skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple originally wanted other Unix-likes to consider launchd. Ubuntu was considering it and I think even had it briefly as an option, but ultimately they decided to go with Upstart. This was mostly because the original license terms for launchd were deemed too restrictive (Apple Open Source License had some extra terms that were somewhat unpopular). Apple changed the license terms a year or two later, but it was too late.

I would love to see this on BSD though.
How? (Tone: neutral question. I honestly don't know what you mean.)
Why not just use docker for this? Then you can install anywhere that has docker.
The launchd_xml code is mildly toxic for openlaunchd, it's derived off of the Apple Public Source License codebase instead of the newer Apache 2.0 licensed codebase that openlaunchd derives from.

IMO the ASL is going to be required to get FreeBSD to adopt openlaunchd at some point
So we finally have Orwell's telescreens, and we're paying our own money to install them in our houses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
Elephants are scary
It's not just about price. It's about quality, durability, planned obsolescence or lack thereof, external costs (like pollution overseas or child labour). Many important things that are often hidden from the customer, preventing a fair evaluation of the true price: total cost of ownership, including external costs.

> Who are trashing the planet?

Everyone of course. Some people more than others, and as you suggested, some people are more responsible than others. But in the end, we're all caught up in this system. Heck even writing and reading this comment takes energy, and sits on top of one of the most polluting industries (computing).
Let's consider just one aspect of this that I see as a show-stopper out of the gate: networks.

Driverless cars, even even in a narrowly adopted context, like a single highway, will need to be networked. Not only will they need to be networked during the time that they are on that highway, for cars in close proximity, it needs to be a network with 99.999999999% uptime. At a minimum, the cars will need to have a transponder with nearly zero bandwidth (like planes); but more likely, this connection will need to send more data than just position. GPS isn't nearly accurate enough unless cars can be spaced 100s of feet apart.

Do you know of any networking technologies that you would trust with your life?

Compare driving on a highway to being in a plane. In a plane, there are usually minutes following a worse-case equipment failure or total loss of communication. In a car, there are seconds or less.
:) Check out the URL here on HN, looks like the trick works here too.
People have been trying to make reusable rockets since the beginning. The problem is that a reusable rocket is more complex, what means it's heavier, and that it needs much more fuel to launch, thus a bigger rocket, and the rocket equation makes everything astronomical.

Like everybody else, I cheering for SpaceX to solve this problem, but the challenge is not making a reusable rocket - it's making a light enough reusable rocket.
Do you realize you can connect w/ any IRC client?

<groupname>.irc.slack.com

Google the internets for username & password setup.
Isn't that litany of vandalism enough to convict? He's meddled with public safety systems. No less serious than destroying traffic signs or cutting the phone lines to the fire department. Lack of security isn't any kind of defense e.g. just because phone lines are not hardened against tampering doesn't mean its OK to cut them.
Fantastic product! I've seen a good few similar concepts floating around the web, but this one seems to nail it. Of course, it could be just a good presentation, so we might have to wait until it's finished, but boy, it looks good.

Backing!
Waiting for the $50 chinese clones...
Indeed, I've heard at least one Rust developer argue for exactly that.

However, since exceptions are not part of the public function API, I think they have to be carefully packaged to ensure that they are only used in cases where catching them makes no sense (that is, for violated invariants, not normal runtime errors). The biggest nontechnical problem with unchecked exceptions in other languages is that they escape the type system and make it impossible to reason about code by looking at function signatures. This makes them unsuitable as general-purpose error reporting mechanisms, even though table-based unwinding is faster in the common case than error propagation through return statements.

Java tried to solve this problem using checked exceptions, which are probably my favorite feature in the whole language, but sadly I appear to be pretty much alone in liking them. Besides the Java community's total rejection of the feature, it was always hampered by the many ways Java offers to subvert it: unchecked exceptions of various kinds, misfeatures like Thread.stop, a standard that allows exceptions to be thrown at literally almost any point in the presence of VM problems, etc.

Personally I generally agree with the article author--exceptions are useful for some projects, but most of the time the best solution is to abort. Not having to worry about exception safety makes writing unsafe code vastly simpler and doesn't force you to write code in ways that can cause missed optimizations. You also don't have to worry about corrupted shared state as you do with thread unwinding, since processes actually have isolated address spaces. You can take advantage of hardware traps on failure modes like division by zero, which are significantly cheaper than exceptions. And, of course, you get faster compile times and smaller binaries (though the latter is not a big deal most of the time). So my feeling is that that should be the default, with an option to opt into using checked exceptions for projects that need it (web servers, Servo).

My other concern with fully supporting C++ exceptions would thus be that I don't think it would be nearly as easy to switch between the abort method and try-catch as between abort and task failure. I can see the argument for it, though--you're already going to have different semantics with abort, and in some cases the performance benefits of landing pads compared to return result propagation and/or process restart are important enough to outweigh the disadvantages.
I don't think it does. The technology we have for self-driving cars in the near term relies on a known map, and the route-finding core of that technology isn't going to be appreciably better, any time soon, than what's in Siri. You can improve the technology by adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications, etc, but now you're pushing out the "5-6 years" timeline that people keep throwing around.

I have no doubt that in 50 years we'll have self-driving cars. It's not an intractable problem by any means. But I have friends who were researching self-driving cars a decade ago, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in many ways those techniques were more sophisticated than what's on the table for commercialization in the near-term. It's going to be a very long slough from here to there.
Are you a genius?
Buffer's Series A – Game Changer in Startup Fundraising?
This tool is built to interface with DigitalOcean's API so it can spin up the VM.

There is no universal API for Docker that would allow one to install "anywhere that has docker", at least as far as I know.
Siri, Google Now, and Cortana Compared in AI Strength Test
>I can't believe that people buy integrated media players with their TVs. They are usually multiple hundreds of dollars on top of the base TV model price, have terrible interfaces, and are crippleware, using apps with very few services

Most of these devices are priced at less than $50. Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV Stick, a Roku. I don't know where you're finding multiple hundred dollar devices.

> A small form factor Windows box or a Mac Mini are superior to every set top media player on the market in every category but price

My Roku is cheaper, quieter, uses less power, uses a real remote, doesn't require any installation or maintenance aside from initially inputting my username/passwords. I can search Netflix/Amazon/Hulu from one search bar on my home screen. I don't see any advantages a full PC has other than "it does things unrelated to TV", which I just don't care about. I don't want to write emails or check Facebook from my TV.

>The best interfaces for all of those services are the full websites.

For using them on a computer, maybe. But interfaces need to be different for different devices. What works on a 14" laptop or 24" monitor does not work well on a 60" TV. For example, Steam's Big Picture mode vs the desktop mode for gaming.
Not quite abandoned, more a question of time. The upstream code is sufficiently undocumented and without tests that in some cases my approach has been to #ifdef stuff out until I can at least get some units compiling.

A test suite for this code would have made this whole effort far easier :(
Look at all the sibling replies.... You just have to get a Mac - works great there! It's like Windows of 15 years ago, redux.

I've had the same experience as you with Slack and Hipchat. The front end guys with the shiny tools love it, and I live with it.

To the extent you're missing the point... it lets people that might not be able to set it up otherwise have secure messaging across desktop and mobile, and a unified place to have all the features that you mentioned vs getting familiar with nc/scp/ftp, grepping chat logs, etc.

That said, they must have one hell of a demo deck (or secret master plan) to get a $1B+ valuation.
I'm not sure you got my point. There is no non-tracking concentrated high-quality solar cell option to compare against. You can only compare "tracking conventional" to "non-tracking conventional" to "tracking concentrating high-quality", and if they really get higher conversion ratios the latter can't be collapsed into the former without loss.
It seems everyone is out to get Islam today. And I think I know the main reason ... Islam as a religion leads much more often to religious states. One graphic should illustrate this for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion

And when a state has a lot of people who believe sharia law should be the law of the land, the courts and politicians have to grapple with what are essentially 6th century moral and legal ideas. And not just 6th century in fact, but made by one of the only prophets who commanded an army, and went to war, and wrote things like this:

http://www.islamawakened.com/quran/8/67/

"It is not fitting for a prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he hath thoroughly subdued the land. Ye look for the temporal goods of this world; but Allah looketh to the Hereafter: And Allah is Exalted in might, Wise."

You'd be hard pressed to find Old Testament prophets speaking this way or being described in this way. In fact, the Jews are admonished for "killing their prophets" who basically went around speaking.

So the "differential equation with initial conditions" analogy is very much a big factor.

Judaism formed to have an exclusionary character - it's hard to become a Jew, and so the Jews were always a minority, never ambitious to make the whole world Jews.

Christianity formed with a "peaceful proselytizing" character, for one thing because when it formed the apostles were the ones being persecuted and they didn't have the power to raise an army and convert people by the sword.

Islam on the other hand was formed that way and the political character of Islam is hard to defeat by populations full of sharia law-abiding, devout muslims. Disestablishment of the Church took a long time, but ultimately there is far less in Christianity that says the Church and Government must be one. In fact, statements like this emphasize the separation of Church and State:

http://biblehub.com/mark/12-17.htm

So yeah founding conditions matter, and I think that's why you see so many Islamic states and why there are more Muslims around the world living in democratic countries who truly believe that if their society was transformed from a democracy into an Islamic state, everyone would be better off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYAcLudBbhg

Personally I think Islam is not alone. I think various forms of socialism (Communism, Nazism) are also like "mind viruses" or group memes that tend to want to take over the government. If you look at it epidemiologically, certain ideas simply take over the population (the vector of transmission is almost always primarily young men, especially in bad economies or situations, e.g. hitler youth, or hamas, or vietkong, etc.) and states built around these ideas are intolerant and squash dissent. In my opinion, the greatest political danger lies in ideologies whose proponents obtain power.
GAW Miner's HashCoin, HashBase, HashPool. Is It an Elaborate Power Play?
Yup, I want to live in a universe where Android is built on Python3.
The notion that we don't "pay atrociously high fees" to own and operate cars is a pet peeve of mine. People look at bus fare, for example, and think it's a lot, but compared to the actual cost per mile of driving (payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance, &c), it's often cheaper, even for short trips.

And this doesn't even get into the costs of pollution (including noise pollution), deaths, injuries, and poor health associated with sedentary lifestyles.
Ah, I didn't do the calculations myself, just did a couple random Google searches for how many joules it takes to boil off one liter of water (not how much it takes to bring a gallon to boiling point, which is of course much much less). Here's one site I used: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/energy-required-to-boi..., but I didn't see the "k" in front of joules. Thanks.
Nobody suggests driverless cars are working open-loop from GPS coordinates; no current driverless cars work that way. Its generally a combination of gps, local sensors including sonar, radar and cameras, and car-to-car networks. The UofIowa Driving Simulator has done studies of trains of cars linked by short-range networks, where they coordinate braking and acceleration to achieve inter-car distances of a few feet.
For OneBody, we have 6 different ways to install the software.[1] We're definitely not forcing anyone to pay DigitalOcean to host our open source app, but it sure is nice to give people that option when they don't want to mess with running their own host.

[1] https://github.com/churchio/onebody/wiki/Installation
How much bigger is Amazon’s cloud vs. Microsoft and Google?
It's installing a brand new VM. By definition, it's got more than just root, it's got enough permissions to bring up new VMs entirely. Being worried about whether it has sudo permissions or something inside the VM is beside the point once you've stipulated that.
Other way around. I have heard people seriously claim that Shimomura framed Mitnick, though I won't speak to how likely that is.
A first look at the Microsoft Band
> For instance on Windows there is Structured Exception Handling (SEH) which however is not used by LLVM currently and as such not by Rust.

FYI, LLVM does actually support SEH on 64bit windows and Rust does actually make use of it on that platform. It's SEH on 32bit windows (which is completely different) that isn't supported.
My point was that very few things work and that was an example. Multi digit numbers will fail. Here's a few examples that doesn't segfault:

3+7

a=3+7

a,a,a

b=a,a,a

{b

b+9

p=2,3,5,7

2{p

{p

~8

<~8

#~8

4#3

c=b#2

c,c
I am a technical lead.

I received a really good entrepreneurial offer through a recommendation and after meeting with the owner of the company, accepted it. The company was in a constant state of firing and hiring. It all seemed so reactionary, almost tied to month-to-month earnings. One bad month could lead to a department restructuring. During a growth period in which they were building up the IT team, there was a lot of optimism about how the company was going to really start investing in it's future. Only a few people were able to attest to the fact that they had seen a similar growth cycle years ago and that those people were gone too.

I checked their Glassdoor reviews, but only as an afterthought and after accepting the offer. It turned out that the consistent negative reviews were pretty much a foretelling of what I would see in my tenure there. I also ignored feedback I had received from people who had worked there and had been unceremoniously dismissed, again, after I had already accepted. Had I went with my gut, I would have backed out. Still, I have no regrets, but I will do this research BEFORE considering applying to a position, no matter how good the offer sounds.
Only if all the cars are automatic...
"If a vehicle is less than 10% propellant, [c]hanges to its structure are readily done without engineering analysis; you simple weld on another hunk of steel to reinforce the frame according to what your intuition might say."

This is why you don't let cabinet makers build ships.
Is it me or does this article end right when some actual implementation details would have been interesting to see?
Interview with Larry Page
I disagree, because actively supporting limiting the rights of minorities over what amounts to an appeal to religious tradition seems more than a matter of opinion to me.

Also, I understand that you downvoted me above, but going to my other comments in another thread and giving them the same treatment is abusive - especially since I'm a new user. You have single-handedly destroyed my karma balance. So I guess the message is that I'm not welcome here because I support equal rights?
This is the reason why I buy the "Dumb" TV version, and its cheaper too. No reason my tv needs to be hooked up to the internet, have apps, or a camera/microphone! I just need it to display images, I don't even need it to output any sound! If I could pay less for no speakers that would be awesome!
Why would I forego the use of a tool that gives me dramatically more productivity right now than I could get even spending 100 hours configuring and managing an IRC server on the prediction that some years from now Slack is going to suck?

I understand using IRC because of privacy concerns or you have very specific workflows, or just because you like managing your own services. But the threat of future changes is not a credible reason to avoid Slack. When it starts to suck, you just switch.
Why do our Internet Explorer visitors convert 13% higher than Chrome?
> Just as C++11 looks worlds different (and better) than C++ circa 1990, I imagine that the same dynamic will play out with Scala, which I tend to analogize as Java++. Certain idiom will develop, certain language features will be deprecated but by nature of the platform will not be able to be removed; &c.

I think popularity (particularly with the enterprise) ossifies a language; it's too late to fix certain mistakes. Certainly this is the case for Scala already. But don't underestimate the difference between 5 years of cruft and 25 years of cruft.

> I find some idiom used by the more experienced Scala devs on my team to be distasteful: I hate hate hate the semantic confusion between the Option type and sequences that leads people to map over Options

That's not confusion but enlightenment. Options aren't Sequences, but both are Monads.

> I think I'm just a fan of smaller languages; I certainly understand -- and commend -- Dr Odersky's approach to a pragmatic extension of a (bad) industry language, just as I appreciated Stoustroup's; but given my druthers, I'd just as soon be working in something perhaps less pragmatic but certainly smaller and less warty.

You might like Idris - it looks a lot like a slimmed-down, more principled Scala with the benefits of lessons learned. Of course the price for that is that it's less mature and has a much smaller community.
Really. I'll have to dig into it to see how they're using it.
Your comments basically state the same thing: "we avoid these problems in C by conscientiously choosing the data representations and defending against the problems while creating and implementing the original design" which is true. But this is different from going back into a large and complex C program whose design and implementation neglected the issues.

Fixing some realloc calls is possible only because the function has an error return code, and so when the overflow occurs in the multiplication, it can "piggy back" on that null return. The hope is that the caller is already handling null properly and so everything is cool. (Is it? Was a test case ever executed in which that particular realloc call returned null?)

In general, multiplications in C take place in situations where there is no expectation of an error, and so no error handling strategy in place in the surrounding code. It may be difficult to introduce it, and even more difficult to test all the cases.

> I usually use unsigned arithmetic, because then I don't need to worry about undefined behavior in C.

That is wrongheaded, I'm afraid. The unsigned types behave poorly under arithmetic, because they have a large discontinuity immediately to the left of zero. And because their wrapping behavior is well-defined, it basically means that unintended wrapping is not diagnosable as an error (without generating reams of false positives).

It is unfortunate that size_t is an unsigned type. This is for historic reasons. When C ran on machines where size_t was 16 bit, making it signed would have meant limiting the size of an allocation request to 32767, rather than allowing up to 65535. That would have hurt, and induced people into workarounds such as writing their own allocators. (Which, ironically, they do anyway, to this day.)

Unsigned types are best used for things like bit fields, and simulating the arithmetic of particular machines. They are also useful for doing clock arithmetic on a wrapping interrupt timer register. (This is best done with macros or functions that safely wrap it, like "time_is_before(t1, t2)".)

"unsigned char" is useful, but note that values of this type undergo default promotion (on most compilers, by and large) to a signed value of type int.
Automating workflow with Hubot
Merge points maybe...but merge points are, by definition, bottlenecks. Even hyper-optimized, you are still limited by geometry.

And definitely not intersections...despite what the fancy visual simulations propose. You would have to eliminate pedestrians to even get close to that.
Hey enterprise software startups: Ignore the mobile web at your peril