skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who work on it, it probably is just for fun.

But Windows is, at its core, not a completely bad OS. I heard many parts of it are actually pretty well-engineered. The Windows NT kernel has pluggable subsystems, one of which is for Windows applications, but there used to be also a POSIX layer. In the kernel, almost everything is an object and can have ACLs (security descriptors). You actually do have something like Linux' /dev and /proc, it's just not exposed to the shell (you can sometimes see hard drive device paths, not legacy drive letters like C:, shine through the cracks, but mostly when there are boot problems).

Even in the shell, there are a few neat ideas. Everything is a (COM) object, and has interfaces. Applications can embed parts of the shell, e.g. explorer windows, and they can also contribute back parts, like custom places and icon types.

Of course there are layers and layers of cruft in Windows, but funnily, the older parts seem to be better engineered (especially taking to account their age, and looking over things like legacy 8.3 module names). Its a bit telling that the new Windows Runtime is actually a new version of native COM underneath, and not .NET CLR (but both are fully brigded).

I think the hardest part to emulate for ReactOS is not the old cruft, but the modern cruft. WPF for example does have a few nice ideas, but its insanely huge and complicated. And a typical windows system has like 4 different, incompatible .NET runtime libraries (.NET, Silverlight, WPF, WinRT). This is one thing I hope MS will get sorted out in the future.
I never liked how people in Python use stringWithSpaces.split instead of a list. Just feels wrong somehow.

But I've seen it many times so it's probably pythonic
California Lemon Lawyers
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Yes, but a modern computer is certainly capable of running that program perfectly under a virtual machine running the actual matching release of Windows.

Heck... I once started porting Hercules, the mainframe emulator, so I could have a fully functional 370 series mainframe in my Nokia E62 phone.
European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google
Well, if you go far enough in math, you'll learn the i, j, etc. convention, which is where FORmulaTRANslation got it (unless otherwise declared, variable names starting with i through n are integer).

And you might learn it indirectly from all the people and code that follow this convention. In my case, it was FORTRAN first, albeit perhaps in the same academic year 1977-8 where I was introduced to i, j, etc. in Algebra II.
Then Microsoft. Now Google. History repeats.
>A programmer should not even try to optimize the code that is not proven to be a bottleneck by carefully profiling the whole program

All who haven't taken note, please do!
Another good/great source of Python tricks/idioms is Raymond Hettinger's "Idiomatic Python". The slides/videos are really great. I highly recommend them.

https://speakerdeck.com/pyconslides/transforming-code-into-b...
The original german presentation of this is here:

http://www.innovationsforum-energiewende.de/wp-content/uploa...

To put this in simple terms:

Normally the plant runs at a constant rate of energy consumption, due to restrictions in how the production process works.

This means sometimes there will be a deficit of available electricity, other times there will be a surplus.

They plan to change their production process such that they can:

1. soak up the surplus usefully when it is present

and

2. "give back" energy to the grid by reducing their own consumption when there is a deficit

They never feed back any energy, they just make it so more energy is available on the grid by reducing their own consumption.

The difficult part here is that there is a certain engineering effort necessary to make this possible in the first place without disrupting the production process.
Check out pubpeer. It is supposedly post-publication peer review, but in practice is usually limited to people making accusations of data manipulation. The conversations can be a bit more chaotic than is ideal for peer review.

https://pubpeer.com/
Its no different in any other language with macros, the data structures are just bigger. It's pretty easy to write a Rust macro or Scala macro that consists of simple data structure manipulation. I have a simple example here: https://github.com/jroesch/pg-typeprovider/blob/master/src/t....
Means i need to dig up a Windows 95 iso or something, and instruct them in how to launch the thing once set up...
What feelings are driving Thanksgiving 2014
Great story. I went Vic20->Spectrum->Amiga 500->windows PC->Linux.

Given I studied electronic eng I also expected to be doing something low level, but ended up doing enterprise oracle too for most of my career.
Interesting testing results on Android 5.0 Lollipop
View Details always pops-up the dialog asking for email even after it has been entered.
It's not simply syntax sugar either.

def sideEffects():
print "Called."
return 5

if 0 < sideEffects() < 10:
# sideEffects is only called once
Inbound.org
Hi Steve, the pull request has not been merged yet as tests are failing. The blog post reads as if it's in master right now, which it does not seem to be.
Irc it (ii), the suckless irc client
Silicon Valley's Culture of Amorality – Water Will Find Its Way
Yep. I understand the use cases of JavaEE's JSRs. Yet, I personally don't see why I should install a complete 300MB application server (possibly with horrific licensing) just because I happen to need one of their JSRs in just one part of the application (that happens to need JMS because the customer's CIO was walked into buying expensive licenses from IBM), which is otherwise mostly just transforming data between the UI and the database. It's just a JSR and I'm glad to buy licenses from a commercial JSR implementor...
It's a cost/benefit thing. You should try to design your program sensibly when it comes to performance, because the cost of a failed architectural decision is high. What you shouldn't do is micro-optimizations which make the code longer and harder to read.
This has been a common theme through Rusts's history. Things that were baked-in language constructs have gradually migrated to become library things with sugar enabled via traits. This is leading to towards a very simple, extensible language.
Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?
Oh wow, yes, definitely some overlap there! Judging purely from the blurb on Amazon, i'd say that the stories at least have rather different styles - Clarke-Baxter-style grand-scale hard SF vs Walter Jon Williams-style cyberpunk-tinged space opera.
ICYMI: In Case You Missed It.
It's just an E-Banking system, i.e. the UI for the core-banking system, which is still written in PL/SQL and Delphi.

It has been working fine for many years with no differences between with or without J2EE.
I'm still not sure why that was deprecated. It's much cleaner. I still use it… :/
How to improve onboarding with Trello
This is utterly batshit. $10k+ per head as your burn rate???!?

We're a 30 person org. We burn about £80k a month - $125k. Our revenues are well in excess of that. That includes rent, salaries, and all other expenses.

Then again, I guess when you're playing with your own cash, which started as nothing because you bootstrapped, you look at things differently, and don't put "35 foosball tables, offices in manhattan and the valley, and a corporate getaway to the Maldives" at the top of your "essentials" list.

I see more and more of what I call "startup dickwaving", whereby people compare metrics on a fairly meaningless basis and act as members of a cute little club of oh aren't we all so special, rather than, y'know, BUSINESS, happening.
Parsing bugs is one category of tickled bugs, another is correctly encoded values that confuse the deeper logic layers. Eg heartbleed was the latter.
You might be interested in jOOQ: http://www.jooq.org
Social Choice and Social Welfare
Seems like mostly drivers -

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?string=DragonFly
Show HN: Visual bug tracking integration for Countersoft Gemini Tracker
4 Secrets to Inter-Aggregate Communication in a Event Sourced System
Using the experimental slicing syntax x.as_slice() can now be x[] which is a lot better. I'm not sure what will happen to .to_string() but it's a recognized problem.
The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I'm optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.
Good point, and in that case, I would say this idiom is not so great really. For functions with the same signature, it's a fine solution I think.
Did a search on code, and seems like fairq in Darwin is taken from DragonFly BSD[0]

[0] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?v=xnu-2050.18.24&string=Dra...
Looking at the linked abstract[1] of a paper about their experimental device it seems like they're running their prototype with a helium plasma, which can't produce energy (He-4 fusion processes require a lot more activation energy than various hydrogen processes).
So they're mostly testing the plasma physics and rely on projections for the energy yield if actual fusion were to happen.

[1] http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP14/MWS_DPP14-2014-000198.pd...
No of course Windows is not bad by itself. Only people who haven't looked closely enough would say that. Windows OS just like Linux has its dark sides but also its bright sides where it shines. The Windows kernel runs extremly well on ARM Devices like Windows Phone as well.
I think they have contract obligation to take some energy, so they just resell it.

Anyway the biggest problem of German grid are not really peak hours, but transporting energy from north where turbines are to industrial south.
Like the Lockheed announcement, the goal seems to raise more funds to create more advanced prototype, so obviously the perspective sounds optimistic.
NASA animations show a year in carbon dioxide emissions [videos]
Enforcing EU rules for online search companies
It's also weird that a European company would quote the price in USD.

Maybe it's yet another Chinese company disguising as a European company in order to look more credible?
If there were consensus on which technology is going to work and which one isn't we wouldn't need the parallel research.

They all work if we're assuming spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum.
Is there any such collection of advanced Python patterns, aimed at Python programmers with more than 2-3 years of experience?
So if a remote working can get twice as much done as a London based office worker, is it greedy or value for money they are providing?
Very cool to see coding ability turning into a new commodity - and a game changing one.
Here's a system that worked for us.

1. Identify VC companies who invest in our space through web research.
2. Search for people who work at the companies on LinkedIn. It shows your contacts who know those people, and also contacts who have contacts who know those people.
3. From the contacts who know people, identify those who you think would be willing to make an introduction. Talk to them, see if they will.
4. From the third-level people, check how you're connected and see if the intermediate contact is someone who can make an intro that you can then use to get the VC intro.

Repeated across every member of our team, we found a bunch of useful contacts and got a bunch of meetings. To be fair -- step 4 didn't turn up many useful ones, most came from step 3. And to add to that, no-one invested. But it wasn't for lack of intros or meetings.
Did Google shut down?
Yeah, my database scheme was fucked up and the work mysql had to do slowed everything down. I did some quick optimization of everything, meaning a few minutes of downtime, but now mysql only takes 10% CPU instead of pegging one core to 100%.
Is it possible they could be able to use their pools as an electrolytic capacitor?

They are melting aluminum oxide, which is used as the insulator in electrolytic capacitors, and the extracted aluminum pools at the bottom apparently.

If they are able to maintain the oxide layer at suitable thickness, do they not basically have a capacitor?
Regarding 1.0 I have thought about the same some time ago.
Rust changed in so many areas in quite a short time so that I would think of a fast move to 1.0 as rushed.
Ususally you want things stable for some time to proof themselves.
If you switch to 1.0 soon after a big change you might regret it when you discover a short time later that your recent change also had some shortcomings but you can't change it anymore due to backwards compatibility guarantees.
It depends on what you mean by IPC I guess. There's a billion and one ways to do it, everything from message passing to shared memory. If you want to do Windows-style IPC on UNIX, wouldn't SYSV IPC suffice? (QNX is of course another beast altogether.)
Those moving points really got me. Gotta look tonight (Github blocked @ company sigh)
Should you commit to Medium and forego a blog on your own domain?
Sure, yes. In Python land for example Django and Flask both present the request parameters in a dictionary-like data structure that supports lookup of the complete list of values passed for a given name. Regular lookups will give you just a single value, but they also present an interface to get the complete list.
In Soviet Russia joke downvotes you!
How to built an e-book library you can touch
> long-running anti-competitive dispute with Google

Freudian slip.
"The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist"

I'd bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.
OK Go's "I Won't Let You Go" was filmed entirely using a drone. And as they are wont to do, as a single take.
I agree with you generally it is possible with other langauges but to really do it is quite hard. As of right now I will stick with Clojure compared to the alternatives. I also really like working in rust and I have found use for macros there too.

More syntax makes things harder, compiler that have not been designed wit this goal make things harder. You can look at the papers trying to get this stuff in to other langauges and there are some problems, dylan [1] was doing it befor most others, now rust is coping that stuff.

Actually some of the coolest stuff was done by David Moon (Common Lisp, Dylan) he greated a langauge spec that he calls PLOT [2] and it has a very inovate macro system. For anybody that is intrested in that sort of stuff I highly recommand it.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/Projects/dexprs.pdf
[2] http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/ and http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/Moon-ILC09.pdf
COM/DCOM have offered a relatively usable solution for interprocess and cross-machine RPC for... quite a while. I used it to do interprocess communication back in the VB6 era (it was built-in), and in fact I did it by accident. I picked the wrong checkbox in the project options, so I ended up with the user interface of my application and the backend literally running in separate processes.

Other than the performance overhead (that I initially chalked up to 'oh, COM is just slow I guess'), the way I finally noticed was when a pointer I passed across the COM boundary wasn't valid (because it was to memory in another process). Whoops! Everything was working perfectly up until that point.

(FWIW, I am pretty sure the invalid pointer thing only happened because I was passing a raw address around - VB6 doesn't have pointer types.)

Plus, since COM provides ways to do source-level and binary compatibility, you can leverage that for your RPC.

I won't call it awesome, but it's quite robust and gets used in many places on Windows.

At a more basic level, you can trivially implement RPC using windows messages, though the security model improvements in 7 and 8 have made this a bit more complicated. There is excellent, straightforward infrastructure for establishing message loops and sending messages - really easy to get right - and it doesn't require your application to have UI. Pretty much any thread can receive and process messages if it wants to.
My bad, should have checked. All hate mongers may not be fundamentalist.
> (The GIL) is there for other scripting languages too (Ruby, Perl, Node.js, to name a few)

I don't know about Node, but I know it's perfectly possible to write "proper" multi threaded programs in Perl (and has always been since the version string started reporting support for threads, which should be a good 15 years ago).

It's not terribly relevant to the article (because you normally don't write multi threaded programs in Python), but then why bring it up?
Is it because it simply does a lot more with less code, though?

Just squinting at the code to see the shape of it rather than worrying about the contents, the C blocks look more distinct, to me.
I guess it's about the QNX message passing APIs
http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.4.1/neutrino/sys_arch/i...
There are a lot of fascinating engineering issues with projects like ITER - which are starting to scale up towards a commercial scale fusion plant. For example the ITER cryostat is apparently the largest high-vacuum chamber ever built:

http://www.iter.org/newsline/294/1792
> but it does nothing for the lows, the aluminium can't give back the electricity

Actually, it seems they might be doing precisely that. See the information in the other comments. It's hard to say for sure, even the primary sources seem fuzzy. But this graphic seems to indicate that they are indeed extracting electric energy from the molten aluminum: http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-11-26/tech_aluminumgraphic49_...

This presentation also shows the energy arrow pointing from the aluminum plant to the consumer:
http://www.innovationsforum-energiewende.de/wp-content/uploa...

The most confusing thing about all of this is that they say that they only adjust their own power consumption by +/- 25%, which seems to contradict the statement that they're giving energy back. But as far as I can understand, this +/-25% is the long term average. Of course they need to consume a positive net amount of energy during the day to keep the plant running.

But it seems that they are able to pump energy back into the grid for a short amount of time, which would be during the hours when solar/wind power is at a minimum.
Good question - as far as I can tell, the article doesn't say so explicitly, so I assume it's not generating a surplus, since if it did, that would have been the headline. There is however the possibility that the two interesting numbers, required power input and power output, do not grow with the size of the reactor/amount of plasma in the same way, e.g. one function might be quadratic, the other cubic. So it is possible that the current prototype does not generate a surplus, but it might indicate enough about those two functions to indicate that a "slightly" larger version would (assuming no unforeseen technical or physical issues arise). It sounds like it's too early to say though.
The modern marketing machine has indeed done a number on democracy. And with marketing being related to money, and money invariably congregating on the right, well...
The New Way to Save Money: Playing the Lottery
Slide-out Social Buttons on Pure CSS
I don't know a lot about the requirements of these operations; how can the European Union guarantee that each Subgoogle does not agree with the rest to provide services to each other that I can't access to?

I don't see how they can enforce that any company can be playing a level field against another subgoogle competitor...
This is something that one should get over. Some of the most brilliant, and downright nice, people I've ever worked with had average to poor grammar and spelling. I'm much better off from having worked with, communicated and laughed with them over my life.
Clues to Bees’ History, Tucked Away in Drawers
This is something which really excites me about Rust. Having constructs as fundamental as function application extensible via traits reminds me of Python's magic methods, but without the runtime overhead.
That would be an oligopoly and illegal. They could no more do that than oil companies could (legally) conspire to fix prices.
Sure, if you have a one of solution you can take out and it works for you then it does not matter if you use clojure, php or java.

However often you find that its not enougth for you and then you will have to write some costume code yourself. You might think one message passing system is enougth but then its more and now you have to manage message from three subsystems in your application.

Ill use a langauge that makes things easy when things are easy and not very hard if they are hard.
Looks good, but I wish we could drag the points :(
The price spikes exist regardless, because those are from high-usage hours (basically day hours) and at a longer range, at summers and winters (depending on where you are) because of heating and a/c.

A lot of factories already use more energy in the evening/mornings, because electricity is cheaper at those times.

Storage technologies are a huge potential to be explored.
The POSIX implementation in Windows was a shim to satisfy requirements about "POSIX compliance" when selling Windows NT. Even Microsoft tells it's not really useful:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/y23kc048.aspx
You can install the VM yourself, set it up, and then send them an image of the entire disk.
Tech company or... Wouldn't be able to imagine not having access to Github
The core Windows OS is actually very cool, IMO. Pity it's closed source. Some time ago, I did some research on Windows 2000 and wrote a lot of it down on the Windows 2000 Wikipedia article. I later split it to the "Architecture of Windows 2000", which interestingly (and correctly) has been renamed to "Architecture of Windows NT" [1]

What you are referring to, however, is in user mode, in the environment subsystem. There is actually a few subsystems - the one you are talking about is the POSIX subsystem. I believe it's actually still there in the latest versions (might be wrong about that).

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT
I was going to add this to the list, because I think the Homeland intro is really interesting and well done. Usually I fast forward through them, but I notice something new everytime with this one.
$125k/month works out to $50k/yr/person. In case anybody else was wondering.
Umm... yes.

If browser-based JS is ever able to ship in an completely compiled form, some people may be comfortable enough to ship their core business logic around that way, but until then, no dice.

The large number of services that 'server side' languages end up talking to - shipping/delivery services, financial services, etc - will likely never (well, not any time soon) be comfortable with letting every single browser connect directly to them for whatever info they need.

Number crunching large sets of data? Server-side - scale up/out. Running in browser? Won't happen.

Too many other things need to happen - new browser functionality and security models, compiled code, etc - before this even has a hope of making a real dent in server-side dev.
MOBROG Encuestas – Login
Game of Thrones is a good 1:30 as well.
Yes we have but crypto algorithms would still be implemented within software and not part of the GPU firmware.
The European Union should be broken up.