skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To me it screams wrongly used PHP.

Of course it's wrongly used, since it doesn't work (hence my request to make it work).

The issue is not whether we should write such code now (we obviously shouldn't, since we'll hit all kinds of language problems); it's whether we'd like to write such code in the future (in which case we need to fix those problems now). Personally, I would like to avoid redefining built-in capabilities over and over.

As for what I'm trying to achieve, the same as everyone else: clean, understandable, maintainable code.

Here's something I ran across this week. I'm instantiating a class $class (read from a config file) and need to inject dependencies ($dep_classes, read from a config file) into the constructor. How to do it?

$deps = [];
foreach ($dep_classes as $dep_class) {
$deps[] = new $dep_class;
}
$instance = new $class(...$deps);

It works, but turning $dep_classes into $deps is clearly a use-case for array_map. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel:

$deps = array_map(function($dep_class) { return new $dep_class; }, $dep_classes);
$instance = new $class(...$deps);

Again, it works, but that anonymous function is pretty horrible; we might have been better off with the loop!

However, it's clear that, again, we're reinventing the wheel. array_map passes the class names to its callback, so why are we passing them to "new" ourselves?

$deps = array_map('new', $dep_classes);
$instance = new $class(...$deps);

This gives an error, since "new" is an operator. Does this scream of "wrongly used PHP", or is it a problem with the language that would be nice to fix? I'd say the latter, since at the moment we're forced to do one of two things:

- Use a foreach loop to duplicate the functionality of array_map.
- Define a new function which behaves exactly like "new".

Perhaps 15 years with PHP has given you a "gut feeling" to avoid programming styles which will inevitably run into problems; I've certainly got such a feeling after 4 years. While avoiding those problems is useful to get a job done today, it would be even better if we didn't have to worry about them tomorrow.

There's no point adding features like array_map, anonymous functions, etc. to the language if we all have to learn to avoid them to avoid parser errors.
This should help the PHP-NG project too. I was a bit worried to see they were doing large refactorings to increase speed when the PHP test suite only has about 30% code coverage.
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Don't spend too much time on HN? :-)
Chlupp's design borrows very, very heavily on passive house concepts.

And he uses massive amounts of insulation. He creates a large (big enough to walk in) wall cavity, and fills that with blown cellulose. I think it's on the order of twenty tons of cellulose. Not only does it insulate, but it forms a thermal mass.

Similarly for his foundation: a large sand base as I recall, then a slab, which create yet more thermal mass. The masonry stove at the building core is another, and finally a 5,000 gallon vertically-arranged water tank. This has a perforated distributor, and the idea is that he circulates water through his masonry stove and solar thermal panels whenever the output of those is warmer than the water at some point in the tank -- it tends to be ~120F near the surface, and ~40F near the bottom. The water stratifies according to temperature, and he banks his BTUs.
There are other approaches that yield Unikernels [1]. I don't quite understand your point about kernel mode and why that would be a problem under this scenario. The code is your own and you only use the OS components you require. The ASPLOS article has more detail on the approach and trade-offs [2].

[1] see table 2 at http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628

[2] http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
Job guarantees kill one of the key advantages of basic income: Basic income allows us to dramatically reduce the overhead in social services and other administrative programs that choose who should get paid benefits and weed out those who abuse the system.

In a world of guaranteed jobs, you would either have to maintain the administration or force sick people to work. Not to mention that basic income could have the huge economic advantage of allowing people to productively use their time to develop products and services they couldn't afford to before. Some of the earners of basic income will certainly do great things with their freedom, which will benefit everyone.
Israel shells another UN school in Gaza, kills 15
How to get Bitcoin from the early adopters to the early majority
[Game] Monster Snack's development took us 2.5 months. Here's a teaser trailer
If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I'd use second hand hardware and become a free software developer full time. I would be working, but what kind of work I was doing wouldn't be decided by anyone other than myself. I suspect that the JG schemes (one is proposed by the Labour party in the UK) would indeed be make-work schemes producing nothing much of value.

If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be:

- Making self-hosting easy

- Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use

- Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency

- Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling

In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.
Any thermal mass will do.

What I've found is that a liter bottle packs a goodly amount of heat, the sock regulates the release just about perfectly (and keeps you from scalding yourself against it), and the result is quite toasty. There's also nothing quite like having warm toes in bed.

The bottles are still warm in the morning under a good duvet.
Facebook.org would've been better.
Employing someone is very expensive. You need to provide equipment, insurance, safety, management and work. It is much cheaper (less overhead) to just provide "existential minimum", lets say $7000 a year.

I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups.

Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch
You can do this (and a ton of different cool stuff) with RogueAmoeba's Audio Hijack Pro app, which lets you route audio from one app to another, optionally applying some filters to it. I sometimes use it to fix audio out-of-sync problems in certain videos.

Edit: As commenter above noted, the audio routing functionality is also available with the free Soundflower app.
This powerful message will be responsible for some new startup successes, and a lot of sweat and tears from startup failures.
I was there and also enjoyed Paul's talk. I thought Alfred Lin made some really thoughtful comments too. From both talks, for me it was clear that one really has to push boundaries and do stuff other people don't think is possible in order to have an impact.
FactsForLife is included, doesn't that count as a public health tool? Not sure what you mean specifically, but this appears to at least educate around a lot of health topics. http://www.factsforlifeglobal.org/

I can see the value of data collection too though, but I think for a person accessing the internet for the first time, they would be more interested in gaining information than sending data about themselves into the void.
I definitely can see the value in this.

As it relates to one specific example on this list, I live in Leipzig, and in East Germany in general, it is nearly impossible to speak English on the phone in order to arrange these sorts of things, plus so many places do not accept Visa (only Maestro/EC card). So coming from the US, you are especially unprepared, and being able to pay OP in USD to have things set up that require German knowledge + lots of euros = huge benefit in not losing money via wire transfer and not needing to know the language in advance.
Seems to be lacking in technical detail.

I suppose the fundamental problem is treating the thing on the other end of the wire as a "peripheral" (i.e. inside the computer's logical boundary) rather than as another computer on the end of a network (which might be expected to be hostile).

Firewire and Thunderbolt are much worse: the peripheral has potential DMA access to the whole of system memory. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2516445
January? Wouldn't it be smarter to start in the summer when the road conditions are optimal?
Again as with my previous response, I still dont get why the need for a Gigafactory. Battery Industry are an extremely automated, high volume market and with profit margin in single digit. Cutting those off aren't going to automatically made electric cars affordable.

Unless Telsa and Panasonic has jointly developed an revolutionary battery that is going to need some funding and mass produced. But any new battery will need years in time for safety testing. And the news would properly have leaked by now.
> I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt

You can't give them that benefit because their company culture was founded on "They trust me — dumb fucks" [0]

[0] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
I'm in this club with Octopus, though my app won't exactly find you a date. (but will hopefully help you sell stuff)
Interesting article, I agree with most of the authors ideas. Converting double-lane streets to uni-directional, and planting trees on the other half + larger sidewalk, would brighten up many streets as well.

I suggest using a CDN for the images. It took me ~10 min to load them. E.g. fastly or CloudFront.
Just move to the bay area or Norway, both of these places seem to issue Teslas to everyone ;)
"They trust me — dumb fucks" - Mark Zuckerberg

While someone will come along and tell me he's changed so much since this comment and it's irrelevant at this point in time I still think it's foolish to place any trust in a company that was pretty much founded on this concept.
My perspective on this as I just said to someone:

It's an opportunity I wouldn't pass on I guess, but this is basically net neutrality in reverse.

When companies start deciding which websites are free and for which you pay the "normal" price, suddenly the normal price is extra.

</open-internet>

---

So yeah a Facebook app that offers Facebook access for free. How convenient, right? For good measure throw in another few services that look good but are still limited (google search without being able to click any links? Lovely) and we have something that we can present as a good thing to the world.
When enough people boycott the content-providers for their heavy-handed actions.

BDS can be used against companies just as much as against countries.
> Netflix provided TechCrunch with a brief statement on the deal, indicating that the agreement was reached in May

Are you kidding me? This was right around the time Netflix was saying how pro-net neutrality they are, while signing deals with the carriers behind our backs.

I said before I won't support Netflix again, after they pushed DRM on the web, but I fell for it with the net neutrality thing. Never again, Netflix. Never again.
Its beyond me why anyone would want to sign up for Linked In, let alone have them trawl your contacts etc.

I don't understand the pressure people feel they're under to sign up. Much like Google, you're the product.
For the curious, here's a paper on the universality of fold (reduce) www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/fold.pdf
Programmer to Programmer Discussions
Hello fellow hackers, developers and programmers!

Sometimes business, personal life and health all fail at the same time. Its like a perfect storm. That's what I'm currently experiencing. I'm finding it depressing and I thought I would ask you all for advice. What would you do?

Since February, my days are spent in interviews, on the phone with recruiters and following up on FTE and new contract opportunities. At night and on weekends, I'm working on a new app for the App Store.

My portfolio and resume are online at http://bensapps.neocities.org

I'm hoping to get through this tough time after a divorce in 2012 eliminated my savings. I just can't seem to get back on my feet, so I was wondering what you all thought. It's always been a pleasure to serve, and now I find myself disabled.

If you'd like to donate, my Paypal link is on my portfolio. I appreciate your time and consideration. I hope none of you have to go through this.

If you have any questions, I will reply. Thank you!
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PayStand Platform Drives Bitcoin Donations for Candidates
Glasgow is gridlike; I was there for the Games and it felt like a very un-British street layout. But I don't think anywhere in the UK has grid numbering ("42nd street" etc). We don't do the continental thing of naming streets after significant dates either.

The UK certainly has plenty of surprising road layout, often involving roundabouts, oneway systems, medieval street plans, and roadworks.
SoundFlower does this, it's open source. It contains a decent chunk of audio routing features that are inexplicably missing from the core OS X.

For instance, you can route application audio out to a Soundflower channel and use that as input for another app.

Edit: just checked, Soundflower rerouting works perfectly with the Shazam Mac app, tried it out on a couple of YouTube songs, and it got it right on 47 out of the current top 50. It's a shame that Shazam is still only useful for mainstream stuff, when I tried it on some random metal, Goa, soundtracks, and industrial... 0 out of 15.
HOWTO: Create an Army of Raspberry Pi Honeypots on a Budget
So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees).

Sure, but the latter tries to solve a different problem set. I think overlooking that is a big problem in the debate: the basic income side reduces jobs to the income generated. The full employment side (through JG, reduction in working hours and similar models) tries to solve more: For many people, a job provides meaning. And social affiliation. That may sound stupid to the creative, self-determined cohort visiting this site, but the ability to live a self-determined life is not something the majority of workers is able to do.

I worked in the poorest part of Germany for a while. The real unemployment rate is at least 30% there. The unemployed get a de facto basic income. That is below the poverty line for Germany, but I personally could happily live my life with that money. I still would have enough plans and projects to fill a 40 hour "work" week with them. But having worked with the unemployed youth I know they see themselves as completely without prospects, without use. The sit around in their rual small towns watching TV, unable to do anything productive with their lives.

These are the people models like JG aim at.
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Good grief. If you live in a country that gets cold, learn to insulate your houses better.

Seriously, it is that simple.

/lives in a country where triple windows are standard for all new buildings intended for people.
It's not free "internet" access. The "Internet" is the place where I can route arbitrary IP packets to any other host on the net. It is not 7 or 8 sites chosen by God speaking HTTP on port 80 (443 if you're lucky).
To me one factor that matter a lot is motivation, or a goal to achieve something.

In my field I see a lot of people coming into CS just because it's trendy and they will sure have a job after graduation. But they lack the motivation to do something in that field. A lot are just in it because the pay is great and you can around computers all day..

I remember when I was 9 I had a goal, I wanted to make a game. I didn't even have a computer back then, but I knew I wanted to make a game so others could play it. I remember spending afternoons drawing level design, characters and how the game would work once I had my own computer. I never actually made a game but I loved the idea of creating something for other to use.

When I was 14 (now with a Pentium 100mhz good times) I wanted to be an hacker (hehe), so I learned C, Socket programming, I wet my feet into Linux, I started messing around deamons like email, web server.

When I was 18 I needed money, my parents couldn't afford to pay my tuition. So I created an app, to add my empty Resume and got hired by a software company to develop web apps.

Tens years fast-forward and here I am today, still making apps that people can use and still learning everyday, working for an awesome company, having my own small software-shop on the side and doing what I love to do.

I may not excel in my field, I may not be disruptive (haha), but I truly love what I do and can't honestly see myself doing anything else.

I just wanted to say that's fine not to excel or to be in the top 10. If that's your goal, go for it, but as long as you love what you do and have something that motivate you I'm pretty sure you will do just fine.
RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response (ACM 2014)
Do We Have the Big Bang Theory All Wrong?
Are you implying that access to Facebook is a human right?
"Mostly automated" is still a lot of maintenance and continuous improvement engineering.
No, they had horrible workplace diseases and injuries and a dreadful attitude to health. If your business model includes telling potential litigants to man up, you're not going into space today.
>people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these kinds of cities.

I'm not aware of any evidence of this being true. If it were, I would assume that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other places (because it's less desirable to people), but the opposite seems to be true.
Jobs that involve numerical analysis and PDEs?
From what I've read and heard about scientific computing/computational science is that it is perfect for those who have interest in physical problems but like using programming and numerical methods. I've only taken one numerical methods course as an undergrad, but liked it. I also like physics/engineering, so I think this may be a good field for me. I am mostly interested in CFD and numerically solving PDEs

However, I heard that most people who get their MS or Phd's related to numerical analysis/PDEs work as software engineers or do work that is mostly programming. There are apparently very few jobs using numerical analysis or numerically solving PDEs, unless it is for work in finance. Is that true?
Reading through the first few chapters I found a couple of words with double brackets round them (( )) that look like they should just have been italics (or maybe links to another section?).
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Becoming a fantastic Software Engineer in Test and Automation
Hello Hacker News,

I've moved to the testing work recently enough from Dev/Support and have had a troublesome time attempting to find resources which will make me a better tester and a better software engineer in test. The one thing I found on hacker news other than hundreds of job postings was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3264223#up_3264286 - which is both very old and doesn't seem to contain great advice.

So HN, how do I become an awesome software engineer in test, clearly there are a lot of them out there based on job postings, so where are they? What skills do they have? Where do they go to learn new skills to become better?

Thanks!
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7 corporations get to decide what the word "internet" means or which books/sites are free? What about the other N-7 corporations in the world?
Doesn't work with HTTPS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

There are plenty of powerful people seriously arguing that the free internet is a bad thing.
Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense.

The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.

It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
Well. I remember a time, when every store in my country had a shop-keeper, that would hand you the goods over the counter. Usualy shop had one shopkeeper that tended to all of the shop (counter, refilling, e.t.c)

Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people.

And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...
This does raise some interesting points, though I am skeptical that the government could efficiently create guaranteed jobs. Though I suppose we have learned a lot since the days of communism, maybe with advanced computing and data analysis we could actually give everyone a useful job without too much administrative overhead. I mean, the US government could never pull something like that off, but perhaps a better-run government could.
Came here to link to theis same video. It would be interesting to watch the Google algorithm run through a similar test (not the actual video, which lacks depth and so won't make a decent model). The chattering classes would be much enlightened.
This is called Gait Analysis and serves the purpose of identifying the best running shows you could get for the way you tread on the treadmill.