skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software engineering is more like witch-doctoring than to civil engineering. It is not remotely price-efficient to prove completeness on programs.

If you expect your doctor's software to be perfect, be prepared to pay for 2 software engineers salaries per doctor.
I started being interested in coding when I was 7 (in 1990). Our family was quite poor, and no way we could afford even 286DX, and 386DX was well out of our reach. Somehow my father found a half-broken Electronika BK-0011M, an old USSR computer that ran a stripped-down version of BASIC. It didn't have a memory chip, and we couldn't find any in our small and remote Siberian town. No tape either. And the power supply was faulty, so every 3-4 hours it would reboot, leaving me with a clean slate. We found some "books" that were badly translated BASIC manuals retyped on a typing machine. I was mostly coding various graphical and physical simulations then, drawing procedural images and such. Because of reboots, I had to write it in parallel on the computer and a sheet of paper, so I could type it again if power cycled before I could run and briefly enjoy it. At 11, I was skilled enough to land a first "job" for my mom's research institute: analyzing and visualizing some agricultural data. It paid enough to get a 2nd hand 80486, and my "career" went upwards from there. This whole experience taught me a valuable lesson: ignore excuses, stop complaining, make do with what you have, and move forward.

These days my biggest gripe is probably the state of the JavaScript world. I'm mostly a Python person, but having to deal with JS leaves me frustrated more often than not: new frameworks, tools crop up every year, old tools stop working, breaking changes are introduced at such pace that someone not fully dedicated to frontend has a hard time keeping up. If any JS framework had the same stability, level of documentation, and clear roadmap as Django, the frontend world would be a much better place.

I think the most valuable skill for a "real world" programmer is the ability to find and read the documentation. Also, curiosity to do that even without an immediate need. Read it like sci-fi. The more you read, the more you have the right mindset, and those "building blocks" that would come later when you're thinking about implementation.
Carl's next entry regards the rope memory: https://rescue1130.blogspot.com/2018/10/looking-at-agc-block...
"Container management is easier than zone management."

Linux has no containers, cgroups aren't anything conceptually close to zones. There are 56 different solutions to virtualization on Linux, all competing, mainly because everyone there is still flapping on deployment and lifecycle management. We'll just have to disagree and vehemently at that.

As for Joyent having no resources: you debug it and fix it yourself. That's precisely how Linux got to be the hegemony that it is today. Oh, how quickly we forget, how short our memory is...
> McCarthy built Lisp out of parts so fundamental that it is hard to say whether he invented it or discovered it.

I loved that sentence! I'm guessing epistemology or a similar field has pondered the "invented or discovered" question already, and if so, I want to read about it.

> [on SICP:] Those concepts were general enough that any language could have been used

What?? In chapter 4, you write your own Lisp interpreter. If they had chosen C++, would you be writing a C++ compiler? Or a Lisp interpreter in C++? Either way, it would be ugly. And most languages would encounter problems even before they got to chapter 4. What made SICP great was building abstractions out of primitives. Most languages give you some abstractions, and others simply can't be built (at least not elegantly). I can't imagine SICP using a language that doesn't feel a lot like Lisp.

That said, count me among the people whose first Lisp exposure was SICP. And yeah, it was really fun and really enlightening. I am loving Racket now, but Racket is big and practical. SICP is small and beautiful - as I recall, the authors deliberately avoid using most of the language. (They used Scheme, but I think Lisp would have worked fine too, right?)
I wonder why Rails 6 doesn't go all in on Webpack and drop Sprockets.
Oink's Pink Palace. I miss the musicians uploading their own music there and the wealth of otherwise impossible to find things.
Interesting. The insects must be migrating to Australia. I have lived in the same location now for 20 years. In that time, I have seen cycles in the populations of both insects and birds. This years has been one of the peaks for birds.

So many different species, and some of them are much larger than I have seen in a number of years - some of them are up to twice the normal size. Flies again have increased, but mosquitoes are down. Bees have been out and about as the amount of flowers being pollinated and fruit starting to appear is large this year. It seems to be an increase over last year. Plenty of spiders and earwigs, though down on snails (as yet).

The chooks are chasing lots of insects about for a feed. There are plenty of aphids on the roses - too many in fact - may not get any roses this year.

Mind you this is Spring and we may see a different change later as we get to summer. We are expecting a bad fire season, though doesn't appear to be like it was when we had the Black Saturday bushfires a decade ago.

I have only just stopped running the fire at night because it has still been too cold to not do so.
I'm for decriminalization, which is a more strongly pro worker's rights position. Beyond that, I agree with you.

(Though the word gets used in a contradictory fashion, so if you google it, you might find my remark confusing.)
So are you saying that they x-ray every board now?
JA3 – A method for profiling SSL/TLS Clients
Without reading, a use case could be to sprinkle some private keys in your “secure” code and “secure” database.

If it gets leaked/hacked, there will be temptation to cash it out. Follow it and get quick notification that your security has been breached.
I still have an unopened bottle, it does not look very tasty anymore though.
The statistics I've seen say 60% of all software projects fail. My experience, anecdotal as it is, bears that out.

Projects that don't fail, usually have to be rescued from some crazy doomed plans fairly regularly.

You seem to have found a calmer, saner corner of the industry.
Snapchat is a mess. They are just eating through their money hoping for the best.
That Sigma 9 photo brings back fond memories. An earlier version, the Sigma 5, was my first personal computer! Back in 1968.

I was hired as "night operator" for a timesharing company in Phoenix called Transdata. Their service ran on a Sigma 5, but they didn't offer the service at night.

So my graveyard shift gave me full access to the Sigma 5 to do whatever I wanted. I learned BASIC, assembly language, and Algol 60. And the art of writing an entire useful program on a single punch card.

One single-card program we used a lot was a simple print program. You'd put the program card at the front of the deck, and it would load and then print out the contents of all the cards after it.

Only problem was it was a bit slow. It had a single buffer that it read a card into, then printed the contents, then read the next card and so on.

I looked at it and realized I could squeeze in just enough code to make it double-buffered. It could read the next card at the same time it was printing the previous one. Twice as fast!

Not much by today's standards (unless you're into code golfing), but it was a lot of fun at the time.
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

"The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented."

"The high-level logic is written in Apple Pascal, packaged in a single file with 5,822 lines. There are an additional 3,583 lines of code in assembler language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor"

But, almost two decades before that, in 1968(!) not directly the Paint program, but all kinds of interactivity and simple drawing using the first mice ever:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
> It was the most peaceful evening I've had all year.

That's a really powerful statement to make. Lately, I am have become addicted to riding my bicycle to the office. The main reason is that I have 30 min each way to not care about emails, news, etc.
One person's diverse group is another's monoculture.
Interesting... I haven’t had any issues using WSL recently (since they fixed the networking stack).
Irish Republican Army
The Irish republican army traces its roots to the catholic Irish nationalism in the early 1990s and was considered a terrorist organization as a result of the diverse tactics and bombings and assassinations they employed in opposing the British rule in Ireland. The name IRA was used since the organization was formed in the year 1921 but between 1969 and 1997, there have been several splinters of the IRA that were all known as IRA. In the year 1969, there was the formation of the Official IRA, which renounced the violence along with the provisional IRA (Shanahan, 2009).

The link is of the issues that were evident during the time that the IRA was active, highlighting the violence and factions that professed to be the rightful IRA.
Reference
Shanahan, T. (2009). The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the morality of terrorism.	Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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It's amazing that webOS pretty much nailed multitasking on mobile years ago. It took Android and iOS several years to copy the cards interface, and even then it's a half baked implementation.
VX was the only airline in recent times I actually look forward to flying with. I dreaded most of the others.
Completely agree. Just started at a company about a month ago and was given a 2017 MacBook Pro. After 2 weeks of hating the entire experience (keyboard and touchbar) I asked for an older 2015 machine. Got it, much better now.
Oh man I used the shit out of altavista! I swear I could find anything on there no matter how obscure, it seemed like magic at the time.
Please keep religious flamewar far away from this site.
Wunderground. Whatever they've done to the site in the past few years is just terrible.
But job market varies in every market. Rails aren't seen much anymore in EU, SEA Tech Hub and China, No idea on Canada or AUS. Japan seems to use Ruby much more in non Rails application.
http://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/
If anyone else wants to do this: find one of the 7z files from pub.keygenmusic.org, grab OpenMPT [1] and export to WAV. It looks like ffmpeg can also link to libopenmpt but I haven't tried.

1: http://openmpt.org/
Mozilla warns decryption laws will break open source
I would counter argument that in the past TV was a shared experience while staring at one's phone is a single experience.
Better than the Haskell one.
Business rules are concrete and have people and names attached to them. ML allows the robot to take all the blame.
I know this story! I was told approximately the following by someone who used to be on the MS Flight Sim team.

So years ago, Flight Sim was part of Home and Office, but they were in the process of moving over to the gaming division. Back in 2009, the call came throughout Microsoft that teams had to cut a certain % of their head count, it so happened that for Home and Office, the size of the Flight Sim team was about the % of the headcount that needed to be cut.

So the head of Home and Office didn't let the transfer of Flight Sim go through, and instead kept them in the H&O division as a sacrificial lamb. Thus, a perfectly profitable product got cut.

(Division names may be wrong, they change a lot over time)
but it's an open source project, a lot of browsers based on the same code base will have the same functionality sooner or later.
Really? Don't get me wrong, MySpace did have its own thing going on back then, but was filled with creeps and strangers I'd rather not connect with it. When Facebook came about in my freshman year in 2004, it was a breath of freshair....now, not so much.
Lots - Lapham's Quarterly, Harpers, The Atlantic, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, Monde Diplomatique, ....
And Game Developer Magazine... between these two I must have spent a year reading magazines on the toilet.
This is of course completely untrue. Neuroscience has been major branch of science for thousands of years, and funded pretty much constantly in human memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
I think it was bought by IBM which is what screwed it up
“Is Rails still relevant in 2018?”

306 points by bdcravens 49 days ago

333 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856314
This whole thread is a dumpster fire. Between this and the recent drug threads[∆][¶], this community has revealed its toxic nature. It's unhealthy to be part of this community, and from this point forward, I will recommend against Ycombinator and related investment and incubation, purely on moral grounds.

[∆]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18205005

[¶]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193884
Ive been using AIMP as a replacement but the universal hotkeys don't seem as universal when you are in certain fullscreen applications.
That's a start. I'd be most interested to see a reference to one of those studies.

Google is letting me down on that.
The Sony Ericsson K550i, amazing phone, with a beautiful camera cover which opened the camera app when flipped. Also supported J2ME apps, which was the best part about it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-paul-allens-yacht-...

Scroll down to see some of the talent he invited....

....and Paul jamming the mighty Zeppelin out on the guitar... the guy was just coolness personified!! :-P
Secret. Good for a quick social interaction but never led to long sessions like FB or Twitter.
Yes this. When I started listening to podcasts years ago, Reader was my primary tool. When Google announced the pending shutdown, I screenshot every part of the app so that I could rebuild it from scratch if needed one day.
Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.
> Especially for something as truly bizarre as Ethereum, why write it off at this early stage?

If a new invention is truly transformative, it will thrive even after long doubt. At this stage the public, forced demonstration of cryptocurrencies deserve to be criticized no matter it will be successful or not. (I don't want to criticize general cryptocurrency researchers of course, because, well, they are just studying.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CR-Z
Wha! I'll try this in the morning, I've been still using it on the side.
It managed a local photo library without uploading everything to the cloud.
The 10 day forcast chart still seems to work decent, but it feels like someone didn't like the short page view times, not realizing they had short view times because the display was so perfectly concise and convenient.
That's odd, it still shows $3.03 for me, even in an incognito window on mobile and desktop, and on a machine that has never been signed into my Amazon account.
Why, yes, there are ways to do this.

One of the interesting ways is adding is adding noise generated by inverse Fourier transforms.

http://repro.grf.unizg.hr/media/Ante/Radovi/033008_1_FINAL.p...
Take a look at DRGs. In the US they were first used for payments in the Medicare system but they have expanded outside that program over the years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group
Infosys Built a Global Machine with Indian Workers. Can It ‘Hire American’?
Oh, blissful unawareness of the crazy untrustworthiness of Google product longevity.
From what I gather, that's actually normal with Amazon. Prices vary.
If you are using Windows or Linux, you must buy SyncStitch with only 64,800 JPY
Maxima (née Macsyma) is a program dating back to the 1960s—1968 specifically—that has largely kept the style from the 1960s. Isn’t it a bit amazing you’re even able to read a modern, running, maintained program that’s lasted for 50 years? Five decades is an enormous amount of time that should really be appreciated, even if for a moment, especially in the era of extremely rapid technological growth. I’d estimate at least three, if not more, generations of programmer have worked on Macsyma/Maxima.

Maxima could be modernized with even the features of Common Lisp, but it’s very architecturally stuck in its ways. It’s rife with lists-as-data structures, symbol-plists, and other early Lisp baggage that isn’t found in modern Common Lisp code. The Maxima developer team is also not interested in gratuitous modernization.

I don’t think Maxima’s style is a reflection on Lisp so much as it is a reflection of the style of programming at the time, and a reflection on the style of maintenance.
Redacted(dot)ch
You use your own, you have the option to make an account with precor and tie the streaming services to it so they work on whatever machine you grab.
I don't want to fly anywhere. I want to buy a plane ticket with my name on it good for travel to B if I decide I want to do that later.
> Heck, I did not sell any of my market research, I gave it away for free

Don't work for Bloomberg, eg?

Bloomberg News Pays Reporters More If Their Stories Move Markets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162440
- MSN Messenger

- KDE 3
At what point does the cost of continuing the status quo outweigh changing it? How do you even measure something like that, when the people in charge of making changes won't live to see them?

I think a major problem humanity has, among many others, is the way we assign leadership roles. Leadership of major institutions should be balanced not just among gender, but also among age. Every government should include decision makers under 40.

When we don't have rules for this, we wind up with the current situation: the average Representative is 57, the average Senator is 61. [1]

This might seem trite or pointless to many, but I really think we need decision-makers who will have to live with the longer-term consequences of their decisions.

Mitch McConnell, the current majority leader in the Senate and one of the most powerful people in Congress, is 76. When the UN says we have 12 years to change our ways or suffer possibly world-ending consequences, how much does that matter to a 76-year old?

I think it's pretty well established at this point that we can't rely on our leaders to think or act empathetically, or make decisions that matter beyond their party and the next re-election. We need to figure out a way to build future-focused thinking into our governance.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do it.

[1]" https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres...
That is pretty common, this is the first one I've seen with Netflix and Bluetooth audio
They’ve confirmed (and had a horrible history of) bundling spyware into the firmware.
Showing $3.03 here, desktop browser. Marked down from the digital list price of $3.99.
Hype cycle suffers from a survivor bias. You cannot use hype cycle to determine if the "innovation" will be eventually successful, as failed "innovations" may also follow the first half of the hype cycle and then fall off.
The Axis-49 [1]. Ninety eight velocity sensitive keys in a hexagonal layout, ready to be remapped to Wicki-Hayden. I discovered them after they were discontinued and when a used one popped up after several years I bought it, but I'm really disappointed these didn't catch on.

[1] https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49
Kozmo was two full evolutionary cycles ahead of its time, and pretty much defined peak optimism for what the internet could weave together. Things since have been [much] bigger in effect, but the ambitions for tacking non-existant infrastructure seem petite in comparison.
I don't know.. Diablo 2s storyline was quite a bit better than whatever happened in Diablo 3.
Why would you start by caching it?

What are you storing the data in currently? If relational, I'd advise starting with simple relational tables (post_comments, user_comment_likes, etc). Render the HTML for logged in users based on querying that, and see how far you can get.

The source code for historical versions of both reddit and HN is available, so you could check that to see what they do. But caching probably won't be necessary for a long time.
Show HN: A small collection of styles for tabs in Ember
In Bury, England there is something called The Arcade Club[1] which is a two-storey factory converted into an arcade. One level is all retro games and the next is PC, Xbox, PS4, Wii-U and VR. It’s incredible.

[1] https://www.arcadeclub.co.uk/
I hear ya. I just payed $600 to get the top case replaced on my mid-2014 mbp. With any luck that'll buy me another year or two of good use out of this thing because there's very little compelling about the new models. I wouldn't mind 32gb of faster ram and a slight CPU boost, but not at the cost of a worse, more error-prone keyboard with no hardware escape button and an awkwardly large trackpad.

I'm sure I could get used to all of those things eventually, but ideally there are more things in a new laptop that I want than things I have to get used to.
17" macbook pro matte.
Related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17799346
Bolo by Stuart Cheshire. Originally release for MacOS in the early 90s. Ended up playing that game for a decade before switching to the good WinBolo Clone. Honestly one of most fun multiplayer games I’ve ever seen that has somehow faded into history.
last.fm in the pre-CBS era
So what if a story or bit of information has to be retracted by law?

I second my sibling, newspapers have no interest in transparency.
The only people who don’t like race bring “brought into” a topic are white.

For the rest of us, race is already here.
You can still write that message to strout, there just isn't a brief "print" function.
Check out https://onuniverse.com/
?- What
As we discuss solutions to climate change, don’t forget people-friendly streets
I think NY Times copied my article that went to #1 on HN
About a week ago (8 October), a blog post I wrote about deleting Facebook went semi-viral on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164188 . Nice. 12k hits in 24hours.

Yesterday a very good friend of mine sent me this link https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/technology/personaltech/how-to-delete-facebook-instagram-account.html containing an article, extremely closely related to the blog post I wrote. It was written 2 days after I published mine.

Any thoughts?
A diverse CPU collection.

For a while we had some good alternatives to Intel x86. Alpha, Sparc, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, MIPS.
Now we just have 32 and 64 variants of x86 and ARM. I guess powerpc is technically not dead yet (which is good!) although the new 64 bit powerpc is little endian I think...

As for companies, Sun Microsystems. I'd like to think that Sun, if they were still around, would be handling Java better than Oracle is today. I'd like to believe that they'd operate similar to Microsoft on the open source front.