problems vs doing it once at launch.
Especially that darn three-body problem. (Not poking fun, just agreeing, it's genuinely tough.)
I'm inclined to agree with that.

Maybe if jobs for all skill-sets were still growing (in availability and compensation) it'd be easier to write off a good portion of the population as mentally inferior, but now that knowledge jobs are gaining a monopoly on living wages/salaries I don't think it's as easy to be that glib.

We need to do better as a society.

We're not that glib when it comes to children and early education, and I don't think we should change attitude just because a person has reached adulthood. Laziness and/or the attribution fallacy seems to get the better of a lot of us on HN.
Ubiquitous computing without proper security and interop is a non-starter.

The present day internet of things to me looks mostly like companies that are in the 'goods' business that are desperately trying to get into the 'services' business because they would like themselves some slice of that recurring revenue.
For winning arbitration (the company-mandated way to solve disputes) against them, for instance:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employe...
> Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :(

You aren't looking at the average workaday C program from that era. I guarantee you that OpenSSL, for example, does not look cleaner than code of today.
UBI is a bad attempt to patch a broken capitalist system that has no regard for the humans within it. It may delay riots, but people's basic needs still won't be met.
And instead use... what? Let's say you are creating a company that needs website to sell stuff. On that website, you need TLS implementation, to process user data & credit cards. After expensive security audit that consumed most of what your angel investors can give you, you decide that anything based on OpenSSL can't be safely used. Now what?
Interestingly, children as young as 5 show an aptitude for understanding overarching concepts of calculus.[1]

This makes sense: it is much easier to talk about "rates of change" and "accumulation" in simple terms and show how they are related using models that appeal to children. We don't need to dive right in to the notation and algebraic manipulations to get across the basic idea. That can come later when children can handle the rigor. For now, let them play with it. That makes math a lot more fun and less draining, esoteric, impenetrable.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year...
So true - Dutch tomatoes are awful bland tasteless cardboard. Best tomatoes in the world I've tried are in Serbia in the summer, bursting with incredible delicious flavour, perfect complement to their delicious grilled meats and sausages.
Even though the free upgrade offer has supposedly ended, it's super easy to upgrade to a fully legal copy of Windows 10 for free. It's a giant side door that MS has intentionally left open. Just google it.
Yeah, SUN was cool back in the day before it moved to the "cursed" Santa Clara building. Interestingly, their original office is now occupied by Facebook (1 Hacker Way) and there is still sign of SUN in front of Facebook - unofficially to remind Facebook it shouldn't stop innovating.
The main function is 111 lines long but only roughly 30 lines of that are setup up code. The remaining 81 lines are the business logic that happens when a control has been interacted with.

Since when does initialising the GUI framework include all of your business logic and if it does should a non trivial application have a main function that is several thousands of lines long?
It's just a fact with the increase in globalisation and specialisation, fruit is picked unripened and is allowed to ripen while being transported and while sitting on the shelves in supermarkets. Nothing beats local produce which has been allowed to ripen on naturally and picked when ready.

Unfortunately that's not a particularly efficient way to farm and also fruit is only available in season this way.
I once played a game of Tetris on the Nintendo DS (about 10 years ago now) where I maxed out the lines… then the levels… and then maxed out the score.

I played this same game for weeks, mostly on the train to and from work. And wouldn't you know it, but Tetris DS has a bug that won't let you save a score once you pass 100,000,000 or whatever the highest possible score is.

Tetris got a lot easier when they added the ability to infinitely rotate a block for as long as you want at the top of the pile.
I don't understand your issue with people making money. Why should people not make money while doing beneficial research for humankind? Is there some reason why making money and helping people are mutually exclusive?
I thought the codewords were classified themselves? Never understood how people put them on Linkedin
HomeBrew Analytics – top 1000 packages installed over last year
Sure, but in the meantime they aren't generating gigantic AirBnB fines. It seems that in this case the locks had already been changed to some sort of remote electronic device by the "tenants" themselves?
Cep/porcini actually grows in the wild in the UK. But there is no tradition of mushroom gathering for food
Great question, I agree. Criminal negligence might be one possibility; fraud in selling something not suitable for purpose might be another. Obviously it's going to be very difficult to draw such lines in the (continuous) sand; but we might as well start now. How many corners can you cut before the courts need to be involved (beyond civil lawsuits?) How much of the net do you need to imperil to trigger criminal consequences?

Maybe something like certification for electronics is needed and is possible here? Where manufacturers pay for a fairly decent inspection of their work in return for a mark of inspection?

(I don't mean to take a side re this particular crap-storm.)
I find this really interesting, where in the world would it be considered bad form to sniff a tomatoe before purchasing?
Another interesting tidbit about Oracle - if you leave as a peon and return back after a few years, you are given exactly the same conditions as you had when you left, regardless of what you did in the years in-between. Oracle doesn't care if you progressed in the meantime.
I'm no Friedman acolyte. Are you actually opposed to meritocracy?
Bullshit. If it was "noise" then you wouldnt need to expain yourself. as you are making the arrogant assumption of everyone to 'know' what you mean. Thus you pointing to a wikipedia explanation "see look you should already have known of this wiki page!!!" type of comment.

--

1.1.:

>see the former SovBloc countries. So this does not at all follow

Uh, were the analog agents that were sittin monitoring the activities not the analog (to wit) of the "invisible computer that is ubiquitous???

They didnt gather al their intel passively in the walls with no sensors, human or otherwise. So, I disagree.

I am not arguing against the cloud - but the Stasi, et al, ARE the modern cloud.

2: Now, for sure there will be 'bad actors' who will attempt - and who might even succeed

Sure, but please define for me a "good actor" - how shall one ID a good one? FB? Nope. Reddit? Nope. Palantir? NOPE.

All surveillence tech is being embedded in "good actor consumer services" such that the lines are blurred.

I would submit that your perception of "good actor" vs "bad actor" is simplistic; 'Does the consumer USE the service and not bitch?'== good actor in your world view (this is not an attack, but an obversatorial-question)

3. -- We agree, except:

I want to walk under a natural realm not covered by .gov satellites and invisible computers/sensors watching my every move to make sure I am staying "within the rules". Such environs become plastic at the point where I cannot ensure complete privacy (I wonder why the elite build underground???)

4. Nope. We live in "utter science fiction" TODAY. We all, including yourself, are guity of reading "utter science fiction" and then developing that which we imagine. To quote the Masons/Mayans/Essenes: All existed in thought first.

We imagined it -- that which we imagined is made manifest.

5. "easier" does NOT mean accessible -- Sure it may be easy to get an education at an extremely high level, assuming you have the -rereqs "BUILD MORE PYLONS" -- yeah - tell some unknown genius from rural wherever that education is easy... that's different than ACCESS GRANTED to said education.

You're an accomplished, privileged, educated, great person... so why cant the gulley-dwarf pull himself up buy-his-mud-straps? You had to SAVE $ in the 80s? Where did you get such to save??? How did you eat if you were instead saving????

(Poor people, without access to resources, cannot even begin to understand the idea of "saving" when they cant defer EATING to save...)

---

We disagree... So, show me how the browser shall save the educational aspirations to those without food, water and power.
Starting Forth
There are massive economic upheavals occurring right now, and we as a society have decided that most people get to live a hardscrabble existence where an unexpected $500 expense will ruin a person or family financially.

This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.
It sounds like municipalities could use a "311" app or webpage where people could do things like share their current location with the police and check for information related to their precise location.
It makes me sad that organizations like the BC Gov't bend and over and take whatever crap Oracle decides to throw at them. The amount of money and developer effort that is spent on Oracle is staggering. All because 'no one gets fired for choosing Oracle'. They are blight on the industry.
While it's pretty clear that Oracle acquired Sun in the hope of suing Google, it's also obvious to anyone who's been following the industry that Oracle has been doing an excellent job with Java.

When Oracle acquired Sun, Java had been stagnating without seeing any major version for five years.

In the four years following the acquisition, Oracle released two major versions of Java, including some very long awaited (and tricky to implement) features.
Nice one :)

https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ -->

“A Forth to be reckoned with…”

—Leo Brodie, Author

#Forth #Lisp
One with a single AI in place of Stalin and every non-prisoner?
Oh, that's an easy one. They want to get some of Snapchat's market share.
Where Opportunity Knocks
Don't underestimate the number of desktops used in business enterprises.

I'm currently developing a product in a Windows environment. We're trapped in Windows for historical reasons- the first draft of the codebase 10 years ago was for Windows, and even just a few years later there was already too much momentum for the guys who tried to do a *nix port to make any headway.

I've been in meetings with business partners where we pushed for an upgrade to Win10, only to hear that they're so risk-averse to upgrading that some of their systems are still XP.

I do agree desktop OS feels like a race to the bottom- I can't believe, given the resources available on modern hardware, that windows 2000 remains my favorite MS OS, with both win7 and 10 unable to replicate its stability and core competency of being good at just running what I asked it to run.

However, I think offices and commercial applications are going to continue to lean heavily on desktop OS-es for decades to come.
For posting the dirty laundry anonymously on HN?
>Common advice is "learn to be happy with what you have", but that will never work if your dream is to do something Great, for future generations to remember -- to not throw away your shot. reading about all the people who started doing interesting things only in their 30's and forward, or those who reinvented themselves at some point in their lives and went on to be famous only on their second (or third) wind.

You've mentioned fame and being remembered by others. Is your main desire to do things or to be celebrated for having done things? Which one of those scenarios appears in your mind when you fantasize about your future? The answer to this question can sometimes be the difference between a miserable life and a happy one.
Falcons are held down at full throttle for three seconds prior to launch, to ensure that everything is working perfectly before letting go. (They've aborted during this period in the past, although that was a long while ago.) As far as I know, this is unique among launch vehicles. I presume (but do not know for certain) that they will do the same for the heavy.
From the basic energy conservation considerations, it is clear how much heat is produced by the AC - the same amount that it consumes from the power grid. There is no other place that energy can go to, and there's no additional energy that can be converted to heat. So if your AC consumed 1kWh, that's 1kWh of heat that was dissipated. It doesn't matter what's inside the AC, conservation of energy works the same way. BTW the same would be true for any device that consumes 1kWh, unless it creates mass (very uncommon for household devices).
We wouldn't want the programmer to spend too much money/time on fixing errors. After all, it's not like people would die if there's an error in the missile software: http://www.gao.gov/mobile/products/IMTEC-92-26

Not to mention they added even more HW to work around the leaks. No wonder those projects always run over budget.
I assume that it is
>"After WW2, people didn't consider taste very important; only appearance, size, cost, and maybe nutritional value mattered, so lots of tasteless vegetables were bred."

Do you have a citation for or more info about this? Were genetically modified tomatoes introduced after the war? I would have thought that came much later with the rise of Monsanto[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavr_Savr
Missing (2015) tag.

It's easy to read this as another shitty "millennial are ruining X" article that piles anecdotes on top of popular stereotypes, though it is maybe worth noting that marriage rates really are declining pretty quickly and consistently [0].

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...
Curated List of Coding Music
Alright, let's have the periodic bout of Oracle bashing, we all know it is well-deserved.

But allow me a bit of devil's advocate playacting.

There are some incontrovertible facts: as fun as it could have been for employees to work there, Sun wasn't making enough money, so it died; and as shit as Oracle can be for employees (and boy do I know that as an ex-O), they are still there squeezing out cash for Larry (and for Wall Street) on command.

Oracle is the ugly side of the market, but you'll never have a market without an ugly side. It takes skills to walk the tightrope between hard realities and "being fun geeks", and sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy involved. Oracle just don't care, they are out for the dollar and they don't really hide it. At least with them you know where you stand from day 1.
The correct answer is most likely languish in poverty at the margins of society.
This sounds negative from an America-centric view. Seen globally, poverty has plummeted and countries have become more equal. If you care about people suffering, the cleaner at Apple is probably much better off than the farmer in China who could easily be dead from famine by now if it wasn't for the global economy - driven by companies like Apple.

It may also be misleading to compare a contractor cleaner today to an employee cleaner 30 years ago. I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and seen as lower status than it was in the past? Maybe someone who's a cleaner today would have been unemployed in the 1980s? In that case, the article is comparing lower socioeconomic status (SES) people to higher SES people and complaining that the lower one is worse off, which is a tautology.
I was referring to public schooling in general, not racial integration specifically. Integration among social classes is arguably getting worse now. You only go to school with the kids of bank vice presidents if you can afford to live in the same neighborhood.
I am 34 year old male, Baltimore, MD. Read the article.
I feel sorry for the both parties.
By the time they reach 30, they will be cynical fuckers who don't understand what is family is for. It is impossible to have sex with different women(man) every week and not become cynical to the point, you don't give a damn.
As another Oracle anecdote, a family member worked for IBM (this was about 15 years ago) as a software engineer and then as (what is now called) a sales engineer/technical consultant, where he'd travel to client sites and demo IBM products, answer technical questions, etc.

He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.

IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company was.
Canadian debit cards run on the Interac system. Generally, they have neither Visa nor Mastercard logos and different numbers. Some don't even have expiration dates because of chip & PIN. This is changing with some banks offering debit cards that can be used online through the credit card networks.

Canadian debit cards would generally not be accepted if they're asking for Visa/Mastercard/Amex.
There was an excellent response to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/26/...