skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are against Easter Eggs, I gather? ;)

More seriously, of these two implementation for Python's str.lower(), which is "minimal"?:

for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
int c = Py_CHARMASK(s[i]);
if (isupper(c))
s[i] = _tolower(c);
}

for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
int c = Py_CHARMASK(s[i]);
s[i] = _tolower(c);
}

I suspect most would say the second is minimal, but the first is what Python uses, because it's measurably and distinctly faster than the second, and that extra performance is worth the extra maintenance overhead.

That's one reason I believe that programming-as-art metaphors don't really apply. Minimalism as an art form not the same as minimizing the cost function of different uncertain factors.

Anyway, this reminds me of a story from the Tao of Programming, http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html :

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: ``Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?''

``An operating system,'' replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. ``Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,'' he said.

``Not so,'' said the programmer, ``when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.''

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. ``That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?''

The programmer made no reply.
Slowness isn't surprising. These books are old and one-of-a-kind. Even with the best technology, it's still a very delicate process to scan them without damaging them. Some of these works are so old, that even the wrong kind of light will hurt them.
Honda is selling a single purpose safety device with no moving parts called the "Fit"? And it's had 4 recalls you say?

Won't that lead to confusion since they sell a car of the same name? With millions of parts? That moves down the road by controlled explosions with chemicals stored onboard the vehicle?
It's not automatically unreasonable to expect attention to safety comparable to an automobile. Yes, you pay 1/200th the price, but the complexity is also much smaller. I would wager more than 200x smaller. Probably even 2000x smaller.

More generally, I think there is also a sentiment that if a device whose SOLE FUNCTION AND REASON FOR EXISTING is to improve safety, then perhaps safety should be a high priority for the development team? In other words, if you don't want to concern yourself with safety, don't sign up to design a safety device.
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The point of marriage is a to enter into a contract with a clear definition of privileges and duties. Wife agrees to provide husband with exclusive access to poon, husband promises to devote all resources to their joint offspring.

Gays have nothing to do with this. They just put their penis into any little hole that comes their way. They want marriage becomes of major inferiority complexes. For that reason alone we should institutionalize them.
Yeah, I was just thinking that. About 90% of what I see on twitter I would consider spam if it were sent by email. :)
Heroku is nice, be nice back.
So. You're conceding that there would still be a backlash.
I have a Venue 8 pro that is my only Windows 8 device and I love it. I don't know that I would like this in a larger/more expensive device, but it pretty much kicks the shit out of a Nexus 7. The screen isn't as nice, and the UI isn't as smooth, but an x86 and the ability to install Windows apps makes up for it easily.
CRLFs instead of just LFs is also annoying.
These things aren't binary. I believe the USA is more meritocratic than it's not. Also depends on what you define as merit. Is having capital a merit? In the eyes of the economy anything that has utility has merit, and capital certainly has very high utility.

B) Yes, meritocracies are not equal by definition, but again, I think it is more fair than not. Fair does not mean equal, it means being "thought to be right" so it will depend on each person's morality. I for one, certainly do not want to live in a world where good health has no advantages over bad health, even if I was unhealthy.
Damn, give it a break those Halloween Documents were over 10 years ago. The pricing thing is one bit, Microsoft hasn't really been too shy about that, but neither has Intel. The whole bundling of IE - how else did you expect someone to browse the web? I don't get it. People don't want IE in Windows yet can never give an answer of how people will get anything else. Then Microsoft has to give people choice. Such a vocal minority.
People change. I believe that he could be a good person in a role for Mozilla, despite being against gay marriage. The fact that he steps back from this important role both shows that either Mozilla or Brendan himself are sensitive to the topic. I would like to believe that Brendan has changed (some people tend to do that over the years) and resings as a sign of admitting that he was wrong about the gay marriage thing. This makes the whole situation kind of paradox - him stepping back indicates a kind of sensitivity that I would like in a leader for an organisation like this.
Until recently I've been sympathetic towards their cause, but I'm starting to fear they'll make taking it up the ass mandatory soon.
> that delegitimises what they stand for

is pretty clear when you realize that only 4.3%[0] of their profit is for charities that they _only stand for money_, they use the rest for privately own businesses (incl. hospitals and schools, but completely private and run like businesses)

They also (currently, not in the past) been linked with money-laundering [1]; by the way your premise of the organization being decentralized and consequently non-responsible for the doings of their members is false; specially when they have special access to far more financial secrecy than the average bank or person.

Plus they are still a great spot for pedophiles[2] to do their things, even with the current pope they do not accept their bad handling of the acussations [3]

[0]http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/08/17/the-...

[1]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25831234

[2]http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-vatican-sti...

[3]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/05/pope-on-pedophile-p...
While all the facts you mention are true, you may want to read http://incisive.nu/2014/thinking-about-mozilla/ for a different take on the conclusions to be reached from those facts. In particular, the paragraph starting "Several of my colleagues have called for Brendan’s resignation. I have not done so, despite my strong feelings on the issue ..."
The reason you're getting down voted so heavily is because you lobbed heavy accusations without any backup (projects, whitepapers, journal submissions please). Distrusted databases are still a specialty today, mainly because they have inherent tradeoffs. If you don't understand how hard those tradeoffs are you SHOULD NOT be using a distributed database by default. I was hoping maybe you had something tangible to share.
I don't see why they would. This has been an obvious move for a long time, keeping it closed never really made any sense to me. They gained nothing from .Net being closed except hate and utter avoidance from people like me (vocal early adopters.)

MS doesn't really make money off C# or .Net directly, they make money off the windows licenses you need to run the resulting code.

Open C#/.Net = stronger, longer lasting community / free improvements = more users = more licenses.

It also has other side effects like fostering [more] open source frameworks/plugins for their platform, which again, strengthens their position.
Or perhaps a car airbag that can be disabled by spoken word
Tag Let's You Privately Share Your Location With Friends [FORBES]
What is interesting is that people don't even know they have a complex about money until they get "rich." I've watched many people, perhaps a hundred, go from "working to pay the bills" to "holy crap I can pay all my current and possibly my future bills with the money I now have." That doesn't include the guy who lived in our neighborhood and won the CA lottery one year.

It affects people in ways they don't expect. If its sudden (like lottery winning or sudden IPO surge) it can be difficult to process. But it is an important thing to realize that one is processing an exceptional event. Like having a loved one die or a spouse suddenly divorcing you.

Not everyone feels "guilty", not everyone feels "smug." A lot of millionaires and billionaires in the Bay Area are outwardly unchanged. But the bottom line is that the emotion comes from the cognitive dissonance between values and reality. What do you value? What is reality?

One woman I knew at Google was massively conflicted when she started work at Google. She always felt that she would help the homeless folks she saw, if she had more money than she needed. Upon becoming rich (on Google stock value), now she found that she wanted to save the money she had for her future kids education and needs. Was she a bad person? Before? After? Do your kids hate you if you give away their college education to the local foodbank? Do your peers hate you because you could close the current food gap at the foodbank and you don't?

When people tell me they wish they were rich, I tell them to be careful what they wish for.

Edited for clarity.
Grooveshark is one, right?
Monetary policy or minimum wages are issues of "small import"? They don't relate to equitable treatment of millions of human beings? I guess we can just lower taxes and increase the wealth gap however we see fit, as long as we have gay marriage.
No. Just.. no. Flagged for being a misleading article from a social regressive website with the most misleading domain name ever.

For the last time, Eich was not ousted for his "views" or "beliefs". (He wasn't even technically "ousted" - he stepped down.)

The furor over this person was because of their ACTIONS, namely donating money to what was for all intents and purposes a hate group.

It really is that simple.
Goat Simulator almost half as popular as DayZ and Rust
This is astounding to me. In an industry which claims to be a meritocracy, at a nonprofit pledged to promoting openness, a legend is no longer allowed to contribute because he dares to agree with the majority of his fellow Californians on a political issue, on his own time, with his own money. For shame.
8 tips for creating the perfect pitch deck (from someone who’s raised $75M)
Direct link to the article itself: http://time.com/49136/brendan-eich-mozilla-firing-firefox-ga...

Not that it really said much. It was just a brief thought dump with no particular direction.
That's what I meant re: no_std, yeah.

Would it be possible to lazily start libnative if a call into the runtime is made but there's none there, but then keep it running for that thread for subsequent calls?
Fun little tangent; I don't know how old my smoke detectors are, but the one by my front door gets a little test every now and again. One of my neighbors burns a fireplace on cold days. Invisible (but smellable) quantities of wood smoke pool under the rafters of my porch; the next morning, when I leave through the door, the smoke alarm always chirps for a moment! It amazed me how sensitive it is, when I first figured out what was going on.
I must be missing something. Why doesn't PostgreSQL use O_DIRECT when doing non-journaled writes to the data blocks? I know there are alignment restrictions on the userspace buffers used to do the reads and writes, but these don't seem insurmountable, and the payoff is huge. Is it because it's not POSIX?
Creating Project Pages manually
What we've learned today:

Most commenters on Hacker News don't know what freedom of speech is. They also don't understand, or maybe don't care, about the responsibility of society to protect minority groups. They also haven't read the bible or understand any of the history behind religion-based attacks on gay rights. I had no idea we had so many Fox News viewers here.
Cool little diagram, couple of nits

- Assertion libraries aren't a backend thing. Jasmine is very useful on the front-end
- If you're gonna have underscore under templates, and underscore and lodash under "functional programming", you better put lodash under templates too ;p
- I wouldn't call Knockout a MVC framework, it's really just a 2-way data binding library.
The blame may not entirely be on the framework, but it is certainly on their documentation.

If something goes wrong, a developer should know which resources to use to solve the problem. Abstracting away the lower level stuff should not be synonymous to keeping it completely hidden and inaccessible.

A good example is the AngularJS source code, which is commented enough for anyone to make sense of it after a read-through.
Something changed at some point in Hacker News; or maybe christians are getting together (twitter?) to downvote contrarian opinions.
Nitpick: your quote about "the worst form of government" generally assumes we're living in a democracy. But the people don't rule. Money does. So it's not a democracy.

Or, the definition of the word changed, and 90%+ of the people still uttering it haven't got the memo. (I have few kind words for those who have.)
ISTM you're approaching a social Darwinist (i.e. 20th century fascist) perspective there.

Take your philosophical angle: do you think society is better off in the long run for having had Socrates, Plato, Aristotle?

How many unlucky Aristotles are we wasting in poverty in Africa?

I can't directly address your question, because it doesn't seem well formed to me. Which "one individual mind" is comprehending, and what is it doing with this comprehension (is it a judge)? Why is tens of thousands of years important - is that because you explicitly want to discount intelligence and knowledge, and only look at the biological ramifications? By that metric, humans might be better off if we wiped out all mammals and devolved into flowers - you haven't established what good even means (it cannot be survival, since that fails Hume's is/ought rule).
Mozilla CEO resigns amid furor over gay rights
This is just sad. Gay marriage has literally nothing to do with Mozilla's work or mission, and there has not been any evidence that Eich was using his position at Mozilla to advance some kind of anti-gay agenda. This is basically the definition of thoughtcrime -- Eich did nothing wrong other than to have an opinion and donate a bit of his own money to a cause he supports.

It was not all that long ago that taking a pro-gay-rights position might have led to this kind of retaliation. If you are one of the people who rallied against Mozilla, just remember that political winds can shift and that in a few decades you might be the one receiving this treatment.
Having read part of the threads (I know, I shouldn't have), the problem wasn't so much abuse or bad behavior. It was well intentioned people talking past each other.

I don't think you should ban people for that. @dang is right to just demote it.
Thanks for posting something from this site. I've never heard of it before, but can't stop myself from checking out yet another article. Most of them are really well written.
It's not about "belief" -- you can perform the experiment described in the article and see for yourself.
To summarize the real issue here: if we stopped using a company's products just because we disagree with the personal views of its founders, leaders or employees, we wouldn't use any products at all. This event worries me because it makes freedom of speech effectively irrelevant.
Oh yea, because having to step down from a company is like going to jail, or hell, not being able to see your dying significant other because you aren't allowed to marry. Yep he was definitely persecuted.
Artist Turns Your Brainwaves Into 3D-Printed Sculptures
Maybe not appropriate for HN, but I thought it was interesting that the force of virality is so powerful that a tiny indie game like Goat Simulator could come anywhere close to the extremely popular and profitable DayZ or Rust.

It speaks to the fact that there are still opportunities for indie devs to make a name for themselves by making something interesting. It doesn't have to be a social or puzzle game either.
> a legend is no longer allowed to contribute

Er, since when is Eich not "allowed to contribute"?

> because he dares to agree with the majority of his fellow Californians on a political issue, on his own time, with his own money.

Either he voluntarily stepped down (in which case, the reason stated is clearly wrong) or he was forced to stepped down by the Mozilla Corporation board and/or the Mozilla Foundation (which owns Mozilla Corp), in which case its a lot more likely that the reason is that they lost confidence in his ability to lead because of the way he responded to the controversy, rather than that they were upset by his political stand. In any case, there is very little basis for the characterization you present.
Sorry, but just saying "it can do it" without explaining how, is not convincing!

The magnetic switch in the video - I have used before, and they do not distinguish between "open" and "closed".

When someone opens the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open".

When someone CLOSES the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open".

Unless you can provide further explanation, the device only notifies of "activity", not specific activity such as open or closed. In which case, you're being a tad misleading.
Bonus points if she was formerly a man.
Wow really? I don't get why someone would be against a more accurate emulator, especially to the point of death threats.

I love your work by the way.
This has always been in Artsy DNA. We want to bring existing players online, not compete with them. Galleries are very valuable as they establish a primary market for a new artist.
So you'd rather put a massive amount of money into a clearing firms account so they will allow you to trade, pay the DMA, seat, & transaction fees to the exchange, pay for the software developers who connect you to the exchange, and the researchers that make sure the exchange you connect to is providing the correct prices. All those lawyer fees you pay to make sure you are in compliance with an exploding amount of regulation is a fun item to ponder as you ride the train into the office. You'd rather buy and hold shares you aren't sure are priced correctly because you don't know when the opportunity to buy them again will be. Don't forget getting the fun opportunity to explain to your employees how the exchange busted 1 half of your trade and you went from the best trading day ever to the worst, and by the way every one needs to go home cause we are out of business? Simple, start a trading company.

Maybe you'd rather just skip all the complication of computers and go back to the good old days of monopoly exchanges and pit traders. Then you get to deal with fees that are 10x of what they are now, the joy of dealing with over the phone brokers and the excellent opportunity to get to buy and sell from specialists who are given cartel status by the monopoly exchange, I'm sure they price things with the retail investor in mind right? At least you won't know how bad you are getting screwed cause there is zero transparency into the market. Sounds good? Get some legislation passed that gives NYSE and Nasdaq back their monopolies.

There is probably a third path that involves some sort of governmental agency bid out to a third party for a ridiculous contract that has massive reliability issues and doesn't innovate at all. That might be better, I don't know.

Me, even though I know way more about the dirty pool that goes on in the electronic trading space, I'll stick with sending my personal orders through a large retail broker that charges me minimal fees & expense ratios, and allows me access to the lowest bid/ask spreads in history with instantaneous execution to a broad array of risk management and investment opportunities that only big banks used to get.

I'd really like access to a massive free social network that doesn't sell my data to the highest bidder, but since I'm unwilling to bank roll that, I can either deal with the social network we have, or opt out.
City driving to get roadway test grant
Partnership for American Innovation
I know some statisticians / analyst minded people your generous contribution may make extremely happy. Myself as well of course.

Thank you very very much in advance. This is a really huge deal. Even for general things like academic research. We shall see.
Japanese Toilets: The Future Called 30 Years Ago
In the case of Mozilla, you're wrong. Acting as the moral compass is Mitchell Baker's job, not the job of the CEO.
The ultimate spy camera will be lensless and thinner than a pencil point
Today, I learned just how trivial people believe gay rights are. I'm actually surprised by it. That's much sadder to me.
from his earlier interview, it definitely seems like he was forced out, and resigning was just to save face.
Values and ideas may change, but seems like the witch-hunt will be around to stay...
Will he continue to be CTO at Mozilla?
Nice to hear from someone using it for a real project and use case. I might consider it next time I get a chance!
I guess you're thinking of an unlikely "Harrison Bergeron" type of scenario. But if such a world was instead achieved instead via highly advanced medicine and universal access to health care, then why not? I would consider that a best case scenario for humanity's future.
The world is not binary either, and that doesn't mean that we can't adjust society to increase or decrease the amount of fairness. It also doesn't mean that the adjusted amount of fairness in society and its rules (both laws and social norms) can't have positive or negative effects on overall total welfare.

Oh, and also: nobody wins. Some just take longer to lose.
Personally I prefer Moment.js over Date.js, it hasn't let me down yet and their site + docs are great.

http://momentjs.com/
On the one hand I'm happy, because it will end the political controversy that has resulted in a blow against Mozilla, but on the other, I feel kind of bad. I mean sure, the guy is a massive prick for donating to support Prop 8, but that honestly is no where near as relevant to his position as CEO of a nonprofit software company as it was made to be. The guy has contributed a lot to his field, and based on my impressions, has been very valuable to Mozilla as an employee in the past. I fully believe that he would have been capable of moving Mozilla in the right direction had it not been for this scandal. With his resignation, Mozilla could end up with a CEO who hinders them instead.
> If we accept LGBTQ as a circuitry of the mind, why don't we treat homophobia the same?

Are you telling me that you think some people are biologically predisposed towards homophobia?

Just because people have the right to exercise free speech does not indemnify them from the consequences. Drawing broad strokes about how we should respect people's rights to express opinions while not judging them for those opinions is not practical. It's all shades of gray.
I wouldn't invest more than 20% of your total savings in something that high risk. Basically what you can afford to lose. And your going to want to make sure you spread it out enough to cover the risk. and it that works out to like less than 10k per investment and 20 investments I'm not sure your going to get your desired result. Even that could not work out so well. That's even if they want your money.