skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Radioshack's demise was precipitated by a number of factors. In no particular order the proximate causes were:

1. A drop in retail sales of electronics from in-person stores as the average consumer purchases more and more online, benefitting from the cost savings due to economies of scale and lack of overhead provided by online retailers such as Amazon.

2. A rapid fall in demand for the consumer products Radioshack offered: camcorders, cassette players, digital cameras, and prior to that CB radios. That trend accelerated as the functions of various devices were taken over by smartphones.

3. A failure to recapture the resurgent maker movement, despite a rather valiant last minute effort.

Radioshack used to be a vital resource for makers. Mostly they stocked breadboards, transistors, capacitors, etc. in at least one third of their retail space.

When I was a child, and my father first introduced me to electronics in the mid '90s, I loved Radioshack and visited at least once a week. The staff at Radioshack could give advice that my dad (a chemical engineer and MBA by education, civil engineer by profession, who built a simple computer out of transistors in the 1970s from scavenged parts from pinball machines when he was 13, so no novice) didn't know.

A few months ago a local maker space opened and I enthusiastically signed up for classes on their machines. Ready to jump in, I figured I would build out some software while I waited to be safety certified on the Tormach CNC and various 3D printers, but their inexpensive Raspberry Pi and Pi competitors were sold out.

Out of curiosity, I stopped into Radioshack, since there was one in the same mall. Lo and behold, most of the space formerly occupied by those parts was now filled with modern maker components: Arduinos, Beaglebones, shields to add capabilities, elegant project cases, various add-ons. I picked up everything I needed to get my project up and running on a Beaglebone Black.

It was so much more convenient than waiting for Amazon to deliver that over the next couple days I went back for more components. Radioshack, for the first time in years, seemed like a place I wanted to frequent, a stopgap between my local maker space and Amazon. But there was one essential element missing: expertise. The staff was mostly clueless about the differences between the products they stocked.

Radioshack failed because it failed to pivot to a more successful business model in time. They tried a scatter-shot approach, pinning their hopes on various experimental focal points: cellphones for a time, high end stereos, video games, etc.

Hours worked is simply an unlikely cause of the company's decline. Americans are still tinkering, and the mythos of the lone inventor is alive and well in American psychology.
Isn't it also the only systems programming language that is memory-safe in single-threaded mode? Possibly ATS could be another, but I'm not sure how complete and useful it is.
One of the school kids that is in the same grade as my daughter is autistic (and also absolutely brilliant on the asperger spectrum). He's had a social worker with him every day, in class, attending to him every day of his public schooling. (This is one reason why private schools do so well and cost less. Imagine spending $60K+ on one student per year.)

His social skills are still not great, with an inability to focus on someone when they are talking, as well as biting and hitting others.

He's incredibly smart though, with an ability to replay any piece of music that he just heard, and replay it on the piano. He's never taken a piano class or was taught piano in his life.

Can his trajectory still change at the age of 11? It seems like the school is doing quite a bit, but he doesn't seem to progress and still stuck in the same behaviors as he was in the second grade (first time he was in the same classroom as my daughter).
HR Deserves Great Software Too
I think you and I are probably spoiled by SQL Server :)

Postgre, MySQL and Oracle all have severely limited stored procedure capabilities compared to SQL Server. Postgre can't even return multiple result sets from a procedure or use transactions.
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Ask HN: Where do you ask best practices / library choice questions?
Where do you guys ask opinionated questions such as: "Is there a tool/library that does X"? or "what is your best practice to do Y" in other words, questions that will be closed as non constructive in Stack Overflow but are still valid questions that you want to get other programmer's experience on?

Is there anything other than HN, slant.co, Quora, reddit that has a large audience and these types of questions are welcome? Do you simply send to mainling lists of specific topic groups?

In other words, in many times I need advice from people like me who have been in a similar situation and I don't have any issue with specific coding / syntax etc, more best practices.

Any other places I've been missing?
Shame to see gradha go - I read and enjoyed his ranty posts on macros, and he's contributed to a lot of repos.

He is right that there was some breakage in libraries with 0.96 to 0.10.2 - I'm hoping that things will start to settle once v1.0 is released and Nim will gain more traction.
I like reading a bit of prose about when a tool doesn't fit someone's use case. Nim has a pretty interesting approach to data sharing in concurrency, and it's more interesting to read a story of someone who got bit by it than to read a table of language features and wonder when it might prove to be a problem.
i) not everyone can get the vaccine. Thus, people who chose not to vaccinate are increasing the risk for those vulnerable people.

ii) vaccinations are not 100% effective. Those who chose not to vaccinate are weakening herd immunity and putting everyone at risk.

There are risks of taking the vaccine. Those risks are very much smaller than the risks of not taking the vaccine.

This is the same answer you keep getting and keep ignoring.
I work in banking. For trader, M&A and other related positions, the contractual bonus rate is/was(?) often 100%.

A lot were fired, they hired back, then fired again. Not sure what the overall impact had been, but for the ones I know, after the crisis it has been like a continuous Christmas. Lot of cash/cheap money to buy cheap flat/houses all around, kids and early retirement at 32.
Quaderno – Stripe VAT subscriptions
> ... Java and C# were...

Do you mean those langauges are memory safe only in their GC implementation, which uses multiple kernel threads? How does this affect user code? Java and C# still allow you to access memory from other threads without locking.
Weekly Startup Idea: Peer Review Based Learning Platform – Code Jar
> failure to find a niche in the modern retail world.

When I was a kid, we'd go the RS pretty much monthly. It was the go to place for things like floppy disks, batteries, cables, stereos, etc. Sure, it wasn't pro-quality but it was good enough. Then pretty much all those items because obsolete or commoditized. Big box stores had all these things, and more, and usually cheaper with better brands than RS's in house and underwhelming 'Realistic' brand. Walgreens started stocking disks, CD's, cables, etc, which became easy as everyone pretty much standardize on the iPod and iPhone ten years ago. Hard to find stuff was easily gotten on the web and Amazon's big push to take on 3rd party sellers into their system meant you could find pretty much anything right there.

I see all this hand-wringing about how RS had a golden age where it was staffed with nothing but EE's and had everything you can imagine, but that seems an overly pleasant interpretation of their product and services. Even during the "golden age" there was never anyone who knew anything about the components I was buying and I was happy to be left alone. The stock there was largely unimpressive as well. I'm afraid nostalgia has taken over here for some people. Not to mention, the margins on components was pretty much non-existent. The idea that it could have trivially turned itself into a "Maker Supply" depot is questionable as well. The prices it would need to get by would chase off makers who knew they could get it for 1/10th the price on Amazon and with things like Prime shipping, it became a no brainer.

Brick and mortar retail is a cruel mistress. You have limited space and each shelf needs to bring in x amount of revenue if you want to stay open. How much space do you need to provide a decent experience to makers? How much would each one of those shelves bring in net everyday? Ten bucks maybe? Turning RS into a Akihabara-like component dumping ground just is financially unfeasible. Heck, the fabled Akihabara doesn't even exist anymore, its all video arcades and game and model shops as I learned during my trip there last year.

RS is probably a cautionary tale of over-specialization without the "boutique" level of added value, but even that is questionable. I have no idea what could have saved it and am highly skeptical that anything would have worked. It just doesn't seem like a business that makes sense in the modern world. A lot of the projection I see seems to be people with a hobby horse they're trying to insert into the argument. Sometimes businesses need to die. There's really nothing wrong with that. We don't get our shoes recobbled anymore or need someone to help us when ours cars get vapor lock. Things change, and usually for the better.
> I find it amusing and unsurprising that the "OMG THE FED IS THE WORST THING EVER" crowd obsessed with Rand/Ron Paul also turn out to be historical revisionists and straight-up racists.

I don't think it's OK for you to generalize like that. Because one article exists on the internet, and is wrong about Hitler and the banks, therefore all Fed haters are racist?

When one makes generalization about the Jews they are roundly chided and rightly so. Consider yourself equally roundly chided. I hate the Fed (it's not an acronym). There's no reason to hate Jews as an ethnicity. The reason to hate the Fed is simple, they have a machine that prints money. Nothing to do with Jews, nothing to do with ethnicity. If the Fed wasn't run by people but only machines I'd still hate it, like I hate High Frequency Trading. Because HFT lied to us about bringing liquidity to the market even though it's not a person but a machine. A lot of people want to derail the discussion from money to race because it's easier. But this is to do only with money and no one wants to talk about it. That's the taboo. Money and machines should not mingle. Do Jews use currency? Yes. Then they are victims of the Fed like every other person is, that doesn't control that machine.

Oh, I also hate when things are passed off as Science when they aren't falsifiable, like Keynesian Economics. Mixing things with machines or formulae that shouldn't be mixed is scientificism. Fed haters want to talk about money but there's a group of people that keep derailing the conversation to non-money issues. You seem to be part of that despicable group. Why? Why worship the money machine? People like you really want for there to be a Science that can predict the future. Well guess what. No such thing.
As you say, there's this incredible rose-tinted nostalgia about RS that is pretty far off from reality. There may have been some ham radio communities and the like that connected with RS to some extent. But, as someone who shopped in RS starting in the late 70s, it's not a chain that I really associated with a "maker" culture in the current sense. As someone else noted, it's probably true that there was more of a need then for certain types of consumables like phonograph needles and oddball batteries that weren't easy to find elsewhere. However, most of their money came from selling generally mediocre consumer electronics. Which they could get away with because their competition was mostly either department stores (which also mostly sold a limited selection of mediocre gear) or specialty HiFi stores that many in the general public didn't necessarily think of going to.
I'd say #3 jumps out as the most tragic and obvious. It reminds me of Kodak's failure to get ahead of and dominate digital photography when they had the IP, the funding, and the brand to do so. I'd say the demise of both companies looks strikingly similar in terms of a failure to execute on the obvious.

Radio Shack should have been stocking things like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino and offering classes, workshops, and opening maker space 2-3 years ago at least.

You've gotta hold a core market, and Radio Shack's was always the enthusiast. Consumer stuff was always secondary for them -- if not as a profit center definitely in terms of brand and customer loyalty.
From the article:

Make magazine, the movement’s bible, has a circulation of only 125,000, whereas RadioShack’s instructional manuals, sold in every store, were printed by the millions when America’s population was about two-thirds what it is now.

RadioShack could have been the home for the makers, but even if they doubled the size of the maker community, they would have to shrink by at least 90%. The maker market exists but it's not big enough to support 5000 stores across the country.

Shrinking that much might as well be death. All the stakeholders inside the company who are going to get squashed are going to fight back, refusing to believe the inevitable.

Sometimes you just can't win. Kodak invented the digital camera and was destroyed by it. They could have survived, but only as a much smaller company, because their entire film division was going to be destroyed.

RS management did a lot of stuff wrong, but that doesn't mean there was a right answer.
So why not just make that part of the license? Just require any tool that uses the GCC API, even transitively, to be licensed under something GPL compatible. I know there would probably be a huge number of loopholes to plug but this is really something that should be fixed outside of the actual code.
First Ever Ubuntu Phone Unboxing Video
I'd argue that the Radioshack's lack of attention to their role as a niche vendor (tinkerer's resource) was the true cause of their demise. As a former employee, I noticed that we continually downsized our parts section (especially in malls) until it was almost nonexistent. There were plenty of customers inquiring about capacitors and other small electric parts. We were then forced to refer those customers to a local niche store.

They were trying to hard to compete with Best Buy in their attempt to sell cell phones and contracts. Poor business decision that led to them being taken advantage of by the mobile carriers who increased market share with RadioShack's assistance, but offered little in return.

By the way that they treated me, my manager and my fellow employees - I'm not sad to see them go.
Minor discrepancy:

On the global map, Mexico City is linked to SF, NY, and Bogotá, while the text description says: "SF, NY or Caribbean for a day".
That's their problem then, not the problem of the parent author. If you think video games are real life and shoot someone because Call of Duty made you do it, you have a mental illness. No where did anyone here make the claim that everyone with a mental illness would do that though.

I drink tea because I have a cold. Not everyone who has a cold drinks tea, though. I'm guessing that mental illnesses might be a sensitive subject for you for some reason, but being overly politically correct isn't the answer to solving the social stigma. You can't deny that people who have trouble separating fiction from reality have a mental illness.
> I'm happy to pay a subscription fee for a reliable service that lets me stream movies/shows. The issue is, none exist. For example, Netflix used to have an amazing selection before (I imagine) various licensing issues effectively crippled them.

There's effectively two models:

* The Netflix model, where a large group of people effectively pool a small amount of money each month and buy a big batch of content. You end up paying for some things you don't care about, but you also probably get some stuff you do want for cheaper than you could get it by yourself.

* The iTunes model, where each person decides what content they want and pays for it directly. There are no bulk-discounts, so individual content pieces are more expensive.

Your argument seems to be that you want the unlimited content selection of the iTunes model, but you want to pay for it like the Netflix model.

Which is fine in the "I want a pony" sense, but seems to ignore economic reality.
Have you considered having some storage in the house that automatically follows you around the world as you move from place to place ? i.e. your belongings just turn up at the house you are currently staying in without you having to deal with shipping?

Edit: to clarify/simplify
Agreed. I spent too long staring dumbly at the page, finding nothing to click on, wondering how to get more information.

I hate this trend towards elimination of affordances.
Ouch.. I wasn't aware of that. Any other providers you can think of that are more free-speech oriented?
" some no name devs in some company" is not the same as "suicidal welfare candidates". And doing an apprenticeship after you dropped out of university is very usual in germany.

And then there is also former Telekom CEO Obermann who dropped out of University to found his mobile phone business.
Looks like this could be an alternative to pm2 that doesn't have the AGPL copyleft?
The biggest issue I see is dealing with the unbalanced torque... You could probably manage a 'controlled crash', but that's about it.
I am a 3rd year undergraduate student of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology,Bombay.

In my junior year due to interest in robotics I did a semester learning project on Mobile robot Controllers. In this project I learned about kinematic and dynamic models of various mobile robot drives and simulated then in Robot Operating System(ROS). I designed feedback controllers for path tracking of differential drive robots, parking control and Leader follower problem of car-like mobile robots by developing direct lyapunov models. I simulated these controllers using Player/stage platform. Having an idea on Mobile robot controllers I look forward to an intern in the field of control of mobile robots so that I can increase my expertise in control of robots.

I have skills required for this particular profile.I am interested in pursuing an internship during MAY-AUG 2015.

My email: sriram.vallabhaneni51@gmail.com
I teach software engineering using an "athletic" pedagogy which means (in part) that I publish YouTube videos showing how I complete small (i.e. 10-30 minute problems) in an efficient manner. Students then try to complete the problems as fast as I do. Once a week, in class, they are assigned a new problem that they must complete correctly within a short time period or else receive no credit.

This provides a mixture of learning by watching a more experienced practitioner do the work, along with active engagement.

For example, here is the website for the software engineering class I am teaching this semester:

http://philipmjohnson.github.io/ics613s15/

The athletic modules ("WODs") start with the coding module. Here's an example of the pedagogy:

http://philipmjohnson.github.io/ics613s15/morea/coding/exper...

Philip
At the time, I supported letting Lehman die. Take your medicine, screw-ups!

I was wrong. It's largely regarded as a bone-headed move today. It was the start of the meltdown.
Redis.io already does this fwiw
The IPO is presumably good for the share price (and indeed the ability to sell the shares at all, even after a 3- or 6-month lockup) - it gives employees with shares the chance to cash out just like any other shareholder. And the importance of your signature on the agreement is directly proportional to how many shares you own.
Is this really different from using a transaction with separate read (using an update lock) and update statements, and looping over that in the same way from the application until the count is 0?
We are sorry for scaring you all. Really, no bad intention here.
I was talking about the app the person linked to, not noisli.
If you're an author, you can use Leanpub (https://leanpub.com/). We added #VATMOSS support, so you don't have to. We did this since we looked at the situation and decided it was the correct thing to do for our authors, even though we're based in Canada with our servers in the USA, and with no physical presence in the EU whatsoever. We also added "bring your own book" support, so you can just upload your own PDF, EPUB and/or MOBI files instead of needing to use our (awesome, Markdown-based) book creation workflow.
I thought Facebook made their own PHP fork type of language.
Template strings will be awesome for lots of purposes, but the given example is poorly conceived. The template in the original is separated from the bound columns in all manners except for order (e.g. change the name of your num_array variable and the SQL doesn't change at all). The second approach creates a tight coupling between the query and the source of the values (i.e. change a variable name and you must change the SQL source as well). If you imagine a more mature system where the SQL is either generated (or stored separately in hand-tuned files, or) you can see why this coupling is problematic.

The specific gripe of "What if you want a new parameter near the beginning?" is not an new problem: it has been addressed in SQL clients by implementing named parameters. There is not a universal standard sadly but competent solutions exist for node and postgres (cf. https://github.com/bwestergard/node-postgres-named).
Vaccinated people can also spread the disease to un-vaccinated people.

Natural immunity is also much better than vaccination, so one might also say that vaccinations are weakening natural herd immunity.

I wasn't aware that I kept getting the same answer, but please don't get snarky with me just because I haven't immediately agreed with the rest of the crowd here.
There is no way RS can compete even if they overhauled themselves to focus on hobby electronics. Microcenter has a well stocked hobby ("maker" if you like, but I hate that term) section, but I doubt they even sell one arduino a day. Microcenters are typically located in urban areas with >2M population.
Looks like a nice app, bought it for iOS.

I love the "animate" feature of this page: http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainNoiseGenerator.php

Any change of the app getting something like it? Or perhaps a new app?
Show HN: A simple Chrome extension to read comments while watching YouTube video
The "copyright infringement is theft" argument has been thoroughly debunked. It's not even remotely similar. Theft is depriving someone of property. No one is deprived of anything when you copy something, and downloads aren't property.
So much of password hashing is a deliberate performance cost anyways, it almost hardly matters if your password passed through md5 and sha{1,2}. bcrypt will eclipse them all in relative cost, as it should be.
Yeah he should be getting the starting & ending position of the ball during the tick, and determining whether that line intersects the other line. If it does, the intersection point should be found and the segment that goes past the line should be reflected over the normal, and the ball placed at the new endpoint of the reflected segment. And, of course, the velocity vector needs to be changed as well.

But... I guess this won't be the first time someone posts bad physics code on the internet and poses it as a good example.
8 Tips for How to Improve Your Motivation for Programming
Improbable.io
Indeed. Guadalajara (at least from what I've gathered chatting with folks local to that area) is much more tech-savvy (quite a few tech firms - big and small - have setups there), is home to an indie film festival (among other things), and is the supposed birthplace of mariachi music. If I were to give up my stationary life and become a nomad, I'd much rather have my transient basecamp in Guadalajara than Mexico City, to be honest.
A Scientific Family