skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps a side effect of "everybody" learning to program will be the demand for more programming tools that are easy to use. Excel and VBA both developed due to use demand.

I've seen lots of people, from engineers to workers on the loading dock, use Excel to create convenient tools for their own use.
Hello strlen, thanks for the interesting reply.

While CAP and durability are orthogonal they are very related in actual systems, I don't think it is ok for a system like Redis to assume that users have multi DC replication and/or other infrastructure preventing mass reboots of small clusters composed of a few nodes. Also note that the more nodes in a distributed system are "decoupled" from the point of view of failures (different physical networks / equipment, different datacenter), the more you are likely adding latency.

But the point in the discussion was never that, since synchronous replication by default is already, exactly as you express in your message, not the Redis business, so fsync or not, Redis Cluster is not going to feature "C". WAIT and its semantics ended taking all the attention, because you know, if your work is to show "C" is violated, you tend to focus there, regardless of the system analyzed not claiming to be consistent.

As for Redis Cluster, many places where Redis is used in the right way, in the environments you say people are happy with Redis, would benefit from the automatic sharding and the operational simplicity that Redis Cluster can provide to Redis, this is why Redis Cluster is IMHO a good milestone in the roadmap.
Yes, you are correct. We're trying to limit the system to one rendering per page at a time.
You must hate APL based languages

applykl =: 2 : '(((u&.>) @: (n&{)@])`(n"_)`] }) ^: ({. uy_vx e.) "_ 1'
If I recall correctly, Linus refused to make this change in Linux, denouncing it as paranoia.

My fear is that the extra complexity adds additional opportunity for a back door to be inserted. However, software can be audited, the hardware cannot be.
That render() method is called only on page edits or forced refreshes, not on every page view.
Basically, if your news/informational/blog site doesn't work without JavaScript: kill yourself now before you reproduce.

Also, there are fleetingly few applications whose best implementation is a "web app". Why go over the network for an effing todo list (and give the NSA this weeks shopping list in the process)?

Web sites should NEVER require any JavaScript to display correctly. End of story.
Make something compelling. Build it non-crappily. Congratulations, you'll get on the whitelist.

Fill my browser with pseudo-popups, craptastic infinite scrolling and other awful things and you won't.
8 facts you need to know about your feelings
This is just all very subjective:

* Zero is the first unsigned integer. If you start at 1, you're wasting one

Counter-argument: If you start indexing at 1, it allows you to encode an exceptional condition (e.g., element of a search not found) as 0 when the result is an unsigned integer.

* p[0] == *p, and it makes no difference whether pointer arithmetic had been invented, because pointers are just memory addresses, and that's what the cpu works with

Counter-argument: This only holds for fixed-length arrays, strings, and the C/C++ idiosyncrasy that conflates pointers with arrays (at the expense of runtime safety). If you have variable length arrays or strings, then the beginning of the actual array/string contents will be at an offset (allowing for length/capacity/etc. fields). In fact, the offset may be exactly one (if you have a length field the size of each element), making one-based indexing the more efficient choice.

You can make up ANY number of arguments for zero- or one-based indexing, and it will depend entirely on how much weight you assign to each of them.

Or, alternatively, you can use the Pascal approach, where you can specify the beginning index on a per-array basis.
This is like the Rapiscan. Really, you are going to name an invasive x-ray-taking-pictures-of-your-junk device Rapi-scan?

It is slapping you in the face and laughing at it just because they can. Someone said "Hey I bet I can do this and get away with it. Here hold mah beer, watch me draw a giant octupus devouring the earth!"
There's a whole book, titled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World: http://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would-Destroyed/dp/193...
>especially its eye, looks menacing, ominous, foreboding, malicious, malevolent, and borderline evil. It implies the agency is insular, unaccountable, and has an aggressive, secret agenda

Thanks, that gave me a good chuckle. I never realized the power of a cartoon eye.
Well the Dreamcast was a very early gaming console (1998, even the PS2 is from 2000) so obviously only a few games were developed with online gaming in mind (although a lot of them boasted online features like rankings or bonus content). Still, I have very fond memories of online sessions on Chu Chu Rocket, Phantasy Star Online and Quake III Arena. I believe this predates any other initiative of console online gaming by at least a few years.

Maybe I'm a little biased (because nostalgia, and Jet Set Radio), but I think the Dreamcast was ahead of its time by a margin
I wonder what this list would look like in comparison with a list of legitimate acts of terrorism. Hint: it would look pretty insignificant.
Hmm. I went to a local school here in the UK and remember sitting in a hall singing hymns and then having to say prayers. Although, judging by what my younger sister told me, that's out the window now.
Or, by being rational and reasonable.
Fed Stimulus Blunted as Software Replaces Hardware
How Placemeter’s Real Time Data Source Can Change Marketing As We Know It
We are a long long long way from that. Only 66% of Americans even understand the statistical concept of mean.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c7/c7s2.htm

Americans encounter basic statistics and charts in everyday life. Many media reports cite studies in health, social, economic, and political trends. Understanding statistical concepts is important to understanding the meaning of these studies and, consequently, to scientific literacy (Crettaz von Roten 2006). One test of these concepts included on the 2008 GSS found that 74% of Americans could read a simple chart correctly and 66% understood the concept of "mean" in statistics. Understanding these two concepts was associated with both formal education and the number of math and science courses taken. Older respondents were less likely than younger adults to respond correctly to these two questions. Men and women were about equally likely to answer these questions correctly (appendix table 7-15).
Linux Mint 16 “Petra” Xfce RC released
Actually, people positively DO NOT want to "consume web apps". They just want something that works and is convenient. Thanks to every other platform being highly anti-competitive, the web platform has edged them out. It's a shame though, because web apps are generally mediocre garbage running on a deeply flawed, slow, largely insecure platform worked on by barely-competent hipsters.
What Linus correctly points out is that when multiple sources of entropy are combined, no single source can act to diminish the sum total of entropy. Even if rdrand was comprehensively backdoored and entirely predictable by the US government, it's still going to improve the quality of randomness. At worst it's a wash, but it will never reduce it.

Here's the direct link to Linus Torvalds' entertaining observation:

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/linus-torvalds-remove-...
The list:

elementary OS

Ubuntu Touch

openSUSE

ChromeOS

Lubuntu

Mer + Plasma Active

Mint

Arch

SteamOS

Roll Your Own - At this point, the tools for building your own Linux distribution are mature and easy.
Is there a list of languages which use separate heaps for each thread? I'm really interested in learning more about that concurrency model, but haven't had much luck compiling a comprehensive list of which languages actually use it
C-style Haskell
I was the wife of a Wall Street ‘Wolf’
Show HN: HubReports GitHub daily reports
To increment x
> Have you actually been there, or are you just talking about it from Wikipedia?

Been there, have friends who emigrated from there.

> Two years ago this option didn't exist, so yes, many of the girls who are now doing videochat would have simply gone into prostitution. And, yes, two years ago, a lot of people were on the brink of starvation, just like today.

Even if you're right, that makes my argument stronger, not weaker. If these videochat businesses are employing girls who would otherwise go into prostitution, surely that makes them a good thing? Surely that means making them illegal would be a really bad idea. Surely these businesses are if anything empowering the girls (a little bit), because they now have (a few) more and (slightly) better choices than they would have two years ago.
That might very well be accurate, but I'm not daft enough to believe anything posted on the "Institute for Historical Review" site. Do you have any better sources?
Is golang good fit for chess engine? (performance wise)
Writing a background thread that does a long-running calculation? easy.

Writing a background thread that can be cancelled immediately, that gives useful progress information, that doesn't leave other threads indefinitely blocked if cancelled, and that cleans up after itself if cancelled? hard.

For my single-threaded code I have great static analysis tools, IDE magic, and testing frameworks. For my multi-threaded code, I'm on my own...
It feels similar to Android intent system. If I want to scan a barcode, an app sends a message to the system asking if anyone can do it. The app doesn't have to build that functionality, nor does it have to be provided by Android itself.

Same with sharing other types of data, installing new apps will automatically appear if they provide the functionality that another app asks for.
"If you are writing multithreaded programs, you _will_ have locks, period."

Not necessarily. In scientific computing, it is common to encounter "embarrassingly parallel" scenarios where each thread can solve equal-sized chunks of the problem, and you can wait till all threads have terminated to collect results.

edit: Okay, the final wait is usually implemented with a lock under the hood. Nevertheless, this type of program is straightforward to reason about.
Sounds like a good move to me. Intel has been awfully quiet about this.
Res Ipsa Loquitur.
I think 2014 is the year for fedora. It is the best solution I see to avoid the insane unity and to have a reliable, modern mainstream distribution.
Throughput vs latency - explaining the optimization process
Did You Know About the IBM Gift Advisor?
I'd use that. I've considered something similar for online classes, but there is no reason why it couldn't be all learning channels.
> However, software can be audited, the hardware cannot be

Exactly. So work on solid security/privacy principles, rather than take the easy way out and hope for the best.
I think what will cause most damage to the ubuntu popularity is the new Unity integration with advertisers, I for one, start using Mint instead, getting the ubuntu environment I'm used to without all the bullshit.
Education in Canada varies heavily by province (and intra-province which education system you're in) which could explain some differences in your experiences.
The level of cooperation between Mojang and the mod makers in the very oldest days is very handwavey and before my time.

If both sides cooperate there is no real difference. If the devs don't cooperate with the modders then its a little harder with C than java.

One obvious issue relates to shipping a thousand jar files and a modder simply overwrites one. You don't need gcc's linker like you would with C.

Another interesting issue is I think the same jar file ships for all OS. If mojang shipped compiled binaries for each OS, you'd end up in situations where its hard to reach critical mass for mods. So maybe industrialcraft would only exist for mac, railcraft for PC, and buildcraft for linux, which would be too bad as they interoperate reasonably well as univeral jar files on all OS.

There is an area of architectural interest for a HN startup or whatever. Its true that GCC was a big deal to install back when I set up SLS linux off 3.5 inch floppy drives in '93 and the "C" set of SLS floppy disks was a considerable stack of disks and time, perhaps half a box of disks (five or so?). In 2014 a game installing its own captive copy of GCC (or whatever) would cost only a couple more seconds of download time. In 1980 "startup time" on an atari 2600 conditioned users to expect 2 to 3 second boot and startup times for a game, but in 2014 we've gradually trained users to expect perhaps 10 to 15 minutes total for OS boot, navigate past console ads, load a game, advertisement/commercials for dev houses, cutscenes, so don't tell me that in 2014 users wouldn't tolerate running a C linker for 30 seconds as the first step of running a game. Link while all the advertisements run, or something like that, and no one would even notice. It would make modding somewhat easier and patches somewhat smaller. I'm not talking about inventing the idea of shipping libraries, I'm talking about compiling them at part of starting the game (or whatever) up. Its an idea worthy of consideration that scales a lot better in 2014 than any time in the past.
"you can be guaranteed that it will work on any random computer you come across without needing to install anything"

Hah. I call bullshit on that.

Also, most apps worth a damn are long-lived and become quite stable after a while. Most web apps are trend-driven garbage that gets turned over every 12 months.
California’s new technological heartland is struggling with its success
Absolutely. The real tragedy of our economy is not that everyone should be coding but isn't, but that it's not generating enough demand so that even people who are good at laying bricks and driving trucks, etc. have enough job opportunities
No, Linus has refused to make a different change in Linux (the complete removal of RDRAND) because linux does not directly use RDRAND output, and it already uses RDRAND as an other source of entropy[-1], which is what FreeBSD is moving towards.

According to Theodore Ts'o, there was pressure from Intel engineers to rely solely on RDRAND but they were rejected[0], it looks like the FreeBSD devs did do it and have /dev/random using RDRAND/Padlock directly[1]

[-1] although — and I don't know why — the linux rng XORs pool output with RDRAND output instead of feeding RDRAND into the entropy pool itself[3]

[0] https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/SDcoemc9V3J#+Theo...

[1] That's the only way I can interpret "for 10, we are going to backtrack and remove RDRAND and Padlock backends and feed them into Yarrow instead of delivering their output directly to /dev/random"[2] anyway

[2] http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2013-09-devsummit....

[3] I'll try to stop now but[4] provides a rationale for it: a history of unnoticed bugs in the random pool making the risk of a trivial xor lower as far as kernel devs are concerned: if you xor a known A and an unknown B, you can't know anything about the output (it won't be any more known than B is), whereas if you know of bugs in the random pool you might be able to take advantage of them and skew the output. Make of that what you will.

[4] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1323386/focus=133...
Is nmake not compatible with make? I thought that it was. I haven't programmed C/C++ on Windows at all though, so I have no experience with this.
I think you're mistaken. It looks more like FreeBSD is moving to using these devices the same way Linux already does.
"And I have to say I was pleasantly heartened when the Call of Duty wave came over in more recent years and really took first-person back to the top of the heap in prominence."

CREATED DOOM AND QUAKE, THE EXEMPLARS OF ADRENALINE ACTION FPS

[Good Guy John Carmack]

HAS NOTHING BUT KIND WORDS FOR DILUTED ALSO-RANS LIKE COD

Seriously, I probably wouldn't be so soured on "modern warfare" shooters if I hadn't played so much Doom and Quake in my teens-to-early-twenties. They set the bar, a bar which has proven very difficult to meet.
Yeah, I thought the same thing concerning the REST api, after mulling it over a bit. Being tied directly to an app could be a bit awkward in practice (Bit of a problem when either can take either's process down).
"Unofficially, someone's put a lot of work into the country’s telecommunication infrastructure, with the result that Romania now has a faster download speed than any G20 nation."

So, low cost of living and great internet infrastructure. Seems like a good place to found a "regular" startup also.

Anyone knows how hard would be to get a visa? Are they part of EU?
What's Your Fortune?
Motivational fortunes for a happy day!
One horrible example of this is Google's obsession with JavaScript scrollbars. Their rationale for doing this was because apparently native scrollbars become unusable for very long "infinite scrolling" pages. Well duh, infinite scrolling pages are a fucking moronic idea too.
So what? I doubt they're bothered if Disqus bans them from using their service.
This was interesting:

"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: 'It’ll be done when it’s done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game."
Will you do a Slayer cover?
how would you write C stye java ?
If you pay the ASCAP blanket license!
Yeah good perspective -- I guess I was thinking about this more from the perspective of predictive modelling than science.

Model averaging can be quite useful when you're averaging over versions of the same model with different hyperparameters, e.g. the number of clusters in a mixture model.

You still need a good hyper-prior over the hyperparameters to avoid overfitting in these cases though, as an example IIRC dirichlet process mixture models can often overfit the number of clusters.

Agreed that model averaging could be harder to justify as a scientist comparing models which are qualitatively quite different.
Perhaps you might appreciate that there is a wide spectrum of problems that might require parallelism, from dramatically simple enterprise apps to "massively concurrent quoting/trading engines".

This advice is written for the 90% of use-cases that can be solved with simple abstractions, where programmers are still spinning up threads and locking objects. Most application programmers don't do manual memory management, low-level network programming, graphics, and so on. Why should parallel programming be any different? That is the point I believe the author is making, and I happen to agree.
And of course that 'wait' operation does not involve locks and/or condvars.

Oh wait.
This sounds like politics to me more than anything else.

Having everyone learn to code is like having everyone be a paralegal.

Most will be bad at it. Neither is particularly difficult, but specialization is a matter of personality more than anything else.
I'd disagree that in-person networking is superior for most. Many are much more comfortable making those positive first impressions online because they are less comfortable in face-to-face settings. Thankfully, by the time they are required to meet with others, they already have gained some points through their online interactions.

The need to physically meet people has become much less important, and reputation seems to be the difference. There are probably hundreds of people on HN who have received work from people before meeting them live, and perhaps were even referred by people they've never met live.
You could use acetate, acrylic paint, plus glue to do a dyi screenprint on the run. I did this, and I have shirts that have held up 10 years :)
The justification is just .. dumb.

Arrogant, unnecessary opening. Your reasons had better be good.

First because the debate is over.

Clearly it isn't.

People want to build web apps, and they want to consume
web apps.

"People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. People want to do all kinds of things on the web. Often, they want to spend as little time on your site as possible so they can get back to whatever they were doing before. They want consistency, predictability, familiarity. They want their browser to work the same on your site as it does any other site they visit.

We had the same debate with Flash. All designers loved it and couldn't help but do "cool" stuff with it. The general public mostly just complained that it was annoying and didn't work as expected.

You can certainly stay on the side-lines, complain and
yearn for the 90s and those glorious days of geocities
and 'proper' web pages, but the world has moved on.

Hmm, were you blowing a raspberry as you wrote that

...I see the next point is more hand waving...

>As Jeremy points out, a web app seems to be nothing but a
web site that requires JavaScript.
No, it's not. A web application is an application that runs
in the browser

And this is why you don't get it. There is no binary here, it's a continuum. The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Incidentally, it's also the kind of site I write for a living.

Those aren't the sites the author is talking about.
Not to accuse Intel, because I have no idea whether or not they have backdoors, but do you want them to say: "Yes, we intentionally sold faulty products that put all your customer data at risk, and you at risk of a lawsuit for not protecting your customers' data."

Not so good for the share price, methinks.
The site started on MediaWiki. But, probably around 7 years ago, it switched over to a platform called DekiWiki, later renamed to MindTouch.

This is way over-simplifying it, but: MindTouch looks like a fork of MediaWiki (PHP) that's had all the database calls replaced by requests to a local web service running on .NET, with a Lua-based document scripting system (DekiScript) added on.

However, MDN ran all this on Linux servers - rather than Windows servers - so our installation was rather unusual. Eventually, the company behind the software decided to drop support for our kind of setup. So, we decided to move over to software we could support in-house, and launched it around June 2012.

What we have now started from the Django-based wiki that runs support.mozilla.org, called kitsune. From there, we worked on getting some practical feature parity with MindTouch. I added a node.js-based document scripting service (KumaScript) that mostly replaced DekiScript for our needs. We worked up some migration scripts, and moved the whole thing over.

It's admittedly kind of an evolutionary mess, at this point. But, at least it's our mess.
One Big, Lofty, Challenge at a Time
Besides, I genuinely find myself hilarious so the attempts at pithy commentary tend to make the whole "christ what was I thinking" part of looking at my old work less painful.
in the same way that abu ghraib/gunatanamo torture and mistreatment of detainees served as a recruiting tool for al-qaeda and similar organisations i can see this sort of thing being the equivalent for digital activists.
Save Nasa For 8 YR old Future Astronaut
Setec Astronomy! God that brings back memories.