skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python 3 wasn't a "debacle" in any sense. In fact, it has proven to be an excellent approach. Users with large Python 2.x code bases haven't experienced any disruption. Users who needed Python 3's features were free to upgrade as soon as they wanted. Libraries and frameworks have gotten Python 3 support when it becomes feasible and worthwhile to do so. It may not be the fastest adoption possible, but it has been quite pain-free, and totally optional for those who have no need for it.

Besides, Rust should be happy to get anywhere near the number of users that Python and .NET have. That surely won't happen until there's a version of Rust that's stable for more than a couple of months.

And what makes you think that Rust still won't end up in a situation where some desired future functionality requires backward compatibility to be broken, regardless of how much effort they put in now?
There's a fine line to walk between "Not Invented Here" and suffering through an inadequate tool. We at Facebook have a long history of trying stock tools and see them failing at our scale.

Walter Bright puts out a good argument against lexer generators here: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/so-you-want-t.... Besides, tokenization is hardly the interesting/bulky part of the task. The verifications are.
Totally agree. Their packing process appears to be designed for $10k orders, so when the optimism fails, the box leaves nearly empty. Perhaps they're trying to send a subtle message: 'don't waste this box, buy more stuff.'

One time I ordered from them some XAM3359ZCZs (a Texas Instruments ARM CPU which is about half a cell phone or double an Rπ) -- out of stock in US, but available from UK. I was in a hurry, so I spring for the extra shipping. Weeks later, no parts and no word. Called, them and 'oops' it is stuck in UK and I need to make a customs declaration to re-import to the US this US part from the UK. Very annoying on several levels.
By the way: I'm glad you mentioned Ragel. It's a fantastic dependency-free state machine generator that everyone should check out. http://www.complang.org/ragel/
Robinhood – Zero-Commission Stock Brokerage
We don't use setState, but we have om.core/set-state! which does pretty much the same thing - an OmLink would not be very hard to do.
Good point, no carbon involved.
No one broke your spine, it never existed and never will. It is imaginary.
Cyanogen runs one of the nodes. I'm not sure where Whisper Systems receives their funding from. At one point Twitter was involved with them, though I believe that is no longer the case.
Nothing, because the smoke detector uses an alpha emitter, and alpha radiation is blocked by practically everything, including a sheet of paper, or roughly 4 cm or air.
They aren't exporting anything to this guy. He's an Australian picking up his order in person in Australia. US laws don't apply.
Dressing for the Interview: Standing Out Without Being Outrageous
Well one problem could be that C++ does not have a context free grammar, and in fact its grammar is notoriously difficult to parse, so perhaps it's just as easy to write it by hand as it is to bend an existing parser generator to fit C++'s grammar?

In fact, I am not aware of any modern C++ static analyzer or compiler that uses an automatic parser generator.
Read the whole discussion please.
Clearly that's something to worry about. What won our team over was the (sometimes spectacular) speed gains compared to the C++ linter.
Yes. Read the bottom of the article.
I ordered from them exactly once, and it took so long that I eventually got in touch to see what was going on: they had forgotten about my order. Soon after, I received 4 rush packages from them (all from the same address), with only a couple of components in each. All told I received about half my order - I just gave up on them.
A friend of mine back then was actually in touch with US Gold about coding it (and he was one of the few people who'd have been capable of it). But they suddenly changed their mind and said "no, we're not doing it".

(And yes, I am the Doctor Fegg who wrote http://mattl.us/aa/AmstradAction082-0010.html ...)
Popular Wikipedia Topics Organized by Popularity vs PageRank
Totally, really wish BlackBerry could have an app like this. At least the new iMessage like part would be possible.
+1. Hosted services shouldn't let people create behaviour that's outside the spec - I know dnsimple actively prevents people who try and attempt this.
I'm still not seeing anything easier than ETLing into a regular old database, at which point you have the power and flexibility of a regular old database. Which is pretty spiffy, actually.

Are people really so bad at databases that they'll gladly suffer hacks like this to avoid using one?
There is more to it than that, the CDDL was intentionally created by Sun to be GPL incompatable, in a bid to create their own linux-like ecosystem with OpenSolaris.

The incompatable nature of the license was so linux could not merge things like ZFS and dtrace.

it was yet more Sun licensing games that only hurt adoption in the end, like their Java shenanagins.

Summing it up as "aww gee shucks licensing problems have struck again" ignores the fact that such crap was an intentional power-play from sun.
Beautiful not Fast
That's cool, though "some of the fastest regular expressions in the world" might be a bit of hyperbole: it would be comparable to any compile-time generator like Flex, Ragel, or a JIT generator like PCRE-sljit. And since D is a memory-safe language, I would expect the guards on buffer access to cause measurable overhead compared with C or C++ generated code.
> The ability of this fictional character to relive a single day points to vital issues in economics. Perfectly competitive equilibrium requires perfect information. Ignorance leads to errors that put the ideal state of equilibrium out of reach. Ignorance and error exist due to perpetual change. In a world where everything stays the same — except our knowledge of previous days — we can approach perfection.

And it makes sense too! I mean, I already knew that practically every religion out there somehow manages to turn it into an example of teaching X or scripture Y, but if even economists can relate it to their field you know you have something special.
Leave it to the WSJ to blame a problem that needs old school trust-busting on excess regulation. They've got libertarian rabies.
"Meanwhile, tech industry execs are screaming over how high (!!) engineer salaries are..."

A couple of recent surveys were very eye-opening. Salaries seem high compared to the national average in silicon valley, but if you look at compensation in other fields in in high-cost areas like silicon valley, it doesn't appear that software developers have particularly high salaries.

The first survey is from sfgate (the sf chronicle)...

http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...

According to this survey, registered nurses in San Francisco earn $112,140 a year. "Software Developers, Applications" workers earn $110,950 a year. System software developers clock in at $112,260 a year. Lawyers earn an average of $165,740 a year.

Software Developers get the best job title on US News And World Report's rankings

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...

But the top jobs in high paid regions tells a similar story. In San Jose, as with San Francisco, Registered Nurses outearn software developers. In San Francisco, dental hygenists earn $106,700 a year, so about 4k a year less than these wildly well paid software developers.

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/s...

My point here isn't these aren't important fields worthy of good salaries. I'm really glad that nurses and dental hygienists are well paid, they absolutely deserve good compensation. But why do we talk about software developers as if they are this astoundingly well paid group of workers with runaway salaries? It seems that they make fine salaries compared to other well educated workers. More than some, less than others.
Twelve Year Old Top Selling Girl Scout's Sales Tips
> Walter Bright puts out a good argument against lexer generators here: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/so-you-want-t....

I'm going to have to disagree with you and Walter. While I agree that for a fixed language, a well-written hand-built recursive descent parser will beat the pants off the output of a parser generator, languages aren't necessarily fixed and writing a good hand-build parser is harder than it seems. I still recommend that people start with parser generators.

(Edit: yes, we're talking about lexers above, but the article mentions both lexers and parsers. I think the case for using a hand-built lexer is much weaker than the case for using a hand-built parser, not that I'm a fan of either.)

If you use a parser generator, you can be sure that your language has a clear, (hopefully) LALR(1) syntax that anyone can understand and port to another parsing environment. If you hand-parse, then the temptation exists not only to introduce subtle irregularities and context dependencies into the language, but also to mix semantic interpretation and parse tree generation, and both of these anti-patterns make it difficult to build generic tools that work with your new language. With a hand parser, you also run the risk of making silly coding errors that end up being baked into your language specification. (Ahem, PHP.)
I don't think you do defend against that. Even if you buried your base, a direct strike by something that big and fast would almost certainly cause you problems unless you were very deep. The crater is 40 meters across and while it isn't as deep, the shockwave anything under it would have felt probably would have been pretty brutal.

A potential Moon base would count on direct strikes by very energetic meteorites being extremely unlikely.
Another interesting alternative could be using or writing a PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper.

There is one that supports tabular data (file_fdw), and another one for JSON files (json_fdw). If you have files in other formats, you can also write your fdw for it. This way, you get complete SQL coverage.

Also, if you don't want to pay the overhead of parsing the file every time, you can use the new materialized feature for caching: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rules-materialized...

(Disclaimer: Enthused Postgres user.)
We've had quantitative easing for quite some time now, and it's definitely inflating stock prices.
Imperfect Processing
It's appealing to some to have messaging that doesn't funnel into a major data harvester. Facebook just acquired WhatsApp.
Bitcoin Seen as Little Threat to Payment Firms
Bussard was one, but there's a lot of alternative fusion research going on, including MIT's levitated dipole, Sandia's MagLIF, several variants of laser fusion, stellerators, focus fusion, General Fusion, Helion, Lockheed's high-beta design, Tri-Alpha, and probably others I've forgotten.

Some of these are well-funded, others are struggling. Even some of the other tokamaks are struggling. MIT's Alcator C-Mod has the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, and the potential to lead to a smaller, cheaper power plant. The whole project was nearly cancelled a year ago.
Um, wow. I'm "well known as a fairly unethical individual"?! I mean, I know I'm being trolled here, but there's a level of accusation that I simply can't leave unchallenged. Like any human, I'm certainly loaded with faults; I can be brash and opinionated and intimidating and abrasive -- but I also consider myself an intensely ethical person who feels a profound sense of responsibility to my family, my team, my company, my community and my craft. So at the risk of feeding the trolls, can you be specific about why you think me to be unethical?

Edit: Okay, looking at the extensive edits above, it's clear that claiming I'm "fairly unethical" was a reference -- at least in part -- to the pronoun fracas. You may disagree with my position on that (though it's a position I stand by, for whatever it's worth), but I would refer you to cooler discussion on it[1] in hopes that you might at least better understand my perspective.

[1] https://gist.github.com/trevnorris/7729322
I'd expect that it's such a rare and localized event that you probably wouldn't prepare for it.

But, wouldn't less meteorite crashes happen at the poles? Would that be the safest base location?
Of course they did :-) It must have been exciting when that first year they started recording temperatures, every day was the hottest and coldest it had ever been on that day, just one record after the next, falling like raindrops.

I was somewhat amused that 'imaging the dark side and recording flashes' was a fairly recent idea. But we have gotten much better about being able to just throw a few multimegapixel imagers around for doing things like that of late.
Perl levels up with native subroutine signatures
Using third party lexer generators means your project is now dependent on that tool. This means:

1. the tool must exist on every platform your project will ever be ported to

2. the same version of that tool must exist on every such platform

3. if the hosted compiler changes, the tool must be updated in sync with that compiler - out of sync means your project won't build

4. if there are blocker bugs in the tool, you're not in a good position to fix it. You're stuck with developing workarounds.

5. Everyone building your project has to get the tool successfully installed.

The current build of D's runtime library has a dependency on libcurl. Supposedly, since libcurl is ubiquitous, that shouldn't be any problem. But it has been an ongoing sore relentlessly sucking up multiple peoples' time, of the issues I outlined above.
I'm saying that the political process which leads to things like gov't required fast internet may also lead to greater encroachment upon said internet.

It's an interesting way of thinking of things.

Yesterday I listened to a discussion comparing the less regulated and more stable banking system of Canada to the heavily regulated and crash prone US banking system. Everyone in the US says that they want Canada's banking system, it's a common refrain.

But do Americans want the political system which leads to such a banking system being implemented properly? As soon as you get to the Queen of England appointing US Senators, Americans tend to want to forget about the whole banking system thing.

I suppose the point is this: If you tell the US political system to implement Korea style fast and cheap internet, what you're going to end up with is something much different from what you wanted. The same political forces which got you to your current location will filter this legislation as well. And you may end up with something far worse than the status quo.
How a grammar error tripped up Apple
Let's call it HTML5-phone or JS-phone from now on! Future consumers deserve to know why it's slow and the apps are crappy.
47 Epic Content Marketing Tools To Help You Save Time And Get Better Results
> While I agree that for a fixed language, a well-written hand-built recursive descent parser will beat the pants off the output of a parser generator

I'm not sure this is true, do you have numbers that demonstrate this?

I know that Clang knows some tricks that lexer generators don't currently know like using SSE to skip long blocks of comments. But even that, to me, represents an opportunity for better parsing tools, not an inherent performance advantage of hand-written parsers/lexers.
By that I meant it is in the same league as the fastest regular expression engines in the world. I should have worded that better. It comes out around the same performance as V8's and Boost Xpressive.
Girls Farting Sooo funny
Mind Games is a kinda creepy series about doing good
I think this is starting to meander. We're talking about lexers, not parsers, and for a stable language, not a language being designed.
My internet TV and my Xbox 360 are IPv4 only. So I am guessing they'll be that way for the next 5+ years of the life span I expect of them.
It would be interesting to see the distribution of Erlang posts over time - specifically, what portion of the 1,189 submissions came on Erlang Day (and its 1-2 sequels)?
an obvious hacker question

What happens when you change your name to a dead terrorists name?

Is there no in government somewhat curious about all the holes in their watch list implementation..
This has been a very long time in coming. Here's Wolfram in a 1993 interview:

"One of the things that I consider an exciting direction is to what extent we can expand the use of the language itself, independent of the application side of Mathematica. We've considered making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics."

http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/stephen-wolfram-multipar...

What's funny is that it's only the "without the mathematics" part that hasn't necessarily come true, except possibly in terms of marketing. This little Raspberry Pi below my desk has a "Wolfram Language" distribution on it, which as far as I can tell is exactly the same as Mathematica.
Are Tiny Houses the Key to Fighting Homelessness?
Java, C#, Ruby, and Python are all interpreted/VMed languages. I'm curious why you would liken Go to them. Other than garbage collection, I can't see any significant similarities in their design or usage.
Thanks mate, will look into it
You have that backwards, it instills terror, how many engineers are out there saying "Oh crap, my name just won the latest watchlist round of regex golf!"
Sure, I wasn't putting one against the other, as I like both languages and feel both will appeal to different types of audiences anyway.

My main point was that they follow the school that you need expressive type systems, even if as you noted, each has different strengths.

And both, each with a different set of mechanisms, allow for some sort of compile meta-programming.
My guess: http://www.cobblestonecn.com/
"non-optional language #1 - non-optional language #2 powered by your optional back-end (because we have no way of enforcing it)" - that's "Open Web" for you.
It doesn't look like there are fewer craters at the north pole:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/09/lunar...
> I'm not sure this is true, do you have numbers that demonstrate this?

No numbers offhand, but GCC's experience of moving toward a hand-written C++ parser was very positive. I don't believe hand-written parsers have an inherent speed advantage, but it does seems that it'd always be easier for a hand-written parser to produce more informative error messages --- if anything, because the hand-written parser has more embedded syntactic information.
Charge what you can get away with. There are clients who can pay you $25 per hour which isn't too bad. However you wouldn't charge clients that can throw money at a project the same price. It's not always easy to tell but for the best clients money isn't the first concern - a good product is and they're willing to pay a lot more. Try not to leave money on the table.

Also don't waste time with small projects. I recently worked out that for clients projects under around $500 I was working a lot harder than for clients projects over $500. Small projects tend to be run by people with little experience who think they can get a lot more for there money than they should - in the end you work out with an hourly rate of $5. This is the biggest lesson I've learnt freelancing. It's basic 80/20 rule stuff but took me a while to think about.

(Of course if you're charging directly by hour rather than per project that's less of a concern).
Facebook React Community Round-up #17
Oh man, if these guys launched for the Australian stock exchange, you'd get a million users like that. Standard brokerage is $20-25 here for a simple trade.
Great inspiration from Google Hangouts on integration of SMS and non-SMS, visual design, and even the icon. Exciting release!
Reach Further: redefining messaging
> Java, C#, Ruby, and Python are all interpreted/VMed languages.

Sure, the usual implementations all use a VM. So what?

> I'm curious why you would liken Go to them.

Because for many of the things people would consider using Go for, one or more of those languages would be the top competitor.
OP is an Australian national buying parts locally in Sydney, Australia and getting a watch list flag purportedly from the US.

Seems to me the chicken has already flown the coop, and this sort of thing is purely belligerent and abusive behavior on the part of the US government (their specialty, e.g. FATCA).
Most games that use UDP do not reimplement TCP because data that is too old is simply not relevant to the game anymore so it is not resent. If TCP had a way to indicate messages shouldn't be delivered anymore that would be great.
Your arguments seem to equally apply to using third-party libraries at all. Are you suggesting that it's better to (for example) re-implement HTTP rather than use libcurl?
but this isn't a parser, it only tokenizes and then applies matching of rules against a stream of tokens.

I.e. it doesn't need to know what C(X) means as long as it knows that it matches <ident,paropen,ident,parclose>.

IIUC.
It just says "Please stand by." for me.

Edit: Works with Chrome's Incognito Mode. Maybe one of my extensions is interfering.
It is interesting to compare energy released by meteors to bombs. This meteor was about 1 meter in diameter, and made 40m crater. The biggest artificial explosion made crater 500 meter wide crater. Mosquito bite compared to bit larger asteroid.
The market always finds a way.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/when-mexican-surveilla...
Try reading the linked slide deck for a start.

ZFS, Zones, DTrace, Crossbow, etc., etc.
The first demo of bubble sort made me think the bottom row was being sorted and then the rows above were just the previously sorted row.

I like Aldo's visualizations a bit better: http://corte.si/%2Fposts/code/sortvis-fruitsalad/index.html
The messaging app side-project I've been working on with a few friends, Reach. We've just released the first details of our powerful and open API!
Any ideas of how the Wolfram Language can be re-used in other commercial applications? Seems pretty powerful capability, in theory you could build a ton of services on the back of this, much like google, only with some new interesting hooks.
The literate format is fantastic: https://github.com/google/vroom/blob/master/examples/basics....

(Disclosure: google employee, but not associated with the project, only just found out about it.)
In a compiler that was compiled by someone else.
/tinfoil hat
One of the big wins you get with IPv6 is that is doesn't allow fragmenting.

This means packets will be dropped but that's not a bad thing when you have other layers taking care of retransmission. So routers then don't have to spend a lot of time chopping packets up and can just either shift packets faster or drop them telling the sender to slow down.

The other advantage I hope we see enabled is multicast. All these streaming services could massively reduce their bandwidth usage if the Internet allowed multicasts.
And so what? some guy stabs someone with a screwdriver and the US regulate the export of them between Commonwealth countries, still without regulating the AK-47 in its own country?
There is more regulation on CNC machining center than on firearms. It's stupid. The US doesn't refrain from sending hellfires missiles on weddings, which kills more surely than the once in a lifetime freak who assemble some mildly radioactive stuff in his backyard. If it's for the radiations, I see people playing with X-ray on youtube everywhere, there is 0% chance of chain reaction, nobody cares about chemical contamination in the US, so I don't know why they would freak about a mildly radioactive contamination in a foreign country either.

What I begin to see, is an entire world under occupation.