skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So what happenened

MS killed it in favour of a 'real' programming language. See eg http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx

> Looking at the prior art of tools that have succeeded at letting end-users build programs is probably a good bet

Indeed. We have a 50 odd page google doc full of exactly that :)
I've decided to "rotate out" of CRUD-ish web and app development for these very reasons, after doing it for about 15 years. I can't help but feel most of the skills that developers have that get them showered with high paying, high security jobs are on a crash course with being commoditized. It's only going to get easier to develop networked data-flow oriented applications that solve business problems, so if you want security in your career you should be working on things that are, at least for now, deeply challenging and have a reasonably high knowledge barrier to entry. Particularly things that require some serious domain knowledge that your average software engineer won't pick up naturally in a short time on the job. Rails app development is not that.
Google Glass lead electrical engineer joins Oculus VR team
When I hear that term though, the only thing that comes to mind is a person who just translates requirements into one programming syntax and has next to no thought involved in the process. No architecture, data model design, etc.
Is it possible that asm.js, since it's compiled dynamically on the client (giving access to more information potentially leading to better optimizations) can eventually out perform c/c++?
My point is that its not enough to point to an easier environment if that environment does not allow them to accomplish the original goal. 'Sure, just go away and study a completely different ecosystem for several months' is not an appropriate learning curve for a simple task.
I'll take a guess that something like pure functions lend themselves to formal, concise specs. Pure functions are, in the end, just input and output, not something complex like a program that outputs some complex bitmap every 30 milliseconds. Haskell has found pure functions to be very practical to have as 'distinguished citizens'; there are enough problems which can to a great degree be expressed with pure code.

Someone might say "but Haskell itself doesn't solve practical programming problems", or whatever. The point isn't Haskell or pure functional programming per se; it's just an example of things that easily lend themselves to formal specs. Whether more complicated, perhaps effectful programs lend themselves to formal specs (I think ATS might be able to express such specifications) is more hard to answer.
Is that seriously a performance issue for any real webapp?
I don't think amount raised has anything to do with it.

I'd say you are a patent troll anytime you are using a bullshit patent to extort a third party. The rub is what constitutes a bullshit patent, but "sending messages through a map UI" seems obviously in this camp. It sucks you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the courts to validate this logic though.

So by that definition, I'm sure IBM could be a patent troll, just like any other company with BS IP.
Once again, why would you use S/MIME in the browser? It is an insecure environment BY DESIGN. It cannot be made secure. Ever. So stop thinking of S/MIME. Or think through how you would actually secure it. Then realize that it cannot be done.
Rust for C++ programmers – part 6: Rc, Gc, and * pointers
Languages for teaching programming
I think it is being downvoted because it doesn't address the real content here. We are being sued for having markers on a map. Who cares if the company is operating or not?
You just have to explain that "b = a" means that you're adding a new name to the thing/object named "a". Whether it's in the same memory location or not is an irrelevant implementation detail.
I look at this as javascript developers taking the next natural step and thinking about de-coupling
What i don't understand is why do they start with a lawsuit. Why didn't they contact Life360 to work something out, like a partnership. Life360 seems to be the big fish. A greedy small fish trying to eat a big fish is a bad idea i think.
Delicious Gluten Free Healthy Tips for Longevity
That's true, but he mentioned "$120k in Silicon Valley", which leads to believe the $80k applies to "places with a lower cost of living than Silicon Valley". I've looked at the numbers before and the standard of living evens out, depending on your priorities. If I live in San Francisco, I have a much shorter commute than my current 30-minute one-way drive from the suburbs - however, we'd have to double or triple our rent to maintain the same size apartment.
East Village Radio is signing off after 11 years.
3D Printed Vehicles Meet US Grand Challenge
Current Redbox Movies with IMDB Ratings
not sure what's the AI bit...this appears to be a filter using the Yelp API.
Man, it is so amazing to see the dates on those files! Some of those files are older than my wife.
Small things add up.
I realize data might shift, but it had less than half a percent of market share at last look. Let me emphasize: LESS THAN HALF A PERCENT.

I used it last week for testing purposes.
Some small suggestions for the Intel instruction set
I'm glad to see IntelliJ getting some love there for making much of this easier - few companies have worked so hard at it, and the results are amazing. Looks like Microsoft is making some great steps too, Bing Code Search gets a bad rap for pandering to blub programmers but I'd love something like that in my editor.
Man, I gotta say I thought that that bit about karma was pretty calm and collected - if it was me I don't think I would have been able to resist using far stronger language
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution."
- Igor Stravinsky
I work as a full-stack developer and UI/UX designer, specializing in Node.js on the backend. I've been working a bit with Go lately in my free time. I also work at an agency, so that may affect my salary as compared to working on, say, a SaaS product.

Out of my own curiosity, where would I seek a 75-90k salary where the cost of living doesn't negate the increase?
How did Smalltalk not provide "real" live programming?
> Its runtime environment exposes a lot of very strange things to the user for no particularly good reason (-Xmx1g? I'm still not sure why I need to specify this to see the version of Java I'm running

I am pretty sure you don't need to specify a maximum memory allocation size to determine the version of Java being used.
From a purely tech nerd perspective, I'm interested in how these pill bottle tracers work. Do they just rf beacon, or do they maintain a cell data link and periodically report position.
How to Inspire Your Team: Leadership Lessons from Walt Disney
It could be if a router/mux is regexp bound and contains a lot of and/or complex patterns.
Absolutely agreed. Form factor isn't nearly as important with desktops, especially when you can put any OS you want on it. I'd happily run a Hackintosh on desktop, if I were a fan of desktops at all.
the wired article gets one thing absolutely right - the excitement has gone out of the high-end smartphone market, but is palpably there in this one. ubiquitous cheap devices spreading everywhere and getting smarter and smarter is a lot closer to the world envisioned by gibson, sterling et al - the high end of the market has become more like a shopping mall than a cyberpunk bazaar.
Suboxone helped me get clean. I was a heroin addict for 6 years, and have been clean for two now. It doesn't work for everyone, but it's allowed me to get back to work and get my life on track (whereas programming on Methadone is near impossible).
I never heard of this before but even late is awesome.
That says a lot about how meaningless FIPS actually is...
IIRC, help would work too.
The anecdote/data statement is usually rendered "The plural of anecdote is not data" so your point is not strictly true.

And that would be a misquote: "You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-fox-knows/
This is what I find interesting in bitcoin :)

It seems to me that instead of having to manually sync files or setup a server, Lighthouse itself could include a small BitTorrent library, and then you could just share a magnet link (with its own protocol handler, of course, e.g. "lighthouse:") and have the software fetch the contract and pledge files from other peers.

In fact, using the protocols which are behind Tribler[1], you could even browse and search for projects in a decentralized way, and probably even allow the project creator to automatically fetch the pledge files.

Fun stuff!

[1] http://www.tribler.org/
Is this part accurate? (from page 8) : "The OpenSSL foundation appears to be a million dollar a year for-profit company doing FIPS consulting gigs. (Incorporated in Maryland)"
Harvard and MIT Students Launch ‘NSA-Proof’ Email Service
Yeah, my biggest issue with touch screens by far is the lack of precision. This point seems a bit silly as your fingers typically move fast enough to allow your memory to recall the image.

Maybe in games this is more of an issue, especially where you need to leave your fingers in the same position and the design of the game does a poor job of taking this into account. But those are mostly edge cases.
Dijkstra (the one who has a graph algorithm named after him, aside from being a really influential computer scientist in many ways) argued more or less exactly what you're arguing: that formal methods (that is, formally proving, mathematically, that your code will behave as it should) are the appropriate way to teach computer science/programming. His argument is basically that computer science is very hard applied math, and should be treated as such.

You might find https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E... an interesting read, if you haven't read it before. There's been some interesting discussion of it on HN in the past, too.
The two most cited correlation points are age of parents and propensity to bring children to doctors.
There's a graphical web browser that runs on DOS, and some other platforms without needing a windowing system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_%28web_browser%29

Not sure if it's for that, though. Maybe it's for a DOS port of Lynx, which actually supports SSL.
Trying to learn Machine Learning stuff I realized I didn't remember much Linear Algebra from my college days.
Im also a beginner in Haskell. So I decided to crack open my Linear Algebra book and start implementing what I was reading in Haskell.
The result of this was that my Linear Algebra knowledge that was all hazy now feels like its etched out in my brain like a digital circuit board :-)
And my Haskell calf muscles are in much better shape. Im still a beginner in Haskell but I can now walk fast in it instead of just crawling like before. Hopefully in a year I'll be running in Haskell too.
Also, you're paying 3-6 airfares when you travel, and you have to worry about education expenses. Even though there are great public schools, those are expensive when one considers that they're priced into the housing market. Then there's college (especially admissions and the attendant dark tuition, which are more terrifying than tuition because dark tuition-- elite high schools, counselors with connections, bullshit "internships" on bought strings-- can run into the half-million range). I'm terrified of how competitive college admissions are going to be in 25 years, especially because going to an elite school matters far more than it used to. (There are plenty of 50-year-old CEOs who went to state schools; these days, kids from Yale can't get VC.)

Personally, I think our society is unintentionally de-eugenicizing itself. If you're smart and thoughtful, having kids is a terrifying idea. The meltdown of the middle and upper-middle class is causing the most thoughtful people to choose not to have children (can anyone, excluding billionaires, make a confident bet 20+ years into the future?) and it'll be interesting to see what this does to the aggregate IQ level of our society. Free higher education (for the qualified) has all sorts of benefits, but one among them that is enormous (if not politically correct) is that it removes one of the major factors that impels smart people to reproduce less.
Amazon's Hypocrisy on Net Neutrality
So... Who is the "stripe/wepay/paypal" of the adult payments industry?
does it still have EDT? If so then I'm sold!
Due to the high fraud rates, the chargeback rate on adult content is generally 1%, compared to 10% for other merchants. It's very, very easy to lose your merchant account because of that restriction. Blame VISA.
Thank you for the detail! You definitely sounds like you should be 100k+ to me.

I would say you don't even have to move (although Seattle might be a good choice), but you'd have to find remote work.

Do you have a Github and LinkedIn profile? Put Go, Node and front-end expertise on there but don't say you're looking for a new position. When the recruiters start contacting you, let them know you're open to remote work ONLY if they can get you 90k+. They can get you this. State that it HAS to be remote in your initial contact and don't waiver.

Alternatively you could spend a couple years in the Bay Area or NY and build up a great network then move back as a consultant or remote employee.

Another negotiation tip: The recruiters will ask you how much you're currently making. DON'T tell them (you can after you get 100k+ :). Tell them "I'm not currently looking for work, but if you can find me something 90k+ I would be willing to take a look". Be nice but be firm.
British Military Seeks A Hack-Proof, Quantum Physics-Based GPS
You got me curious as well, so I went looking. According to Michael Port in his own Beyond Booked Solid, the quote is from Drucker in Drucker's The Practice of Management.

http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22...
Change your code in smalltalk, say from "w color: black" to "w color: red". And even though the code of the program is "changed," nothing happens because the modified statement is not automatically re-executed. In a live programming system, you get useful feedback about your code edits, not just "fix and continue," and so you would immediately see affected widgets go from being black to red.

Chris Hancock's dissertation [1] is really good at making this point:

> And yet, if making a live programming environment were simply a matter of adding "continuous feedback," there would surely be many more live programming languages than we now have. As a thought experiment, imagine taking Logo (or Java, or BASIC, or LISP) as is, and attempting to build a live programming environment around it. Some parts of the problem are hard but solvable, e.g. keeping track of which pieces of code have been successfully parsed and are ready to run, and which ones haven’t. Others just don’t make sense: what does it mean for a line of Java or C, say a = a + 1, to start working as soon as I put it in? Perhaps I could test the line right away—many programming environments allow that. But the line doesn't make much sense in isolation, and in the context of the whole program, it probably isn't time to run it. In a sense, even if the programming environment is live, the code itself is not

i.e. Smalltalk code simply isn't live.

[1] http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf
"Amazon said to play hardball in book contract talks with publishing house Hachette"

AMZN reportedly adding 3-5 weeks of (arbitrary) "delivery delay" for online orders.

Exactly the type of opportunism they seek protection from.
Turn keyboard LEDs into disk activity indicators
Whether the wave of abstraction drowns you or propels you depends on whether try to fight it or learn to surf it

I personally love that about every year or 18 months the time it would take me to build a particular feature set drops by about half (either because libraries have arisen, I gained experience, or I have code that does half of it already).

If you're not putting yourself out of a job every six months or so, someone else will.
You can do "profile-guided optimizations" in C++ as well. It's easier to exploit CPU capabilities (e.g. AVX) if you run the compiler on the client side, but once again compilers can do the same.

The latency requirements prevent some of the more aggressive and time consuming optimizations from being attempted.
This is an important point. The right tool for the job has to take into account the existing tools inertia.

Having said that, I had a similar situation at my research lab and have now almost replaced Matlab.

This process was mostly organic, starting with me changing my personal post-processing workflow when I switched to IPython Notebook as a logbook and plotting library (i still use gnuplot occasionaly).

Soon I started having to port bits of Matlab and C code to Python and Cython to allow me to continue using the logbook, and I found I was becoming a lot faster at creating new modules and tools, mainly because the programming component was now intricately linked to my workflow (and more fun)

The tipping point was when I converted a notebook into a slideshow for a presentation I had to do for the group. Everybody was more interested in how I made the presentation then in my results, and wanted access to the new tools. I provided them with the git repo (and git tutorial), gave people notebooks I had written to log coding practices and demos of my code (I have poor memory) and encouraged people to contribute back.

Getting people to contribute back is still the hardwork: Everyone is shy to share their code, but the Professors starting preferring IPython Notebooks. New code is now usually written in Python first, and sometimes ported to Matlab and even the hardcore Matlab researchers are starting to show interest because of the speed and flexibility of the new code.

Basically, I found Matlab is definitely replaceable - and can only improve workflow (speed it up if nothing else). There are a few instances when specific hardware requires Win driver access through a Matlab plugin, but there are ways to interface with these too.
> Docs are patient facing..

And expected to maintain a certain degree of clinical detachment. If they were basing their parenting relationship on doctor-patient relationships, I'd not be surprised if they had a high rate of autism in their kids.

Not that I'm saying they do, just that if that were the line of logic one were to go down.
Yep, it's just `javac -version` or `java -version`
I'm a Software Engineer. You can scoff, roll your eyes, or outright laugh if you like. But it's the term I use to describe what I do, it's the title on my business card, and, if I may be permitted an appeal to authority, it's the subject of my graduate degree.

There isn't any substantial difference between some types of software engineering and other engineering disciplines. The HDTV antenna I unboxed this morning was a travesty of "engineering" and is the electrical engineering equivalent of a crappy todo app. OTOH, my day job developing software is as rigorous as the physical engineering I've been involved in (my undergraduate degree is in Electrical Engineering and I worked in that field for about a decade).

The "problem" is that most software doesn't need to be engineered any more than the average garden fence does, so there is a lot of drawing of false parallels.

And as far as nagging users to update, that can be a little difficult if your software is embedded in the controls of a diesel engine somewhere in the South China Sea.
The smell of perfection trying best good is the smell I want to wake up to every morning.
The only working definition of "Big Data" that I've come across is "Data too large to work with in a traditional RDBMS".
Then organized crime would run the streets, as the combative pressure keeping these operations small would removed. Gangs would spring up like weeds, get absorbed into syndicates, and wield large amounts of power over ghettos and other blighted areas without regular sweeps to keep them in line.
In that case a C implementation would not help, most languages already use C implementations of their regex engines.
The Mathematical Experience
Strong Consistency Models
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h3mhztjin2ysy64/card.png

Hopefully the correlation between my (years old) username and the name on the card is close enough to meet the (hopefully fairly low) burden of proof for an online messaging forum.
> An explicit tax on the company by the local government would still be better than a build-out requirement, since this would at least be transparent.

I guess I don't quite see how it's more transparent. What information would it provide, and to whom, that the current system obscures? And is the issue whether we call it a "tax" vs. "build-out requirement", or is the issue what is being taxed (land use vs. revenue from local customers vs. ...)? I can't picture what such a tax would look like, how it would really differ from the status quo, and why it would result in better service -- walk me through it.

> But even if you want to transfer money from someone to the poor, and (perhaps unethically) you want to take it from someone who's not a voter, it still makes no sense to pick on this particular company. Why not tax any of the other non-voting companies that service a locality? Say, the tax on coca-cola?

Well, I take it that there are some relevant differences here, as qq66 pointed out. Internet access is infrastructure, and increasingly, it is essential; access to Coca-Cola is not. I think the government has some obligation to avoid creating a disparity between haves and have-nots for infrastructure like this. It's not the only consideration, but that is one reason build-out requirements are appropriate for broadband companies, while not for soda vendors.

Also, this infrastructure often has to be built on public land. It's the government's job to make sure that land is managed well for an indefinite period into the future, presumably well beyond the life of whatever cable is being laid down. This is why it's appropriate for the government to demand more oversight of these companies in general, whether that comes in the form of build-out requirements, a fund for cleanup fees, or whatever. A story I've seen again and again is public land rights being granted to a private company, which subsequently damages the land and then tries to stick the public with the bill. The government has an obligation to protect public interest in the land and avoid that kind of situation. Again, it has no such obligation with respect to many other businesses: Coca-Cola doesn't need land rights to sell bottles in private stores, so that kind of oversight is not appropriate.