skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we really want to move into The Future, we need to start
> versioning individual modules or functions, instead of
> whole suites of software. But the cognitive burden of doing
> this is very high, and the software to do it hasn't been
> written yet.

I don't think this problem is related to any cognitive burden, but is an artifact of how the package manager works and how easy it is to liberally publish packages. Consider npm, where people publish packages with little to no coordination and everything is mostly fine (whatever the author of the parent article says). Because it's so easy to make an npm account (anybody can `npm adduser` and start publishing immediately) and so easy to publish (just pick an unused name, make a package.json, and `npm publish`), people routinely make very granular packages, often just a single function. Importantly, these functions don't need to fit into a taxonomy namespace like in haskell which prevents namespace hierarchy turf wars for the lesser price of namespace landgrabs.

Better still, you can have multiple different versions of a library in the same application. In your example, libB would just get the version of libA that its constraints satisfy but elsewhere other libraries could depend on a version of libA that do not satisfy the constraints on libA that libB requires because every package gets their own copy of their dependencies, with automatic deduping when the constraints are satisfied to save space.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant, the topic itself.
so if Calico is independent company funded by Google then what would Google gain by it? I mean how does this relate to Google's mission to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Is it a long term strategy to increase the age of humanity so they search more, use more of android, and earn Google more revenue because their search business is saturating? or is there a truly altruistic motive behind funding Calico? Seeing on their website an executive with title VP of Business Development seems interesting and just wonder how would he benefit Google through Calico's business.
very misleading title for a commercial solution.
We got good at preventing and treating heart attacks and stroke. People lived longer and they got cancer. We got really good at treating cancer and now people get dementia illnesses.

What happens when we get good at treating dementia?

(Obviously, "good at treating" is with respect to what went before, not where we want to be.)
>1:1:1 mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride

mmm, my proffered drink! I always keep one handy in the kitchen.
I've enquired about a link between him and SENS in the past and also received a few quick downvotes, possibly HNers don't like the tone (fair enough) but I'd suggest it's possible he is using multiple accounts.
Conflict In The Real World
Notes from “Weapons of Mass Distribution” conference by 500 Startups
> If automation continues and demand stays the same, things like 3-day work weeks will come about naturally.

That's simply not true, otherwise we wouldn't be working the same hours at the same adjusted wages as we were 50 years ago despite massive gains in productivity.

A company's increased productivity doesn't benefit the workers, it benefits the owners/shareholders. What do you think the typical factory owner will do when a new assembly line component means he only needs 50 out of his 100 line workers? You're pretty naïve if you think he'll let those 100 employees work 20 hours/week now. No, he'll fire 50 of them and let the wages of the remaining employees stagnate at best since there's more competition for their jobs now. Why? because that's what reduces expenses and improves the immediate share price of his company. Economics 101.
So, just like software, we should throw in the towel and give up?
Why Analysts’ Stock Recommendations are SH*T
Does anyone know of any similar GUI toolkits, for languages other than Python? That is, cross-platform GUI toolkits that use true OS-native widgets, and ideally, also abstract away platform-specific details such as the placement of the Quit/Exit menu items and the order of OK/Cancel buttons. Toga is actually the first library with those features that I’ve heard of.
I work in aging, and I think both avenues -- understanding the genetic bases of longevity, and working on repairing damage or other interventions -- need to be pursued in parallel.

Yes, genetics is hot, but also necessary to find the molecular drivers of the aging process. Despite what de Grey and others might have us believe, it is very far from clear what age-associated molecular changes qualify as "damage". Which changes are causal and which are compensatory? Are the widespread changes in DNA methylation and other epigenomic markers that occur with age "damage"? AFAIK, no one knows.

Even when it is clear that a molecular change can probably be considered "damage" (loss of telomeres, DNA damage, protein aggregation), it is still unclear which kinds of damage actually need to be reversed to promote longevity.

I think it is silly to see SENS and Calico et al as if they were in competition. We are all working towards the same goal, and anyone who claims to know for certain which avenue will ultimately attain our common goal of achieving increased longevity is selling you a load.

EDIT: My personal opinion about the difficulty of funding the SENS program (which I'll take your word for; I don't know anything about their funding sources or situation), is the extravagant claims that have been made. Reviewers don't like those. A lot of scientists have very ambitious and grand goals, but one of the secrets to grant-writing is to frame your goals as ambitious enough to be interesting, but limited enough to be attainable in the 3-5 year scope of a grant. And "unlimited human lifespan" is just a tad too ambitious.
Makes me think about the story of AmigaBASIC, since Microsoft was there too, ready to sign $$$ with Commodore, ready to abandon thousands of loving users without looking back... but that's another story, isn't it?
Somebody did a show-HN for this a couple years ago and it was well-received. I think it was salarysurvey.me but that's now a domain-parking page, so it looks like hosting expired.
Neither of those are constraint based.
Learning may not happen on-chip, but the network is still learned, and the performance of the chip is dependent on the learning. The spiking architecture of the chip means that the best learning algorithms can't be used. An ASIC implementing a convolutional neural net could also be low-power, scalable, and fault-tolerant, while taking advantage of the best currently known learning algorithms and ultimately performing a lot better on real tasks.
Sure, but the vast, vast majority of their freight is Asia -> US.

I work in the shipping/logistics industry and I assure you, Somalian piracy is not a threat to Wal-Mart's supply chain. It's barely a blip on their radar. If one container ship were hit and a few of their containers were on board it would not hurt them financially, they have cargo insurance anyway. Storms at sea are a much bigger risk factor, containers fall off of cargo ships in rough seas surprisingly frequently, and voyages often get delayed by a few days due to weather. Water damage due to holes in the shipping containers is also very common. And delays at the port and rail hubs due to congestion. These factors are all much bigger risks to Wal-Mart (or any major importer) than piracy is.

It's kinda like worrying about carjackings when an accidental collision is probably thousands of times more likely to kill you.
You have a very curious mind.
Would pipelined hardware work where all operations are run in parallel whether "correct" or not, combined with several "dummy" inputs work?
That's a fair point, but I don't think asking the question "Why don't we have a leisure society yet?" is subtextual. I think the question follows immediately from the article and my commentary follows immediately from that.
Sumerian base 60 and kumbaya y'all!
First, I would guess that part of the reason Calico is a separate company instead of just a team within Google is that they don't fit within Google's central mission. Second,I don't know if there really needs to be an altruistic motive; is Larry's concern for his own health and the health of those he cares about not enough?
Lightning detection network in realtime
> That means over about ¼th of the comments in the dataset, and atleast 1/10th of all comments submitted, used this website’s submission form.

Nice write up, minimaxir. I was lucky enough to be involved with Battle for the Net. We ended up successfully submitting ~135 thousand comments to the FCC.

I highly recommend people reach out to their favorite nonprofits. The projects are really fun.
Then perhaps "better at" is a more apt phrasing than "good at"?
That's a matter of design, not an observation based on technical merits.
In both my own experience and according to indeed.com (though I don't know how reliable their data is) embedded pays more on average than web development, nationally.

Game developers do get short changed often relative to how technical and time-demanding their jobs are, but that is primarily because it is a "glamour" field that lots of young people want to get into and the industry has evolved into a churn factory to accommodate them (for a short time).
A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914. 100 years and counting.
Emotions to some extent could be conserved between related species. But this does not mean that every animal has the same repertoire of emotions. Some animals could exhibit emotions completely novel and unimaginable to the likes of us, while at the same time some emotions could be uniquely human.

I would suppose that some very basic emotions such as fear might be widely conserved among higher organisms.
Interesting. It sounds like you sometimes only detect incompatible updates at runtime?
It's considered a wart that old style classes even exist in the first place. Classes look way nicer without it.

Imagine having to write `extends Object` for every Java class you make.
This project appears to be quite early stage (many missing APIs, no stable Windows support, poor documentation, etc) but very promising. If it had integration with a GUI designer and was feature complete, I'd start using it on projects.

I've explored the options for Python GUI toolkits quite extensively. They're a real challenge to get running conveniently (by conveniently, I mean a simple PIP install away with no external C/C++ library dependencies) on OS X with native looks, and that is a nice advantage of this one IMHO.
I understand your point on the original post (not the original poster btw) but I wish people wouldn't say "this isn't reddit" so much.

Of course it isn't. It isn't slashdot either. Just make the point without unnecessary references. Or at minimum use an original reference rather than one I see appearing every 5 pages on HN. Or better still how about just a silent downvote rather than appearing a content prune?
The event log yes, is not great for querying, but the underlying ETW mechanism that actually does the logging is great and extremely fast, despite that post a few days ago that thought it was the worst API ever.
This is a limitation of the way ETW does structured logging, rather than a design decision in sysmon itself.
> I certainly wouldn't advocate a unit that's defined as one 60th of a second

Veering sharply offtopic, seconds are actually called seconds because they're "second order minutes". So, just as a minute is 1/60 of an hour, a second-order minute is 1/60 of 1/60 of an hour.

In the past, people have indeed used "thirds" (1/60 of a second) and in the 13th century, Roger Bacon went as far as using "fourths" (1/3600 of a second)!
What do you mean by XmlHttpRequest? I have the latest version of Netscape Communicator (4.5), and your site doesn't work.
I believe that this convention is borrowed from Common Lisp. I always thought of it more as a way to highlight importance. Three semicolons for block comments outside of top-level constructs, which usually explain the purpose or usage of the following expression (usually a function definition). Two for comments inline with function body code. And one for trailing comments on a line, where space is limited and the comment is least important to understand code structure.

The conventions are even mentioned in the Common Lisp specifications: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_ddb...
Why not base 8? It's closer to 10 and doesn't require 6 more numbers, but 2 fewer.
Sure you have to be critical, but not outwardly.

Boy am I grateful that OpenStreetMap isn't a VC-funded startup, because they'd have to deal with logic like this. It's an open source project. I'm happy for him to be honest about what needs improvement.
I think Purescript has been a nice combination of easiest to install and easiest JavaScript interoperability.
Show HN: Create Youtube playlists from Your Facebook wall posts
But the saddest thing to me is that the Mac shipped with no user-level programming language.

Right there. If not Basic, HyperCard should have been put into the Macintosh ROM. Things might have been completely different.
Sleepless in space: Why astronauts have trouble getting any shut-eye
I think you're looking for phoenix: http://byuu.org/programming/phoenix/

An example application using it, with the GTK backend: https://i.imgur.com/pW2Jl9q.png

and the Qt backend: https://i.imgur.com/z6cC3rM.png

The author (byuu) posts here, he might be able to answer questions.
Yes. They did a study that determined that death is the largest factor for user churn.
Thanks for the link, which means I can now post two links each time!

I agree 100% with your post, pretty much. I even like to quote that very quotation from the C standard myself, with that very same passage italicised. Rightly so, as I see it, because it's the money quote. (See, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328982)

It's not even clear - to me at least - that this stuff is of any use. Every example I've seen takes code that probably won't work as intended and silently turns it into something else that doesn't work as intended, only in some unexpected way. Dear compiler authors - god damn it. Knock that shit off. Here was me thinking you were on our side.

Everybody is fired, indeed.
Does it really make sense to put apps into the Mac ROM?
I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system.

It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Your idea is interesting. Perhaps impractical, though. The ocean is monstrously big, and the US Navy is insufficient to cover it at all times. Especially in its current size and state.

Even just the Gulf of Aden is 438,000 square kilometers, which is roughly the size of California. Admittedly you don't need to cover all that area, as the effective range of pirate speedboats is limited, so you're really just covering the coastlines. Even still, that's a lot of space.

Satellites, sensor networks, etc., could help virtually shrink that playing field, so to speak. Just-in-time response is still a manpower issue, though. Strong signaling and prevention is more effective than constant response, though I'm not sure how you apply a blanket of prevention selectively to the ships that are paying for it. Flags or color signals, perhaps.

[EDIT: Seems you're back in black. Your comment was greying when I first came across it.]
I agree.

Yes, it could be seen as "If Calico hasn't even invested the time and energy necessary to build a decent and informative web presence, they're obviously not serious about what they're doing."

... but it could also be seen as "If Calico hasn't been concerned about their website, maybe that's because they're concerned about other things and have made the decision that the benefit they'd get from a website isn't worth the administrative overhead."
Isn't this statement taking it too far? As far as I understand, the word "imply X" means that there is a chance >0% that X might be true. Therefore "not imply X" would mean that the chance is <=0%. But when you have an unknown dataset showing X (with X being "A correlates with B", for instance), then the chance for X being true is in fact bigger than 0%. It might be dismissably more likely than 0%, so little more that you might conclude it is basically 0%, but it still is >0% in the mathematical sense. Therefore seeing correlation should imply correlation.
Day 1:  Who Should Be CEO?  A Checklist
OSM is not a routing product but a data source. It should be judged by its quality as data (accuracy, currency, precision, completeness) rather than a single narrow use case.
Well, he also was the OP of this (interesting) link, so without this "shill", you wouldn't have anywhere to put this ad hominem comment.

I don't really agree with all of what he's saying either, but at least address the content...
The startup life means there's a lot of legal and financial roiling going on at the management level that Employee #1 and below aren't allowed to see.

Probably a visa issue. Maybe a money issue (they don't dare admit that to any outsider, and employees are outsiders, so get the polite happy faced response management gives the rest of the world). Probably the all-too-typical inexperienced management issue most startups have.

When you choose to join a startup, you have to have a strong tolerance for surprises, some good, many bad. ALL of them are nice-seeming guys (nobody'd work for them otherwise). ALL of them have cool-sounding projects (will they work? Will they step on Big Legal's toes and die in deposition-induced agony? Will another 100 companies jump on the bandwagon before you can get it out there?)

It's a VC-self-serving myth that startups are succeeding at an increasing rate. See: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/corporate-america-hasnt-... for the actual stats.

Keep in mind that chasing startup dreams may not be healthy for family life, especially given that the failure rate for startups has been increasing, not decreasing.

Of course, it's always made to sound like success is just around the corner, but your most recent experience should give you a good idea whether your family's risk tolerance makes it worth it to you and those you love. The odds of dreaming turning from a bunch of extreme hidden hard work into extreme hidden burned-out failure are high. The startup world's only prescription for that is that you rest up a bit, then do it again.

There's a reason some people take the corporate jobs, save up, and only then follow their dreams.

Too many people are wasting their precious youth following the "fail early, fail often" mantra that is counterintuitive for a reason.

VCs make their money on the ones that succeed. The ones that fail don't cost VCs all that much, once you start counting actual funded startups that have passed all due dilligence and cashed the check. It's hard to filter out all those who are really only braging about funding on the way, because they've got to be convincing about already having it to have any chance of getting it.

But a steep price is being paid in wasted best years caused by startup failures. I count as failures, even these smaller "pivots" such as one where an employee is let go because different talents are needed (their stated reason to you). You wasted your time? No skin off their noses, they get to be the nice guy to somebody else they can use.

The startup world's harm is as cruel as any harm the corporate world can do. The startup world is just far less honest about the harm that it does to individual startup employees, preferring to say whatever they need to, keeping everybody's dreams alive until they absolutely can't anymore.
>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information.

How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration.

Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.
When something implies correlation it doesn't mean there actually is correlation. It just means it might be worth to look deeper into that direction, right? Therefore you need all these different attributes to show a causation exists, but a single one should be enough to imply causation.

note: I might actually really confusing my word definitions here, btw.
I have the Acer C720 and installed Linux on it. It is an excellent development machine for what it is. Cheap but sturdy, light enough to carry places that I'm afraid to bring my Chromebook Pixel, cheap enough that I wouldn't be too bothered if I were to lose it instead of the Pixel, and fast enough to do most of what I want.
At least one Google exec has suggested life-extension would be the ultimate perk for employee retention. See the quote here:

http://www.zdnet.com/googles-life-extension-venture-is-part-...

I suppose it's the Khruschev strategy for winning the platform and talent wars – "we will bury you!"
Maybe transport & trucking needs to be automated. If there's a lack of labourers, why not fill in the gaps with self-driving semis?
Consider

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms63...

where the window system makes a callback including a pointer lpCreateParams whose type depends on what you did earlier while creating a window. Deputy can't possibly know whether you're using that pointer in a typesafe way, it just has to believe every TRUSTED cast you make, any of which could be wrong (and some surely will).

If you want to say that's bad API design, I wouldn't argue, but I found that kind of thing to be normal in C, and the massive reinvestment in getting rid of all code like that might as well include switching to a language that doesn't create these problems.
Agreed on all fronts. The article has some decent suggestions, but they seem INCREDIBLY elementary to me as a person who has made a career of teaching programming to beginners.

In fact, just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. In an extremely conservative estimate, I have spent more than 30,000 hours working face-to-face with students teaching them how to code.

Actually I guess this explains why everyone sucks at teaching coding: nobody has enough experience.
I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.

I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters.

It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.

When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.
It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.

Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.
Cronzitto.JS version 1.0.1