skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of interest, how does this compare with the free editions of Visual Studio? Is there any compelling reason to use it over them?

I am genuinely interested; I don't do much (any?) C# at the moment.
Bad Parenting (or, On The Meditative Nature of Screens)
True enough. That reinforces a couple of other points that tend to become apparent from these sorts of comparisons and benchmarks:

1) High level languages are easier to refactor and maintain than lower level languages (changing the algorithm in the assembly's a big job).

2) For performance, the algorithm used is almost always more important than the language you choose to implement it in.

Both of those points back up the author's assertion, it's a shame he didn't specifically discuss them.

I used to hand-code assembly (or generate it, eg "compiled bitmaps") back in the 8086 days. For many situations there were easy gains to be had that couldn't be achieved so easily in high level languages. These days I wouldn't dream of attempting it other than perhaps for vector code in an inner loop. I'd far rather spend the time profiling and optimising the algorithms and data structures because that's where the big gains are going to be. To go ahead and implement something in assembly when the algorithm clearly isn't yet optimal is perhaps fun but also kinda insane.
I can't really relate to how these guys feel because I've never been that rich but I can definitely relate to some of that guilt that they're speaking of, watching my own mother wake up every morning to slave away in a factory.

Just travel around, go to SE Asia for example and look around. You'll see little 6 years old kids selling chewing gum and bottled water at the bus station. I really can't tell you how I feel seeing this day after day.

Little kids should be happy. They should be playing with their friends and going to school. Not selling lottery tickets and chewing gum at a bus stop.

When I was young, I went to school with many kids like this. Most of them drop out because their parents couldn't pay for tution and books.

While I'm not anywhere close to rich, I might as well be Bill Gates compared to these kids.

So I wonder to myself, why should I have all this while they have nothing? The guilt plays itself on many levels. When I feel like I'm slacking off, I think about my mother.
I think about all those poor kids.

I've been given so much, yet I'm still not good enough to take full advantage of it.

I hope that one day if I ever become rich, I won't be so delusional as to think that that a huge part of success isn't just luck.

For some reason, the older I get, the more I keep dwelling on the fact that life is incredibly shitty and unfair to 99% of the people out there. Strange, whereas many people I know instead look at their richer peers and wonder, why shouldn't I have more?
I also started off on a very similar path writing my programming book [1] and ended up switching over to using LaTeX-powered Texpad for Mac.

It's resulted in a huge gain in productivity, in terms of both managing the content and the code samples and keeping everything nice and consistent. (That last item can become difficult, much quicker than I originally anticipated.)

It's wonderful to see more tools cropping up in this area; there's most definitely a need for them!

[1] http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/
You can find pixel art from Suzan here: http://www.stickaz.com/en/58-susan-kare
Yes, you are right, F# has been open-source and on github for a while, and that itself isn't new news. However I don't believe users could make contributions that would be upstreamed into the official releases or VS builds.

Quoting from the associated blogpost - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/04/03/facili...

"Prior to today, contributions were not accepted to the core implementation of the F# language. From today, we are enabling the community to contribute to the F# language, library and tools, and to the Visual F# Tools themselves, while maintaining the integrity and unity of the F# language itself."
A few years ago we had to call an ambulance for a medical emergency for a family member (in Tokyo). When the ambulance came, all three EMT workers dutifully slipped their shoes off as they came in. They all had old sneakers so loosely laced that they were basically slippers.

Slip-on shoes are basically a must-have thing in Japan.
Getting all the information from all clinical trials will probably spur some great data mining efforts, on a much broader scale than what has been done so far. For example, a former colleague of mine used the correlation of published drug side effects between different drugs [1] to predict potential alternative therapeutic targets.

Getting all the data on drug efficacy, availability, correlate it with chemical structure, combine it with the information on other drugs could potentially help us a lot in predicting better working future drugs and the workings of existing drugs.

Also, transparency. No more picking out those trials that worked and conveniently forgetting about those that did not work.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5886/263.abstract
It might not be possible in every case, but it sounds like a laudable goal to me.

Also, what do they tell people who take part in trials - I'd be pretty annoyed if I took part in a trial and someone told me "we can't tell you because with your humble CS education you wouldn't understand it".
He sells shirts picturing a rubber ducky with "nutritionist" printed underneath: http://badscience2.spreadshirt.co.uk/sophisticated-visual-ga...

Congrats to ben goldacre and everyone else who worked on this!
>I don't know anything about Ismail's mother, but I would bet that she didn't put much value on all his "computering."

Yeah, but should you really be pointing the finger at her? You really feel like she's at fault for her ignorance of modern, tech-related opportunities if she grew up under completely different societal pressures of a different generation? Even despite the fact that (with a "busting your ass" mentality) she never forced her son to get off the computer and find a suitable job?

Point being-- she may have voiced her (honestly ignorant) opinion on his "computering" habits because he failed to articulate the job prospects in the tech field to her on a level she could respect. If she was not making ends meet for the family, he would surely have a job to help out.
There is no such capability on Windows as a GNU makefile. There is nmake, but it's substantially different.

Please don't do this. It will make your code much harder to port. So almost every gamedev will be harmed by this.
WinX DVD Copy Pro v3.6.2
Higher Education: Too many degrees are a waste of money.
The Other Side of Depression
I think you're looking at NICE the wrong way - the monetary value of a human life is not arbitrary, it is measured in terms of other lives. It is arguably unethical to spend millions of pounds to save one person's life, when that same million pounds could have saved 10 other people, or more. On the other hand, the whole point of socialised medicine is the guarantee that society will go out of its way for you in your time of need. Balancing utilitarian ethics and socialist ethics is the essential but unenviable job of NICE.

As for forcing companies to sell life-saving drugs at reasonable cost, I'm all for it, but it seems to me to be a major problem that such vital societal functions as advancing the medical state of the art are left to organisational structures that exist in a landscape where ethics and altruism are highly selected against.
Well, a trial is not about the molecular mechanisms of a drug. It is about checking whether a drug works and whether it is better than existing drugs. So statistics.

Still hard, obviously, and plenty of space for semantic whitewashing.
Was Marriott well regarded before he (I'm assuming he was in charge at the time) contributed to Prop 8? Then he has a track record of not letting his personal views get in the way.

I think people were mostly unhappy that Eich has no track record in this regard - not that there's any reason to suspect he would be discriminating - and that he kept dodging the issue in interviews. It's a PR disaster on Mozilla's part - putting him in charge was always going to create an internet frenzy and the - possibly entirely innocent - coincidental departure of three board members does not look good.

Eh. I think it could all have been handled in a much wiser fashion by Mozilla and none of this would have happened.
What has happened to Zuck's opinion on privacy since the early days of Facebook?
Anistock stock footage
Guide To Reliable HTTP Resource Retrieval In Applications
It's quite doable in C nowadays. Just use the restrict keyword which pretty much just gives the compiler a permission to assume that nothing aliases the pointer in question.

It's not that hard to write loops in C that vectorize well. And you get the benefit that those same loops also vectorize for ARM neon.
>> • Require that a summary understandable to a lay person of what was found in the trial is published on the register.

>Good luck with that. Explaining complex cellular mechanisms to a lay person without any scientific nor statistical background is a very difficult task.

I don't think that the cellular mechanisms, or generally speaking the mode of action, are what has to be explained understandable to a lay person. What has to be explained is the result of the trial.
I feel like people are assuming that the only reason you write assembly is for performance. I try to stay as far away from it as possible, but sometimes there is no other way (barring finding a library that itself has written assembly). Some examples: finding a backtrace, getting the CPUID, or calling a function of arbitrary number of arguments (for some reflection like capabilities: imagine a function like "void foo(void (* func)(), ArrayList * args, char * arg_types)" and getting foo to call func with args passed as arguments, not an array). If you can, you should try and find a library to do those tasks, but the libraries themselves have no choice but to write assembly as you just cannot do those things in plain C.
"Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it"...

Bla bla, shame on these platitudes!

Bad times when a ceo no longer can act according to his opinion (in private). Reflects very badly upon Mozilla: no spine, get rid of Eich and talk about 'we are stronger with you involved'.

Deeply disappointed (and fwiw i'm pro gay marriage).
You are correct as to the technical side of things; on the other hand, it's a completely different product as far as license and support is concerned.

So while MS could have, theoretically, decided to keep releasing fixes for XP Embedded as well as for XP Home/Professional, it has decided not to.

Note that the Embedded version is stripped down a lot, thereby reducing the attack surface (and the amount of code that still needs to be supported) significantly.
I've been following this for a while. I applaud the effort but there is no way they can keep up with VS. Also Xamarin forked SharpDevelop ages ago into MonoDevelop, but I don't know if any contributions flow back from MonoDevelop to SharpDevelop.
This looks pretty good. It's very similar to something I built [1] to scratch my own itch for some illustrated short stories I've been self-publishing.

I needed some more fine-grained control over page layout so I did go down a completely different route for generating PDFs - I do manual pagination and render the PDF pages using PhantomJS - but generating ePubs is something I've been wanting to do for a while.

Hope you don't mind me looking through your code to see how you've handled ePubs.

[1]: https://github.com/andrey-p/apocalism-js
Banana time 
As any entrepreneurs, i wanted to change the world.
I create my own school accelerator and worked as an intern in a famous VC in my country.

I wanted to disrupt as many market as possible in order to make the people life better and easier (i.d fight again starvation, homeless issue or other big problems ).

I worked in the web ecosystem because of the of its own ability to spread the world and i always used to say : 'hey ! i'm here for bringing the change, not to sell banana online!'

But the thing is, i have to feed myself and pay my rents today.

So i get an idea ! Sell Banana online !! But with a social goal, by sharing 50% of my gross margin to causes.

What do you think about it ?

And, as an entrepreneur, i have to ask you this question : what's are you best issues with bananas ??

Thanks for reading !
As somebody who lives in a non-English speaking country, with not-so-great prospects of well-paid local work, I encounter the opposite problem of not knowing where to look to find people willing to hire professionals.

Also, it seems that a big proportion of people who are looking for "remote" work are actually looking for people who live in the US, and can still go to the office when required. That is going to limit your pool a lot too.

Assuming you are someone who actually looks for these professionals, what sort of process would you go through to actually try and find them?
And in order to become an expert...you'll need to use assembly whilst not quite there yet. [Hopefully not for mission critical code though]
He may have been the most technically qualified to lead Mozilla but he's definitely lacking in, most obviously, PR and shitstorm handling.
This is written in a way that suggests that APT came from/for Ubuntu. Get your facts right kid.

(nevermind the fact that this has nothing to do in a list of javascript libraries/tools, why not add Vim, and Unix, then?)
But you see, this is why its ever more important to have public data available - so that people can educate themselves on these things, if they want to.

Its sort of like in the bad ol' days of computing - you used to have to know all kinds of arcane things just to be able to get some numbers crunched. Nowadays, if you want, you can look at the source for your OS .. this is the same effect that needs to happen in the pharmaceutical industry, and I for one look forward to the reduction in sheer Power over peoples Lives that the pharma mega-industry has had, as people start to realize that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors in what they're being told 'is a solution to their problems .. for $99/month' ..
when I program, I have those pieces of paper around with register allocation tables (1970s-style).

Would you please make a video or tutorial demonstrating you doing this? Because that's awesome.
How did you get it so cheap? Is it an educational one that has restrictions on releasing applications produced with it?
I am still using VS2010 at work. What was bad about VS2012?

VS2010 does keep me from using C++11 features, but that isn't a massive problem.
Irrepressible robot roo bounces on flexible blades
I don't think it necessarily has to keep up with VS as that will always be a loosing battle. I just think it needs to feature complete in its own way to make it a viable alternative, and I think they are at the point of achieving that.
Is there any more information on what exactly the problem was? From the article it is unclear if this is a pure software bug, a UI problem, or something else.
Both V8 and LuaJIT are extremely impressive but I'm not sure either dominates the other, at least when I last benchmarked things <http://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/files/metatracing_vms/... (the benchmark suite is on github, so you can update/rerun). To cut a long story short, each has some benchmarks where it blows the other out of the water, but overall I'd say that, from a performance perspective, it seems to be a score draw.
There is a comparison matrix between #develop and VS express here.

http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/mattward/articles/Vi...
You're right about the Mac OS IE version not being the same. It was far better than the Windows one!
More here http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83e63a02-bb7c-11e3-8d4a-00144feabd... (registration required)

Basically the wave to disable alarm feature is too aggressive, and other movements can disable it.
Actually, SharpDevelop is not the same project as MonoDevelop: http://monodevelop.com/

MonoDevelop was forked from SharpDevelop but they diverged. Unity has MonoDevelop with Unity-specific patches and they are a little behind. Xamarin Studio is also MonoDevelop with proprietary stuff.

Speaking of the "linux version", linux distributions are very far behind in the package versions provided and the folks at Xamarin are only doing packages for OpenSuse. If you want to do development with Mono, Linux is unfortunately not a good OS to be on. Mind you, this is nobody's fault - it's just lack of interest.
Regular storage mediums are just too fragile and if you have a lot of data transferring it over takes too long we're still digitizing books.

Long term storage medium capacity doesn't need to progress in line with regular storage mediums it just need to be updated once it's too out of sync.

The old data can stay on the old version since there's no urgency in transferring it over as long as the spec for it is kept on the latest medium a reader can always be built to read it.

We tend to worry about not having devices to read it but given how 3D printers are progressing having the spec and building a replacement reader should be easy enough.
People who take part in trials usually dont care about the science, they take part in it because all the other treatments failed and they are willing to try something new. That's their main incentive, at least for life threatening diseases.
> Also, the mods of Reddit are a huge problem.

I hold the exact opposite opinion. And I believe reddit's growth over the last 6 years is affirmation of my opinion.

Before reddit had subreddits and mods, it was a virtual clone of this website. It was roughly the same size (possibly smaller) and had similar content. Then in 2007/2008 (can't remember, it's been a while) Reddit made the big change and added the new subreddit feature, each with its own set of mods. Mods who became responsible for the growth and health of their own communities.

Immediately after this change, reddit exploded in growth, and it still continues to see exponential growth today. One can easily correlate it's explosive growth directly due to subreddits and their mods. Mods who put in a lot of work and basically do the admins job for them (promotion, community outreach, fighting spam, etc).

Sure, you occasionally hear about a few bad apples here and there, but those cases are rare when you factor in the thousands of mods (150+ just for the defaults) that you don't hear about. I think risk and trade-off is more than fair and if I was an admin on reddit, I'd do it every single time.

Reddit's biggest asset is its mods, that I guarantee. I wonder how many man hours the mods put in collectively that reddit doesn't have to pay a dime for? I bet it's a large number. It's unfortunate because the admins don't seem to give a shit about their mods despite being the very engine that keeps their site tolerable. They've let them languish for years now with subpar mod tools.

> Having those kinds of moderators is the best solution anyone's thought of so far, but it's still horrible (at times).

Seems to work for wikipedia. I think it works for reddit too. It's just the users and mods over on reddit have more of a community platform so the dirty laundry is more visible. Everyone loves drama...

> but from the perspective of someone who just wants to see good content, they are at times the exact opposite of what Reddit needs.

Making exceptions to rules is a problem in of itself. Just because it's something "you" want to see, doesn't mean someone down the road isn't going to bring it up and throw it in your face a week, a month even years down the road. "You let this guy do that, why not me! Censorship! Censorship! Witch-hunt!" There are drawbacks to making exceptions to rules which were laid down for (usually) very good reasons. It's easy to ignore them when you're not the one who has to look and deal with the bigger picture every day.
The forward slash in paths only sort of works but not really. And because you can sort of use forward slash and backslash for paths deliminators you can't escape spaces in path names.

And why did they have to screw up tab completion like that? More like tab cycling. Why does MS always have to be different just for the sake of being different?

MS whole approach to the cli grinds my gears. And Powershell fixes nothing.
While I myself wold newer use windows for anything unless there was no other way, I hope that the stuff that Microsoft is doing might influence some windows people to start doing stuff the "right" way.
A trial usually tries to justify a mechanism of action. That's the least you try to do when you spend hundred of USD millions in a Phase 2 or 3 trial. And anyway even if a drug works better than another, it's almost never a black and white result, because drug safety profile usualy differ. You'll end p with a one pager result most laymen won't be able to grasp, no matter how you want to simplify things.
> This is why, when I write assembly, I separate out entire functions, use an external assembler and link them into the final executable. You still have to worry about calling conventions, but in general your code is much easier to maintain than inline assembly.

This will only yield performance benefits if the functions you write in assembly are large enough to actually create a performance benefit. Having a non-inlineable function call to a few instructions of assembly may yield worse performance than having a few lines of C code that may be optimized. This is especially true if you write 32 bit code where the ABI needs you to put parameters into stack.

> Also, at least for the x86 and gcc, the inline assembly syntax is horrific, and I can't see how anyone can write software in it and still keep their sanity. You really want to use Intel syntax.

This is just a matter of getting used to. It's just an assembler syntax, get over it.

You're going to have to learn to read AT&T syntax assembler anyway when looking at disassembly in the debugger or inspecting object files with binutils.

I, too, learned assembly programming with the Intel syntax and I still kinda prefer it, but for the occasional few instructions of ASM code I need here and there, it's just easier to use inline asm.
I'm just trying to convey my experiences with bathroom remodeling on my own house. Anyone is free to listen or ignore my advice.

I never said it wasn't a valid idea. It's just a hard and expensive one. You guys will find out once you become home owners in the future. Also a Japanese toilet costs the same as a cheap car. If you haven't already guessed, I wanted one for my bathroom for years now. It's just not practical.
The auto-complete is truly wonderful. XCode's isn't too bad (but does anyone know how to get it to pop up the parameters in a function, same as VS Ctrl-Shift-Space????) but the real stinker I had to use was Borlands Codegear 2007. That whole think was rubbish and engaged in colossal disk-churning for auto-complete. The linker crashed and the IDE was buggy as anything. A shame.

But VS auto-complete was a breath of fresh air afterwards.
Password Hashing Competition: Candidates wiki
What percentage of clinical trials involve people in those kinds of situations?