skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A relative worked for an alcohol post-rehab center (Patients would get the severage in the hospital first for a fortnight, then go to rehab for several months). She says former drinkers almost never come here on their own choice. They're brought in rehab by a judge requirement, generally after car accidents involving death. Their average of wine drinking could be 5 to 12 liters... a day. The center was in a forest so they couldn't procure alcohol, but they're so much addicts than anything will do, and the center had to ban alcoholic liquid window cleansers because patients would drink them. And there were cases where patients drank them anyway, just in case...

So yes, anti-freeze isn't a surprising drink if better alcohol wasn't available.
Nim Programming Language Gaining Traction
CSSWizardy say it better than me: "BEM – meaning block, element, modifier – is a front-end naming methodology thought up by the guys at Yandex. It is a smart way of naming your CSS classes to give them more transparency and meaning to other developers. They are far more strict and informative, which makes the BEM naming convention ideal for teams of developers on larger projects that might last a while." http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head...

But basically: agreed rules for how to name and format css to make it maintainable and performant in big projects.
XBT to Be Headquartered in Luxembourg
I wonder to what extent they are still using Perl.
"which has been ratified by the United States and is therefore law"

Oh is that how it works...
Webzilla Bytes-Up Its Cloud Storage
IMO you can't win big number competitions by such a low-level approach. At least notice that the concept of "deepest iterator in 1000 characters" is itself mathematically definable, and define it as D(1000) or something. Then try to find connections between that and BB numbers... Coming up with the "highest paradigm function" is the important part of the challenge, iteration is unnoticeable by comparison.
The jury's still out on that one, though. Maybe there is no money to be made in ~30K electric cars. :-) But I am almost certain that's not true.
> ... a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.
Also, taking walks in foggy parks, and working out (to a degree) :)
You have to learn the big concepts in computing. These include low-level details like how a Von Neumann architecture works, memory and pointers, I/O, how the OS, network, and file system work, etc. But it also includes useful abstractions such as data structures and ADTs, algorithm efficiency, objects, functional programming and lambda calculus, design patterns, and big-picture questions of what kind of system should I be building in the first place. (Should I build one big monolith? Should I break it down into pieces? How should they communicate? and so forth)

This will necessarily require familiarity with a variety of languages and ways of thinking about code. When you find a particular style of building software that suits you well, you can invest a lot of time in becoming expert at building that kind of system, making it run fast, and making it clean and maintainable. But you will also have a deep well of knowledge to draw from because you've looked at the computing field from a variety of perspectives.

In other words, both Hickey and Norvig are right, to an extent.
Microsoft Lumia 435
Shipping doesn't always need to mean shipping to the public.

I write complex software too but I "ship" to myself early and often. I start by trying to solve a hard problem as fast and as quickly as possible in a naive way so that I can experiment more freely. This gives me more insight into the problem itself and into the solution space. The solution often changes -- sometimes it's the problem that changes.

If I were working with a customer or a startup I would definitely "ship" early and often, too, but I wouldn't give much weight to these "releases". They're just something to play with and to cut the shape for the problem.
Thanks. I dont know why they couldnt just say that on their homepage!
> It's like they monitored the front-page of HN everyday for a year, made a list of the top mentioned technologies and then gave that list to their management

Or perhaps those technologies were actually useful for them? I don't know, just a thought.
What Is Load Balancing? – Increase Broadband Speed
Remember report on Toyota accelecator firmware, which had like 10K global variables? Someone 'with technical background' could call this kind of software organization 'obscure' and that fact that it actually (somehow)works - 'magical'))
Didn't military funding accelerate US tech development?
Is giving more inheritance to the oldest child still a thing?
Hard Disk hacking – Other uses
Few days ago, there was this post on HN. Go through it
> Screw motivation, what you need is discipline Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976451
Alternative to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk
And now I'm wondering, why isn't there an nation agnostic open-source antivirus ?

Oh, I almost forgot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clam_AntiVirus#Effectiveness

But it's not famous enough...
Also see this mathoverflow post by Scott Aaronson as a follow-up to the article: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/34710/succinctly-naming-bi...
Not starting a side project earlier. And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.

Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do. All he cares about is how much money he can make with your energy. Know what hard work gets you? A pat on the back and more hard work.

Gone are the days where you could build a career based on mutual respect and trust. Nowadays it's just a list of previous employments. Nobody cares how good you are or what problems you can solve. All they care about is overqualified warm bodies. Hire skilled developers and throw them on meaningless tasks controlled by business politics. At least this seems to be the general experience among my peers.

If you want to be successful, become a good politician. It's the only thing that will make your life better. Anything else is just a lie designed to squeeze more value out of you.
It's a spectrum. Trying to ship a perfect software from the start will probably end up like OS/360 project. Then K&R came along and designed what we know now as unix. An OS that wasn't complete and fully featured like OS/360 was intended to be, but it worked!

Making the wrong choices is inevitable, but correcting them is part of the software life cycle.

We aren't working with concrete and building bridges here. If we built Pisa tower like software, we can still fix it.

So yes, ship when you can as long as it works and delivers what it promises. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Flag it and move onto an article we can read.
What do you not like about their new Android app? I use it daily and greatly prefer it to the old one.
A ‘bionic leaf’ turns solar energy into chemicals and fuels
Eris Solver – Online Complex Problem Solver
Nope. The alternative (mean average distribution) also has the same units. The problem with the MAD was that it used an absolute value and so introduced a discontinuity. If you are a mathematician working with a system of equations, each discontinuity doubles the size of the system when taking integrals/derivatives. The SD was a clever hack to hide the discontinuity. It makes the mathematician's job of juggling equations much easier by changing the workload from O(n^2) to O(n). If you are not doing calculus on the system then the SD has much less utility. Negative utility even, because the square/square-root hack used by the SD is identical to the MAD only for perfectly normal distributions. For real-world distributions it tends to give wrong results.
One example I often run into is where dissimilar ways meet. For example a footpath that crosses a road. The path and the road should share a node. If not, then it will look fine on the rendered map but it won't be routable. (Of course, if the path is bridged over the road with no access between them then they shouldn't share a node.)
Promises are going to solve this problem in an elegant way, expect it in next major release.

That said, I've release a client/server game (online sailing regattas) in Elm & Play/Scala with websockets, and current API was enough for me:
https://github.com/etaque/tacks
It's not just about strict adherence to the law. These companies have been willing to cooperate with the state voluntarily, even when doing that was legally questionable. For instance, the AT&T data collection 'room' as well as the special infrastructure hooked directly into internet giant's networks. It takes more than just laws to stop these practices, you need a reform of government and the secret agencies.
No; at present the osm.org tiles aren't generated at a retina scale.

This is most likely to be fixed in the medium term by moving to vector rendering via WebGL et al.
So in your case, the FAE is "guy is an asshole" rather than "acted like an asshole". I'm pointing this out because I thought it was interesting that you still at least sounded like you were committing the FAE, even in a comment explicitly talking about the FAE.

> However this kind of sexual harassment is unacceptable no matter how many times you do it. Even if its just once because he was feeling lonely/sad/drunk/whatever

I'm sorry to hear that OP had this experience, but I'm not willing/able to draw conclusions about the character of the other party w/o hearing the other side of the story. For example, you're assuming that the actions were intentional on his part and that he understood OPs wishes/desires/state-of-mind.

To put that another way: conditional on the assumptions you're making being correct, I agree the guy's a complete asshole :p
You know, everyone who uses ConnectedDrive or TeleServices is pretty much aware of it, because it comes with monthly fee.

It is a feature sold, not something undercover that the poor drivers are unaware of.
This is extremely offensive to the team that built this product. Why the hate?
This is very good, I’ve been wanting this for a long time. But it still has some serious shortcomings:

Car routing only for OSRM. Is this something which will be fixed?

Also egregiously missing is the ability to create a link to a pre-made route.
> A life-jacket will keep your head above water with minimal exertion.

With no exertion, depending on conditions. Lifejackets should be able to support an unconscious casualty.
What's wrong with rm -rf /Path/To/Application?
Being in a different jurisdiction makes the wrench crypto-analysis pretty hard as well ;). Not impossible, sure, but politically and economically costly. Remember, this is about trusting some sort of global cloud without everyone in the world having to trust a single third-party government. If the user lives within the country of the government seeking to compel them, and the laws of said country are such that torture is a permitted method of interrogation (specifically, by monkey wrench), well... nothing your cloud provider can do for you, except perhaps try to help you fly under the radar (stenography, anonymous logins, etc.). Keep in mind, that in the case of mass surveillance, even if every user is vulnerable to wrench crypto-analysis, the fact that the cloud provider isn't still raises the costs of widespread surveillance enormously.

As for US judges not caring about the five companies thing. Well, so what? They can, assuming their local laws and political climate lets them get away with it, jail everyone working for their local company. This should not compel the other four companies, in four other countries, to give them the extra four components of the key. Note that I selected USA/EU/China/Russia/India for a reason, and not, say... USA/Mexico/Colombia/Afghanistan/Iraq. If this sort of system were the accepted global standard, any nation that tries to "brute force" their own local company, instead of using whatever legitimate procedure becomes available for internationally agreed law enforcement, would just be basically marginalizing itself out of the internet.

I'll be the first to admit that what I am describing is not very likely. It would probably require a significant number of governments to be basically OK with not having access to certain data about people, so long as other governments don't have access either, which is not what most political leaders are clamoring for right now. But the problem is, the alternative is not business as usual either, the alternative is every country basically building their own silo-ed internet over time (China is there, Russia is heading there, the EU is strongly considering it, etc). Reasonably powerful non-U.S. countries will eventually see using U.S.-company run cloud services as equivalent to what Americans would think of say, having their energy grid directly connected to power plants in Russia over Alaska and running no plants within their own territory.
Ive probably doesn't know that there was already precedent for a lightsaber with an uneven blade.

https://www.google.com/search?q=unstable+lightsaber+crystal
I actually watched the screen cast this blog post is about. [1] And I would like to say something about that here, because the questions from the screen cast were also coined in the blog post.

The Question is this: "Why do people not replace VT100 style terminals?" There are two reasons. tl;dr Terminals have other reasons than programming in them and people actually reinvent how you can program on a daily basis. See more in depth arguments below.

The first thing is that people actually still need the old terminal stuff. There are loads of old computers you want to communicate with (just think of your pa trying to relive old times be trying to get the 80's game console to work). And there are also a lot of technologies that really need something that stupid, e.g., if you develop your own embedded system you might actually communicate with it using these VT100 commands. So yeah. Wow. A Terminal (emulator) doesn't have the task to show your text editor. You can start GVim if you just want to show your editor. They have the task to communicate. They can communicate with the system you are running them on or you can use them to communicate with another terminal. If you want to replace them, you have to replace the software in your pa's console (and probably some hardware), you have to find a new way to develop fresh, small computers, you have to find a new way SSH works, you have to find a new way to show your text editor. It's not impossible, but it's probably so hard that nobody would like to spend their whole life (work time, spare time, youth to death) doing it. It's not worth that much. Summary: It's not worth it, if you consider the whole picture.

And second argument: People actually do, if you just think about use cases like coding, gaming, etc. A modern game doesn't run in a Text shell as e.g. Nethack could. It runs in a graphical shell and is represented to you in 3D, e.g., GTA 5. Also there are many people who use IDEs. Unix+Bash+Texteditor was actually an IDE. Eclipse etc are a new way of thinking about the editing task with helpers like compilers, static analysers, debuggers, performance analysers, unit test runners, etc. There are even people who reinvent the programming wheel from another point of view, e.g., have a look at NoFlow. The reason the other stuff is not dying is because it's useful for other reasons. That doesn't mean you have to still use it for programming (also some people, like me, choose to). Summary: People do work on finding modern ways to program.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
Yes. Learning new languages and libraries is helpful to a point, but learning all new languages and libraries is a distraction.
Virtual-Reality Porn Is Coming
I never heard Nix addressing the reproducible-problem as Debian does here: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/Howto

E.g. various build tools (e.g. gcc) include timestamps in their output
How to Install Windows 10 Technical Preview in VirtualBox – TechRepublic
Good try WSJ, not paying.
Well now Arabic is a jammer for English text processors. ;)

Hallelujah has a long tail in many languages, which grammar sonars of science fumble.
The concentration of buzzwords caused my sensor to cross the redline. Can you please explain, in plain English, what it is?
Actually that I my opinion from any web based UI, a mess of JavaScript/CSS trickery and HTML.

Native UI development feels so much more advanced and user friendly.

Saying this as a UX developer since the mid-90's.
Improve your life with automated tests, talking formulas
I've noted this to them in their feedback forms before. It's been like that for over a few months. If I recall correctly when the Guardian (uk) was developing their current version under Beta the same problem came about for a short while.
Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
It's a shame HN doesn't auto-minimize the sub-comments once they get to a certain size and depth to make it easier to view other OPs. I often find that the first comment dominates the tone of the discussion about an article making it an easy target for astroturfing campaigns like this one.

To your point, I read the OP and thought to myself that it seemed very familiar, I then checked the details on the user account and feel reasonably confident in thinking that it is a targeted attack. It's just sad that it worked so well.
Free sound samples from NASA missions – for ringtones and other things
Every small tool deserves special launching site and promoting if it's "written in go" or some other hyped language.
That's what I got reading Learn C the hard way, the author showed how small uses of function local GOTOs gave you very nice and clear failure mode. It even merged all exit points to one or two, making it easier to reason about.
That makes sense, I have a different world view and wouldn't think in terms of an "inner nice person" (or "inner evil person" for that matter).

You've made me think I have ignored another class of people who automatically disbelieve this kind of thing: people who's world view is naively optimistic and have a lot of emotional pressure to believe the world is too fair for this behaviour to be going on regularly. Seems like you saw that reason for disbelief more easily than I did.
For those that aren't aware, the BBC has one of the worst cases of "Not invented here" syndrome you'll ever see.
The interesting thing is that all these big-corp code-bases started out relatively small. The origins were actually able to overcome the complexity-wall that arises when a product is successful.
I remember reading about the c65 in zzap!64 back in the day.

This (old) page has a bit more info.

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/65.html
Rich Hickey's advice is shaped from his experiences and following his advice can lead to his kind of career. Rich Hickey and Peter Norvig, although both successful, have different experiences and hence different careers. If you ask someone like Bill Gates, he'll have another much different twist to his advice. Each successful collection of skills (deep, shallow or mixed) will lead to certain unique career; which one you regard highly is up to you.

Although an important caveat remember is, following some successful person's specific advice may not even work for you if there's a big difference in your basic brain circuitry compared to his/her. Your best bet, IMO, is to commit to the projects you feel 'hell yeah!' for and say no to the rest (more about hell yeah vs. no here: http://sivers.org/hellyeah).

The bottom line is: Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.
American citizens have been involved in planning and executing terrorist attacks, identified as enemy combattants and even been targetted for drone strikes. If foreign terrorists operate in the US, the only way to find them is to search. That means looking at everyone's communications, citizen or not.

I'm not an American, so it would be wrong of me to assert what you or your government should or should not do in this regard. However in general I think GCHQ and the NSA have a case for some of the kinds of monitoring they are doing, I just think it's lacking in legal basis and appropriate oversight. They have shown repeatedly that we can't trust them.
Religious extremism, and in fact extremists of all kinds, always exist everywhere. What the USA has done has been to topple organized states or regimes that were able to keep some order and rule of the law in their territories, fuel hatred and desperation by killing hundreds of thousands of people, bombing the cities and destroying any form of economy, also with the aid of a decade long and ferocious embargo (the estimates put to a million the victims of the embargo, mostly children), and finally providing weapons and training to "rebels" to produce internal revolts to weaken the "enemies". A myopic and downright evil strategy that is now fully showing its obvious results.
Australian galleries ban selfie sticks, save small speck of humanity
As I understand it there are good reasons the SD is often more useful. For instance, if you are dealing with a large number of samples from your distribution, and want to apply the central limit theorem, it's the SD, not the MAD, that you need to know.
Okay, before I get on the mailing list of a nonexistent app, tell me more about the idea, because this page is really light on details even for a teaser.

How does it generate its routes? Does it have some information about which routes are good for running, which routes are in sketchy areas that are better to avoid, and which routes take you to busy intersections with a long wait for the signal?
Generic C Reference Counting
Same principle as Benton white-light holograms, see 2003 SPIE paper linked on the site, also "Not true holograms?" The scratches are line-scatterers, not flat-bottomed as Fresnel, so no focal length.

Basically it's an enlarged Zoneplate rather than a fresnel lens. Arrays of curved line-scatterers can reconstruct single pixels with programmable depth. The fringes of Rainbow holograms do this, and their 3D image-reconstruction requires no interference nor monochromatic illuminators. Insight: change the spacing of the fringes of a rainbow hologram, or even randomize the spacing, and the 3D reconstruction still works fine. The 3D image doesn't depend on optical interference. A very weird effect! So, can we draw a Rainbow hologram by hand with a needle, by scratching the fringes with random spacing? Yep. We get 3D images, but they're white in color with no rainbow artifact.
> The universe

As far as we know currently, the future looks particularly grim†: on the longest time scale imaginable, the very fabric of the universe is being thinned out of existence. The absurd thing here is trying to make sense out of what definitely hasn't, as all information within this universe will ultimately be destroyed.

Whatever, I choose to enjoy the ride.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
H264ify: An extension that makes YouTube stream H.264 videos
The sad bit is that many full-stack developers are actually better that specialized developers in respective skills. (unless of course they are JS/Node.js types)