skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a convenient explanation and you will find a lot of evidence for it, but I think it's superficial.

The real question is, why can they afford to take this approach without being outperformed by companies that use better languages and better developers?

For those of us who enjoy exploring more powerful/innovative languages, there is a convenient explanation and a not so convenient explanation.

The convenient one is that the success of these "Blub companies" is largely determined by factors unrelated to software development.

The inconvenient one is that all these interesting and powerful language features do not significantly improve software development outcomes.

I think it is remarkable that some of the companies that are on the Blub side when it comes to software development are among the most cutting edge, research oriented companies in other regards, such as AI.

Also, companies like Google can not only choose among the best candidates, they also have a lot of influence on what people learn before they even apply for a job there. So I simply don't buy the familiarity excuse, at least not for the entire workforce.

I also don't buy the large existing codebase excuse as that would apply equally to new Blub languages and new PL research based languages.

There is simply very little faith in any positive impact of PL research innovations on software development outcomes. And this lack of faith cannot be explained away by claiming that all those lacking faith are simply incompetent.

The likes of Google and Microsoft can and do hire competent PL researchers, just as they hire competent AI researchers. And they do have a massive incentive to improve software development quality and productivity.

I think the truth is that PL researchers simply haven't made the case for the effectiveness of their work.

In part because it's extremely difficult to make that case empirically. All the empirical studies I have seen suffer from huge and mostly unfixable counfounders.

But I think another reason is that PL researchers seem to largely ignore cognitive science and sociology. I haven't seen much discussion about the impact of particular PL features on developers' state of mind in any realistic context.

Nor have I seen much debate about programming languages as group communication tools or about the different roles in which people interact with code as part of a software development process. All of that is apparently considered out of scope.

And that, I think, is the reason why it is so easy for many practitioners to dismiss PL research out of hand. Even where PL research is being picked up decades later it appears more fashion driven than evidence based.
The Internet Worm of 1988
Recently a famous AI project was shut down because it was inventing its own language. Perhaps the next generation programming language and design paradigms won't come directly from humans at all.
There is a link between power structures and illegal activity. It is heartening to see this positive development where both government and communities are working together. As the article suggested, the poachers along with the entire network of supply chain [0] of illegal ivory trade should be dismantled by prosecuting all those who are involved, else this will only be a temporary gain.

After narcotics and weapons, animal trafficking is listed as the most lucrative illicit trade commodity. [1]

Countries like Tanzania should take note. The Economist reports [2] that "Every third poached elephant in Africa dies on the watch of Tanzania’s president, Jakaya Kikwete". Just two months back, Wayne Lotter, an elephant conservationist was shot dead in Tanzania [3].

The solution is not easy: "a gate-keeper state” run by corrupt politicians, with wildlife policy too heavily influenced by “prima-bwanas” – heads of international NGOS. Local people get left out. Poorer, marginal communities’ land and grazing rights get nibbled away. They have lived alongside elephants for centuries but are being neglected and excluded. Vulnerable, they succumb to the offer of money so they can live. Supporting and strengthening communities so they can manage wildlife responsibly from the bottom up, with some controlled hunting, is an argument that many wildlife experts have come to see is the only long term viable solution." [0]

0 : http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2017/01/27/book-review-iv...

1 : https://www.cfr.org/blog/lords-resistance-army-and-elephant-...

2 : https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/216312...

3 : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/17/leading-...

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/tackling-illicit-african-wi...
There seems to be a pattern of US tech getting special tax treatment from the UK. Google pays little. Amazon avoids payroll taxes by exploiting self employed. Starbucks exploits brand licensing to move profits abroad.
Well, type "f*" into Google and it's the second result ... Why Facebook is first, I have no idea.
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Imperative programming is fine imo, as long as it is done in a relatively small scope.
We actually had a nice system for that... but again: browser bugs :(

Until browsers collectively get off their asses with SVG (most of these bugs are years old in their big trackers) using React for SVGs is a good workaround.
Unforuntately JavaScript is the present and, yes, we're screwed.
It's hard to be objective on this.

A modern JavaScript engineer would point out that:

- The community is very accepting of new engineers.
- The ecosystem is huge and there are great solutions
available to many problems.
- It's easy to write consistent code while avoiding
many problems with the language if you use `eslint`,
`prettier` and `flowtype`. Tooling on the web is
excellent and rapidly improving.
- You can use one language on the back-end and front-end.
You can even use the same language to write desktop,
embedded, command-line and curses applications.
- `babel` drives the adoption of new features into the
language with greater vigor than many other languages.
- The VM is very fast due to lots of work by Google,
Mozilla, etc. There's also methods of interacting with
modules written in WebAssembly or if you're on the
back-end native modules written in Rust/C++.
- JavaScript is driving a lot of momentum for
new programming languages (Reason, Elm, PureScript, etc)
since as a transpilation target it gives you access
to many environments and libraries at the get-go.

In my opinion JavaScript in 2017 is a much better language than JavaScript in 2012. I wouldn't call it objectively good but I certainly wouldn't call it 'objectively bad'. There are many reasons to choose it beyond the syntax and semantics of the language itself, and there are effective treatments available for most of the warts it was once known for.

It's dominating because of the sheer drive within the community, and if there were award ceremonies it'd be winning 'Most Improved' year-upon-year.
To see the Int community have a special mode to disable ME simply confirms that the ME is exploited, if any further proof was needed.
This is what I'm saying: We have more context. There is theoretically nothing keeping machines doing the same kinds of analyses when given the same information.
REST APIs must be hypertext-driven: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
The sad part is that this requires a sort of herd immunity to be effective: if 85% of users are still running chrome from within the Facebook app, the added anonymity provided by this technology is (if I understand correctly) less effective at preventing tracking.
That would be a subjective definition not an objective one.

How “well” something fits is absolutely subjective. It’s a judgement call with no objective measure.
Ewww Image Optimizer Plugin
Of course you _can_ create a dependency mess in a C++ project. Package managers just make it a lot easier. My personal statistics (aka anectodal evidence) says that a typical Rust project has several dozens of direct dependencies, while a typical C/C++ project can make it with half a dozen. And those will most probably be dynamic libraries, which encourages both sides to care about API stability. Some libraries, openssl to name one, are notorious for failing to do so, but at least it is expected.
I experience somewhat frequent GPU crashes when playing Diablo3 under Wine with the integrated i3-4150 GPU, but the graphics stack recovers by itself in about a minute. I can then continue from where I left off, sans the application that crashed with it.
> I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but: Wouldn't it be trivial for someone who knows how to write Android software to monitor if an an application is accessing the audio input device?

Or even by MITMing the connection and looking at the network packets. But yes, it's not outside the realms of possibility to hook into the microphone driver on a rooted Android phone and check when it's being activated.

I'm not one to leap to Facebook's defence and if this is happening it needs to be shut down ASAP, but I suspect that there would be at least some credible evidence out there if it were indeed the case.
I'm not versed in the facebook tos, but it very well could be included. If that bothers someone they should just stop using facebook, what's so hard about it?
It's flawed because 99.999% of the time your code will work just fine. Job done. Then one day, "undefined is not a function" and your airplane falls out of the air.
Any data about this?
It prompts very different behavior, to extend the coin flip metaphor: If you could slow down time and see the flip turning bad, you could quickly withdraw your bet. Then you'd be much more likely to bet a higher fraction.
To offer online compiler for 20+ languages. We create a temporary container for each user on our servers.

Here is one of our high-traffic product:
https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/

It's used by interviewers, students, teachers who need a quick place to practice and pair-program.
Absolutely. Ublock origin scrubs every page clean of ads and trackers.

It's really not THAT hard to stay off the grid.
That's been done, and no one has found any evidence that this is happening. Hence it's status as a conspiracy theory.

As soon as you start assuming that the OS is giving the facebook app access to the microphone regardless of whether you allowed it in the settings, things start to get absurd
The SeaTac taxi lane is a different kind of thing altogether, since you just walk up and take the next taxi. It is much more convenient, and is much more logically justified, than the Uber zone, since Uber matches you to a specific driver.

Aside from the fact that the cab lane creates convenience, while the Uber area destroys it, there’s other reasons that apply to cabs and not Ubers. Cabs would just be slowly crawling through the arrivals area, hoping to get a client, and causing traffic. Ubers, in contrast, are there to find a specific passenger, just like family/friends, and have no incentive to slowly crawl through arrivals.
It's just my opinion, but there definitely is difference in favor of optional static typing. It simply adds more expressivness to language - you get free documentation standard (input,output,structures) backed in. You don't have annoying typos and you leave data manipulation computation to computer lowering programmer cognitive load. Also you can change code in editor(fastest feedback loop) without even running it(very important if there is high price for running code - ex. complicated system bootstrap, deployment, hardware).
What's wrong with TypeScript?
So many layers with a single goal: preventing the user from owning the hardware.
Triangular Love Story: Indian Army – Alexander Army – Greeks
Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
NPL: A programming language for neural networks, 3d simulation and visualization
You would confuse a big chunk of the East Coast, where "Columbia" means a city in Maryland southwest of Baltimore. If you're looking for something totally unambiguous, you can say just "DC". If you're the New York Times and likewise, you could say "the District of Columbia", but apparently their style guide prefers otherwise.
>Would there be a strong argument for simply saying Columbia?

Yes, that it would confuse most of your readers since DC is never referred to in that way, ever.
A short guide to why we should not raise UK interest rates
> Nondestructive

This is the important part, IIRC.

Example: http://diybookscanner.org/archivist/
I cut my teeth as a sysop using Wang systems - very interesting systems .. it seems there is a missing element in the history of computing and GUI's in general, when discussing the part Wang played in bringing these concepts to the masses.
There should be a mechanism such that when you click any of the elements on this website there's a small chance of a popup saying "stop reading and start doing".
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I agree, I used to use R and found it hard to google for.
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Facebook denies listening to user conversations via microphones
Internet ads are far more measurable than most other forms of advertising.

The advertiser certainly has all the data necessary to see if it's profitable or not to do those seemingly counterintuitive ad campaigns.
I can think of one: the fraction of design decisions that the language's creator, standardizers, and serious developers wish they could change but can't.
Maybe it's time to bag the stupid X86 instruction set entirely and move to a 64-bit chip that has a sane instruction set and that embraces loyalty to the end user all the way down to the metal.
Is this a common adage? I'm not sure I understand its meaning in this context.
It's not unimaginable, but the frequency of these stories should make you wonder.

I had this happen personally. Had a conversation about my work with this girl I know which ended up being mostly about project management. The girl told me later she started getting ads for project management stuff.

It's not a subject she's interested in, has ever searched for information on, and has no relevance to her job working the counter at a sandwich shop. We have no social media accounts in common and don't even talk that often.
Show HN: MirroDiffKit – Graduation from messy XCTAssertEqual messages
A surprisingly honest take on the phone. Faceid will take some revisions to get right but overall he seems to like the phone and looks forward to app developers to make use of its killer features.
For React, install the appropriate library[1] and then call the functions you need from the Fable.Helpers.React.* namespace. If you want to see a complete implementation of Fable + React in action, the canonical example is https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE-BookStore

For alert(), you'll find it in Fable.Import.Browser.window.alert()

(In case you're wondering, the Fable convention is that the Fable.Import.* namespace is used for pure JS bindings with no business code, while libraries with an actual translation layer are placed in the Fable.Helpers.* namespace.)

[1] https://www.nuget.org/packages/Fable.React/
Paired programmining in a skype call is not ideal, but it keeps me on track.
Probably the four most well-known pieces of software with end-to-end verification of functional correctness are the CertiKOS microkernel from Yale (verified in Coq), the SEL4 microkernel (verified in Isabelle), the Compcert C compiler (verified in Coq), the CakeML ML compiler (verified in Isabelle).

Stopping short of full end-to-end functional correctness, there are lot more notable examples, such as the Verve system at MSR (verified type/memory safety using Boogie), and the Bedrock system at MIT (functional correctness down to a fairly low-level IR, done in Coq), the miTLS/Everest TLS stack (protocol correctness verified in F-star, most of the way down to a C-like implementation), and the Iris project (a toolkit for verifying higher-order concurrent programs, currently being used to formalize Rust including unsafe, in Coq).

In machine-checked proof, the three biggest successes are the verification of the Odd Order Theorem (in Coq), the Four Colour Theorem (in Coq), and the Flyspeck project verifying the proof of the Kepler conjecture (in HOL).

In hardware verification, there has been a huge amount of work using ACL2 and HOL, but I don't know this space as well.

Basically, Coq and Isabelle have the most actual successes, but other things like F-star, Boogie and HOL have all worked as well.
labor has been disrupted through automation.
materials can be disrupted through better manufacturing and or new materials.
permits can be disrupted by removing or streamlining the process through regulatory changes or personal changes/increases at the Department Of Building(s).
If we look at blub engineering regarding mankind's history, impressive pieces of work were build by recurring to thousand of workers each doing his/her little thing across several years, even generations.

Yet, most likely we would use heavy construction building machines nowadays.

Niklaus Wirth admits on one of his papers that he expected developers would pick Oberon by caring about tools for quality in software engineered, but he was wrong about it.

Hoare has a similar remark on his Turing award speech.

So from my point of view it is a mix of sociology, fashion driven development and office politics.
> Well, I'd say the point of Docker is to make distributing and running something easy, reliable, and reasonably safe. Which is what is happening here.

No, that's http://flatpak.org/
Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt on Fake News, Russia, and “Info Warfare”
It's undergoing training and testing, which seems a bit dubious without any aircraft to land on it.
Not warranted. From the article: "CNTK is new and it's hard to find easy-to-use code examples and tutorials for learning by doing!"
..."except when Facebook Live and Stories are explicitly accessed by the user."
Why not a standard syntax like this:

```
/api/payments?fields=customerNumber&fields=checkNumber
```

You don't need [] to look for multiples.
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I mean, probably? Significant chunks of Rust code are already making it into Firefox.

I will say that from my relatively limited experience of Rust, it's a language to use if you're really really sure that you can't use GC. Any time you want to use a graph-like data structure (which can quite often, in some applications) you have to do a significant amount of thinking that you just don't have to do in a language with GC.

I don't mean that as a criticism of the language. Rust makes automatic non-GC memory management about as easy and flexible as it could be. But it's still a significant cognitive overhead.
Very useful directory I added it to my bookmarks a year or two ago. BTW, it would be great to have some rating for the tools.
ooo this is smashing. Adding to the list.
Jo is a tax barrister who does some pro bono work for tax fairness cases. There is more analysis on Twitter @JolyonMaugham. He seems to be alledging that the government are pressuring HMRC not to collect tax from US technology firms. A whole new meaning to the Special Relationship
s/algorically/algorithmically/
I thought it was the PC itself.
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581114
Genuinely curious; can you elaborate which benefits the C++ implementation is missing out on?
You're overlooking that Rusts "solution"(borrowing, livetimes, etc. ) is not only solving the same problem that garbage collection tries to solve. Garbage collection is "only" solving the "memory resource problem". Rusts solution is a more general solution to the "general resource problem" .. like file handles, sockets and of course memory and besides that gives you tools to never get bitten by data races. Nothing (besides memory) garbage collection is helping you with. You have to mitigate those problems still in garbage collected languages like Swift, Go, Java, Python (to name a few) and various other solutions to help with this (try with resource, with statement, immutable message passing etc.) Rust tries to give you one solution "to rule them all". Is this better, worse? Idk – nobody does, the Rust people are trying to figure this out :) Nothing is carved in stone. And if you're more productive in another language you should use it! But you can only know by figuring this out for yourself. Rust works well for me – that's no guarantee that you have the same experience. Rust is still hard to learn and one needs to question himself if the effort in learning pays out at the end – it has for me, i guess/hope ;)
The 95 Theses (1517)
Yeah, exactly. That´s what I meant. If you don´t put yourself out there, stumbling across a great opportunity becomes rather unlikely.
What I always ask myself is, if that phenomenon should really be called luck. I mean, if you´re at an event already that a lot of interesting people attend, then it´s very likely you´re gonna get to know someone "interesting". Like you´re already better than "the ones on the couch". Because I guess luck is something you don´t really get to have an influence on. Do you understand what I mean?
Sample Interview with Bengio, LeCun and Hinton, from 'DL Summit', Montreal, 2017
> Nvidia has been hostile to the linux world for as long as they existed.

Really? Weren't they the only ones who released a driver for like a decade?
Today they are almost exclusively pre-packaged candy of well known brands. They used to include a lot more home made products, like cookies, cupcakes, caramel apples, popcorn balls, rice krispy treats, etc.
> They may seem expensive at first, but they last a lot longer. No viruses. Premium build. Solid privacy guarantee etc etc.

Poor ignorant fanboy, no one is talking about price here!

> No viruses

Enjoy, https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/p.... If there are vulnerabilities, there will be someone/something exploring them.

> Premium build

You don't visit Apple forums and/or Apple support at the stores, right? If you visited you would see the gigantic mass of people with issues regarding the phone build. There's nothing premium regarding Apple build, just the price. Also, just as a reminder, the amazing screen that everyone worship is from SAMSUNG...

> Solid privacy guarantee

Company A says they are saints, well, better trust company A...

> etc etc.

Wow, there must be a LOT of other good things regarding Apple for you to put not just one, but TWO "etc", hahahahaha.
How is this different from sending SQL to a remote MysQL server? It is literally wrapping existing interface with obscure query strings in URL
IN the video he claims not to have owned a cat or talked about cats for 20 years. they chose a subject that they are certain they have, as a couple, never exchanged words on.

Explaining away doesn't explain. For an average, normal FB user, this was as scientific as they could get. It would be nice to see someone repeat the experiment with a pro-hacker type on hand and a packet sniffer ++.

There are too many people giving a company like fb, who have form on the implementation of morally and ethically dubious practices, the benefit of the doubt, all the while dismissing any and all claims of users. It looks fishy at best, and I'm not name calling, it isn't allowed on this forum, but there are a disproportionate number of FB defenders popping up wherever this story surfaces.
I find it helps starting with the most egregious issue/concern first. Otherwise your argument is merely an appeal to self-declared authority.