skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't ycombinator all about creating and advertising for (new) companies, often with closed-source software and for-profit goals?
Thanks for pointing this out, it is great!
"As soon as you have any kind of highly-distributed system, accurate clocks are usually..."

Let me stop you right there. If you have a highly distributed system, it's design CAN NOT rely on perfectly synchronized clocks among it's components. That's actually the point of the Lamport paper you cited as well as the OP.
I actually started writing a detailed rehash of the Lamport's paper but I realize I'd do a poor job of it at best. Instead, I think it's best to just point to excellent and highly readable entire paper here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...
How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors
TBH with the knowledge of the recent (and not so recent) NSA stuff, so should phone calls, then - IIRC those are still protected by confidentiality.
that would not allow them to resize a machine, would it? Once they've placed it on an instance type, how would they resize it?
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo follows the same tactic. You can see a (I think) r.duckduckgo.com URL before it loads the desired site
It would have been a different version Linux, but Ubuntu is the easiest to install with the bootloader nonsense.
Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
I'd love to talk to you in more detail, can I have your email ?
Remember that many (most?) recipients of international remittances don't have bank accounts or access to payment cards. Hence why Western Union et al have to maintain extensive agent networks.

As for visa, I wrote about it recently here: http://gendal.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/why-the-payment-card-...

The thing to remember is that Visa authorisations are done in near real-time but settlement between issuers, Visa, acquirers and on to merchants is done over the normal banking system, as far as I know.
Their website has been changed quite a bit and old linked videos are hard to find. I found a copy uploaded to YouTube in 2011 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE

Edit: Found the original copy on the Web Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110615000000*/http://www.spacex...
Yes, Python seems to encourage this sort of organization, while (from what I have seen) JavaScript does not.
No idea, but can confirm from New Zealand that the entire internet can be flying along and t.co can be completely unreachable. Happens all the time.
An old oil rig has the right level of Bond-villain-ness about it. Gets my vote.
So now we only need better batteries, and we'll soon be able to cut and weld metal with our phone?? :D
It seemed quite broken on WP8 too, looked pretty much the same and it didn't seem to want to load another image after the initial load (though this may have been a connectivity problem)
I didn't see the benchmark code in the repo, so I didn't really think about a pull request. Next time I find time I'll poke around a bit more. They are trivial changes though.
The situation must be differentiated by language/environment. The suggestions for Haskell are certainly not bad. They hold, too, for many systems programming.

For scientific coding, comments should align with the underlying theory for the code: “This implements matrix transposition with regard to ... as defined by ...”, so that next generations can align code with papers better.

And when you’re in a wacky environment like the PHP runtime or coding for a moving target like the browser, comments might be indispensable to explain one or the other really strange way of doing things, where you simply have no other choice. Look at the [jQuery source code](https://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/master/src), where they comment excessively, which browser quirk they address with which work-around.
Wouldn't about 12kg of laptop batteries provide 4kW?( wikipedia: ~250-~340 W/kg ) Put them in a backpack.
I agree. Comments sometimes make it difficult to go through the source code. That's why I always loved Java naming convention that suggests variables and method names to be self-explanatory.
> I repeat: Try hard - very hard - preferably repeatedly - to remove unexpected behaviour from your program. Comments can never fix unexpected behaviour.

This is golden!
This solution isn't talking to GL from different threads, instead it builds a command list on one thread, for the 'render thread' (here: actually the main thread) to consume. Only one thread creates and talks to the GL context.
Npm surpasses maven
make that 320,000%
No this is the official boycott list I guess.
The article correctly advices against commenting the obvious. I think it is often practice by novice programmers to assure themselves about what the language expression actually does.

What the article omits is the suggestion of commenting the right way, i.e. adding reasoning or the description of the high level logic behind the code.
Indeed! I'll add that. Thanks
Xiaomi Launches the Mi 4
What else does Sublime Text do that is new? I guess you could count the minimap. The command palette, code navigation, configuration files, package management, speed, plugins, snippets, all have been implemented and widely used in both Emacs and Vim for years.

I would be pleased to be proven wrong here, but how exactly did it "change the game entirely", and how exactly is it a "next-generation editor"?
> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y

Unless you are Dwarf Fortress.
Great resource! This is also worth attention: http://bootswatch.com/. I have zero-to-none design skills and using these themes makes my chrome extensions design look acceptable (well, almost)
This is huge, it means that laser cutters will be even cheaper than they are now, and that much more ubiquitous. Laser cutters are already making their way into small scale shops and hackerspaces, this'll just hasten that. But it also has a ton of applications elsewhere. Likely it will lower the cost and increase access to the minimum set of machine tools necessary to sustain a developed economy, which has implications for the entirety of the developing world as well as further afield in things like Mars colonization.

Additionally, it makes things such as low-footprint or modular factories, configurable/programmable or wholly automated factories, and self-replicating factories more of a possibility in the near future.
Show HN: The RetroPie Project
Google buys Helsinki-based drawElements to bolster its Android team
I, for one, love the name. (I'm impressed they were able to get the domain.) "Terminal" seems like a perfectly natural name for this sort of product.

Very excited to see this tech used for online computer science education. When I took CS classes (and TA'd them) it was always a royal pain in the ass to configure everything right on every student's personal computer / OS / etc. Being able to pre-install all the libraries, code, and data once and then blast it to everyone seems like a huge win. Not sure how the pricing would work for a large CS class (or even an online version) but hopefully they can figure that out.
Excel's ActivePane Index property bug and a workaround
I use 9 digits, as well as being significantly "secure enough" it's also a conveniently easy length to remember, as three groups of three digits - nnn nnn nnn
The Internet of Things has arrived in the restrooms
That a joke is funny because it plays on the racial stereotypes in an unexpected way. For example:

"What is a game called where a bunch of white guys are chasing a black guy? Golf."

I think the joke would be less funny if the races were reversed (and a different, but appropriate game was used).
This is great news.
Should draw interest for startups in India, a lot more problems with scale to be solved here.
New vulnerability on Windows XP
Obviously. E.g. The Sims was probably targeted more at girls/women than at boys/men. But that is irrelevant, different games are targeted at different sectors of the market, and some are targeted specifically at men (violent games come to mind).

I would think that the marketing of video games is more connected to the fact that in the beginning, most games were developed by males (simply because most programmers/geeks were men, developing games that they would enjoy themselves).
idea: random constraints

A grammar that generates every possible squence of symbols is boring. What makes it interesting is contraints, that only some subset of all possibilities is generatable. Even the Chomsky hierarchy relates to characterists of the subset defined.

So, you don't need more elements, but more constraints. e.g. a novel is a sequence of a small number of symbols...

This would make each section of a game have a certain style or character. For gameplay elements, figuring out the constraint could be part of the puzzle.

Generating interesting constraints then would be the difficulty...
Comment only magical code, but don't write magical code.
So the whole point of using a shader is that it's the GPU that's doing all the work?
Some more background info why this project might be an important proof of concept, because it may allow to move a game's main loop into a web worker:

In a browser environment (and other event driven platforms like iOS or Android) it is usually a bad idea to block the main thread (aka UI/browser/event thread) for more then a couple dozen milliseconds because the application would feel unresponsive. If the blocking goes on for seconds, the application will be terminated by the operating system or browser. For a game this means that the game 'cannot own the game loop' like on game consoles or Windows, instead all execution must happen in small per-frame-slices.

As a workaround it is a good idea to move the actual game loop into a thread, and keep the main/UI/browser thread free for UI/input event handling, and other stuff that needs to happen on the app's main thread (varies by platform, in the browser, calls to WebGL currently must happen on the main thread).

In emscripten this was difficult to implement because WebWorkers have a different threading model then traditional 'pthreads' (or may be it was always possible but no-one dared going there). Alon's work may show that it is feasable also in JS+WebGL to move the main loop into a worker thread (I haven't read the code yet whether the worker can actually run completely decoupled from the main thread).

Before Google Native Client was able to call GL from threads I implemented something similar (wrap all GL function calls and write them to a command buffer, and then on the main thread read the command buffer and issue the calls to GL). It worked but I wasn't very happy with it because: all GL calls which return a result would stall the producer thread, and GL is very chatty/verbose, lots of very small calls (e.g. glVertexAttribPointer, glUniform...), and each call now had some tiny additional overhead. In the end I wrote an engine-specific message protocol which was more abstract, thus reducing the number of commands drastically (by 10x or so). But the latency problem is still there (for instance in Chrome, all WebGL calls are encoded again into a command buffer, and decoded in another process), so in my current experimental/minimalistic 3D engine I'm back to not doing any threading at all (good for latency, bad for making use of available CPU resources).
The article is spot on. Comment as last resort.
Yes, obviously the examples given in the link are bad style of comments. But sometimes you need to explain the reasons behind the (Haskell) equations, just like one would do in a Math paper. So there's a use case for the literate Haskell files *.lhs (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Literate_programming).
Sometimes reading new crypto news I think that all my attempts to build some real software for people are just worthless. All I need is stay at home for 6 months and roll out another $coin$ to participate in this gold rush. Oh ok.
Travis CI render Blender scenes
Very excited to see hash-source being implemented and enabled. This means you can load files from a CDN and have their integrity checked by the client so the CDN cannot trick the user.

Hope to see this land in Chrome.
Collective Intelligence: a strategic approach to compliance management
I was always told that if someone couldn't tell what your code was doing by glancing at it, you'd done it wrong and should re-write it.

I know that's absurd in practice, we don't always have the time but I've always used comments as a last resort.

If I need to comment code to make it understandable at a glance, so be it but I'd rather avoid them all together and rewrite until it's clear enough without them.
> if you don't like it you don't have to read it
How do we know we don't like it until we've read it?
Ask HN: Plugin to search Facebook and Whatsapp messenger from Apple Mail app?
Show HN: Codota extension – augmented android code snippets in Chrome
I totally agree with this. I like to put a bigger comment block at the top of my source files explaining the overall concepts and data structures used and then put few actual comments in the code. Instead I think about my variables and function names and make them talk for them-self. Commenting each and every element of your code will just make people (possibly yourself) curse at you when debugging your code and realizing that the comment was rendered obsolete 15 iterations prior and the code does something entirely different.
Apple slammed with another lawsuit in California over unpaid lunch breaks
This submission needs to have a different title. It's not very clear whether the submitter is being genuinely surprised or sarcastic.
US: Terrorism Prosecutions Often An Illusion
Definitely as a string. Numbers aren't things that have digits. Numbers are things you do math with.
True, there is a negative connotation there - maybe using that term was a mistake.

There certainly are huge variations in baseline skill depending on location and line of business.

I was thinking of the more or less generic enterprise software environment in firms whose main business is not software development, and which reside outside silicon valley or other tech hubs.
I would say, never assume sarcasm is in play unless it's absolutely clear. So I think this title is fine.

If the OP meant to be sarcastic, that's just like me saying "yes" when I mean "no"---my mistake, not yours, and you can't be blamed for assuming I meant what I said.
It's all right to blame the source. Imagine half a population having grayscale screens. Would you pick colors that map to the same shade of gray? I guess not, so why would you pick colors and thickness that can be mistaken on so many setups?

In this case it doesn't matter, as it's obvious which line is which.
Google considers buying Spotify but finds the price too high
Does having pop-up box once in a few days really makes it unusable without a license?
The Promises of DevOps
Already installed it 2 weeks ago.
Great tool for every Android developer!
Definitely agree with T440 (I have the T440s) w/ 9 cell battery especially if your commute to and from work is large. Macbook Pro + VMFusion + VS results in < 2 hours battery life. It's much better to do native Windows 8.1 and then VMware OSX.

You'll get 8-10 hours battery life (under load, else 16 hours), touch screen Windows 8, touch screen OSX/iOS simulator, touch screen Android simulator and touch screen Windows 8 Phone simulator - concurrently all at the same time.

This is my setup for cross-platform mobile dev using Xamarin. There's something special about commuting on the train, doing iOS/Droid/WP8 development in Visual Studio without being chained to a physical mac-mini or multiple computers.
Even Facebook events now seem tacky for anything other than massive events in my social circles.
You can "snap together" pieces and build an ethereum script for various things here: http://etherscripter.com/0-4-0/

See the code sample link. You can even check out the output in a Lisp-like language.
The bottomless money pit that is Windows Phone
Ever wish your Android device had more buttons? Check out Dimple
Somebody can't tell "average story" and "average reach or story" apart. I'm not sure medium.com assigned weights to the stories based on their reach.
because it strikes me as an inside term, possibly only used inside the military. Maybe I'm wrong on that?
Isn't SuperCell (Clash of Clans) using open allocation as well ? They did it before becoming a cash fountain.

My feeling is that open allocation is the most efficient with very dedicated employee and strong constrains. The manpower limitation being one of these constrains. Self organization is also more efficient with few people because communication is then more efficient. Obviously when the number of employee grows, these two conditions are much harder to met. Cashflow can only hide the inefficiency.
This is not convincing to me because the examples are trivial:

-- swap the elements of a pair
swap :: (a,b) -> (b,a)

Yes this is redundant.

let b=a+1 -- add one to 'a'

Yes this is also redundant

Does it mean that every piece of code can be expressed as clearly as in a one-line comment in natural language? I don't think so.
So was Kildall. It's ironic because U. Washington ignored its own alumni and failed to recognize his contribution;. things typically go the other way 'round -- universities encourage their students and highlight their alumnis' successes. The appearance given by this event -- that Kildall's work is acclaimed and recognized -- is largely contrary to the reality: IBM and MS went through significant efforts to relegate the importance of CP/M in their own designs, U. Washington gave him a backseat despite being one of the people who contributed most to the computer industry after graduating from their CS department, and the tremendous importance of his activity was largely ignored during his lifetime and afterwards.
Glad to hear! Don't forget to save snippets you like
To rephrase - code makes comments understandable?
>>Even facial detection is in most modern digital cameras. Tying these things together doesn't require sending a whole lot of information back and forth -- you just update a couple of vectors representing estimates of phone location and head location.

The problem is, that it's just not good enough. Even the Kinect 2, which from a developers perspective is a fantastic tool and I have never seen anything as good as it when it comes to full body tracking, it also sometimes messes up. And as a customer, I don't want gadgets in my phone that work 90% of the time. If I want to use the Dynamic Perspective and it works 9/10 times, it's just not good enough - I would rather turn it off.
How to build an Hacker News clone in 30 minutes with Stamplay
That's why the judge felt insulted.
Encryption should be mandatory for all sensitive data if it's not encrypted it's public.

However judges allowing the emails to be read sounds really stupid to me it's obviously protected by the attorney-client privilege.

Most obvious breaches in law are motivated by prosecutors as a lack of staff or convenience these days.

I don't care how understaffed you are or how inconvenient it is that is the law and you have to follow it or at least that's how it should be but apparently judges can choose which laws they want to follow.

PGP would be great in this situation, your attorney could give you a USB stick with the public and private keys encrypted by a password of your choice and you could use it to send messages to him.

Even if the warden or guards were to confiscate the USB stick they still wouldn't be able to decrypt the messages without the password which is protected by law because it's something only you know.

And because of how PGP works the messages sent by you to your attorney can only be decrypted by his private key. Once encrypted even you can't decrypt them anymore since you are using his public key to encrypt the message.
Thanks alixander. Appreciate it :)
I am trying answers from Crashlytics since couple days ago. It is easy to use, since it is automatically setup for me, no configuration needed. But from analytics point of view, I cannot get it how it is useful compared to Google Analytics.
They have clients in 3 different languages, something like 3 different scripting languages that compile to the assembler, a working testnet, an ecosystem of working contracts, and a bunch of 3rd party apps already. It's good to be skeptical, but this comment strikes me as ignorant.
None of these Bootstrap 3 themes seem to just replace /bootstrap/css/bootstrap-theme.css which makes them pretty daft.
Comments say what your code does, your code says how you do it. The swap example is trivial, but for most functions it is good to add an API comment, because how you use the function shouldn't depend on how it's implemented, but what it should do, described in the comment. That way you can change your implementation as long as you don't change the contract. In other words, changing how your code does something shouldn't therefore change what it does. And this last part is specified in the comment.
At the risk of sounding like an asshole. The themes on prebootstrap is pretty average at best. Alternatives like bootswatch.com offers far better themes.
The reduced variance of the /queries benchmark suggests to me that the database is the bottleneck in this setup. This would be the first thing you'd attack if you were optimising for speed. For instance checkout the section on StackOverflow's caching -- they have 5 levels of cache, including in-memory caches on the web servers. They are doing a lot of work to take the DB out of the equation.

I prefer the /json test because it gives me a performance ceiling. I know that's the max performance I can expect, and it's up to me to design my system to get as close to that as I can.

On the other hand the db tests don't really tell me much. Does my data and data access patterns match theirs? Probably not. So it is difficult to generalise from their results. If the systems you build are always stateless web servers talking to a relational db then I can see it might be more useful.
Does it mean that even if it goes through the VISA network. Actual settlements still have to hop through layers of peering banks?

Do you see an advantage for bitcoin then by removing the need of peering banks?
Ask HN: Need to interview a hacker for my paper about hacking
Its just a general pro vs con paper and I also need an interview with a hacker if anyone is willing to give me one!

Since I am not a hacker by any means whatsoever I have no clue as to what the pros and cons are except for the obvious ones

pros
- Hacktivism
- hackers = innovators
- Vulnerability/ Security research
- Hacking is an essential aspect of the tech industry
- ?

cons
- How the US gov is so loose with the hacking laws and sentencing
- Blackhat hackers or rather just plain criminals with knowledge of hacking
- Nothing is 100% bullet proof and anyone can get their info hijacked/ stolen/ possibility's are endless
- ?
- ?

Questions for an interview

- How long have you been involved with hacking?
- what got you started?
- How vulnerable is everything really?
- What degree did you graduate with?
- What is a zero day? (for the sake of the interview)
- over the past 10 years what has been the greatest achievement for hackers and how about safety against hackers?
- Why is being safe against hacking so hard? and what can change that?
- What is your definition of hacking?
- How do you make a living?
- What is your perspective on the US laws for hacking?

These are really general questions i just typed up in 2 minutes and need to sleep. Hopefully maybe I can get a response or 2.

Thanks for all the help!
The argument is not to never use comments, but rather to avoid bad comments.
Leo Brodie says in "Thinking Forth" in the style section: "The most-accurate, least-expensive documentation is self-documenting code". I am sure there are other prior examples.