skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sunday before last (twelve days ago) I started working on a VM, assembler/disassembler and compiler for TXR Lisp, just early morning and evening spare time.

Assembler and VM handle lexical closures, exception handling, unwind-protect, function calls (of course) and global variable access, and dynamic environments (special variables). Compiler handles a significant number of important special forms: let, lambda, function calls, assignment and others. lambda handles optional parameters with default values, and any parameter can be a special variable, correctly saved and restored, and excluded from the lexical environment.

VM closures are hooked into the rest of the environment; they are represented as a new kind of function and can be used in the normal ways.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/84j8l0/txr_lisp_vm_co...

This stuff is not terribly difficult.

Compiling Lisp is in many respects easier than interpretation. A huge simplifying factor is that in the compiler, you can mutate an environment object as you compile: that is to say, add a binding, compile something, add a binding, compile something ... The compiled something, even if it contains a lexical closure, does not see any of the bindings you didn't add yet. Can't do that in the interpreter; not with the same environment representation. If you interpret something which captures a closure and then extend the captured environment, you've screwed up.

I have to grapple with a couple of messy special forms. That's how it goes when you've been interpreting for years and now you're introducing a compiler. One form is the one which underlies the evaluation of the string quasiliteral syntax. Unfortunately, the special form is deeply interpretive; it passes the environment into some functions which walk the syntax of the quasiliteral doing eval here and there, which come up with the pieces of strings that catenate together to form the output. I'm unraveling that stuff for compiling; coming up with a way to hoist the evals out into static code, and some function API that can then just work with the results of the evaluation, yet maintain compatibility with the interpreted semantics.

The annoying thing is that just the partially complete transformation code for this crud is 60 lines of Lisp so far, whereas the entire compiler (so far) which accomplishes so much more is only 378. One is a big percentage, in other words. It's an annoying thing in programming that sometimes code which is very specialized and achieves little in the "big picture" burns more LOC's then you'd think it deserves.
Is it possible to make a ML algorithm which has only "noise" data for training and then identifies abnormalities? It seems like that's people do that easily and it would be ideal for an application like this where you might not have much training data on all the "not noise" types of examples.

Another application would be a security camera that detects unusual events without having to train it on actual burglars.
Dual Quaternion Shader Explained Line by Line
Website has words, words that don't make sense.

Case in the point, this fucking title tag: Zuora is unifying order-to-cash for a dynamic subscription world

What the fack is order-to-cash and a dynamic subscription world???

Someone needs to put down the dictionary and put their copy through a "grading" tool (https://readable.io/)
What do you use for unit testing C code?
I'm looking into writing unit tests with C and I'm trying to find a framework that ideally lets me mock out unit tests. Ideally I want to find something that people have used and enjoyed using.
Not sure where your at, but this is generally considered poor road design, and even on 2 lane streets you'll add a bike box to keep drivers separated from bikes. Having 2 ton boxes of metal and glass interact with bikers unpredictably is risky!
Good observation.

And I gotta say, while I once scoffed at the idea of robots helping out at home and giving some sense of company, it seems that such things actually might help in this case.

My colleague was recently in a car accident and is now wheelchair-bound. I can tell sometimes that when I’m helping, he feels conflicted in that he doesn’t want to appear helpless and pitiful, but at the same time needs help doing some things. Having a handy robot helper would be an enormous emotional relief for him and would give him the sort of empowerment he really needs.
FDA's Gottlieb on step to reduce cigarette nicotine to non-addictive levels
They made this map by spidering public onion sites, so you're only seeing sites that were publicly linked to on a site they crawled. You could brute force the .onion address space to get a more accurate estimate of the number of onion sites currently online, but that would take a long time at the speed Tor operates.
TIL that chef-d'oeuvre has such origin. Thank you.
Picard was a model of a good leader. That doesn't mean a spaceship command is a model for how all society functions.
For people who have Word/RTF formatted text and want to convert it to markdown, this is a very nice little utility to convert text quickly: https://puppypaste.com/

I use it almost every day when copy-pasting from from shared google docs.
I think a good percentage of those 130k would give one of their limbs for a better commute on I-90. :)
Undercover agents can buy whatever they like. But smart sellers aren't so easy to identify. There's always a risk in mailing stuff, of course. But Bitcoin can be anonymized well enough.

Buyers are more vulnerable. Many have stuff mailed to their actual addresses. Even if they pay with well anonymized Bitcoin. Some have stuff sent to places that are empty, where people are on vacation, or infirm, and so on.

I haven't heard of fake markets. But investigators have taken over markets, and identified both sellers and buyers.
Yes, there's a reason compiler books start with parsing and building an AST.

But I think studying Lua [1] or the Wren codebase [2] is still worthwhile, provided you keep in mind that they're relatively simple languages that are designed to be both fast and embedded.

[1] https://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf
[2] https://github.com/munificent/wren
A lot can be encoded in 3 chars.
Perhaps write your own script that sets it back?
Machine learning detects cancers better than pathologists
Yeah 2-3 years for shoplifting stuff worth less than 50$ seems harsh.
Which metrics matter?
You just described two extremes, surely there is a middle ground somewhere?
Stormy Daniels’s 130K Payment and the Probability of Disbursements Matching 130K
Hacker who gave up Wikileaks source dies
Immigrants are less happy in Sweden than in other Scandinavian countries
No, it's not the same thing. A compiler without the AST phase itself is more compact and arguably more beautiful, but again not every language is compile-able this way (C++ being a notable example).
Yeah, the grandparent is only true if you don't want to do interesting things with the language, like nearly any but the most basic peephole optimization.

But a fun fact, if you know about single-pass compiling, you can figure out a lot of why the original C syntax is what it is. A declaration is a "reserve some memory" statement. Local variables had to be declared at the beginning of scope so that the compiler could deallocate them at scope close. Without an AST, the compiler had to produce instructions immediately.

With a true AST, you don't need such a restrictive syntax.

There are many other possible examples.
> I have no fear of being struck by cars. I fear bikes.

Piling more anecdata into the pile, I've got two things to offer:

1. I'm worried about both; I've been almost hit by both, my wife's been dinged a bit by a car while walking.

2. As a biker, I also worry about hitting pedestrians - because they're so often blundering out into the bike lane or the street without looking. Granted, a bike is more difficult to see than a car - partially because people aren't really used to looking for them - but still.
Civilization and Orion 2 - childhood gaming life secured. I still buy, play and enjoy the sequals whenever they are released. I actually had a few good hours of Master of Orion just now this evening. <3
Sigh, a story chopped up over 29 tweets.
It's the fastest way to get started. It literally takes two seconds, don't even have to login try here: https://repl.it/languages

Furthermore if you open a port from the repl you've just deployed. Here is a gif of the whole thing: https://repl.it/public/images/blog/server.gif

Read more here: https://repl.it/site/blog/platform
Let's fix that: your car, your responsibility.
They use escrows.
If that were true you can compare back to when we didn't spend money on fighting terrorism. Has it changed much? No not really. Terrorism is not a (major) problem in the world if looking at major causes of human loss of life.
I don't think he ever thought he would win.
Start by diversifying into international investments, like at least 40% or so.
You're right I hold the US government to a higher standard.

When I or many others say "China's doing this but look what the NSA is doing", I am not trying to be a CPC apologist by pointing at the NSA. I am being pro civil liberties by using the CPC as an example of what happens when you don't hold your government to account.

America gets to enjoy its relatively high degree of civil liberties precisely because its population is so often critical of and suspicious of its government. Even when the criticism is laughable in comparison to other countries.
Okay, I read that article, and it said traffic went up over 8.32% overall, and then showed some increases in accidents near 8%. It looks like they reported absolute numbers without controlling for the increase in traffic. If traffic was up 8.32%, and angle crashes were up 6.72%, doesn't that imply that angle crashes were actually reduced by around 1.6% per capita?

What about this one:

"Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study stated that fatal crashes from red light runners increased by 30 percent per capita after cities turned off their red-light camera programs."

> Speed limits are also based in large part on the 85th percentile speed of actual traffic, which presumes 15% of drivers are breaking the law.

It's a misleading assumption to suggest that the way speed limits are determined actually implies a design intent to retain a 15% minority of law breakers. The stated and explicit intent of posting the speed limit is to set the maximum, and for nobody to exceed the maximum.

Also: "The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile operating speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic is exceeding) and in the US is frequently set 4 to 8 mph (6 to 13 km/h) below that speed." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Maximum_speed_limi...)

> So no...I don't believe absolute traffic enforcement was ever envisioned

It doesn't matter what was envisioned. We don't need to preserve what was envisioned.

> in over 20 years of driving I've never received a moving violation.

That's great! I would be more impressed if you hadn't done any speeding or run any red lights in 20 years. (I can't claim that, though I also haven't had any tickets in 20 years.)
>We're just one big family and, when you've been to a few domestic disputes, Littlebottom, I can assure you that you'll see the resemblance.

- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
There will never be "enough" parking in urban areas, and attempting to force there to be "sufficient" parking is how you end up with suburban sprawl & extremely expensive high density development.

Parking can never cover its own cost per square foot, hence why there is so little of it outside what the government provides or mandates.

Stronger enforcement via ticketing and towing is the quickest means to clear the bus lanes and bike lanes, after that adding barriers to the most illicitly parked in areas is the next step.
Ah yes the cultish rhetoric of shouting "FUD", pathetic.

Feel free to ignore the prior mentioned methods denial of service within blockchain networks as It appears your comment has rendered all reality moot.
Postmortem on Last Week’s Outages (Clever – S12)
Whether they are "hired guns" or not, there are usual suspects that invariably whataboutism on these stories. Anybody can figure out who they are on their own.
My kids really like Tumbleleaf and Curious George.
It's absolutely warranted and you did great. Everyone else on Hacker News is commenting as if perfect communication would have solved this issue. What they don't understand is the political reality of the situation - that in no universe of conversations, would Bill DeBlasio have admitted on recording that he was wrong or whatever.

In my experience, when politicians act defensively and cornered, they often go and make changes behind the scenes later. When you let them go without a scuffle they will view you as a non-threat. So great job, and cool project!
I would amend that statement to they hope to make a lot of money with their "bad" website.[0] If your messaging is incoherent I will have no idea if you are able to solve my problems in the first place.

[0] "We have incurred net losses in each fiscal year since inception, including net losses of $48.2 million, $39.1 million, and $47.2 million in fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal 2018, respectively, and we expect to incur net losses for the foreseeable future."
Ask HN: Have you created a technology manifesto
We’re going through a large tech architectural change involving teams in multiple countries. We’re thinking of creating a tech manifesto to share the vision to the global team. Are there any great tech manifesto that are available to the public?
Your point of view is considered scandalous by the local audience, but I'm inclined to agree. I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in 1990s Russia after history threw a few sucker punches in our direction. I can say from watching my parents and other adults that "shut up & do your job no matter what" was a common enough sentiment that to me it might as well be the only possible truth.

Here and now, in late capitalism, we seem to be aspiring to some other arrangement, which is commendable in itself, but I observe it with healthy skepticism. It is my responsibility to make myself happy. I'm lucky to have a boss who cares about my well-being, but I see his efforts as secondary and something to be leveraged in order to improve the company as a whole, not somehow make me happier as a person. I'll take care of that last part myself.

Edit: a late-breaking thought I would like to include. He who externalizes happiness is bound to be disappointed, as the incentive is simply missing to make others happy without asking for anything is return. Better learn to DIY happiness.
I sometimes censor myself online by deciding not to comment or reply to things - both here and on other places for precisely this reason. Not fear of imprisonment or execution, just a concern that the comments might cause me hassle or grief at some point.
Still, when people are driving next to me I wish they would focus fully on the road. More than a hundred people die every day in the US from traffic accident, it's far from nothing.
It's happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttGUiwfTYvg
Mr Rogers is the modern-day Mr. Rogers, and a good detox from the patience-destroying sensory-overloading shows like Power Rangers.
Well, Archimedes didn't really go away, being the first real ARM-based computing device. The legacy is in everyone's pocket.
How to quit your job
My experience has been that you can get incredibly far (much farther than you'd think) without any form of AST and just iterate over the raw parse tree and tokens, but the problem you eventually encounter when you do this is that if you want to support all the different cases in a 'real' and messy evolved language like C is that you get a combinatorical exposion when you try to support all the corner cases of the language. A great example of this would be if you try to figure out how to write a function to iterate over the tokens that make up a struct definition in C:

http://blog.robertelder.org/magical-world-of-structs-typedef...

This is the reason for needing the extra 'abstract' syntax tree layer that lets you generalize over all those different cases and avoid having 20-level nested if statements in your compiler.
I'm only familiar with this on the west coast, but yes, you're usually required to merge into the bike lane to turn right.

Here's an image: http://www.sfbike.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Right-Turn....

From CA directly: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/turns

> To make a right turn, drive close to the right edge of the road. If there is a bike lane, drive into the bike lane no more than 200 feet before the turn.

This is also true in Washington State. Not sure about Oregon.
AT&T-Time Warner Trial
Shouldn't your edge be caching this static article? I don't see why each page needs to be custom generated...
A big part of Mr. Rogers appeal was back in the pre-Internet less-connected world, he and his cast were people you could see and who talked to you when you were home alone.
> I'm also doing Scala.js for the quick startup time btw. The JVM isn't usable with AWS Lambda last I tried.

Heh, I was using Scala.js when AWS lambda was first announced I enthusiastically posted to the mailing list at the time that Scala.js would be great with this new paradigm of programming. I think the JVM is going to just be dead in the water on that front. So much of the design of v8 is around beign tossed a bunch of code and being told to start running it at full performance ASAP, whereas the JVM has been optimized under a very different set of constraints (e.g. long running server processes which it pivoted to 15 years ago after the failure of applets).

---

> I think WebAssembly is going to be great, but it's effectively a sandbox for native code, so it targets languages like C++ and Rust, or in other words languages that have a very light runtime and no garbage collector.

I think the end goal for wasm is to provide all the hooks that javascript has.[1]

And, In the meantime, Two stories I came across recently, indicate enhancements and polyfills and moving rapidly to bridge the gap:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16585315 (Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages)
https://github.com/alexcrichton/wasm-bindgen (A project for facilitating high-level interactions between wasm modules and JS.)

> I don't know what hooks WebAssembly will be able to provide, but consider that at this point most high level languages would also have to ship at least a garbage collector with the compiled binary, because WebAssembly does not give you one, see open issue: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1079
> So you won't be able to run languages like Java, Scala, C#, Go, Clojure, etc any time soon. These languages are better off targeting JavaScript for now.

I could see there being some sort of jvm bytecode interpreter written in wasm happening some handy wavy time in the "future". My hunch is that wasm going to become the universal low level bytecode, so I think there will be more and more projects emitting wasm as compilation target in addition to then eventually surpassing x86 / arm etc (obviously this won't happen overnight).

That does still leave the area of server processes with long uptimes that benefit from JIT performance optimizations and which are ok with garbage collection overheads.

> That said the thought of targeting browsers and Node with binaries built out of Rust fills me with joy.

With all great power ... And a bit of fear of having articles & guis rendered to canvas removing the ability for users to control their interaction with the web.

Maybe once that happens you'll start seeing your node servers stop falling over.

1: e.g. https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings (Host Bindings Proposal for WebAssembly:
This repository is a clone of github.com/WebAssembly/spec/. It is meant for discussion, prototype specification and implementation of a proposal to add host object bindings (including JS + DOM) support to WebAssembly.)
If Support just do this kind of thing why not put it in the UI. It's like unlinking a fork - GitHub Support just do it on asking - but why is GitHub spending unnecessary manpower when it could just be a button in the settings saying 'Unlink'.
Why does Amsterdam manage to serve both cars and bikes?
A reasonable question, but for now I'd prefer to keep my real-world and HN identities separate. It's not a well-known company at all except in a very small sub-industry that most don't even know exists.
4.4 million phones is a good clip, esp. with how few devices Nokia has. LG has hundreds of models on sale (which is part of what bleeds their profits) while Nokia has a bit over a dozen. Much lower R&D cost, plus a smaller maintenance burden.
It means what it says. They simplify how a company can take an order and get the money. It’s a product for businesses.

And dynamic subscriptions means they have a way to change elements of a subscription (term length, renewal period). Dynamic means it’s something that changes.
>Anyway, having said all that, I'll say that embedded work is mainstream :-). I have a hard time thinking of stuff that isn't mainstream.

Ah, well in Chicago area at least, the market is dominated by web development, mobile development, data science, and algorithmic trading roles, in that order. I'm part of a few local Slack groups for Chicago programmers and it's been hard to find leads for embedded programming jobs. Several people have told me embedded programming is not something Chicago has a lot of.

>As I have done it many times, I will say that it is challenging to hop over domains. If you are a web developer, then people often tag you as a "web developer".

And this is the obstacle I'm trying to overcome, when I don't necessarily have the time or budget to dedicate several years for another degree. I'm in my mid 30s after all. How to get into those heavily engineering oriented firms, like JPL or NVidia, doing the low level stuff? When your last full-time job was in front-end JavaScript with PHP for a dime-a-dozen SaaS company? Can I find a suitable replacement for STEM college education that has the same level of organization AND credentialing? (remember I want my resume to at least make NVidia want to interview me)

I don't think anyone likes being pigeonholed, and it's especially troublesome when the majority of jobs here have a programming language in the damn job title. I want to work in "concepts", not languages.

I'm still trying to map out how to get from point A to point B. Maybe go from a local web dev shop to a local web-and-mobile shop that uses Java, then use that Java experience to work at an enterprise firm, then slide in some C++ work? That's just a guess :) It's also gonna likely take as much time as getting the college degree, so I don't know, I'd like to get a do-over in college life.
Maybe they saw this, or maybe they are A/B testing, but I saw, "Zuora creates cloud-based software on a subscription basis that enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business.
the subscription economy", which makes a bunch of sense to me.

But it's true, I'd never heard of them either.
It's a bit more complex than that actually. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNKR9wFe8o
He was actually a Presbyterian minister, and the mission that the church gave him was to do his show. He approached everything in a way that was incredibly kind and caring for everyone, without being preachy in the slightest. He was even part of an LGBT outreach program at his local church! I'm not Christian (though I did grow up with a very religious mom and nana) nor am I a particularly religious woman, but I'm sure Fred Rogers would be chilling with the most holy people up in heaven lol. Like I honestly think that he was one of the most "Christ-like" people in a long time.