skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What reason is there to believe we can improve programming technology to be vastly easier and more accessible? To start with, spreadsheets.

So many failed efforts to make programming vastly easier and more accessible have started with almost this exact line.

I think it's possible that there is a seductive trap there. We see spreadsheets and we think, “programming that doesn't have the downsides we associate with spreadsheets could be just as accessible”. But maybe the problems are intimately tied to what makes it accessible, and wheb you try to make programming that accessible you either fail or end up with something that doesn't offer any advantage over the spreadsheets we have.

> Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush.

No, it didn't. Oh, sure, it's not getting chased around by venture capital, but there's plenty of it going on.

> As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity.

It really hasn't; we may often be solving far more complex problems, but we do it with languages, frameworks, and platforms that allow casual programmers to do so more easily than at any time in the past. Programming is “more exclusive” only in that:

(1) in working environments, IT policies restrict programming (other than spreadsheets) to the high priesthood more completely than ever before, and

(2) lots of simple problems that would be solved by casual programming in the past now have end-user tools that allow them to be solved without anything we recognize as programming.
Providing authenticity, in whatever form, is a huge business opportunity, and it's only going to grow.
It was actually part of the Google Search via SMS; You'd text 466453 - which spells Google - with the keywords: directions <your current address> to <destination> and they would text you back turn by turn directions.

They had other features as well but it was discontinued in 2013 if memory serves correctly.

There are now costs associated with Google Maps; Directions have two costs: basic (0.005) and advanced (0.010) - the advanced includes traffic. You also need to factor in the cost for sms delivery and short codes, to make it easier, so you'd need to monetize from the start unless you want to lose money.

Hardest part is parsing the commands eg current location and destination as folks make mistakes and you might need to have a back and forth dialogue via sms to get further details.

To get a concept off the ground wouldn't take much time but to perfect it and refine the parsing of commands would take some effort.
It wasn't just the Japanese. "Korean time" was a thing back when Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized.

There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.
Management. At the C-level were people who got lucky once and were largely inexperienced, unwilling to take input from subordinates, and convinced they knew better than their customers. They were wrong. Within a year of my departure they were out of customers and employees, and ended up sold off for pennies.

Edit: spelling
> No runtime exceptions, ever.

This is something I wonder about JS: there are a lot of places that exceptions happen in (say) Python that just return `NaN` or `undefined` in javascript. Is it intentional? Is it a good idea?

Examples: the multiplication operator essentially never throws. Out-of-bounds (or "not found") lookups don't throw.

I suspect the logic is "only throw if you have the wrong type for that operation" -- like calling something that isn't a function, or looking up an attribute on something that isn't an object. (Except multiplication for things that aren't numbers is fine, I guess...)

I'm writing a dynamically typed language and don't know if it's better to go the JS way or the Python way. Or do something horrible like having multiplication return a `Maybe` type...
Why don't they make a review system where the products with fewest bad reviews gets rated the best.

If the reviews have to go through Amazon's system it should be hard enough to fake.
The "true" customers will make bad reviews if they didn't like the product.
The "fake" reviewer can't rate their own products to make them get a better review, an they have to buy the competitors product x times to give x bad reviews.
Unless you ban all human drivers from that road, and find a way to keep out pedestrians and animals, there will always be an infinite number of possible scenarios. Mapping everything out in advance can't possibly produce the level of safety that the general public would demand.
How Quantum Computers Could Kill the Arrow of Time
Yup, Bram Cohen moved on a while ago to his Chia.Network project, and the corporate owners of BitTorrent were just looking for an exit. TRON got a name brand and some tech that seems related to blockchain but not necessarily directly useful to it, and not Bram, and not sure what else.
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS DESIGNATED AS EXPERIMENTS OF NATURE
I went to go look for evidence of oracle dying and actually came up empty handed. I was also under this impression. I think it has waned significantly in popularity in the developer community over the years, but their stock isn’t bad at all and they seem to have diversified quite a bit in the time they’ve existed.
Surely that's a transitive point. If the fact that they got in is supposed to be meaningful, then surely the high GPA is just some arbitrary slice of that meaningfully distinguished group. Yet they're still often clueless.
I mean, this looks interesting, but why was this posted prematurely? Now I have to remember to look this up again in two months when they actually have a website that isn't 3% done. Basically all of the docs are in the "todo" stage. I always get a bit annoyed when people post their pages way too early.
My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years. But she has never taken my last name.

When we were engaged, I learned that she wasn’t planning on taking my last name, and the thought didn’t really bother me —- I felt it was her choice to do as she wished in that regard, and it wouldn’t change the fact that we were married.

As it turned out, she already had a number of years of experience as a lawyer with her existing name, and there would have been a reputational cost to the change, so she just wanted to keep her name. Makes total sense to me!

Since then, I’ve been called “Mr. Geyer” more than a few times, and I’m kind of used to it by now —- maybe about as much as women get called Mrs. Husband-name, when they didn’t actually change theirs.

Household-wise, we are the “Geyer-Knowles Family”, by dint of alphabetical sorting. We don’t have children, but if we did, then they might have a hyphenated last name.

Now, I do have a male friend who changed his last name to match that of his wife after they got married, and the story I heard was that he never liked his last name. So that totally made sense.
AvE
That is what VeChain is aiming at [0]. One of the better blockchain incentives around if you ask me.

[0] https://www.vechain.org/
I write reviews usually only in extreme cases if something is either exceptionally good or bad. In the positive case, I want to help the creator/owner having the deserved success, in the negative prevent fellow customers getting ripped off.

The problem is, my review might appear fake.
I think self-driving trucks are going to replace truck-drivers for most large companies in the near future. However, I'm glad that a company run by a bunch of spoiled, sociopathic idiots completely bereft of any sense of ethics has shut down its self-driving truck program. They should get out of the self-driving automobile industry in general before their pathological desire to cut corners kills enough people to trigger over-regulation and the demise of the entire concept.
If you have enough annoyed off customers that you're running analytics to determine whether they're likely to leave a negative review, and interfering with their ability to leave that review on a third party site - then perhaps you should focus more on fixing your business instead.

If you're asking a customer if they're satisfied with the service/product, and then following that up to try and resolve it - that's not misleading or deceptive, that's normal customer service.
I'd assumed much better bandwidth is available for the a certain class of satellite (gbits a second via laser to downlink) [1], but for cost effective surveillance high altitude drones [2] would be the tool of choice to monitor cities, if not the world.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-build-a-space-communicati...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-dr...
That's basically what asm.js was, just less friendly to human readers.
Thankfully the world of managed languages is not constrained to JavaScript, nor C is the only option for unmanaged ones, a language that we would consider no respectful games programmer would use, after all a good game engine should be written in Assembly.

Ironically it is now used as the language to beat.
Remember: not all the roads are the same everywhere.

Self driving cars and trucks is a very hard topic.

With the today's technology, it might work only on hypothetical straight and perfect roads and during the day.
Work in progress, floods, snow, holes, traffic and /r/IdiotsInCars are factors not taking into account for today's algorithms, because the data and the tests are missing.

I see that the automated trucks might be the vehicles of the future, but a driver (or "operator") should be always present onboard, just like it happens for planes and ships
I dig the aesthetic.
I just knew this was going to be bad based on the title of the article alone... No need to change the current logo and even worse to consider something so close to the Gitlab logo. Mozilla should be embarrassed.
As opposed to the people who are responsible for managing it, who must be the victims I assume?
> As an internet user, I really enjoy reading about all these performance improvements in V8 / javascript.

As an Internet user whos has been reading for years about how fast the various js engines are it annoys me that the web still feels slow :-]
I still have to steal movies from time to time--when after checking all the official, legal ways there is still no way to download it.

However, with Netflix and other studios finally getting their head out of their ass there is a lot less going for BitTorrent nowadays compared to a few years ago.

At least, that's my impression...
Great! Refreshing to see a ML post using some well-understood methods instead of throwing a random neural net from Kaggle at the problem...

Tangential:

> Is a given audio file a sample of a kick drum, snare drum, hi-hat, other percussion, or something else? (...) Humans have no trouble classifying these two sounds, as we’ve likely heard them tens of thousands of times before.

Are people taught that in schools or something? Because I personally can't classify those sounds, don't know these names, and I'm not sure how I was supposed to learn them, other by playing in a band.
Not sure about how it works, but if they sold that much US Debt, who bought it?
Vertical video sheds its black bars on YouTube, Android app adds dark mode
Free babysitting is a luxury that not everyone has access to :)
That's not a bad answer - "my own current employment does not available the time required to perform this test".
Go is not rather unique in having GC and stack semantics, there are plenty of languages that have it, all the way back to Mesa/Cedar and CLU.
JS has the advantage of being the thing that makes your website run faster on the screen of the user whose clicks are earning you ad dollars. JS is in a good spot.
Trains have in no way "lost out" to trucks. Rail transport is a huge and growing industry. But long haul trucks are sometimes preferred because they're faster. Our cargo transportation system needs both.
Belarusian here. We use milk with honey. I don't think it kills virus, just helps with the soaring throat and "softens" the coughs.
Another popular medicine: vodka with pepper

Never liked either
Super happy for them. It's clear that lots of companies and people are interested in serverless, as the benefits are clear. this could be how the "microservice" actually manifests itself in a few years.
Hitler did not marry until right before suicide. He believed that being married would lead to lower support among women. Hitler did not wanted children, because he thought they would want to make them inherit position and that children of powerful leaders tend to be unsuitable for such task. Hitler kept the image of asketic leader focused only on nation and cause.

So yeah, Hitler would not mind those rules.

Also, Athens were democracy for its citizens (minority of population.) They were in "democracy is good" mood, because Thirty Tyrants period mentioned above abolished democracy and killed/tortured significant percentage of citizens. It was not some kind of abstraction to them, it was "I had power to influence things and then lost it" practical concrete consideration. Athens citizens might be violent slaveholders themselves, but they sure as hell minded past violence against themselves and loss of their own freedom.

Socrates execution was miscarriage of justice, but the whole "democracy or not" was as down to earth as "no more nazi" was after WWII. It might be pure thought experiment to you, it was not to them.
AirTable looks kinda like a spreadsheet, and it's a MS Access clone at heart. Not terribly programmable, though it does look pretty usable.

I think "traditional" databases will fail to reach a general audience (or rather, much expand the definition of "technical audience") because SQL is not really easier than Python etc. Maybe the problem is environments and not languages, though.

Personally I think the relational model is just a little too limited. It's possible to build abstractions in SQL (views, temporary tables, `WITH` etc) but it's hard. And repetitive.

Basically I think functions and variables are great little building blocks, so I'm pushing them. And then, having not backed myself into a corner with by having chosen a limited computational model, I'll make relational stuff easy too :-).
I recently found a backup of an old portable mp3 player and realized that the manual curation and limited storage really made me appreciate my collection more. Gave me a wonderful warm feeling going through that collection.
Right. Given their size, I'm not sure how painful this amount would be to the offender. Too low, and it's just a cost of doing business. A percentage penalty (of nationwide if not worldwide revenue) might prove much more concerning to them, much as we're seeing with general alarm caused by the fear of the GDPR's percentage penalty.
And to further secure it, the amount of buys can be compared to amount of negative reviews.
Because who will in their right mind buy a product with a lot of negative reviews, to later give a negative review?
And here I am just happy I don't have to touch js.
How does this compare to Elm and F# (Fable)?
Maybe it's those sunglasses and that pose, but their new mascot in the douchey dot com white dude costume sure nailed the "Chad" stereotype! Right out of central casting, as Trump would say. Which episodes of Silicon Valley did he play a Hoolie Brogrammer? ;)
What’s Store in the Latest Version of Node.js?
> VM languages like Java and C# and native languages like Go.

Oh well this VM meme is getting old,

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

https://www.excelsiorjet.com/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/net-native...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/mac/internals/aot

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP-HowItWorks.html
ZFS Boot Environments at PBUG
> backslashes in strings

There's a simple solution to that: use «balanced quotes»
Binomial was founded by Stephanie Hurlburt and Rich Geldreich. They both work on Basis. Basis it not a WIP, it is used by games today (and also Netflix). All of this information is available on the single page that is their homepage.

http://www.binomial.info/
It's absolutely nothing for a company this size.
It is, technically. However, most TLDs forbid this.
Don’t Commit These Errors When Building a Minimum Viable Product
> What's not so easy to understand for an imperative programmer is this: Why should I jump through those hoops just to have a readonly structure? Why not just, you know, program imperatively?

Beacuse imperative programs are rife with "statements". Opaque lines of code that may or may not do something, somewhere, which cannot be manipulated as first class objects.

Why would you ever wanna program with that weird restriction?
Here’s the funny thing tho’ we can contrast AI with nuclear fusion. No one questioned that fusion would be a decades-long effort. Now in the present day AI is starting to pay off big time, and fusion is as far out of reach as ever. One had its funding slashed, the other didn’t. If it wasn’t a bungle it was remarkably short-sighted.

It just infuriates me how much U.K. engineers could accomplish if we weren’t fighting with our own government bureaucracies the whole time and could concentrate on the work
Win+. on Windows 10 at least. But then you still have to know the name of the emoji.
Sure, you can hint with OR: `x = x | 0; x = (x + x) | 0;`. Bitwise operators always work on 32 bit integers in js. I'm not sure whether the js vms actually need or use this information.
Liability from the creditors. If a company is in default they must declare bankruptcy. Failure to do so leaves its officers subject to personal liability.

When you fail to supply your customers with the agreed merchandise because you have no money you are bankrupt. Bankruptcy law doesn't allow you to pick and choose who you will pay/supply in hopes you get a last minute break.
It depends. I had a sysadmin consulting co. in high school that serviced nuclear, mech and thermo engineering companies. ML/AI, scientific and other specialized software eng are rarely picky in anything but pedigree and experience. For general-purpose coding, I wouldn’t bother unless you’re hackathon-insanely productive... also such jobs are more standardized and therefore more readily outsourced.

Haskell (biceps emojis here)
What Are Top Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Their Features?
NTSB preliminary report – re Branson duck boat incident
Guys your opinions are great, I just hope that if you really care about FF leave you comment in the blog post too.
PhpStorm 2018.1.6 Crack with Activation License File
Still the most enjoyable programming language!
I believe that software is not a professional practise but a new form of literacy (in fact the book I am writing is all about this (Real Soon Now, thanks for asking))

And when you see software as literacy a lot of the stuff he moans about simply goes away.

Yes it is seen as exclusive and a priesthood - imagine what illiterate serfs thought of those who could write. It took years of practise.

No it's not a good idea to make programming more accessible. We don't have easy literature, we don't think someone who reads and writes solely with fridge magnets (#) has mastered the language. It is a good idea to invest more in education and that is being done reasonably well, but as in all things more is needed.

Yes the results can be a car crash at times - my favourite analogy for this is our management structures.

Would we ever take a literate organisation like the Washington Post or Harper Collins and put a layer of senior management in place who were totally illiterate from birth? If we did do we think they would make sensible decisions, empower those organisations? No.

Yes there is a lot of shiny new thing, going on. But that's because there are a lot of people doing software - and many of them select for being good at marketing too. The real big software projects tend to select for conservatism married to pragmatism- look at Linus on a mailing list or the PEP process, or Debian.

So yeah software needs to sort it self out - and professional bodies will start to solidify (personally I feel a lawyer like body, concerned with managing the course of OSS code used in government is the most beneficial), and until then don't try and fix the world or boil the ocean - just focus on making your coding practises as good as possible, even if your boss is making crazy calls.

(#) Wanted: Better analogys - can you write pithy phrases that sizzle like ice cream on a griddle? Contact the author in complete confidence today.
> Programming today is exactly what you’d expect to get by paying an isolated subculture of nerdy young men to entertain themselves for fifty years. You get a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Rubik’s Cube, elaborated a thousand-fold.

This is vague and insulting.

Many of us programmers spend a lot of energy to keep systems simple, to a point that one could mistakenly conclude that they were easy to write.

We don't dream of having to maintain complex machineries reminding us of Rubik's cubes.
We consider maintainance nightmares and hard-to-understand systems as failures, not goals.
We don't love complexity, we hate it (but the less experienced of us haven't got the chance to fully develop this hatred).
Truly absurd generalizations about a vast and complex country. You’d have thought we’d outgrown this sort of crass writing about other countries when we exited the nineteenth century.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...

this was published 3 years ago, but he came to a similar conclusion. really in depth dive as to the systems that could have been 'manipulated'
I very much agree. Marketing people will always want to design fresh things because that's what they love to do. Once their product dies, they move on to something else.

Marketing people also believe that you can sell anything with a fresh coat of paint. They are trained to sell.

I think the new icons are awful. You don't even see it's Firefox anymore. God I dislike marketing people so much. :(
The documentation about types says to look at the Readme of the compiler, which is very short and doesn't tell anything about types. Same thing for many other entries in the side menu. The examples don't have any type declaration. So, type inference and no reuse of the same variable with a different type, even when forcing mutation? Unfortunately the documentation is still too skinny.

A note to language designers: I can understand the { } but if you use them why do you also need the ( ) around the conditionals here?

if (n <= 1) {
n == 0
} else {
isOdd(n - 1)
}

The parser can find where the condition starts (after the if) and ends (at the {) and we won't have to type two useless characters. It's ergonomics.
Is the language incomplete like the docs?
If you need to parse a file that is more complex than what regex can handle, what does one /generally/ do?

I'm doing some analysis in R, and the data is generated by a program that more or less just spit things out.

Its values are comma separated, but if there are 2 values on one line, it is column 1 and 10. If the first character on a line is a comma, it is not a separator but a value. Commas inside quotations or escaped with backslashes are also values.

The list of special cases and oddities is pretty long. Right now I have a large switch statement that applies different search and replace on all sorts of conditions before feeding the CSV to read_csv.

Is this a case for owl? Can I use it within R or Python?
Does that help if those characters appear in the string?

My bet is on editors that let you "type your string into this text box".