skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it is definitely niche.
However it is super cool to be able to do optimizations like constant propagation and loop unrolling using information that would never be available at compile time.
For instance if you have a function that evaluates an argument and branches based on the value, and if for some other reason your program knows that after a certain condition the argument will always have the same value, it can just optimize away that branch while the program runs.

Now that is kind of contrived, but one real world example I ran into happened when I was writing a program to render 2d plots of complex functions.
If you hardcode the equation of the function into the source code, the compiler can optimize it (important, since this function gets called for every pixel in the image being rendered) but the program is limited to rendering that one function.
If you let the user enter that function at runtime in the form of a text string, your program has to essentially act as an interpreter by creating an AST from the string then walking the AST repeatedly for every single pixel, so obviously much more costly.
The ideal solution is to have an environment where code can be seamlessly compiled at runtime and executed without extra ceremony or semantics that would be out of place in compile-time known code.
In C you would have to attach a JIT to your program and manually write to an executable page etc, whereas in lisp the system handles all of that for you.

Another example happens with config files:
Config file data is used for conditional branching, but since it only becomes known at runtime, your progarm ends up with a lot of branches that would get optimized away if the config info had been known at compile time.
You could just make all the config data compile-time known by having a something like a massive config.h full of #defines, but this is obviously not user friendly at all and makes it necessary to recompile every time you want to change a setting.
If your code is able to introspect and optimize itself based on data that only becomes available at runtime, this tradeoff is eliminated.
> Cooperate IT is all about not getting fired and doing no wrong. It has very little to do with performance, power, or cost.

From what I have seen this rule is mostly about software which is vastly more complex than hardware for typical IT departments. So that 'not getting fired' is mostly about software. E.g our company still buy very expensive licenses from IBM, Oracle, SAP and so on. However as far was hardware goes it is super crappy HP laptops despite devs complaining about disk crashing, freezing and myriad other problems everyone still keep getting those.
What exactly is the benefit of HTTP2 for HLS CDN use, particularly?

The obvious benefit of not using it is that you don't need your CDN to do TLS, likely to be utterly superfluous if video chunks are validated through the secure side-channel of the playlist already.
something_else && touch something_else_done
True, but all the nonlinear optical effects I'm aware of only really start to matter at very high intensities - so wouldn't really be applicable to the kinds of scenarios they envision, like directly feeding it images seen from ambient light.
The skeptic in me thinks that it's never going to work in practice due to 'worse is better': Any system with the 'I/O vs no-I/O' system will have more friction than one without it, and there is no measurable benefit until you get hacked, so most people will not use it (or declare everything as I/O).
> Before you "grounded" your system, the AC voltage in general acted pretty safe for your customers. The only way they could get a shock was if they touched both wires at the same time. This was a fairly rare occurrence. One single wire acted as if it was "safe," and it did not deliver shocks.

I'm confused by the assertion that you could not get a shock from a single wire in an ungrounded system. If there is 120V AC between the two wires, doesn't this mean that there has to be at least 60V AC potential between at least one of the wires and earth ground? Is he depending on the "halved" voltage for safety, or depending on having an intact circuit so the other connected wire is always "better" than an earth ground, or is he right in some way that I'm not seeing?
Not really obscure, but I find old-school Windows batch lots of fun.

Some of the stuff I've messed around with is on my Github: https://github.com/rahuldottech/
Can we record the screen or take screenshots yet? If not, Wayland is DOA.
Author of the article here, I was getting constant notifications from WordPress about "booming traffic". Wondered why the sudden spike, surprised to know it was coming from Hacker News.

Feels good! :)
"The data in the article runs counter to the basic complaint against CFA currency, that it causes poverty and therefore migration into Europe. Two of the highest migration sources were ex-CFA members who now use their own currency and only 14.4% came from CFA members."

You're assuming the main cause of migration is poverty, that people from poorer countries emigrate more, and that since emigration is lower the countries are less poor.

The former might be justified, but the two latter arguments are definitely false[0], in fact 'richer poorer' countries have larger emigration!

"Just the opposite: Those richer countries have three times the average emigration rate of the poorer countries.... Somewhere roughly around $7,000–$10,000 per capita, there is a turning point: Emigration from the average country starts to fall with greater economic development, as we might expect. Today’s poor countries are generations away from that level."

So the data cited does not contradict the CFA criticism that it causes countries to be more poor than they otherwise would be. Another criticism might wonder what 'voluntary' means with such power differential and historical relations.

[0]
https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2016/10/31/dev...
It also doesn't do Lisp. So that keeps me from venturing in that direction as well. I just use a well set up vim - fast and easy on the eyes.
I read statements from Feynman that I interpreted as very similar. He said things like: the question "what is the underlying reality behind all this" probably "has no meaning." I never understood what he was trying to say.
Ad campaigns are not effective campaigns unless they manipulate searcher's behaviors. As you said, water is wet. Ads manipulate. That's the definition of an ad, NY Times.
>I don't have any particular experience with Lisp macros, but my experience with the closest equivalent in every language I've experienced them in is very different from your experience.

Yes, because the way metaprogramming is achieved in other languages is very different than the way it is done in Lisp, thanks to s-expressions.

>and if you ever have to debug a problem in the macro itself, you're going to find it to be a royal pain.

Yes, because you're not dealing with Lisp macros.

If i'm looking at a Lisp source code, and there's a macro invocation, and I want to see what this macro is going to do to the code,i just press a key, and I can immediately visualize, in-place, how the source code gets transformed.

A big part of the standard library of Common Lisp itself is implemented as macros too, it's no big deal. Dealing with others' macros has no particular difficulty in Lisp; or in any case, no additional difficulty to dealing with others' functions.
Another fun idea is to make a "code denoiser". Removing noise (bugs) from your code.

It's quite simple to synthetically inject lots of noise into code, simply use the wrong variables, operators, numbers, structures, reverse statement ordering, transforming code at the AST level.

Then you can learn mappings of bad code => good code!

The same idea has worked for natural languages as well, correcting typos.
Both of those links are the same. Both PDF's, no video.
Show HN: Comntr – a widget that adds comments to your page
By the way, you can do business without IP...

I recommend the following book:
Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella.

https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
> As usual, Apple pushes NIH, instead of supporting DASH which is the common standard.

I mean... HLS predates DASH. It would've been hard for them to support a common standard which didn't even exist at the time. Initial release of HLS was in 2009[0], work started on DASH in 2010[1].

I'd also disagree with the characterization of DASH as "the commmon standard" - it's certainly a legitimate standard, but I feel like support for HLS is more ubiquitous than support for DASH (please correct me if I'm wrong).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!
>“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
>No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have?

No one wanted to save another human...but maybe we could get a robot to do it?

Is this what they call "peak capitalism"?
I'm not assuming anything. That was the evidence provided by OP's sources. The other examples in the article were posed as questions, not data. Otherwise my comment is largely anti-CFA and foreign controlled currencies.
Most people can't tell the difference between an email from Apple and an email from someone with a "from: line" of "Apple".

Most people use Google.com to search for Youtube.com.
No one is stopping the thieves today. I regularly see people walking out with stolen items. Unless there is a security guard there, which an automated store could still hire. Also the amazon stores make you scan your phone on the way in, so they can prevent people who have shoplifted before from even entering.
The simple answer here is that unless the US government is going to provide statistics, then there is almost no data, and there can be almost no data, because of the nature of the accusation.

Holding people indefinitely without need of cause, and without a clear legal way for them to communicate with other people, there can be no information on this. It's like asking for pictures of the inside of a black hole, or a message when you reach the area that causes your phone to explode. And on the way out? They can force them to sign anything to say that it didn't happen.

Yes, this does sound very conspiracy-esque. But we're talking about a country that tried to assassinate Castro 600 times, and several times poison him to make his beard fall out. Doesn't that also sound crazy? We have clear evidence that the US has these powers, and thanks to guantanamo and what's currently happening in the ICE camps, we have clear evidence that they will use that sort of legislation when it suits them. Even if it clearly violates international and domestic human rights laws.

Another answer is that the sheer sum of people that that is happening to, doesn't matter. It's the fact that the government has granted itself those powers in the first place, that matters here.

As an analogy, I don't care that nobody in the camp has hit my child over the head with a large stick, I care that they have gone to the pain of stating, in their code of conduct and in the contract of attending the camp, that they can hit my child over the head with a large stick if they wish, with no repercussions, and that my child is responsible. Do you see?
S9 user here, never signed up and will never use a samsung account. Its definitely not needed for nearly any function of the phone.
Go stores have people watching, but it's much easier to have 1 to 2 people watching than it is to have a bunch of cashiers
In absolute agreement here. Even though mutt's shortcuts are hardwired into my brain, I always check the new-comers out - especially ones written in a language that compiles to binary. There is something lost in this world of shady docker containers, epic javascript runtimes and infinite universe of python environment versions.
Inform is a language for creating text adventure games with an English like syntax. It's very expressive, powerful and highly domain specific.

As an example here is the complete source code for a very simple game:

"Prototype" by defaultcompany

The Lookout Point is a room. An old man is here.

The Outskirts is south from the Lookout Point. A campaign poster is here.

The Village is east from the Outskirts.

The Scumm Bar is inside from The Village.
One workspace is not enough, but more than one monitor is bulky and distracting.

I've used six virtual desktops with one physical monitor for several years. A 24" or 26" monitor is a reasonable size for comfortably taking in practically the whole screen at once. Six virtual desktops is a reasonable figure, it allows a desktop to be more or less allocated to a single task (such as email, web browsing, programming several separate tasks, showing reference books/texts/websites, etc, etc)

Switching tasks is as simple as switching virtual desktops with the ability to switch back and forth immediately to where you were before, whenever you feel like it.

EDIT: I suppose it seems like I am just echoing the original post. What I meant to show was WHY the multiple virtual desktop method works better.
Not looking for anything :)

To come back to the photos example, by default Android has a Document picker. Its .. bad. Unless you are picking a picture you have just taken, you won't be able to find what you are looking for.

At the very least, either allowing apps to respond to the search intent in order to allow them to handle the search however they want or at least delegating this task to one app (like Google Photo) that already has a good search feature.

More generally, I am not a big fan of exposing the file system to end users. It is relatively convenient for power users, but for all the other users it is a complete mystery.

For pretty long, Android has toyed with the idea of doing something else. Hiding away the file system as an implementation detail users don't need to know and offering a document based interface instead.

Whether this could work or not has remained unanswered though .. their implementation is so half assed that it is barely worth mentioning.
Well, they don't play as nice as AMD, but they do at least give you working drivers. They do have place for consumers, there are valid use cases for Nvidia on Linux, such as:

1) top performance available on the market;

2) off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

3) (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

I still prefer AMD for their play-nice attitude with Linux and seemingly better track record on behaviour towards consumers, but Nvidia for the last years have been offering better hardware.
I believe Guido van Rossum was working on SETL 30ish years ago (which I know because I did a parallelizing version of it back then too).
I agree. But now there is motivation for the CDNs to solve these problems in a clever way so that users can get better performance and lower latency.
> Nobody expects a lathe to be as easy to use as a hammer and screwdriver.

Especially for connecting pieces of wood together.
If you have time and/or money and want to contribute to fixing this issue, please feel free to join in: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/2496
CSound, which seems to have found a way to provide composers with a powerful and unparalleled tool for scoring computer music.
Elephant in the room: the hostility of the LISP community. Is there any language community with quite the reputation for unwelcoming unpleasantness, combined with the opposite - no counterbalancing reputation for welcoming friendliness?

That people feel bad when they try to enter LISP world is much documented[1]. That Python and, say, Julia, managed to get reputations as welcoming communities long after Eternal September says the problem isn't "everyone" invading Usenet.

I'm expecting immediate downvotes for this comment, but what I really hope for is "yes I have that feeling about LISP world compared to other languages" or "no I feel LISP world is represented approximately the same as other languages".

[1] e.g. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2006/10/27/the-sad-state-of-th... from which comes this

> "And yes, I think it still represents the comp.lang.lisp group, even in the post-Naggum area. Just look up the latest debate of the shortcomings of Common Lisp that was incited by Steve Yegge. Lisp is as close to a perfect programming language as any, and its zealots guard it rabidly. Criticism isn't tolerated. Ignorance isn't tolerated - which drives many newbies away quite quickly. Lisp has been attacked so much before, that any post by a newbie meekly seeking an advice on some arcane feature gets immediately interpreted as criticism and turns into a flame war. True, Erik Naggum was the main cause of such flame wars in the past, but he wasn't the only one. Wake up, Common Lisp gurus - your language is so unpopular because of you - there is no one else to blame. If you ever asked yourself why is CL much less popular than the obviously "brain dead" Perl (paraphrasing Naggum's favorite Perl quote), the answer is the community, that is you."
As someone who's worked at a grocery store - the 4-digit code is also printed on those little produce stickers, and will generally also be on the labels with the prices on the shelves. Use this to avoid searching by name!
So, applied abstractions then?
Ask HN: Mobile developers – how do you market your apps you made for fun?
I recently released my app WorldAnimals (https://worldanimalsapp.com/), a $0.99 game on iOS & Android makes language learning super fun by teaching you how different countries all over the world say animal sounds (ex. do dogs "woof" in Chinese? Does a frog "ribbit" in Russian?).

I'm not planning on turning this into a full-time startup idea so I'm not looking for comprehensive marketing strategies. I just want to make sure I'm doing a passable job at getting the word out there to users who might enjoy my app.

I posted on ProductHunt and hit up my own personal networks (FB/Twitter/etc). I also had the good idea to answer related quora posts with a promo of my app. I've reached out to a few tech reporters too.

What else do y'all do?
That remains one of my favourite web pages on the internet.
Its probably a good idea to treat most first page results on google as ads anyway.
That's correct Hurd doesn't support SMP yet [1]. In theory it should and I'm waiting for that.

Kind of like how I waited for HAMMER2.

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/smp.html
> Backward compatibility needs to be a thing, but not forever. Things need to be deprecated eventually.

This mentality is the true cancer of software development IMO. Can you imagine the utter insanity and chaos if any other form of engineering worked this way? Programming languages are like protocols and standards: they are a common platform that people build on; simply deprecating them with no plan for backwards compatibility requires everything to be rebuilt, which represents a tremendous cost. Sometimes these changes are worth it, but outside of software, these are usually once-in-a-lifetime changes.

I can't think of any fundamental technical change between Python 2 and Python 3 that make this scale of disruption worthwhile. If the maintainers of Python don't want to maintain Python 2 anymore, they are completely free to make that decision, but it's a decision worth criticizing and complaining about. It is not a good thing for all software developers to be forced to rebuild the same sand castles every time the tide goes back out.
> Can you even get bare stm32s in hand solderable form factors???

Yeah, TQFP is fine to hand solder. We're starting to use as we move on from AVRs. But no, definitely not running Linux.
I was trying to find out the Chinese names for these seasons and came across a Wikipedia page on these seasons, if anyone else is interested

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_term
Hmm, interesting GQL endpoint name choice by NYT devs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
> the currently-popular crop of languages: Java, C, Python, C++, C#, VB.NET, JS, PHP, SQL, Objective-C, Ruby, assembly, Swift, Matlab, and Groovy, say

Did you get this list of 15 languages from TIOBE's July 2019 top 15 rankings at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ ? It also says Apache Groovy has risen from #81 in July 2018 to #15 today. I do believe the #81 ranking but the rise to #15 only 12 months later is ludicrous. Someone's obviously spamming a search engine to get that ranking up. I know someone does the same thing with Groovy downloads from Bintray.

Now if Groovy's ranking has been fabricated over the past year, then surely some others of those languages have also been similarly fabricated for much longer, and their popularity has been exaggerated.
I use Total Commander. Everywhere, not just on Android. It's somehow unified interface for all OS'es is what keeps me using it even after 2 decades.
Don't be so sure you won't miss work if you haven't yet tried Factorio! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179

WoW was what convinced me how practical and powerful Lua really was, too. And that there were people out there that knew how to program it really well.

The WoW "Auctioneer" mod in particular was quite advanced and elegantly written. It would analyze the prices of items in the auction house over time, and help you price and sell your own items competitively. Not just lots of fancy user interface, but some respectable data wrangling and number crunching too.

One important thing about Lua is how cleanly and efficiently it integrates with C code. TCL/Tk also has this virtue, but TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming language. While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent. It also has a great community, plus RMS never declared a holy war on it, either!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944103

https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html
My first post about the web extension idea got some interest (and almost 150 stars on github!), so I've made the next logical step: an <iframe> that renders the comntr.github.io page and effectively adds comments to your page. The spam problem is partially addressed by the filters: the iframe.src can have a special ?filter=[...] param that can hide some of the comments you don't like. Although it's unlikely one can bypass the security model around those filters (but you are welcome to try!), advanced spammers can still post a lot of garbage to those comments as they can easily generate new ed25519 keys.
>NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned.

I mean it objectively is.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html

Stop assuming rational actors when the evidence is telling you there are none.

>Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it.

You'd have to pretty obtuse to ignore the harm this "wild west" (nice romantic framing) has done to several western countries.
How to Use User Mode Linux
Inspired by Singapore’s education system, Bangladeshi worker starts polytechnic
Realistically it’s probably London. You can fly from Cape Town in 12 hours and they already have the expertise and trust. If it’s an African city Lagos or Johannesburg.