skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like this is a kind of naive approach that might work for some end user programs, but isn't a good principle in general. Large/monolithic programs like databases, operating systems, compilers, etc. all can benefit from added overall complexity. (new data structures for storing data on disk, better memory management and program separation, better/more aggressive optimization+static analysis+etc.) You can argue that monolithic programs like those should be broken down into smaller parts (they already are, though), but in the end adding an R*-tree to a database allows you to do more types of lookups efficiently and makes your program /better/.

The thing that no developer really benefits from is added state complexity. But we've spent the last 30+ years coming up with ways to hide that kind of complexity from a programmer. That's /why/ we have our programs and processes divided into boxes (PL, OS, etc.) and /why/ we use things like higher level languages instead of assembly, object oriented programming, and general data hiding. On the other hand, it sounds much less sexy to say "People should do a better job of following best practices, and a lot of the problems in our industry are because people prefer to glue things onto existing code instead of being willing to do a higher level restructuring of a code base when a new need is established."

I'd agree that a lot of programming is not science. We shouldn't be treating it as such. The harder parts of programming are an application of theoretical mathematics (Dijkstra pointed this out years ago, and it's still true), but very little of CS is 'science' the way something like physics or chemistry is 'science'.
PACER's Nonsensical Excuse for Deleting Tons of Court Records with No Notice
Why? Facebook just paid 19 billion for WhatsApp. Investors are hoping Snapchat produces similar results.
Question: Why are there so many new chat platforms coming out? Isn't this problem pretty well figured out by now?
This looks like an interesting project. The struggle I've had in the past with similar libraries is the level of extensibility provided by the API. It's not clear from he docs how to add your own custom viz. I would love a d3 based chart library that would provide an easy to use chart api,such as we see in c3js. Which I do like. But also a DSL that is not as low level as D3 but provides enough flexiblity for creating new visualizations. There have been some nice declarative charting libs posted on HN, which links I can't find right now.
Keep up the good work, I'll be following this project closely.
The security critical programs I've worked on, nobody would even think of randomly upgrading the compiler just because a new version happens to be available.
Cool it would be nice to be able to connect your own XMPP server.
UPDATE: Looks like it not working is Mozilla's mistake, not your browser's. Using fiddler shows that the mime type Mozilla is using is binary/octet-stream, but it looks like the correct mime-type should be text/vtt. This is documented on Mozilla's page at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Video_T...

Also look at http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#refsRFC3629 and search "mime"
Slightly off topic, but have you seen the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It's about a man with locked-in syndrome. Only his left eye isn't paralysed and he writes a book by blinking the alphabet one letter at a time... If your glass if half full it's life affirming, if not it's harrowing. Either way it's worth watching.
Thanks for the information, I'll definitely be looking into this to see if it can help me at all.
Oh, and the game also has a time dimension (which works normally I think, just one-way at one speed), so I guess that's 5 :)
Microsoft’s ‘Plan B’ for mobile
But ask yourself, why do you feel something is wrong with the system? My guess is because you've only been exposed to the media outrage built around cherrypicked examples of bad patents. I've read hundreds of patents, most of which could be called "software patents", and the reality is much more mundane and boring: the vast majority of patents are not groundbreaking or even interesting, but they are not overly broad or vague or obvious either, and very rarely are they infringed by anybody because they solve a narrow problem that nobody else has.
>> Why compare to some traditional tribe?

Because it is interesting? Maybe allergy is complicated and you cannot learn everything with a single study of your next door neighbor!
On a side note, what are the current options for iOS video stabilisation? I assume Instagram's Cinema framework is proprietary, so are there any open-source alternatives available?
This is exactly what Guacamelee does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQDwqrqAvwk
All of that is really specific to a specific company. So it is hard to make any specifically applicable comments without access to the terms under which the stock was issued.

That said, typically employee stock is Common stock and Investor stock is Preferred stock. The difference is usually how it is treated in a change of ownership. So buying back employee Common stock probably doesn't change either the investor share or their voting rights or their basic return. It does however give them a 'kick' if their stock converts to common after liquidation preferences are met and it participates in the remaining distribution.

The trend though is to keep employees motivated even when an IPO isn't on the near horizon. I've known people who were really 'trapped' in that they had an equity position but couldn't afford the tax hit of exercising their options[1] and holding them for some future event. If you let them sell their shares in a round (possibly at a discount against preferred shares) you give them some share of the success to date. In California that can be the difference between keeping your key players and losing them to a place indicating a faster exit.
Thank you for the helpful comment. I can't help but feel you miss the point of my post though. I can solve the problem. Verbally, (but admittedly less eloquently and less complete) I approximately gave your answer in the interview. Give me a quiet Monday morning, a pair of headphones and a compiler/interpreter and I can solve it well.

It's the fact that it is being used as a filter when the person filtering doesn't know what is being filtered in and out.

All in all, it's a spectacular waste of time and money.
I agree. I use TODO indicators as a code smell for things I forgot to add before making my pull requests, but I also see them as valuable reminders for future needs.

Sometimes there's a quick-but-less-generalized way of solving something, and you know there's a more elegant way of doing it, but for now you need to get something working/fixed and don't want to make sweeping changes.

Your immediate change might be to add a way for users to see that X is finished. A useful TODO message would be something which explains what you're doing

# Tell users when their Solve-My-Foo is done
# (Currently done in an ad-hoc way)
# TODO: Add a notification infrastructure so that
# arbitrary components of the apps can present
# notifications of Important Things
# e.g.:
# - celery job is done
# - a thing you've subscribed to has changed
# - a report/download/etc is ready to be retrieved

Building such a system might be overkill right now, if this part of your system is the only one that uses it, but a TODO message helps me see (the next time I make changes to it, or try to extend it, or use it as a template for reimplementation elsewhere) that there's more than one place we need this feature, and so it might make sense to plan/do those more comprehensive changes.
> move towards smaller stores where you virtually walk into and interact with rooms and furniture

I'm sure once Holodeck technology arrives, all stores will adopt it...
In the first case, the 1D vertical line is the same, but it's "seen" from a different angle. It looks the same because it's 1D and it doesn't happen to change because of the rotation.

For the second case, maybe it's the ground plane that's the same; it certainly has some of the initial texture in it, but it's been rotated and it's now seen from a different angle. But now we can tell the different because it varies along the dimensions it rotated around.

Or maybe I just can't visualize the rotation through the fourth dimension... I'm not sure.
> it's worth changing the environment to simplify the problem instead of writing complex software!

No doubt there is a fair amount of architecture astronautics out there, but thinking you're going to turn complex problems into simple problems by "changing the environment" is most of the time extremely naive. You can push against reality all you want, but reality tends to push back.
I think you are not stepping back far enough to look at the problem. Are you actually suggesting the entire complexity of the current web-stack (html, css, js and server side code) is essential to make web-apps?
NASA completes test on composite cryogenic tank for rockets
I'm sorry if this is negative of me.

1. Linux is a kernel. It is not the user land necessarily and really that's all this post seems to be about.
* Him being unable to run Skype and do his dumb Windows things.
2. I feel sorry for people who try to convert to Linux or Mac and try and keep the same applications; and the same workflow.
* Do you like driving your Pinto like it's a Tesla S Roadsters? if so you might like this blog post.

I agree with @tarminian that pcmag.com has run out of time and this post was a waste.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella
by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously
as "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of
Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture; but the
novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

"A Square" feels sorry for poor, limited "A Line", but can't wrap his two-dimensional head around what "A Sphere" can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
You make it all sound so simple.
How to Deal with Haters
The biggest benefit of Dropbox is the mobile app client support. On iOS, you see Dropbox and iCloud support, but rarely anything else.

When other sync services like Box and friends get more integration, I’ll gladly switch away since I would love some sort of encryption, which Dropbox, and Evernote damn you, appear unable or unwilling to implement.
There also isn't a real alternative to C++ for many of the things it does. If you're writing an OS, JIT compiler, or a garbage collector, you're writing it in C or C++ right now. And due to frustratingly solvable problems like symbol collision, C does a terrible job of scaling to to large code bases.

In contrast, there are many languages that can do the job of PHP.

To be sure, there are languages that aim to challenge C++ on its home turf, but it will take a lot of time and a lot of work before you will see a relational database written in Rust (or insert your favorite C++-killer here).

EDIT: spelling and grammar
C++ is somewhat notorious its developers' practice of selecting different subsets of C++ as "the good bits". I think one of the biggest mistakes of C++ was conflating the three different concerns of record types, polymorphism, and encapsulation. All three are bundled up in the catch-all "class", and everyone comes up with their own workarounds which should have been language constructs to begin with. So you'll end up with a language which enforces your C++ style.

The good bits everyone agrees on are parts like <algorithm>, and oh man, I have a hard time imagining how you'd make that easy to follow.
Just because a improvement is not applicable to all situations does not mean that is should not be pursued.
The banner across the top provides some strongly negative feelings. Awards and ratings are often meaningless.

The shield logo confused me. I thought it was for some other company but was missing some text - "approved by CORP" perhaps. So I web-searched it, and it's your logo.

The claims range from nonsensical to deliberate lies.

> Blocks government agencies

This is a remarkable claim! If a well funded government agency is targetting me are you really saying that your software will prevent them getting access to the microphone?

The footer text makes me trust the product even less.

I'm genuinely confused about this: what the fuck is going on? It feels like a mishmash of stuff. I'd be interested to know how many customers you get.
Why You Should Tap into the Power of Ruby from the Comfort of the JVM
Thanks for posting this - some real food for thought here. Can you explain exactly what you mean by a "work-sample test", in particular how that might differ from a pair programming or take-home coding exercise?
Motorola Semiconductor was spun out to become Freescale. They're very much alive and kicking.

Their i.MX series of application processors are in a lot of devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX

The old 6800/68000 cores live on in the S08/S09 and Coldfire lines.
It's not just "skilled in the art", someone of "ordinary skill in the art".

And with all the complaints you inevitably read whenever an interviewing thread happens about candidates unable to code up FizzBuzz, you can guess what the level of "ordinary skill" in our industry is...
If you're not the next Google, I'm not going to cram things for an interview with you. Sorry.

"Competitive programming"... if I get hired, am I going to be evaluated through "competitive employment"?
These are tough questions. I don't know that I have any great answers. Connect with savvy, non-violent organizers; find small ways to make a difference that have the potential to grow.

Re: "So how can I as a Web developer contribute?" You might want to check out movements.org -- I can't specifically endorse it based on experience, but it looks interesting.
Exactly. Propagating the information that p was passed as argument to memcpy and thus must be non-null is a new GCC 4.9 optimization (some discussion here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5243012/is-it-guaranteed-... ).
Here are some realistic renders from Unreal Engine 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7Bp4wmd_s

Epic is encouraging all kinds of applications such as architecture simulations and not just video games. I'm interested to see how the engine can be used to do something similar to what Ikea is doing.
Which provider? Curious.
It doesn't help that criticism of crappy behavior and abuse is met with cries of "Free Speech" and accusations of being too sensitive. We as a community/industry need to start calling out abusive behavior for what it is.
>But generations before did not suffer from this epidemic, so what is it that's making us so allergic in our modern world?

How do we know this is true? I always assumed some middle aged lady in 1803 had just the same problems with ragweed as any of us. In absence of contrary evidence, this of course is the logical assumption.

If we are talking about things like eczema and asthma, I'm more inclined to believe this, but I'd still like to see some evidence.
Did you ever get that 'Modelling Freemium' article posted? I can't find it.
"Reality is going to push back." It's a tradeoff, but experience has shown that fixing the problem without software will cause fewer headaches in the long run than fixing it with complex software.
I was at Motorola from 90-98. I recall that they were a bloated engineering bureaucracy that didn't understand software at all. The other thing is everyone knew Chris Galvin was going to run the company. Lots of executives left during that period. Finally, the iPhone killed everybody: Nokia, Ericsson, Blackberry. It was inevitable. When markets make big shifts, big companies can't adapt.
If something this sexy only made it into PLoS One, either it can't be that good or the authors have some ideological commitment to PLoS One's publishing values.
Diamond Roads: The UK Remade in Minecraft
Does Uber guarantee English-speaking drivers in Japan? I mean, that hardly seems important when the usual taxi companies carry around lists of common phrases you can point at, and you only have to say a destination landmark.

Riding Narita into Tokyo in a taxi just seems so inefficient anyway (for <4 people). One Google Maps printout saves you tens of thousands of yens.
You left out Squarespace - whose site editor is amazing. Was this on purpose or just an accidental ommission?
sort before you uniq!
I agree, I changed the banner. That's how I originally purchased the site so I didn't make any changes to the home page including the claims.

But I am confident in saying that the program can protect your webcam and microphone since I developed the current version from scratch.

If anyone can prove me wrong feel free. This is a fun project about a real issue and concern. The previous owners were using clickbank to market it, hence the footer.
I also wonder about modern soaps being much better at killing harmless bacteria then traditional animal fat bar soap? Think about all the liquid hand soap, shampoo, etc that is everywhere. The purpose of soap used to be more solvent then germ killer.
So, what is the reason to use the gyroscope data? Can't frame-to-frame pixel comparisons get you the information about how the frame moves?
I wasn't clear. I know there's a lot of incidental complexity in the web stack. But I'm afraid that some developers, in response to a stirring call to simplicity such as this manifesto, will go too far, blissfully unaware that some of the complexity of mature UI toolkits (not just the web stack, but also the native toolkits of mature platforms) is actually necessary.
Isn't there something that once a word is used enough and becomes an actual word in English you're not able to claim a trademark on it anymore? Or am I dreaming this up..
Agreed, 100%. It's business. And, it's all designed to help these drivers get a better job. Who is hurt here?
From https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/08/introducing-more-powerful-d...

> Already a Pro user? Dropbox will update automatically in the next couple days. You don’t have to do a thing.
Another sample size of 1 (so I guess that makes us a sample size of 2): I had eczema from 6 months old until 18 years old, and asthma from 13 years old to 18 years old. The asthma was bad enough that walking up a flight of stairs winded me.

When I moved out of home at 18, both my eczema and asthma _disappeared_. Doctors had no explanation. I eventually realized that one major thing that changed in my diet was milk: I had unintentionally stopped drinking milk when I moved out home. (We consumed gallons of milk every week growing up: good for the bones!)

After several months of no milk, no eczema for the first time in my life, and my asthma all cleared up, I drank 1/2 a cup of whole milk to test my theory. Within minutes my body felt sick. The next day I _was_ sick, and it took several weeks before my body felt normal again.

When I avoid dairy, my body feels better.
This totally goes against the whole point Mike Bostock (creator of D3) laid out when he talks about creating reusable charts...

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/

"To sum up: implement charts as closures with getter-setter methods. Conveniently, this is the same pattern used by D3’s other reusable objects, including scales, layouts, shapes, axes, etc."

You get none of that with C3.js...
Yep, except it is in 3d. I was hoping for some continuous movement, but it looks like it only switches between two worlds.

Maybe they will implement some more levels to make it look seamless. But there is simply too much work to design the world in 4d as a single piece of land holds a lot more information.
Afaik, the gyro data on the iphone is already sensor fused with the accelerometer.
How Cops and Hackers Could Abuse California’s New Phone Kill-Switch Law
Game Maker and Unity are trying to make the full stack as easy and accessible as possible. The programming languages they use are part of that, but their chose of language is mostly a pragmatic balance between speed, power, familiarity for existing programmers and learning curve for newbies.

I mean, Unity3D uses C# on top of .Net, which isn't at all what is described in the OP.
This "manifesto", for lack of a better word, neatly exhibits the main problem I have with so many efforts to "improve programming" of this style: they focus on ease of learning as the be-all and end-all of usability. Coupled with the unfortunate rhetoric¹, it left me with a negative impression even though I probably agree with most of their principles!

Probably the largest disconnect is that while I heartily endorse simplicity and fighting complexity—even if it increases costs elsewhere in the system—I worry that we do not have the same definition of "simplicity". Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy"² talk lays out a great framework for thinking about this. I fear that they really mean "easy" and not "simple" and, for all that I agree with their goals, that is not the way we should accomplish them.

How "easy" something is—and how easy it is to learn—is a relative measure. It depends on the person, their way of thinking, their background... Simplicity, on the other hand, is a property of the system itself. The two are not always the same: it's quite possible for something simple to still be difficult to learn.

The problem is that (greatly simplifying) you learn something once, but you use it continuously. It's important for a tool to be simple and expressive even if that makes it harder to learn at first, since it will mostly be used by people who have already learned it! We should not cripple tools, or make them more complex, in an effort to make them easier to learn, but that's exactly what many people seem to advocate! (Not in those words, of course.)

So yes, incidental complexity is a problem. It needs addressing.
But it's all too easy to mistake "different" for "difficult" and "difficult" for "complex". In trying to eliminate incidental complexity, we have to be careful to maintain actual simplicity and not introduce complexity in other places just to make life easier for beginners.

At the same time, we have to remember that while incidental complexity is a problem, it isn't "the" problem. (Is there every really one problem?) Expressiveness, flexibility and power are all important... even if they make things harder to learn. Even performance still matters, although I agree it's over-prioritized 99% of the time.

Focusing solely on making things "easy" is not the way forward.

¹ Perhaps it's supposed to be amusingly over the top, but for me it just sets off my internal salesman alarm. It feels like they're trying to guilt me into something instead of presenting a logical case. Politics rather than reason.

² http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
What would the 4th dimension coordinate of your models even represent, though? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.
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Intel Announces New Packaging and Test Technologies for Foundry Customers
Pro Tip: Anticipate Your Customers' Needs
That's cool, but I think the real in-browser path tracing example using WebGL is even cooler: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/
> either I have to stop saying negative things about Code Club sponsors, or resign as a director.

sponsor is basically indirect employer. Don't bite the hand feeding you, it is just unethical. Publicly saying bad things about your employer is a bad thing. Resign and, only after that, say whatever you want as long as you don't violate the non-disclosures you may had signed.
Thanks -- this is the only relevant thread in this discussion.