skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nintendo got it right again
Direct democracy is still pretty awful though, especially for anyone who falls into any kind of true numerical minority category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority .
A typical chess position has fewer than 100 possible moves, so a modern computer can do quite a deep exhaustive search of the state space. You won't beat Kasparov just by doing that, but I'd bet it's enough to beat me.
Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time. The ability in business for people to complete tasks in-line with when they were expected allows for better scheduling.

I'm not suggesting that everything in business benefits from being regimented but that meeting expectations allows for others to plan their time effectively.

Time where people are waiting for others to do work which should have been completed can often be wasted.
Google Scholar for Legal and Academic Research?
MS/PC/DR-DOS was also inspired by Unix. It's where the handle-based API, the hierarchical directory structure, and indeed ioctl, came from that appeared in MS/PC-DOS version 2.
>The design is nearly identical to what one would get if one simply literally (almost) digitized a vinyl record.

I don't really agree with that, or at least it only makes sense to me if you're willing to go at a level of abstraction so high that makes it relatively meaningless.

For one thing CDs store digital data, zeroes and ones, not analog like a vinyl. On top of that the data is written using 8-to-14 modulation (every 8 bits of data is written using a unique 14 bit pattern on disc). This provides very basic error correction and ensures that you never have very long stretches of zeroes. Then on top of that you have a cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding. You also have subchannel data that contains things like position in the track and other metadata. You also have a table of content at the beginning of the session to easily seek to individual tracks.

Besides the fact that it's disc shaped and read in a spiral I don't find many similarities with vinyls. Sure the format itself is largely driven by the music track format (which is why you still address CD-ROMs with "minutes" and "seconds" even though it's meaningless there) but then so is Spotify.
"Strong typing" as a term has actually been muddied and doesn't mean much nowadays other than "not C", being re-purposed for marketing reasons. Irregardless of the language, you don't want your language to be weakly typed, although in fact you can say that about most dynamically typed languages.

Leaving the marketing efforts aside, what people want to express is "statically typed". A static type system can prove a lot of things about your program. Traditionally you could rely on (good) static type system to prove that your program is memory safe, or that it has as few runtime errors as possible, preferably zero. N.B. don't fall into the trap of saying that a language like C is statically typed. When you can pass void pointers around and cast that to anything, that's in fact not static typing.

Type theory has a lot to do with math logic actually, the two being highly interchangeable. Statically typed compilers can prove various properties about your program, freeing the developer from writing certain classes of tests, plus it makes refactoring easier.

Refactoring, correctness, these are things people have always struggled with in JavaScript, especially due to JavaScript's nature. Quick, can you tell me the answer to "Math.min() < Math.max()" in JavaScript?

You know it's a trick question, given this is JavaScript, don't you ;-)

---

Other than ClojureScript, I don't know of any other dynamic language targeting JavaScript engines and that's interesting. None. And ClojureScript is only interesting because it is a LISP and because it has sane conventions and defaults.

Languages providing superficial syntactic sugar, such as CoffeeScript, have been a really bad idea and I'm glad that we've moved on.

Therefore the innovation that happens tends to happen in statically typed languages, because there's a lot there left to explore and because such languages tend to bring value.

That said I always wonder what new languages bring to the table versus already available alternatives like PureScript, Scala.js, ClojureScript, Elm, etc. And from the TFA I don't understand what those advantages are.
Highfidelity has been trying to get traction for years now and it's not really moving. OTOH simpler platforms like SL and opensim are doing better. I think (ability of plain users to build/create) > (AAA graphics).
Firefox 'System 1 masterbrand' icon: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/files/2018/07/Screen-Sho...

Wileyfox logo:
https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/file...

Bit similar?
This tactic allegedly resulted, this person said, in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in phantom revenue. He added that more than a dozen people reported the practice to the relevant human resources representatives, and CEO Elon Musk himself, who never replied.

So employees were pumping up projected sales figures for (at least) personal benefit in the form of bonuses. What happens when these figures don't materialize?
> When I throw parties in the US nobody shows up until 30 mins after the start time

But if you expect people to show up 30 mins. late structurally, why not just give a time 30 minutes later and have them be on time ?

All this does is cause unnecessary ambiguity.
Ever since BestBuy has started price matching amazon, I have started going there a lot. And the purchases have been significant: a modem/router, a laptop and a couple of fitbits.

Nothing better than being assured that the product you receive is genuine and well priced.
Oh absolutely, I'm not suggesting that meetings are always well run or indeed necessary, but where they are held, time management is important to get people in and out as fast as possible, which improves efficiency.
> who else has the patience to deal with the minutia?

Women. What the hell is this?

> If programming was easy to do at high levels of excellence by anyone

We're not expecting programming with high levels of excellence from no programmers. Just some basic programming would be nice without having to spend a week setting up a dev box before "Hello World" even can be attempted.
> They come up with the silliest excuses too, like that one time were they claimed that the track bed had caught fire. I would have believed it if it wasn't -10°C in the dead winter while it snowed like crazy.

Here in Chicago, the tracks are intentionally lit on fire in the winter (so they don't develop an ice sheet, I think). Maybe the same thing, but whoever explained it was unfamiliar with the practice?
One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.
The new icons aren’t intended for Firefox itself; they’re intended for projects like Quantum, or developer tools, or other parts of the FF ecosystem that should look “Firefox-y.”
I think that, within the context of that story, both directors are missing the deeper issue: A company's technology decisions aren't just about the final state, they're also about getting the project bootstrapped, and all the other technology decisions between that point and the final state. So it's not just that Facebook had already done it their way, it's that, along the way, they never had any realistic alternatives that led toward a mainframe solution.

Having never worked directly with a mainframe, I can't really speak to the reliability question. What I do know, though, is that I've spent my entire life living around PC hardware, working on PC hardware, etc, because that's the hardware that's designed to fit into my day-to-day life. So, if I have a new idea, and want to try it out, I'm going to reach for the hardware I already have, because it's basically free. Just like Mark Zuckerberg did.

And at that point, I'm already on a path that leads inexorably toward building the reliability into the software. There's simply never going to be any point at which it makes sense for me to scrap everything I have so far and do a complete rewrite for a different platform.
Wait times for non-elective surgeries for people on Canadian government healthcare are significantly longer than for Americans on private insurance. Many Canadians travel to US and pay out of pocket to get something fixed that shouldn't wait that long. This varies province to province because there really isn't an all Canadian healthcare system. The systems are run by the provinces with varying qualities and success.
This is why I am starting to do almost all of my shopping by googling "Wirecutter [product category]". Or CNET for electronics. Amazon's reviews have become so useless and corrupted that I question why anyone would even bother with a genuine review. Luckily, Wirecutter gives fantastic, detailed guidance in just about any category you can think of. I'm finding them so valuable that I believe this would be a great space for more sites to compete in.
Good point, but hackernews does both.
Indeed, it is a bit surprising to me that timeliness appears to be a debatable point in business.
Ask HN: What works for promoting a SaaS to tech people?
I have an upcoming SaaS product for monitoring REST API endpoints, and I wonder what works as a solopreneur to promote a product for tech people?
Open Source Week, South Africa [8-14 October]
You're right for audio CDs but very fast CD-ROM readers use constant angular velocity (CAV), mainly because they start hitting mechanical constraints (including the integrity of the CD itself).
Saves arguments, at least. A project like this doesn't need everybody arguing about what the "book really looked like". https://youtu.be/Nsdpb-4kW3Y?t=2m31s
Same here. For me, often the most useful thing I bring away from my university CS classes is the knowledge that various problems have been solved, and even if I don't know those solutions (either I forgot them or never actually learned them), I know where to start looking.
RTF-OP
Please charge money for this. I’d pay ~$20USD for an export option and reminders to leave a note. I love the onboarding. Extremely minimal but very effective. Web sockets are a nice touch.
The github project itself is at https://github.com/sbussard/canvas-sketch

Question: how do you save/load?

We had a similar idea for draw.io [1]

[1] https://www.draw.io/?splash=0&url=https://raw.githubusercont...
Marpa is a general parser: it can parse any context-free grammar. Owl can only parse the visibly-pushdown grammars, which are a much smaller class, even smaller than the LR(k) grammars that traditional parser-generators can parse.

Besides guaranteed O(n) parsing time, it's not clear to me what the advantages of Owl are, and Marpa runs in O(n) time on any grammar that Owl accepts, and many more (and I think it can or could easily be modified to warn if it can't guarantee O(n) parsing time for a particular grammar).
On Critical Thinking
FWIW, you could do the same thing with a Spark cluster. It might not handle it quite as gracefully, since you'd be taking down entire compute nodes, and probably some of the data storage along with them, but the computation would also be able to continue.
The UK agreed to international-treaty level this year that it will do nothing under any circumstances which necessitate the reintroduction of an Irish border, not least because that would collapse the Good Friday Agreements.

Two weeks ago Theresa May tore it up.

Yes, the UK is an "unreliable partner". In its current regime of rule by imbeciles, there is no point negotiating with it nor coming to agreements with it, because the UK cannot be trusted to actually hold to those agreements from one month to the next.
> It’s a bit complicated to set up […] it’s really fast

Sigh, just use Perl. Writing code with the general regex engine took me only one minute of effort, but it runs already nearly 500× faster than codeplea's optimised special purpose code.

Why 100000 loops and not 10 like in the original code? Otherwise Benchmark.pm will show "(warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)".

----

benchmark.php 100000 loops:

Loaded 3000 keywords to search on a text of 19377 characters.

Searching with aho corasick...
time: 329.3522541523

----

benchmark.pl 100000 loops:

Benchmark: timing 100000 iterations of regex...
regex: 0.691561 wallclock secs ( 0.69 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.69 CPU) @ 144927.54/s (n=100000)

----

benchmark.pl (fill in the abbreviated ... parts from benchmark_setup.php):

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Benchmark qw(timethese :hireswallclock);
require Time::HiRes;
my @needles = qw(
abandonment abashed abashments abduction ...
);
my $haystack = 'unscathed grampus ...
heroically';
my $n = join '|', @needles;
timethese 100000, {
regex => sub {
my @found;
while ($haystack =~ /($n)/cg) {
push @found, [$1, pos $haystack];
}
return @found;
},
index => sub {
my @found;
for (@needles) {
my $pos = index $haystack, $_;
push @found, [$_, $pos] if -1 < $pos;
}
return @found;
}
};
And now all of those reviews seem to have disappeared ...
Maybe it's more effective to complain on HN.
They are many reasons why people fall into a hole if it is not clearly marked. Some people have bad sight and may not be able to see a hole but are able to see flashy signs. Should people who have bad sight not be able to navigate freely?

Furthermore, this is about driving and not walking, and during the night. It shouldn't come as a surprise that people are not able to see a black hole on black cement at 'high' speeds (50kph/30mph). Add a little bit of rain or fog, and it's just a recipe for disaster. Maybe if people are aware that workers do stuff like that, they are a little bit more careful but it's probably too late when you finally see it.

The problem here is that there is a culture that does not care very much about their action towards others and think it's not their responsibility and nothing is going to happen to them. While I liked my stay in Brazil a lot (although it was only for a few days), the difference is quite obvious.
A functional language with readable syntax for mere mortals?

Sign me up :)
We did this 3 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16889181
French government health spending per capita is under half of what the US government spends. This is just public spending, private costs to the end consumer are also more expensive stateside. The US gets many things right, but healthcare is not one of them.

France: $4500 USD per person

US: $10,200 USD per person

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA
Also in the industry and I have a few counterpoints.

1) That the general level of Canadian English is reducing due to immigrants is ludicrous. You have a significant burden of proof for statements like that.

2) Transcreation is usually understood to mean the translation of creative/marketing texts where cultural and local norms are taken into account (think slogans, taglines etc.). It does not typically mean that you re-write the source text, adding new ideas and concepts. All you are doing in that case is fixing a bad source text. Sometimes we get blamed for translating a bad source accurately, so it's a fine line. But it isn't transcreation.

3) "Creative, complex text" does not make up the majority of a commercial translation operation's workload. Literary translation is a fraction of a fraction of the global translation demand. AI/neural net machine translation works for many, many commercial texts. I'd go so far as to say it works for the majority in the major language pairs.

Essentially it is recombining known good, reliable human translations in grammatically sound ways, even using idiom correctly where appropriate. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, and as such machine translations can be limited by the corpus it draws from. For example, the swathes of the freely available legal or regulatory texts it receives from the EU. These texts can use 'globalised language' at times, avoiding anything tricky to translate in the other languages that they are to be presented in, but that edges into a side issue of the globalisation of English/languages in general.

Overall, I hear a lot of this from the industry, "oh, it'll never work well enough to replace my job", but that's how you get blindsided. Accepting that it works well for major language pairs at this point is a good first step to accepting a changing industry.

That the industry is growing, and fast, may be down to any and all of a) increased awareness of translation's ROI, b) increased awareness of translation itself through the ever-present dream of ubiquitous, perfect babelfish-like translation and c) globalisation maturing into its final form. There's plenty of work for translators and LSPs for a good while yet, but spinning the line about how bad MT is does not help further the cause.
Still 404 for me, but so is Google's cached link - really weird. If anyone else has the same, it's on archive.org too: https://web.archive.org/web/20180730114747/https://hpjansson...
>No, we willingly and voluntarily gave our personal information away to companies in exchange for their services.

There is something to be said about informed consent, deceptive behaviour and the like here. But I don't have time for that. I wanted to touch on

>People just don't want to manage their own data, as shown by the mass transition of data into "the cloud" and the abandonment of "ownership" of data for a streaming rental model

I suspect people actually do want to retain control and ownership of their data. But it is getting increasingly complicated in ways it wasn't when everything was physical.
Perhaps the choice to transition into the cloud and streaming services is less of a choice by consumers and more of a choice by the companies what products they want to offer.
I noticed that socialists refuse to be bounded by mathematics. Math is like a father that demands that chores be done and lights turned off before leaving the house. By rebelling against the father, a life of endless, unbounded freedom and prosperity is possible.
Kinda hope these accusations are mostly true in a way, since Ars doesn't seem to show any compunction about naming names filed in a lawsuit. Would suck for the named persons if it turns out to be entirely false. I miss when journalists at least pretended to have standards.
Best Online Shopping Site – Huge Discounts and Free Shipping
Communism does bad things to cultures

I read Paul Midler's "What's Wrong With China" recently, the followup to his "Poorly Made In China", and his research seems to indicate that communism and the Great Leap Forward are not the source of those aspects of Chinese culture, that those aspects go back much further.

Definitely a fascinating read.
Apple Hires Developer of VR Painting App
If you require programmers to have a deep understanding of computer science then you will never have enough programmers. This is good for those people with the qualifications but not necessarily good for the rest of society which ends up with an unmet need.
Thanks! I'm glad it's working well for you.
Rare dolphin-whale hybrid spotted near Hawaii
It's just tolerated, not respected, including by many JS developers.

It's not that performant either, it's just that it's getting closer to Java-class performance which is enough for many types of workloads.

JS is living proof that throwing enough money at a problem can go quite a long way.
Pretty useless. This yet another js based language.
> The full stack consisting of assembly, compiler design, C, networking, operating systems, embedded development, data structures and algorithms, databases development and design (including an understanding of the algorithms/optimizations used).

> At least one class in functional programming and at least one in and OOP language.

I think it's pretty common for CS degrees to have all/most of this in scope already? At least I had all of it, with the exception of embededded development.
Why not just use tikz / LaTeX?
"This tactic allegedly resulted, this person said, in tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in phantom revenue."

SolarCity had revenues of ~$480M in 2016 [0]. "Tens of hundreds of millions" would mean billions of dollars of phantom revenue. Even if that fake revenue would be distributed over a couple of years, it would have been a significant proportion of SolarCity's revenue. Just seems unrealistic that the SEC or any other agency didn't realize that.

Or what do they mean by "Tens of hundreds of millions?". Did they mean to write "Tens OR hundreds of millions?". Even then the same logic applies.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/505770/revenue-of-solarc...
Me too! I setup a couple of Linux LPAR on AS/400 - iSeries running OS/400. The distro was RedHat for PowerPC. One LPAR was for a Linux/Apache/PHP stack that used the DB2/400 database on the iSeries, and the other was to host an Oracle 8i instance. DB2/400 was a great RDBMS but there was an application requirement for an Oracle database, so the director of IT at the time said that if a DB is required then it must go on the iSeries since it hosts the primary DB the company used. I didn't care for his rationale, I just thought it was fun to be working with LPAR on the iSeries.
What companies need to start doing is digitally signing their products (e.g. put a unique code on each box that is generated from a private key). Then Amazon and/or sellers can go online and verify this key to ensure their wares are not replica.
Anychance you can prove you dont work for amazon? Otherwise you could just be an employee trying to sway opinion.
Well, it's actually both. We get a decent buffer of safety only if all parties take precautions.
skimming the paper

> We implemented our approach on top of the GraalVM, a high-performance virtual machine for Java, and evaluated it with a set of Java and JavaScript benchmarks in terms of peak performance, compilation time and code size increase. We show that our approach can improve performance by up to
150% while generating a median code size and compile-time increase of not more than 25%. Our results indicate that fast-path unrolling of non-counted loops can be used in practice to increase the performance of Java applications.

150% of non-counted loop speed or 150% of total application speed? i suspect the first. i wonder how prevalent those kind of loops are ...

ah:

> We evaluated our implementation on top of the GraalVM by running and analyzing a set of industry-standard benchmarks.

for the Java DaCapo suite it looks like it didn't do much except making the variability of the jython runtime more unpredictable.

throughput for javascript jetstream looks good.
It does seem like the involved persons' names are public, no?
How ethical or legal is to divulge this information while working at Shopify?
Techmoan did a video about a record that is recorded "backwards" to take advantage of the increasing fidelity in the outer grooves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Afikv6k1-c
I'm guessing that is the case, especially considering it was a precedent, seems to be more about shooting across the bow of large companies engaging in this behaviour and putting them on notice rather than actual punishment.
Looks nice!

Would be nice to have a comment option, cuz sometime keyword could have a looooooong description - it's good to have it hidden
I've also seen this in Mexico. Sometimes, roads just end, into holes and large rocks and equipment.

However, this is mainly an issue in rural areas. And even though there may be no signs, there's typically a line of small rocks, maybe 0.5 meter from the edge.
Yes, but I'm guessing this predates Spark by decades. Not sure of the exact timeframe, though.

In any case, it helps explain why a purse-string-holding exec would be convinced to shell out money to IBM.