skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those don't seem like "these days" things. In fact, some is much more "old days".

Glib is just another library like any other, and POSIX is just a library plus specification of the details any platform would have to specify. And if you're not on something that tries hard to look like a *nix, POSIX mastery isn't going to help you.

Autotools is a plague slowly being eradicated, the problems it ostensibly solved have become far less serious to the point that they can be effectively dealt with by less insane means.

Make is increasingly replaced or supplemented with other tools (cmake, scons, ninja, ant if you're crazy), especially when builds start getting complex.

Heavy macro usage is not some modern idiom. In fact, "these days" it's indicative of laziness, poor design, premature optimization, or a religious refusal to use an OO language for OO code. Sadly there is a lot of this code out there, but yours doesn't have to be part of it. If writing your application involves many and/or complex macros, you should reconsider your approach.
Not a valid comparison at all. One is a learned skill, the other is an innate phenotype.
Right, well I agree with you almost entirely.

My only hesitation is that you and I have to recognize that we are on the fringes of the fringe, and be hyper-vigilant.

This behaviour is only surprising if you get lax (as I was, too) about evolving functionality.

My point about vim is that for me, it's a purposeful simplification. I do sometimes wish for a more flexible note taking app, but I know that it would take an earthquake of change for vim to sprout a file sync feature that tied into iCloud. And I value that, a lot.
The Accuracy of Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick, Quantcast (2012)
I organize a drone enthusiasts group in Fort Collins, CO, and we have some members working on similar custom racing rigs. One member has his own CNC and is designing frames for around ~$200 cost of materials that can jet around at 60+mph. It's incredible to watch.

I've focused more on building a custom rig for getting great video of backcountry skiing, but there's a lot of overlap in the video/radio tech. If anyone has drone questions, feel free to send them my way.
Are there more rare scenarios that you can think of?
> I can't understand what undefined behaviors C has, because it is the most simple and defined language I do know of.

C has lots of undefined behaviors because the language was designed to be easy for compiler writers to implement. As such, a lot of decisions were left to the compiler writers, which is what "undefined" means. Here is a (probably partial) list of undefined behaviors in C. (For a full list you'd have to search through the standard): http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

Edit: Linked to a C++ article by mistake, so I changed it.
Crowd Funding for Free Software Projects
My impression from reading about steno is that a lot of the complexity in steno systems comes from disambiguating similar-sounding words. Have you found this to be the case?

If so I'm thinking predictive techniques could help.
They also look very similar to the engines used by Yves Rossy (aka Jetman) on his wing, although they seem to be a bit bigger and more powerful.
http://www.jetman.com/?page_id=242
If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.
missing overflow guards is just one of the big disappointments in c, if you have experience with asm for any popular processor atm.
You're a braver person than I then. I wouldn't download HIPAA data to a machine with Dropbox on it, anymore than I would be downloading protected research data to such a machine. But then, I'm not a doctor so I don't deal with one-off patient info, so it's easy for me to maintain separation.

Though if this is actually a thing that many people want to do, perhaps the new Blackberry OS actually does something that people need...
I have used Dvorak fulltime for about a decade and I'm much worse at qwerty than I used to be. I can get back up to speed, but it feels like reciting a poem I used to know and I can't actually think about what I'm doing.
Well, it also puts you in a desperate position and you make decisions (and possibly accept deals) that you normally wouldn't take.

I've been on both positions. When I had no money coming in, it was always in the back of my mind and my business ideas were short-sited, not creative, and rushed. They all failed.

I go to tons of startup events where new companies are presenting and the majority of business and products I see are exactly this. I'm not sure if it's because of a lack of experience of the reasons above.

I only became successful when I had money coming in and didn't have to worry at all about it. I could focus on my business goals with a clear head. The money was a part-time consulting job. I was able to quit it after a year because I was making more with my business. It's been going strong for 2 years now.

I guess I'm different. I don't think I would ever go h ycombinator. My first business idea involves very-little up front capital, but has nice returns. I'm going to use the proceedsa to invest in my next idea, that requires some capital. My ideas are always profit-centric. If it's cool, but has little chance of making money, I don't even consider it. I consider those hobby projects I might create for fun.
I clicked on this figuring I'd look at some pretty pictures of toys for the ultra-rich, but as it turns out people are still coming up with new and interesting things to do with watch movements. It was unexpectedly fascinating - though it glossed on some technical detail that would have made it much cooler.
Nice to see a context and link to code specifications in a high-risk and highly-regulated industry. 'Work slowly and don't break anything' would make a good poster.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B)
Why 3 foul mouthed Brazilians are Exosphere’s first incubated team
Take a step back from RDF or Linked Data or even DL or any particular KR.

Programmers do have to agree on ways to represent information when interfacing different systems. Right now for the web, that is HTTP APIs.

There is a pretty powerful religion pushing "true REST", i.e. emphasis on using the correct HTTP verb in the proper way in relation to the type of entity being updated.

To me, that is enforcing a very basic general (CRUD) type of knowledge representation for the programmed web. I think it demonstrates that the instinct for a common language is there.

You can also see serious KR use in certain domains like biomedicine.

One area I have been thinking about applying KR is in defining information systems and programming languages. The reason I want to do that is because there seems to be quite a lot of overlap between a very diverse set of programming languages, and also because I want a format to be able to represent algorithms that can serve as a basis for a type of open source operating system. This operating system either needs to force everyone to produce code for a certain programming language or common lower-level virtual machine. OR: it can use a higher-level semantic metalanguage (maybe based on description logics) and then people can program that in the language they choose (perhaps something most suited to a particular system or domain).

All of these are programmer use cases. I think more and more of this general purpose type of knowledge representation will inevitably start being applied by programmers.

One key reason we don't see it applied more often I believe is convenience. You need a convenient representation and convenient tooling. Most of the semantic web or more generally KR tools haven't focused on that enough, which is understandable because the core requirement is machine-processable exchange. I think the trick might be coming up with a way to embed a compact KR more directly in general purpose programming languages or data formats, or translate automatically to and from domain representations to a KR format.

Another idea I had besides building an operating system on top of a DL (translated to and from different programming languages or representations, serving as a common metalanguage) was to try to popularize semantic computing at the same time as you popularize a standard for the metaverse. https://github.com/runvnc/vr
Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).
> I can't understand what undefined behaviors C has, because it is the most simple and defined language I do know of.

"Undefined behaviour" is a very simple and well-defined term when it comes to languages like C. Undefined behaviour is code who's behaviour is specified to be arbitrary. And languages like C is famous for having them.

(I'm assuming that you were being honest about not knowing about undefined behaviour means in C, and not trying to re-frame the word to mean something else.)

An example is overflow on signed integers. Strictly speaking it does not help that you know "how computers work" since you have no guarantees about what will happen if an overflow happens in your program. You can't assume that a wrap-around will happen and base your program on that, since that might be a faulty assumption on some compilers.

Undefined behaviour allows the compiler to assume that it never happens and introduce optimizations based on that assumption. For example, use of initialized variables is undefined. This allows the compiler to avoid having to initialize variables (like arrays) to some default value when they are declared.
Ask HN: What programming/technical books do you wish existed?
Any experiences where you became unproductive while using a language or technology, wasting time googling, reading multiple blog posts on the topic, trying to fill in the blanks?
This is OS functionality, so it would be akin to iCloud helpfully synchronizing your vim recovery files across your Macs (via a roundtrip to iCloud) without you ever asking it to - not a change in vim.

This is why this is worth sounding the alarm over - it's an OS-level change that affects all apps, not just Apple's.
While (La)Tex could be better/faster/easier to use, it's still the best typesetting system there is.
I don't have the URL right now but there is an engine called Fatfinger which does this. I used it to score a Super Famicom cartridge, in box, of the Chrono Trigger for $30. Normally I think it goes for $100+
I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format.

Any recommendations/tutorials?

My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good.

Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).
A history of warnings about entering academia
He probably means (https://www.kth.se/en), the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology.
Thanks, interesting commentary, and your point on Google / Oracle all makes sense.

One question regarding the architecture would be whether there is more of a performance improvement on x86 versus ARM for the ART pipeline compared to the pipeline for Dalvik.

ARM are saying Intel performance suffers mostly because of native code - http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014/05/02/arm_test_resul... while not speaking to performance of Dalvik versus ART on the two platforms. Intel are pushing their performance and scale while skipping over the native code question: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130552-intel-dismisses-... .

It sounds from what you say that ART doesn't really change the balance between Intel and ARM in any significant way, so that leaves the question of whether the problems Intel has with translating apps with native code compiled to ARM targets can be overcome by any manufacturing advantages Intel may enjoy.
> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”.

I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...

You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
Personally, I could just as well use Word for most of my work, but I like not having to use shortcuts or plough through menus to format my text. Markdown is a nice alternative, but doesn't support referencing figures and tables nor does it support citations.
I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future.

I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired?

I have my doubts it would really be an improvement.

For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.)

I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time.

(If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)
Interstellar's Black Hole Explained [video]
You just ignored almost everything I said.

Writing raw code makes up a TINY proportion of what I do professionally day to day. Writing long code in a single stretch (e.g. without researching, checking other parts of the codebase) almost never ever happens (because code isn't created in a vacuum).

Also I am well versed on Vi's functionality. I choose to use an IDE.
http://ideone.com/ZOvq0n

You probably meant this:

http://ideone.com/wuZI2o
VMware's vCloud Air does: "To help customers comply with HIPAA and HITECH, VMware offers a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to all interested customers using our US-based data centers."[1]

[Full disclosure: I work on vCloud Air]

[1] http://vcloud.vmware.com/service-offering/security-complianc...
Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have. You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you are trying to do.
> LaTeX input files are a proprietary format.

This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses".

LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0].

This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so.

[0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).
Facebook closes users' accounts who write “ I beg forgiveness from God”
> when many of the decision makers that mandated angular move on to something else and leave piles of mess behind for someone else to clean up.

That's already happening. Two contacts came up in the last two weeks with Angular projects gone off the rails (pun intended).
You have a strange definition of everyone - one that conveniently ignores the massive gains in wealth made by the 1%.

The age difference is a nitpick, and almost entirely irrelevant to the obvious political and economic implications.
money is the life blood of any startup. Many pivot because they weren't thinking enough about their profit model and realize it's not going to work.

I'm a mix of the two. I only work on products that I know fills a void, but are also profitable.
It would be more rational to output to HTML5, since there are insane amounts of HTML to X converters around (APIs and tools alike). PDF or Doc from HTML is utterly trivial at this stage.
>LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them.

That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear.

And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.
My goal is to get more information than simply "go to a doctor". RSI is not well understood. Most doctors can't tell you more than "if it hurts then stop doing that". So, that tidbit doesn't go far. I've been to a doctor and didn't find it helpful. I've also been checked for carpel tunnel and I don't have it.

Btw, everyone agrees not to ignore the problem. I would think that there are enough people who read hacker news, we might be able to get a little more concrete information.
I use latex daily and tolerate it. If you can offer me a tool that does a similar job (conforms to ieee journal style specifications and deals with citations well) then I would love to hear about it.

The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.
> You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...

Eh?
Good news for the OP: The OP seems to
want more output options than just
paper or PDF. It appears that the OP
also wants HTML output. Okay.

TeX and LaTeX say next to
nothing about the final physical form of the document
and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate
device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX)
puts out a file called device independent
with three letter file name extension DVI.

Basically a DVI file says, put this character
here on the page, then put the next character
there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page.

Well, then, it would appear
that there could be a device driver that would
convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be
a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable
fonts and the special math symbols. Besides,
now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols.

It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into
TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into
TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully
open source with some of the best and
most beautiful software documentation
ever written.
That's great, got a video of the custom frame in the air perhaps?

Edit: what material by the way? And what do you think of 3d-printing for drone parts?
I would like to add for those of you not familiar: The Neural Turing Machine method uses a neural network called a recurrent neural net. Recurrent neural nets are used in modeling time series data and have a neat concept of training called back propagation through time.

Here's a neat tutorial with an RBM (typically a feed forward net) as a recurrent net for those who want to just see what a recurrent net "looks like"

http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage (2010)
I think Herbert is much better at this than Gibson.

Gibson also uses proper names for everyday objects that severely date the material (ie: Porsche sunglasses ), which has the same effect.

I guess we should be glad that he didn't give his characters Wireless Apple Newton's for all their communication and research and entertainment. ;)
It's funny to hear this compared to Markdown. The reference implementation of Markdown uses regexes applied in order---an operationally defined language. Only niche implementations like the beautiful Pandoc---also by a philosopher---use a real parser to provide a less leaky declarative semantics.
The study's authors make a few references to age:

"While wealth is getting older on aggregate, in the top 0.1% of the distribution wealth is getting younger: the share of top 0.1% wealth held by elderly households is lower in 2012 (39%) than in 1962 (46%). In 1962, top wealth was significantly older than average, while today it is about as old as average. This finding is consistent with the results of Edlund and Kopczuk (2009) showing that there were relatively more widowed women in top wealth groups in the 1960s than in the 1990s."

Source: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf, Section 5.3, page 25
It's overly verbose and useful for exactly one platform. Objective-C started out as a bunch of macros bolted on top of C and that ugliness is still obvious to me when I look at it. No, I don't think it's great at all.
It seems very much like the browser wars of old. I think that soon your NFC payment system on your phone will have to be your choice, and not that of the carrier or manufacturer. Retailers however will always have a choice to accept or not, unless collusion is found that is. When large retailers are the payment system, as is what it seems here, I think they will be forced to accept more than just their own.
Yeah the earnings certainly aren't too bad, although realistically how far will $4k per month pre-tax go in somewhere like NYC?

It does offer more benefits than just pay though. I mean you get to choose your own hours, can work as much overtime as you like, comparatively low responsibility, etc. If one could get $90k-$100k out of it with 40-50 hours a week, it would certainly be attractive.