skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you had a conversation with some guy in the airport and assume he's an undercover TSA agent based on what exactly? Nothing in the article substantiates the title. A conversation at an airport bar isn't exactly an interrogation. As far him leaving abruptly, it's an airport... it happens all the time. Everyone is coming and going.

Let's say he was undercover TSA. Which I'd say would be highly unlikely considering what TSA does and how they operate. But let's say he was. What exactly was his end game? Had you taken the bait and had a conversation about Ferguson what was he going to do? Detain you for having an opinion on a major news story?

TSA is about airport security. They don't give a shit what you think about Ferguson, the left, or the right. I'm not a fan of TSA as an organization and I've had run ins woh idiot TSA agents going through security but this is just plain silly.

As for it being some other type of undercover federal agent... your story still doesn't provide an explanation as to WHY they would be doing this to some random guy at an airport bar. Typically undercover ops are highly targeted. You don't get anywhere just randomly targeting strangers in an airport.

Sounds like the author needs an industrial strength tinfoil hat.

Another explanation? He was selling something. It's not uncommon for people to approach strangers with random small talk in order to try and all them something and abruptly move on when it's clear it won't go anywhere. It's also not unusual for the person I be a clean cut young white guy.

I used to get approached by people selling some crap Ameay affiliated ecommerce sales program a few years ago and it was always young, clean cut adults who would strike up random conversation at a grocery store, etc.

I'm guessing it was either that or just some random idiot. Nothing in this story screams you had a brush with an undercover government agent.
Not so long ago C was the 'high level language' to assembly. Now few people use assembly and C is 'low level'. Its a weird transition to make. There's still plenty of people around who want to use C for high level tasks.
So, is Rust a better C? I haven't dug into it too much but that's been my general impression of how it's been presented.
You might be interested in this: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180 (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8233484 )
Sounds like they were professional bull shitters. A professional isn't going to say that to you.
First they interrogate you, then they mess with you, then they recruit you.
This isn't a bad list, but it's hard to over-emphasize the amount of pushing that supervisors and committee members typically need to clarify their beliefs about what is an acceptable dissertation. It's not too strong to say that most academics will flat-out lie to students about what they need do. Although this "lying" is frequently the result of inattention of misunderstanding its effects are indistinguishable from malice.

So don't be shy about getting very concrete and specific with your committee, including the kind of analysis you want to do, the theoretical framework you want to apply, etc. This is all easier in the sciences--humanities PhD programs are basically abuse factories (http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588)--but even in the sciences it is all too common to see students get misled by their supervisor and/or committee, who give guidance in one direction one month and a completely different direction the next.

One further piece of advice with regard to a clear thesis question: I've often found it useful to ask students "What's the title of your dissertation?" This just a more concrete way of asking about their thesis question, but it's much harder to fool yourself about. "Well, I"m investigating blah blah blah..." may look like an answer to the question "What's your thesis question?" but it frequently can't be reduced to "Experimental Investigation of Blah Using Blah Models and Blah Theories".

Finally, it isn't just your own perfectionism you have to watch out for. My iron rule for when a dissertation is finished is: the very first time your advisor tells you to change A to B in draft N, and then tells you to change B back to A in draft M &gt; N, you are done. Your resistance to making further changes should go up factorially at that point, because your advisor has stopped paying attention or has become obsessed with minutia, and if given a free rein will continue to fiddle around indefinitely. I've seen students waste a year on this kind of nonsense, when they had a perfectly acceptable dissertation to begin with.
What kind of programming techniques did you learn?
Right-wing populism resembles the left-wing positions it coopts, but with perverse differences.

Left-wingers tend to say that the government is running as intended. "The government is all broken" sounds like nostalgia for national founding mythologies. (Benevolent Founding Fathers, etc.) "A major change is coming" maybe sounds more apocalyptic than revolutionary.
It speaks volumes. Either you are a complete look or you have a reason to be weary of being investigated by an undercover government agent. I'm pretty sure I know which is the case here.
I am puzzled to see this on HN. Maybe it is one of the "you have to be there to understand" moments. Lots of far reaching conclusions, hardly thought provoking. I expected "Coincidence? I do not think so!" at the end of it.
... and some way to store and transport hydrogen. We can make hydrogen quite cheaply right now (it is kindergarten technology), but once you try to store and/or transport it then this is where things get really, really difficult [1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
> You’re safe from browser exploits.

I'm skeptical of that. Of course no one is actually targetting whatever vulnerabilities there are, and getting rid of JS helps a lot. But is all the code sandboxed or anything?
>> TSA is about airport security.

TSA is about airport security theatre. Sorry, had to fix that for you.

Sometimes, there is simply no why, there is just "because". Even/especially when govs are involved.
But here's the deal: now the web developer has to manually do something that used to be intrinsic to the way the web worked. Really feels like a step backwards to me.
I doubt it's a uniformly better C, just because the space has so many dimensions. I hope it's a better C, on balance, for the things I want to use C for. I've not yet dug in, though.
Lock free techniques can actually hurt performance compared to mutexes. Their advantage is predictability. A lock will often be fast and sometimes be really slow when it has to wait for some other thread. A lock less algorithm runs at about the same speed no matter what. This is important for realtime tasks such as audio recording and playback.
Facebook Birthday Liker
Just this week I started learning org-mode by reading one of Charle Cave's postings on how uses org-mode to implement the Getting Things Done methodology http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.h.... For me this has been a great tutorial.
Undercover security theatre?
In the UK they've had a similar concept called Premium Bonds for over 50 years.
Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet and PC (1974)
That has little to do with ITER. They could fund tokamaks by diverting some cash from other budgets.
> I've written applications using Java, Groovy, Clojure and Scala (in that order)

I'd say the most natural pathways for Java programmers upgrading their language skills are:

* from Java, to Groovy, to Clojure

* from Java, to Groovy, to Scala

* from Java, direct to Clojure

* from Java, direct to Scala

Once someone reaches Clojure and Scala, they seem unwilling to give up what they've gained (the simplicity and macros of Clojure, or the higher-order typing of Scala) to switch to something else, even when that something offers more.
An other issue, the one CPython has hit repeatedly when trying to remove the GIL — and the big sticking point for the core team in general — is that single-threaded performances of a naive interpreter suffer a lot when splitting the GIL: instead of a single lock which is taken and released relatively rarely, the interpreter has to juggle with many small locks which it has to acquire and release much more often. When David Beazley looked back on the GIL-less patch for CPython 1.4[0] he measured performance hits of 4x~7x.

Though in the case of CPython most of the cost comes from the refcounting. MRI is not refcounted so the performance hit of finer locking would probably be lower.

[0] http://dabeaz.blogspot.be/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal...
‫‬‏‮txet lanoitcerid-iB
It's basically impossible to write safe code in C. Surely that makes it pretty damn poor at what it does?

Especially since system code is the place where safety matters most.
I have no idea who those three people were. I do agree that "unprofessional" is a good way to describe their behavior. I emailed a few colleagues about it but it was all too strange to speak publicly about. There was also a bit of a religious vibe to their questions, so there is a (small) chance that they were evangelicals claiming to be interrogators.
That is indeed the only model that would make sense as long as we use domain names for addressing.

You can publish and sign your TLSA records today, without interfering with your current CA signed certificates.
I use vim-instant-markdown heavily and it's fantastic, it's very simple and very responsive.
I'd kill for good fuzzing tools that ran on embedded systems that lack a real OS.

The embedded world really needs some better tooling.
I have been meaning to work on something like this too. My email is in my profile if either one of you is interested in collaborating.
If I follow exactly what you are saying, you should say it's C coders who rely on undefined behaviour and compiler writers you are frustrated with, not the language itself.
2. Is bullshit. Stapler thesis are totally acceptable. In fact many people think they are better than a traditional thesis since they are based on work that is of enough quality to already have been published in other venues.
Also, Niklaus Wirth weighs in with Lola-2, his logic description language, with a compiler to translate it to Verilog. Also, source for a working RISC computer. All in service of Project Oberon, 2013 edition:

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.ht...

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Lola/index.html
Perhaps also/more OT, but in the past couple of months I've occasionally observed my Gmail web connection using QUIC instead of TLS. They are already trialing it publicly and in non-beta use (discounting whether Gmail is still "beta") at least in Chrome stable on Linux.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. Probably by a bunch of people who think they can write C and C++ without writing any security bugs. Which, unless they belong to a vanishingly small group of security experts who write code in an organization with the same discipline, budget and glacial schedule of the team writing software for the Space Shuttle, they can't.
Consider the Linux kernel?
What interview questions to ask when hiring a Product Designer
> build/run cycle

> non-compiled language

C isn't trying to fit in that space. regardless, C code takes far less time to parse, optimise, and convert into machine code than all the languages i know of.
six digit burn rates just for building a web app with HTML and Javascript?
Which is filled with security bugs. Consider the conventional sysadmin wisdom that if someone gets a shell on your box, it's as good as owned, due to a no doubt fertile field of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the kernel.

Don't get me wrong -- the Linux kernel is a magnificent piece of engineering, and an excellent choice for hosting a mainstream server, I run a number of such myself -- but let's not kid ourselves about its security limitations.
If you assume staying on the page for 15 minutes with an Mac Book power supply of 85w, it's about 0.05 kg to 11.3 kg depending on where in North America you are.
Show HN: How to beat Procastination
That sure looks like fun!
If you're in Chicago and want to join a fast growing company focused on building a marketplace for musicians come check us out at http://product.reverb.com/work-at-reverb. We are only 2 years old and about to cross into the top 10 music equipment retailers in 2015. if you play music and love clean code this is your dream job.
except that literally every piece of software you have ever written or used goes through some level of C, and lets face it, most of the C projects out there are actually pretty well tested.

and it's not like higher level languages are significantly better in this regard.
HTTPSwitchboard is so awesome for this.
https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

P.S. Next version might be a local proxy (well, usually local) which will improve browser performance, cross-compatibility with other browsers and across OSes, and all around fit better, imho (which is that a browser's only job is to render web content).
One thing that served me incredibly well (finished from BS to Ph.D. in 4.5 years) was to very early on write a proposal that clearly stated exactly what question I would work on, and stating clearly what the approach and work product would be.

This all but eliminated feature creep, and I could then go back and say "you agreed that investigating this was sufficient." Then it was just a matter of doing what I said I would do, and be done.

It helped focus my attention, because anything that didn't address the thing in my proposal was more obviously tangential. It focused my entire course of research and kept me from spending too much time on side projects. But most importantly, it established in writing exactly what question I was going to answer and roughly how.

I didn't say "I'm going to prove that <foo> does <bar>." I said "I'm going to test to see if <foo> does <bar>." If I do the tests, and show the relationship between <foo> and <bar> I've done science. The goal is to create an experimental plan that tests a theory, not to build the best whatever possible. The job of a Ph.D. student is to demonstrate that they can carry out research, not to build the best widget. If you can, great, but that's not what a Ph.D. means.

I saw endless examples of people who waited until they had better data to put together a proposal. The problem with this approach is that it raises the bar by removing risk from the project. If you spend five years demonstrating the <foo> results in <bar> then your adviser will ask for you to spend another two years doing an actual project extending that result. If you clearly elucidate early on that it's not clear that <foo> results in <bar> then simply seeing if that's the case or not is often sufficient.

Formal proposals are like a contract between yourself and your committee establishing the scope of project that is sufficient to graduate. Doing this as early as possible can only help you, and in my experience any work prior to establishing the scope merely results in a larger scope later.
Rust is aiming more to be a better C++. However that doesn't preclude it from being used in the same space as C and can become impressively lightweight if you forgo things like the standard library.

I would argue that it is better than C for its safety features alone. I hope in the future we look back at this decade with its never ending stream of buffer overflow vulnerabilities with disbelief that we could use something so insecure for something so vital.
Microsoft plans to launch Power BI mobile apps, starting with iOS
This is where JRuby / Truffle is exciting - JRuby's been exciting for a long time and never quite reached it's potential, but with these latest projects it could become the main ruby implementation - and these complex issues are already largely solved in the JVM.
i'm sorry, but proof by convention or consensus is not a proof. you have an idea of the linux kernel, and it's not entirely unwarranted. but whilst there have obviously been security issues, it would be a mistake to suggest that they are the fault of C.
HTTPSwitchboard for Chrome-like, and Policeman for Firefox. Those 2 extensions replace NoScript, RequestPolicy, AdBlock, you name it.
Is there some way to do a fallback if the DNS server is down?

Also if my host is down can I "quickly" try another host? I know that it's possible in my own app, but can I tell a browser to do it, as a web publisher?
Is the projected revenue based on what you expect to make with or without the assistance of a marketing-focused cofounder?
Home furnishings, gifts and home improvement products
Vimperator for Firefox, then.
Great ! We can use forEach !

Maybe in Ecmascript 7 we'll finally get rid of

var me = this;
Nope. Pascal is still king here. The speed it compiles at is simply ridiculous. Largely this is because the way the modules are defined makes it a snap to pre-compile aggressively. You're simply not allowed to do things that would change the way a module is understood by the compiler based on context.

The biggest hold-up in the C world is rampant abuse of #include files.
Supercomputing 14 view from afar
"When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop."

What a shitty, shitty quote.
Oh fun. That is not a nice associativity weirdness to have to deal with.
No, I assumed (in hindsight could have mentioned it) that you could use the hydrogen locally to generate electricity. The thing is connected to the the electricity network.

But I realized that is roughly the momentary day power of the panel. The real yearly average production is maybe 15% of that.

Forgot the panel efficiency with this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_system#mediaviewer...
Melting polar ice is really screwing with the jetstream and that's altering winter weather patterns pretty severely.
I half expected to see the image in the article to slowly pan and zoom.
I don't think it's true. Back in the day Pascal was known for a fast compile, single pass compile was a major selling point for Borland's Turbo Pascal.
I don't know if a single pass C compiler ever existed but current C compilers use multiples passes (in addition to preprocessing).
As far as I remember C was always known for a slow turn around cycle compared to other languages.
What a horrible pissing contest that thread contains.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar strikes again.
I used this approach. My University would not allow me to just put all my publications together and submit it, so I just added a general introduction at the front and a general conclusion on the end and then made each of my publications a chapter.

The only problem comes with the papers that are not solely your own work. I got around this by putting in the preface what I had done in each chapter. It did meant that my thesis was a bit longer than it might have been as it had work that was not mine, but the examiners didn't seem to mind and it had the fortunate side effect of making my thesis a better doorstop.
Relevant, from earlier this year: [Humans Need Not Apply](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU) (15:00)
Your right i didnt make myself clear sorry, i was referring to a post made by techdirt :

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141121/17314329218/eu-pa...

And also to the fact that i dont believe they are a monopoly(nor do i think their abusing their position), and as such dont think anyone has any right to demand anything from them - especially breaking the company up.
Yea, change a certain .h file and you can go get a cup of coffee while waiting for the build to end. This can't ever happen with Java/C#.
Itlbe – The Easiest Way to Find Your Dream Home
> The biggest hold-up in the C world is rampant abuse of #include files.

true.

> Nope. Pascal is still king here.

for some values of "king" perhaps - perhaps it's faster to compile, but no arrays of varying lengths in a function call? and if i'm not mistake, a function must be defined before use..? pascal is incredibly restrictive, and perhaps that's why it's so fast.
check out cedexis
http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=cdn_response_time&co...
"C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language."

This is not true. Using debuggers and crash dumps to reason about your running program is not fast or interactive at all. It doesn't matter how good the tools are. They interrupt the workflow.

Working in a REPL on the other hand, is real interaction with your program. You speak the language to the program and the program responds in the same language. This is fast.
Are you retarded? You asked source for 'Using SEPs for suing others is wrong.'.
The source for the fact that it was SEP's involved is already in my post.
After someone uses your tool, maybe a couple times — create some built in virility. ie) 'Like this app? Help up grow. Click to share.'
One of the local Gods, "the market", would seem to imply that it doesn't matter much to most people.
I used Lynx back in my glorious startup days (12-15 years ago :) it was a great tool to see what the various crawlers (which were Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo and Hotbot at the time) were actually "seeing" on the pages of my site. It helped solving issues with spacing, alt texts...
Java: Reading millions of text lines at top speed
That's the future that science fiction has been promising us for decades... Alas I fear the reality will be much harsher for the majority of people.
I agree. Reading it, I felt there were quite a few inferences made with just a dash of artistic liberty. There is some value in adding flair to historical accounts, but not when it potentially distorts important details like, for instance, Newton's character and how he related to people around him. I also doubt that our historical record can support conclusions like these, although I would gladly be disproven. All in all, the writing in this article doesn't make me want to trust that the journalist is treating the topic fairly.
Only in _some_ places.
I have always wanted to use org mode, but it comes down to that I use more than one computer and might want to share my todos with people who are not emacs geeks: how do you guys handle these things?
Is it an app or a guide?
"I thought that disabling JS would make the internet unusable, but a vast majority of pages display their content just fine without it"

I also browse the web with Javascript disabled (using Noscript), but have formed the opposite impression: more and more sites won't display their content (or display their content incorrectly) if Javascript is disabled. Most of the sites I'm looking at are not "web apps" or SPAs (single page apps), they are sites with text articles or links so they have no real reason to break without Javascript. (It's always annoying when you attempt to click a link only to find it won't work unless Javascript is enabled.)

The rise of Javascript frameworks is only fuelling this trend of Javascript-dependent web sites. I've said this before, but Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.
I still don't understand how queueing signals works.

For example, signalfd() is really cool, and you can indeed read() a signal from it, but only one of a kind.

If you get, say, two SIGINT's you may as well just be able to read() one. I guess it's an implementation detail that some signals aren't queued while some others are, I guess. In practice it means that receiving a signal is an edge, and in signal handler you must check how many times the signal occurred. This for me sounds inherently racey.
It's not like higher level languages are significantly better? Seriously?

The last time I accidentally executed injected code due to a free error or buggy bounds check in the non-C parts of Python, or Ruby, or Lisp, or Erlang was ... well, never.

And no, the fact that C underlies all these languages isn't a testimony to the adequacy of its security features.
Startup Schadenfreude