skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, zero-length arrays have different semantics; the clang devs weren't trying to claim they were a drop-in replacement. And, yes, it's obviously used in the Linux kernel, but the Linux kernel has, traditionally, been wedded to GCCisms and not cared about working on any other compiler, so the Linux kernel was not a priority when that decision was made for for that obvious reason. Most codebases, and certainly the vast majority of codebases likely to ever target Clang, aren't using this "feature".

Their biggest point was, and remains, that variable length arrays inside structs have no defined semantics at all. GCC has no design document specifying their behaviour. It is impossible to tell what about their behaviour is undefined happenstance and what is intentional. There is no means of determining how Clang should behave in any number of corner cases (presuming you could even enumerate them all), short of reverse engineering the behaviour of a specific release of GCC, and praying that that release's implementation was bug-free and displayed no undefined behaviour (spectacularly unlikely, for a little-used and obscure feature like this).
Sounds more like it is a win for non-taxpayers, doesn't it?
That's ridiculous. Virtually all of government is funded by "private money." Why shouldn't I be able to use my resources to attempt to influence the group of people who can forcefully take an arbitrary percentage of my wealth for my entire life?
I've always wanted something like this to. Only, I suspect that lists are only one possible form of information that needs to be organized. I also think users should be able to shape trees (and maybe others).

Maybe you encourage vistors to click on everything they agree with and thereby learn which users contributions are seen to be the most valuable. Users with the most valuable contributions could be rewarded with more ability to shape the tree or list...
Mobile payments for the vending Industry, yes they have card swipers but what if you don't have your Cc.
Or raising a DTS issue, of which you get 2 per year as part of your iOS developer account and can buy more.
I'm struggling to find a way to say this that doesn't come across as either bitchy or trolling, but none of this is exactly surprising coming from Puppet Labs. Puppet is hardly a poster child for simplicity. The people behind Puppet are smart, and very capable implementers, but simplicity and modularity have never been goals of theirs.
No, you're just using a poor password manager. For example, 1Password integrates into your browser making password lookup and form filling a key-chord away. At most, you'll also need to authenticate with it for your current session, turning it into a two-step process which still takes less than ten seconds.

But either way it's much more preferable to waiting x minutes for your authentication link to appear, and then having to copy and paste. The fact you have to wait an indeterminate amount of time for your auth email/sms to come through means it's a totally sub-standard solution, bordering on the ridiculous.
The IRS is not paying $11M for the development know-how to maintain security; it's true that they could probably shop around and find the services they need for much less.

No, they're paying $11M so they can say "We paid Microsoft $11M! What else could we possibly do?" when something goes wrong.
Check out the kickstarter for FTL. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-tha...

The FTL kickstarter started off demonstrating how excited they were to build the game followed almost directly with information and footage of the core mechanics. The game looked fun before even getting past the first minute of the video.

On the other hand, the presentation of your kickstarter just didn't do much for me. I got through to about 3 minutes in the video before deciding stop watching.

The main problem for me was that nothing in the presentation me made me want to love either the game or the people behind it.

You call the game an action RPG... but the footage shown during the first 3 minutes that I watched involved mostly walking around and opening a chest. I'd have much preferred to have seen some whitty dialog with an NPC or some of the core game mechanics. This would have helped immensely as nothing that I saw looked "action" or "rpg".
^ This is the best comment in the entire thread.

Nobody who's making anything that actually matters and delivers value to customers cares about the improvements in the language itself as much as they care about the battle-tested libraries that come with that particular language.

If you are a company that actually matters (has significant growth / users) and you use Python3 over Python2 as the main language in your stack, I'd like to know who you are, if you even exist.
Is a marketplace designed for retail investors that disallows HFT something that would be better or worse for retail investors?

Let's pretend that the marketplace only sells securities with dividends. The people buying them are not interested in their liquidity, only in their ability to store value as well as ofter a steady return.

Why would I want to buy shares in companies in any other type of marketplace?

Can you explain how this hypothetical market would function differently than how our current markets function?
>The problem with this is that it's not as convenient as passwords and people hate things that are even slightly inconvenient.

This is generally true but I wouldn't go that far.

One example of something that is more than 'slightly inconvenient', while being introduced globally fairly recently, is captchas. Sure, nobody likes them but it isn't like people have boycotted sites that have them.

(another example would be requirements for longer passwords with digits and mixed letters in them - a requirement that was mostly non-existent 10 years ago)

Sure, email authentication is probably more inconvenient than my examples, but you can definitely make improvements to it (a browser extension similar to those used by password managers for example can greatly reduce the inconvenience) if it becomes the standard.
Solar farms already do this. Optimal angle always tracking the sun.

I have panels on my roof in England - today they generated 22.5kWh. That's roughly 3 times my daily need
https://mobile.twitter.com/Edent_Solar/status/45541993526384...

The issue isn't generation as much as it is storage. My south facing roof should generate my yearly kWh - but I have no practical way of sorting that energy. A multi kWh battery like in a Tesla if just far to expensive to stock in my attic.
Just to note, Edwin was the original author of Idris, so I'd definitely recommend watching his talk.

Edit:

Given that my comment seems fairly high at the moment, I'll post a link to his PhD thesis, which seems to be the genesis of Idris for anyone interested:
http://eb.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/writings/thesis.pdf
In that case why not skip the middle man and just implement enough soft-HSM for whatever Apache/nginx needs with a simple serialization protocol just for that? Emulating all of PKCS#11 sounds like a chore for very little gain.
I think this would be a good approach on many levels.

It appears there is already an (expired?) internet draft for this:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pala-rea-ocsp-over-dn...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pala-rea-ocsp-over-dns-00

But i could not find any browser support or even plugins.

I guess all current development is behind DANE and/or multi-OCSP-stapling; second one has some chance of being deployed soon.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611836
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6961/

--igor
How do you handle users gaming the system for profit?

I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain behaviors. But not from the modern Facetwitter perspective of a site that wastes your life by addicting you. The true measure should be the correctness of the content and money should pay for that.

First a system where you have to pay to post and if you post is confirmed as not spam or abuse, then you get the money back. Otherwise the site takes your money. Should be a negligible amount. Mostly a way to make spam expensive and compensate for moderation, but of course a site can abuse a user this way as well.

If a user posts some profound story/comment and others want to compensate him directly with an easy UI, they can add a monetary amount to their upvote. But there is little guarantee that the amount will be significant or the money will arrive promptly. Users should be able to undo money sent for well sounding but ultimately wrong info. This is to discourage participation driven by points and monetary rewards.

If participation and content creation is driven by money even more than it is now, there will be a few new legitimate sources with useful information but the vast majority will be content farms. To discourage this "points" or "money" should accumulate, BUT should not be paid out for years until the accuracy of this content is confirmed by the passage of time, peer review, etc. If mistakes are found, all readers should be notified of corrections. There should be penalties for releasing misleading or mislabeled information (like tech blog posts that are really advertising but pretend not to be. You should pay to advertise and pay more for advertising what turns out to be crap after peer review.)

A site should take its share for moderating content well and working on rules that incentivize useful content/services and penalize attention seeking of little utility.

It's hard to predict effects of various new incentives. But a site should work on modifying the rules until desired results are reached. Users should not stray from normal behavior to satisfy some quick and dirty addicting point systems. If that means limiting participation to select trained users, releasing information to larger audiences only after it has been discussed by relevant experts (so no shocking attention grabbing studies are released) then so be it.
You can do this in FIFA already (since FIFA 11 I believe) - it's 11 vs 11 multiplayer. You start in a lobby and then pick your position.
This is poor advice.

This article is written as if it were suggesting two-factor authentication. In actuality it's suggesting a new one-factor authentication. A single factor that my phone company and device manufacturer can access, no less.

On Android, you can give apps permission to read your text messages. The effect, were this author's advice followed, would be that apps get access to all of your other services.
Just to add some more info:

We used to have instructions for installing and compiling under Linux. Since our main focus is currently iOS and some users were confused by mentioning Linux and thought that they could cross-compile for iOS on Linux we removed those instructions from the web site. Only Linux x86 can be targeted when compiling under Linux. Here's what you need to install if you are running Ubuntu 12.04:

sudo apt-get install build-essential g++-multilib openjdk-7-jdk

Then you also need to download an ICU data file and place it in /usr/share/icu:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/icu
sudo sh -c 'curl "http://download.robovm.org/icudt48l.dat" > /usr/share/icu/icudt48l.dat'

From then on you should be able to follow the command line usage instructions to compile Linux x86 executables.
Because your browser doesnt know the chain, yourdomain.com could sign google.com and browser will accept it as is today.

For your proposal to work the CA system would have to check with dnssec and probably another protocol to enforce the subca signs only its domain constraint.
I was planning to make something like that myself, but there seems to be plenty of competition from https://stormpath.com/ and others
Worse. You don't have to guess: there are two compelling pieces of evidence you can use to evaluate. First, you can look at spreads since electronic traders wiped out the 1/8ths market makers in the 1990s. Second, you can look at the Canadian experiment that increased cost of trades and drove spreads up.

"Type of company" and "marketplace" are orthogonal concerns.
I think the most important factor is that Microsoft puts a ton of effort into backwards compatibility, to make sure that it is always easier/less risk to upgrade Windows (and Office) than to switch to something else.

I know that in the corporate world there are still very many business applications that are mission-critical and very special-purpose (sometimes custom) that were not written in a cross-platform way, and may not be maintained anymore - I would be shocked to find out that it was not this way in the government too.
Unless you can teach the compiler how to verify that arbitrary expressions will be true at compile time, you have created a glorified syntax for assert. The reason for the the often strange syntax and structure in functional languages, especially dependently typed ones, is to allow you to restrict how you can construct programs so that it can give you those stronger assurances at compile time. You don't want your program to crash or throw a runtime error when you try to convert an int to a natural, you want it to not be possible to do unsafely in the first place.
It would cost them a tenth of this XP license nonsense to fix whatever makes LibreOffice or Calligra "not enterprise grade enough" for them.

And they are switching to 7. Inherently, they have the retraining costs already, and Lubuntu or Zorin is much more linear a change than going from no-search no-dock quicklaunch to Windows 7.
a Java mindset

I'd just like to point out that this is not the only Java mindset. It's certainly true that Java has a long and horrible tradition of people thinking that everything and the kitchen sink should go in the app server (which can then be managed with a SOAP interface!), but this is not intrinsic to Java, and it's not the only way to work with Java. Some of us are actually pretty keen on the 12 factor approach.
Isn't The Well pay-to-post (at least in a sense since there's a subscription fee)?

http://www.well.com/
Excel is great to be sure, but it's only the really advanced features that LibreOffice Calc is missing. Things like advanced macros or embedded VB scripts.

I really doubt that people in most government agencies are using these features.

And if they're intelligent enough to use these features, learning to use Unity would not be a huge hurdle.
My issue with how things work currently is that logging into a native mobile app is not nearly as easy as logging into a website. That process has to improve. That why I like logging in with Facebook, Twitter or GitHub.

Still what I would prefer is a single trustworthy service which does not compromise my privacy for the purpose of advertising. I could use that service to log into any service which would integrate with this single service to get a one-time password to the user on the computer or mobile device they are using.

As the user I would be able to use an mobile app and browser plugins to get the one-time password to conveniently log in with as few steps as possible.
Freeze Tolerant Frogs
Ok, valid point- to clarify, when I said 2-factor SMS, I was assuming a 30-second TOTP like Google's.

If you don't use TOTP, someone can login to your account just by knowing the password which they can use from almost anywhere. If you were to only use TOTP, they'd need your phone. To me them stealing your phone is tougher than stealing or guessing your password.
For those other keyboard warriors:
(Note: this information is publicly available)

District Superintendent, Dr. Bille Pearce Rondinelli:
brondinelli@southfayette.org

Dr. Nanci Sullivan, Director of Pupil Personnel:
sullivan@southfayette.org

And last but not least, the School District Board Members:
http://www.southfayette.org/Page/143
Become a Glass Explorer on Tuesday April 15
Also, there are calls for boycotts every time an organization makes a decision that someone with basic HTML skills disagrees with. We just don't hear about most of them, because they don't gain traction. We hear about the ones that strike a nerve in the community (whichever community we happen to be a part of: there are probably plenty of calls to boycott Mozilla for forcing Eich out). I wouldn't read very much into the fact that these two incidents happened close together. This sort of thing is self-regulating: people have limited capacity for outrage, that slowly recharges over time.
http://imgur.com/nbS7BJo
They are talking about the decreasing cost of solar cells over time.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...
Now I'm not saying the move to Linux is necessarily the right move for the IRS, but you missed the point entirely. The only thing stopping the transition on time was that the upgrades were put on hold because of budget issues, not because it was hard to upgrade. Last I heard, Ubuntu was free to install, so sure they would still have a similar upgrade schedule, but this wouldn't be an issue here, at least in terms of budget for such an upgrade.
Does it allow you to create Calendar as a data object whenever you want to create one or is it just one calendar associated with one google account ? Because what if I don't want to create google account for my users , just get the calendar functionality.
WTF? Email and SMS are not even remotely secure channels for transmission of data. Granted SMS is harder to get too but your telco typically stores all your messages (for a period of time) for law enforcement reasons and everything is passed in the clear for emails.

You are better off using a trick like this one: http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2009/12/28/tip-creating-easy-to... to create a unqiue but easy to remember password for all the sites you use. Of course you want to use at least 4 different patterns one for banking, one for email, one social and one for the rest of the web...
Presumably if they had could switch OSes easily, they would have switched from Windows XP to Windows 7 by now.

XP was released in 2001. If they'd adopted Red Hat they'd have adopted 7, and upgraded 22 times, changing distro once to be on Fedora 20. If they'd adopted Ubuntu they'd have had to wait 3 years for the first release (confusingly numbered 4.10), and now they'd be on release 13. Even Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't become available until 2002, and you'd be on version 2.1, unsupported since 2009.

If you suck at upgrading and want something that will be supported for 12+ years, Linux is not for you.
A programming language equivalence site that helps you transition from one language to another. I mean it does not have to be perfect because full equivalence don't exist for many languages but just how you would do similar things.
#1 http://pen.io/
He's only been in charge a few months...
1. Momentum.

2. Custom Windows-only applications

3. Really, really good price on support contracts - which they'd insist on getting if they switched to any *nix. Oracle (formerly Sun), IBM, RedHat (?). Are there any other major players in the OS world that can offer anywhere near the level of support that the government has come to expect?

4. And as Igglyboo said, MS Office. So many workflows in corporate environments depend on that damned suite, it'd be difficult to move away from it at the moment.

---

There are many offices that could make the transition. They use all web applications and various office suite tools (Excel, Word, PowerPoint mostly). The other applications they use would be things like Acrobat (but office suites can generate PDFs directly these days) and software to fill out forms (not handled as DOC/DOCX files or PDFs). The latter may be able to transition to signed/fillable PDFs. But these aren't the majority. Too many offices (particularly anything involving project management or inventory management) just depend too much on custom desktop applications that would take too much to port over or rewrite. It's like trying to modernize the avionics systems of an aircraft: in theory it'd be great, in practice your developers will kill themselves.
At their scale, they will need to pay someone for support no matter what, whether that "someone" is Microsoft, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.

So, you can't just look at the consumer price tag on a Linux distribution ($0) and compare that to what the IRS is paying Microsoft in support contracts - you have to compare it to the total costs of enterprise Linux support.

And if the IRS is having a hard time migrating off of a version of an OS that was released 12+ years ago to its more recent version, I imagine they'd have a hard time migrating to a completely different operating system altogether.

Even if the incremental costs of upgrading LTS versions of a Linux distro ended up being smaller, they simply don't have the up-front capital to cover the costs of migrating to Linux in the first place.

(Oh, and don't forget that even if they did manage to procure that somehow, as soon as Microsoft gets wind of it, the price for Windows support contracts will magically fall).
I recently launched a webapp, CapitolBells.com, that is sort of a HN for arguments supporting or opposing legislation in Congress ("crowd-lobby Congress"). A friend of mine runs a project called Madison, which in essence is GitHub for legislation, allowing for various branching debates and amendments to bills. We've often thought it would be cool to combine the two ideas.
Reminds me of https://www.kimonolabs.com/
http://hyperpolyglot.org/ ?
IIRC, they are ranked by taking into account a mix of comment points and your comment average, which is the average points of your last 50 (?) comments.
Interesting to see this here, I had this idea a while back and have been discussing it with people before I go on validating/invalidating it.

In my mind anyway, the idea is something like https://railslts.com/ but for potentially every other gem in your gemfile. We would provide security patches, bugfixes, features, documentation, training, version upgrade scripts/documentation and so on to subscribers.

I really like the accumulated credit for features, maybe a system of like: request feature, we put a "credit" value on the complexity of the feature, then companies/people can pledge credits/money for it would work?
HN,

So who do you guys use more? Import.io or Kimono? I have heard good things about both.
No way to feed to the grid? Or is that to hard at the moment?
I had the opposite experience. It's pretty obvious how to do anything in Clojure. I don't need to hunt down magical incantations to use libraries like I had to in Ruby.

I started Clojure for web development. Once I found out about the Compojure template, everything else was just a stone's throw away.

$ lein new compojure myapp
$ cd myapp
$ lein ring server-headless
Server started on port 3000

I wager the average HN reader could run with that.

> There's no Rails-like framework that makes things
> 'just-work' waiting for you.

That's actually what stifles the productivity of Rails projects I've worked on. It's why I started looking at other solutions and why the simplicity of Clojure pulled me over.

rails g devise:install
rails g devise user
rails g devise:views

Nobody really knows what just happened. Things kinda work til the answers to your questions can't be pasted from Devise's wiki anymore.

> because you have to learn every little piece at a low-level to
> ever make anything happen.

Maybe we have different things in mind, here. The alternative to this in my experience is an application where nobody actually knows, for example, what's being put into the cookie, when it's put into the cookie, what part of the session is serialized in the DB, if the cookie is signed, etc.

At least that's how it was at all the Rails projects I worked on.

https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki was refreshing. It turns out that managing your own session/cookie/authentication lifecycle in your own application code is easy. And it turns out that these "it just works" generators doesn't actually save any time because when you want to make trivial changes to them, you have to credentialize in yet another abstraction.