skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are not "Rules of Programming", but are excellent "Guidelines for Performance". Having 30yrs under my belt I have come to all the same conclusions as Rob Pike over my years, so these are very deserving of some serious contemplation for those with < 10yrs experience.

In my current job we have lots of large and often 'sparsely populated' objects which means basically you can never count on any of the properties you were hoping would be present will actually be present. This means the data objects are essentially useless (at least for knowing what data you have to work with as you are writing code), and violate Pike's rules mentioned about data object design being critically important. In the modern world the younger generation of developers thinks "functional programming is great, and OOP (inheritance, etc) is obsolete", and only after 20yrs of coding they look back and eventually realize OOP had it right all along.

In architectures with massive numbers of sparsely populated objects only the guy who originally wrote any given function will be able to understand it, and everyone else who tries to work in the code is pretty much screwed.
> You can also make a typo when all you need is a package name

"packagename" instead of a full URL is quite a difference. And you are not addressing the other risks.

> On the other hand, with a URL, you can actually inspect the code directly

You can do that with most package managers as they show you the upstream URL.

Expecting every developer and every system engineer to verify every package and every dependency they install is not "just a tradeoff". It's simply impossible.

> since most package managers eventually resolve packages to a URL somewhere, the issues you mention are probably present in other package managers

Some check for the SSL certificate, some use package signing (e.g. APT). Also if the pypi domain expires everybody will know, unlike a random library.
Only 10 have been made and all have been sold for some exorbant amount, so mostly it’s genuinely motivated coverage of some cool tech.
From this article:

"The view of Thoreau as a hypocritical jerk is alive and well. In an article about Walden in The New Yorker (October 19, 2015), Kathryn Schulz works herself into a froth of indignation as she denounces him for his “hypocrisy, his sanctimony, his dour asceticism, and his scorn,” claiming, as many others before her have, that “he was as parochial as he was egotistical.” Thoreau does Schulz one better in Walden, where he writes: “I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.”"
Just prop 13. If a less well off Europe can handle all 3 so can the richest state in the richest country.
Can we not just have the law changed and buy them all out? Like ending slavery.
Police in Catalonia hunt for hidden ballot boxes in bid to foil referendum
8 platters? Seems like it might be extra loud...

Speaking of which.. what is a good hard drive that is above 1tb that is extra loud? I want my kids to grow up with a loud hard drive just like I did....
"Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."

This seems to follow from Curry-Howard isomorphism.
I barely trust most car companies to build a radio. What makes them think I will trust them to build an autonomous car?
Huh? If you're selling an information product, then you can charge for the information. I.e. if the information you produced/collected is better, better organized or more convenient than what you and I can find searching hours on the internet. That has value, a lot of value, and you can, and should charge for it.

The problem with academic publishers is that they don't do any of the above. The information isn't even really theirs! That's why their product is essentially worthless...
> the probably largest innovation horology over the past couple of hundred years

There was this little thing called the quartz revolution though :) Just because it turned out you can make really cheap watches with it doesn't make it less of an innovation.

But limiting the field down to mechanical watches, there is also Seiko's springdrive which manages to combine the durability of mechanical watches whilst approaching the accuracy of quartz watches by using a complete new method of escapement.

Co-ax movements are surely a worthy innovation, but I wouldn't want to claim it was the most significant horological innovation of the last few centuries.
There's nothing like finding out which of your friends and coworkers are competitive assholes like going out with a wiffle ball. And thanks to this article, now I know that scuffing it really does do something. BRB, gotta rough up some wiffle balls and throw BP to my kid.
Thank you. It was an embarrassingly badly written article, not to even define the basic terms.
I'd hardly call it anything close to a "disaster"
There's one basic question I couldn't figure out from the article. Where is the spring that you wind up and that stores the "power reserve of about 60 hours"? Is it part of the silicon? Or is it external? I figured out that the three crescent-shaped parts are springy ("flex laterally to provide a restoring force as the oscillator vibrates through six degrees of amplitude"), but it doesn't look like there's anything else that could stretch/relax over 60 hours. My sense of intuition is useless, of course, at this scale and with these materials.
> A lot of people say that degrees do a poor job of preparing people for development jobs.

Because IT is a craft, and universities are an not appropriate environment
to teach craft, which is completely opposite to what companies are expecting.

Craft is best learned while doing the actual job on actual product, so you
need real production lines, machines, and tools -- and somewhat modern at
that. All these are too expensive (in money and man power, both in setting up
and maintaining) to be kept without them earning money (producing), and an
university would need many of them for different degrees. It's just too
costly and too far from how university works and should work (science!
research!).

Note that a university has some traits that a normal work doesn't have. For
instance, you won't learn much of the theory behind the craft, nor would you
have a chance to wet your toe in an unrelated specialization of your field.
It's valuable to have both, university degrees and craft training, it's just
they're two different things and IT industry doesn't carry out one of them and
expects the other to fill the gap.
Looks like my info is a bit out of date. Thanks for the link!
QR Droid worked fine.

So did Google Goggles.
I think #5, which is probably going to be thought of as great wisdom for our age, is secretly an empty tautology. That is, my amateurish work in schemas and validating data structures and type systems has led me to think that there is a somewhat hard-to-see but extremely-important bijection between data structures and the control structures that consume them. (In many ways this is theoretically a non-issue as there are Church and Scott encodings of those data structures, but I think it also extends lists to for-loops and not just folds.) Seen that way it's really just saying "the most important part of the algorithm is figuring out the right basic control structures to build the algorithm out of." Well, yeah, that's what programming is.
1. Go to the library of a public university

2. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work.

3. Profit!!!

Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step 2 was not upload to scihub.

Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.
Oh! Could you show the relevant post/source from webkit for this?

After reading the webkit blog post on ITP I had no idea they changed this, but yeah, they are probably going to anyway if haven't yet. Otherwise it'd be too easy game this.
How to Edit a Proposal After Sending It to a Client
The people who complain about it seem to be owners who just complain because complaining is free and any they are against increase whatsoever: http://www.workingwa.org/sky-aloft/2015/tom-douglas
Haha, awesome. Since the tourbillon spring mechanism seems to be constantly rotated with the gyro version, I wonder if there is another way to mechanically keep the tourbillon always level?
TO ABOLISH THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: ON a CENTURY OF REFORMIST RHETORIC
oblig. Bikes need road infrastructure, or at the very least, a path cleared of trees/underbrush (though less efficient). Condors don't.
An Ode to Acts of Kindness O the NY Subway
There never was a roadmap for building that radio.
I was thinking that wheeled locomotion is still much easier than legged locomotion, artificial arms, grasping and fine motor manipulation. Robots still can't compare to a dexterous human, but a SDC is arguably a good driver.
Yep. It's trivial to download the preview files on Bandcamp - view source, look for the URLs starting popplers5.bandcamp.com - but nobody does, because you'd have to be a bit of a dick. And Bandcamp takes only 15% at most, the rest is passed straight to the artist/label.
Zero marginal cost doesn't imply that the product or service in question has no value. Rather, it implies that producing has no value to the firm. But it can still have value to potential consumers.

As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.
As ARM Research architect, Jonathan Beard describes it, the way systems work now is a lot like ordering a tiny watch battery online and having it delivered in a box that could fit something an order of magnitude larger and with a lot of unnecessary packaging around it to account for the extra space

Seems that's how most stuff we order online IS delivered. I can see the point, but maybe "unnecessary" is more a matter of perspective?
> a way to prevent random connections from having keyboard access if I were to forget to unplug

Pretty sure that already exists, at least on Android. InputStick lets you set up a pre-shared AES Key and pairing PIN that you need in order to connect to the device.
The rule makes a lot of sense but most of the articles I found completely ignore if this includes systems like GitHub or Bitbucket. Technically you can create a Pull Request based on the branch yet no-one is actually "using" it. Would you say the rule also applies to such a branch?
Neat!
The great thing about docco is that it takes the comments right from the source and creates that page out of it. So you have both a pretty website and the same documentation directly in the code.
Yes, the risk is much higher than the cost. From the article:

> The company's internal review of the incident continued. Upon discovering a vulnerability in the Apache Struts web application framework as the initial attack vector, Equifax patched the affected web application before bringing it back online.

That bullet point lies between the "July 30th" and "August 2nd" bullet points. Based on that timeline, the vulnerability took days to patch.
It looks like the guys at WPEngine have written an eBook about scaling WordPress if you want to check it out: https://wpengine.com/resources/scaling-wordpress-high-traffi...
>the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.

The problem with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful.

Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs.

But at that point you could legitimately ask whether it's programming at all or just configuration and what was actually achieved compared to the status quo.
Most non-technical people I know have trouble with "simple" undo-redo and copy-paste ; this would only make it harder for them.
Show HN: Script to install recent python versions. Verified on .deb based OSs
The mathematical world
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15258058
When you say society always executes poorly, what alternative social reality are you comparing it with?
Download FileMaker Pro 16 Advanced and License Keys {Mac OS X}
There's some debate about that. Knuth at one point (in Literate Programming) attributes it to Hoare, and Hoare later attributes it to Knuth.
> I also changed how I work: no sitting, ever. Laying or standing

Do you work remotely? I assume laying isn't an option in an office. Even standing, it may be frowned upon in more conservative work places.
Is silicon-material manufacturing now within reach of industries other than IC manufacturers and high-end watch manufacturers? If so, you could imagine all sorts of mechanical devices that will experience a renaissance now that they can be precisely designed and manufactured in tiny sizes and in huge numbers.

I suspect I just reinvented nanotechnology. For some reason, this watch article makes it feel much more real.
What is keyed DOM updates? Is that the equivalent of React's `key` property?

https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/lists-and-keys.html#ke...
In re: the Caddy kerfuffle

> There's nothing in the ideals of free software that prevents what the Caddy authors have done.

You're right. By coincidence, I had just gone to look at caddy after the announcement was made, which I missed, and I confess, the header in the binary turned me off for reasons I can't quite articulate. It hurt my feels a little. Some how it felt wrong.

Still, the folks who flipped out and flipped the table are out of line, in my opinion.

You're absolutely correct about selling Free software. I wish more people did it. Matt Holt and co. should get money for their hard work. I'm tooling up a thing right now and I'll probably use and pay for Caddy.

Now that they removed the header that decision is much easier for me personally, but my emotional response wasn't due to a violation of Free Software principles (after all you could compile your own binary!) It had more to due with squishy, unquantifiable things that don't make a lot of sense when you dredge them up and look at them in the light of day.
Yes, even bacteria should be conscious. Cells have a so called "gene regulatory network" that is analogous to a neural network where 'neurons' are genes and signals are chemical molecules. It has as many 'neurons' as genes. Every cell has such a dynamic sensing, acting and learning system allowing it to adapt to the exterior and cooperate or fight.

In complex organisms, gene regulatory networks coordinate the development of the body and internal organs. So it has the complexity necessary for consciousness, it's just a small size chemical-based consciousness, but the main ingredients are present - sensing, acting, learning and a goal - to maximize its own life and replicate, and let's not forget the most essential one - it is part of the world, which guides its evolution.
I'm not a lawyer, but I did work on one of the previous Transparency Reports[1]. From our most recent one:

> Between July and December 2016, Dropbox did not comply with any non-US government legal process unless issued by a US court as a result of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process.

... if that helps answer what you're getting at :)

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/transparency/reports
Can We Quantify Machine Consciousness?
> the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.

The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet what they actually want to do (mostly because you think you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).
Counting Road Traffic Capacity with Computer Vision
Octave tries to make every Matlab program run unmodified. A difficult goal, but that is the goal.

Scilab doesn't try that exactly. They have their own syntax and some compatibility converter from Matlab code to Scilab code, but I don't thik it's as complete as Octave's.

As a sibling comment mentions, Scilab has Xcos which tries to be a modelling helper like Simulink and Octave has nothing comparable.
That doesn't look more expensive than consultant, looks less. That's what I'm saying, if anything I think they may have underpriced that cost. That's way cheaper than most support options I've seen.
This comment seriously violates the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please stop and re-read them.
IPython 5.5 and 6.2, Jupyter Notebook 5.1 released
They tend to be more tricky to combine than frameworks.
It's 2017 and we still can't distribute software or manage libraries. For some reason content addressability based on hashes for libraries has never occurred to anyone.
from Paul Graham's Essay "Mind the Gap" http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

Another approach would be to ask, if you were going back to the year x in a time machine, how much would you have to spend on trade goods to make your fortune? For example, if you were going back to 1970 it would certainly be less than $500, because the processing power you can get for $500 today would have been worth at least $150 million in 1970. The function goes asymptotic fairly quickly, because for times over a hundred years or so you could get all you needed in present-day trash. In 1800 an empty plastic drink bottle with a screw top would have seemed a miracle of workmanship.
Main features added to IPython:

- Show function signature in the terminal while completing.

- Assignments can trigger the display mechanism.

- IPdb can be called recursively.

- Support for system-wide configuration.

- Built-in support for Progress Bar.

More details here:

http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/whatsnew/version6.ht...

Main features added to Jupyter Notebooks:

- Internationalization.

- Shutdown server from command-line.

More details here:

https://medium.com/jupyter-blog/jupyter-notebook-5-1-0-ddc8b...
http://qmlweb.github.io/
Try this one: http://www.dafont.com/dec-terminal-modern.font
Pirate Bay uses JavaScript on page for cryptocurrency mining
I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.
Right, but their average pay isn't nearly as good as the business owner's. Most restaurant workers live paycheck to paycheck, have no healthcare, and no leverage. While there is risk involved in being an owner, it's still a much better position to be in than a minimum-wage worker.

It's also a matter of a return on capital vs return on labor. Business ownership can grow exponentially as profits are reinvested. For the worker, though, returns are linear based on hours work. And since they mostly live paycheck to paycheck, they can't exactly invest much free cash without living with their parents or something, which many workers don't.
Then you'll get weird errors. Everyone distributes the whole universe because it just works. Docker is the same idea for services.
Agreed. My experience with academic publishing is in the humanities, not sciences, but over the last 15 years I've seen the quality of editorial work go way down at publishers I worked with, and increasing burden placed on the authors to do work that should be the publisher's job like exact typesetting and layout, as the publishers do anything they can to slash staff costs. A year or two ago I did an article with an Oxford University Press publication and the copy editor mistook a Latin book title for German and offered some nonsensical change based on that. It used to be that OUP staff had such a depth of linguistic knowledge that they themselves offered valuable feedback to authors. Now it appears to be a purely mechanical (and largely "offshored") process for them of pushing text through a pipeline to produce cash from captive markets (university libraries). As their prestige and monopolies wane, these publishers have to be able to offer authors some tangible benefit.
I feel you and I went through that horror too. By what I'm about to say please know that I don't mean to diminish the severity of your injuries and pain nor do I mean to suggest any lack of diligence on your part in finding the right treatment or implying that any treatment could work for you.

I'm not going to bore you with my story except to say, looking back, I'm amazed I was able to endure such pain for so long. I cry sometimes when I remember it.

I too had to fight to get the treatment I needed to "survive". Surviving was still miserable and I was always at the mercy of my pills and my health care providers. Thank god I make good money and managed to remain employed. I don't know how the average person could have afforded to pay for everything modern medicine has to offer like I did. Scans, injections, surgery, pills, PT...

May I suggest that an expert (I mean a top doc) in traditional Chinese medicine can take you from surviving to truly living. There are some things Western medicine truly excels at and for that I am grateful. However it does have blind spots. Some of those blind spots are perfect for eastern medicine. I thought it was vodoo bullshit but I found a few providers that legitimately changed my life. Plenty eastern medicine docs were total quacks. You get that in the west because it's fairly unregulated. I was lucky to stumble upon some of the best, people who even publish.
I like the clean design of Terminus
Neglecting path dependence is the root of all evil. I mean, he’s not wrong, but maybe the answer is just that this is fucking hard. And some of his specifics are just wrong. The pen? No. It’s super useful in some areas, like drawing, but if you include it by default you get lazy developers making UI that depends on it for navigation. Apple absolutely made the right call. I’m not taking away any of his amazing contributions, but his habit of slamming every incremental bit of mainstream, at-scale tech because it doesn’t fulfill his vision (yet) is not that helpful.
If a theoretical technology that can remove that "unnecessary" waste exists wouldn't it be valid to say it is an unnecessary waste even if only in theory?
It's the IBM J9 donated to the Eclipse foundation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_J9
First to market AND have the most well known brand.
And then when you see how easy it is to make a Qt app (eg http://qmlbook.github.io/en/ch04/index.html) you start wondering why you didn't go this route sooner :p
Regarding your last sentence: Spotify may still be alive, but it's losing massive amounts of money. One example article about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/spotify-l...
After unambiguously specifying the partial ordering for the triple, its very gratifying to note how each node gets an ordinal rank in the Hasse. So you can talk about
USA > Russia ( rank 0 vs rank 1) but can't say anything about USA vs China ( both rank 0) - you can do this simply in terms of the ordinal rank and forget all about the medal tally.

A few years back, there was a data science problem to predict which startup had the best chances of exit, based on similar set of presumably unquantifiable predictors. There were some 10000 startups, and for each startup you knew who the VC's were, number of rounds of funding, valuation etc. Though it seemed quite an amorphous problem, we hit upon a very similar partial order, that made all the startup nodes fall into a Hasse and you could practically read off from top to bottom which startup would succeed and which ones would fail.

At that time, I remember thinking how you could do the same exact thing for humans too. Quantitative reductionism at its finest, sure, but when it works it's pretty amazing.
So that explains why safari almost burned my laptop to a crisp. Not cool. Don’t they make enough with porn ads.