skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What the heck does this have to do with legalization? Your employee's performance was presumably suffering because of their addiction, and in any event, theft from your employer is grounds for dismissal.

Your employee was not any less addicted due to the criminalization of drugs.
You only need 39 digits of pi to measure the circumference of the observable universe within the width of one hydrogen atom.

Once you memorize them, you can proudly wear this t-shirt:

http://teespring.com/memorize39digitsofpi
"work stays at work" is perfect philosophy
More to the point, if people - en masse - refused to use cellphones that tracked you, someone would be selling cellphones that don't. And then RMS would presumably carry a cellphone.
It's not just a drop-in glyph replacement. The 2 is a number that can, and frequently does, disappear.

e.g. You would never write the area of a circle as (2pi)r^2/2

Are you really saying that he should have chosen a letter from the Hebrew alphabet as a glyph? Sure, it has no collisions, but it's completely bizarre and unlikely to gain widespread adoption, which is the whole point.
Turning on search for special cases like 20GB of local email sounds like the perfect reason to opt-in to some sort of specialized search system of the user's choosing.
Capitalism is prone to this. Oil stays high for long enough, lots of people jump in, drilling for new product. Each individually is smart, but collectively they over-saturate the market. Because there is this lag at each step, at each step the people collectively overshoot the optimum. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot.
Adding a complex and unreliable dependency that has to be reimplemented underground and isn't really needed (because you don't need the GPS coordinates, just a little bit of local metadata)? Not ridiculous at all.
It's not just German.

See: homeless spikes vs homeless shelters.
I assume mansr refers to profile guided optimizations in gcc and many other compilers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization.
Using an unauthenticated, jammable signal for a safety critical function is wrong, not something dictated by the practicality or expediency of the solution. It is absolutely
wrong and stupid. Like Therac stupid.

And as someone mentioned below, there is already a solution for this exact problem; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balise
> We all make fun of "One weird trick to lose belly fat" but how many articles have you read about pomodoroing, closed offices, meeting refusal, and the like?

I've been reading them for years. I'm sure there are vets who have been reading them for longer.

I'm also sure a good portion of management - at all levels - have read it, or heard about it, or attended a conference etc.

So then why does it persist? I'm sure it's not down to just one reason. There are three that instantly spring to mind -

One slightly cynical one could be that management simply views the eroded productivity as an acceptable cost of getting things their way in regards to meetings, agendas, stopping by to bother you and so on.

Another, more self-critical one, is that we as developers just aren't assertive enough in demanding change in the workplace. Maybe we do need unions. I don't know.

A third is that for every one company that "gets it" there are hundreds (if not more) of companies that don't. Most of them not even in your field/industry, but if you want them as clients then external pressure to conform to their way overrides the ability to operate how we want.

I'm sure there's lots of other good reasons it happens and probably plenty of bad ones. I haven't _completely_ given up hope things could change throughout the industry but it's not something I'd cling to.
I would add for 2. that there are newer architectures, especially low power and various experimental parallel ones, that could use better optimizing compilers.
The disease you can catch from the Internet
A Summer of Code on Mars
I don't know Dan's work/thinking well enough to anticipate what he might talk about. But if someone wanted me to speak on this prompt, I would talk about modern examples where optimizing compilers significantly underperform hand-written assembly:

- LuaJIT's interpreter (here is Mike Pall's famous post giving a detailed explanation of why this is, incidentally prompted by a question I asked: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html)

- x264, which has extensive acceleration implemented in assembly for a/v codecs (they even built their own assembly abstraction layer: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/191)

- GMP, which has extensive acceleration implemented in assembly for arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

I wouldn't go so far as to argue that any of this implies the death of optimizing compilers, so I will be very interested to see what Dan has to say.
Hi, we are the Italian chapter of the Mars Society (IMS). IMS is spearheading the European MaRs Analog Station for Advanced Technologies Integration project (ERAS http://www.erasproject.org). ERAS’ main goal is to provide an effective test bed for field operation studies in preparation for human missions to Mars. If you are a student interested in contributing code to the ERAS project you should start by visiting our GSoC and SoCiS project ideas pages witch contains a list of suggested projects:
http://erasproject.org/socis-2015/
http://erasproject.org/2015-gsoc/
Minimum ‘X’ Product: MVP, MLP, MSP… MXP (where X Is a Variable)
I think it's for the same reason why the US hasn't seen a revolution in a very long time, despite the obvious corruption in Washington. Most people are too far away from Washington.
I had only one thing to do this entire week, and I didn't even get it done. So from where I sit one thing a day is pretty optimistic. Granted I did a lot of useful things for people, I just didn't get my own priority completed. Hopefully all this other stuff will die down over time.

I don't think he is really saying to do just one thing, just that we should hang the success of the day on only one priority. It is somewhat similar to the 'today is the deadline' motto from scrum.
I had a theory (completely unsupported by evidence or even a vague understanding of the industry) that OPEC's recent decision to not fix prices was targeted at hitting the weaker new American producers that were contributing to the recent production boom by America.
But still, the developer of the configuration file format has to think of all possible use-cases of httpd. It seems to me that life for the developer, as well as the user, could be much simpler with a programming language instead.
A majority of the drug cartels' profits come from one drug - marijuana[1] - which is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. Legalizing pot alone would hurt these guys immensely.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/02/us.mexico.marij...
Sure we can help, alternatively you may consider https://sudopay.com as well ? Just trying to be helpful..
If you're lonely, you should join a startup with lots of other smart & motivated people. It sounds like your colleagues don't care -- which is reasonable, because what's in it for them?

Startups are horribly lonely experiences. If you're lucky, you're the only dev for ~1.5years, and then you get to grow the team.

Happy to chat about this more, email in my profile.
Just read my top comment or talk to any economist. You're gambling with fundamental human assets (as are food speculators), except that in urban real estate, there is very limited elasticity in supply. So your self-interested activity takes profit off of and drives up the cost of living for no gain to anyone but you. The fundamental value of the asset is unchanged for your involvement, but the price is higher.
OpenNTPD is only a client. ntimed is currently only a client, but is intended to grow to a complete replacement of ntpd.
> The shifted goal post was: "Dart ain't gonna replace JS in the foreseeable future". I never claimed that Dart will, or needs to, replace javascript.

And I never said you did, so stop echoing my phrases. You called my "JS ain't gonna be replaced" flamebait, not goalpost moving. (I cited your obvious goalpost shifting, from "Dart helps uplift JS" to "at least we get great tools"; separate point!)

JS replacement wasn't ever a goal. I noted it can't be done, so it's not a goal. Nothing shifted. This fact is a painful truth that I cited as the minor premise of a syllogism:

Major: Web needs better programming language support than current JS, and soon. (The Dash memo was not wrong on this, although it overstated how mobile native stacks have better languages when the bigger issue is app/device/system APIs.)

Minor: JS cannot be replaced. (Anyone want to argue this?)

Therefore: JS needs to be improved soon. Easy to agree but harder to do, yet it is being done, e.g., ES6, SoundScript, plus over-the-top but informative tooling such as Flow and TypeScript.

We were arguing about the best way to improve JS. Since it can't be replaced, an entirely new second language and VM, especially without equivalent compile-to-JS semantics via JS uplift (bignums, more), has drawbacks:

* Super-expensive. (Other vendors won't do it without third bullet: market power abuse.)

* Leaves JS uplift to "later". (We've already seen this happen with bignums, but not with SIMD due to John McCutchan going extra miles.)

* Tempts market power abuse, a la ActiveX. (Not yet a real problem for the Web.)

In no way is there a goalpost to move about JS replacement. It's not in the cards. The only issue is how big a chunk of work and "time out" from improving JS should one take to test and bake new ideas.

To return to this HN thread, SoundScript is a quite-big chunk of work and time-out (much of this year, for some of the V8 team), yet it still looks aligned with the grain of the Web.

Dart without more JS uplift than the fine SIMD work is too big a chunk of work to produce much fruit for the Web soon.

Clear enough?
People flag the register because, as this examples shows, the titles are link bait and the articles are worthless.
Hands-on tests with Apple's Force Touch trackpad reveal a serious shortcoming
Well done! Thank you for your time and effort to do that. I enjoyed the story and learned a thing or two along the way.
My favorite hypothesis is that the saudis want to punish the US for investing (and subsidies) too much in oil production. It put them in debts, and destroys their margins, but they can afford it, while the US cannot really afford to invest in oil rigs that have a too long ROI.
Appreciate your thoughts! Definitely agree the article doesn't apply to everyone in all cases.

As a company we really want to spend time sharing what we learn.

This is one of the first posts we've written, so we'll try to improve in the future :)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of dysfunctional working environments out there, where this wouldn't be considered "normal".

Of course, in those environments, developers cannot say "no", they can either keep working under whatever unreasonable constraints they have, or quit. (I've found this a lot more common in companies where the main focus isn't software development)

I agree it's not very revolutionary, but I still find it useful to read about how other people organize their teams and how it works, and very especially what tools they use (Slack and a few others are on my to-try list).
The .Pr Controversy (2012)
Migration Woes ? Sudopay once and then keep switching payment gateways easily... :)
Making a $50m transaction with traditional banking would cost many orders of magnitudes more in fees than $0.06.
The DoJ report is significantly better reading than this low-quality article http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-release...

Maybe this should be submitted instead of the linked article? (March 4, 2015)
Regarding #2, it's conventional wisdom that you can't beat a compiler, but I'm sure DJB is going to show examples where he beats the compiler significantly.

That doesn't surprise me for two reasons: 1) DJB is a great programmer. 2) Compilers are so complex that there are lots of non-obvious reasons that they miss optimizations.

I'm not an expert, but it appears to me that, in the last 10 years, processors have gotten complex at higher rate than compilers have gotten better. There's just more room to do nontrivial things that have come up only recently.

I found this interesting portable ASM DSL on DJB's site: http://cr.yp.to/qhasm.html

Honest question: Can you write C that compiles to what his qasm programs do with a modern C compiler? (I suspect the answer is no, because DJB writes tons of C and wouldn't have written it othewise)

Older perf notes on his site: http://cr.yp.to/hardware/x86.html

On the other hand, DJB writes a very particular type of software (crypto and mathematical code lately), so I suspect his experience won't be that generalizable. But it will be correct and important, because his niches are important.
I've been told that customers actually respect companies that say "no" to them more than the ones that always say "yes" to everything (as long as the rationale is explained and reasonable).
"...most users still spend time waiting for computers."
I'm still in the dark ages when it comes to phones. I have a pay-as-you-go flip phone of approximately 2008 vintage, and I've never owned anything more powerful phone.

I pay a couple hundred a year depending on usage.

If I want to get on the Internet when I'm out and about, I just find a place that offers free wifi (such as a library or fast food restaurant). Then break out the laptop or tablet.

Judging by what others are saying about their cellphone bills in this thread and elsewhere, this simple life hack has saved me thousands of dollars over the years, and will save me thousands more.

I think most people massively overpay for their cellphone plans -- the minor increase in convenience isn't worth the four-figure price tag.
This is exceedingly meaningless. Horizontal fracturing rigs can be reanimated relatively easily. And new wells are still being dug at a feverish pace -- they just are not being finished and activated. There really has been a sea change in the petroleum world; and the productive pace can now, with fracking, be feathered ever more delicately with respect to global market prices. It'll get even better if a GOP majority ends the ban on U.S. oil exports.

Here's a better article this weekend: http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-producers-ready-new-oil-wave...
Akonadi really annoys me. Who thought it would be a good idea to run mysql on each desktop to store email metadata? That's just ridiculous bloat. Mysql is among the top 10 entries for me in powertop. Why would MySQL be needed to deal with the metadata? All other mail applications seem to do fine with Maildir and an index.

And in case anybody thought that using MySQL would allow them to scale (you know because people receiving a million mails/s is such a common use case) then the answer is no! Thanks to Nepomuk many operations were bound by the RDF triple store they used. Maybe it has improved now thanks to Baloo. But once I tried to delete a folder containing a mailing list with a few thousand mails and I wondered why my laptop got so hot until I realised that Nepomuk was struggling.

Maybe the situation has improved now though. But the whole KMail transition was really painful for no tangible benefits to the user. This really feels like a prime example of overengineering.
First paragraph: "Ok, ok. I didn't quite 'hack Facebook'. What I did was execute OS level commands on one of Facebook's acquisition's servers."

Seriously?!
sounds awfully boring.
Reinforces every stereotype I have about British Engineering(tm), precision watch gears cut with a hacksaw. 400 Hp steam powered lawn mowers. Jaguars.
As I said on another thread, 2010's MongoDB is just 1970's MUMPS. Once you have been through a few cycles, you see that actually technology comes round and round again. Centralize, distribute, centralize again, just one repeating pattern. Thick clients, thin clients, thick again. Compile, interpret, compile again. Just the buzzwords and the syntax changes.
Whenever I see stories like this I always wonder why we don't talk about (and get shouted down when we do try to talk about) the failure of modern architecture and urbanism. It's great that they are trying to turn lemons into potable lemon-flavored water, but there is almost no self-reflection on how we ended up with lemons in the first place. The fear of looking insufficiently progressive and innovative has caused huge damage to our built environment, and it simply isn't discussed in polite society.

There are symmetries between this and the current fad of flat UX: we had discovered what worked (UX visual easements using faked depth), had become bored with it and noted that some unsophisticated people overused and misused these techniques (symmetric with the stuffy and occasionally cartoonish classicism of Golden Age building) and pitched the entire thing in the garbage can, starting afresh on top of what turn out, for users, to be horrible ideas.
And let's not kid ourselves. It's all very difficult, what our public servants do.

Yes, it's very difficult to raise that much money to destroy your political opponents while balancing all of the donor favors against what you promised to your constituents while also trying to figure out a way that you can become rich from your time in public office.

I have no pity for most politicians. They tend to be power hungry control freaks who have no problem lying to (get into/remain in) office. The lack of discrimination in voter ability to at least filter out the obvious liars is a never ending source of frustration for me.

We could do so much better.
This article is not "worthless." It's a popular writer whose blog is notably popular here on Hacker News talking about writing software usability.
GCC has supported `-fprofile-generate` and `-fprofile-use` for profile-guided optimization since (at least[1]) GCC 3.4, which was released over 10 years ago:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.0/gcc/Optimize-Option...

Firefox is an example of an application that ships production binaries with PGO.

[1] It was actually supported earlier than this, but I didn't search further; the 3.4.0 manual says "New -fprofile-generate and -fprofile-use command-line options to simplify the use of profile feedback", implying it was there before in a less convenient form.
It's not my favorite thing, but I do believe it removes the need for a lot of other meetings. I also find that I am almost never 'statused' on this team, which is a huge improvement. Talking too much is a discipline thing that you have to push against hard & often. Some people get it really easily, while others take a lot of coaching before they learn to give the right amount of information.
Last I saw, Western Union charged $7 to transfer $50
Technological improvements have increased the preponderance of crap on the web. Dart ain't gonna change that but it will give more centralized control to Google.

More technology means more corporations building crap. I should know, I've spent about three months of my 10+ year building things that were just slightly better than useless.
I am talking about the Word 2011 for Mac version only though. The Word 5.1 files open fine in all the Windows versions I tried after the format is unblocked.
I can't imagine living like that. Trapped in a prison with invisible walls.
Maybe a couple bucks through ACH. Whenever I use ACH, it doesn't cost me anything (though I suspect someone else pays it).

EDIT: Sorry, looks like ACH charges a percentage on high-value transactions. That would certainly be a lot of money on 50 million.
At least they added Comic Neue. I'm a bit disappointed that a project like OpenBSD that is so vocal about free software is promoting a proprietary font like Comic Sans MS.
For me the semantic desktop was too resource hungry so it was turn it off or move to a different DE - at one point I had to remove the actual binaries in order to disable it the devs were so keen to push their ideal DE it seemed.

TBH if I'd been using the full KDE communication suite then perhaps it would have made sense but the refusal to support the sending of html email for kmail (did they change that yet) moved be back to Thunderbird a long time ago.

I applaud the innovation and feel that the community would have really been behind it if it had been optional from the get-go. Having never used Activities I still appreciate that KDE devs tried something different, the great thing with Activities is that – whilst initially you couldn't turn them off – they kept out the way and used little-to-no resources.

The desktop search, integrated to Dolphin, is great. Usually I use locate/find/grep but I'd use an integrated search if it could be tamed in its resource usage; but that's really the limit of the "semantic desktop" that I find useful under my desktop use at present.
SO the solution to people pissing on your wall is to turn your wall into a proper toilet?
Is the Mill CPU real? (2014)
Hmm...the abstract matches my experience pretty closely.

A lot of the non-critical code is perfectly fine, performance-wise, in bytecode interpreted Squeak Smalltalk or even Ruby. On the other hand, perf critical code tends to require re-thinking your abstractions and often your layering, which can give you several orders of magnitude of performance improvement (I've frequently had 10x - 1000x).

So I don't need the optimizer for the first part, and it doesn't really help me with the second part. It can and sometimes does take out some of the drudgery, but it can also get in the way by being somewhat unpredictable.

What I find interesting is the approach talked about by VPRI of allowing manual optimization specifications sitting next to high-level code (some of the earliest AOP examples were like that). Less magic, more control, much more predictability and power.
Of course the simple way to deal with this is to piss sideways.

On the other hand, as a resident of a neighbouring derby city, I don't personally have a problem with Hamburg football fans pissing on themselves!
Former tech journalist here.

From 2000-2002, after the first dot-com bubble burst, the industry experienced the first wave of mass layoffs. At that time, the newspaper and magazine sectors were still relatively strong and were able to absorb some displaced writers and editors, but some started to go over to the "dark side" (PR). At my company it was also possible for senior writers and editors to go into research, which was seen as a more respectable alternative career path than corporate PR.

There was a slight recovery from 2003-2004, but then an interesting thing started to happen: a steady trickle of slow-motion layoffs, consolidations, and other cost-cutting measures. The weaker pubs began to fail as demand for print advertising dried up, and events began to feel the heat too as new entrants muscled their way into the scene. In some cases, staff were shifted to growing online units, but overall there was a net loss of staff in editorial, ad operations, and events.

Starting around 2005 or so, I began to notice a curious thing: Many of the 30-something journalists in my organization were voluntarily moving to industry. Some started to work for PR agencies, but in many cases they moved to in-house marketing units of large tech companies -- Microsoft, CA, Bose, etc. Certainly the pay and benefits were attractive but my own sense was there didn't seem to be much of a future staying in journalism. Why keep a job which offers little chance to advance and could probably lead to layoffs in the near future?

People stopped using the term "the dark side" around that time. It's hard to make some ethical stand about the purity of the profession when people are getting laid off or taking a salary cut while serious journalism is being sacrificed for the sake of pageview-heavy slideshows and blogs.