skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of a random restart is that you completely eliminate any bias and hopefully end up in an entirely different section of the search space (and it's far from a solution to local minima, it's just better than nothing.)

If you just give a random organism a really big mutation, they still retain 99% of their genes and will tend towards the same solution space. They will almost certainly be outcompeted by the non-mutated members of the population. And even in bacteria, they will eventually trade genetics through horizontal gene transfer.

Anyway the premise was that evolution is essentially magic and has reached the optimal solution for every task. This is just false. It's merely reached good local maximas where it can't easily improve through small changes. Human engineers are far better, evolution merely had a big head start.
Ask HN: Best open source/free software in their own category?
I recently stumbled upon Krita on HN, which I really like. Would be great to collect the most powerful, feature-rich free software that are among the best in their category, and that get close to or even beat the commercial ones. I know some other great pieces like Gimp, Inkscape, but what's the state of the art for animations, music notations, audio mixing, etc? GUI & CLI should be both ok.

Here is a list of my favorite software that are worth learning:

- Gimp: photo editing
- Krita: digital painting, illustration
- Inkscape: vector drawing
- sox: sound processing (command line)
- ffmpeg: video processing (command line)
- imagemagick: image processing (command line)
Google Pledges $3M to Singularity University
I don't know much about Haskell, but I thought it had some properties to isolate side effects, but the code he gives:

main = do
cd "/tmp"
mkdir "test"
output "test/foo" "Hello, world!" -- Write "Hello, world!" to "test/foo"
stdout (input "test/foo") -- Stream "test/foo" to stdout
rm "test/foo"
rmdir "test"
sleep 1
die "Urk!"

Clearly doesn't (it creates a directory, writes in a file, removes that file and that directory all in one go without anything indicated by the function main. Is it because it's the main function of the program, or am I missing something?
Easy. I wanted to communicate, so I decided to let that information out.
First time I heard of sprockets (weird, being German). How many JS build tools are there out now? And is none of it deprecated/abandoned?

Other than that, the braces/indentation issue alone will keep people with CS. Can its compiler emit ES6, by the way?
Presumably the target is existing haskellers. Basically, "if you use Haskell, here's something to help you use it for shell scripts too".

I don't think it's reasonable to assert that Ada "failed" (e.g. it runs on large passenger airplanes), but in any case that's kinda beside the point, TFA isn't primarily about Haskell evangelism/advocacy.

> language pragma, do notation, liftIO, parser combinators.

Arguably, all of this is within the reach of an intermediate-level Haskell programmer. OverloadedStrings is considered a basic pragma.
I do believe the need for virtualenv stays, in development as well as in production. Even when using a Docker container, you will still want to pin your dependencies strictly to specific versions and not risk any interference of Python modules that happen to be on the OS. I think it's important to not make assumptions in that area (dependency management) when wanting to create stable software.
this :
Nobody other than you is going to read your website once you have it, at least at first, so don’t worry about designing it for other people.

I like that line.But now considering there are people reading his website.It is quite aesthetically unappealing?I found navigation a bit hard too.

And if you haven't seen it yet.This caught my attention and is actually brilliant.
Belly Dancing Techy Talk :D
http://www.shira.net/techtalk.htm

It is actually quite an interesting read though.
I don't understand how admitting the game is rigged actively makes it more rigged?
I don't think it's a fluke of history, theocracies have been increasingly hard to come by in the past 1000 years (especially in the Western world). The US has never been a theocracy.

Religious organisations are not growing in power.

Even if the US were to become a theocracy, that =/= you're as good as dead.

So there are a few reasons why you shouldn't feel threatened. Not saying it can't happen, but as I said it's extremely unlikely. Thankfully(!).
Lisp programmers would love to disagree
Same, if I squint a little I'm just writing Python that runs in the browser.
_The world is a big bad place_

Are you really going to teach tham that it's bad?
True but they're all diverging away from one another, all under the "goamz" name
On render speed, if you're trying to serialize json 1 million times a second, the benchmark you linked might have some relevance, if not, then you're being misled by looking at benchmarks like that, which measure an app doing not very much millions of times a second, so basically they're stressing the routing path and the json serialisation speed. This is unlikely to be a problem you ever encounter and if you did you'd just rip out the bits you don't need for that path - use static routing, cache json etc, and your speed would be massively improved.

Speed is not the only concern, or even the biggest concern, for most web apps, the constraints nowadays are typically in something like this order:

- Memory
- CPU
- Bandwidth
- Database
- Render speed

Clearly that doesn't hold true for all sites, but for most the order is something like that because with caching you can obviate any render speed concerns very easily. On memory and CPU usage, golang completely trounces a solution like Rails (I say this having built similar sites in both) - it's better by a factor of 10, which means you can run a pretty big site with very spartan resources.

The largest obstacles to go replacing languages like ruby as a tool for web apps is more that the libraries at present are not available for everything you might want to do (user auth, sophisticated templating, csrf, fragment caching, form helpers, orms and query builders etc), but that situation is steadily improving, and the standard library is pretty excellent as far as it goes.
> "This car will not turn on for anyone with a recent DUI"

This one's already happening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device
Do you have trouble with voting up either comments or stories on HN?

If you check out the HN page source you'll notice the HTML anchors for voting are essentially empty save for an empty HTML DIV element with it's background image set to the arrow icon. Needless to say, the way it's designed is dead wrong and highly problematic for systems like terminal text browsers.
Learn ES6 – A detailed overview of ECMAScript 6 features
No, it's not the same thing. Your influence on others is proportional to money and unbounded. Your immunity to others approaches 100% and stops. There's very little to brag or be guilty about, and we can share a goal of getting everyone close to that 100%.
A little pain for 2 hours to replace your office ID with this tiny RFID chip to gain entry to doors, unlock/lock mobiles and computers, unlock copy machines.

It is well known fact that RFID are easier to hack (http://www.eweek.com/security/hacking-rfid-tags-is-easier-th...). I think this under-the-skin-RFID is being pitched as convenience rather than better security.

However are we prepared for skin penetrations for making us more digital.
Probably not.

Because you'll only make money if the stock stops being undervalued.
And there's no sign that the reasons it's undervalued will change any time soon.
So he was being publicly shamed and humiliated until he A) was fired B) resigned or C) renounced his personal beliefs? That's horrible. When gay people are treated this way I speak out and say it's wrong. When gay people treat people this way I speak out and say it's wrong.

> That he didn't even try to correct the issue made it more likely that progressive coders would turn away.

Just because he didn't prostrate himself before you doesn't mean he didn't put any effort in. https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

And it would take a lot of "progressive coders" to make up for Mozilla losing its CEO/co-founder who had been working on Firefox since it was called Netscape Navigator and who just happened to be the creator of JavaScript.
Can I build my own device with an access to AppStore? Now that's a monoculture.
Moral absolutism is the killer. There is no set of 'right' that you can apply regardless of context, actors or situation. Attempting to create such mental shortcuts is the problem, and perpetuating any as _absolutely_ 'correct' is toxic, and detracts from any of the real issues, actual humans, or real world consequences of whatever is under discussion.
My brother still has his 3DFX cards (Banshee, Voodoo Dragon, perhaps a Voodoo 2 as well?) Playing Screamer 2 with 3DFX acceleration and Need For Speed 2 SE with 3DFX was very impressive at the time, still great fun now (he keeps an old ancient Celeron around and runs Windows 98 on it for such vintage things)
It's quite tractable, stop voting for the same two parties that keep causing the problems over and over again. The trouble is, most of your voting neighbors don't mind so they perpetuate the problem - there's the downside of democracy, two wolves and a sheep.
If you enjoy both, be sure to check out Psychonauts, also by Tim Schafer. One of the best games ever made, and extremely story-driven although more of a platformer than a traditional point-and-click adventure.
After reading the linked [Isaacs](http://blog.izs.me/post/2353458699/an-open-letter-to-javascr...) post it made me realise a bit more about the language. I don't think I'd agree its easy to screw up. Its as easy as accidentally using global variables.
There was a similar thread about a month ago, you should check it. Also, in the first comment you can find another 7 threads about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083
Someone who brings that paper to a discussion isn't trying to engage, they're flogging a point of view.
Yes, both Scala and Play are great.
Because shell is so deficient that even for "simple" things it is really easy to screw up - when whitespace or special characters in filenames cause some case you overlooked to screw up due to terrible quoting rules, when missing arguments cause [1], when you accidentally put bashisms in scripts labeled /bin/sh, when you suddenly have to do some basic text parsing (e.g. extracting capture groups from a regex) and have to either switch to perl or use some ugly bash extension that's incompatible between the version of bash OS X uses and the newer ones.

So you might want to use a different language - even for purely/mostly personal use, in which case Haskell would be fine.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
Yes, the bookmarks need some attention. The new UX I saw for bookmarks presented them as a grid of large colourful squares but I wasn't sure that was easier to read or use than a list. Hopefully someone will come up with something (that will no doubt be hated by many).

I always thought the system for displaying the bookmarks bar was a bit daft because you could only see about 10 bookmarks before running out of horizontal room. On OSX at least we have a dedicated "Bookmarks" menu but using it under Linux and Windows was always painful due to this strange (IMHO) design.
Kafka at LinkedIn: Current and Future
I'm curious about animations. That is one thing React hasn't really figured out on the web. I think the last experiment I saw was to do all the animations manually using component state. I wonder if this is the same on Native?

Ideally a cross pollination of ideas about animations would make both ecosystems better.
I actually envy you guys. I come from an European Christian family, and it was only my father that occasionally engaged in discussions regarding wealth, earnings, business. It was not a popular thing to do where I grew up. Although I firmly believe this is the right thing to do, properly executed it brings family together and gives support to everyone's plans.
I think I get what you mean, but bear in mind that the examples in the article are all people who come from privileged backgrounds. It is definitely not about personal powerlessness, at least. It's something else.
Have the BBFC ratings dropped though? I mean, stuff that was horrific and rated as 18 in the 1970s is now routinely part of films rated 12 or 12A. The sheer amount of violence that is part of films has significantly risen.
How strange. Why didn't they use a timer? That is, on any machine you know how long 1 second is. From a developer perspective that doesn't change if you bump up the CPU clock speed, else "clocks" wouldn't work.
I filed a bug report for Mac mail about 3 months ago. From the bug tracker UI (which isn’t informative at all) I don’t think the ticket has even been touched.
It is a bit easy to dismiss everything haskell related as only useful for "academic research". In fact I am not sure how do you make this link between this post and research at all.

Now if you don't know about haskell and want to write a quick and short lived script, there is 0 value in writing it in haskell. However, if you happen to now a bit of haskell and that your script is likely to be used several times you might find some benefits to this.

- haskell is quick to write and the code can be quite terse. You can create an myscript.hs file and run it with runhaskell. Zero platform complexity overhead.

- you get the benefits of static types which are easier maintenance and refactoring.

- if it evolves in anything more complex, it is easy to move it in a cabal project.

- if you need to do something cpu intensive, you can compile/profile/improve perfs.
Even now, as a 29-year-old adult, I have no clue what my mother makes

Hey, my wife doesn't know how much I make. But nor does she care. If she asked, I wouldn't hide it :) It is unusual to know other people's income in the culture I grew up in and live in here in the UK though, so it's not too bizarre.
By he also stole some patents from Tesla. Not every modern-day start-up is doing that.
It just occurred to me, they figured out how to serve a complaint against your property (civil forfeiture) so I'm actually half surprised they don't serve warrants against the house not the house's occupants. Or even better, just serve the data itself; US Government versus 134,612 bytes of Data!
I haven't tried ResidualVM yet, but do have my original Grim Fandango CD so am looking forward to trying it out.
And by reducing communication, it reduces the chances of people changing their beliefs. It might even strengthen their existing beliefs. And that goes for both sides of the argument, so you better make sure you're right before you start jumping on others for their 'wrong' beliefs.

I consider it an important goal to be as patient and open to communication as possible with others, and politely decline communication (or friendship) only when it's clear that there is nothing to be done, and that our views are too far apart.

Often I've failed at that. I've had my moments where someone's views were so offensive to me that I could not stay calm and continue conversing, but I consider that my failing, and something to work on. And to some extent I accept that I have my limits.

One of the reasons I take this approach, is that I've been utterly wrong in my beliefs in the past (conservative Christian, bible-belt style). Or rather, I think I was utterly wrong. And yet I was the same 'rational' person I am now.

Another reason is that I've spent most of my life being around wildly different people and cultures and belief systems. And the one thing it made me realize is that most people are not 'evil' in their beliefs, but that they either 1) never really thought about them much, or 2) made a fundamental error at some point of the process.

For example, it was only when I started reading 'republican' blogs that I started to understand and to a degree even appreciate their point of view on many things. Understanding the religious elements in this dynamic made this a bit easier too.

Perhaps the problem the author describes is a result of people living in very 'homogenous' surroundings, and as a result perhaps they never learned how to disagree in a civil way, or respect someone's views even though they disagree with them.
CM also phones home on an opt-out basis, and they even wanted to remove the option to opt-out. They also still give data to Google.

https://blogs.fsfe.org/torsten.grote/2013/04/03/cyanogenmod-...
Sprockets is part of the Rails asset pipeline - it's not used much outside of the Rails world.
Good idea, serialization is a good technique when you don't need to switch architectures.
The effects of that standard are only just hitting us now. Have they dropped the requirements for a license for exFAT yet?

As for Open Sourcing .Net, what good has come of it as of today? It looks like a move to push their own environment more than anything else. But I'll tell you what: if in 2020 the decisions Microsoft are making today prove to be for the good, then I might start think better of them. At the moment, though, they've got a lot of past to make up for.
Perhaps there is a market for "condensedlongreads"?
I don't like the class syntax in either ES6 or CoffeeScript.

In my opinion Ceylon nailed it:

class Person(variable String firstName, variable String lastName) {

shared String name => firstName + " " + lastName;

assign name {
value names = name.split().sequence();
firstName = names[0] else "";
lastName = names[1] else "";
}
}

Classes are effectively just closures with subtyping that export their shared members/functions.

Unrelated: A simple class like that shouldn't be mutable.
Adobe is suing Forever 21 for pirating Photoshop
I think your "most" is rather optimistic.

(6to5 didn't even exist six months ago.)
How to turn an app idea into mobile application?
iOS, take your pick: https://www.cocoacontrols.com
I can't help but feel like we continue to just go backwards; Swift doesn't look like they spent much time really thinking about what they wanted to solve and how to solve it. I thought this was an interesting read: http://owensd.io/2014/09/24/swift-experiences.html

I know saying this is a bit terse, but a native Clojure compiler for iOS would have been the best thing Apple could have done -- let someone else with far better language skills who has already done a lot of thinking about values, identity, state and time solve it and then just use the work.
GitHub activity vandalism has been around for a while. e.g. https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
Oddly enough no, I can read the vote up buttons just fine and should in fact use them more :) maybe some JS behind the scenes that is taking care of it
I like the indentation + braces redundancy because indentations are for humans, brackets are for the interpreter. Logic blocks are more explicit with brackets

I encountered a non-obvious Python bug that was caused by mixed spaces-and-tabs: to my human eyes, the indentation looked fine - the same as previous line, but the interpreter saw a different level of indentation.
Would this work on AWS EC2 Instances?

Amazon runs it's own variation of Linux which is different from the base image of this docker i.e. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ?
I think the puck is going in the direction of an ever increasing number of people who buy used iPhones. So I don't think that the iPhone 4 is going away soon.

Looking around, I see that a lot of people who can't afford (or don't want to afford) new iPhones are starting to buy used iPhones instead of cheap new phones.
It's not just significant indentation. CS parses "f + g" differently from "f +g" (the former is an addition, the latter is a function call with "+g" as the first argument).
https://github.com/thentenaar?tab=repositories

https://github.com/zedshaw?tab=repositories

Not too bad for a "writer", Mr Engineer.

There are things one doesn't get to say until one gets to say them. And I return this one on me, shut my mouth, and get back to work.
You are right. In this case effects are not isolated. But in this particular script, there are no interesting things to move into a pure function. It does not mean that it wouldn't be the case in a more complex script.

Like everything, you have to learn to balance your IO code and your pure code. A bit like learning when to factor something into a separate class, or leave it in a few statement/methods. If you write everything in IO & do notation, you don't get the main benefits of haskell. But if your code is more than 10 lines long, chances are that there will be useful pure functions in it.
I suspect a big part of it is being in an echo-chamber of people who have almost the exact same set of beliefs, which are then contrasted with the more extreme opposite beliefs. This creates a rather simplistic (and therefore desirable) us vs. them dynamic.

I've experienced this as conservative christian, and I only realized how black and white my world-view had become once I 'got out'.

I could be wrong though. I generally avoid these 'communities' for the reason the author describes.
The article discusses two Swift versions of the same program, one that uses UnsafeMutablePointer (which is basically direct C-style memory access), and one that uses Swift's built-in Array type. The former runs well, the latter is slow.

If you look at the Objective-C code, BackingBuffer is a C struct containing a C array of Pixels (themselves each a 32-bit C struct).

The problem is that the best analogy to Swift's Array type is not the C array in Objective-C - it's the Foundation class NSArray. For the given use case, most Objective-C developers would eschew NSArrays and classes serving as data bags in favor of fixed-length C arrays containing C structs. C arrays don't perform bounds checking, they require you to manually decide when to allocate, copy, and free the backing memory, they require you to know how much space each piece of data requires and work with the data accordingly, and so forth.

The fact that NSArrays can't hold value types, only references to classes, complicates things a bit, but I doubt the Objective-C code would be anywhere as fast if the backing store was an NSArray holding NSValues or something similar. Comparing the Swift implementation using Arrays to the Objective-C implementation using C arrays is not really fair.
I didn't notice that but thanks, it made me chuckle. Perhaps the author really wanted you to take note of the beautiful blue 8bit style graphics they had drawn?
I always found it cumbersome to modify these.If you have the time&&patience,have you tried this?
http://dashing.io/
New Debian installer (for Jessie) handles UEFI / GPT just fine. I use systemd for a long time already. Besides some minor issues like warnings if you have swap defined in fstab and with partition flag, I don't have any issues with it.

You can get the installer here: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/jessie_di_rc1/amd64/iso-dv...
(just take the first image and write it on a USB drive - it's hybrid).

I usually select KDE inside the installer (it gives such option) and after installation repoint repositories to testing proper.
Did you watch the video? They're taking a genuinely new approach here. It's not "lowest common denominator" like Xamarin, Qt, etc, and it's also not a WebView like Atom or Ionic (Cordova).

It's actual native components, with the intent that you "learn once, write everywhere" rather than try to jam iOS and Android into the same codebase.