skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience solutions generally fall into two camps:

1) Create a "generic" version of the function using reflection / typecasts
2) Create a specific version of the function for your use-case

I don't have a ton of experience using channels. My code tends to be very imperative and I add the channel layer at the main application level rather than the library level.

So from his example:

> func merge[T](cs ...<-chan T) <-chan T

You can create a function:

func merge(cs ...interface{}) interface{}

Then call it:

merged := merge(c1, c2, c3).(<-chan int)

You lose type safety and pay some penalty for performance. Also merge is harder to write than it would be with generics.

But even languages with generics often have similar issues. For example you can't write a generic min/max in C# either.
> If absorbing it would make the compiler much slower, much more complex, or the compiled code less deterministic, or corner cases in the compiler much more numerous, I think it may be reasonable to not go this path.

Why would that be the case for Generics?

I think nobody says "Go needs Generics, but the implementation needs to be horrible."
Microsoft now owns Minecraft
Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft
Minecraft Joining Microsoft
Minecraft to join Microsoft
Another excerpt: "Excessive amounts of capital lead to a lower average fitness because fitness, from a business standpoint, has to be cash-flow profitability or the ability to generate cash flow. That's the essence of equity value. And so I think we get further and further away from that in the headiest of times."
WAY too many security companies play both sides of the fence.
A while back I saw a similar project that used Samba to transcode on the fly.
I'm not in the business of space mission engineering, so I don't know details. Sorry.

But in general, you can control the error and make a trade-off between computing time and accuracy. You would select a timescale over which you want the error to be below some value, and then only consider the simulation valid until then.
I just think that it's kind of funny how, so suddenly, a generation of young builders/players became tied in to M$.
Om Malik's reflections on the Apple event
I was thinking 70% of people. That figure is actually my guestimate based on:

"In December 2011, over 300 million Indian citizens had no access to frequent electricity. Over one third of India's rural population lacked electricity, as did 6% of the urban population." (Wikipedia)

Checking 2011 article "The rural-urban distribution is 68.84 per cent and 31.16 per cent respectively" (The Hindu)

Multiplying those by 1/3 and 6%, that would make it 75% had electricity around 2011 and presumably a bit more now.
Had to lookup that reference. For others - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

However, what events do 2.0 and 3.0 refer to?
TLDR seems to be there is an unspoken priority between the words community and manager that is often wrong, and a hierarchy between the community and whoever pays the managers bills that is often wrong.

There is also a side dish of dogfood WRT eating your own dogfood, if you insulate your coders and company from the community effectively enough, you schism the community.
Most Expensive iPhones in the World
Time to End the Embargo of Cuba
> saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease

This isn't true at all. Too much saturated fat, perhaps, does, but this idea that if a drop of saturated fat crosses one's lips, you'll die a horrible death in 5 year is just plain silly.
Some lead-acid batteries can also be completely drained, unlike many other rechargables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhIRD5YVNbs
This is just a dispute over terminology, but to succeed is to achieve an aim or purpose; unless your aim is simply to raise money, you haven't achieved success at that stage.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we take your definition of success as simply a positive event, I would dispute the implication that raising $13m in this manner is necessarily a positive event.

The inventor hasn't accrued $13m with no strings attached; he has accepted the money in lieu of an obligation to deliver product. Whether entering into such an exchange is a "positive event" or not for the inventor depends on whether he can uphold his end of the bargain.
Trash buttons don't work.
You aren't completely alone a lot of people love Ruby and it's easy to see why. But it isn't the right tool for the job when you're talking about actions on the client, this has caused tension as client side development on the web has exploded.

There are many who wish to continue using Ruby.

I think people should take the opportunity to learn new tools like Meteor. Then come back when for example Ruby really can run client-side. Or with any luck a totally new language, something unlike Dart (which is just another javascript abstraction) comes along.
Microsoft buys Minecraft for 2.5B
Show HN: Report4Me – Automated network abuse reporting
> Plus, there's …
Try it and you'll find out.

You should contribute in order to improve the whole ecosystem. You should contribute in order to help it keep its promise (http://sergimansilla.com/blog/promise-of-ffos/ ).

You could also contribute in order to stop talking nonsense and gain the right to badmouth Firefox OS.

But ultimately… You said you would if you could. It's up to you: are you honest and can you keep your word?

So if you don't, please, just shut up, ok?
> Sure, there's always tension between community and corporate needs. Again, who would you rather have managing that tension? Some introverted developer who only sees the world through the lens of the code as its already written, or somebody with better perspective and people skills?

And here we go again, someone calling all developers introverts. Could we please stop that nonsense? There are certainly some introverts between developers, but not more than in any other high skill profession.
Ah. Yeah possibly, if people are approaching it like they used to approach phones: what's there is what will work.

Personally I come to smartphones from a x86 PC point of view, so not being able to reflash/reinstall whatever OS I like is a disaster already, to say nothing of no OS updates :).

But on phones not targeted to enthusiasts this is probably not a problem.
Its historically been where lots of abuse happened - quacks offering miracles; legitimate researchers overstating the hope and downplaying the suffering involved in 'new' treatments. So there's a lot of rules in place.
Thousands seek vocational classes as skilled jobs go unfilled in Mass
Microsoft is buying 'Minecraft' for $2.5B
The fact I need to sign up to read this article is stupid. Why is it on HN?
That looks interesting although I'd have to go back to legacy paper, no legal ebook format. Will put it on my library list.
> Microsoft acquired Mojang for a smooth 2.5 BILLION dollars.

Impressive.

I hope that Microsoft won't disrupt Minecraft's development (e.g. like they did with Skype, making Linux a third-rate platform - which should not happen since Minecraft's coded in Java).
> The app ecosystem is like nature’s ecosystem – where innumerable species evolve and thrive, and that is the best that could happen for users. We need a rich ecosystem comprising of multiple species – read startups – that can lead to further evolution – read innovation – than just a few predatory monsters.

I wonder how much of wishful thinkin is in the article.
The claimed fact that there is no dominant actor yet does not grant that this not going to happend, like "In the desktop world".

I remember reading the same kind of idealistic descriptions about the internet about 15 years ago, and now it is dominated by the giants.
Jim Crow laws were LAWS!!

So if there are such laws then they would contradict each other, in that case you have a completely different problem, putting your constituents in the position of having to comply with one law (for instance compulsory voting) or the other (for instance a law to take away the right to vote) but never able to be compliant with both laws at the same time.

Implicit or subliminal discouragement of minority voting would not stop with a compulsory voting law, it would just make those influenced now subject to breaking the law and subject to fines beyond merely (I use that word lightly) being dis-enfranchised.

Such discouragement should be dealt with through the criminal justice system, rather than by forcing everybody to vote.

As you probably realize (or maybe not) I am categorically against nation states forcing their subjects to perform certain acts, be it military service, compulsory voting and many others beside because I think in the aggregate nothing good can come of it.

In the case of compulsory voting, fortunately most countries have seen the light for this lowest-of-all-barriers protest against the way a particular slice of society is run, and 'voter turnout' is a good bell-weather for how well a country is actually representing the interests of its constituents.
> He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance

> The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving

Yeah, that's exactly what I suspected when the rumors started. Markus doesn't really want to run a company, so he's cashing out and doing his own thing. Good on him.
Holy crap, 2.5 BILLION? And on top of that Notch and Jakob (and Carl) are leaving? I understand Notch's decision (as he has been doing his own thing), but I did not imagine Jakob or Carl leaving.
I'm just waiting for them to announce a rewrite in C#.
I think the real point is that Go just isn't a language meant for developers:

It's a language meant for sys admins (which explains why it is popular with users of other languages usually used for sys admin jobs).

If your job is glueing a few existing services together, you won't miss Generics much.
A copy of the blog post if the site is down: https://archive.today/TbJQh

Xbox announcement: http://news.xbox.com/2014/09/games-minecraft-to-join-microso...
Why do people still use such a narrow definition of what a "manager" is?

It is almost as bad as the word "politician".
>What about the other editions of Minecraft? Will they stop being developed?

>There’s no reason for the development, sales, and support of the PC/Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Vita, iOS, and Android versions of Minecraft to stop.

So what is happening to the Linux edition that has been fully supported since day 1?
We believe it is time to stand up to the hackers and spammers which is why we try to encourage people to be good netizens and report the abusive network traffic to their web servers.

Just CC your Logwatch reports to us and we will make sure the failed hacking attempts get reported to the appropriate ISP.
I think the most significant part is that the founders at Mojang are leaving:

> The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool.
There goes all hope of Minecraft being released as open source.

There was a blog post from several years ago from Notch saying that after he made enough money with the game, he would "probably clean it up and release it as open source". Oh well.

Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their binaries on shady file upload sites, their "project page" in a forum thread, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.

So much wasted potential. Anyhow, congratulations Microsoft.
Well, this will be an interesting ride. At least now Notch will have enough time and money to fund that Psychonauts sequel!
Haha! First thing I noticed as well!
They are intrinsically built atop generics. Duck typing is row polymorphism. Dynamic languages often depend upon that flexibility to operate—and they enable it by allowing everything. Static languages without polymorphism are at a low point in that trade-off space since they restrict useful operations and provide no way to express the invariances needed to recover that flexibility.
The linked-through blog article describing the decryption process was interesting:

http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixm...

What I especially liked is that this was literally one of the challenges from the Matasano crypto challenges:

http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/6/

It's fun when theory meets practice.
Given how similar the two languages are, I wonder how hard it would be to automate such a translation?
They also didn't mention the free Raspberry Pi version.
Coming soon, Minecraft 2.0! Exclusive to Xbox One.
nono, that was originally asterisks but apparently hacker news replaces those with an empty string. that is weird, but unrelated to my problem
The people he "raped" were singing his praises on Twitter after the supposed incident took place. The woman only went to the police to see if she could compel him to take an STD test.

"definitely rape" is so far off base, it's ridiculous. You're either gravely misinformed, or shilling.
Already posted there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8318506
And a web version in JScript.
I'd like someone to make custom firmware to stop these new canon pixma's from cleaning themselves at every start, and generally taking minutes before even starting to print. It's ludicrous.
So Linux is not PC anymore?
I look forward to seeing notch's announcement on his blog. Semi-depressing, but it should be interesting to see how this plays out.

As an alpha purchaser in 2010, i hope they still honor the lifetime updates promised.
Apple Announces Record Pre-orders for iPhone 6 and Plus Top 4M in First 24 Hours
It's just my rough mental approximation of how many times such a situation has already happened (even if Usenet is to all intents and purposes dying/dead, it still applies to the internet as a whole).

Imagine a billion people with poor to no English and no previous experience of concepts even similar to the internet all gaining access at once.
Worse kept secret ever.Good for Notch and everyone else though, a well-deserved cash out and completely understandable. Notch never striked me as a guy who wanted to run a big company like Mojang in the first place.
> So there's a lot of rules in place.

I'm not sure if you are aware but in Africa right now people infected are actually going to see the quacks and shamans because they have no other option. Maybe it's time to think about providing them with something that has more scientific ground to actually work.
That idea is just plain silly. And who exactly advocates it? It's just a plain, silly straw man.
One would hope that their recent "open" nature to things like the .NET compiler and parts of the .NET source will rub off on the arm that will control Minecraft/Mojang. I find it hard to believe that they'd fail to recognize the impact of being on multiple platforms. But, Skype is a recent example of failing to realize the importance of platform agnostic software.
Skills All Front-End Developers Must Have
Infiniminer still exists, I bet Zach wouldn't mind that good PR.
My family has been playing Minecraft on Linux for over a year. I'm pretty sure the PC version works natively on Linux since it's a Java client.
Evaluating Band Popularity from Bonnaroo Tweets
While Mojang may have taken a relatively hands off approach to modded servers of questionable legality (Spigot, Bukkit, MinecraftForge), I have a feeling Microsoft may not be so benign.

I'm not one to usually throw FUD, but in this case I feel it's most likely warranted.

I predict an unhappy ending to the unofficial mod community, with it being replaced by an official plugin API. It's been promised for years, perhaps it will actually come this time...
Conway's formula of generating primes in FRACTRAN
It sounds like you were forced to write/maintain some Go code and are basing your opinion on that, an opinion heavily colored by the quality of the original code and your annoyance at your employer for making you work in something other than your preferred language(s).

It's even possible the software you were tasked with writing/maintaining was a bad fit for Go. I tried to mention that in my previous response. Such things certainly exist, and most Go enthusiasts will be more than willing to admit it.

However, saying you can't write reusable, future-facing code without generics is preposterous. To refute you, all I have to do is point you at the Go standard library. A huge body of code whose purpose is purely reuse, and not a generic to be found.

Or perhaps we could look at the thousands of reusable go packages found on godoc.org.

You don't like Go. That's a perfectly acceptable stance to take. But I don't think you've really given it a fair shake, either.
This is a great point.

There are different types of communities, and judging them isn't really a high-value pursuit.

Think about things like the "SHARE" community around IBM mainframe and other products. Obviously it's in IBM's interest to have people getting together talking about doing more stuff with IBM crap... but it's very valuable for those users as well.
How a Startup Can Wreck Your Life
> The claim is that generics add complexity to the language and its ecosystem. That, I'd hope, should be an undisputed claim.

I strongly dispute/oppose that claim.

1) Generics don't add any complexity to the rest of the language. If you don'y use generics, you're back to the "plain Go". Especially since generics doesn't mean just "ML-style polymorphism"; I'm pretty sure that many people would be happy with a very limited implementation of generics, e.g. only for reference/pointer types (or even only for interfaces), with all types/generic arguments declared, not inferred. In that case, implementing generics would only require a change of the type-checker of the language, or in the case of Go, not even that, which brings me to the second point:

2) Generics are already implemented in Go (the compiler/the language/the libraries), via map/arrays/slices, it's just not accessible to user code. I really can't see how anybody could make an honest claim that "Go is avoiding generics because of added compiler complexity", when that complexity is already there.
The .NET Compiler Platform and parts of the .NET Source being open sourced will hopefully tell a different story.
And an image mirror (credit to @duncangeere on Twitter): http://i.imgur.com/Vcyx0Yx.png
Those are all mediatek phones which they refuse to honor GPL and release the kernel sources. I suspect Android One will be the same. You can check out the CyanogenMod porting guide and pull the kernel and recovery settings from boot.img, modify clockwork mod with settings you found in boot.img to get root access then flash(most Chinese clones use fastboot to flash) CWM recovery and run a script in the porting guide they have to yank proprietary binaries off the device and attempt to fully port using the pre-compiled kernel you ripped from the boot image. I did it with a Mediatek i9300 clone from Alibaba but built and ran Replicant mod on it instead of CyanogenMod. Some things won't work like proprietary GPS and NFC but I didn't want those anyways.

If Android One Mediatek kernel is released can use it on matching Chinese clones unless it's some special kernel/chipset only made for Android One device. If we are lucky and that chipset is mass produced by Alibaba suppliers, and Google has the kernel source available we can get even cheaper phones than the One and run better software on it.

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_porting_intro
They are different links (this one coming from the acquirer Microsoft). It's interesting to see how the two sides spin the acquisition.
That's 2.5 Instagrams, or 0.33 Nokias. What do you feel, realistic, too much, too little?

Personally I feel this makes (much) more sense than instagram, these guys have a very loyal following, a tremendously strong product and actually make money.

Congratulations to everybody on the selling side in this deal, too bad it had to be Microsoft but with amounts like that there are not too many companies on the acquiring side.

Does anyone know if this was stock / cash / a mix?

edit: this Microsoft - Mojang deal will do more to get people into (games) programming than a million $ adspend by codecademy would

edit2: right now (16:43 my time) microjang.com is still free

Wonder how long it will take before that is a registered domain.

edit: microjang.com is now no longer free.

Registrant:
Microjang Development (DR is US)
PO Box 100439
NY, NY 10163-4668
US (UNITED STATES)
Didn't you get the memo? This is the Brave New World where everything runs in Javascript or on Google's servers. Security? Isn't that one of those 'privacy' things that terrorists like?
That link has been debunked over and over and over.

Why keep posting it? As you have seen in this thread, many people avoid Go not because it's not a very good language, but because of the way Go people deal with language problems and can't admit issues.

Being dishonest will just alienate even more people.
Those zips are encrypted, that's why. I have included links to the unencrypted results [1,2], with ~80% detection rate. Notable green checkmark by Microsoft, perhaps FinFisher made extra sure to not get caught by Microsoft's heuristics?

[1] https://www.virustotal.com/en-gb/file/f827c92fbe832db3f09f47...

[2] https://www.virustotal.com/en-gb/file/0b465877a998a993a64a14...
Yes, but that will fragment the thread.
This is the first time i've seen the word infiniminer in 2 years, not sure i'll see it again. I think it already got the publicity it would out of minecraft, the game is already well enough known without MS.
I have been trying to understand why Microsoft would buy Minecraft. Even though Minecraft is really important, and wildly successful, but the price tag for a game studio with one successful game is rather odd, considering it is unlikely Minecraft will sell millions of copies more (it is already the most sold game ever made). This is a long shot, but it may explain it:

If Microsoft is trying to build its own Steam competitor (which given Valve's current strategy to make Linux an alternative gaming platform to Windows, makes sense), then Minecraft is the perfect acquisition to start it up, for a number of reasons. It is the best selling video game of all time, with over 15 million copies sold for the PC (54 million copies across all platforms), and it has over 100 million accounts registered. It is possibly the only successful indie game that has never integrated with Steam, and that has a very young userbase (based on my experience) which, given their ages, probably isn't part of Steam's userbase. All of these aspects make it a great strategic acquisition if Microsoft wants to make a new and successful game marketplace and platform for Windows.

Anyone else has any other idea why the 2.5 billion price tag?
That would mean 2 things:
1 - They stop supporting everything except Windows and XBox
2 - They need to buy Xamarin too in order to keep supporting all platforms.

#stopspeculation :)
Agreed, completely delusional wishful thinking. There is some innovation and "unbundling" at the edges, and then once those edges become reasonably well defined and there is a verifiable market there the majors will swoop in, build a couple of clones or additions to their platforms and hoover up a couple of the larger apps. And the cycle will continue. Every once in a while one of these major players at the edge will grow big at a fast enough rate that it will achieve orbital velocity and become a major in its own right by owning the new hotness for long enough to become a utility (cf. Netscape, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc.) but the idea that this there is any sort of major change in progress seems somewhat detached from the facts on the ground.