skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been trying to think of something that drastically change how I coded. Bugs and productivity really are the two major dragons to slay.

I'm just spitballing here but something I'd really like to see stuff like code contracts and unit testing, but more integrated with the language, less verbose and requiring less to setup. Being able to let the "meat" of a method be separated from all the error-checking, post, pre conditions etc would really make things cleaner.

Current implementation feels like it requires too much setup with separate classes, duplicate method signatures in several places etc etc. It would be really cool to have something like

public int SomeMethod(int a, int b)

pre
{
Requires (a > 5);
Requires (b >= 0, new Exception("something something"));
}

{
// DoStuffHere
}

post
{
Ensures (result > 0, new Exception("needs to be above 0"));
}

I'd even want to be able to separate it into separate files using partial classes (or something) so you could the condition stuff separate , with or without duplicating signature
depending if you wanted to target specific overloads

Full signature would simply be without the body:

public int SomeMethod(int a, int b)

pre
{
Requires (a > 5);
Requires (b >= 0 ,new Exception("something something"));
}

post
{
Ensures (result > 0);
}

Without signature is trickier, but would be cool since you could use same conditions for several overloads, and just target the variables that are included in each:

Conditions.SomeMethod
{
pre
{
Requires (a > 5);
Requires (b >= 0, new Exception("something something"));
}

post
{
Ensures (result > 0);
}
}

heck, why not even throw in "test blocks" and Visual studio could run light-weight kind of unit test as you programmed and mark the whole method as functioning or not. Imagine having a sort method and throw in something like:

public IEnumerable<int> Sort (IEnumerable<int> list, Order order)
test
{
(list = {3,5,6,2}, order = Order.Ascending) => result == {2,3,5,6};
(list = {3,5,6,2}, order = Order.Descending) => result == {6,5,3,2}
}

VS could highlight the failed test(s) directly in the editor as you coded

The specifics and syntaxes of these things requires some thought but I love the basic premise, am I rambling?

edit: I saw that something in this direction if not as extensive was actually discussed
I started using node.js 1 year ago for a personal project and I must say that the callback hell is a real issue to be solved.

Personally I think the highland approach is too verbose, while the bluebird promises is the one I prefer for both readability and functionality.

Does anyone has used them in big production systems? Are you happy with them?
Thanks for that I am getting into ardunio and was looking for good textbook - I have basic electronics back from my engineeing ONC and need sligly more up to date book than the priciples of wireless that I inherited from my dad - pre transistor age and still referes to capacitors as condensors :-)
I have a 2012 MBP and it's the last of the good ones I feel. A real pity because I don't know what to move to when the time comes!

(I too fear the insane RAM prices).
Those sidebar articles are definitely NSFW
How is that even possible when Android has a 84.4% market share?
Guide: Selecting the best UX prototyping tool
Bionic Bird Drone May Fool Actual Birds
You obviously don't read Business Insider.
> The important thing isn’t who created it, but who shared it—you!—allowing readers to become purveyors of entertaining content to their friends. We’re all complicit now in the joke black market, each share an act of criminal fencing.

This is pretty funny stuff. Imagine the beautiful world of the future, in which kids in playgrounds telling jokes to each other make sure to attribute each one to its original author... Or the dystopian alternative, in which nobody creates jokes because the legal and cultural protections of their intellectual property aren't great enough.
One think that I've been noticing over the years is that my brain has been rewired to find problems in things.

Whenver someone shows/tells me something I instantly start to search for holes in it. I don't actually think about it. It just happens, my wife complains a lot about it.
In fact, if my friends and family are representative of the general population, I'd say that wearing contacts is much more of a fashion choice than glasses. Most contacts wearers I know tell me they're less comfortable, and many keep a pair of glasses to wear in their homes.
your guidance always welcome. i think posting about the community despite requests not to happens because there isn't a thread or forum to discuss administrivia. when people feel something strange or new is happening on the administrative side they are more likely to ask peers what is up rather than email site administrators.
I think this is accurate about the nix underpinnings of OSX. I spent years and years and years on Linux faffing around every distro upgrade, fighting with drivers, spending so much time getting stuff working, and then they pulled the stunt of new desktop paradigms, chucking 30+ years of desktop interaction in the bin, so I bought a MacBook after using OSX at work for some years and having a Mac Mini at home for some time. It is a joy to be able to continue doing nix things whilst having an accelerated window manager (Quartz), although it still needs some things to make it more usable (like installing ShiftIt for window movement with the keyboard).

Using Windows is more and more of a pain to me, particularly as Visual Studio 2010 is dog-slow for me compared to Xcode. I know I need to buy a new version of VC++ but it is now always a clunky-screen-refreshing-whirly-cursor-many-folders-shown-in-Explorer-inconsistent-navigation-and-buttons-shortcuts-hyperlinks experience in Windows. Sigh.
When it comes to realizing what a billion dollars is like, i always fall back on a streamer who recently used notepad to demonstrate a billion dollars. Some not safe for work language but it really explains the sheer immenseness of this value.

Let alone the fact there are streamers who have received tens of thousands of dollars. In this case there really is a very rich person in the middle east who has given tens of thousands to streamers.

http://youtu.be/0J6BQDKiYyM
It's fun to see how much credibility people give by default to these pieces of silicon and glass they have in front of them.
That would be nice, but in practice, there's no commonly accepted clear criteria for what is "political" and what is not, and any attempts to enforce some such criteria would likely bring arbitrary and unfair results.
> The DRM software itself is completely optional.

Unless you want the web page to work. One could just as well describe having a web browser as "completely optional".
It's a perfectly valid concept. A company takes action not aimed at succeeding in the market, but instead aimed at damaging their competitors. The direct goal is to reduce the amount of competition in the market, aka being "anti-competitive".

Companies are not supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That's closer to a description of organized crime.
Love the idea behind this, more to come from ActionAlly I feel, it's got a good basis but a couple more features will kick this into awesome land.
I too find the trackpad (which is a joy to use under OSX) to be a clunky ill-performing appliance under Windows. It suddenly becomes a real nuisance to use (ie, no I want to move a window not drag and select). I resort to using an external mouse when I reboot to Windows on my MacBook.
There is no silver bullet as such. Open source is just a bullet, the one that keeps the community armed.
At which point does a semantic snippet or invention become significant enough that it should be licensed? Two words? Three? A new word? This capturing of positive externalities is getting ridiculous.
Yes, we should all step forward into the wonderful world of running brand new software all the time in production. I'm sure it will all be much more secure than relying on year old software that is being actively maintained.

Is the date on this one supposed to be April 1st?
For others who haven't tried it yet, here.com seems like a very interesting alternative -this was the first time I tried https://www.here.com/ (Nokia Maps it seems?). I always assumed Nokia Maps were only available on Nokia devices.

I have a feeling that they have got something right compared to Google Maps. Based on a few seconds reading-HN-in-lunch evaluation I'm not sure what though.
Are there any non-academic professions which employ a high percentage of humanities PhDs, e.g. publishing, think tanks?

Phrasing the question differently, if the economics of a humanities education means that only the already-wealthy need apply, where do such people put their education to work?

The article could have benefited from a historical perspective on grad school economics and tenure opportunities. When and why did these change and what does it mean for society?
Yeah, when I read something like "but the surgery has a 99% success rate" (I don't remember if that was the actual figure, I think it was lower actually), my mind instantly goes to the other 1%. Glasses are a very mild annoyance, so mild that I'm used to them and don't think about them as an annoyance at all (in fact, sometimes I'm even grateful to have them when I'm cooking and a stray drop of oil flies to the glass). To each their own, but for me personally getting rid of glasses isn't worth the risk of being in that 1%.
Fuck Off as a Service (FOaaS)
Hey guys, thanks for the submission vegasbrianc. I'm Fred, one half of CONTRAST, would love to hear any questions/feedback on anything from the post. Thanks!
5 Blog Posts That Make You a Smarter Content Marketer
Coming soon: the drone-hunting drone
I've been using async for quite long time now and it's absolutely sufficient - never had any problems, it has all the control flow types you'll need and in my opinion it's very readable. It's also the most mature amongst them, so yes, it's definitiely ready for big production systems ;)
You do realize that maintaining windmills is a constant affair, their install costs and such are not insignificant. I won't even touch the damage they can do to birds and bats. Solar might be worse depending on which tech you implement. Besides simply all the site improvements required you have entire factories elsewhere making the bulk of the parts and many of those processes are not that clean.

Then top it all off with getting the power to where it is needed. Wind power pretty much has locations where its more ideal to build. Solar's foot print does similar. A fusion plant, probably could simply replace any large coal facility which would get you two birds with one stone
But what about the customers? If a customer buys a $1k laptop and gets $2k out of value from it, the customers are effectively exploiting the workers more than Apple the organization could ever dream of. Where would you draw the line?
Careful at this age, as middle-age/"can't see up close" might hit you in a few years forcing reading glasses. While one person is an anecdote, I sent from 0 to 2.5 diopter correction in the 42-44 range, with 0.25/0.5 changes occurring every 6-month checkup. I'm currently watching a whole lot of coworkers making their offices brighter (greater depth of field) and wishing for larger arms, monitors and fonts. Get some good advice here to avoid disappointment.
> There was a time a couple of years ago when Android looked like it might gain enough momentum to sweep them away, but it now looks like the iOS market share in developed markets is going to remain fairly solid.

What are you talking about? iOS market share is at an all time low.

It went from 14.4% (2012) to 11.7% (2014).

As of the end of Q3 2014, Android was the most popular operating system, with a 84.4% market share, followed by iOS with 11.7%, Windows Phone with 2.9%, BlackBerry with 0.5% and Others with 0.6%.[90]
Source: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability.

Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reliability they offer to both sides, but it would give employers the benefit of at will employment without the drawbacks that normally has for the employees.

Of course I don't really see it happening in the US -- at least not in a way that's good for the employees. A lot of the welfare system in the US is still based on the idea of traditional long-term employment, even with Obamacare and all that decoupling it a bit.
I think you are spot on with the "free" perception of Google products, and by extension, Android.

I am one of the freeloaders on Android. I have bought a few apps but I mainly go for the free ones, even if they had advertising. It's a real pity really because I know the effort needed to write an app (I have done a few for Android).

Under iOS, I know I am going to have to BUY most apps, as there aren't that many free ones! Also, I had to sell a kidney to buy the device in the first place so I am expecting to have to fork out money - I know it was an "investment".

The same sort of goes for Mac hardware - I always thought it overpriced rubbish and expensive until I actually had the money to buy one and then suddenly it wasn't quite so bad.
Using Customer Data? Start with Clean Data
> But glasses are medical devices, first and foremost. Putting them on for fashion alone feels like faking a wheelchair-bound injury at a theme park to jump to the front of the line.

Well, I guess in Japan the market has decided for you. There's tons of girls nowadays wearing glasses not for vision for just for fashion. And even for the ones who need glasses for vision, buying glasses has never been so cheap over here, and you can easily have one pair for each day of the week if you so wish. So it's clearly a commodity nowadays, and therefore fashion drives sales further compared to it just being for vision only.
I am assuming you could use coffeescript as well?
Maybe he's running the rip-offs and believing that they're the "real" ones?
I'm actually looking for a system that allows me to write Javascript code in the normal imperative way, and automatically makes it reactive.

So, for example, calling a function f(a, b) is first done normally, and then, when e.g. "b" changes value, the function f(a, b) is re-evaluated incrementally. Note that this means that not simply f is invoked again, but that f is recursively re-evaluated.

Anybody here aware of such a system?

I know there is research in this area ([1]). I would really like to use such a system in Javascript.

[1] http://www.umut-acar.org/publications-by-topic#TOC-Self-Adju...
Not to sit around speculating about how something may work or what may be faster when a test case can be built that quickly proves which works or is faster.
http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
I'd like some method to write GC-less code for games.
Structs with copy constructors and destructors perhaps.
For any problem I face in real life, I start to break it down to make it more manageable pieces. Eg, my wife would say the bank is over charging us in their bank feeds. I would break that down to what fees are we talking about, how are we using the accounts to cause the fees etc. It drives my wife nuts.

One bad habit that could be attributed to programming is that I don't remember much anymore. I just jump into SO or wikipedia etc to get the information, and I also keep a bunch of notes in my pocket for "all the things I need to remember".
I assume you went for LASIK ? Well the problem is that not everyone can do it, there are a number of contraindications for LASIK usage (medical conditions). And long term efficacy of LASIK is still a question mark, as far as I know.
It definitely does. It didn't use to be the case, but many banks now offer the same protection from credit theft as a credit card. My local bank only requires that I alert them as soon as I notice it, but their map-reduce jobs have always caught the crooks before I would have ever known.
That sounds like another language, or some sort of javascript processor that would wrap all functions and variables with magic... I haven't personally heard of anything like that, and can imagine lots of drawbacks (mostly about memory) for it.
Yes, in the pursuit of perfect we appear to be overlooking good.

With what we know about Gen III+ and what we're told about Gen IV nuclear fission, we should probably be doing a war-like roll-out of existing and new nuclear technology.

I grew up in South Australia which is host to the worlds largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.[1] Maralinga in the Woomera Prohibited Area is the site of seven British nuclear tests.[2] Australia is also host to the OECD's dirtiest coal fired power station, Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria[3].

There's definitely some irony going there. I suppose if it weren't for Greenpeace and Friends Of the Earth Australia might have had nuclear power by now, or at least process and value-add our uranium ore.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Marali...

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station

Edit: fixed a word
I would concur that Windows 8 was a massive part of the problem. It was like they didn't listen to the resounding feedback from the RTM release.

I think it is odd that OEMs released these touchscreen laptops in the first place! There wasn't any need driving them at all, nor even any "wants" for them. When's the last time they heard anyone say "This laptop's alright, but I REALLY need to reach out over the keyboard and put smudgy marks on my screen and get arm ache swiping left and right. I wish my laptop had a touchscreen!"

It is like they produced a solution to fit a non-existent problem.
Share link from Android to desktop with QR scan only
It's a terrible opamp for precision measurement. (Actually it's a terrible opamp for most things, except maybe student experiments.)

I have mixed feelings about AofA.

On the one hand it's funny and a good broad introduction to a lot of relevant concepts.

On the other it glosses over so much of the math you need to learn to be competent at design that it doesn't teach you nearly as much as it seems to.

When I first read it as an electronic engineering undergrad I thought this was a very good thing, especially compared to the standard textbooks that buried you in equations.

A few decades later I'm not so convinced. I think a good upgrade would be a series of much bigger books (or Wiki pages?) that keep the breezy hands-on style but also dig fearlessly into the details.
We made bad assumptions regarding default probability. Analysis of internal documents has been done - even the "pessimistic" estimates were far less bad than what actually happened. That would have been a problem regardless of securitization.

Securitization didn't fix this risk, nor was it meant to. Regulators allowed banks to satisfy capitalization requirements with senior tranches of other banks, but not with the senior tranches of their own portfolios. This isn't necessarily a terrible idea - it reduces local mispricing risk (i.e., one bank's underwriters suck), just not global mispricing risk (everyone sucks in the same way).
You can also use a transpiler such as 6to5[0] which supports ES7 async/await.

[0]: http://6to5.org/
I use bluebird in all of my production systems, not only because I believe it creates the most readable code, but also because it can do things that callback flow libraries and async simply cannot do.

It's fast to boot and is great for error handling. I highly recommend it.
Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads
It's an UFO landing zone. Stay away from this area!
Mullen could pull it off on command, with a casper slide to top it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcjN5LhYmdE#t=259
Further Turkish social media censorship found with Facebook Mohammad threat
It would be interesting to find out whatthe relative abundance of elements is in a system like that. It's materials will have been through fewer generations of stars, so I'd expect heavier elements to be less abundant than in our system but I've no idea how much less and whether that might limit the possibility of the evolution of life.
If you really want to understand how things work from the very bottom, you can build a toy computer running on FPGA, there are some very cheap boards available now.

To make things even more interesting, you can write your own HDL compiler (into netlist, of course, anything lower level is, unfortunately, too proprietary).

From this point you can build up your abstractions. The shortest route to the high level you're already comfortable with is to implement Forth first, since it's very easy to build a simple stack-oriented machine on FPGA, see ( http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html ). Running your own Forth on top of such a CPU is easier than on something like x86.

Next step is to implement a Scheme compiler and runtime in Forth. Garbage collection can be somewhat tricky, but if you go for something trivial, like stop-and-copy, it won't take long to implement, especially if you have some assistance from your hardware.

Three totally manageable steps from the very bottom of the abstraction ladder - and you've got Scheme, an extensible, powerful meta-language, from which you can grow anywhere.

I recently wrote this bit on bootstrapping a Lisp-like language using the most trivial interpreter possible: https://combinatorylogic.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/bootstrapp... - you can find this approach useful, I did a similar thing on top of Forth and it was very easy, much easier than trying to implement a "proper" interpreter.

And once you know how to build the whole thing from the bare silicon, there won't be any place for "magic" in your understanding.
The concept you're looking for is "savings". Contractors and freelancers charge a premium to compensate for the lack of income stability. If that premium is saved up, you get stability.
Yes, I'm well aware of the input and maintenance requirements for wind turbines. One company I have worked for manufactured a bunch of turbine masts. Lots of steel, lots of welding.

Though I reckon, with nuclear fission + solar + wind, when and where it makes sense to use each technology, we can keep the lights on, buying us time to develop even cleaner more efficient forms of electricity production.

The small modular reactor designs we've been hearing more about recently sound like a really good idea for drop-in replacements for existing coal fired power stations. Though retro-fitting new technology to existing plant is often a better idea on paper. But at least the existing sites can be reused.
This is definitely correct. The article focuses more on data synchronisation where as a lot of services (some of which jkarneges has highlighted) don't offer data storage and focus on letting you define your own feeds/channels/topics/subjects and exposing data updates/changes via messages or events. These services are highly complementary to RethinkDB as it's very easy to see how a channel subscription can map to a changefeeds.

So services Firebase, PubNub Data Sync, Realtime.co cloud storage, the Google Drive Realtime API and Simperium (see: http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide/...) are much more in-context to the article.
Own this book previous edition.

What is good resources for learning electronics online?
Are the online schools like Codeschool and Codeacademy with tutorials anywhere that are good that you can recommend?
This seems like an obvious situation to me - people have been repeating jokes to friends since long before social media, whether jokes they've seen at a live stand-up show or knock knock jokes from the playground/office. Why would it be any different now that we can tweet rather than just speak?