skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> VR will become a new creative medium [...]. Are movies and symphonies "useful"?

Watch out when comparing current typical art mediums with VR, a technology still in the property of a 2-3 big tech companies, paired with countless patents, and which costs hundreds of dollars, not including the top gaming rig that you also need to have.

Currently, if you want to convey a message, or exprime yourself creatively:
- via music, you can buy any kind of instrument off the shelf.
- via movies, you can just start with a $200 camcorder and record stuff.
In both cases, consuption can be done with any device compatible with the digital format.

right now it's not possible with VR, at the state of things.
I'd welcome an email if you'd like to have a discussion.

You can reach me at john at common-sense.com.
Within a narrow community, a little bit of "echo chamber" is worth the quality of commenting online. I'd rather get downvoted a little and have to debate my minority opinion than it be drowned out with spam and bots here.
I pay pretty close attention now days, but your warning is a good reminder. I stopped doing situps a long time ago, and stick with crunches, as situps were just uncomfortable.

I think a general "pay attention to your body's warning signs" is a good common sense rule.
I agree to an extent, but I think it's mostly an issue of branding. Consider that Japanese brands were once associated with poor quality, but as their quality improved their brands became better known.

Chinese pens have been greatly increasing in quality for a few years now. Today, I recommend the Wing Sung 698 and 608 for new fountain pen users.
It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates.

The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic.

Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators.

Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out.

I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users.

Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.
Thank you for a valuable description of ICEs.
No, even empty space, where there is not even one particle or even the thought of anything aspiring to be a particle within the defined area, will have a tiny weight.
You've changed my mind on adding special syntax for `async`, generators, and results (`?`). I previously thought it was a big mistake given that these all generalize as monads (granted, there is some ground to be covered before such an abstraction would fit in Rust).

What I hadn't considered: specialized syntax leads to better error messages for the most common cases. That's probably quite a good thing, especially since descriptive error messages make me much more productive. (Not to mention that specialized syntax also acts as a type annotation of sorts too; a common problem I have in Haskell is figuring out _which_ monad a certain `do` block is using.)
Or for some, “simulation”.
Well, this depends on your conception of simplicity. It certainly makes for a shorter explanatory sentence, but at the cost of undermining our ability to truly explain anything at all, since we cannot know whether a given result is due to the laws of nature or is a miracle--or both. And if it's a miracle, we have no reliable access to its reasons for occurring.
When you ask for BigCo to remove conspiracy theories, what you are asking for is that a small unaccountable elite decides what the truth is and deletes everything else.

This model has been shown to work fine with newspapers and other massmedia, but that's because there are competitors to jump to.
> (raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least."

Don't forget about interrupting the candidate every 5 minutes to ask about the color of a blue moon, effectively preventing him to "get in the zone".
China-Linked #APT15 used new backdoors in attack against UK Gov service provider
What is Social Selling
The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news.

The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News *

* you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
And if production is down, and you're the one under the most pressure, it's probably because you're the one who knows "production" the best.
China Demands Dalai Lama Reincarnate After Death
> whereas a good puzzle cannot be impossible to crack.

This is a very important distinction. It would be no fun if the cipher on a given cryptographer's tombstone were created with a one-time pad.
This whole thing was created because it's annoying for devs to set up Vault, but Vault is an Ops process, not a Dev process. Just use environment variables and let Ops take care of exporting them via a credential management system. Coding a specific credential management system into your app is a bad idea.
Reddit's /r/fountainpens, too. There's an IRC channel that's fairly active, but I don't have the server address in front of me.
Thanks for your input :)

Firstly, maths is just my hobby. I didn't pay much attention in my school years, but later in life I wanted to know more about maths.

I'm a typical code monkey, which does business software and hardly needs any maths, so agian maths is just my interests and I don't foresee using it in my career. I might do more maths when I retire as maths is such a broad subject, it will keep me as a hobby to the rest of my life :).

I'm taking it slow as a) I'm not in hurry, b) I want to have solid foundations in maths. I want to ensure I understand well basics and proofs and where they come from. I also do lots of exercices based on acquired knowledge. "Productivity" is not my main concern :)

Interesting thing I found maths helps me with my work indirectly. In maths we encounter problems such as "a plane flew north at 300km/h and side wind east was 30km/h. After 2h, the plane changed direction 30deg...". You need to find all data and best formulas for the problem. It's like translating customer/project owner issues to technical ones. It's fun!

I wish to progress my maths faster, but I can do only x hours a week and want to do it properly. I'm looking forward to more challenging 21st century maths!
> this approach has to come down in cost by 10× to even compete with our current vernacular architecture, let alone improve on its pricing.

I'd like to be wrong, but that seems like a kill shot to me. Not only does the new system need to be objectively competitive with the vernacular, but it needs to be so much better that it can overcome the myriad cultural and institutional inertias which have hitherto kept the vernacular locked in place.

Which is why this is a Hard Problem. I doubt that 3D printing alone can solve it. Would love to be pleasantly surprised, however.

Also, thrilled to see another superadobe shoutout on HN!
Thank you for that reference. I have not yet chased it down. If I do and find it interesting, I'll follow up here.
https://anchorcms.com/
"God" is not an explanation. You're "answering" a mystery with an even bigger mystery.

Explaining lightning with Zeus instead of electricity just raises more questions.
try train via look at the fonts at fonts.google.com :)
What questions are asked that are as divorced from being a software dev as olympic level flexibility is from being a welder? Or is this just a straw man argument?
How Capitalist Is Singapore Really?
They never embraced IRC, they just had a gateway for people still using it. This would be valid if Slack's protocol was based on IRC and they later extended it and made it incompatible with IRC. This is not the case here.
> some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

I've done this many times. Why? On some platforms (like Coursera) you retain access to the content of a course you have registered for, but that content isn't available for people who didn't register once the class is over. If I think I might ever want to view that content, my best bet is to register (there's no cost) and then have that content available when I want it.

I've also done this on platforms like Udacity where that's not the issue, because by registering I can create a curated list of courses I'm interested in possibly looking at in the future.

In my experience, the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time. Many people don't find lectures to be useful at all, but the vast majority of MOOCs focus on them. After the fifth time I'm stuck waiting for the teacher to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook.

I don't think I've ever seen a MOOC that had written content anywhere close to the quality of Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way.

Also, MOOC efforts for community building are (at least were) focused on a particular class rather than a particular subject. This doesn't lend itself well to long-term community building, especially when people are going through these courses and very different paces.

There seems to be lots of discussion about how MOOCs can be improved, but not much effort into actually trying different approaches.
I think it's a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C's support, from a practical sense.

So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being "the browser that can't play Netflix", and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn't going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.
Be careful, System.ValueTuple has a compiler requirement too.

So you are correct to say you don't need .Net 4.7, but you DO need a C# 7 compiler to use System.ValueTuple with .Net 4.5/4.6. We tried to use System.ValueTuple and it would work on VS 2017 but fails to build on VS 2015 due to compiler complaints.

We resolved this by adding the NuGet package "Microsoft.Net.Compilers" to the project. This results in a C# 7 compiler traveling with the solution, and no matter what Visual Studio/installed compiler you have it works.

This won't be a problem in the future as most project templates in Visual Studio come with Microsoft.Net.Compilers preinstalled. Only impacts older projects (such as those targeting .Net 4.5/4.6, etc).
Why embedded developers should use static code analysis
“Media” is too bland and generic. Might as well call it “Apple Content”. Yuuuuck
Ask yourself this question - "Am I doing lots of math and computationally intensive stuff"?

If so, don't use Erlang.

The corrolary is "Am I mostly passing data around, doing I/O, etc?"

If yes, Erlang is probably a reasonable choice (and a GREAT one if you're doing a lot of concurrent stuff).

So games, backend server -can- work; it just depends what it's doing. You may need to mix and match for functionality if you're doing a mix of things, and then you have to ask if it's worth the effort and translation cost if you have to jump between languages.
OK, agreed that's not the trivia I was talking about. Although honestly it sounds like you dodged a bullet, if anything your experience is even more ridiculous. Does this company make a habit of writing programs on whiteboards without any references?

It, uh, probably does help to know the language you're being interviewed for, although a good programmer in any language can almost certainly start being productive in another one within a month. A good hiring process knows this, too.
There are the basic primitives found in c/any language, but there are also synchronized{} (or synchronized (my_mutex) {}) blocks that essentially automagically handle locking/unlocking and let you just mutate around willy-nilly across threads (in that block). There are also atomics, although the syntax for using them is a bit clumsy (foo.atomicOp!"+="(7), anyone?).
There's also the OneOf NuGet package [1] which I've put to good use in a number of projects. Using `object` and `is` means you can't enforce what types get passed in, nor can you ensure that all possible types actually get handled.

[1]: https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf/
WPA3: Technical Details and Discussion
This has got me thinking recently, even the second hand market is really strong for 5-year-old mid-level GPU's. Not the sort that are useful for mining either, just the knock on impact. Also it seems to me that a 5-year-old mid-range card is more than up to playing popular games like WOW or Overwatch. I wonder if there is an opportunity for either

a) AMD to offer something mid-market for a low price and steal a load of market share back from Nvidia, while they concentrate on the $900 plus market. I suppose AMD's CPU's with onboard graphics are sort of like this.

b) A new entrant?
What tech company do I sign up for to get an interview like the one in Swordfish?
Matthew Keys released from prison after two years
They break really, really quickly. Almost half of the ones i've ridden have had something broken. And not seemingly from abuse or collisions or anything, just stuff falling apart. Bad brakes, broken shifters, snapped off seat adjusters(the metal feels soda can cheap), bits just falling off from sheered off metal, etc.
No, "God" will never be "simpler" unless you also redefine the term into something utterly incompatible with most major religions. The instant you drop a god into the mix you're presented with far more questions, and "he works in mysterious ways" is not an answer.

___

Despite it's explicitly Christian focus, I like The Screwtape Letters as a kind of cognitive psychology fable, and this part seems apropos:

> I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us [devils], (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. [...] If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight.

... If you're worshipping a property of physics you're doing it wrong. :)
Free market as an economic model really isn't considered acceptable in a laissez-faire approach. So I would have attacked 'free market' and people respond with 'economist don't actually believe a true free-market would work well in today modern world.'

Instead I attack the ones that are actually driving to make policies that reflect a 'free-market', deregulate and push the ideology. Those are the ones pushing for an unreasonable policies.
The Nordic Glass Ceiling [pdf]
All I see is a great opportunity for the big guys to go from regulation -> regulatory capture -> rent seeking.

When you have a few big players they love to see regulations that make it harder for upstarts to enter the market since they won't have an army of employees who's only job is to ensure compliance with the bureaucratic demands.
The myth of the 'agricultural revolution'
For some background on Key's case check this timeline: https://newslines.org/matthew-keys/
Many are behind paywalls, but... let's just say there are ways around those.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12131/full

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aehe.20018/full

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2835842

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2112

https://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/sites/default/files/legac...

http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2014/uploads/procs20...
An "explanation" is required to be falsifiable in science. "God" is not falsifiable.

This is why so many scientists have heartburn with "anthropic" explanations. They can't be tested.
Also livelocks and race conditions. They're just harder, usually requiring some bad design decisions.
>I'm still waiting for the day a C-like language that runs on BEAM

I used to have a similar desire!

I actually started working on a language that transpiled to Haskell, like CoffeeScript -> JS. What I found, however, is a lot of little ways to make it more and more terse, until I ended up with something resembling Haskell’s syntax.

After this happened several times, I had some new found appreciation for Haskell’s syntax. It’s god awful for someone coming from a C-like background, but that seems like a very temporary problem.

I went from hating Haskell’s syntax so much I wanted a language wrapping it, to realizing it’s actually rather well thought out and other languages have a lot of noise to them. Lots of curly braces and semicolons that seem to mostly be there to make writing a compiler easier.

I still love C-like syntax, and still don’t like Haskell’s syntax, but not enough to write a CoffeeScript-like language.
> But are you any good at analyzing a combination of problems never encountered before ?

Haven't won a Nobel Prize yet, otherwise most work is done by first examining what I know vs. what I don't, and then using the appropriate tools (search, reference -> think -> implement/test -> discuss, as necessary) to accomplish the next steps.

Regardless of what I think and what I know, or even of my abilities to solve novel problems, the industry has decided upon its entrance exams.

Many times the problems vary on the surface, but the core concepts do not, and so the iterations and combinations thereof are solvable by polling previously encountered experience (study & practice).
> Apple Media has no brand recognition among consumers. Sounds like applying an engineer's mindset to a marketing/branding problem.

Is it really ? For old timers, yes iTunes is the application from the days of uploading stuff on your iPod from a Mac, that's a well known Apple Media Hub for people managing their media on their Mac machine first. The mandatory tool where you manage your iPhone backup and applications.

If you come through the iPhone world, including Apple TV - the iTunes "brand" is basically invisible, they name it "iTune store" and that's the place you buy stuff, not where you look at stuff ( there are dedicated app for that ) This point of out to parent being more right than you give him credit for - Apple made 0 effort to preserve its 15 years investment on its prime platform, it actually did what parent suggested, splitting everything into dedicated app, they just need to rename iTunes Store as "Media Store".

Anyway let's be a bit realistic here, Apple on its own has enough brand recognition that they could very well make a new "Media" product with a nice catchy name and a fresh rewrite or reskin iTunes. I suspect that it the marketing solution but the problem is actually an engineering problem: on MacOS, iTunes has grown feature organically and it probably requires a lot of investment for very little gain.

edit: remove duplicate
The best one I know in this regard is the Platinum #3776 Century, mentioned above. It has a special sealing mechanism so that it can go for months without drying as long as you close the cap. On Amazon you can find Japanese sellers that sell it for around €60/€70. That probably doesn't quite fit "not very costly" in absolute terms, although it's actually quite a bargain for a pen with a gold nib (and a good one, IMO!) that would cost twice as much at a shop, and can last for many years.

I have heard that some Sailor pens also have a similar sealing mechanism, but I don't really know which. I have tried maybe a dozen fountain pens a bunch of inks, but I'm far from being an expert. However, if you go to the forums at http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/ you will find real experts. You can ask for what you need and you will get answers for sure, it's an awesome community.
>I mean that you have to start a new process, and hand over all state as command-line parameters (because it's a new process).

Do you mean to the shell's command-line parameters or the compiler's? Either way whatever state you need you can also give as macro expansions.

MACRO := whatever
SHELL := /usr/bin/python
.RECIPEPREFIX := >

.ONESHELL:
.PHONY: all
.SILENT:

all:
>foo="$(MACRO)"
>print("{}".format(foo))
>print("You can call yur compiler from python if you want. You could even write the build system from OP here if you wanted to")

>This can be impractical and error-prone, especially if you add shell AND make syntax on top.

Make syntax is just simple macro expansion. Shouldn't be too hard. And no one is forcing you to use a bourne-style shell. You can use Lua, Perl, Python, Javascript, whatever you want.

>From within a decent scripting language (e.g. Python) instead

You can use Python.

>you can simply use the convenient built-in data structures (e.g. list/tuple of str) as command-line parameters for subprocesses.

Then do that here. You don't need to reinvent everything just because you dislike one part of an existing solution. This kind of NIH is why there are so many sub par solutions for everything and nothing is compatible with each other.
Latest update from our team. AMAA. Also, we're hiring: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/866321
You're missing the point because you don't understand the gravity of the crime.

A minimum wage fast food worker is constantly observed by a phalanx of cameras that will incriminate her should she attempt to steal five dollars from the till, but a surgeon in an operating room performs an infinitely more consequential task with nary a recording device in sight. Why? The immense trust and responsibility invested by society in medical doctors.

There is a common misconception that a medical license is basically just a reward for a demonstration of technical mastery, much as a developer job flows from passing a coding interview. But in reality the technical aspect is only secondary; the primary purpose of all those years of training is to ensure that the student understands the fullness of the obligations associated with the profession and is properly disposed to accept them.

In a case like this, the person understood and accepted those grave obligations, as well as all the privileges that came with them, only to toss them out the window when the opportunity arose to make a few extra dollars. That is what is being punished here. Four years is hardly too long, or cruelly retributive.