skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting -- I've been living in a furnished rental in Hawaii for the last few months where I have a very small TV (maybe 22"?) and I've had my Apple TV hooked up to it since I got here. Before the update, I found it very hard to read the menus across the room, but I do think the new design is much better for smaller screens. I have a feeling the giant blocks would irritate me if I still had my 60" plasma (sob I miss that TV) but for a more modest screen, it really makes life easier. Ideally I'd love to be able to mirror the menus in the Remote app so that I don't have to squint to read the Netflix reviews and descriptions.
I Chose C++ because it's the language which makes me suffer the most. Besides the existence of legacy code and currently available expertise, this language is totally inappropriate for the work I'm currently doing. Also, I suspect C++ is the language that cause the most suffering among programmers, partly because it is so widely used in the first place.

As for why I hate it so much, the arguments are well known: the language is overly complex, not very consistent, generally unsafe with regards to exceptions and memory management, and widely used for applications that could have used a garbage collector. C++11 solves parts of this, if your team observe very clean coding conventions, and at the price of an even more complex language.

For my favourite language, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3747696 (The current answer is OCaml, but I now know of another approach that looks orders of magnitude better.)
Is that was "use in anger" means? I had assumed it came from "fire a shot in anger", meaning serious use rather than practice or ceremony.

It's true that most software makes me either angry or sad, but PHP (where even "==" is wrong after Perl had gotten it right) was a singularly memorable peek into Special Hell.
can it be made more difficult to accidentally flag or downvote? i find myself fat-fingering those buttons a lot on the ipad and it doesn't seem very fair to the submitters.

an optional zoom level would probably solve my problems, on the desktop my browser remembers to always keep HN zoomed in a few steps, but on the iPad it's tiny.
Whether sudo sets $HOME depends on your /etc/sudoers configuration. Alternatively, sudo -Hs.
Thoughts on now.js? Why now.js instead of dnode?
Sure, Microsoft technically has the right to censor whatever they like, just like pg technically has the right to ban you from Hacker News for writing a comment he doesn't like.

Both are disturbing examples of legally infringing on free speech.

Stop being so pedantic about language.
Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium, which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears.

As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers," since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking account in full.

I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks? Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.
I wonder how much of this disappears when you normalize for use? PHP would still seem overrepresented and C underrepresented.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and
the ones nobody uses. Bjarne Stroustrup
He said destructuring, not destructing.
Like so:

int a, b;
(a, b) = function_returning_array();
Yup, different types of financial products trade differently.

Stocks and bonds are "fungible" meaning that they can be traded on any exchange that will let them, or even via private agreement which is called Over The Counter (OTC).

Futures are not fungible, so contracts that are traded have to be traded on the same exchange where you got them. The main reason for this is that each futures has a contract specification that would need to be the same across exchanges to be fungible: e.g. one contract of light-sweet crude oil is X U.S. gallons of oil at Y quality... The other reason for this is that once the contract has been traded the exchange (or your broker) assumes the counterparty risk if you or your counterpart default on the contract -- so keeping it all on a single exchange helps everyone keep track who sold what to who.

Currencies are the worst: there is no central market. It's all inter-bank agreements and probably the lightest regulated of the bunch. Retail customers get hosed because it's absolutely legal for your broker to front-run your order and skim a couple pennies off your trade.
You seriously think they don't? I refuse to believe that design decisions like this are made with absolutely zero feedback or human input. Google is an incredibly data-driven company. They always have been. Design changes can serve a multitude of purposes for a company. They can be trying to make a dated interface look better, make it easier to use for "average" users, or a combination of both. The thread was very informative in terms of explaining the rationale behind the design changes, and the fact that Google was so open about this leads me to believe that they do consider the human factor. With all due respect, your comment makes you sound exactly like the people I'm describing.
Portugal's effective approach to drugs
I am delighted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for the explanation.
March Madness - SQL Azure - sys.dm_db_objects_impacted_on_version_change
Interesting. I was reading at a high school level when I was in 5th grade. I also read "The hunger games". I've been out of high school for 10+ years.

Is it well below my level? Yes, but it was a good story.
An industry is dying ... That industry is the media industry

That's a spectacularly vague assertion. Let me give you a more pointed one: there is no such thing as the media industry. In [textual] publishing alone there are at least a dozen different highly specialized industries that, aside from a common technology base (the printing press) are radically different in structure and operation. And that's within any one language/nation; if you look at, say, mass-audience consumer movies, is it reasonable to stretch and assertion that "the movies are dying" to cover both Hollywood and Bollywood, much less crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France?

(I'll agree that the MPAA and RIAA are parasitic and preside over a business model that doesn't appear to be long-term viable without lobbying for government support -- but that's not the same thing at all, and I really wish pundits like Mattheij would be a bit more circumspect in their predictions.)
There seems to be some confusion about the XMPP definition of OTR as defined in XEP-0136 which does not mention encryption (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html#otr) and the colloquial use of OTR which apparently means "encrypted IM."

AFAIK there is no defined standard or agreed-upon XMPP extension for the latter. I should have clarified this in the original comment.
I buy a lot of Humble Bundles.

A lot of those games I haven't even tried, because I can't figure out what any of them really are. Their websites are usually terrible (one game even shut down their website during the bundle. How helpful!).

Why would I spend time on them, then, when I have a ton of games that I know what to expect with?
This might change our standard of living by giving us new insights into our bodies. In less than a decade, living a healthy life will be about respecting your particular genetics as opposed to just following a set of formulaic guidelines.

After big data makes individual DNA sequencing possible, we'll be able to start clustering results and then reverse engineer illnesses to find even more risk factors and correlations between illness and ethnography. These are potentially important achievements for the Pharma industry and governments alike.
The main problem is the DOM and event binding. Do you want to refit ruby to play nice along with browser model?

Problem is, surprisingly, nobody does! And the sandboxing would be huge too.
Lol, I just also saw someone with score 100000000. It's funny how they tear apart this game :)
This is AMAZING. Installed it on my phone, and it works exactly as advertised. I'll be telling everyone about this. Thank you thank you thank you.
It's not completely empty. It boosts the authority of facebook users to deny employers' requests.

Maybe not as much as we'd like, but it's still something.
I'd also generalize this and say that you can't trust anyone that can't be too critical and honest with you with anything. I know people don't like to hurt other people's feelings, but nothing is less helpful than telling someone "Hopefully, so and so will happen", or "Just be optimistic and hope for the best". If I'm screwed, tell me I'm screwed and possible actions I can take.
20 years ago web designer was not an occupation. 20 years from now web designer will no longer be an occupation. What you learn in a serious, traditional CS program (not an IT school!) will last a lifetime.
Yeah it works when it's novel, now imagine that it's normal ... instead of going to Netflix and streaming a movie tonight you go to kickstarter-for-movies.com and book what you're hopefully going to watch for Christmas.

I cannot imagine a worse way to be entertained, it actually returns us to the pre-internet days with the added plus of gambling on and paying in advance for everything we want.
Or you could just create a chat client that modifies links to amazon and other retailers to automatically include your affiliate link. Profit!
It'd be nice to have some data to prove the assumption that the industry is dying. Not that I can't believe it but I think one should back up these kinds of claims.
>(Would your 5-year-old compiler target dsPIC and have support for their IO ports and interrupts? clearly not)

C doesn't have support for dsPIC and its IO ports and interrupts. People writing real kernels or embedded code have to write little shims in platform-specific assembly code to hook their C code up to the hardware.

>All the things that "make C fast" are really ways of making the "underlying machine" fast through C, and trying to come up with new language constructs that facilitate these techniques seems like a losing game.

Yes and no. C's so-called speed comes from its transparency: everything you write in C can be cleanly mapped down to its constituent assembly code without extra code being inserted by the compiler or runtime library. C has a fundamental principle: you only pay for what you use. Other languages can, but mostly choose not to, emulate this.

>Any new languages are going to have a hard time catching up to C when it comes to compiler optimizations

GCC and LLVM make this not so much of a problem. Most of the major compiler optimizations nowadays are done on intermediate representation code, not C source itself.

>The source language emphasizes features that allow one to write concise reasonably performant code (H-M, local inference, sum types, some kind of object polymorphism).

Local inference is only necessary in situations where Hindley Milner or another HM-based algorithm doesn't work (see: Scala).

There's bunches of languages like this. In addition to BitC, there's also Cyclone, Rust, ATS, and Deca -- all of which are in various stages of development. ATS has a stable release, IIRC, Rust is in alpha, Cyclone has made a release but development stopped, and Deca is in active pre-alpha development.
A heck of a lot, and all current phone standards are based on it including current GSM.

GSM used TDMA which sliced a frequency into time slots. The time slots are allocated to the phones whether there is talking or not. This also leads to a fixed number of connections per frequency, and adjacent towers can't use the same frequency. It is also not forwards compatible since the phones expect certain behaviour from other phones in terms of using the time slots. That is why GSM carriers had to go out and get new frequencies when they added 2G data.

CDMA just has all phones broadcast at once. The phones merely see others as noise. When there isn't anything to transmit (voice calls have a lot of silence) then not much is transmitted. The tower will direct power levels to phones to keep the noise as low as possible. The net effect is that there isn't a fixed number of connections per tower/frequency, adjacent towers can use the same frequencies and it is forwards compatible - other phones can use newer versions and it won't affect current phones. CDMA is a lot harder engineering.

Here are a bunch of articles describing it in more detail from someone who worked on it.

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G.shtml (politics, tech, how CDMA happened)
http://denbeste.nu/cdmafaq/cdmatdma.shtml (tdma versus cdma)
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/04/Howspreadingactual... (what actually gets transmitted)
Any censorship or modification of your "private" communication is a very scary precedent to set. Will they start modifying hotmail emails or bing search results next?
How do these issues of copyright infringement not come up immediately during the formulation of the business plan?

Is the idea to get big really quickly and deal with the legal issues at that time?
Yes, I like this too.
YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript"
I think there's plenty of people who would not like this as well and the current method they're experimenting with is unique in that only people who want to test the app will agree to get a ride. If someone does approach me in public and ask for my time, I'm not going to think too favorably of the experience.
Very good looking. Is it a concept? Where/when do you (plan to) sell it?

I'm not sure it can adapt very well to other body shapes, though.
I voted for PHP - it was the first "web" language I ever learnt.

I'm not going to hate on it for all its foibles, like the $ before variables and the jumble of functions that constitute its standard library which totally lacks any and all kinds of namespacing.

The real reason behind why I hate it, is because as a newbie, it let me do things that are now, in hindsight, terrible practices. Things like including mixing code and markup outright, placing source in public facing directories, and not to mention the myriad PHP tutorials which encourage handling paths using simple concatenation.

A better language, I feel, is one that 'pushes' against things that are wrong, and makes them harder to do.

I'd also have voted for Java if I could, for no other reason than its verbosity.

ps. If you're wondering, I like Python most.
They have fairly different goals, though. BitC's main goal was to be a verifiable systems language, so it makes some sense that a lot of effort up front was put into investigating the "verifiable" part. Rather than building libraries and trying to get it to catch on, the effort was focused on trying to figure out if it could be designed in a way that simultaneously supported low-level, systems-ish programming while also supporting verification. If the answer on the verifiability part turned out to be no, then that would mean it wouldn't necessarily be worth building the rest (or trying to get people to use it), since that was the point of the project existing in the first place.
Brilliant. This is such a common use case I can't believe it's not more optimized in the OS level.
Quick suggestion: style the "Current Location" bubble differently from the rest.

Also, I'm not sure what "?" is. I assume that it lets you enter an address, but it's best if I don't have to try it to figure it out.
Don't Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging
I am rewriting my site with its css now. Actually, i can build everything with js and css, but i cant make good looking things. TB for me is the way to prettify my ugly markup.
It is very friendly. I have to revise tons of javascript written without any mvc, but TB is built on classes. So, for the most parts i have to just install ids in tags required to drive my code.
Hey Twitter, What's Happening
Didn't want people to buy anything from me, just "enlighten" them about lotto.

On the other hand I am not even sure if lotto is really such a bad investment. I know the expected value is negative, but there is a chance to become a millionaire after all. If spending 1$ doesn't hurt you much, might be worth a try?
In a small community where people collectively want to foster good discussion, comments can succeed for a while. I think it's impossible to sustain that if the community grows or if they lose their focus.

No community I've ever seen, apart from MetaFilter, has kept the noise level low enough that participating in the community is enjoyable. Hacker News was great a few years back, but it's painful to watch now. Same for every other site I've known: As the community grows, discussions degrade, and people get hostile.

People don't have a lot of insight. So when sites open up to comments, the typical comment — which may be perfectly average for humanity — is trash. People have agendas and biases. Most people don't see it, or don't care, so they don't correct for them.

Commenting systems and algorithms can hold back the tide for a while. They can force out people with a net negative impact on the community. But in the end, attempting to sustain good discussion is a losing battle. It's so easy for good discussions to turn bad, for intelligent arguments to become baseless, for disagreements to become personal attacks. Humanity as a whole isn't capable of rational, reasoned discussion at scale.
What I already told Esten on twitter:
He outlines some aspects of a method to keep the 'good contributors' engaged, even if the community grows, by highlighting their contributions.
What interests me is how to scale these good comments without excessive moderation. And also, even on sites that have moderation available over time there's again and again this boom-bust cycle, where comments start out being really insightful when the community is small, which attracts more people which brings down the quality of comments, making people less interested in high quality commentary (and also the general audience less interested in the comments at all).

I think limiting the number of contributors is interesting, but I wouldn't limit the ability to reach a big audience per se. Precisely the possibility to reach an audience entices high-quality comments.
Possibly part of the real challenge is actually to keep the non-commenting audience interested in the comments.

So maybe it's about limiting the number of contributor-slots available in any given situation, and then of course think of a non karma-whoric way of assigning those slots... hmm :) Maybe even make it random, so anybody can get one of those slots, so create a sense of urgency not to blow that chance. Might work in some situations.
For a feature suggestion I've been craving (not quite in-line with your app, but possibly a useful pivot): let me specify a route[-gesture] with multiple stop-points, possibly even returning to the start--so that the start of each route is the end of the previous. (Say, go to a friends' to pick something up, then from there to the grocery store, then back home [where I already was while entering the route.]) The one thing I find absolutely tedious is saying "from Current Location, to B", then after arriving at B, having to change that to "from Current Location, to A", rather than just being able to say "from B back to wherever the Current Location was when I was coming here."
A few of the other engineers I work with think I'm crazy, but I'd bet $100 that in the next few years, Apple will produce a TV itself and remove this product from the market.

The well-known comment in the Jobs biography tipped their hand about a further commitment to TV. Literally everybody I've talked to about it balks at the idea of a full-on Apple tv set. That it's too murky, too much tangling with cable providers. Too much competition with existing set makers without the ability to really revolutionize the form-factor like cell phones. That instead they'd just give you a box that you can plug into an existing TV to make it good.

But Jobs (and Apple) have always been about "the whole widget." Moreover, they have a lot of experience building really great large displays.

Besides, TVs need it now. So-called "Smart" IP tv's are the future. TV's already have Apps. And the experience sucks because Samsung, LG, Sony, etc, are not in the business of making first-class software products. I believe the line where steve said he'd "finally cracked it." Because a lot of us I'm sure can see the rough outline of a product there. Let it run iOS. Let me remote control it with my other iOS devices. Let me integrate iTunes/etc in a first-class way. The murky part is: How exactly do you deal with existing cable content. Can I add HBO West to my home screen like an "app" right alongside the HBO Go app? That integration of these 2 side-by-side systems of content delivery (Cable and Internet) is the detail that I think needs to be "cracked." How great would it be to see this product emerge as posthumous part of Jobs' legacy..
The whole PHP vs "Real" languages reminds me of the Bootstrapping vs VC Funding argument. Also, it seems (to me at least) to simply be a purist vs pragmatist debate.
> How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?

Because if you try to tell any of those stories today, you'll have Disney's lawyers knocking on your door (if not the FBI knocking down your door). And don't forget those stories were already old when Walt Disney was a little boy.
Agree that it could be clearer. The idea of the '?' is to let you enter a location without the hassle of having to save it first. Useful for times when you want to go someplace, but it's not common enough to warrant saving it
The capital is unnecessary for two reasons. First, common parlance does not distinguish any old internet from the global one. From a descriptivist standpoint, the battle is already over. Second, we already use an article to differentiate the two uses: an internet is to a world as the internet is to the world—not the World. Same goes for a web versus the web.

What does bother me is that it’s called the World Wide Web and not the Worldwide Web.
Because you've been a bad, bad boy and now you're going to be punished... :p
That may be true of actors and directors. But for software? I can't imagine.

Look at the presenter's experience:

> Over a six month period, I lead the project to rewrite a top 100 website using a new software stack. Doing so, we used HAProxy, Varnish, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Symfony2, Syslog-ng, Redis and MySQL to create a platform that handles 100 million page views per day and has room to grow.

There are tons of companies out there eager to hire someone with that experience.
Very smart. Great work. I have definitely felt this pain, next time I do I will use your app!
Am I the only one who thought this was about BitCoins.

Because I think Bitcoin wont work in it's current form.