skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you referring to the lack of value types? Or is there some more fundamental problem?
Speaking for Elixir, a few notes:

I rarely find myself using if/else statements and I definitely avoid 'unless'.

One of the 'Rubyisms' I really disliked was the optional parentheses for method calls. While these are still optional for good reason, in practice this is no longer the case. The formatter will add parentheses and IIRC the compiler will give you a stern lecture too.

Obviously taste is subjective, but I do agree it matters.

I'd say if the Ruby-like syntax is what keeps you from trying Elixir, remember that's it's only skin deep and at least for me, the bad stuff is not really there compared to Ruby.

Furthermore, the advantages of having a functional and 'lispy'/homoiconic language that doesn't look like my bathroom floor after clipping my toenails is worth any remaining 'niggles' like the begin/end thing, or optional [] in the last parameter of a function call, etc. (which just like the optional parentheses is there for a very good reason).
That video is so cringy.
How to pronounce SQL properly? S-Q-L or Sequel?
Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page-pop-u...

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/in-page-pop-up-rep...

(both for reporting such pop-ups - the blocking hasn't been implemented yet.)
Jack Ma Original Sales Pitch
Please publish it as a Firefox addon!
Talenthon   closed   token   sale   is   live
Late 90s floppies and drives were definitely not as good as early 90s and 80s floppies.
The Free Software Foundation has some details on this[1]. This used to come up with the video player VLC, but they seem to have relicenced it, and it's now possible.[2]

I've heard one reason is that the App Store requires users to agree to additional usage restrictions, which the GPL forbids distributors (in this case Apple) from applying.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
[2] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
It's sad that this is needed.
Google Maps absolutely has this as well.
> Closure & timer – a deadly combo

In practice you can avoid this problem if your function wrapping a timer is not a method and the callback of the timer is a recursive call to the very function wrapping the timer. In that case there is no object to access to get to the timer's function and secondly the this function never nullifies or removes from garbage collection until the last timer is called.

> setImmediate over setTimeout(fn,0)

Yes, agreed, but I wouldn't ever run timers in a loop to achieve parallel asynchronicity. I would use native Node methods to achieve this. I would however use timers to achieve sequential asynchronicity, also known as polling, which is where setTimeout would be beneficial. Sequential operations likely to always be slower than parallel operations, but sometimes you only just need intermittent delays.

I agree that these recommendations in the article are really good ideas.
It happened last week in Sri Lanka too. Although the government was quick to block FB i think 3 muslims died.
Am I the only one that finds these unprotected rotating blades unsettlingly dangerous?
Yep, try/catch is optimized since node v8.

The biggest takeaway from the latest batch of optimizations I read about is this:

Write idiomatic JavaScript code!

Secondly:

Just because you're working with a dynamic language doesn't mean you should abuse it. Don't write functions with weirdly changing parameter arities, or dynamically change the types of variables.

Finally:

These things are all hints and micro-optimizations by themselves. Don't prematurely optimize at the cost of readability and maintenance. Profile and only fix things that need fixing!
Another discussion on KittyHawk here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573676
As soon as it gets mentioned to make a point, it incites a completely orthogonal discussion about what it means, its validity, socioeconomic bias, racial bias, etc
One of the things I noticed about living in China is the noise difference due to the illegality of riding petrol motorcycles in the cities. It’s a really nice change. Too bad people beep their car horns constantly.
It has actually been considered.

I'll bring it up again. Personally I don't see why not!
Is INFINITY the new MOON?
I hope you manage to reduce your hours until your son is old enough to remember whether you were there or not.
> Avoid O(n), try O(1)

Be careful with this, as dictionaries are not really O(1), in the worst case, it can be actually O(n). When your code heavily evolves around the 'fact' that it's O(1) try to make a version with a simple array iteration and compare which is faster.
Xaiomi note 5 pro और mi tv4 कुछ ही सेकंड ऑउट ऑफ स्टॉक यह है कारण
You're focusing on the theoretical fields while conveniently ignoring the doctors, engineers, pharmacists, chemists, biologists, architects, etc.

All of whom spend all of their degree on practical, applied learning. And have done for decades/centuries.

If you then want to go into research in those fields you do a PhD. The vast majority of their graduates go into industry.

And of course, the vast majority of CS students go into industry, just woefully under-prepared, unlike other disciplines.

There's no reason for CS to stay theoretical only. The field of computer science/engineering/making/whatever you want to call it doesn't need loads of researchers, it needs loads of practical, professionally trained, programmers.

The ridiculous defence that it's computer science not engineering is so over and dead and that ship sailed decades ago. It's just a name. Just like a PhD, a Doctor of Philosophy, in History doesn't make you an expert in Philosophy, it's just a name.
anti-gravity will come about by necessity, until we have flying taxis we might not need it (that much)
Works fine on chrome, but it seems too fast on firefox.
Takeoff, in particular (as you have to build up kinetic and potential energy). For landing, you could glide in without thrust.
Is this about actual popups, new windows with their own browser chrome, or about modals? The graphics in the article reflect modals.

If Mozilla really wanted to block actual popups could do so directly by directly removing the userland functionality spawns a new browser window.
It's also really strange (to me) how no PHP frameworks or CMS made the cut.
National Geographic Acknowledges Past Racist Coverage
I believe a good rule of thumb is that looping over an array will generally be faster than using a hash map until you have around ~1,000 items.

Very approximate and dependent on the case obviously, but I always find it surprising how far you can go with just a simple array.
GDPR in 6 minutes
Well if the deity would reveal its message to us then the theory would be validated.

Maybe in the digits of Pi as in the book CONTACT

Or perhaps... :)
I think this is true because they hold a reference in window.
I don't see the relevance on knowing Leslie Lamport to learn about TLA+ - what is the matter? One thing has nothing to do with the other...
Would be valuable to learn that he dresses like a clown or like indiana jones in conferences and my preference on learning TLA?
WordPress is up there at 16%
10 Czech startups to watch in 2018
No. That's one reason why I much prefer the Volocopter (where the rotating blades are high above you, like in a conventional helicopter) to the eHang 184, where they seem to be aimed at your kneecaps.
What does it have to do with Hacker News?
“We will have to pay a painful price in the next 3 to 5 years, it is the only way we can succeed.”
Cool and impossible to apply to real world projects due to budget or deadlines.
Unboxing and Setting Up the Samsung H890 Monitor with a MacBook Pro
Thank you for pointing this out. I don't see the relevance myself.
yesterday I came across a YouTube video with 1M views where the expulsion of white farmers from South Africa was demanded. while they might have a point, the language in the comment section was so harsh that it cried for some form of moderation.
FYI: Blank page (with title text) in Firefox (58.0.2, 64-bit, Windows).
Have you ever seen relatives fighting over inheritance? It's quite ugly. I consider myself lucky to be an only child.

Winning the lottery is even worse. I'm glad that woman managed to protect her identity.
Whhy is the salary for F# developers high?
Actual popups not spawned from user interaction have been blocked for like the past 10 years though
Ah, thankyou for fixing session restore. For years this was a really expensive (although useful) feature that caused huge disk write pressure. I used to have to move the Firefox directory to a ramdisk in order to have a usable system.
I am yet to use InteliJ professionally, specially given that it requires more beefy computers than Eclipse.

Indexing that one cannot turn off unless laptop mode is enabled, spinning the HDD all the time, really?

Also none of our customers IT teams allows InteliJ on their leased hardware/VMs to external partners.

The exception being Android Studio.
I wonder if (or how) one should take population into account, too. We might figure that a majority of the people read only threads that are on the frontpage, so, if the number of people on HN has doubled, then each thread will get viewed by 2x as many people, and, if the new crowd has the same likelihood of voting on each comment as the old crowd, then you'd expect 2x as many votes, assuming no change in comment quality. Instead you might want "votes per comment, divided by number of users".

Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments.

Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down.

The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".
How to reduce SaaS customer churn
Why is Facebook to blame here exactly? I'm not a fan of the company at all, but, as I've said in earlier topics on more of less the same thing, I don't think it's fair to hold them responsible for what people post on there more than it is to hold internet providers responsible for people using their connections for the same thing.
Tuples are useful when the types are different, in that case a dictionary or list doesn't work since a list(dog, fish) will be of type list<animal>, while a tuple (dog, fish) will be Tuple2<Dog, Fish>.
I'll say this again:

We, as a society, across multiple governments and now the UN, with ample public support, are dragging Google and Facebook into the role of judge and jury of what is or isn't acceptable speech.

They may well eventually settle into that role, and come to like it.

I understand that the volume of information grew much faster than the traditional legal avenues for taking down illegal speech. And we're scrambling for a quick fix. But this fix may prove worse in the long run than the problem it fixes. These organizations may be relatively enlightened today, but there's no guarantee they'll continue to be 30 years from now.
Steve got it right. I'll clarify nevertheless: Rust and computer architecture (caveats apply) are (IMHO) very good subjects to be taught in tandem, as Rust tries very hard to provide safety features and high level abstractions that are impossible to implement in general, but quite possible in special, if very common, cases. Seeing where it is possible and where it's not and why should be an eye-opening experience.

The operative word here is actually 'taught' - I think it's just too much stuff to internalize to be able to read a few tutorials and get it. It's a topic for multiple semesters of structured teaching going together with lots (lots!) of practical excercises. In that sense, it's easier to be taught if you don't know anything about programming than if you have a wrong mental model of how programming languages work, because you have to unlearn it first or open your mind in some other way for a different way of doing things. (The post that I was replying to asked why would you want four different string types - and you actually need at least six to interact with C libs and the OS...)
The comment you are replying to becomes more valid the larger the subreddit regardless of its subject. You wouldn't think subreddits like javascript and programming would be hotbeds of rampant emotional insecurity fueled by deep echo chambers, but they certainly are.
Classified Clone Script – Build an Outstanding Business
Well, they did that the moment non-tech people started pushing for slack, and the decisions to adopt this was no longer in the techies hands.

The company I currently work for was very hesitant of adopting it, and they only did the moment our sales people started asking for it. And as a productivity tool it's great, but there is obviously a lock-in.
The Steam integration is nice if you have a couple of other people who also play these games because you get to compare your best with their best.

Personally I managed to keep up with the global optimums early on in the shenzhen campaign but as it went on my solutions were progressively worse than the population. (Or least the portion of it left still completing those puzzles.)

The personal satisfaction is still the main driver of course, I think having the base binary "solved or not" solution is a good way to gate progression as you can choose to optimize as you go through or do a success pass and then revisit for optimisations which suits different play styles. (Personally I like to optimize as I go).
To reduce noise you could shoot something with extremely noisy electric ducted fans out of a big tube (tower), and get it to land into another big tube elsewhere.

By the time the vehicle has left the tube it's high enough where noise at ground level cannot be heard.

Something with blades could also carry less juice (or none) and glide to its destination.
It's an easy thing to do in JS, it happens if you forget the `var`.
There were massacres before Facebook, and there will still be after it. As much as I dislike Facebook, they are just a platform and if they weren't here, another one will take their place so it's a bit weird the UN investigator would blame them directly. Ultimately people, not FB, are responsible for what they do, and for being too easily manipulated by online propaganda.
Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad
My sister ordered me a copy of that book on Amazon for my birthday in mid-2016. Then she was surprised that it was a pre-order and I wouldn't get it until October.

It still isn't done. Like a good wine I guess.
Agree with the premise of all that you say.

Perhaps I'm nitpicking but its worth noting that Haast Pass was opened in '65 and Dunedin to Queenstown takes 3.5 hrs without breaking the speed limit.

But yeah, flying cars would be a boon for many parts of Nuw Zulund
I'm not opposed to unicode in source code, but we do put all string literals in external files, by using gettext.

Your example would be:

print(_("Hello World!"))

And then a zh.po file with:

#: file.py:1
msgid "Hello World!"
msgstr "你好，世界！"
I agree that tools should be better, but i believe that "just use good tools" might not be a viable solution for the parent.
How Can Popular Apps Benefit from Integrating Blockchain Technology
What do all the context transformation lines do in this example? It seems to work just as well with clearRect on its own.
Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".
There are two kinds of people who use real names on FB: those who never post offensive content anyway (the vast majority), and those who simply don’t care if offensive content is associated with their real identity (a small minority).

Those who post offensive content and do care, find it completely trivial to get a fake name. FB’s enforcement of their policy is basically nonexistent. This is the second-biggest group of users.
Not joking at all, I assure you! Primary use case is for education/training materials where a flat or prescribed style is not desirable, and also because despite my girlfriend being an artist I have no ability there whatsoever and this has just removed a whole bunch of fear about presenting polygons.
How about just make a time machine and stop the Netscape from creating JS. I think it was a mistake adding a client side language to the web standards.
Two unrelated remarks:

I'm surprised that Elixir was the 6th most loved language last year and disappeared this time, while Erlang gained some points. Was it even in the survey?

Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.
> there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas

What do you think a "safe space" is? If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

And this is the whole problem with naive free speech advocacy. Unrestricted free speech is not possible anymore than unrestricted freedom in general is possible. People cannot possibly hear every single person's viewpoint, so some people will always be denied a platform to speak to some other people.

The question is how best to structure our societal discourse. What values are important, and how do we protect them? And the question needs an answer more complicated and nuanced than "free speech". Because when we don't acknowledge the complexity of this question, we become blind to the de-facto decisions that we're making about which speech to prioritise.
Building your own Startup: Creating a mobile app for healthy living [Audio]
Try/catch point is an in-general thing. Irrespective of language. Always better to handle errors by yourself.

I was not aware of the browser deprecation of Shared array buffer. But this (or something like this) is a part of the ECMA proposal which is in stage 4. https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem

I said using forEach (or in-builts) are always a good practice. Now like you have to. For an example, if you have an array with no holes in it, for is better performant then forEach.
Raising a New Generation of Team Members
Is it possible to compile algorithms from PlusCal to a traditional programming language? That way you could have a provable subcore of algorithms in your actual software project, and just autogenerate the code for the algorithms, instead of going manually from proven algorithm to hand-written implementation.
UN is to blame for keeping religion alive.
It does. OP is saying that “Java Millenium” is an error.
I have had my dinner and a wonderful dinner it was too - my wife is a brilliant cook. She pours love into every meal and it shows in the outcome.

So, with that out of the way, The fundamental equations all have simplifying assumptions. Even the equations of GR and QM are based on simplifying assumptions. Otherwise, you wouldn't have various scientists disputing their veracity.

I have copies of a certain portion of some work done in the 1960's which look at the assumptions made for the development of QM. The particular author quite clearly demonstrates the various assumptions made in the development of QM. In his case, he removed some of those assumptions and redeveloped the various models. He came up with a different formulation. I have over the years tried to have a good look at the work in question to see if there is things that can be engineered from the work.

There is a certain level of mathematics that I am still trying to wrap my mind about. It is used in both models (QM and his). From my perspective, it does away with the strong force as unnecessary by making a modification to electromagnetic theory and it gives what you see in experimental results.

Does it have merit, I don't know. But I am happy to put it on the same footing as QM as a possible explanation of what we see.

There is a model that also does away with gravity as a separate force. The model in question formulates gravity as a residual effect of electromagnetic theory. Does it have merit. Again, I am putting it on a similar footing. My attempts to use a CAS have only been partially successful as I need to understand a bit more about Maxima first and what I can do with it.

For me, these are ongoing interests (among many) which I dabble in when I have time on my hands. I am looking at one paper that does an analysis of SR and as yet I have not finished studying this paper. The author's main conjecture is that SR only works because Einstein made some simplifying assumptions by which SR then gets the measured results. His conjecture is that if those assumptions are not made then SR gives the wrong results. Does it have merit, I can't say at this point. It again hinges on whether or not I can get the work into Maxima. For the same reasons above, I only look at this when I have time on my hands.

Many people assume that the E = mc2 is a specific formulation of Einstein's work. Yet in my engineering undergraduate days in the late 1970's, the same formula was developed directing from Classical Electromagnetic Theory with no recourse to anything that Einstein did. But even here, it is not a simple equation that is correct, you have to know what the E represents and what the m represents. It is context sensitive and you have to know what the assumptions are.
Two runways, at A and B, require less space than a road from A to B, though, I'd think.
Money Mom: How Can I Save More Money?