skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree for three reasons.

Firstly different people read HN on different schedules, the weekend audience is different from the monday morning audience, it makes sense for it to rotate to maximize the different number of people aware of it. People also tend to look for new jobs mid-week so it's good for it to fall on tue/wed/thu as well.

Secondly there are likely to be people who'd rather not read/post on the hiring thread while they're at work, and the weekend posting gives them the freedom to interact with the thread.

And finally highly rated postings on the weekend tend to stay on the front page for longer than on weekdays when there's more competition. Hence they may actually get read by more people overall.
I think you misinterpreted my comment, but that's OK. My comment was that OOP in C can be seen kind of like a question of API or ABI (a bit like COM in the Windows world). If you need to do what some would consider hacky things with macros, or stuff that is "not very OO", you still want to keep boundaries between compilation units and libraries clean, and OO-style constructs is a good way to get that done. The fact that you used a macro is an implementation detail that disappears once your code is compiled.

However to your (to my eyes entirely tangential) comment about subrountines.. No, you can't do everything macros do in a subroutine. For instance you can't take the parameters and stringify them with #, you can't concatenate tokens with ##, you can't do funny things with braces or have a macro declare a bunch of static variables or code for you. You can't do the co-routine hack that btilly's link references (although it is very "out there"). This means you can do lots of interesting things with macros that you cannot with a function. These things can be abused but they can also make your code a lot simpler, shorter, easier to understand - and with the uglier parts constrained to a small amount of code. I don't see it as in conflict with OOP because it doesn't have to leak outside a single compilation unit or library.
Neat. I like how when you move the cursor over a cell, a path to that cell lights up.

It might be nice if there were a defined exit you could go to and win the maze.
I'm both curious and a little teasing here: Where do you live?

I'm talking from the perspective of a (leftist) German who wanted to relocate to Singapore (Wife said no) and lived in Tel Aviv. I've never been to the States, because quite frankly I feel the trip would cost me more 'freedom' than I'm comfortable to part with.

Note that I comment on things I know only online/through the news/from talks with friends. That said, I wonder how many critics of Singapore have actually stayed there for some time..
We're all very proud of you, but to me the OP seems to be making a general statement about achieving goals and productivity rather than specifically calling you out for not using Coursera.
I found drawing the board unexpectedly tricky.

Try again, but use an image for each hex rather than drawing its outline using lines. I'll wager you'll be pleased with the result.
They took the code from the Ariane 4 and stuck it on the Ariane 5 assuming all would go fine.

While a famous incident attributed to Ada, I can safely say that C and other popular languages have done far more damage. Even if not in terms of exploding rockets (I don't know), but time lost debugging, fiddling with checks that would be handled in other languages and so forth.

I like to tell people with Ada I can spend my time adding value rather than fighting against the language because of it's minimalism and the bugs that come with that.
I use Trello and Google Calendar for smartphone support. But I do use emacs whenever I'm at a computer. Should I try org-mode? Can it interface with those?
Here is video of very well-behaved protesters from a Turkish inland city, Eskişehir: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHoMtf_2g8
I'm curious: How do you think these terms are defined, and how do you think they differ? I have never before seen anyone object to usage in the way you did there; in this context, surely almost any (reasonably sane) freelancer will also be a contractor, and almost anyone who is contracting with a client will be doing it on a freelance basis?
Construção de uma das Maiores Ilhas Artificiais do Mundo no Catar
Ah, fantastic, another game of "spot the agenda". This is the Daily Fail so you can be sure there is one.

My guess? It's an anti-EU piece. They none-too-subtly play up how gross it is (complete with an infographic showing how the poo makes its way into a human belly, and closeups of flies and maggots), and then make sure to mention how it's an "EU trial" no less than 7 times, when as far as I can tell it is no such thing - indeed, while they do have the good grace to note that it is currently illegal under current EU regulations to sell meat fed on maggots, they rather selectively omit that it is the UK's own Food and Environment Research Agency that is leading the trial.

They also link to a (somewhat) less biased and more detailed article on The Independent, that only mentions the EU twice:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/...
Just worked that out and then saw your reply. Shouldn't have doubted myself. You're clearly more knowledgable about this than I!
Don't forget to trawl through the rest of Amit's stuff. His articles are responsible for who knows how many game developers learning interesting algorithms and howtos.
The implication is that his test is a proof of C's merit.

Merit is time-sensitive, in that if software is converted to another language, that language is more profitable/efficient for that software.

Therefore, the implication is also that systems converted to C demonstrate C's merit, because it's been decades since they were actually in the language you speak of.
I found this blog entry interesting not so much for the point being made, but as an insight into the intellectual pursuits of an extremely intelligent teenager.

At that age, I was mostly playing Goldeneye 007.
True for some definitions of "society".

Like "entrenched group of ruling fascists", for example.
Carbon Copy the Cat and the Rise and Fall of Pet Cloning (2011)
This is very much a good cause - the BSDs tend to get forgotten behind the rush of Linux development, but they take their time and produce some excellent ideas and products (thinking of: PF, OpenSSH, amongst others) - why not take 5 minutes and donate the cost of this week's coffees to the project, and see what else they can produce in the long term.
I knew something interesting would pop up by filtering "Prolog" ;)
I feel really insecure posting this but I have to ask: isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent? Or are my feelings of insecurity justified and I am truly too ignorant to recognize the intricacies and complexities laid down in that sea of text?
It is certain that in the vast majority of cases, the parent/facilitator is entirely imagining the input from the subject. For instance, experiments have been done where a 'facilitated' subject who was apparently capable of complex conversations through facilitation was shown a simple object (eg an apple) where the facilitator could not see it, and then the subject was unable to name it through the facilitated communication. The APA and most psych bodies pretty much denounced it as bunk in the mid 90's (see http://www.apa.org/research/action/facilitated.aspx). Studies that find it 'works' tend to avoid lab settings and 'overly controlled settings', similar to the studies of working telepathy.

While it is not impossible for any given instance of facilitated communication to be actual communication, it is irresponsible to believe so without some pretty solid verification given that even proponents of the technique admit that in 'many' cases the facilitator was doing the communication. I believe that the most recent APA stance was that facilitated communication should be actively avoided.
> C compilers were optimizing long before Haskell

Right, and they've come up with some excellent tricks too. But the reason she felt optimization wasn't going to progress as far is because C is a lower level language than some of the other languages out at the time, and there are necessarily less tricks you can do in a lower level language because you have to infer the intent of the programmer more, and rely on optimizing idioms etc, rather than optimizing actual constructs of the language.

How does a compiler optimize a single "goto"? There isn't much it can do unless, for instance, it notices that the goto is found in an idiomatic pattern that results in a loop. Then it can make a decision whether to unroll the loop or not. If the language gives you the loop construct, it can skip the "recognize the idiom" step (and the associated risk of guessing wrong), and go right to optimizing loops. Similarly, in higher level languages than C, the programmer can express their intent more directly, and therefore the compiler can take less risks when guessing "Ah, I see what you're trying to do, here's the fastest assembly that accomplishes that"
QR Code in shopping cart handle
The title of the blog is ... "Linux Blog" and the author may very well have no time/resources/desire to check whether his writing is also applicable elsewhere.
So you're forced to duplicate the monadic combinators (e.g: inlined replicateM here).

Now let's consider:

myParser = do
logDate <- date
char ':'
logTime <- time
let fullTime = fromDateTime logDate logTime
msg <-
if fullTime < newLogFmtEpoch
then do
str <- parseString
return (toLogMsg str)
else do
idx <- parseLogIndex
getLogParser idx

Translating this to bare-bones Go would require using explicit continuations everywhere. Any combinator you use from Control.Monad is going to be duplicated/inlined in your Go code, violating DRY repeatedly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5802474
"and his first words are"

One of my kids had some pretty serious medical problems resulting in some speech delays. This is just barely before "all problems must be solved via a tablet" era. So the speech therapists were all into sign language and then pictograms and eventually he started talking when he got around to it. Other people are like "yeah my kid started talking just out of the blue one day" and I'm all feeling that's like throwing lego pieces in the air and they come down full assembled, although supposedly it happens. Anyway I'd be really suspicious of any first words other than "more" as in candy and treats and toys and stuff. Carb addiction sets in early I guess. Basic needs were discussed long before discussions of kissing up to mom and dad.

Watching kids learn language makes me wonder about the standard sci-fi trope of humans and space aliens learning language via math or sharing physics constants. Probably adult human vs adult space alien will learn each others language via sharing pr0n pixs and pixs of junk food. Actually that kinda resembles what I've seen on 4chan. That would make a very interesting sci fi story if the concept were expanded on. For better or worse I think Hacker News is probably not a primary choice location for space alien first contact, compared to say facebook, youtube comments, or 4chan. Presumably space aliens would have their own little weird green space alien 4chan and would come to the same conclusion, thus a realistic tolerance and shared understanding would result.

I suppose this will lead to the inevitable start up idea of creating a space alien attracting social network. Or just buy reddit rather than develop it as a startup.
In the case of Erdogan you may not be that far off. Turkey is interesting country - the army there was the guardian of the secularism inherited from Kemal Ataturk.

That is almost dismantled by now with the involuntarily help of the EU. Erdogan came after free elections and after that Turkey is moving in some very dangerous waters. Add instability in Syria into the mix and the semi civil war with the Kurdish minority.
Live map coverage of the Istanbul protests
This is called the "Real World" fallacy. Your techniques are unfamiliar to me, and I am in the "Real World", therefore you are an academic who doesn't actually solve real world problems.

DSLs are used in production code, and solve real world problems better than ad-hoc repetative code does.
Welcome to the nonsense of the U.S. patent world.
Google’s balloon-based wireless networks may not be a crazy idea
Cluster is down? I cannot access it: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/meteorhacks.com
> My belief is that there's a grey zone where considered discussion of the pros and cons is okay, even good.

Considered discussion is welcome on HN. Unfortunately there are some topics where considered discussion is unlikely. Abortion; circumcision; Israel / Palestine; gun control; etc etc. It'd be fantastic if there was a site like HN where these topics could be discussed, especially if that site fostered calm rational discussion.

But these discussions too often deteriorate into noise, and worse into wider ranging down-voting and derailments in other threads.
Not really what I refer to by robust media. I'd say 200+ private TV stations, hundreds of radio stations, 40+ national daily papers qualify to call it "robust". IMO high number of incarcerated journalists is more reflection on the government that ,though democratically elected, does not seem to understand you can't really have democracy without respecting individual rights and freedoms.
To Erdogan and co.: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VmffgIqlAYA
What a victim complex. If someone is debating that we should stop using C, and I ask for software not written in C, it's obvious that I'm looking for contemporary software. And the reasoning that every software is "C" because it needs to do system/library calls would be ludicrous, and to provisionally accusing me of that is insulting.

I've done some research myself, and there are some interesting and big projects in languages other than C. Eclipse in Java, Dropbox in Python to name two. But my point still stands. I looked at all the desktop applications I have installed and they're without fault C or C++.
I'm happy with feedly
> You kinda made his point for him didn't you? He said all these are benefits of Go, and you pointed out he would need to use lots of different languages to get them elsewhere.

Not really, I just found out it was easier to reply to his bullet points like that using languages that are known for certain features.

Actually most of those languages cover all Go features.

Anyone with background in compiler design can easily provide a paper like article that picks up every single feature and describes which languages offered them initially and their evolution across programming languages.

However something like that would only contribute for flame war discussions without any productive result.

I also work for Fortune 500 companies with multi-site offshoring projects, so I do have some experience on that world.

I was attracted to Go, because it is a Google language, but I got disappointed with its features, after using the language during 2010-11 timeframe.

It remains to be seen how the language will evolve in the marketplace, but would HN care if it wasn't a Google language?
This is a fantastic resource, a future side project I have been kicking around is for an online game that would use hex movement. This is a great place to start for laying out the logic, thanks for sharing!
The horror of python dependencies, build and deploy (I currently am working on a 250k+ LOC python project) is part of what made me really love what is around the edges of Go.

There is a lot of "worse" in Go. It seems the "worse" choices were for 3 reasons: (1) make the language simpler, and (2) make the compiler / tooling simpler to build or (3) ship a production usable product in X time. I think all might yield benefits in the long term.

Getting angry about a "poor language" is pointless, there are hundreds. It seems people get more angry that it might get popular more than their favorite language. For a bit, I was a bit of a stick in the mud about Go because I was hoping Erlang (maybe with Elixir) would take off. After that I was worried it might get popular before Rust had a chance to get off the ground.

But, after having spent some time with it -- I have grown to like its odd, pragmatic mix of tooling and features.
The Future has Arrived: Print Your Own Mechwarrior Toys
Yes. I've never been able to come up with a paper or computer organization that I would naturally come back to every time. Every attempt gradually dissolves into a random spray of data.
Did their children do any wrong?
Since when did you start to punish other people instead?
You'll also want to "mark their houses" at some point...

Please think before you write such things.
That's not outright hate speech but it sure leads to hateful actions.
You're not alone in thinking that having that concept patented is actually kind of... outrageous.
> why give myself type system problems too?

Exactly! Why use Go and have type system problems? Chase nil bugs in the middle of the night, when my type system could have caught them all for virtually no cost at all?

Why use Go and have type system problems like lack of sum types and pattern matching, having to waste my time emulating them with enumerated tags or clunky type switches?

What you're calling "layers of complexity and abstraction" are just "layers of abstraction" -- Haskell code to solve a problem tends to be simpler than Go code to solve the same problem. By simplicity, I'm talking about mathematical simplicity here. Not ease of learning. Simplicity is hard. But it pays.

I don't claim that the type system makes all problems go away magically, but it helps catch a far greater chunk of the errors.

> we both know you're gonna be debugging the same crap at the end of the day

Actually, no. If you've actually used Haskell, you'd know that debugging runtime problems is a much much more rare phenomenon. It happens, but it's pretty rare.

I don't ever debug null problems. I almost never have to debug any crashes whatsoever. I don't debug aliasing bugs. The vast majority of the sources of bugs in other languages do go away.

> I'd prefer to work with a simpler environment, and it doesn't make me "too dumb to understand haskell"

Who claimed you're "too dumb to understand Haskell"? If you're smart enough to write working Go programs, you're most likely smart enough to learn Haskell. But learning Haskell means learning a whole bunch of new useful techniques for reliable programming, and that isn't easy.

People who come to learn Haskell and expect it to be a new front on the same concepts they already know (e.g: like Go is) are surprised by how difficult it is -- because it isn't just a new front. There are a whole set of new concepts to learn. This set isn't really larger than the set of concepts you already know from imperative programming, but the overlap is small, and you forget just how involved what you already know is.
Well, I won't try to give every anti-democratical actions of Erdogan : HN comment post limit may be exceeded.

Maybe those two links might help to understand the vision of "democracy" of Erdogan :

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4387396,00.html

http://www.quora.com/Turkey-country/How-can-the-Turkish-publ...
I suppose it depends how you define "wealth." And what is wealth worth if it's in the hands of a small minority, while the rest go without, for instance, healthcare or a decent education? Even if you are in that small minority, is that the society you want?

BTW, the only country I can think of that actually practices laissez-faire capitalism is Somalia: they really have no regulation. Not so much wealth being produced there.
It's not news that there are tons of broad patents of ridiculous nature which obviously have prior art.
I think it depends on the context.

At my last company, we dropped mostly estimating because it wasn't getting us much in the way of value. We had other things to make us think the solution through.

It also let us give up some illusions: That there was a single right solution. That we could know the idea's bounds in advance. That we wouldn't learn anything important by releasing early and often.

Of course, we were a startup. In that context, it's easier to see that neither the problem nor the solution is understood. But looking back on other projects, I think 90% of the time I've spent estimating was wasted.

In the future I expect I'd only do estimates if a) there were a question about being able to meet a hard external deadline (as opposed to a made-up bullshit deadline, which is most of them), or b) we needed to choose between alternative paths that were large enough that handwave relative estimates wouldn't cover it.
There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment.

Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.
The actual "biggest threat to society" is politicians.
Very troubled waters indeed...

I spent quite a bit of time there in the late 90s; absolutely love the country and the people, despite almost getting blown up by the PKK.

After Erdogan came to power, I was wondering how long it would take the military to put him in check. They got pretty close a couple years back.
The product/market fit isn't the business model. The product/market fit is first seeing if there's any demand whatsoever of whatever you're selling. The strategy is how you position yourself within the market. The business model is how you plan on scaling the business in a systematic way.

You don't want to think about the business model before you have product/market fit. We could just be arguing semantics here, but I think the general advice is sound.
Seriously, though. I mean, a ban on chewing gum, though? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore

Right, I dont want to contemplate that.
>anti-Singaporean sentiments on HN lately

To be honest I doubt Singapore is on the radar of most HN participants in any shape or form whether positive or negative. Thats not to say that its insignificant - its just that there haven't been any 40k people riots there lately...so not at the front of people's minds.
I'm not betting anything. I'm just saying that it seems to me the advantages of higher level languages do not outweigh the disadvantages. Most of the software I use was written relatively recently, which means other program languages were available, yet C was chosen over them.
By demanding that western companies contracting work out in 3rd world countries get them done.
Several of your examples are hard real-time systems. Garbage collectors, schedulers, etc. are a no-go in such environments, so you won't see much Python or JavaScript there, but that doesn't discount the value of those languages. Note that Ada, a high level language, is used in similar systems, and that Lisp has been used in NASA satellites. High-level languages like Erlang are used in telecom systems and other critical network applications.

The fact is, languages created in the early history of computer programming have had the opportunity to be used in high profile projects like the ones you brought up. In time, you will undoubtedly see Python and others used in such contexts.
Civilization 5 uses hexagons
rather http://motp.sourceforge.net/

According to the gauth “disclaimer” on the website, the recent versions of the Android app are proprietary: the most recent on Google Play is from February 13. It’s hard to tell if there will be any more commits to that repo.

Fork: kaie/otp-authenticator-android https://github.com/kaie/otp-authenticator-android