skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An aspect of "how the computer works" comes into play when the C program goes so wrong that you debug it at the level of examining disassembled code, registers and memory contents.
That's correct, but "does not need to implement" and "this kind of computer does implement" are not incompatible statements.
Using AI to help doctors prevent blindness in diabetics
We already get hit with cosmic radiation —- we really don’t need anymore.
Don't forget about "neither". That happens too.
A look at how Sarnia Police are contending with drug-fuelled street crime
If procreation was the sole important biological function, gay people would be much rarer.
> Even just the distinction between the stack & heap is wrong. They aren't different things, just different functions called on the otherwise identical memory. It's why things like Go work fine, because the stack isn't special. It's just memory.

To add to this: I have seen people who learned C and thought it to be "close to the metal" genuinely believe that stack memory was faster than heap memory. Not just allocation: they thought that stack and heap memory were somehow different kinds of memory with different performances characteristics.

And the C abstract machine maps just fine to computers where the heap and stack are separate, unrelated address spaces, so this isn't even necessarily mistaken reasoning for someone who just knows C.
> C at the very least teaches the difference between stack and heap memory, a crucial concept obscured by most higher-level languages.

Go does that too. C teaches manual memory allocation, de-allocation and pointer arithmetic as well.
>It was probably the hardest course of my entire degree, and I ended up taking it twice,

Interesting. Did you study at a US univ.? I have not heard of being able to take the same course twice (except via, say, failing a year of the degree and having to repeat the whole year). I did hear that US universities are more flexible in some ways than, say, Indian ones, whose rules are probably based on British ones (maybe ones from much before); e.g. being able to mix and match courses, take longer than the standard 4 years for a degree, etc. I have American friends and relatives who told me that. But didn't know one could repeat a course. Seems like a useful feature.
They don't have anywhere near close to 51% of American commerce.

* Total US Retail sales in 2018: ~$5.4 Trillion

* Amazon trailing 12 months revenue as of June 30, 2018: $208B.

This is a little less than 4% (and that's assuming all Amazon revenue is US-based and retail sales, rather than AWS or other...)

You may be thinking of share of growth of US eCommerce.
I suggest maybe you learn C :) or Rust.

There are significant performance and strategy differences between the stack and the heap. On the stack, allocation is cheap, deallocation is free and automatic, fragmentation is impossible, the resource is limited, and the lifetime is lexically scoped.

On the heap, allocation might be cheap or it might be expensive, deallocation might be cheap or it might be expensive, fragmentation is a risk, the resource is 'unlimited', and the lifetime is unscoped.

Your statement is equivalent to saying "there's no difference between pointers and integers" - technically, they are both just numbers that live in registers or somewhere in memory. In reality, that approach will not get you far in computer science.
I generally call small businesses like that a lifestyle business rather than a startup.

They don't return huge amounts of money, but they are not going to disappear overnight as they have the market cornered on one or two very small niches (eg: the entire worldwide demand for the product they offer is $0.5-5mil). In my experience, a lifestyle businesses has found a problem that a dozen or two midsized companies have and precisely solves it or produces a low volume customizable product.

Basically the goal of the company is to keep the owners comfortable rather than play the unicorn lottery.
Isn't the answer obvious? The inventors of C did apparently know how computer worked before there even was C.
I was used to all the 8 bit machines and their graphics and sound too, but I was enthralled by 80 column BASIC and DOS with its hierarchal file system as well. I saw it as a separate branch of computing entirely.

And once EGA came out, it quickly started to surpass the 8 bits as a gaming platform too.
Wasn't this sort of the idea behind the Homeworld games? Ancient artifact discovered in Antartica, left by the original settlers of Earth, leads to a quest to travel "home".
Me too. I haven't tried any of this but here's a suggestion:

https://akomljen.com/protect-kubernetes-external-endpoints-w...
You are correct: I didn't specify what I was hiring for. I didn't have a need for plug-and-chug hackers to knock out one-off fixes, i had a need for talented programmers to groom into software and system architects that would maintain complex systems for many years. First I went for the Farady over Maxwell approach the first 5 years i hired and that was a 50% fail. The next round of going for degrees + hacking worked much better after 3 years. Granted, hackers might be different today than they were in the mid-90's early 2000's
Thanks, I just tried adding two apps (our internal one, and bank-of-america small business login page).
Even in SF or Seattle, very few companies can offer that size of package for a senior engineer (300k+).

EDIT: downvote if you want :) you all have unrealistic expectations thanks to HN.
This is an excellent essay, and touches on a lot of the key ideas both of what C is and of how C maps to the hardware. In particular, I completely agree with where Steve lands here, which is that C can give you more understanding of how computers work but won't necessarily reveal some "deep ultimate truth" about the zen of computers. Especially in light of this essay recently shared on HN (https://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/x86-is-high-level-languag...), which makes the excellent point that even a language that is compiling down to raw x86 assembly is still operating in a "virtual machine" relative to what goes on in the actual chip and the flow of electrons through the silicon-metal substrate.

It's abstractions all the way down.
I'm sorry I do not fully understand what you mean.
Imagine, that you need to grab some data from SoundCloud and, also imagine, they do not have a public API :)
How would you do it without launching a browser?
Thank you for this =)
Huh. I hadn't really thought about malicious actors using these vast password dumps to try and target users that are continually using weak passwords.
iPhone XS: A Look at the New Camera (and Debunking the 'Beauty Filter')
I didn't realize Meijer was regional. And I thought Sears would be relevant since this is over the last five years (I guess I'm not sure how long they have been on the cusp of dying). For some reason I was struggling to come up with other chains on the spot, but obviously anyone clicking on the link is free to add their own.
So .. it's not that this place is claiming they compost their waste when they don't (or it's not really compostable), but that the cities these people live in don't have municipal compost.

I remember Seattle and Portland had municipal compost. You could get a green bin along with a blue bin for your house, and almost every restaurant and work place had "Trash, Recyclable and Compost" bins.

Now we know a lot of that recycling just gets shipped to landfills since China stopped taking/sorting our recycling, but the compost usually does get composted. It's usually industrial compost too, allowing for the composting of paper towels, pizza boxes, etc.

The solution seems to be that more cities need municipal/industrial scale composting. Another thing is that places like the salad place mentioned should have reusable containers instead of compostable containers, and you can bring the old ones in to be washed and save like 25 cents when you do. There are food courts in Portland who do this; offering higher quality containers and plastic wear that can be washed over and over again (or taken home and used/reused if you wish).
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120221, which was posted first, which seems fair given the karma lottery.

We do have a plan to distribute karma across multiple submissions of the same story, but haven't gotten a chance to work on it yet.
Pytorch is way easier to learn DL than Tensorflow because of its natural place within the python workflow. Just write a simple 1 layer feed-forward NN both in pytorch and TF, and you will see the difference.
Figma to Sketch Export Competition with $15K in Prizes
14 days ago we have released improvements on the performance of the app (see release note: https://community.getstation.com/t/station-1-24-0/4015). If you tried the app before the app you might see a difference. Let us know how it goes.

Performance is a priority and an ongoing work for us. We know Electron has limitations and we are working hard to limit memory & CPU usage.
I think it's a good approach and similarly it works for some projects I help out with.

But for some projects it's not working in my experience - especially if you have a lot of non-technical users, for example in a PHP web application.

I'm focusing on PHP because you don't just deploy a Python or Ruby web app without at least a bit of developer or *nix experience, whereas shared hosting with "follow these 3 steps and have an ftp client" still works in 2018.

In this case the bug reporters are probably not returning, the bug is often fixed in 10mins of developer time and just explaining what all the words mean takes longer than doing it yourself. Sadly these are often also the most ungrateful, so I'd be inclined to just ignore them - but at least we can improve the software after the bug report. Of course not all of them are bad, sometimes you literally have users that wouldn't know how to fix CSS, but they're testing all your new releases and provide feedback - awesome, but not technical.
They're comparing 12 weeks of warehouse work to revenue per hour. Why twelve weeks? It still makes no sense.
This account looks to have been created for the sole purpose of posting this comment.

I've noticed an increasing trend of top level comments on social commentary articles immediately jumping to "liberals are the problem". Just yesterday, [0], the first reply. I do not see this happening in reverse. It is divisive and disheartening.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488

Further, this comment does not echo my take on the article as a whole. It's half a book review, half a person's commentary on their life in SV. The key paragraph:

> I felt like I’d ceased to become anything else,” she said. “All I did was work all the time and talk about tech.” She concluded that a job that asked her to jump from crisis to crisis, that did not admit time or perspective to consider many ideas that were outside its small world, was not the best use of her time.

The main gist of the sameness mentioned is that everything is tech.

Where is this political play coming from? Why is it a liberal problem?
But if there is a different universe where gravity is not factored by the inverse square of the distance...
It varies from application to application.

In my domain, we reach for the CUDA libraries to write the high-performance parts of our code. ;)
Arguably those problems did not exist before the C-era as software wasn't large or complicated enough. C++ directly attempts to improve over C by providing new mechanisms to solve problems encountered by C developers every day.

Point is that out of context, a lot of the things modern languages provide seem superfluous. Why have objects? Why have templates, closures, or lambdas? For a novice programmer, these are many answers for questions yet to be asked.

When you come from a heavy C background and you encounter something like templates, you know EXACTLY what this is for and wish you had it years ago.

I'm as hardcore as they get C programmer and I'm having a ball with C# for this very reason.
Will check this out as well as the book above. Thank you.
I'm not sure how you got that read on the situation. Georgia is top, and then if you add together FL, TX, NC, MS, the south is still the population-center (and arguably the current cultural center, via ATL) of black people in the US.

Add in the fact that we're seeing trends of migration of more black people back to south (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration ) and there's no escaping the fact that companies which exclude the south are effectively excluding many black people, including some of the most educated ones (Lookup the states with the most HBCUs, they're all in the South).

The south is a big place though, and those places you named are not typical of the places that are growing now (ie, "New South" cities). Charlotte is my home town, and if you look at maps comparing the degrees of segregation there, vs places like Philadelphia, there's no competition. There's one expensive neighborhood area with mostly white peope, but on average people in CLT are FAR more likely to live in diverse neighborhoods than people in most other cities. Add in the fact that southern cities (including Charlotte) have historically practiced school busing for diversity, and you'll find that the handle on diversity in many Southern metros is actually pretty good. Check it out yourself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/segreg...
Nice strawman argument, but you undermined your own argument:

Electron apps are not generic browsers that run random content from the web: they are fully debug-able projects, and the developers have full control over what is deployed.

You know, like ANY compiled project that is shipped as an .exe/.dmg.

Nice try though.
So, I had heard that as well, but http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138..., co-authored by Dennis Ritchie, says

> C was developed for the PDP-11 on the UNIX system in 1972. Portability was not an explicit goal in
its design, even though limitations in the underlying machine model assumed by the predecessors of C made us well aware that not all machines were the same [2].

So that's what I went with.
At e.g. 3GHz and 8 cores, you only have 24 instructions to calculate one bit. I guess the limit is the processor.
I'm not sure but I don't see the relevance of that. I was simply pointing out that the incentives for both companies are the same, so Amazon shouldn't be bashed for this in particular.
I can’t make a thorough argument, but u/flyinglizard (in a comment adjacent to mine) mentioned what I was thinking: Ruby/Python almost entirely abstracts the concept of pointers, references, and memory. For beginners and intermediates, it’s not a big deal until you get mutable data structures like lists and dicts. When I learned CS, we were taught C/C++ first, and I remember the concept of mutability and object identity being not at all difficult.

Without being able to refer to fundamental structures and concepts, I usually just exclusively teach students non-mutable patterns (e.g. list.sorted vs list.sort), while pushing them to become much proactive at inspecting and debugging.
But that's fighting against a straw man. When people advice others to "learn C," they don't mean the C99 specification they mean C as it is used in the real world. That includes pthreads, simd intrinsics, POSIX and a whole host of other features that aren't really C but what every decent C programmer uses daily.

As you point out, modern architectures are actually designed to run C efficiently, so I'd say that's a good argument in favor of learning C to learn how (modern) computers work. Pascal is at the same level as C, but no one says "learn Pascal to learn how computers work" because architectures weren't adapted according to that language.
Why aren't they offering a /56. People offering /64 are doing the same things while thinking of IPv4 exhaustion
Roscosmos accuses spacex in dumping prices using governmental money
Should be better now. Thanks for reporting.
The most fun, in a tinkering sense, that I've ever had with low level programming was in a variant of Forth (within Minecraft, years ago when the mod that included it was still up to date).

That experience made me regret that Forth wasn't part of my formal education experience: it is a wonderful slightly above assembly language.

Forth is what should be included in a BIOS as the absolute lowest level interpreted language. A basic machine abstraction could be made by using only interpreted functions/procedures and that could be used to bootstrap add-in routines for attached hardware. It would be very possible to write low level bootstrap drivers that could be used on any architecture providing the specification (including some interface hooks for defining how to register and use an IO interface).
> in small ways, like inemuri (sleeping during work), Japan treats their employees like humans, rather than resources

Preferring that your employees be exhausted and asleep at work, rather than having a work-life balance, is treating your employees like humans?
Unfortunately that is true even with high quality engineering companies like Apple.
This reminds me of Clarke's Rama.
Hmm, you could rent/carshare an EV and try your commute for a few days to see how it compares. I have been commuting by bike for 15 years, and any time I try to drive instead I am much more annoyed by being stuck in traffic...
Peace, dude. That's not what I said. I agree with you on the topic of the federal income tax. I responded to your question about slippery slope arguments ("AGAINST ALL TAXATION"). These are similar to the "why don't you go and live in Somalia" stuff we get sometimes. Maybe I should have described such arguments as "totalizing" rather than "totalitarian"...
i wanted to read this article but techcrunch's oath GDPR privacy panel represents the cutting edge of dark patterns.
Do you have any idea how many women who go into STEM ultimately leave due to harassment and discrimination? If the harassment I faced had happened early on in my physics degree rather than when I was almost done, I absolutely would have left. Because I can't learn if I'm living in fear that my harasser will walk into the room and trigger a panic attack, so what would the point be? I ultimately left my job in my school's tutorial center to get away from yet another student who was harassing me since nothing was done after I reported the first student except I was bullied and ostracized by my classmates. To my complete non-surprise, student #1 has gone on to harass another girl.

It's not getting women in that's the struggle, it's not losing the few you have to the leaky pipeline.
But how can a civilization even start to move a star to a degree it fills a purpose?
You don't gain discipline by waking up earlier than necessary. If you don't need to be at work until noon, waking up at 5am doesn't add discipline to your life. Waking in time to go to work is discipline, but if you don't need to be at work until 9am, there is no need to wake any earlier than it takes you to get to work on time. Waking early for the sake of waking early or having general "discipline" isn't such a thing.
What happens or what are they going to do with those that are already earning $15/h?
Hello and thank you for the great work!
Hopefully, the new version will work on MacOS with Anaconda, because 0.7 failed there due to the unsatisfied dependency on PIL. Apparently, the default Anaconda channels doesn't include the python 3.x-compiliant PIL package for Darwin.
That blocked my progress on ML course.
Yes. They are bit numbers.
Interesting point

This said, when you get a 500 there isn't much which can go right.

To take it further, some things will just fail without any good outcome and they are too trivial to even learn from them.
When making that calculus, assuming you are talking about a situation where you already have "enough" money or salary, you have to consider the fact that it's possible you will never make it to that big payday you are looking for.

But one thing is certain. Your children will grow old and move out, you parents and grandparents will pass on. Life is short and death and taxes are your only guarantees.
decadent: characterized by or appealing to self-indulgence

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decadent

Seems like it may be fitting for some desserts.
What do you mean by the double caret (cm^^2) ?
Not the computer, the linux operating system.
DOM is a representation of some data. Which means, you can extrapolate the data and then manipulate it.
The language itself has nothing related to the DOM. All DOM operations are implemented via functions from standard library.

"Good artist copy, great artist steal"
I'm trying to be a good artist trying to not invent a new brand language (I'm not that smart), so I just picked up (copied) an existing one that fits better for dealing with complex structures like trees.
So it is AQL - ArangoDB Query Language. https://docs.arangodb.com/3.3/Manual/

If you have any suggestions how to improve the language - you are very welcome.
I would love to stream as I program, but I'm too afraid of accidentally showing a password or API key or something and pwning myself.
I think a new language has to be relatable with another and have some sort of huge defining feature(s) in order to get some sort of momentum, rust has rubyists(still one of my favorite languages)/c++ and safety, hopefully zig has something as well.
Introducing PyTorch Across Google Cloud
I commuted by bike all the time my entire adult life, save a period of three months with no alternative. Then I got tired of getting screamed at and nearly being killed all the time, as well as hearing coworkers joke about murdering cyclists, and changed country. But that's one less bike commuter in the US.
'Data refinery' would be even more spot on as a metaphor, I think.
> It's why things like Go work fine, because the stack isn't special. It's just memory.

Care to elaborate?
ARM releases free Cortex-M processor cores for FPGAs
You have to plan a little in advance, but I have a little Burley utility trailer that expands my ability to make trips to the hardware store. For the supermarket, the key (aside from adequately sized panniers) is to make many small trips, buying food for tonight & tomorrow instead of for the next two weeks.
Isn't population growth also more concentrated in metros where pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure is much worse?

Moving from New York to Seattle, the biking infrastructure there is appalling.
It teaches you how PDP-11 assembly worked back in the day.
Regional house prices are correlated with regional demand which correlate with regional job opportunities. I could go live in the sticks but then I'd struggle to find work. I moved to London because I couldn't find satisfying opportunities in the South East, 25 miles outside of London, let alone in the suburbs of Leeds. If I hadn't moved to London my 10 hour work day would have become 12-13 hours, including a nasty rush hour commute, and I would still have been paying £500/month in transport for the privilege and a high rent.

The problem here is that salaries don't scale in a linear fashion with regional property prices. In places like London, where quality property supply is low, rents are set to the absolute maximum, while still filling tenancies, and salaries, just as else where, are set to the bare minimum to fulfill demand. The result is rent as a % of take-home is maximized.

There are only three solutions. Lower property prices and rents (more housing supply), higher salaries and/or a more regionally distributed job market.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not bitching. I'm comfortable. But when people hear what you earn, and you can see by the way they react that they think you're a rich git, they just don't see these realities.