skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With re Borges' attitude to Hitler and Nazism: clearly, neither the interviewer (Cavett) nor the author of this article (O'Connell) seem to be very familiar with Borges' writings.

No one who has read Borges' half a dozen essays on the war (written before and during WW2, collected in "Selected Non-Fictions") could accuse him of "refusal to engage with politics", at least as far as Hitler was concerned.

I quote:

"If I had the tragic honor of being German, I would not resign myself to sacrificing to mere military efficiency the intelligence and integrity of my fatherland; If I were English or French, I would be grateful for the perfect coincidence of my country's particular cause with the universal cause of humanity.

It is possible that a German defeat might be the ruin of Germany; it is indisputable that its victory would debase and destroy the world. I am not referring to the imaginary danger of a South American colonial adventure; I am thinking of those naive imitators, those homespun Ubermenschen that inexorable chance would bring down upon us.

I hope the years will bring us the auspicious annihilation of Adolf Hitler, this atrocious offspring of Versailles."

"Those who hate Hitler usually hate Germany; I have always admired Germany. My blood and love of literature make me a natural ally of England; the years and books draw me to France; but in Germany, pure inclination. I am certainly not one of those fake Germanists who praise the eternal Germany in order to deny it any participation in the present. I am not sure that having produced Leibniz and Schopenhauer cripples Germany's capacity for political action. Nobody asks England to choose between its Empire and Shakespeare, nor insists in France that Descartes and Conde are incompatible. I naively believe that a powerful Germany would not have saddened Novalis or been repudiated by Holderlin. I detest Hitler precisely because he does not share my faith in the German people; he has decided that to undo 1918, the only possible lesson is barbarism; the best incentive, concentration camps..."

"Things are much worse in Russia, I hear people say. I infinitely agree, but Russia does not interest us as much as Germany. Germany - along with France, England, the United States - is one of the essential nations of the Western world. Hence we feel devastated by its chaotic descent into darkness..."

Does this sound like "refusal to engage with politics"?
Mixing Qt, OpenGL, CUDA and some proprietary devices.
Unfortunately the documentation still states that at this point I can choose either threads or a dynamically linked run time library. For an embedded system, static linking isn't much of an option because there are real memory constraints.

It's a shame that a lot of these new languages focus on creating a really great language, but don't seem to give as much time to the practical usage of the language (for example, GHC did not support cross-compilation at all until very recently).

Ironing some of those fundamental issues out before adding some of the fancier features could probably really boost interest in the language and programmer uptake.
Startup Founder Prostitution
Are people honestly still proud to be American when things like this come to light?

Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)
> The downside was that it took several minutes to compile <100 line sources that produce <1000 instruction programs.

This sounds like the Stalin Scheme compiler.

Simple benchmark (vs C (gcc), Stalin wins): http://justindomke.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/the-stalin-compi...

GUI addon: http://code.google.com/p/stalingui/

http://community.schemewiki.org/?Stalin

Download link: https://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi/software.html
That's not the point. I'm sure OP would've been fine loosing, as long as it was in fair competition.
Nope, that's just poor planning on behalf of the company.

But let's say the company's boss refused to let his employees have Thanksgiving off because he did not want to be alone on Thanksgiving, so he was going to selfishly make his employees be with him and keep him company. However, all of his employees got caught in traffic --> behind a Thanksgiving parade --> that his company was sponsoring --> (with the theme, "home for the holidays") --> and he ended up alone at the office anyway...that would be ironic. It's situational.
The flip side of noise, distraction and interruption is people. I still find it hard to get this part of my working life just right.

On the one hand, to do really thoughtful work does require quiet and isolation, something that's difficult to get in open-plan spaces. On the other hand, avoiding garden paths and finding better ideas also requires the kind of impromptu chatting that happens with others around. Plus, company is nice.

I feel like my ideal would be an office with two sections, the "library" and the "coffee shop". The library part is dead quiet, by design and by convention, somewhere always available when you need to focus. When your work is more mundane, you need a break or you feel like company, you can emerge and work around others in the more traditional open plan environment (i.e. the coffee shop).

It doesn't seem that many workplaces are able to provide both environments well. Most favour just the latter.
At this point, there isn't any way to say for sure. The only thing about that situation that seems clear is that the situation is a clusterfuck and that nothing is clear.

We should want nothing to do with that situation and indeed it seems most Americans don't want anything to do with that situation (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/us-syria-crisis-us...). Unfortunately the possibility remains that Americans already do have something to do with the situation, whether that is what the people desire or not.
Wormhole Is Best Bet for Time Machine, Astrophysicist Says
I thought this was common knowledge. Ballmer said a few years ago that he would be retiring in 2018. To announce that he's quitting, even "within a year", is very out of the ordinary, and it's obvious something went down, and the board got very frustrated with Ballmer.
> our transformation to a devices and services company

This is what I find the most worrying. Are there no more "software companies" anymore? That you know, sell software as a product and only as a side-business they sell related services? Like the kind of companies that can "shaft their customers from time to time" because they know they make enough money from their great software not to care? Will they stop making great developer tools and will they start to not give a fuck about developers just like everybody else? Will they stop funding the cool research they currently do, like in the programming languages field?

This is the saddest news imho, because it will fuel up the current trend in industry. An in "services" or "devices" companies programmers are seen more and more as just "code monkeys". And developing tools for developers or "power users" becomes less of a priority. Catering to "the needs of many" is nice and fluffy and all but we still need techno-elites somewhere, and they're not gonna truly exist outside of companies that make enough money and have the privilege of occasionally showing the finger to both the customers and the minority shareholders because they know that in the end they have real products they can leverage to milk enough money from the customers and poor into the shareholders' pockets... "service" companies can't really do this because they always need to be perceived as "good" and "devices" companies will have a hell of a time competing in the new "so-cheap-they-are-almost-disposable devices" economy.

Winter is coming here. But there is hope for more summery weather for companies in the fields of AI/ML/BigData.
> Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine?

Honest answer to the honest question: I want to live in this country[1] because I consider it my home. The government? That is the part I don't care for. I feel absolutely no loyalty to it. When another victor inevitably starts writing history books, those books will not be kind to the modern American government.

[1] Where "country" is both a chunk of geography, a loose-knit culture (perhaps best described as a culture of loose-knit cultures), and the place where most of the individual people I like also live.
A lot of the criticism of Ballmer seems to miss the point.

Did Microsoft miss key trends? Maybe a few but who doesn't.

Microsoft saw and got involved in most of those trends they "missed" and even often got there well ahead of the parties that own the markets today.

In 2000 I was hired by Microsoft. One of the big initiatives was to make tablet PCs a reality. Microsoft spent years working on marketing consumer smartphones before the iPhone. That Microsoft lost a leading position in the market for computing devices is surprising given how much effort they put into devices eventually popularized by other companies, particularly Google and Apple.

Why doesn't Microsoft own the tablet and consumer smart phone market right now? The answer must be in execution rather than understanding of where the market was headed. Why couldn't they develop (and why can't they still develop) products folks like in these areas?

When I was there the mentality was that Microsoft would be first to market, would fail for a few major releases but still beat everyone else with a quality product. Yet they spent time producing products nobody wanted while first Apple and later Google ended up walking away with the tablet and consumer smartphone markets.

What went wrong? That's the real question.
Make documents available only as apps.
This is a troll, right? You just gave us a very scary glimpse of the future.
Why isn't the api compatible (or at least sympathetic with) 2D canvas? If it could do that, you'd be able to reuse so much code.
Don't worry, if this idea gets adopted then they will quickly label it as a 'terrorist network' ; no problem.
</freedom>?
I usually do my best work with music, street noise and chatter from the TV at the same time. The more variety, the better.
One of Microsoft's big problems is that software and hardware lifecycles are slowly extending to the point where Windows' primary competitor is Windows. In other words, older versions are good enough, people don't upgrade until they get new computers and they do that less often. Microsoft has been trying to transform themselves into a services business since at least 1999. I am not holding my breath.
I lived in a California Craftsman house for a few years, and plaster-on-lath construction on the inner walls was great. The higher density & mass of the material masked sound better than drywall, but also provided additional thermal mass so very little AC was required for most of the season. Just circulate outside air at night to cool the house, and close up the windows in the morning to stay cool for the day.

Modern tech exists for good acoustics, it's simply a matter of cost - houses near areas that need noise-abatement routinely get fitted with it, but developers are cheap and will skip it if at all possible.
LOL!

Don't be fooled by this post, the dude comes from a country where rape is a regular no-comment thing.

Where a minister cost the exchequer $50 billion by giving away spectrum.

Where the state army regularly massacres its own citizens in the name of progress (forced land seizures), citizens who have no political options and have turned to Naxalism out of desperation.

Look, brown man travels for 10 years in the US and gets hassled once -- with some justification it seems (the chemical tests came back positive). I can guarantee that and average American travelling to India would face a much harsher ordeal at the hands of the locals. Just ask any white woman tourist.

Yo...Aggrieved Bong! Karma is a bitch and somehow all the hassling of Whitey when he is in Calcutta had to come around. In this case it landed on your ass. Move along and stop pretending to be a hipster with your "virtual corporations" and shit. Or would you prefer going back to the motherland and working for Didi?

I for one would be happy to be subjected to such a process IF it also had the effect of catching the REAL terrorists. The fact that it does not is the real tragedy here.
Intel has been doing the groundwork for using their chips with Android. If they deliver on Intel-quality chips, and they will, these will, due to process alone, blow anything ARM out of the water, both on power consumption and performance.

Thats a huge win for Android, and by extension it will be a huge win for Intel. It certainly seems like Intel is heading to Android for an entry into the market.
Oh wow! Thanks!!!
This is where things like Chaos Monkey really come in handy. If you want to run EBS or ELB, I suggest randomly breaking things, until your architecture is resilient.

This is one reason I like Linode. They don't offer EBS, so you don't design it into your system. Also, they are just a really great company to do business with.
Then US citizens wonder why everyone else hates them.

Much of this, is not news in many countries, although it lacks solid proof or confessions, it is impossible to keep all that hidden for long.

Brazillians for example figured only one or two years after the US backed coup here, that the coup was US backed. (declassified documents confirmed our suspicions about 5 years ago).

Also, there still many people here waiting to see if documents detailing how our ships got sunk during World War II, the official history is that it was the germans and this is why we joined the war, but WWII veterans swear it was US posing as germans, so they could close the steel mill deal.

When WWII started, Brazil president was very close to Italy leadership, and he was a fascist himself, Brazil was providing lots of resources to Italy and Germany.

Later, US wanted the massive amounts of rubber we had, and of course, wanted Brazil to stop helping the Axis. Then there was the sudden attacks, and a sudden president change of heart, where Brazil would start to supply US instead, specially Jeep tyres, would buy a steel mill, and would help in the African front lines... this got changed to Italy mid-trip, with Brazillian ships dumping into Italy snowy mountains people trained and geared for a desert war...

I know a bunch of people (specially, obviously, fascists, but many non-fascists too, but most of them are over 50) that still resent that story, and wish Brazil had joined (with boots on the ground) the Axis side instead.

Also Brazillian soldiers got shafted hard by the US, specially the "rubber soldiers". US and Brazil made a agreement, where drafted people could choose to fight in Europe, or get shipped to Amazon (with several promises regarding the advantage of going to Amazon, and indeed 50.000 soldiers went to Amazon), they would gather the rubber to make tyres, and US and Brazillian government would jointly pay them and take care of them, and return them back to their family after the war... The payment arrived (and partially) only in 1988, and they are still stranded away from home... (some of them still roam the forest wearing their military uniforms, kinda creepy seeing 90+ year old soldiers roaming the forest)
> I feel absolutely no loyalty to it.

Yet you are enforced to be loyal to it. Try not paying your taxes, for example, and they will deprive you of your freedom.
No, this is the kind of thing that happens with a poor application architecture (ie, using one AZ). Sad that companies still can't get this right.
Frankly, I'm not sure that this is 10 years off. In fact, I'll be a little disappointed if we don't see it in 7.
To quote the post:

"So I grabbed their code and tried checked if it would also produce warnings, and it did, almost as many as mine."

So, no, not so much. I believe you're confusing this with a statement made after it that does relate to jQuery Mobile.
Although even accident cannot be ruled out (the situation is just confusing and crazy), it would not surprise me if the attack was backed (even if indirectly) by US or Israel. It would surprise me even less if it was someone else, and US knew and did nothing to prevent it on purpose (like the story on the article, or the one about OWS people being targeted by snipers and FBI ignoring the snipers on purpose).
Tomorrow's cities: How the Venus Project is redesigning the future
GitHub System Status
The Hackathon in question is apparently BattleHack Miami, hosted by PayPal:

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2013/08/bat...

The winner in question was YellowPepper, who at the very least share their name with a startup also involved in mobile banking (http://www.yellowpepper.com/#/homeId/homeCB/page/home.html) and have issued a press release from Miami (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...).

(I'm not involved, I just saw this through Tom's Twitter.)
GNUStep is almost dead project, it was being developed already before Apple bought NeXT, and it is still not there.

The way the web site gets updated, looks like a software project connected to a machine, without proper support for the latest Objective-C versions, who would bet on it for production code?

Every time I see them at FOSDEM I look forward to see better updates, but it always looks the same.
Just upvoted you for "Lisp is a dangerous language that shouldn't be taught or used these days.". You just made a huge number of people curious and willing to learn more about Lisp by saying that :)

Jokes aside, the Van Roy book is something to add to my "to read" list. Try posting it again in a comment that doesn't get downvoted to hell, maybe others will notice it too.
Well, I think a lot of open source business models involves selling services relating to the software instead.
I am loyal to it like somebody is loyal to a mugger. If I don't give them money, people with guns will take it.

I would say this is better described as "obedience" than "loyalty".

Should I move to another country and pay a different government my tax money instead? Arguably. It is not clear to me which government I should instead be forced to pay, and my options are very limited as I am ill-equipped to live in most other countries. Five Eyes rules out the most obvious answers.
I've seen this before. I was involved in one where the winning team had been working for months beforehand (their website was registered > 6mo before the event), had prepared presentation materials far before the event including design mockups, and presented with nothing more than a pre-cooked video that was looked manipulated to show "working" code. None of us knew for sure, but it looked like they had just built static HTML pages and transitioned between them.

For those of us who had built working products, it felt more than a bit cheap. We saw some great code and very little of it was recognized.

I believe the issue is one of expectations and marketing for these events. They are pitched as "hackathons" and try very hard to attract engineers, as you simply can't have the event without coders. Therefore, engineers reasonably expect an event where the best code wins. After all, it's called a "hackathon", not a "meet & greet with investors" or even a "startup weekend". In the end, it just felt like the judges were putting themselves into the mindset of investors, and in that case, obviously the team that has prepared for months beforehand will win. But to the coders, we felt cheated, and that they had completely missed the point.
Only if you ignore the gigantic set of APIs that Apple also controls through which those binary apps get the vast majority of their work done.
I can also work with regular noise that's why I drown out voices with Russian or Japanese heavy metal, or electronic music. If I'm working on heavy concentration work I always have earbuds in.
On the contrary, I found Sedgewick's lectures very interesting. The animations of algorithms using cards, trees, nodes etc. is an excellent way to get a good grasp. It is a solid representation of what you would imagine in your mind while learning algorithms.

Another particularly interesting thing about his lectures is when he shares some stories from his vast experience over the years. For eg. When they named a red-black BST after the best contrasting colours you could get on the first ever color printer built in Xerox PARC. Or his excitement to build an animation for Prim's MST on a personal computer.
Still hard to say. Objectively, given that neither side actually cares for taking innocent human lives, the ones most likely to profit from this are the rebels. Obama's "line in the sand" speech coupled with the timing of UN inspectors on the ground should make one think twice before jumping to default conclusion. I don't care for one side or the other, it is just a big mess anyway it seems. The reason I kind of follow is that I am afraid somehow US is going to get involved in it, which, now seems more likely.
Your teacher got it wrong. Sarcasm is not irony and the saying goes that "sarcasm is the lowest Form of humour".

However, an English teacher teaching others what irony is and getting it wrong is ironic.
While not extraordinary by quantifying and studying it we can learn to understand the mechanisms behind it. If we understand concentration and thought better we can start implementing habits to maximize those values. Seems like a pretty decent goal to me.
I find it is a tradeoff. For the deepest thought, I feel I'm best in a quiet environment. However, if I've got to have sound, then music I'm very familiar with is better than something more random.

For instance, from my office I can hear the tech support people. If I'm trying to solve a hard problem, and I can hear some support person trying to explain for the 10th time to a customer that if the customer schedules our software to run overnight, the customer has to leave the computer on overnight for this to work, I'm probably not going to be able to think effectively about my problem.

If I then put on the headphones, open Spotify, pick a playlist that I've listened to a hundred times, and turn the volume up enough to mask the support person, then I can pretty much ignore the music and concentrate on my problem--maybe not quite as hard as if I had quiet, but enough to feel useful and not get frustrated.
> Are people honestly still proud to be American when things like this come to light?

Humans have an amazing capacity to hold contradictory views.

> Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)

If you disown your government, you relinquish any hope of fixing it through democracy.
He sleeps with a bunch of women in a fancy apartment. Some of them are important.

That's the whole story.

Dragged out into this shit: http://valleywag.gawker.com/google-boss-enjoys-15-mil-manhat...
I think it is ironic, according to the definition. Expected result is that when you order lunch, it should be a treat, something out of the ordinary. Actual result, everyone already had the same menu the day before, and probably brought it as leftover s, so it is not special anymore.
If Microsoft rests on the laurels of their enterprise business then activist shareholder sue them and kick up general shit storms for letting mobile and changing markets pass them by.

If Microsoft tries a lot of different things, even possibly cannibalizing existing business in the process, to try and stay in step with the market activist shareholder sue them and kick up general shit storms for "losing sight of core competencies" (the enterprise).

Public companies are damned if they do and damned if they don't if either strategy doesn't play out.

That being said. How is Windows 8 a "despicable hi-tech corporate maneuver"? Shaking down Android OEMs, that falls in my despicable bucket, but taking a stab at a touch optimized interface, not so much, it's just a run of the mill failure.
Am I crazy or did the URL of the submission change? I've never seen that done on HN before.
4GL Alliance - Uniting efforts around open source 4GL tools