skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These sorts of posts are profoundly boring. I know people will up arrow it -- some sort of spiteful "Down with Go!" contrarian thing, when they aren't talking up rust -- but it isn't because the content is interesting or illuminating, but rather as some sort of activist thing.

This particular piece (by a high school student, as an aside) starts off trying to create a surrogate for generics in Go.

Don't.

Here's the thing -- most of these posts are not about people making real code, but people making -toy- code. Where every function is all things to all people.

The number of times I've needed a generic abs in my life -- zero.

The number of times I've needed a double floating point abs in my life -- every single time.

That's the thing about generics and real, actual world code: Your types are generally much less amorphous than you think. They really are. This illusion that everything needs to be everything just does not hold in the real world.

But it is always the tiring example used against Go. Boring.
The standard for acceptability and eloquence is decreasing, and the number of people writing goes up.

Coding seems to be the same way. You won't see many kids today figuring out carmack reverse, for exmaple.
He's being downvoted for content, not tone. Opposing failsafe systems that can prevent tragedy until millions of people start behaving in a way that common sense shows people (whatever their mode of transport) are not likely to is:

a) monumentally callous, b) completely idiotic and c) a sadly all too common, stereotypical response.

Can you imagine someone saying "I'll support seatbelts when everyone stops drinking and driving". No, because it would be a stupid thing to think or say, just as it is to wish death and injury on large number of perfectly blameless cyclists because of the behavior of some.
I think in the long term you'd learn to cope with this, a lot of the user issues seemed to do with depth perception more than lag.

I'd love to try this for a day but I think after a few minutes with the dev Rift you tend to strain your eyes in my experience. Fantastic ad though.
Do your eyes have zoom and both active and passive (near or far)-infrared detectors? Because you could easily put those on robotic (or even non-robotic) cars. You could even put several on a robotic car.

Take this, for example:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w...

But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems.

A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.
I'd bet that was intended.
My client moves me every few months within the same building. So I have the most boring desk just like you. I keep it simple. Pack stuff in 1 box and move when asked.
Thanks, that's slightly reassuring. It's still odd for a business to go generally incommunicado, though. I think I'll probably wait to buy a license until Kari's words are substantiated.
Bottom-up style works well for this ex-Lisper using Haskell.
I like Sococo for teams (I work at Sococo). No scheduling conferences (talk/view any time they're available); integrated video/chat/doc sharing; can tell who's talking to whom/who's not busy/who has their door shut.
Consensus is that his publisher sent the other one. As far as I'm aware it has never been published (and probably was lost long ago).
I assumed this was the copy that was not sent.
Keep in mind, for most of Skype's history, the application ran peer-to-peer.. You could replicate that functionality with another app.
Would you be so kind as to change the title, which is ambiguous now I come to read it again, rather than misleading, to something like

Tolkien verbally pistol-whips Nazi publisher who wanted
proof of Tolkien's Aryan ancestry before publishing `The
Hobbit`.

The thing that worries me, and that Tolkien conceded, is that these were probably not bad people, just people obeying the law. Problem was they were not good people, willing to disobey the law.
Some improvements made. Going to be better!
Novel Elevator Pitch: How To Secure Lunch With Anyone
A solar PV technician explins the downsides and costs
It reads like a proper email because emails are memos ;-)
Conversnitch is a small device that automatically tweets overheard conversations
> and then we're sitting in the same horrible morass we live in today

But you see, this is the claim that requires substantial evidence. Let's assume we're in a mess. If Haskell is one way out of it, as some people claim, why won't they show us the way? They've had more than 20 years to do it. There are enough Haskell developers out there to give us this pesky evidence we need. And yet we've seen absolutely none. There are way more impressive BASIC programs out there than Haskell programs. I think that there are two reasons for that: 1) People involved in PL research are less interested in programs that aren't compilers, and 2) languages like Haskell make certain tradeoffs that their designers fail to see, and as a result their advantages fall way short of the claims they make.
This is largely because more people are reading and writing than ever have in history [1]. Especially in ways that are broadly visible. Just because you have no written record of the boorish speech of the past does not mean it didn't happen, it just means only the very most literate ever got anything published in the permanent record.

Personally, I think a reduction in average civility (especially when that civility was often masking incredibly horrifying ideas) is an entirely reasonable price to pay for the rise of universal literacy.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
The idea of having the camera on the front is powerful. I have heard people complain with the rift about the fact that they cannot see their arms. I.e. that their "virtual arms" do not match up. it would be cone if their was a way of filming the arms, extracting then from the background (possibly by playing in front of some kind of green screen), and overlying this on the display.

The potential would be great if the games could then query the arms locations and allow the use to interact with the game. I.e. hold a fun, or manipulate menus Minority Report style.
I think a self driving car will do a much better job operating in the rain than a human being. Rain makes it difficult to see and wipers are sometimes worn out and make visibility even worse.

Slick driving conditions are also dangerous for human drivers but these days there are electronic stability systems in place to make it less dangerous to drive in the rain. If you have a car that can turn all traction controls off you can easily see the difference of assisted and non assisted driving in the rain.

I think the bigger problem will be heavy snow. What happens when you park your car at the mall and come back to find the sensors covered in 4 inches of snow? Very curious to see how they deal with that issue.
I'm so glad Go can compile everything quickly, it's almost as fast as an incremental compiler from the 80s.
This is completely ridiculous, like those TV commercials where some clumsy person nearly severs their own hand with a knife because they're not using the infomercial's special chopping tool. The guy making pancakes was especially egregious. His friends were laughing at his stupidity, and he likely hammed up the remainder of his "performance"... who swings an egg by half a meter to crack the shell on the edge of a bowl? It's as if they went out of their way to find people who have absolutely abysmal proprioception and watch them bumble along even more as their inability to perceive the world they live in gets magnified.
> We eventually gained each others trust, and our visions started to coalesce, but only after spinning our wheels for 6 months.

> Everyone on the team suffered from burnout.

> 11 months later, our team decided to cancel the project.

My guess is that the lack of a singular clear vision caused everyone to become disenfranchised / burnt-out in the first six months, and it took another 5 months for people to realize the project wasn't going anywhere.

I think the story underlines the importance of having product leadership - it's all well and good to have a flat organization when the product is already defined and the only thing left is adding features / fixing bugs (as is the case with the github platform), but if you are starting from scratch you can't expect a product grow to grow organically from the combined whims of individual contributors.

> The best software comes from a team where everyone shares a vision, cares deeply about the result, and are motivated to make it happen.

Definitely!

> That level of caring and motivation can only come from people that had a role in crafting the vision and own a piece of it.

Yes, but Design by Committee is a cliché for a reason.
Skype, awesome communication tool, turned most expensive honeypot ever.
Very interesting, I wonder the environment hazards, if any, of such technology.
My desk is so small I can barely fit my two 22" monitors along with the laptop dock on it. Besides the phone shoved in the corner (because, I mean, who calls a developer these days??) I have a small notebook for ideas and other inspiration and my smartphone.
Can you point me to Skype's API? I always thought that Skype was a closed protocol and that they don't want any other client applications using their service...
The Computer Did It? Technology and Inequality
100% money based motivation. I don't particularly like programming but I'm good at it. I just want more money to buy things I enjoy using/doing.
Go is also easy to parse, AFAICT, both syntactically and semantically, and they ship a parser in the standard library.

While absolutely not implying that it's a reasonable alternative, someone could try implementing infix operators as a syntactic layer on top of Go (kind of a preprocessor). It might work to fix the use case presented in the OP (math operators being far more readable in their infix form).

Infix operators might just be implemented as a syntactic sugar layer after all, at least as a first draft; if you're able to parse a Go source file and its types in a way that when you see a sum expression, you already know whether both arguments implement a Numeric interface and/or Add method, you might be halfway through.

To clarify: I love infix operators and I'd love if Go added them, and I consider the above just a hack.
Unfortunately I'm not joking. They have 2500 workstations running something written in Adobe Air so no banana with removing flash.
4x2.5" monitor stands (dual monitors) that cater to the "ergonomic" set-up of my desk.
aren't all businesses about keeping someone happy?
Tissues, post it notes and a stress ball.
How does it make the OP less relevant? i know pretty smart programmers that are still in high school. And tt doesnt matter, the guy obviously knows Go.
Yes, I caught that too. Bob definitely comes off as very insulted, and the post is largely emotion rather than facts.

Personally I am so tired of hearing lines approximating Bob's statement (if you don't do x you should feel bad) that I can no longer consider anyone whom utters them credible. It is provably false (Linus has no reason to feel bad), and a disservice to the entire programming community.

There is no silver bullet, stop acting like there is. Different things work for different people.

That said, while I agree that DHH came off pretty extreme (I don't think TDD is bad, just the overzealous proponents), I am glad that he did. It is really nice to have another very public figure speaking with equal passion and in utterly concrete terms to present to people whom are struggling with some degree of impostor syndrome over their dislike of TDD.
I hope the hackathon winnings become more transparent (not yours)...I hear many complaints from folks who have put a lot of effort to only see the "prize" or not the "prizes".

Brain - What are you thoughts on when to take the investment vs cash?
I can’t tell if that’s a fantastic idea, or you've watching too many Fast-and-Furious action movie. Let’s agree it’s both.

Serious answer: probably not. What you describe involves turbulence control — an area that has driven the most spectacular effort in computing for half a century, and as far as I can tell, still a very dark box.

Having self-driving space flight to Jupiter trigger philosophical debate by quasi-human AI, that’s pretty much a given by now; using a fan in a controlled manner… no way. Who would have though in 1968 that 2001 was the realistic one, and Iron Finger 2 non-sensical?
I see -- apparently it's common to call this "Prim's algorithm" even though it is more accurately described as a randomized variant of breadth/depth-first search. Thanks for clarifying that.

I do still object to the text reading "This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same" -- what is described there is not a minimal spanning tree algorithm (even if it's called Prim's algorithm).
Who's minding the nukes?
That isn't against the law, that's the DMV-handbook-prescribed way to turn left.
PiPhone – A Raspberry Pi based Smartphone
End-to-End Provider Testing to Ensure SMS Alerts Are Delivered
Not yet. That's why Google's been testing in Nevada.
OT but my 7-year-old entryish-level iMac is still going strong running Mavericks.
In other words.. be careful when downloading another browser.
If a potential intruder knowing what username to use helps them bruteforce your SSH, then the problem is with the entropy of your password, not your choice of username.
Unless you do it every few days, menubar seems maybe a bit excessive. Something like linode/cli[1] might be a better solution for the occasional use.

[1]: https://github.com/linode/cli

Naturally, this is for Linode, but I assume there exist CLI tools for other providers.
India has the most number of enslaved people in the world
"The 2013 US TIP Report cites figures of an estimated 20 to 65 million Indian citizens in forced labour within India as a result of debt bondage.6 While this estimate is much larger than the Walk Free estimate, both estimates underscore the enormity of the problem within India itself.
Many of India’s enslaved have not been moved from one place to another – they are enslaved in their own villages

Reports consistently note that India’s most significant challenge is the high number of Indian citizens in various forms of modern slavery within India’s borders. For example, the 2013 US TIP Report that suggests ninety per cent of trafficking in India is internal."
I won't be at ACL this year, maybe next. My advisor will be there though (Reut Tsarfaty).
Awesome! I've been waiting for them to put this up.
Thanks for the reference. I'll definitely check it out.

That's what I like with Sqwiggle (or similar tools). It's the ease of connecting with a team member using video. (I'm just noticing something: I forgot to mention that AFAIK Sqwiggle doesn't support group conferencing.). Your connection/team member is a click away and you know if they're at their desk thanks to the snapshots.
I still have trouble when writing - is it email, eMail, or Email?
When writing a letter, there had to be a decent effort at expressing ideas clearly. If you make a mistake, even for someone else living in your parish, you would have at best a turnaround of two days. If the receiver couldn't understand what you wanted, you've delayed any wanted action on their part by a substantial amount.

On top of that, most people wrote letters by hand before WWII (maybe not Tolkien, as a professor and author he had a typewriter at home, and I know that at least some of his correspondence was typed). Handwritten letters take a lot longer to compose than typing out an email. This is true even if you have a typewriter - making a typo is not fixed by hitting backspace a couple of times, you need to wind the paper forward, paint out the error, roll the paper back, and re-type.

Finally, it's not fair to hold the rest of us up to the standards of J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the most read authors in the English language! :)
But McDonald's knows who I am when I hand over my credit card, the server recognises me as the fat one. Really its not about how and where we will be recorded - the answer is everyhow and everywhere. The problem is what can someone do with that information, and how do I know they are doing it?
OS X has plenty of open source too.

And on that note, someone has now made an (open source) version of this tool for OS X: http://davidhsiehlo.com/blog/2014/04/27/digitalocean-droplet...
`Also glad NYC is not the valley. But there is reason for it. It's not random. I think SV was first to market. This is more or less in keeping with my sentiments about it: http://www.evanmiller.org/marketing-startup-hubs.html
I am waiting for some compelling work of literature to come out of this start up culture, something with elements of 'Lord of the Flies' but more like 'Grapes of Wrath'.

If I was in start-up-central I might have to consider writing that grand 'n' cautionary allegorical tale, entirely fictional yet entirely true, with the plot elements given here and elsewhere. Long term the right book could stand the test of time and be around a long time after the Twitters/AirBnBs/Facebooks have long gone.
I think that part of the problem is that more 'powerful' languages often more concept heavy than more 'pragmatic' languages and that makes them harder to learn for a lot of programmers.

Take Clojure for example. A lot of people including myself like this language a lot, but to be productive in it, you have to get used to the JVM, Lisp s-expressions, a heavily functional programming style with few side effects, a significant break from a normal approach to OOP, and Clojure's distinctive concurrency constructs which are more complex than Go's. It's not that any one of these things is hard, but you have to know all of them. Unless you have Lisp, or Haskell (or similar) experience, the only one you're likely to know is the JVM, and even then, maybe not.

This isn't like C++ or Java which are huge languages with a lot to wrap your head around but at core simply reuse concepts that most programmers are familiar with, (OOP, basic types) It's the very things that make the language interesting to begin with that makes it trickier to pick up.

Most of this holds for Haskell, Erlang, etc.

Then again, real code is written in these languages, but they don't tend to dominate.
Because it doesn't add anything constructive to the discussion.
Can't imagine not trying to login to the server and doing some investigation before just doing a blind reboot

I agree with parent, and prefer this http://fitztrev.github.io/shuttle/

Best of both worlds (and works with all hosts) only thing you lose is the 1 click reboot/shutdown
Hitting the brakes on our tech brain drain
Having 6 people on a project like that sounds like why it failed. If you're not going to have a manager, one or two people seems like the correct team size. maybe 2.5 (bringing in outside design help for small parts of a mostly-infrastructure product, or someone to do docs, or integrating with an external system.)
Do you have a customer for this, or just making it for the heck of it?
It is so funny to see that somebody else got annoyed by Go the same way as I did. I could not get over the fact that I cant pass any type to a function other than interface{}. When you do that it just delays the problem and I have decided to not have a generic function but have multiple specific one. This violates the DRY principle but at least works. I am still looking for best practices with Go. I think the biggest advantage of that languages is the fact that Goole uses it in production and the libraries are well tested. The community is great too. Clojure has a way smaller community that limits the usage of that environment quite a bit. I agree with the author on Lisp is being more fun than Go, but that is a single dimension of the entire problem.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote, except the first sentence.

But I'm cynical about the possibility to get a new bytecode standard out, without e.g. MS sabotag... extending it. Half the value of asm.js should be that if there is a working system already in place, the motivations for such shenanigans lessens.
The hunt for Google I/O 2014 registration easter eggs
Printing Teddy Bears: A Technique for 3D Printing of Soft Interactive Objects
5 top tips for the Samsung Galaxy S5
My laptop, a lamp, and a Braun alarm clock.
This looks like a bug. The kernel shouldn't raise OOM if there's swap available, the swappiness=0 should just make it not swap unless absolutely necessary. From my interpretation of the commit, it's supposed to improve the implementation in this respect. Quote:

"avoid swapping out pages of important process or process
groups while there is a reasonable amount of pagecache on RAM so that we can satisfy our customers' requirements."

But apparently it's deciding to not swap even when there isn't RAM available, failing to allocate, and not falling back to swap.

It's also possible the bug is only in the redhat kernel, due to the correctness of this commit depending on some other commit not backported.
The account is unlocked now. Just downloaded a backup in case this happens again. Still no response to why they didn't bother reading the abuse complaint. (Edit) DigitalOcean wrote back a nice response. I'll follow up with them before commenting futher here.
I would guess, too, that there are mitigation actions that can be taken by computers that humans don't have the reflexes to handle.

For example, I was always told in driving school as a kid that if you're about to hit a deer, you should let up on your brakes right before you hit them. This is so the bumper of the car comes back up and hits the deer center, as opposed to the bumper hitting the deer's bottom half, possibly bringing the deer up on to the hood/windshield where it could injure passengers.

I have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but a self-driving car could easily handle something like that, or automatically turn a car to take the impact of the deer on the side of the car without passengers, whatever the best course of action is.
There is a type of trolling - the concern troll - where a person just asks questions.

There's a risk that you look like a concern troll or like someone with a superficial understanding of the topic or someone with vested interests in competing technology.

Concern trolling has a long history in, for example, big tobacco campaigns.

I don't believe you are trolling and I didn't downvote you. I am giving a possible explanation for downvotes.
Versus click the bookmark to your droplet list or linode list?

Or do your service maintenance via ssh on the box?
Why CPUs aren't getting any faster (2010)
Printouts of often needed code snippets is a great idea. I think it would help me to put up printouts of 'context-switch-snippets'. Like when I need to go to iOS programming after doing Ruby for a while, a quick checklist of the syntax and things I end up looking up again every time I make the switch (diff between retain/strong/assign).
That is in theory a great link because I have the problem of trying to figure out how to actually start a hangout all the time with users. I say in theory because, oddly, if I sign in with one G+ account it takes me right into a Hangout after authentication and any other G+ accounts take me to the beautiful landing page which is completely broken (nothing happens after filling in the form).
I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.